Great mischief (4 page)

A bell tinkled below-stairs which was Timothy's signal to haul up the dumb-waiter, so he crossed the hall and went through Mr. Dombie's bedroom above his own, and into a small room at the back. He pulled on the ropes in the shaft and soon the tea tray rose out of the black depths with the teapot like a setting hen

in its wadded cosy, the teacups and covered dishes surrounding it in a fat flock.

As Timothy, carrying the tray, reached the dining-room door, Penelope came up the stairs to open it for him. From long practice they had come to time this maneuver exactly to save Mr. Dombie from having to stir his crippled legs. Holding the door ajar, Penelope, who was half a head taller, looked down on Timothy and the tray with maternal searching; apparently they both passed muster, because an affectionate smile softened her strongly cast features. At one end of the dinner table a white tea cloth had been laid on top of the green velours cover, and on this Timothy set the tray.

"Tea is ready—will you come to table, Mr. Dombie?" said Penelope, taking off the tea cosy and beginning to pour.

Mr. Dombie after a pause laid down his paper; his reply came diffidently, as if some dusty substance clogged his throat.

"Why, thank you, Miss Penny, I believe I will." All these years of living under the same roof had not broken down the formality of their address to each other. Timothy helped him to a chair near Penelope's and they sat down together at that end of the table.

Penelope passed the biscuits, the cold stew left from their midday dinner, and some pumpkin preserves. Timothy tasted his stew and put his fork down with momentary irritation. Mr. Dombie was forbidden to eat

salt and sometimes Penelope, who prepared all his food separately with her own hands, made the rest of the household finish up his special dishes, a frugality that never failed to irk Timothy. Not that the lack was hard to supply, and without speaking he went to the sideboard and brought back the saltcellar. As he sprinkled his plate elaborately Penelope glanced at him under her large lids, but she too refrained from comment; by only the slightest motions they carried on the argument their discipline seldom allowed to break into words. Why should I be made to eat pap? Timothy's fork thumped out on the plate. And by the flutter of an eyelash, a disturbed motion of the hand, Penelope answered, You are unreasonable—and you think too much about food. . . .

While they ate she spread over the table like another cloth the pattern of the day's activities. The cook had left the kitchen dirty again when she went home after dinner. She really ought to be turned off; she'd never learn to be tidy and Penelope had stood all she could. The two men listened unresponsively and ate their supper because they found food more gratifying and because they had heard this before. Penelope had rescued the woman from some long-forgotten tribulation and was bound to her by her own benevolence in a slavery from which neither really desired manumission.

Unabashed, Penelope turned to more general subjects. She had gone that afternoon to a board meeting of an orphanage that was one of her fighting causes, and

the treasurer had tried to thwart her schemes for improving certain unfortunate conditions.

"Why is it that treasurers—men treasurers"—she glanced with smiling reproach from Mr. Dombie to Timothy—"are so feeble in imagination? It's perfectly obvious that education is the South's most burning problem. We can get along without luxuries—in fact, we're better off without them—but good schooling for these children born since the War is a necessity, our whole future depends on it. But to every suggestion I made, that dull little man simply kept saying we had no funds for expansion. Well, I say we must give the children better teachers and better food—we can't afford not to— and the funds will be forthcoming. I put him to rout, I think; I got a resolution through . . ."

Under his irritation Timothy couldn't help being stirred by the gust of Penelope's confidence and conviction which blew people along, even male treasurers, their umbrellas turned inside out. She went on, "After all, which is more important, money or education?"

"Education, of course," said Mr. Dombie obligingly, setting down his cup and sucking the tea from the ends of his mustache. But Timothy said nothing because he thought Sister Penny was right but illogical, and he had never learned how to meet this dilemma effectively. He met it this time by a jerky movement that upset the saltcellar. "Clumsy!" she exclaimed, but her broad forehead and fine eyes turned on him indulgently and she smiled. Timothy drew a cross with his finger in the white pile on the table between them, but Penelope

ignored his look inviting her to do the same; she declined to placate the dark gods who breed quarrels—so he threw a pinch over his shoulder for good measure,

Penelope continued to provide the conversation; fitting at the head of the table, she was the dispenser to her household, of food, of comfort, and of ideas. And 5he did it with warmth and style. Her fresh coloring, her animation, offset the austerity of her dark hair, parted in the middle and piled fiat on top of her head, leaving her ears nakedly exposed.

