Dragonwyck (42 page)

'I daresay,' answered Nicholas, ushering her into their box and settling himself on one of the red-velvet seats. 'The lower classes are always jealous and trying to ape their betters.'

There was a distant crash and the diminishing tinkle of glass. A murmur of consternation ran over the audience. All eyes turned for reassurance to the group of frock-coated policemen who stood together in a far corner under the balcony. Their chief, Mr. Matsell, chewed on his fingernails and looked unconcerned. The audience settled back again and consulted their programs.

The curtain rose on time and the three weird sisters played to a quiet, waiting house. When Macready, tastefully arrayed in chain mail, strode on in the third scene and announced to Banquo:

'So foul and fair a day I have not seen,'

he was greeted with an ovation marred by a few hisses which the police suppressed, and supporters rushed a placard to the side of the proscenium which stated that 'The Friends of Order will remain quiet.'

The Friends of Order did remain quiet, but the mob outside did not. It worked itself into a fury. In the seventh scene just as Macready, beating his breast and flashing his eyes, began,

'I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition—'

a handful of stones crashed through the upper windows and bounced harmlessly along the gallery; then clearly through those broken windows the frightened audience heard a shout. 'Tear it down! Burn the damned den of the aristocracy!'

Macready paused only a second and then went on at breakneck speed to Miss Pope, who made a valiant if pale and trembling Lady Macbeth.

Another clatter of stones fell into the theater; one of them hit the gorgeous chandelier, which shivered and tinkled threateningly. The parquet audience rushed back under the galleries. The play went on through the uproar, though the actors became inaudible and were reduced to the status of wildly gesticulating puppets.

Mr. Vandergrave rose. 'I'm going to take my wife home,' he said to Nicholas in a low voice, 'and I presume you will do the same. This is outrageous.'

'Why, no,' answered Nicholas, smiling and rising to help Rebecca with her shawl. 'I believe we'll stay. I'm fond of "Macbeth," and find this particular interpretation remarkably interesting.' He indicated the stage, where the third act was in resolute progress, though the actors had to skip over a stream of water which gushed from pipes which had been broken in Mr. Macready's dressing-room.

Vandergrave shook his head and presented his arm to his wife. They quitted the box and hurried with other prudent ones toward the Eighth Street exit, where a squad of policemen escorted them outside.

'Don't you think we should go too?' asked Miranda nervously. There was a constant banging of bricks, paving stones, and pebbles against the facade of the building; the balconies shouted and stamped to the accompaniment of the pandemonium outside on Astor Place.

'Are you afraid?' asked Nicholas, laughing.

She saw that he was exhilarated. He, who was so seldom amused by anything, derived from the hostility which surrounded them, from the mouthing, frightened players, the shrieking audience, a sardonic delight.

She twisted her gloved fingers together and tried to reason away her panic. They were safe enough in the covered box, but what would happen later? Suppose the rioters succeeded in firing the opera house, or in breaking in? And even if none of this happened, when this nightmare performance was finally ended, what would Nicholas do? Danger was to him a joy and a challenge.

A sharp apprehension seized her. fear that was separate from the contagion of panic around her.

Though Macready's company begged for the descent of the curtain, implored him at least to make stringent cuts, he refused. The audience had paid for a full performance and that they would get, if they dared stay for it. No despicable Yankee mob doubtless incited by the even more despicable Forrest should feaze a British gentleman.

Toward the close of the last act there was a lull outside, occasioned, though no one in the theater knew it, by the arrival of the militia in Astor Place—sixty cavalry and three hundred infantry.

The last scenes became audible. The final curtain came down and Macready appeared bowing and was received with cheers.

The manager made a hurried announcement thanking those who had stayed and asking the audience to leave through the back door, where the constabulary would insure their safety.

Everyone obediently surged toward the indicated exit. Everyone but Nicholas. He adjusted Mirandas satin pelisse for her, put on his black cape, and blew some specks of dust from his gloves. Then he placed his rail hat under his arm.

'Where are we going?' cried Miranda as he ushered her from the box and turned down the deserted corridor to the right.

'Out the front entrance, as we came in, of course.'

She drew back, hanging on his arm. 'But that's where the—the disturbance is—oh, please, please, Nicholas, go with the others—I implore you—'

'The disturbance seems to have died down,' he said with the faintest tinge of regret. 'But in any case would you really contemplate our scuttling through the back door like mice?'

Yes, she thought passionately. I want to get home. I want to be safe. But she was silenced by her habit of obedience and the instinctive admiration for physical courage. The great front doors were barricaded from the inside. Nicholas removed the planks and held one of the doors for her to pass through.

At once they saw the reason for the silence. The troops were ranged along the base of the steps confronting the mob. Both factions were uncertain, eyeing each other warily. New and again one of the rioters shied an isolated stick, stone, or rotten apple at the soldiers, who dodged as best they could and endured stoically. They had no orders to fire.

The flickering light of torches and such of the street lamps as had not been broken illumined the square. On the Bowery corner a fountain of water from a smashed hydrant gushed high in the air.

In the darkness of the colonnade around the theater no one had noticed Miranda and Nicholas. They might still have slipped down behind the troops and, mingling with the Lafayette Street crowd, who were mostly onlookers and curiosity-seekers, have walked the two blocks home.

The mob had exhausted its venom, and nearly exhausted its missiles too. It was nearing midnight, and in the absence of any victims and confronted by the impassive militia, most of the rioters began to think of drifting away. They had made their demonstration against "foreign rule and the aristocracy," they had inflicted a certain amount of damage on the hated Opera House. Perhaps that was enough. The frenzy for destruction ebbed with every passing moment; a good many of the older men were beginning to tell themselves it was a good thing there'd been no blood shed.

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.

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.