Then Nicholas walked down the steps and pushing through the astonished soldiers appeared in the front rank and gazed at the mob.
For a dumfounded instant they were hushed and then a hundred cries rose. 'Bloody bastard snob!' 'Spoil his pretty clothes for him.' 'Give it to him!' But still there was no concerted action. They seethed back and forth, fists were brandished, a few futile pebbles thrown, when suddenly a boy darted up carrying a bucket.
He had filled it at the hydrant, and laughing in an excited voice, 'This'll spoil his fancy duds!' he flung the water full over Nicholas. There were cheers and approving roars.
The crowd was willing now to be satisfied with horseplay rather than violence; the spectacle of a dripping aristocrat delighted them.
Nicholas' arm shot out in one quick, smooth motion. He seized the rifle of the soldier beside him, aimed carefully, and fired.
The boy dropped the bucket, the taunting laugh on his face crumpled into a look of foolish amazement. From the hole in his throat spurted a jet of blood, black as ink in the dim light. Before he fell to the cobblestones, fifty shots spattered across the square. The militia had started firing.
The mob, frantic now with terror, sent one last volley of paving stones before they fled. One of these stones hit Nicholas on the chest. He fell to the sidewalk not ten feet from the dying boy.
Two of the soldiers carried Nicholas back to the colonnade and laid him on the top step. Miranda knelt beside him, chafing his hands, easing his head on her wadded-up pelisse. The horror of the last few minutes receded. She no longer heard the screams and shots from the square. Her brain worked clearly. She knew exactly what to do. She saw that Nicholas, though unconscious, did not seem seriously injured, but he must be taken home at once.
'Go to the Van Ryn house on Stuyvesant Street,' she ordered one of the soldiers. Tell whoever opens the door that I want the carriage to hurry to the Eighth Street entrance of the Opera House. There must be three of our men, blankets and brandy. Then you will wait and show them where we are.'
The man went off without a word. She did not realize that that was the first command she had ever given in her married life, but she was aware of astonishment. Nicholas was, after all, not invulnerable! Mixed with this astonishment was a sick revulsion. She was too much confused and shocked to understand exactly what had happened—was still happening—in the square. She could only wait beside Nicholas and try to erase from her memory the black, spurting hole and contorted boyish face.—That face had reminded her of Nat at home.
Before the soldier came back to them accompanied by MacNab, a footman, and the coachman, the riot in Astor Place had ended. Amongst fifty who were wounded there were twenty corpses on the cobblestones. These included two bystanders, a little girl who had stolen from her house in Lafayette Street to see why the soldiers were shooting, and an old man who was on his way home to Jones Street after visiting his daughter uptown.
The troops marched back to their barracks.
To the north, Grace Church's new marble spire shone like an inverted icicle against the midnight sky.
19
A MONTH LATER WHEN THE VAN RYNS MOVED UP to Dragonwyck, Nicholas had entirely recovered from the effects of the blow from the paving stone, which had cracked two ribs but done no other physical damage. His body had recovered, but his personality had changed. He wished to see no one. As abruptly as the phase of activity and continual hospitality had started, it now stopped.
During his convalescence in New York he lay day after day moody and silent, accepting Miranda's or Mrs. MacNab's nursing without comment.
Nobody knew of his part in the Astor Place Massacre. If any of his friends had heard the story, most of them would have considered that his action had been justified. They would have applauded his courage. What was the life of one vicious hoodlum amongst so many dead and wounded? And after all, the militia had fired at the same time.
It was Miranda alone who struggled through horror and doubt. She tormented herself with a hundred bitter questions. If Nicholas had not insisted on leaving by the front entrance to the theater, if he had not pushed down where everyone could see him, if instead of shooting he had knocked the boy down with his fist, would then the massacre have been avoided? Or would the soldiers eventually have fired anyway?
The conviction grew upon her that Nicholas too was suffering and that he felt remorse. This enabled her to bear his gloomy moroseness. In nightmares she repeatedly saw the blood spurting from the jagged hole in a thin boyish throat, and she thought that Nicholas saw it too.
