Darconville's Cat (15 page)

  “It has the scent of a fairy-forest,” said Isabel,
breathing in the orange and cloves and regarding Darconville,
sideways, with a covertly wistful smile. And then, foreshadowing a
“changeling” fantasy he’d soon see was often hers, she quietly told
him of a dream she’d with abiding continuity had from childhood:
she was a solitary princess, wandering barefoot, lost in a desolate
land whose perspective slid down into lonely valleys and empty
meadows where people were cruel and no one understood her or who
she was until one day she came to her fairy-forest, an enchanted
world of flowers, castles, animals—

  A knock at the door interrupted her. It was Miss
Trappe, tiny under a huge straw hat, holding an armful of—but it
triple-somersaulted with a whine out of her hands, rucked up a rug,
and went skidding beneath it only to the point of its blinking eyes
and pink nose, parts all recognizably Spellvexit’s. That, then,
became the happy occasion for Darconville of introducing Isabel
Rawsthorne to Miss Trappe who, excusing herself, mentioned she only
wanted to be sure the cat got in (she swore he mewed “Why,
good
evening, madam!” from the front porch ), but before
she left—exclaiming upon Isabel’s beauty— she invited her, anytime,
to come visit a lonely old woman. And then she was off. Darconville
told Isabel how much she would like Miss Trappe, as he himself did,
and encouraged her to accept that invitation. “And
this”—Darconville’s lap was suddenly filled with an agitated
creature, flumping its paws and eyeing Isabel suspiciously—”is
Spellvexit, who walks by himself and all places are not alike to
him. He talks.”

  Isabel, unsuccessfully, tried to touch him.

  “I don’t seem ever able to communicate with
anybody,” whispered Isabel as if she were breathing on glass,
distractedly twicking her thumbnail, the cuticle of which, saw
Darconville, was curiously wrinkled. The words almost broke his
heart.

  “Surely your mother and father—”

  “I have no father.”

  It was spoken so fast that Darconville, struck with
it, could find nothing whatever to say. Isabel, it seemed, never
said anything important to him except while making some physical
movement to distract attention from her words, for simultaneously
she held a cushion to herself and something jumped in her eyes, now
tense with search. He couldn’t define it at once, but after
watching her for a space, while his brain pressed for the right
words to say, he thought perhaps suddenly he’d understood the
meaning of her dream. But beyond that, his spirit extended outward,
rising from stoical self-sufficiency and reaching, like sweet
miracle, to a conscious concern not to flout the souls of the
lonely on earth, and so Isabel went to Darconville’s heart by the
very nearest road, which was the road of pity, smoothed by grace,
and beauty, and a gentleness that seemed, at last, the one ray of
light in the darkness of Quinsyburg.

  Darconville sought a way to put her at ease,
experiencing, however, an intimation of helplessness in the face of
what he guessed to be a strange pride and almost exultant
loneliness, for without a sigh, without a break, she pondered
wildly, floating upon some inner sea of feeling while yet being
frightened, it seemed, of suddenly drowning in it. He attempted to
reach her, carefully, without trying to contribute to the invasion
of forces that within her had clearly already begun. And in someone
so young! Come, asked Darconville, wasn’t she only seventeen? No
answer. Eighteen? She nodded. Where did she live? It was a place
called Fawx’s Mt., about seventy miles north of Quinsyburg. And
hadn’t she wanted to go to college?

  “Isabel?”

  “Everybody thought it best,” she replied, her grave
reflective calm obviously masking an unsettled temperament in the
matter. “My uncle, who lives with us, didn’t really care. My
mother, I suppose, did. But I told my mother, no, I really wasn’t
anxious to come. I wanted—”

  But Isabel hurried across the passage, silently,
leaving in the stead of whatever it was that slipped away simple
resignation, and mechanically smiled at her hands. He looked for
something to say.

  “Did your mother drive you down to Quinsyburg?”

  It was an ordinary question ordinarily asked, but
she looked away, smoothing the nap of her dress over and over
again. The poignancy of her shyness, or her hurt, or her
fear—whatever—increased his awareness of the suspense between
them.

