Great mischief (9 page)

His indifference to his kin, if he had any, was matched by their indifference to him. The War seemed to have made a clean end to his life before that time. Perhaps they had received the official report of his death; at any rate, no one appeared to dispute Timothy's inheritance.

Will was greatly excited about Timothy's sudden accession to what was, relatively, riches. He returned to his argument that Timothy should go away. "You need a change, man—a new outlook. It's an ill wind

that blows nobody any good. You ought to travel for a while, see London and Paris—then take a turn with some of the big drug companies in New York."

Timothy was glad Will knew nothing of his conversion to the idea of traveling nor of the arguments it had bred in his household. It rescued him from the dilemma of explaining what he scarcely understood himself, namely, that his desire to go away seemed to have been cauterized by the fire. He took long walks about the streets by day and by night and found among them a compulsion to stay, a sense of a design yet unfinished.

People tactfully left him alone, though they stared at him over their shoulders as he passed. He concluded without vanity that his appearance must be singular, especially when a gray swath began to make its appearance along the part in his black thatch. He took to the side streets and alley-ways to avoid curious eyes, looking at houses and gardens with fresh pleasure as the spring began to stir in the winter branches.

As he was coming home one evening along a street near the waterfront his eye fell on a house set far back at the end of a narrow lot. It was a stuccoed house, its yellowish face mottled by wind and rain; and as he looked at it in the falling dusk he felt a shock like recognition, though he had no clear recollection of having noticed it before. He stood with his hands on the little iron gate that led in from the street and looked along the strip of weedy ground that ran like a length of drugget to the front steps. He couldn't tell whether

it was occupied or not, but he guessed not from an air of reserved expectancy with which its windows looked out from under the shaggy trees around it.

He left it reluctantly and walked past the next building, a livery stable, lingering a little there to enjoy the smell of musty grain and leather, and the bustling sounds of men and horses. Now with his new wealth, he would get a horse perhaps—

The next day he strolled by and looked at the house again, thinking that the illusion of dusk might have endowed it with false significance. The daylight did indeed reveal an unpromising mansion, narrow, withdrawn, and obviously untenanted except for a brindled cat that walked along the high -wall and looked at him with pale hostile eyes. But again he had the quiver of recognition, of subcutaneous assent—and he felt sure that the dormers under their hoods of dark red tiles would have a pretty view of the harbor.

His conjectures about the house proved astonishingly correct; it had been empty for some years because the owners refused to put improvements on it and because of the undesirable proximity of the stable. Improvements did not bulk large among the luxuries Timothy intended to indulge in, and he liked the smell of livery stables; furthermore, the third-floor front did look out on a blue and bewitching section of water between other roofs, all the more provocative to him because of being framed, enclosed, limited—like a small private sea. He was able to buy the house for cash at a very moderate price.

Negotiating the deal gave him great satisfaction, and when tlie moment came to pay, the sight of his name on a check of such size filled him with awe and admiration. He walked back to the Golightlys' in a state of excitement he had not felt since the fire. He found Will sitting by the parlor hearth with all the windows open.

"Come in, Tim! God bless me, where have you been? You don't find it chilly in here, do you? It's a fine evening; you ought to be out riding through the pine woods. Thank your stars you didn't go in for medicine. Why I chose to spend my life tied down by a lot of croupy babies and puking adults is beyond me. A man hasn't got but one life to live—"

"You'll have to stay at home and tend to your family and your guest if you let in the night air like this," said his wife, coming in and putting down the windows. Anna Maria always panted a little as if her fine deep bosom were too heavy a load for the mere breath of life to lift. "Well, Timothy, what have you been doing with yourself?" She joined them at the fire, pushing her way as best she could among the dogs stretched out on the rug.

"That's what I'd like to know." Will looked along his nose at Timothy with sharp curiosity, the gray bristles thrusting pugnaciously from his nostrils. "You're on the prowl all day, doing nothing that I can see."

"I bought a house this afternoon," said Timothy tranquilly. "I shall be leaving you before long, as soon as I can get it cleaned up a bit."