That was not what Nicholas saw. He saw a man whose invincibility had been scathed by a chance blow, a man who had been unconscious and impotent for the first time in his life, a man who had to depend on strangers for safety—strangers and Miranda.
They returned to Dragonwyck and his moroseness and his silence continued. One day he mounted the tower stairs and locked himself into the room at the summit. He did not reappear for three days, and Miranda, remembering how it had been after the baby's death, left him alone.
When he came back to her he seemed more normal than he had since his injury, but upon his first greeting her she noticed the same faint sweet odor about his clothes, and his speech was slow, the words almost imperceptibly slurred.
Peggy noticed this too. Were it anyone else but the master, she thought, I'd say he'd been on a tout up there a-skulking by himself for three livelong days. But he's not got the smell of liquor about him, and he's not the kind of a man for a free and honest swig, not that one, he isn't.
A month later it happened again.
Miranda wandered about the house, which now that it was no longer filled with guests, had for her regained all its oppressive atmosphere. She avoided the servants' eyes, and pretended even to Peggy that Nicholas' conduct was in no way peculiar.
Toward twilight of the second day she made up her mind. She mounted the tower stairs, fifty feet of slow spiralings. The door at the summit was a six-inch slab of paneled oak. There was no answer to her first knock. She retreated a step and gazed at that dark, implacable door. A year—even a month ago, she would have accepted this silent symbol of Nicholas' orders, would have obeyed him as always.
Now she did not. She clenched her fists and pounded on the door until a muffled voice cried angrily, Who's there?'
'It's Miranda!' she called back resolutely. 'I demand that you let me in.'
There was silence, then the key turned in the massive lock and the door swung open. Nicholas, in a brocaded dressing-gown, stood and looked at her sardonically. 'Come in, sweetheart, by all means, since you demand it.' He closed and locked the door behind her, purring the key in his pocket.
She stared blankly at him and at the circular room. What had she expected? A bluebeard's chamber, a sable-hung and gloomy magnificence, exaggeration of the apartments downstairs?
On the contrary, the room was austere and nearly bare, furnished only with a plain table, chair, and couch. On the table were a row of shabby books and an unlit candle, on the floor a straw matting. Even though the sun had set across the river behind the Catskills, the four windows, each facing toward a different compass point, still caught ample light.
It was only after a moment that she noticed in the room a bluish haze and a pungent odor.
'You smoke here?' she asked vaguely, conscious of a baffled disappointment. She had for so long romanticized this locked room, had been so sure that once she penetrated its secret, she would at the same time penetrate the wall that guarded her husband's soul.
He stared at her steadily, so that she turned and answered his gaze, noting with surprise that in his eyes the pupils had shrunk to pinpoints. The irises appeared to be a solid blue.
'I smoke here.' He repeated her puzzled question with a sarcastic inflection. He reached out and seized her right wrist. His fingers closed around it in a brutal grip. He pulled her over to the couch, and she saw then that on its far side, hitherto hidden, there stood a small charcoal brazier and a
tabouret on which lay a carved silver box, some fine wires, and three strangely shaped pipes.
'Behold the diamond gateway to all beauty and all power!' he said in that curiously slow voice.
She stared at the little pipes and the glowing charcoal. 'What is it, Nicholas?'
He released her wrist and opening the silver box brought out a sticky black ball which he cupped in his hand. 'Opium, my love. The glorious fruit of the poppy!'
She looked from the sticky ball in his hand to his face.
'But that's a drug, isn't it?' she said uncertainly. She had never heard the word except once two years ago when she had skimmed through a newspaper editorial on the evils of the Chinese opium traffic.
Nicholas inserted one of the wires into the ball and twisting off a tiny bead began to toast it over the brazier. 'No drug for me—' he said, and his voice sank to a whisper. 'No drug, but a javelin to pierce the mist which separates us from reality. It is my servant. All things are my servants. For I am master of life and death. Don't you know that yet, Miranda?'
He turned his head and smiled through half-closed lids. Her heart began a slow pounding, but she managed to speak with calm.
