Dragonwyck (6 page)

He shook his head. 'You must go first. Always a lady precedes her escort.'

'Oh, to be sure,' she said quickly. Pa had always led his flock but this was different, the ways of gentry. She would not make that mistake again.

The Swallow was overpowering to Miranda. It was, as the newspapers proudly called it, a 'floating palace.' From the carved golden eagle on the bow to the gaily flying flag at the stern, every available surface had been embellished with scrollwork painted white and tastefully accented with gilt. Inside the main saloon—two decks high—Corinthian pillars supported Gothic arches which merged in turn into a vast ceiling painted with cupids and garlands. The satin draperies, the inch-thick carpets, and enormous chandeliers eclipsed even those at the Astor House.

Whereas, yesterday, Miranda had sat on a sack of potatoes in the market boat, today she had a rosewood-and-velvet armchair in a sheltered recess of the broad white deck. And there was music. A German band in the saloon rendered one after another, without interval, the popular tunes.

'An infamous racket,' commented Nicholas disdainfully as he sat down beside her, so that she did not dare admit that she thought the music beautiful. But as the Swallow got under way the band's efforts were drowned out by the swishing of the paddle wheels, the pounding of the walking beam, and chugging blasts from the smokestacks.

They gathered speed after they passed Yonkers, and Miranda was grateful for the protected place which Nicholas had found, for the firemen brought up pressure by the addition of fat pine knots to the anthracite, and less sheltered passengers must either be deluged with soot and flying sparks or seek the stuffy saloon.

When they left the Tappan Zee, Miranda gave herself eagerly to admiration of the scenery. Nicholas pointed out to her the peaks of Dunderberg and Anthony's Nose, the tiny Pollopel's Island, on which in Dutch times a goblin had dwelt to plague the sailors. He told her this and other legends of the river so that she listened in wide-eyed fascination. Nicholas, when he chose, was a brilliant talker, with that inborn and unreachable gift for making any topic interesting. At the moment it amused him to entertain Miranda.

The Swallow was leaving the Newburgh landing when several passengers ran down the decks to the stern and the boat seemed to leap forward, the pistons banged to a new frenzied rhythm, and sparks flew thick as red flies from the stacks.

Nicholas stood up and gazed down-river where another ship had appeared around the jut of Denning's Point. 'It's the Express,' he said. 'She's after us. Now we shall doubtless race her to Pough-keepsie.'

'Race?' questioned Miranda, surprised. 'Whatever for?'

'For the pleasure of proving that the other boat is inferior.'

She looked at him quickly, thinking it an odd reply, and wondering if he were laughing at her, but he was intently watching the Express's progress as she gained on them. The Swallow's pounding and straining increased until it seemed that her decks would burst open, and the sparks from the smokestack coalesced into tongues of actual flame. Suddenly the race frightened her.

'Isn't it dangerous?' she cried as the deck grew hot under her thin soles.

Nicholas shrugged, never taking his eyes from the pursuing boat whose bow was now flush with their stern. 'There's danger everywhere, I suppose.'

She shrank into her seat clutching its arms and telling herself that she must not be a silly coward. Certainly everyone else was enjoying himself hugely. The passengers surged from bow to stern cheering or groaning as now one boat gained and then the other; they made hoarse wagers on the outcome, shouting across the hundred yards of water to the Express, whose own passengers and crew answered back in kind.

And then it was all over. The Swallow slid first up to her Pough-keepsie dock; there was deafening applause on the decks around them, while catcalls and oaths came from the vanquished boat.

Miranda felt foolish, and glancing apologetically at Nicholas she saw that though he had taken no part in the enthusiasm of the passengers, he yet wore an expression of exhilaration and triumph. An expression which vanished at once as his face returned to its usual reserve.

She had a moment of puzzled uneasiness, for though she did not in the least understand him, she knew that his reaction to the race was not like that of the other passengers; she felt that the contest had had for him an inner meaning, and that in some way its outcome represented the vindication of his will.

