Yesterday's Murder Read online

  David picked up his bag and began walking up the path beside his rescuer.

  “My name is Arthur Stone,” the minister said.

  “And mine is David Telefair,” the young man replied. “Philip Telefair is my great-uncle.”

  The Reverend Arthur Stone stood still for only the barest instant.

  “You must be Eugene Telefair’s son!”

  “I am,” David said excitedly. “Yes, I am. Did you know him?”

  “No,” the minister said almost sharply, as though the subject was one he preferred to drop. “No, I never knew him.” They walked in complete silence for a little. “And now Philip Telefair has asked you to come to the Island.” His voice had a faint, carefully restrained note of surprise, as though it skirted the edge of unbelievable things.

  “Yes, he did.” David paused, and added, “Philip Telefair has been very good to me.”

  The two men turned in at a little stone gate and walked through a dusky garden to a small house standing near the shore of the inlet. In the sombrous dark the air was heavy with the odor of flowers, of grass and trees and earth, all newly washed with rain. Damp leaves brushed David’s face in the gloom; he felt soft turf crushing underneath his feet. The minister led the way across a little veranda, fragrant with honeysuckle, into a lighted room.

  David felt a sudden sense of relief at coming again into the embrace of walls and lights. The weariness of the long day, the gloom of the desolate countryside, and the inauspicious interruption of his journey had oppressed him and filled him with a sense of unaccountable dread. Now he was glad of the walls that shut away the shadows.

  He turned to look at his rescuer and saw a tall man, thin and a trifle stooped, with a tranquil, welcoming, friendly face, and heavy, silver-white hair.

  “So you are Eugene Telefair’s son!” the Reverend Arthur Stone said at last, in a voice that seemed to be very deliberately quiet and soft. For a moment the room was deadly still, yet charged with the presence of unsaid words. It was as though the space between its walls was filled almost to the point of bursting with something that must be told, and yet would not be told, and that, for one undecided moment, hung perilously in the balance between the telling and the not telling.

  Then suddenly the minister laughed in the very friendliest and gentlest of manners, and the moment passed, and the thing which should have been told, whatever it was, slipped back into the silence from which it had momentarily and dangerously threatened to emerge.

  “I am forgetting my manners,” he said. “Please take the most comfortable chair and rest for a bit. In fact I would suggest that you wait until moonrise before rowing across to the Island—you will not have long to wait, and these shores can be treacherous in the dark.”

  David agreed, glad of the interval to be spent in a lighted room. He lay back in an immense arm chair and looked about him. The room was large and exceedingly pleasant, with the accumlated pleasantness of many years. The house was an old one, he could see, but kept in beautiful and flawless repair, like a very old man tended and barbered and brushed to shining perfection. Its furniture was faintly shabby, yet polished and graceful, all of it very old, some of it, he guessed, very rare. Over the marvelously carved mantel hung the painting of a white-haired man in the robes of a bishop, probably Arthur Stone’s father, David guessed from the resemblance. Long bookcases filled with well-worn, many-colored volumes lined the walls, a conveniently littered desk stood near the window. It was, David decided, the minister’s study, a room as smiling and friendly and anxious to please as the Reverend Arthur Stone himself.

  In the wall across from him was an oriel window facing toward the bay, and through it David could see, faintly in the distance, the lights of Telefair. For a moment he sat staring at them, wondering how many years the two houses, Telefair and the minister’s house, had looked at each other across the inlet. Then he brought his eyes and his mind back to the room he was in, and realized that the minister was watching him.

  In that one moment while David had looked away, the man’s face had changed. In the barest breath of time before it resumed its gentleness and tranquillity, to the young man it seemed deep-lined, saddened, the face of a penitent. Even as David turned to look, the expression vanished, yet he wished that he might look away, and could not. That sudden glance had shown him what lay behind the tranquil smile, the friendliness and the calm; now the face of the Reverend Arthur Stone would never be entirely veiled again.