'You're not well, Nicholas. I know that whatever this stuff is, it's bad for you. Come downstairs with me now—please.'
He laughed lazily and, placing the cooked pellet in the bowl of one of the pipes, he inhaled deeply, at the same time stretching himself upon the couch.
She began to edge cautiously away and his hand shot out fastening itself again on her wrist.
'Nicholas—' she said, looking down at him, 'I don't understand. What makes you do this?'
He did not answer her. He considered her question with an inward silent pleasure, viewing her and himself as through a translucent crystal. How delicious it was, this expanding of the faculties. His mind functioned by itself. It had withdrawn into cold star-spangled space, and out here in the vast infinity it gathered power until it became a flaming bail burning with an exquisite brilliance.
It had been on the visit to Poe's cottage that it had first occurred to him to try this instrument of power. Sometime after that he had gone down to a shuttered house on Mott Street. That experience had been distasteful, the poppy had not yet yielded to his mastery. He had not sought her again for a long time. There had been a reluctance. How shameful it now seemed!
He lay and contemplated that reluctance until it took form and he saw it as a small, creeping animal which must be crushed. Everything must be crushed which might obscure the flaming brilliance. He turned his head and looked up at Miranda. She too had taken on a luminous, fluid quality. In the dimming room her golden head was the only bright spot. His fingers tightened on her wrist until he could feel the small sinews move.
'Let me go,' she whispered. 'You hurt me.'
He saw that she trembled and that her long, beautiful lids were lowered to hide the fear behind them.
'Let me go—' she cried more loudly.
'Ah, but you don't want to go, my darling. Your soul and body are only a reflection of my will.' And he twisted her arm until she was forced down beside him on the couch. Her cries were stifled beneath his mouth. She shrank to a frozen stillness. The smell of the opium nauseated her.
At last his grip slackened. He pushed her from the couch, and reached for the silver box. 'Leave me alone,' he said dully. 'You weary me.'
He drew the key from his pocket and tossed it on the floor.
She bent to pick it up and gave an involuntary moan as pain shot through her swollen wrist.
Nicholas lay without moving, his eyes shut.
She unlocked the door and shutting it behind her walked slowly down the stairs to her bedroom.
Peggy, at her eternal task of putting away freshly laundered lingerie, uttered a sharp cry when she saw her mistress.
'Whatever is it, mum!' She gazed horrified. The missis' hair was falling down her shoulders and all tangled, her pretty rose bodice was torn, worse than that were the great staring eyes of her and the trembling of her pretty mouth. 'Och, and ye've hurt yourself, poor darlin'—' cried Peggy, touching the discolored wrist. 'Did he do that—the varmint?' she cried in sudden enlightenment. ''Tis the drink after all then he's a-closeting himself with up there!'
Miranda shook her head. 'It's not drink.' She moved restlessly to the dressing-table, picked up her brush, put it down again. 'Peggy, I want to see Doctor Turner. Heaven grant that he's still in Hudson.'
'He is that, mum. 'Twas only yisterday they was a-talking in the kitchen about him and the fine cures he does. 'Twould be for your wrist you were thinking of him?'
Miranda looked at her arm. 'Yes, yes, of course. It should be bound. I don't dare go to Hudson. I must get a message to him somehow—I don't know...'
'Leave it all to me, mum,' said Peggy with instant comprehension and sympathy. 'Write a bit of a note to send to him. I'll see that he gets it by midnight for sure.'
'But how can you—?' whispered Miranda, looking up doubtfully. 'How can you without danger of—?' In this house nothing escaped Nicholas, no orders were given without his approval, not the most trivial episode took place without his knowledge.
Peggy smiled demurely. 'There's a lad in the village, mum, Hans Klopberg the smith's 'prentice, wouldn't boggle at doing me a bit of a favor. He's trusty enough, for all he's a great hulking Dutchy.'
'Peggy dear—you're not—in love!' cried Miranda, momentarily shaken out of her own distress by the little maid's expression.
She had come to take this fidelity and affection for granted. It had never occurred to her that Peggy might have a life of her own, might—and this thought filled her with desolation—want to leave and get married.