The Swallow proceeded decorously up-river from Poughkeepsie, but Miranda continued to suffer uneasiness out of all proportion to the cause. This uneasiness had in it a quality of foreboding and of prescience, as though the boisterous and senseless contest between two boats held for her a future significance. And yet the summer afternoon was tranquilly blue, and the narrowing river flowed peacefully past their vessel as the wooded shores came nearer. By the time that the western shore reared itself up into the purple masses of the Catskills, she had regained her eager expectancy and cried: 'Oh Cousin Nicholas, how high they are! I'd no notion mountains were so big!'

Nicholas thought of the Alps, in which he had spent the summer of 1835 while making the Grand Tour before his marriage, and he smiled, but forebore to disillusion her. Instead he pointed out the Mountain House, whose thirteen white columns were visible even at that distance.

'That's Rip Van Winkle's country back of the Mountain House,' said Nicholas. 'They say that on hot summer days one can still hear the little men playing at ninepins.'

Miranda looked blank.

'Don't you know Diedrich Knickerbocker and "The Sketch Book"?'

She shook her head.

'Tales by Washington Irving, a fine writer and a friend of mine,' Nicholas explained. 'No doubt you'll meet him some day.'

Nicholas settled back in his chair. This touched on one of his dominant interests. He was well grounded in the classics, of course, though it had never occurred to his father to send him to college; that type of education open to almost anyone, even tradesmen and farmers' sons, was not fitting to an aristocrat. There had therefore been a succession of tutors, German and English, to prepare the boy for the cultural climax of the Grand Tour.

He had spent two years traveling elegantly through England, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany before returning to Dragonwyck to find that his father had died and he was now Lord of the Manor.

Nicholas, then, knew the classics, but in the last five years he had developed a lively interest in contemporary American writing. In this he differed from most of the young men of his class, who aped the European and persisted in regarding the United States as crude and negligible.

Nicholas, true to his birth and an upbringing far less democratic than that of an English nobleman, delighted in the role of patron. He had patterned himself half-consciously on a Lorenzo de Medici or a Prince Esterhazy.

He enjoyed entertaining the intelligentsia at Dragonwyck. He read the new works of Bryant, Hawthorne, and a startling young writer called Poe, with a sincere appreciation which was only slightly patronizing. For Nicholas' conviction of his own superiority was so interwoven with his flesh and bone that he had no need to prove it to others as do those not quite secure. He was a Van Ryn of Dragonwyck Manor, a law unto himself and beholden to nobody on earth—or in heaven.

He glanced again at Miranda who sat forward gazing first at one shore then the other. The breeze had whipped color into her white skin, her lips were slightly parted, her small breasts under the brown merino bodice rose and fell rapidly. There was a strong aura of femininity about her, and her long eyes, gold-flecked in green between thick dark lashes, were really magnificent. Except that they were innocent of all sex-consciousness, they were the seductive eyes of a passionate woman.

He was suddenly reminded of a French marquise he had met in Paris and of whom he had been enamored until she offended his fastidiousness. This memory annoyed him and he said coldly:

'I fear you're rather ignorant, Miranda. I shall map out a plan of reading for you.'

She smiled nervously, hurt by his tone. He had seemed so cordial and charming on the trip that she had felt at ease with him, almost as though he were her own age. It was therefore startling to see that his handsome face had grown indifferent and remote, and to have him speak to her as her father did. She felt suddenly that she bored him, and was sure of it when he wrapped his cloak about him and rose abruptly, saying, 'I'm going to take a few turns about the deck; you'll be quite safe here.'

She would have liked to walk with him, she was unused to sitting still for hours on end, and her healthy young muscles ached for exercise, but she dared say nothing. Nicholas had turned sternly unapproachable. It was her first experience of his dark moods, and far more experienced and mature people than Miranda had found them impossible to understand.

In an hour he came back, and she saw at once that the darkness had lifted. He approached her with his rare smile, a smile devoid of merriment and yet magnetic and intensely personal so that the recipient invariably felt flattered.

'In half an hour we'll arrive at Dragonwyck, Miranda. This town is Hudson.'

She obediently inspected the small neat collection of buildings and wharfs, but she was somewhat sated with new sights and privately thought Newburgh or Poughkeepsie more attractive.