  “No,” whispered Isabel quickly, lowering her eyes,
“a friend.” She glanced imperceptibly across her shoulder in a
brief but distinct scrutiny. “Just a friend.”

  Smiling, Darconville hurriedly looked round for
something to do or say, anything to precipitate a change of subject
and arrest not one, but two minds beating against the unknown, for
a counterpoise had lowered: a
friend
—the commonest
dysphemism in an affair of the heart —is always a member of the
opposite sex. He saw the shadow of someone else cast across her
life. It didn’t matter, he thought; inevitable things don’t. And in
spite of his anticipation of that very possibility, he leaned
forward, his hands under his chin, and quoted humorously,

        ”My maiden
Isabel,

        Reflaring
rosabel,

        The fragrant
camomel.”

  Isabel paused, left off biting her underlip in
concentrated thought, and pulled her thumb. “Oh, I ruin
everything,” she burst out. “I seem to ruin everything.” (She
pronounced it “ru-een.”) “I do! I do!”

  “No, not at all. No,” Darconville heard himself
insisting, shaking his head, mad to absolve her of anything, “you
don’t ruin everything.” She seemed so lost, outside the world
looking in, divided from him in some way not as yet understood,
drawing away and revenging herself on her own magnificence as if
trying to distance the perfection she, by embodying, couldn’t know.
She hunched down into herself, saddened, like a small batrachian in
a hide-hole.

  “I feel small, for some reason,” she said. “I feel
like a little thing.”

  Sympathetically, Darconville touched her chin and
lifted her head. “Then I’ll call you that,” said he. “‘The Little
Thing.’“ Isabel couldn’t stop the smile extracted from her, but at
the words, automatically, she pulled her dress to cover her legs as
best she could.
Can’t you see it doesn’t matter
? thought
Darconville.
Can’t you see that
?

  “The curfew,” said Isabel. “I must be getting
back.”

  Darconville drank some wine. “Oh,” he said, “but we
haven’t told you anything about us?”

  Isabel looked startled, hearing the plurality of
plural pronouns, and said almost below her breath, “I thought
you—were all alone.”

  She pulled her thumb.

  Suddenly, her eyes grew luminous with that special
excitement of sympathy that can bring tears from something deeper
than passion as Darconville lifted up Spellvexit—a twitching,
bewhiskered explanation—from the top of the large trunk he then
dragged from the corner of the room. And as he sketchily outlined
the course of events that had brought him down South, filling in
various facts of his past, both eccentric and ecclesiastical (she
agreed, as he preferred it that way, to keep those religious
adventures a secret between them: for privacy) he sorted through
the trunk to show her what, over the years, he’d collected: a
golden ikon; old flags and coins; a few of his own manuscripts;
ancient books, several written by his ancestors; photographs of
Europe—many of Venice and, of course, his grandmother—and other
romantic bits-and-pieces evoking a thousand distant places all more
exciting than the little town of Quinsyburg from which, suggested
Darconville, his eyes sparkling mischievously, they could both
secretly escape that very night! Isabel’s gay laughter rang like a
peal of bells and, upon fleeting reflection, asked as if really to
know, “Where will we go?”

  Darconville was almost ready to pull out a map!

  The assortment of odds-and-ends in the trunk,
however, took Isabel’s attention, and as she delicately lifted out
each object, attracted especially to a carved Russian fife, she
seemed for the first time truly animated and excited. She found
confidence. She asked questions. And always she was full of
exclamations, charming Darconville by the cadences of her voice,
now rising, then dropping to a rich whisper of roguishness in which
a slight rural monotony of speech disappeared and a soul
resounded.

  “At my house—how could I
forget
?—I have a
real snakeskin
and
my grandmother’s diamond ring
and
an actual tintype, really, of Lee on his horse, let me
see,” she continued breathlessly, “and a very old bracelet my
grandfather found in China a long time ago.”

  Darconville, impishly, asked: “Was he Chinese?”

  Isabel laughed into her hand.

  “Silly,” she said, clicking her tongue and tapping
his nose with her finger, coming close enough for Darconville to
feel the weblike softness of her hair and almost taste a breath
like candy, Sweet William, golddrops. “He was in the navy.”