"A house!" cried the Golightlys together, astounded

and a little affronted, he could see, that he had not consulted them, nor even hinted at his intention. They plied him at once with questions about the location, the price, the size, and could not help doubting the wisdom of buying real estate in such a poor neighborhood,

"And see here, Timothy," said Will, "what about the trip you were gonna take? You don't look right yet, man, and as your doctor, friend, relative, adviser—I strongly recommend a sea voyage. At least take a trip to New York by water and get some of the cobwebs out of your brain before you settle down. Cobwebs staunch the flow of blood, and sometimes that's good and sometimes it's bad. A sluggish flow of blood in the brain—" He thumped his skull forebodingly with his large knuckles.

Timothy made a grimace. He couldn't explain why the mention of a sea voyage gave him a twinge of dismay, nor could he tell his good cousins sitting there so ample and wholesome by their fire why he couldn't bring himself to leave Charleston, He only knew that some force held him in stronger bonds than even Confederate loyalty warranted. So they sat for a while in an awkward silence while Will stroked the ears of the drowsy hound yawning against his knee and looked at his cousin with honest concern. Then he got up with a great whoof and opened all the windows again. As the fresh air poured in, Anna Maria steamed out of the room in dudgeon and Timothy made excuse to do the same.

Will, however, had put an idea into his head. He

would send Lena Whitlock on that sea voyage. He could aflEord it now, and going to bed that night he rolled the sweetmeat of benevolence under his tongue. But a day or so afterward he picked up the morning paper and there was Lena's obituary staring at him. This shock, this death, raised up a ghost to him, not her ghost but another's. It was no coincidence, he felt sure; with startling clarity he saw the trailing black dress beside him, the piled and shining hair, he heard on the morning air a faint creaking of old stays, familiar, ludicrous, and terrible. He had no doubt who had come out of her ashes and dealt him this rap.

The following week he sold the lot on which their house had stood and never went near it again. The street has run down anyway, he said aloud as he walked home from the bank where he had gone to deposit the money —the condition the city leaves the pavement in is a scandal! Why, you could break a leg just walking through it—

But he grieved for the shop, nevertheless, as he went prowling. The tips of his fingers remembered the cool marble of his pill-tile; whiffs of tar and turpentine from warehouses, nearly all smells, good or bad, rebuilt for him like magic the musty brown interior, the pointed arches, the live twinkle of the gas jet in the glass and china receptacles. As he sat on a post of the sea-wall and watched the gulls, golden-feathered in the bright, late sun like beings from another star, he began to think

again about the solanum ointment and the lunar world he had caught sight of through the shop window. The effects of the ointment, he supposed, had been mild and partial because he had had so little of it left. Shall I buy the ingredients and mix some more? Shall I? But he had no accurate memory now of the proportions, and, besides, he knew intuitively that the old medico would not have committed the full secret to writing; like a canny cook, he would have left out some vital constituent of his recipe.

Perched on his post with one leg thrown over the top rail he stared across the harbor between the rise and fall of the gulls—should he try to find the Farr girl and persuade her to talk to him? But she had not wanted him to see the prescription at all, he remembered; it was only when he had refused her the solanum that she brought it out. She had the answers he needed, however, or some of them—perhaps the answer to his most gnawing doubt.

He jumped down from the post, walked to the corner, and took a streetcar to the Farrs' house.

The gray clapboards looked as blank and forbidding as he had remembered them. He paced up and down the sidewalk, trying to formulate a convincing excuse for ringing the doorbell. It proved singularly difficult—and God knew what unholy antics he might surprise her at. He bethought him of the corner grocer who had helped him out once before, and he strolled toward the shop to see what facts he could gather about this ambiguous household.

