Yesterday's Murder Read online

  He felt that he must say something, make some spoken tribute to the house. He started to say, “It is very beautiful,” caught himself in time, finally said, “It must be very old,” and instantly hated himself, feeling that he had still said an incredibly and indescribably foolish thing.

  “Yes,” said Philip Telefair gently. “Yes, it is very old.”

  He pointed with his free hand. “That wing, the old wing as it is called now, was the original house. The main house was built a little later.” He paused, and added, “The upper floors and most of the lower floors of the old wing are not used now. We have them locked off. They are not safe any more. Some day we shall have their supporting framework strengthened, so that the house shall not fall apart of its own age.”

  To David it seemed fitting and right that the house, with its incredible beauty, should be ready to crumble into ruin. He felt a sudden awareness of the splendid and magnificent evil of the marvelous house; he knew that the rotting of its framework and the hidden disease that ate away its timbers were its very heart; he knew suddenly and inexplicably that Telefair must inevitably destroy itself, that the beauty and the evil were one and the same thing and were, at the same time, its self-destruction.

  “Yes,” said Philip Telefair again. “Yes, it is very old.”

  They had reached the wide doorway as he spoke, and entered the great hall, brilliant with light. David was only conscious of a large, very high room, of the long stairs that seemed to rise from nowhere and float on the air without support. Coming from the nocturnal half-light into the lighted space between the four walls had been to pass suddenly from unreality to reality, and he turned for his first look at the Philip Telefair who had been so kind to him.

  Philip Telefair seemed incredibly old, older than any other man had ever lived to be. His narrow, handsome face was smooth and unwrinkled, but the skin, waxy and colorless, seemed brittle, ready to crumble with age, like some fine and well-preserved, but still perishable leather. The hair that was thinning on his beautifully shaped skull was pearlish white, fairly blue, making his deep-set eyes even darker and more brilliant by contrast. He was extremely tall, straight as a pole and almost as slender. His hands were pale, long, delicate, and incredibly graceful; on one finger was a great yellow sapphire.

  It seemed to David that he should have had ruffles at his wrists.

  He had plucked a small, shiny, dark green leaf from one of the bushes along the way, and he was twisting it between his slender fingers as he spoke.

  “Welcome to Telefair,” he said, smiling and resting an affectionate hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You will want to bathe and to rest for a bit. There is still a little time before dinner.”

  He turned toward a door that led out of the great hall and called, “Edris!”

  David felt a sudden quickening of his breath, a tautness that ran along the surface of his skin, as though some voice out of nowhere had called out, “Now!” He turned in the direction Philip Telefair had called.

  The girl who came through the doorway was too pale and too delicate for beauty. She was small, and extremely fragile, her features, though fine, were little and childlike, in an almost colorless face.

  Even her hair was pale, faintly gilt where the light shone on it; her eyes were a soft color somewhere between blue and gray.

  “Edris, this is your cousin David,” old Philip Telefair said. “Will you show him to his room?”

  She acknowledged the introduction without a smile. They glanced at each other and looked away again, without that curious, searching inspection young relatives, meeting for the first time, usually give each other.

  “We will meet again at dinner,” old Philip Telefair said pleasantly.

  He vanished through a doorway. Edris led the young man up the stairs without a word, paused halfway down a long hall.

  “This will be your room, David,” she said, leading the way. Her voice was soft. Suddenly she pushed the door half shut and leaned against it. “You ought never to have come here,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

  David stared at her. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said coldly.

  For a moment it seemed to him that a kind of terror was in her pale eyes. She laid an impulsive small hand on his arm.

  “I don’t know why he sent for you. I don’t know why he wants you here. But you ought never to have come. You must go away at once, if you can.”

  David looked down at her, at her little, colorless, frightened face, and was filled with a distaste that was close to loathing. The sight of her almost childlike hand, with its thin white fingers and tiny, bloodless wrist, sickened him. He withdrew his arm from its clasp, roughly, in a sudden, violent movement.

