Waltz Into Darkness

6

The house was empty, waiting. Waiting to begin its history, which, for a house, is that of its occupants. Oil lamps had been left lighted, one to a room, by someone, most likely Aunt Sarah, before leaving, their little beaded flames, safe within glass chimneys, winking just high enough to disperse the darkness and cast an amber glow. The same blend of wood shavings, paint, and putty, spiced with a dash of floor varnish, was still in evidence, but to a far lesser degree now, for carpets had been laid over the raw floors, drapes hung athwart the window casings.

Someone had brought flowers into the parlor, not costly store flowers but wildflowers, cheery, colorful, winning none the less; a generous spray of them smothering a widemouthed bowl set on the parlor center table, with spears of pussywillow sticking out all over like the quills of a hedgehog’s back.

A clock had even been wound up and started on its course, a new clock on the mantelpiece, imported from France, its face set in a block of green onyx, a little bronze cupid with moth wings clambering up a chain of bronze roses at each side of its centerpiece. Its diligent, newly practised ticking added a note of reassuring, homely tranquility to what otherwise would have been a stony-cold silence.

Everything was ready, all that was lacking were the dwellers.

A house, waiting for a man and his wife to come and claim it.

The resonant, cuplike sound of a horse’s hoofs drew near in the stillness outside, came to a halt on a double down-beat. Axles creaked with a shift of weight, then settled again. A human tongue clucked professionally, then the hoofs recommenced, thinned away into silence once more.

There was a slight scrape of leather on paving stone, a mischievous little whisper, like a secret told by one foot to another.

A moment afterward a key turned in the outside of the door.

They stood there revealed in the opening, Durand and she. Limned amber by the light before them in the house, framed by a panel of night sky sanded with stars behind them and over their heads. They were motionless, as oblivious of what lay before them as of what lay behind them. Face turned to meet face, his arms about her, her hands on his shoulders.

Nothing moved, neither they nor the stars at their back nor the open-doored house waiting to receive them. It was one of those moments never to be captured again. The kiss at the threshold of marriage.

It ended. A moment cannot last beyond itself. They stirred at last and drew apart, and he said softly: “Welcome to your new home, Mrs. Durand. May you find as much happiness here as you bring to it.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, eyes downcast for a second. “And may you as well.”

He lifted her bodily in his arms. She came clear of the ground with a little foamy rustle of skirt bottoms. Moving sideward so that his shoulder might ward off the loose-swinging door, he carried her over the sill and in. Then dipped again and set her back on her feet, in a little froth of lacy hems.

He stepped aside, closed the door, and bolted it.

She was looking around, standing in one place but moving her body in a half-circle from there, to take in everything.

“Like it?” he asked.

He went to a lamp, turned the little wheel, heightening its flame to a yellow stalagmite. Then to another, and another, wherever they had been left. The walls brightened from dull ivory to purest white. The newness of everything became doubly conspicuous.

“Like it?” he beamed, as though the reward for it all lay in hearing her say that.

Her hands were clasped, and elevated upward to height of her face; held that way in a sort of stylized rhapsody.

“Oh, Louis,” she breathed. “It’s ideal. It’s exquisite.”

“It’s yours,” he said, and the way he dropped his voice showed the gratitude he felt at her appreciation.

She moved her hands out to one side of her face now, still clasped, and nestled her cheek against them slantwise. Then across to the other side, and repeated it there.

“Oh, Louis,” was all she seemed capable of saying. “Oh, Louis.”

They moved around then on a brief tour, from room to room, and he showed her the parlor, the dining room, the others. And for each room she had an expiring “Oh, Louis,” until at last, it seemed, breath had left her altogether, and she could only sigh “Oh.”

They came back to the hall at last, and he said somewhat diffidently that he would lock up.

“Will you be able to find our room?” he added, as she turned toward the stairs. “Or shall I come up with you?”

She dropped her eyes for a moment before his. “I think I shall know it,” she said chastely.

He placed one of the smaller lamps in her hands. “Better take this with you to make sure. She probably left lights up there, but she may not have.”

With the light brought close to her like that, raying upward into her face from the glowing core held at about the height of her heart, there was to him something madonna-like about her countenance. She was like some inexpressibly beautiful image in an old cathedral of Europe come to life before the eyes of a single devotee, rewarded for his faith. A miracle of love.

She rose a step. She rose another. An angel leaving the earthly plane, but turned backward in regretful farewell.

His hand even went out slightly, as if to trace her outline against the air on which he beheld it, and thus prolong her presence.

“Goodbye for a little while,” he murmured softly.

“For a little while,” she breathed.

Then she turned. The spell was broken. She was just a woman in an evening gown, going up a stair.

The graceful back-draperies of the most beautiful costume-style in a hundred years gently undulated with her climb. Her free hand trailed the banister.

“Keep an eye out for the wallpaper,” he said. “That will tell you.”

She turned inquiringly, with a look of incomprehension. “How’s that?”

“I meant, you’ll know it by the wallpaper, when you come to it.”

“Oh,” she said docilely, but as though she still didn’t fully understand.

She reached the top of the stairs and went over their lip, shrinking down toward the floor now as she went on, until her shoulders, then her head, were gone. The ceiling-halo cast by her lamp receded past his ken, down that same illusory incline.

He went into the parlor, first, and then the other downstairs rooms, latching each window that had not already been latched, trying those that had, flinging out the drapes and drawing them sleekly together over each one. Night air was bad, the whole world knew that; it was best kept out of a sleeping house. Then at last blotting out each welcoming lamp, room by room.

In the kitchen Sarah had left a bunch of fine green grapes set out on a platter, as another token of welcome to the two of them. He plucked one off and put it in his mouth, with a half-smile for her thoughtfulness, then put out the light in there too.

The last lamp of all went out, and he moved slowly up the ghost-stairs in the dark, that was already a familiar dark to him though he’d been in this house less than half an hour. The dark of a man’s own home is never strange and never fearful.

He found his way toward their own door, in the equal darkness of the upper hall, but guided now by the thread of light stretched taut across its sill.

He stopped a moment, and he stood there.

Then he knocked, in a sort of playful formality.

She must have sensed his mood, by the tenor of the knock alone. There was an answering playful note in her own voice.

“Who knocks?” she inquired with mock gravity.

“Your husband.”

“Oh? What does he say?”

“‘May I come in?’”

“Tell him he may.”

“Who is it invites me to?”

The answer was almost inaudible, but low-voiced as it was, it reached his heart.

“Your wife.”