Part 3 (1/2)

I listened for my brother's step in the hall. And when I did not hear him stir from his room, I wondered at it, that curiosity would not impel him to come to me, to say that we must go together to discover the truth.

It was just as well. I did not want him to be with me. And I felt a dark exultation as I imagined myself going out of the room and down the stairs as I had the night before. I should wait one more hour, however, to be certain. I should let the night reach its pitch. Twelve, the witching hour. My heart was beating too fast at the thought of it, and dreamily I recollected the face I had seen, the voice that had said my name.

Ah, why did it seem in retrospect so intimate, that we had known each other, spoken together, that it was someone I recognized in the pit of my soul?

”What is your name?” I believe I whispered aloud. And then a spasm of fear startled me. Would I have the courage to go in search of him, to open the door to him? Was I losing my mind? Closing my eyes, I rested my head against the high back of the damask chair.

What was more empty than this rural night? What was more sweet?

I opened my eyes. I had been half dreaming or talking to myself, trying to explain to Father why it was necessary that we comprehend the reason ourselves. And I realized, quite fully realized-I think before I was even awake-that he was standing by the bed.

The door was open. And he was standing there, dressed exactly as he had been the night before, and his dark eyes were riveted on me with that same obvious curiosity, his mouth just a little slack like that of a school boy, and he was holding to the bedpost almost idly with his right hand. Why, he was lost in contemplating me. He did not seem to know that I was looking at him.

But when I sat forward, he raised his finger as if to quiet me, and gave a little nod of his head.

”Ah, it is you!” I whispered.

”Yes,” he said in the softest, most un.o.btrusive voice.

But we had been talking to each other, hadn't we, I had been asking him questions, no, telling him things. And I felt suddenly I was losing my equilibrium or slipping back into a dream.

No. Rather I had all but caught the fragment of some dream from the past. That rush of atmosphere that can engulf one at any moment of the day following when something evokes the universe that absorbed one utterly in sleep. I mean I heard our voices for an instant, almost in argument, and I saw Father in his top hat and black overcoat rus.h.i.+ng alone through the streets of the West End, peering into one door after another, and then, rising from the marble-top table in the dim smoky music hall you... your face.

”Yes...”

Go back, Julie! It was Father's voice.

”... to penetrate the soul of it,” I insisted, picking up the lost thread. But did my lips move? ”To understand what it is that frightened him, enraged him. He said, 'Tear it down!'”

”... you must never, never, can't do that.” His face was stricken, like that of a schoolboy about to cry.

”No, absolutely, we don't want to, either of us, you know it... and you are not a spirit!” I looked at his mud-spattered boots, the faintest smear of dust on that perfect white cheek.

”A spirit?” he asked almost mournfully, almost bitterly. ”Would that I were.”

Mesmerized I watched him come towards me and the room darkened, and I felt his cool silken hands on my face. I had risen. I was standing before him, and I looked up into his eyes.

I heard my own heartbeat. I heard it as I had the night before, right at the moment I had screamed. Dear G.o.d, I was talking to him! He was in my room and I was talking to him! And I was in his arms.

”Real, absolutely real!” I whispered, and a low zinging sensation coursed through me so that I had to steady myself against the bed.

He was peering at me as if trying to comprehend something terribly important to him, and he didn't respond. His lips did have a ruddy look to them, a soft look for all his handsomeness, as if he had never been kissed. And a slight dizziness had come over me, a slight confusion in which I was not at all sure that he was even there.

”Oh, but I am,” he said softly. I felt his breath against my cheek, and it was almost sweet. ”I am here, and you are with me, Julie...”

”Yes...”

My eyes were closing. Uncle Baxter sat hunched over his desk and I could hear the furious scratch of his pen. ”Demon wretch!” he said to the night air coming in the open doors.

”No!” I said. Father turned in the door of the music hall and cried my name.

”Love me, Julie,” came that voice in my ear. I felt his lips against my neck. ”Only a little kiss, Julie, no harm...” And the core of my being, that secret place where all desires and all commandments are nurtured, opened to him without a struggle or a sound. I would have fallen if he had not held me. My arms closed about him, my hands slipping into the soft silken ma.s.s of his hair.

