Pearl Buck - Death in the Castle

He flexed her thumb. “I’m stubborn, too. See my thumb? I’m more stubborn than you — been at it longer so you may as well give up. You can’t change me. And I’m not going to take the castle away from you if you don’t want me to have it. I’ll go away and everything will be as it was before, as it always has been, always will be — and you’ll be happy again.”

“No,” she said in a low voice. “I won’t be happy again.”

He folded his hand over her hand. “Your hand’s trembling, trembling like a frightened bird. … Kate, tell me who you are. There’s some secret here in the castle — I feel it. It’s not about ghosts, either. It’s about someone who’s alive. … Let me help you.”

“No secret.” She shook her head.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“Only that I’ve been wrong — about you.”

“But you don’t know me.”

“I’ve been mistaken about you. I mean — I thought you were—”

“What?”

He was gazing deep into her eyes and she could not look away. She tried to smile and felt herself blush and her heart beat. His face was near, very near — his lips—

“Kate!”

It was Wells. He stood there before them, his jaw hanging, his eyes stern. She snatched her hand away.

“Get back to the pantry at once,” Wells ordered her. “The breakfast things are waiting, not to mention that this afternoon the public will be here.”

John Blayne rose. “It’s my fault. Wells. But I don’t think you need speak to her like that, in any case.”

Wells was icy. “And there’s an overseas call for you, Mr. Blayne — it’s waiting in the library — from your father again.”

“Thanks.” He paused to smile at Kate and sauntered toward the library.

Wells waited until he was out of sight, then turned to Kate. She was still sitting there in the deep window and now was looking out into the yew walk. “Don’t get yourself mixed up with this American,” he muttered. “There’s enough wrong here in the castle without you confusing everything, too. Sir Richard would he very angry.”

She did not turn her head. “It’s a confusing world. I know — I agree with you, Grandfather. And I don’t want to get — mixed up, as you call it. We’re working people — that’s all we are. They don’t really care for us. Whatever they do, it’s all above our heads. We’ll never understand them.”

“And you,” he retorted heavily, “you don’t know what you are talking about.”

He left her and she watched his gaunt old figure shuffling down the long passage until it was out of sight. He had never loved her. Who was he? Who was she? Why were they so different, and why, for that matter, did she not love him? She had never loved him even as a child. She was always quite alone … but never so alone as now … and felt herself impelled, in loneliness, to follow John Blayne to find him blindly, merely to be near him for the brief time that he would still be here in the castle.

… He was in the library, sitting behind the great oak desk, his eyes shut, his face grimacing as he held the receiver as far as possible from him, as usual. From the receiver came his father’s voice, loud and rasping.

“Do you hear me? … I want you back here in New York, next Monday. Why? For the merger, Johnny. Where have you been all this time?”

He replied reasonably but firmly. “It’s not so simple, Dad. There are complications here — I don’t understand them altogether, but—”

The voice cut across like a buzzsaw. “You won’t be here, then?”

“I won’t he there.”

“Do you know what you’re saying?” The voice took over again. “Louise’s father will be mad, and when he gets mad you know what he’s like! It makes me mad when he gets mad and between the two of us the merger will fall through again, like as not, the way it always does. What can I tell him now?”

“You don’t need to give him any explanations for what I’m doing. What’s all the opera about anyway?”

Kate tiptoed into the room. He did not see her and she stood waiting and silent.

“The opera,” the voice emphasized each word, “is that Louise is running around with another man while you’re running around a castle. If you’re not here on Monday, you’ll lose her, sure as my name is John Preston Blayne, Senior. Son, why do you throw everything away on a pile of rock?” The voice softened slightly. “You don’t know what love is until you’ve lost it, the way I have. I remember everything I ever said to your mother that hurt her feelings. It’s not just what I said or did, either. It’s the times I could have been with her and wasn’t, the things I wish now I’d done …”

The grating voice faltered and recovered. “To hell with you,” it said distinctly, and there was the bang of the receiver.

Kate tried to escape unseen, but he strode between her and the door. “That was my father.”

“I know.”

“You’re not going before I explain?”

“About mergers?”

“No, something much more important.”

She looked at him bravely. Then she went to the desk, took up the receiver and held it out to him. “Here,” she said, “take it.”

He took it stupidly. “What for?”

“Isn’t there a cable you should send first?”

She walked out of the room, her head held high, and left him staring after her. He took a few steps in her direction, then stopped and walked slowly back to the desk. He sat down and held his head in his hands. Ten minutes passed. He reached again for the receiver, dialed, and waited. Then he sent his message, not to his father but to Louise.

He sat a moment longer, then smiled suddenly and slapped the desk with both hands. To the tune of a waltz whistled under his breath, he all but danced out of the room.

… In her own room Kate sat down and wept. She was out of breath and tired and bewildered. It was a tower room, the western tower, a circle of narrow windows and a small fireplace set low in the gray rock walls. It had once belonged to a maid-of-honor, a very young one, whose home had been in Wales and who, because she was lonely, had hanged herself one night from the broad beam in the center of the ceiling. No one had missed her and it had been days before they thought to look for her. Megan was her name, and Kate had thought of her often, had wondered how she looked and whether there was another reason than loneliness to make her want to die. Perhaps her mistress had been cruel, perhaps she had been in love, perhaps — perhaps — but who knew?

It seemed to her now that she understood how it was that Megan had died in this little room. Perhaps she too had sat weeping on this very stool of oak set by the chimney piece. She was not herself quite ready to die but she wanted to weep and did weep now with long, satisfying sobs until she could no more. Then she got up and washed her face and tidied her hair and after that she opened her chest of drawers and made everything in them neat. This done she sewed on two buttons that had fallen from her wool jacket and mended a rent in her black silk slip. She could think of nothing more to do then, and she opened the door and listened to know how they were managing in the castle without her. Silence was all she heard, and after listening for a moment she tiptoed down the circular stairs and slipped across to the great hall where there was plenty of noise and bustle, John’s voice asking questions, demanding, arguing, contradicting; other voices replying.

“We must provide an incentive,” he was saying. “What, for example, could we do here after the castle is gone? How could the land be used most profitably?”

“You’re providing incentive in the cash sum you’re offering, aren’t you?”