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But I had already seen through the side windows a raging fire in the far corner of the yard, away from the street, and the figure of Mary Beth hurling one object into it after another.
"Stop her," I whispered. I could scarce breathe at all. The thing was invisible, yet all around me, sustaining me.
"Julien, I beg you. Do not push this further."
I stood there, trying not to pass out from weakness, and I saw the stacks of books on the grass, the old pictures, paintings from Saint-Domingue, old portraits of ancestors back to the beginning. I saw the account books and ledgers and sheaves of papers from my mother's old study, the foolishness she'd written. And the letters from Edinburgh, all tied and in bundles! And my books, aye, one was left, and this one she threw into the fire as I called out to her!
I reached out with all my power to stop it. She swung round as if caught by a hook, the book still in her fingers, and as she stared at me, dazzled and confused by the power that had stayed her hand, the wind rose and caught the book and sent it flip-flopping and whirling into the flames!
I gasped for breath. My curses had no syllables. The worst kind of curses. All went black.
When I awoke I was in my room.
I was in bed, and Richard, my dear young friend, was with me. And Stella too, holding my hand.
"Mamma had to burn all those old things," she said.
I said nothing. The fact was, I had suffered a very tiny stroke, and could not for a while speak, though I myself did not know it. I thought my dreamy silence a choice. It was not until the following day when Mary Beth came to me that I realized my words were slurred and I could not find the very ones I chose to use to tell her of my anger.
It was late evening, and when she saw how it was with me she was greatly distressed and called at once for Richard to come, as if it were all his fault. He did come, and together they helped me down the stairs, as if to say, if I could get out of bed and walk, then I could not die that night.
I sat on the living room sofa.
Ah, how I loved that long double parlor. Loved it as you love it, Michael. It was a comfort to me to be there, facing the windows that looked out on the lawn, with all remnants of that brutal fire gone now.
For long hours, Mary Beth spoke. Stella came and went. The gist was that my time and my ways were gone now.
"We are coming into an age," Mary Beth said, "when science itself may know the name of this spirit, when science will tell us what it is." On and on she spoke of spiritualists and mediums and seances and guides, and the scientific study of the occult, and such things as ectoplasm.
I was revolted. Ectoplasm, the thing from which mediums make their spirits material? I didn't even answer. I was sunk into despair. Stella cuddled beside me and held my hand, and said finally:
"Mamma, do shut up. He isn't listening to a word you say and you are boring him."
I gave no argument one way or the other.
"I see far," said Mary Beth. "I see a future in which our thoughts and words do not matter. I see in our clan our immortality. It will not be in our lifetime--any of us--that Lasher will have his final victory. But it will come and no one will prosper from it as greatly as we will. We shall be the mothers of this prosperity."
"All hope and optimism," I sighed. "What of the glen, what of the vengeful spirit? What of the wounds dealt in the olden times, from which its conscience has never healed! This thing was good. I felt its good. But now it is evil!"
And then I was ill again, very ill. They brought my pillows and covers to me there. I could not climb the stairs again until the next day, and I had not quite decided to do it, when something turned my head one last time, with hope, and that was to a final and helpless confidante.
It came about this way.
As I lay on the couch in the heat of the day, feeling the river breeze through the side windows and trying not to smell any taint of that fire in which so much had been burnt, I heard Carlotta arguing--her low sour voice growing ever more fierce as she denounced her mother.
At last she came into the room and glared down at me. She was a thin tall girl of fifteen then, I think. Though her actual birthday escapes me. I remember that she was not so terribly unattractive then, having rather soft hair and what one calls intelligent eyes.
I said nothing, as it was not my policy to be unkind to children, no matter how unkind those children were to me. I took no notice of her.
"And you fuss over that fire," said she in a cold righteous way, "and you let them do what they have done to that child, and you know it is in fear of Mother. Of you and of Mother."
"What are you talking about? What child?" said I.
But she was gone, angry and despairing, and stalking away. But soon Stella appeared, and I told her all these words.
"Stella, what does all this mean? What is she talking about?"
"She dared to say that to you? She knew you were ill. She knew you and Mother had quarreled." Tears sprang to Stella's eyes. "It's nothing to us, it's just those Fontevrault Mayfairs and all their own madness. You know, the Amelia Street gang. Those zombies."
Of course I knew whom she meant--the Fontevrault Mayfairs being the descendants of my cousin Augustin, whose life I'd taken when I was only fifteen with a pistol shot. His wife and children had founded that line at Fontevrault, as I told you--their own palatial plantation in the Bayou country miles from us, and only now and then at the largest of family get-togethers deigned to pay us a call. We visited their sick. We helped them bury their dead. They did the same with us, but over the years there had been little softening.
Some of them--old Tobias and his son Walker, I believe--had built a fine house on St. Charles Avenue, at Amelia Street, only about fifteen blocks away, and I had watched it being built with interest. A whole pack of them lodged there--old women and old men, all of whom personally despised me. Tobias Mayfair was a feeble old fool who had lived too long just as I had, and as vicious a man as I have ever known, who blamed me his whole life for everything.
The others were not so bad. They were of course rich, sharing in the family enterprises with us, though they had
no need of us directly. And Mary Beth with her large family fetes had been inviting them into the fold, especially the younger ones. There had always been a few star-crossed cousins marrying cousins across the dividing line, or whatever it was. Tobias in his hatred called the nuptials wedding dances on Augustin's grave, and now it was known that Mary Beth wished all cousins to return to the fold, and Tobias was supposedly uttering curses.
I could tell you many amusing stories about him and all his various attempts to kill me. But it's no matter now. I wanted to know what Stella was talking about, what Carlotta meant. What was all this venom?
"So what have Augustin's children done now?" I asked, for that was all I ever called them, the whole crazy lot of them.
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel," said Stella. "That is what it is all about. Let down your long hair, or waste away in the attic forever."
She positively sang out these words in her merry fashion.
"It's Cousin Evelyn, I mean, my darling dear, and everybody's saying she's Cortland's daughter."
"I beg your pardon. You are referring to my son Cortland? You are saying he has got one of their women with child? Those Mayfairs?"
"Thirteen years ago, Cortland snuck off to Fontevrault drunk and got Barbara Ann with child, to be exact. You know, Walker's daughter. The child was Evelyn, you know, you remember. Barbara Ann died when Evelyn was born. Well, guess what, darling dear? Evelyn is a witch, as powerful a witch as ever there was, and she can see into the future."
"Says who?"
"Everyone. She has the sixth finger! She's marked, my darling dear, and positively strange beyond imagining. And Tobias has locked her up for fear that Mother will kill her! Imagine. That you and Mother would harm her. Why, you are the girl's grandfather! Cortland admitted it to me, though he made me swear never to tell you. 'You know how Father hates the Fontevrault crowd,' he said. 'And what good can I do that girl, when everyone in the household loathes me?' "
"Wait a minute, child. Slow down. Do you mean to tell me Cortland took advantage of that addle-brained Barbara Ann, who died giving birth, and he deserted that baby?"