  For it was the face of a man whose communion with God, beginning in his earliest childhood, had been so close that wonder at it had never ceased, even as the child became a man, and the man an old man. It was this very closeness to God which made the Reverend Arthur Stone believe that his sin, whatever it had been, was so grave, and could never be entirely wiped away. The eyes of the Reverend Arthur Stone were like the eyes of a child who has been forgiven and assured of forgiveness by a sorrowing father, yet who is still repentant and still aware of some frightful consequence of his deed.

  A slight sound behind him caused David to turn his head.

  The girl who had come almost silently into the room startled him out of speech. It was as though he had unexpectedly been propelled into the midst of a dream from his waking life, or rather, as though some figure from the dream had invaded that other reality. For she so closely resembled the imagined daughter of Philip Telefair that for a moment he was positive she could be no one else.

  She was a little above the average height for a woman, and slender almost to the point of thinness. Her hair was very dark, and bound loosely about her small head, smooth and shining. Her features were delicate and sharply defined, the creamy pale oval of her face was tranquil and composed. He saw in that first startled glance that her hands were very beautiful, long and white and slim, and that she moved with a slow and careful grace.

  It was not until she turned her face, with its great, dark, expressionless eyes, toward David that he saw that she was blind.

  “My daughter, Laurel,” the minister said.

  David managed to say something, he never remembered what it was, but even as he spoke he knew that it was inadequate. Nor did he remember what he heard in answer; he was aware only of the peculiar quality of her low, gentle voice, the voice of one who saw nothing, yet heard everything, and knew a great deal.

  “David Telefair,” the old man was saying, “Philip Telefair’s great-nephew. He is going to the Island.”

  “Oh no!” she said suddenly, turning toward David, speaking as though the words had risen so quickly to her lips that she could not call them back. “No, you must not go.” It was as though a cloud had passed between her face and the light.

  “Not go!” David exclaimed. “But it is inevitable that I go.”

  He wondered why, of all things in the world to say, he had said that one.

  Her eyes were blank, yet her face seemed to be looking at him. She nodded slowly. “Yes, of course. It is inevitable that you go.”

  David realized suddenly that they were speaking not as strangers meeting for the first time in the comfortable and cheerfully lighted study of a country parsonage, but as two travelers might meet in the crossing of some desolate and dangerous prairie, pausing momentarily to examine the markings of their maps. Again he felt that the room was filled with the presence of things forever to be left unsaid.

  It was Laurel Stone who broke the spell while he waited, breathlessly, for someone else to speak. She spoke lightly, graciously, laughing a little. She wished David a safe voyage across the inlet and a pleasant stay at Telefair. She spoke as though the surprising interchange between them had never taken place, expressed a wish that he would return to visit them whenever he could, and, with the friendliest and most gentle of smiles, bade him good-by and left the room.

  He was sorry to see her go.

  “Laurel,” said the minister, speaking softly and quietly, as though he did not wish to say anything at all, “has been blind since birth.” He glanced toward the orie
l window. “The moon is rising. Shall we go into the garden?”

  They walked across the little veranda and down the steps, where the minister took David’s arm to guide him along the narrow path.

  The air was very still, heavy with the fragrance that rose from secret places under the trees, from unseen flower beds and deep, damp grass. They walked on to the very edge of the garden and David saw that the minister’s house stood on the point of the mainland, where the waters of the bay turned toward the inlet.

  Suddenly the cry of a loon shattered the silence, a silver fish leaped high, and all was still again. Then, while they watched, beyond the water’s edge, over the great, dark trees, the moon rose—blood-red, round as an orange, mist-garlanded and sheathed in flame, the scarlet moon of early evening.

  David felt the hand on his arm tighten.

  “I lied to you,” the minister said simply. “I did know your father. I was his tutor when he was a boy.” He paused and stared for a time across the water. “Perhaps you should not go to the Island. Yet I shall not try to dissuade you. You were right, I think, when you said it was inevitable that you go.”