'I've wondered about the name Dragonwyck, Cousin Nicholas,' she said timidly. 'Please don't think me prying,' she added, fearful that she might offend him again.

But Nicholas was pleased to explain anything that bore on the history of his family or Manor.

He sat down at once. 'The name is typical of the place in that it's a mixture of Indian legend and Dutch now anglicized—made into English,' he added, seeing that she did not understand the word. 'You see, when my direct ancestor Cornelius Van Ryn, the first patroon, acquired our lands here, he sailed up from New Amsterdam to inspect them and choose the site for the Manor House. He decided on this cliff by the river. But there was a party of Mohican Indians camped near-by and he soon found that they were afraid of this cliff on which he had started to build the house. They avoided it always, and though he was kind to them they feared him too, nor would they touch one stone or brick which went into the building. After he knew them better he discovered the reason. They believed that under the cliff there lived a great winged serpent which devoured everything which encroached on its territory.'

'And did he build there anyway?' asked Miranda.

'Of course he did. And he called the place
Draketmyck,
"place of the dragon" in Dutch, and so it has been for two hundred years.'

'The dragon hasn't ever bothered you?' asked Miranda, half-seriously.

Nicholas was amused at her question. 'No. There are many other legends and superstitions of this region; I hope you're not too impressionable or Old Zélie will frighten you with her spook rocks and phantom ships and witches—' He stopped abruptly as though he had been going to add something else.

She waited politely to see if he would go on. But he did not, and just then the steamer gave one sharp blast and veered to the eastern bank. 'We're here,' he said.

She turned from her puzzled contemplation of his face.

In after years Miranda knew that her first sight of Dragonwyck was the most vivid and significant impression of her life. She stared at the fantastic silhouette which loomed dark against the eastern sky, the spires and gables and chimneys dominated in the center by one high tower; and it was as though the good and evil, the happiness and tragedy, which she was to experience under that roof materialized into physical force and struck across the quiet river into her soul.

While the steamer made fast to the private landing she stood by the rail close to Nicholas gazing up at his house with a fascinated repulsion, while the setting sun touched half the hundred windows into fiery rectangles against the blackness of the vine-covered stone.

Nicholas seeing her awe-struck face was content to let her gaze in silence.

His home was part of him, an externalized expression of his will, for upon his inherited Dutch Manor house he had superimposed the Gothic magnificence which he desired. He had been attracted by the formulations of Andrew Downing, the young landscape architect who lived on the river at Newburgh and whose directions for building 'romantic and picturesque villas' were changing the countryside; but it was not in Nicholas to accept another's ideas, and when five years ago he had remodeled the old Van Ryn homestead, he had used Downing simply as a guide. To the original ten rooms he had added twenty more, the gables and turrets, and the one high tower. The result, though reminiscent of a German Schloss on the Rhine, crossed with Tudor English and interwoven with pure fantasy, was nevertheless Hudson River American and not unsuited to its setting.

The Dragonwyck gardens were as much an expression of Nicholas' personality as was the mansion, for here, he had subdued Nature to a stylized ornateness. Between the untouched grove of hemlocks to the south and the slope of a rocky hill half a mile to the north he had created along the river an artificial and exotic beauty.

To Miranda it was overpowering, and she felt dazed as they mounted marble steps from the landing. She was but vaguely conscious of the rose gardens and their pervasive scent, of small Greek temples set beneath weeping willows, of rock pavilions, violet-bordered fountains, and waterfalls. She was acutely conscious of her travel-stained brown dress, and the sharp, contemptuous stare of the liveried footman who had met them on the pier and was gingerly carrying her wicker basket.

It wasn't credible that she was to live in a place like this, and her steps as she followed Nicholas to the great front door dragged slower and slower even as her heart beat faster.

They entered the great hall which ran sixty feet through the house to open on the back lawns by the drive. It was dark inside, for the tapers had not yet been lit, and she shrank toward Nicholas as two people glided through a door at the right and confronted them bowing. They were Magda, Mrs. Van Ryn's housekeeper and personal maid, and Tompkins the butler.