Peggy read her mistress's face, and her own sobered. 'I'll never be leaving you whilst you want me, missis dear,' she said earnestly. 'Never.'
But I can't keep her if she has a chance for happiness, thought Miranda passionately, a chance to get away from this. And I don't know how I'll live without her. She felt that she hated this Hans Klopberg, whoever he was, and at the same time she despised her selfishness. Yet there were only two people in the world of whose love she was certain—Peggy and Abigail.
And neither of them had she repaid in kind, for always between herself and them there had stood the shadow of Nicholas.
'Come, mum, write the note,' said Peggy with brisk tenderness. 'I'm thinking we dare not have the young doctor to the house, for there's no telling when he'll be abroad again, nor yet what he can see from his turret and all. You must meet the doctor outside.' She thought swiftly, seeing that the poor dear lady was too deep in misery to plan. 'By the old mill on the creek, mum, as soon as it's light. Ye can slip out. Tell him that in the writing.' And Holy Mother of God keep that one from coming downstairs beforehand, she added to herself.
Her prayers were answered. All night long there was no sound from the tower room. Miranda lay alone and sleepless in the great Van Ryn bed. Her sprained wrist throbbed incessantly. At five she rose and dressed with Peggy's help. The November morning was chilly; both women's fingers grew numb and fumbling as they buttoned Miranda into a high-necked blue merino, topped by a hooded gray traveling cape.
Everything was arranged, Peggy whispered. Hans had ridden his father's plow horse to Hudson, giving as excuse a sudden pain in the foot which needed doctoring. 'Though,' said Peggy irrepressibly, 'divil a pain or an ache he's had in his life, that one, may the blessed saints forgive him for his untruthfulness.—'Twas artful of him, however, ttaking it all in all.'
Miranda smiled sadly at the girl's obvious pride.
'Yes, very artful, and then what—?' she urged.
Jeff had been awakened and read the note. 'He looked for a moment as dumbfounded as a hen what's hatched a clutch of ducks,' said Peggy, quoting her admirer. 'Then he gives a bit of a start and a shake, and says he'll be there.'
Miranda leaned down and kissed Peggy. 'Thank you,' she whispered.
They stole together through the s
ilent house, and on those thick rugs and carpets even the shuffle of Peggy's dragging foot was inaudible.
They had decided to use the little side door in the music room, which was at the farthest point of the house from the tower. The door was behind the grand piano, and Miranda, seeing the gilded instrument, was suddenly reminded of how long it had been since Nicholas had played on it. The keyboard was locked, and upon the painted garlands which decorated the lid there had gathered a thin powdering of dust. She saw him suddenly as he had been on her first night at Dragonwyck.
Just here he had sat and played to her 'I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,' and at her hesitant singing, he had smiled. A smile full of tenderness and indulgence. And back there in the Red Room, Johanna had been sitting alone, with her clumsy botched monograms. What had she been thinking of alone in there, while Miranda and Nicholas sang and played together 'I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls'?
'Hurry, mum,' whispered Peggy, and Miranda started. She had forgotten the miserable present, forgotten even Jeff in the reconstruction of that scene of five years ago.
As Peggy stationed herself to wait by the door, Miranda slipped out. She kept close to the protection of the house, then ran ten yards across the lawn to the nearest hemlocks. From there she hurried shivering through the woods toward the mill creek. Her kid boots made little crunching sounds on the frozen ground. Ahead of her through the distant oaks and chestnuts a lurid red sun slid above the horizon.
Jeff arrived at the mill first. He tethered his horse and entered the deserted stone building. It stood on the edge of the Van Ryn estate proper, and Mrs. Farmer Gebhard's rueful prophecy had been correct. As soon as the tenants had started the long-drawn-out proceedings against Nicholas for their rights to the lands, they had been deprived of the mill, and the shad runs, and the threshing barns, and the market boat—all the perquisites that they had formerly enjoyed. Nicholas would not negotiate, he ignored their proposals to rent these conveniences—to share produce. In fact during the last year he had come to ignore his tenants. If he saw them in church or in the village, he looked the other way.