  “Of course I’ll do nothing of the kind,” he said sharply. “I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re talking about.”

  Just as he spoke a huge, white-haired Negro, who seemed almost as old as Philip Telefair himself, appeared in the hall with David’s bag, brought up from the landing. David had not seen him before in the light, yet he recognized him as the shadowy form seen back there on the shore.

  “This is Jonas,” the girl said.

  The old Negro lighted the lamp, laid down the bag, and paused for an instant in which his eyes flickered quickly over David. Then as he went on down the hall, David wondered if it had been his imagination, or if he had caught a look of mingled curiosity and intense dislike in the dark old eyes.

  “He will unpack for you later,” Edris said. For a moment she was silent, staring at him pitifully, seeming close to frightened tears; then she slipped through the hallway and disappeared like a pale wraith, leaving him alone in the room.

  David closed the door tight, and leaned against it.

  He was barely conscious of the room he was in, only half seeing that it was spacious and comfortable, with its carved fireplace where a tiny blaze glowed cheerfully, with its immense, canopied bed and wide, many-paned window. He was tired, unbelievably tired. The mass of impressions gathered through the day, the excitement of reaching the Island and meeting Philip Telefair, the strange conversation with Laurel Stone, the spectral beauty of the old house, the dislike in the eyes of Jonas, and the unaccountable behavior of his cousin Edris, all filled him with a sudden unendurable depression, a sense of deep melancholy and weariness. He felt terribly lonely, lonelier than any man had ever been before, alone and curiously frightened. If he had been half the age that he was, he would have flung himself on the floor before the fireplace and wept.

  2

  They were five at dinner, Philip Telefair at the head of the table, Edris, a young man introduced as “Edmund Telefair, your cousin,” a middle-aged German named Doctor von Berger, and David himself. Conversation was careless, trivial, and David took little part in it, contenting himself with listening and with watching.

  The dining room of Telefair was large, dignified and flawless, where it was impossible that meals could ever be otherwise than faultless, and faultlessly served. David was enraptured with the room, with the windows that looked across Telefair Island to the shadowy inlet, with the graceful mantel where a pair of crystal candelabra shone and sparkled like dew in the sunlight, with the elaborate over-mantel and its bas-relief of grapes and vines, with the warm glow of candlelight on the table, with the perfection of the dinner, and most of all with Philip Telefair himself.

  There was, David felt, something curiously familiar about this first meal at Telefair. He remembered a long succession of first meals in new schools, where he had sat down, a stranger among strangers, and kept silent, inwardly studying and weighing, judging which he might like and which not like, preparing himself for the little time he would spend among them. It was as though those years of coming into new places, and into groups of strangers, had sharpened some deep-seated intuitive sense that enabled him to feel out the relationships between people, the hidden entanglements, the friendship and distrust, domination and subjugation.

  It was this acuteness of perceptio
n that made him conscious of the relationship between old Philip Telefair and his daughter Edris. Philip Telefair. Why, he must have been past middle age when Edris was born. David felt, with that inexplicable other sense, that the girl was completely dominated by her father. Completely? No.

  There was some secret Edris that did not show itself to others; he did not see it in her face or her eyes, but he knew that it was there.

  Most likely, David thought, his mind searching out the easiest explanation, Philip Telefair had been disappointed that she had not been a son, and so he alternately ignored and bullied her. Perhaps he liked her, or tried to like her, though that would be hard to do. Edris was not likable. It was simply, though, that she did not matter to him; she was not important.

  No, Edris, of herself, was not important. Yet at the same time David sensed that Philip Telefair had some plan for his daughter. He could not even guess at what it was; yet he knew that it existed, and he had a vague and uncomfortable idea that he himself was a part of it.