I was floating, and there was as there had always been at Rampling Gate an endless peace. It was Rampling Gate I felt around me, it was that timeless and impenetrable soul that had opened itself at last... A power within me of enormous ken... To see as a G.o.d sees, and take the depth of things as nimbly as the outward eyes can size and shape pervade... Yes, I whispered aloud, those words from Keats, those words... To cease upon the midnight without pain...

No. In a violent instant we had parted, he drawing back as surely as I.

I went reeling across the bedroom floor and caught hold of the frame of the window, and rested my forehead against the stone wall.

For a long moment I stood with my eyes closed. There was a tingling pain in my throat that was almost pleasurable where his lips had touched me, a delicious throbbing that would not stop.

Then I turned, and I saw all the room clearly, the bed, the fireplace, the chair. And he stood still exactly as I'd left him and there was the most appalling distress in his face.

”What have they done to me?” he whispered. ”Have they played the cruelest trick of all?”

”Something of menace, unspeakable menace,” I whispered.

”Something ancient, Julie, something that defies understanding, something that can and will go on.”

”But why, what are you?” I touched that pulsing pain with the tips of my fingers and, looking down at them, gasped. ”And you suffer so, and you are so seemingly innocent, and it is as if you can love!”

His face was rent as if by a violent conflict within. And he turned to go. With my whole will, I stood fast not to follow him, not to beg him to turn back. But he did turn, bewildered, struggling and then bent upon his purpose as he reached for my hand. ”Come with me,” he said.

He drew me to him ever so gently, and slipping his arm around me guided me to the door.

Through the long upstairs corridor we pa.s.sed hurriedly, and through a small wooden doorway to a screw stairs that I had never seen before.

I soon realized we were ascending the north tower of the house, the ruined portion of the structure that Richard and I had not investigated before.

Through one tiny window after another I saw the gently rolling landscape moving out from the forest that surrounded us, and the small cl.u.s.ter of dim lights that marked the village of Rampling and the pale streak of white that was the London road.

Up and up we climbed until we had reached the topmost chamber, and this he opened with an iron key. He held back the door for me to enter and I found myself in a s.p.a.cious room whose high narrow windows contained no gla.s.s. A flood of moonlight revealed the most curious mixture of furnis.h.i.+ngs and objects, the clutter that suggests an attic and a sort of den. There was a writing table, a great shelf of books, soft leather chairs and scores of old yellowed and curling maps and framed pictures affixed to the walls. Candles were everywhere stuck in the bare stone niches or to the tables and the shelves. Here and there a barrel served as a table, right alongside the finest old Elizabethan chair. Wax had dripped over everything, it seemed, and in the very midst of the clutter lay rumpled copies of the most recent papers, the Mercure de Paris, the London Times.

There was no place for sleeping in this room.

And when I thought of that, where he must lie when he went to rest, a shudder pa.s.sed over me and I felt, quite vividly, his lips touching my throat again, and I felt the sudden urge to cry.

But he was holding me in his arms, he was kissing my cheeks and my lips again ever so softly, and then he guided me to a chair. He lighted the candles about us one by one.

I shuddered, my eyes watering slightly in the light. I saw more unusual objects: telescopes and magnifying gla.s.ses and a violin in its open case, and a handful of gleaming and exquisitely shaped sea sh.e.l.ls. There were jewels lying about, and a black silk top hat and a walking stick, and a bouquet of withered flowers, dry as straw, and daguerreotypes and tintypes in their little velvet cases, and opened books.

But I was too distracted now by the sight of him in the light, the gloss of his large black eyes, and the gleam of his hair. Not even in the railway station had I seen him so clearly as I did now amid the radiance of the candles. He broke my heart.

And yet he looked at me as though I were the feast for his eyes, and he said my name again and I felt the blood rush to my face. But there seemed a great break suddenly in the pa.s.sage of time. I had been thinking, yes, what are you, how long have you existed... And I felt dizzy again.

I realized that I had risen and I was standing beside him at the window and he was turning me to look down and the countryside below had unaccountably changed. The lights of Rampling had been subtracted from the darkness that lay like a vapor over the land. A great wood, far older and denser than the forest of Rampling Gate, shrouded the hills, and I was afraid suddenly, as if I were slipping into a maelstrom from which I could never, of my own will, return.

There was that sense of us talking together, talking and talking in low agitated voices and I was saying that I should not give in.

”Bear witness, that is all I ask of you...”