Three Bright Pebbles. Leslie Ford
top of her delicate head. He lifted her gaily off her feet, gave her a resounding kiss, and set her down again, flushed and radiant.
Rick Winthrop had got lazily up and come forward. There was something so grudging and perfunctory about his slow “Hello, how are you?” and his handshake that Dan’s good-natured grin froze again, so abruptly that even Irene, who makes a point of never noticing anything that doesn’t please her, noticed it. Her purling laugh wavered for just an instant as she turned with Dan to Major Tillyard.
“You remember Dan, Sidney.”
“Yes, indeed!” Major Tillyard said. They shook hands cordially. Major Tillyard turned to me. “I haven’t seen you for a long time.”
“I’ve been away a lot,” I said, thinking it was odd how well I seemed to know him, seeing him as little as I did, and how very well he looked—prosperous and satisfied with himself.
Irene was babbling merrily along. “Dan, darling! I do want you to meet Natalie—”
That was as far as she got. Mara’s dark flat little voice interrupted.
“I should think he ought to meet Cheryl, first,” she said.
3
In the instant’s silence that fell I saw her look across at the auburn-haired girl, who was astonishingly good-looking, now that I was seeing her properly, and in some way exactly the kind of girl I should have expected Rick Winthrop to marry. She smiled, but ever so faintly, her green eyes changing, and I gathered more clearly than if she had spoken that there was no love lost between her and Mara. Then Irene’s light laughter gaily wiped the slate.
“Of course. Your sister-in-law . . . Cheryl, dear—this is Dan . . .”
And knowing—because Irene, without saying anything, had managed to say so much about the young woman who had married her elder son expecting a sinecure—what that “dear” was costing her, I looked again at the handsome auburn-haired girl beside him. I saw the smooth but firm set of her jaw, and her hazel-green eyes, and her mouth, not tight-lipped but definitely not soft and yielding; and I found myself wondering, with the first amusement I’d felt since I’d arrived, if it could be possible that Irene had at last met her match, and more than that, had it permanently—like a hair shirt—under her own roof.
The girl still hadn’t moved, or changed the faintly smiling curve of her red lips. I realized abruptly that there was something wrong in the room, something more than odd about the deafening silence that had fallen on it as this girl was looking at Dan. I turned and glanced up at him. He was standing, his back a little to his mother, absolutely rooted to the floor, his face quite colorless, his eyes blank, his lips parted stupidly, staring—not at the auburn-haired girl, but at the other girl who stood beside Mara, her back to us.
Irene’s voice cut the silence almost sharply.
“Cheryl—this is Dan!”
The girl turned, supporting herself lightly against the solid Chippendale chair, her hands gripping the back until her knuckles were like a row of white marbles in her brown hands.
I saw then for the first time that her hair was gold, her eyes as blue as sapphires . . .
I looked back at Dan Winthrop. I wouldn’t know how a man looks when he merely finds the Holy Grail . . . but I do know how he looks when he finds it only to know he has lost it forever, because it belongs to another man. For I realized, with a lurch of my heart and a feeling almost too sick to bear, that the auburn-haired girl was not Cheryl Winthrop, that she was Natalie, whom Dan was supposed to marry, and that Cheryl was the slim fragile girl who stood next to Mara . . . and that she was the girl of Vezeley, with hair the color of ripe wheat in the sun and eyes blue as faded hyacinths.
It seemed to me an eternity that they stood there, looking at each other. I could feel, rather than see, Rick Winthrop’s sullen sleepy eyes moving from one to the other of them, slowly. They were still motionless, and speechless. Irene wasn’t. She couldn’t have fluttered more charmingly, but her voice had a steelier note than I’d ever heard in it before, through all the years I’d known her:
“Cheryl . . . why have you never told us you and Dan were . . . acquainted?”
It must be hard indeed, with a whole golden universe lying shattered around you, to feel the sudden flick of the lash, on a spot where your heart is the most vulnerable . . . and neither of them could have failed to recognize that note in Irene’s voice.
Cheryl stood an instant, stunned and hurt, like a child struck full in the face by someone quite strange, and turned slowly around. I didn’t know, then, whether she realized there was nothing she could say to answer her mother-in-law’s question, or whether it was the way Rick Winthrop was looking at her, the expression on his face inexplicable to me. I did know that it wasn’t inexplicable to her. Whether it was a challenge or an accusation, I couldn’t tell; something, certainly, that it shouldn’t have been, probably would not have been if Rick hadn’t been drinking far more than was good for him or anybody, not only that day but for many many days before.
I saw Cheryl’s slim bare back stiffen defensively, and the color deepen slowly in her high exquisitely modeled cheeks. If she could have spoken before, she couldn’t possibly now. Nor could Dan. If you dissect the loveliest butterfly it’s a mess; the most delicate and complex frost pattern on a window is a drop of dirty water in your hand. How could either of them tell any of these people that they’d sat up all night in front of a tiny cathedral on a little hill in a plain in France, and that the patron of a village bistro that had oleanders blooming at the door had brought them chocolate and croissants at half-past four in the morning, because they were amusing young Americans who had declined his own room . . . when everything would have been so entirely discreet?—I could see him shrugging his shoulders—“Ah, les Americains!”—and raising his fat peasant hands.
Or how could either of them say that they’d shaken hands and said good-bye, and waved good-bye again, Cheryl from her rattletrap French car on the sunny plain, Dan from the fence by the door of the little cathedral on the hill, not knowing each other’s name, not knowing, yet, that that simple starry night had so changed both their lives? They couldn’t have told it. No one in that room would have believed it if they had. No one but Mara, and Mara could believe anything. She still believed that Alan Keane was an innocent man, and he had served thirteen months in a Federal prison because no one else believed it.
Irene’s perfect genius of tact in just such moments is a byword in Washington, in Aiken and Newport, anywhere, in fact, on the Eastern seaboard where there are tables like the one we were at and where it’s so easy, these days, to mix inadvertently new deals and old, both foreign and domestic. But Irene, still with that fixed sweet smile of inquiry on her lovely face, was obviously smoothing no paths for her daughter-in-law.
And that increased and deadening silence lengthened almost unbearably, until the auburn-haired girl by my side did her best by putting in—and I don’t think she meant it in the least to sound as bad as Mara Winthrop’s quick retort made it sound—“I’m sure it was quite all right!”
“Has anybody suggested there was anything not all right?” Mara demanded instantly, with positively devastating smoothness. “—And as Mother was saying before Dan went native on us, this is Miss Lane, Dan—Natalie to you—and this is Grace Latham, Cheryl and Natalie . . . for her sins a friend and relative. And now that that’s over, Mother, couldn’t we eat? Grace and Dan must be starved.”
“Oh, of course they must!” Irene cried charmingly, and I thought she gave her daughter a not entirely ungrudging glance of admiration for her rather heavy-handed but effective putting things in place. She drew Dan down in the chair beside her, and I took the one between Natalie Lane and Major Tillyard. I looked at Mara again. Her pointed little face under its cloud of dark hair was perfectly expressionless except for the droop at the corners of her wide unrouged mouth. Was her defense of Cheryl, I wondered, because she liked her—or because she didn’t like Natalie Lane? Or did it spring from something deeper than that, some passionate sense of justice that