  Amused, she feigned to strike him. “He’s been around
the world, you know. Several times.”

  “It must be lonely sailing around the
world”—quickly, Isabel looked at Darconville to see if somewhere in
his consciousness by obstinate resistance he were opposed to such a
thing—”unless, of course,” shrugged Darconville, “you have nothing
to keep you on land.”

  There fell an odd silence. Darconville looked at
her. But Isabel was staring enigmatically past him, her brown eyes
fixed upon vacancy as if she were scrutinizing some faraway image
on a distant horizon, trying to divine, as it were, and perhaps
overcome its limits by some studious, some private act of the will.
Darconville, at last, thought that he had met someone as romantic,
as full of dreams, as unpractically and wondrously mad as himself.
Then she looked up, her sad smile like the light of white candles
shining from a quiet altar. Darconville reached for something in
the trunk and asked her if she’d accept it as a small gift. It was
the carved Russian fife.

  Thanking him, Isabel folded it to her breast. She
waited a moment, solemnly. “You—” She hesitated. “—you won’t mind
if I ask you something?”

  With precise thumb-and-forefinger she carefully
picked up the fat pen lying on his desk.

  “Would you, sometime, write a poem for me?”

  “I promise,” said Darconville.

  The piety of her expression, the peculiar intimacy
of that mysterious girlishness anticipated in his imagination,
nourished all his happiness. She exhaled so deeply that he was
instantly reminded of the Elizabethan idea that each sigh costs the
heart a drop of blood.

  “Oh dear,” whispered Isabel, “I feel so safe here
now.”

  “Here? You mean, in Quinsyburg?”

  The room grew strangely quiet as Isabel, coloring,
bowed her head, her eyelashes sweeping down in a sedulously lowered
glance. She paused.

  “Near you.”

  The candles, swipping, took their attention for a
moment, throwing shadows this way and that. As she watched the
flames, there was a complicated wistfulness in her expression
until, in the solitude, itself almost predatory for the spell it
threw, she turned to him. “We won’t meet again like this—for the
first time. We won’t meet again, will we,” she asked, “when we’re
strangers? We know each other now?”

  Was it a question? A statement?

  There was not a flicker of a doubt, however, as to
the summons he received from this girl who for so long, or so it
seemed, had insinuated herself into his life as an almost spectral
apparition. Gently, touching the small of her back, he drew her
body with scarcely perceptible pressure against his own, as she
leaned forward, her heart beating fast, a certain virginal
detachment in her awkwardness, and she came forth, as if
collapsing, towards him, her flowing hair scented with a fragrance
of almost immortal influence. Fairest of mortals, thought
Darconville, thou distinguished care of a thousand bright
inhabitants of air! They looked into each other’s eyes in an
admixture of sudden beauty and confusion, and, in that pure light,
Darconville clasped her almost to suffocation against his heart and
kissed her until destiny, fulfilled, seemed no longer necessary. It
is always the most beautiful moment in a love affair.

  Isabel was already on the porch and down the steps
when Darconville, in a hushed voice, called to her through the
darkness, “What will you give me for a basket of hugs?”

  And just before she disappeared into the night of
fells and foxglove, silence and stars, Isabel turned and ran back
several steps to lean forward and whisper with the inaudibility
that is at the heart of joy itself, “I will give you a basket of
kisses.”

  XIX

  Effictio

  How to name it, blessed it.

        —GERARD MANLEY
HOPKINS

  HEAD: Stately

  EYES: Brown demilunes (something too close together)
proving Astrarche, Queen of Stars, a twin

  NOSE: A nobility softening its slight
acumination

  MOUTH: Perfect, with the tremlet of a dimple at the
edge. The tallest hyperboles cannot descry the beauty of its smile,
which flashes, however, teeth too large.

  LIPS: Full

  EARS: A gynotikolobomassophile’s delight

  FACE: Simonetta Vespucci’s, in the ecstasy of
transverberation:

        ”A face made
up

        Out of no other
shop

        Than what
nature’s white hand sets ope.”

  The scar weeps once, forever.