When the meal was finished Timothy carried the tray back to the dumb-waiter, Penelope removed the cloth and went down to the kitchen to wash the tea things. He returned to the dining room, which was also their sitting room; Mr, Dombie was in his armchair again, and Timothy sat down in its twin on the other side of the hearth to warm his cold feet, a complaint that afflicted him chronically.

Outdoors the rain had slackened to a cold quiet dripping which merely sealed in the warmth of the room. Mr, Dombie talked seldom and that was a comfort. The two men steeped in a cottony silence. The light, Timothy noticed with a sudden awareness of familiar things, suffused wood and chenille with a kind of luxuriance; the gas jets on either side the mantel wavered in their milky shades; the globe of the kerosene lamp shone like a little sun domesticated in the center of the table. Light itself, he thought, had been captured and enclosed in Penelope's service.

She came back presently and Timothy gave her his

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place by the fire. She turned the gas jets lower, reaching up with a gesture that made the petty economy seem an evidence of seriousness and character, like the plain black dresses she habitually wore. Then she sat down with her sewing basket and Timothy took his allotted seat beyond hers. It was a straight chair that made few concessions to tired muscles, but obviously age and sex qualified Penelope and Mr. Dombie for possession of the two horsehair-covered armchairs on either side of the hearth.

The grate threw out a lovely arc of warmth, but beyond it lay an arc of chilliness which even the thick curtains could not temper. Cold little airs fingered Timothy's spine and added to his irritation. Furthermore he had forgotten to bring the book he was reading, and not for worlds would he plunge into the cold regions below to get it.

The sitting room offered a reader only the family Bible on the whatnot, a gift edition of The Lay of the Last Minstrel bound in the Scott tartan, and a photograph album of dead Partridges handsomely laid away in maroon plush. Timothy's mind thus lay open to the temptations Satan finds for the idle. He tilted his chair back and picked his teeth, then he put his hands for warmth into his trouser pockets and gazed about the room. In the surrounding air he discovered another area of chill than the one at his back, a picture of The Last Judgment on the wall in a corner. This painting with its message of impending doom had hung heavily over his childish head, especially in the War years, but

Papa considered it a salutary reminder of the briefness of mortality and, later, Penelope had kept it there because it was a copy of the work of a great Flemish artist. Familiarity had long since shrouded it from Timothy's sight; but now it came out of its cerements and gave him a fresh sensation. Below the central figure of Christ enthroned, the earth cracked to disgorge the dead (in a distressing state of nakedness) , who were being seized and sorted into the Saved and the Damned. Two exophthalmic angels hustled the former toward Heaven while the sinners were being thrust into a horrid pit.

The naturalism with which the Flemish master had treated his fantasy suited Timothy's tastes exactly. He admired the lifelike figures and began to find resemblances in them—that knock-kneed fellow with the crutch was Mr, Dombie being helped toward the pearly gates, the handsome virago bound the other way was Sister Penny, giving the devils a bad time as she protested her fate and her bare condition. He glanced slyly at the two bent heads before him and his lips went up at the corners in their characteristic curve, then he returned to the picture to look for Will and his wife, Anna Maria. . . .

The childish fancy faded out. Mr. Dombie had begun to read from the newspaper about Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee which was being prepared for next year, and Timothy's thoughts became meshed in the hypnotic singsong. . . . The day Penelope had brought the young stranger into the house throbbed dully in

Timothy's memory like a foreign body still encysted there. Fascinated and horrified, drawn and repelled, he had shrunk under the staircase as the stretcher passed by, all blood, bandages, and a dead man's face . . , and on that day his father had told him the undreamed-of, the impossible news that the South was going to lose the War. As to Mr. Dombie, Penny had nursed him back to life with fanatical care; passionate, wholehearted Penny . . . when the surgeons had laid him aside in the heavy rush of casualties, in the dreadful shortage of nurses and drugs, to make room for men who might be patched up and returned to the lines. Penny had refused to give him up, she had revolted against that cruel abandonment, she had brought him home and saved him.