  Edmund Telefair puzzled him a little. When Great-Uncle Philip had introduced them just before dinner, in the tiny parlor just off the great hall, Edmund had not risen to acknowledge the introduction, though his greeting to David had been cordial enough. He was tall, as all the Telefair men were tall, but unlike old Philip Telefair he was big-boned and rangy, almost ungainly in his movements. His hair was brown, thick and unruly, his friendly, homely face was deeply tanned. He seemed to David to belong to a world of tweeds and shotguns and hounds, great fireplaces with immense, blazing logs, and the smell of old, cherished pipes. David imagined him tramping for miles across stubble fields in the autumn, oblivious of wind and rain, a dog close at heel. It was not until he rose and limped into the dining room that David saw he was crippled, misshapen, with one club-footed leg shorter than the other.

  Now, sitting at the dining table, David was aware of the tension of antagonism between Philip Telefair and Edmund, a continuous, underground warfare that would go on and on forever. For some unknown reason, old Philip Telefair hated the young man. Was the hatred returned? David wondered. No, Edmund was, in some manner, beyond the old man’s reach, without hatred, dislike or fear. But why, then, was he at Telefair at all? David felt that Great-Uncle Philip endured his presence, and treated him with the greatest of friendliness and courtesy, because Telefairs did not turn their kinsfolk from their doors, and because friendship and courtesy were the way of the Telefairs. But Edmund was here for some reason, some definite and important reason. Again David had a curious and uncomfortable thought that it concerned himself, though he could not imagine how that could be.

  It seemed strange to him that Edmund had brown hair and gray eyes. He thought of all Telefairs as dark, as Philip Telefair must have been before his hair whitened.

  “Edmund is one of the brown-haired Telefairs,” old Philip Telefair said pleasantly, guessing David’s thought from watching his eyes. “That is either because he lives at Claire, on the mainland, or is the reason why he lives there. There have always been two great branches of Telefairs, the brown-haired like Edmund, and the black-haired, like ourselves.” His speech and smiling glance seemed to admit David and himself in some close association of black-haired Telefairs, at the door of which Edmund might forever batter in vain. “Curiously, the brown-haired branch has always lived on the mainland, and the black-haired branch on the Island.” He turned to Doctor von Berger. “What would be your guess, Doctor? Do the brown-haired Telefairs live at Claire because they are brown-haired, or are they brown-haired because they live at Claire?” There was gentle laughter in his voice.

  The little doctor’s accented speech was deep, guttural, and pleasant. “It is as hard to explain why any of the Telefairs live where they live, or do what they do, as it is to explain why some have black hair and some have brown,” he said amiably, “save that they repeat themselves in patterns. You can see the face of Philip Telefair”—he nodded toward the old man—“in the portrait of Sir Philip Telefair who came here in 1661, and the features of Edmund Telefair in the portrait of Sir Philip’s brother.”

  “Even the names go on repeating themselves,” Edmund Telefair said, “generation after generation. Philip, Edmund, David, Eugene, Anthony. It’s like the chorus of a song.”

  “Yes,” said old Philip Telefair, turning to David, “nearly every Telefair born in three hundred years has had one of those five names.”

  It was as though a light had been struck in the deep-down caves of the young man’s mind. From the moment he set foot on its shore he had been acutely aware that he was on the Island owned and inhabited by Telefairs for three hundred years, yet he had not been even vaguely aware of what it meant to him. Now, hearing those names, he knew. He too was a Telefair, one of them. He himself was David, his father’s name had been Eugene, his great-uncle’s name was Philip.

  “The mental traits,” Doctor von Berger was saying, “and the physical; they repeat themselves as well as the names.”

  “Were there cripples among those early Telefairs?” Edmund asked, in the very lightest and most careless of tones.

  “Not cripples of the body,” Doctor von Berger said gently.

  “Yes, there was one,” said Philip Telefair, twirling his delicate wineglass in his hand. “A Eugene Telefair, who was Secretary of State for one term, and later Ambassador to Russia. He was a hunchback. He went mad in his old age, the only Telefair who ever went mad.”

  “You forget Amabel,” Edmund Telefair said.