  When he spoke again his voice was friendly and at the same time impersonal, its tone was light. “My boat is moored at the bottom of these steps. Be careful that you do not stumble in the dark.”

  Silently they descended the stone steps to the water’s edge. David laid his bag in the boat and stepped in, while the Reverend Arthur Stone unwound the rope that was tied to the landing.

  “I’ll bring it back in the morning,” David promised.

  “Plenty of time,” the minister said amiably, “plenty of time.” He hesitated an instant, one hand still on the prow of the boat. “If you should ever have need of me—”

  He paused. “I was fond of your father.” He gave the boat a sudden push that sent it rocking out into the water. “Good night, David Telefair.”

  “Thank you,” David called back. “For everything you have done, thank you.”

  The glassily tranquil waters of the inlet were frosty and silvered in the light, leaden-gray in the shadows and the valleys between the ripples. The moon that had been a ball of fire hung low over the water, shedding liquid white upon it, pale now, and round as a wheel. David dipped an oar in the luminous flood and saw it break and shatter into a multitude of little glittering bits, like broken crystal, breaking and moving and uniting, over and over again. Against the now unclouded sky the Island was a somber, dusky bulk, all heavy masses of great, mysterious trees.

  He paused in his rowing and sat listening to the faint drip of his oars, the soft whispering of waves against his boat, and the distant calling of night birds on the shore. He wondered if he were imagining it all, if the scene before him was only an illusion, a phantasm that would evaporate before his eyes if he were to make a sudden move. He felt again that sense of unreality which inevitably accompanies being in a new place, as though the senses by which one perceives the reality of one’s surroundings have been left behind in the old place, like a trunk that is to be sent on later.

  He began rowing again. Suddenly a light appeared on the Island, a lantern, he guessed, bobbing among the trees. Someone there had seen him and was coming to meet him. He hoped that he would be recognized, if visitors to the Island were as unwelcome as the Reverend Arthur Stone had hinted.

  Then, over there on the Island, a dog began howling.

  Once more he paused, feeling a recurrence of that inexplicable familiarity, the sense of being in an often seen and well-remembered place, of repeating an action done times beyond number. The dog howling in the calm night, the lantern shining on the somber shore, the sound of his oars dripping above the glassy water; these, and then the action itself, the circumstance of his coming to Telefair Island, they were all part of something that had happened before, not once, not twice, but uncounted times.

  All this passed not so much through his mind as through his nerves, in one flash of time, in a moment so brief it might have passed between the falling of one drop of water from his oar and the falling of the next drop. It was not a thought but a momentary sensation, a quickening of the mind, gone as suddenly as it had come.

  He dipped his oars in the moon’s path and went on rowing.

  Suddenly a tiny wharf emerged from the shadows, and as he drew near to it, he could see two figures on the shore. One of them ran forward, caught the prow of his boat and made it fast to the landing.

  “Welcome to the Island, David Telefair!”

  He knew that it was the voice of Philip Telefair, coming to him from out of the shadows.

  Even as he had known the square, heavy, black-inked handwriting on the envelope, he knew the voice. In the first moment that he listened to it, tightly gripping the oars that were his one link now with the world beyond the moon-riffled inlet, he knew and recognized the voice of the old man who had been so kind to him.

  The sight of letters written in black ink by the hand of old Philip Telefair had been his first awareness of the reality of the man, his first assurance that the man on the Island was a living, breathing being who could pick up a pen, dip it in ink, and form square letters on a creamy envelope, not someone dreamed or imagined, a shadow behind a shadow. Now, in the darkness that united trees and sky and shore, he heard the voice of old Philip Telefair for the first time.

  It was a beautiful voice, each sound as circular as a bubble, friendly, amiable, welcoming. Hearing it, David was glad for a moment that he could not see the man the shadows hid, whatever he might be.