How much she had saved in so doing might be open to question, for all Penny's care could not rebuild the nerves, the tissues, the bones splintered in the last desperate fight at Secessionville. Bleached, almost helpless, he seemed to have caught the shell fragments in his spirit too, as if the vital flow of life had only half returned to the vacant dwelling.

Thus it had befallen, Timothy saw, enlightened, as if the wick had been turned up in the lamp, that Mr. Dombie had become the slave of Penelope's devotion. But how had he himself succumbed—he who had inherited the fine constitution of the Partridges? A sharper, more insistent chill went through him. The love-slaves ... a fanciful epithet; neither of them looked the part exactly. Yet neither of them stirred, he thought, without a ghostly silver clank around the ankles.

Timothy came to, acutely conscious of his twenty-six vertebrae against the narrow chair-back. He bethought him of his torn coat, and, when the nasal voice trailed off for a moment, he got up and took it to Penelope.

"Look at this sleeve. Sister; it's frayed out at the seam-Can I trouble you to mend it for me? It's almost new, this coat, I bought it only—let me see—winter before last, I think it was, but the seam has pulled already."

Penelope took it from him and clucked sympathetically. "I'll have to patch it, I'm afraid. All the materials we get these days are wretched. When I remember the fine alpacas Mama used to buy— This feels as if it were made of straw."

"I got this at Robinson's, so it should be a good coat. But I suspect Mr. Robinson puts out old dry goods sometimes. These threads are rotten; it's downright dishonest to sell a coat with no more wear in it than this."

Mr. Dombie lowered his paper. "Robinson was a good cavalry officer," he put in mildly. "He rode like a demon, until he was captured in Virginia."

Timothy was nettled. He should have sympathized with Mr. Robinson's difficulties in keeping his goods in stock but he didn't; he took a reprehensible satisfaction in blaming Mr. Robinson. "He may ride like a demon but he runs a miserable dry goods store. You can't build up a business unless you have good stock to sell. After all, you have to put out money before you can make money."

"Making money is not the most important thing in life," Penelope said.

There was something familiar to Timothy's ears about this exchange; familiar, yet curiously tangled. Penelope gave Mr. Dombie a protective glance that ranged her on his side and went on. "You oughtn't to say such things about Mr. Robinson, Timothy. I don't believe he would sell decayed material—he was in Hampton's Cavalry during the War. You must have sat in the east wind. That will sometimes loosen the fibers of cloth, they say."

"That's true," said Mr. Dombie, his thin face almost animated. "It must have been the east wind. Miss Penny. It's a mean wind, the east wind; you notice fish won't bite when it blows, fishing lines rot out, and it makes a man's wounds ache like the Old Boy."

From long discipline or sheer discouragement Timothy forbore to point out the non sequiturs in this conversation. He returned to his chair and, tilted back at a reckless angle, nursed his grievances for a while. Mr. Dombie's flat, persistent voice went on, reading a description of the Crystal Palace, and the glittering structure began to take shape in the small stuffy room. A craving seized Timothy to escape from the damaged structures of defeat and to see this brave palace reared on foreign ground. The English names woke in him a queer response, a desire that had throbbed lately.

He brought the forelegs of his chair down with a thump. "Sister, there's something I want to talk to you about. I'm thinking of going away."

It came on him with a certain surprise that under the thick coat of habitual yielding he still had a residue of spunk . . . perhaps one always has more than one knows.

The two faces by the fire turned on him in utter disbelief.

"I want to visit the Crystal Palace."

He felt as if the chair were still rocking under him in a precarious balance and went on quickly. "Besides, business is going badly—trade is falling off. Without any capital I haven't much chance of building it up."

"Why, Timothy, you astound me—" The remark was unnecessary; Penelope's rigidity, her fixed blue glance, spoke for her. "I had no idea you were worried about the shop. Why didn't you tell me?"