  “She was not a Telefair,” Doctor von Berger objected. “She married into the family.”

  “Still,” said Philip Telefair meditatively, “she was an ancestress of all of us.”

  Edmund smiled across the table at David. “You’ll get used to this,” he said in an agreeable tone. “Here on the Island you live with every long-dead Telefair who ever was in this house. They sit with you at breakfast, luncheon and dinner, they go to bed with you at night and inhabit your dreams, and wherever you go on the Island, they walk with you and you stumble over their graves.”

  Old Philip Telefair set his glass down sharply.

  “But,” Edmund finished, “after all there is nothing else to talk about on the Island.”

  In the small silence that followed, Doctor von Berger smiled across the table at David. He said, “It is true, we are a little isolated.”

  Then talk went on to other things.

  David could not decide on Doctor von Berger’s place in the household. He was a small man, all spheres and circles, yet looking as though his flesh might be as hard and solid as iron. His partial baldness made his head appear egg-shaped, and he wore the thickest eyeglasses David had ever seen. They magnified his pale, blue eyes and made them prominent as the eyes of a fish, protruding, inquisitive, and perpetually peering. David gathered that he was a regular member of the household, and had been for many years, yet he could not guess the reason for his presence. All the time, he had a curious conviction that it was all part of some prearranged plan, that they were all here as part of it—he himself, Edmund, Edris, the doctor—but he could not tell anything of what that plan was, save that in some manner it concerned himself. Once or twice he was conscious that everyone around the table was quietly watching him under cover of the conversation.

  “Edmund is a famous horseman,” Philip Telefair was saying. “He rides like a madman, and the stables at Claire are magnificent. There were Telefair stables at one time, but they were across on the mainland. One went to one’s horse by boat, a pleasant custom. That was long ago. Edmund spends half his life on horses and in boats.”

  “Good manner of getting about, for a man with only one and a half legs,” Edmund said with a short little laugh. He turned to David. “You’ll have to take a look at my boat, the Dark Lady. She’s moored down off the end of the Island. I’ll take you for a tour of the bay, if you like.”

  “I’d like it very much,” David said, hoping it was the thing to say.

  Edris spoke up suddenl
y, the first words she had uttered at the table. “I’d like to go on Edmund’s boat. I’ve never been on it. I’ve never been on any boat. Why can’t I go?”

  Her voice was thin, and almost petulant. David sensed that it was the first time she had ever said so bold a thing, and he felt the current of surprise that ran around the table.

  “But of course,” said Edmund heartily, too heartily. “Any time you wish to come.”

  “It will have to be arranged,” old Philip Telefair said very smoothly and agreeably. “Perhaps sometime we might all go.”

  The moment passed, and talk turned almost immediately to other things. While nothing more was said of the matter, David realized that Edris would never go on Edmund’s boat, that her father would never go, and that he too would never go if Philip Telefair could prevent it.

  But after dinner, when they had carried their coffee into the small parlor, a little jewel of a room, where a blaze in the fireplace dispelled the faint, damp chill in the air, David discovered that Edris was staring at him.

  “Look,” she cried out, “he is exactly like the portrait of David Telefair!” Her voice broke off, it was almost as though someone had forced her to speak against her will.

  David’s eyes followed the others in the room to a portrait of a young man in a dark green hunting coat. The portrait startled him; it could have been painted of himself.

  “It is very like,” he said at last, haltingly.

  Philip Telefair smiled. “Let us hope the resemblance ends with the appearance and the name,” he said.

  “Why?” David asked.

  “The David Telefair of the portrait,” the old man said, “was hanged for murder.”

  In the little silence, the young man looked at the portrait with a new and uncomfortable interest. The man in the dark green hunting coat had a proud, yet smiling face, very like his own. There was the same breadth of forehead, the heavy brows over large, dark eyes, the same narrow, high-bridged nose and curving, full-lipped mouth. Even the wave of black, heavy hair over the pale brow was the same.