A kerosene lamp hanging from the low ceiling shed a lusterless twilight in the small dark shop. He heard the object of his quest before he saw her, in vigorous disputation with the proprietor. "Fifteen cents a pound? That's robbery! They're green anyway—" The grocer, melancholy but respectful, said, "But that's the price. Miss Lucy; cost me almost that much to buy them." "They're as hard as rocks." "Come now, they ain't as bad as all that—"

Leaning against the doorpost, Timothy blinked at this scene, so different from the one his imagination had painted. The mysterious Miss Farr, dickering and cajoling—it had never occurred to him that she shopped for supper like any other woman. She had driven a shrewd bargain, too, he suspected, because she was smiling as she picked up her bundles and jollying the proprietor. "Now, don't stand there looking at me like that. You give me the creeps. Muller, the gruesome greengrocer! I don't know why I trade here. Well, good night, all—"

Her darting walk carried her through the door so precipitately that she almost ran over Timothy. She stopped short; the level rays of the afternoon sun seemed to hold her suspended in the strong graphic colors of daytime. He took off his hat. "Good evening. Miss Farr."

"Well. . . this is a surprise. I didn't expect to run into you here."

"I was just out for a stroll and happened to see you. Allow me—" He took her package from her.

As she started up the street he fell in beside her, but

she went quickly along, keeping a little ahead as if not ready to consent to his company. Indeed, they were covering the short distance to her door with such speed that he was forced to plunge baldly into the matters that had brought him here. "I wanted to ask you—would you be so kind as to let me have a look at that prescription again? The one you brought to the shop."

He could feel her bantering mood slip from her. After a pause she said, "That wouldn't cure anything that ails you. You'd just better forget that visit."

"Forget our meeting? Don't ask too much of me. You can't just forget."

"You haven't got any supplies now."

"No, but I could scare up some. Curiosity, you know, is one of my besetting sins, and there's a lot going on in this town I'd like to know more about."

Already they had reached her gate. "I'd give up worrying about all that, if I were you. You were raised wrong —you're too scientific to learn anything." She reached for her bundle.

Timothy held on and as her hand touched his he held on to it too, supple, small-boned, the fingers ready, he guessed, to nip when the time came. "Don't go yet. There's something I think you can tell me. What about my sister?"

He felt her hand give a slight jerk of genuine surprise.

"Why—" She looked at him thoughtfully, perusing his mind with impersonal deliberation. Self-consciousness overtook him; he let loose his hold on her hand and the parcel. He couldn't go through with it, not to a girl

in a plaid wool dress coming home from buying groceries at the corner. He couldn't even phrase his singular doubts. What did he want to ask: If Penelope was alive? If she was dead? If she was a ghost?

"Forgive me; what an absurd question. I'm still a little nervous, I suppose, since the fire. Please overlook this nonsense. We'll both forget our indiscretions, shall we?"

The gate-latch gave out a small, cool click under her hand. " 'Don't ask too much of me. You can't just forget.' " Her face puckered quizzically. "Good night—" The high, solid wooden gate closed behind her.

Timothy walked away feeling a slight discomfort next to his skin, as if from scratchy woolen clothing. Again he cursed his propensity for wild goose chases. If she knew the answers, he told himself crossly, she wouldn't share them for nothing—that had been obvious from the start. Well, he would go to headquarters; and he would come back a match for this aggravating hussy with her twopenny hocus-pocus. He would go to England after all; but not just yet.

In one of those spells like a warm breath down the neck of departing winter Timothy moved into the new house. Little effort was needed to make it habitable from his point of view. Soon after the purchase he had come across his erstwhile delivery-boy sitting cross-legged on a horse block in Queen Street; and beguiled by the deep blue of his overalls, the rich butternut of

his skin, Timothy forgot Polio's idleness and unreliability and hired him on the spot as his general servant. A colored man came in and calcimined the walls salmon pink, which gave them, Timothy thought, a handsome and worldly air. Anna Maria sniffed because there were no conveniences, but Timothy had the outhouse cleaned and neatly repaired, and the cistern, he pointed out, would provide him, via a pump in the kitchen, with more water than he could possibly use. He stood off Anna Maria's well-meant offers to make curtains for him and left the windows bare, but he accepted from Will a fine deerskin rug, evidence of his cousin's prowess.