  He leaped onto the little wharf and called some greeting (he could never remember what it was) to the voice in the darkness.

  Then there was a moment of discussing the trivialities and necessities of travel, of the trunks that were on the way, of the difficulties of his journey to the Island. Even as he spoke, David felt a strange sense of speaking to a voiceless and probably disinterested Eternity, seeing no more than a dim and shadowed outline of the man to whom he spoke, and hearing no answer to what he said. He explained his borrowing of the boat, and his meeting with the Reverend Arthur Stone. As he came to the minister’s name, he was faintly aware of a coolness that touched the night air; he could not see old Philip Telefair’s face in the dark, yet he felt that a frown had gathered on his face, he was in some way conscious of a faint, almost imperceptible stiffening of the old man’s figure.

  “Arthur Stone?” said the old man harshly. “What did he say to you?”

  It was not a question; it was a demand.

  “Say to me?” David repeated, wonderingly. “Why, nothing.” The breath died in his throat. There had been what the minister had almost said to him, the things that had been left unsaid. But he could not speak of them now. “No, nothing at all.”

  The chill in the air, whatever it had been, vanished and was gone.

  Old Philip Telefair laughed. “I am glad that you had no more trouble getting here than you did. We are a trifle isolated.” He raised his voice ever so little. “Jonas, take the boat back to the Reverend Mr. Stone and thank him for me. Then bring young Mr. David’s bag up to the house.”

  The man who had been lingering on the wharf unfastened another boat, hitched the borrowed boat to it, leaped in, and began rowing toward the mainland.

  “I’d meant to return it in the morning,” David began hesitantly.

  “I prefer to have it taken back immediately,” Philip Telefair said, and that was an end to it. He linked an arm through David’s, affectionately. “We will go on up to the house. It is good to have you here, after all these years.”

  David felt a sudden rush of almost overwhelming happiness. After all these years, he thought—yes, after all these years, he was actually walking on the Island; its ground was beneath his feet. He was walking beside old Philip Telefair, the imagined and almost legendary figure. He had heard the voice of old Philip Telefair speaking softly through the shadows. Now they walked side by side, arms linked—two unseen figures moving arm in arm through the darkne
ss, each marvelously aware of the other, not speaking—for their knowledge of each other had not yet passed beyond the trivial matters of boats and travel and luggage, and all those matters had already been settled—yet, David thought, intimate beyond all description, two people meeting each other for the first time after all these years.

  As much as young David Telefair had ever longed for anything in his life, he longed to make Philip Telefair love him, not from the faintest thought of what the old man might do for him and his future, but because, already, he looked to Philip Telefair as a god on an island.

  Yet even in that same instant he heard the distant, rhythmic, chop-chop of oars in the water as the Reverend Arthur Stone’s boat was towed away from the shore. He looked over his shoulder and saw it vanishing into the shadows that hung low over the water. He saw his last link with the mainland being taken from him, and, with a momentary sense of fright, was suddenly aware of what it was to be on an island.

  “There’s the house,” said the soft, beautiful voice of old Philip Telefair.

  They had been following a path through a little woods, rich with the fragrance of moist leaves, of grass and flowers trampled underfoot. Now they passed beyond the last tree and there, across the smooth, wide lawn, was the old house—Telefair.

  The two men paused for an instant at the edge of the woodland. David saw that Telefair was very large, a long, low building reaching out into the trees that grew on either side. The central portion was higher than the rest, fronted with a massive and graceful portico whose classic pillars were almost lambent in their whiteness, shedding light like the round moon itself. It seemed to David that this could not be a real house, standing there splendidly flawless, moon-colored; moving toward it across the lawn that was like an island of moonlight in a sea of shadows he had a fantastic notion that Telefair could not be made from wood and brick and mortar, but that the whole was a marvelous illusion, a creation of the moon and the darkness, and that it would dissolve and disperse as he approached it, an ethereal thing, leaving behind only a great pit of darkness to mark where it had been.