All the King's Men (31 page)

So began the second phase of the story of Cass Mastern. All that year, as before, he was often in the house of Duncan Trice, and as before he was often with him in field sports, gambling, drinking, and racegoing. He learned, he says, to “wear his brow unwrinkled,” to accept the condition of things. As for Annabelle Trice, he says that sometimes looking back, he could scarcely persuade himself that “she had shed tears.” She was, he says, “of a warm nature, reckless and passionate of disposition, hating all mention of the future (she would never let me mention times to come), agile, resourceful, and cheerful in devising to gratify our appetites, but with a womanly tenderness such as any man might prize at a sanctified hearthside.” She must indeed have been agile and resourceful, for to carry on such a liaison undetected in that age and place must have been a problem. There was a kind of summerhouse at the foot of the Trice garden, which one could enter unobserved from an alley. Some of their meeting occurred there. A half-sister of Annabelle Trice, who lived in Lexington, apparently assisted the lovers or winked at their relationship, but, it seems, only after some pressure by Annabelle, for Cass mentions “a stormy scene.” So some of the meetings were there. But now and then Duncan Trice had to be out of town on business, and on those occasions Cass would be admitted, late at night, to the house, even during a period when Annabelle’s mother and father were staying there; so he actually lay in the very bed belonging to Duncan Trice.

There were, however, other meetings, unplanned and unpredictable moments snatched when they found themselves left alone together. “Scarce a corner, cranny, or protected nook or angle of my friend’s trusting house did we not at one time or another defile, and that even in the full and shameless light of day,” Cass wrote in the journal, and when Jack Burden, the student of history, went to Lexington and went to see the old Trice house he remembered the sentence. The town had grown up around the house, and the gardens, except for a patch of lawn, were gone. But the house was well maintained (some people named Miller lived there and by and large respected the place) and Jack Burden was permitted to inspect the premises. He wandered about the room where the first meeting had taken place and she had raise her eyes to Cass Mastern above the newly lighted candles and where, a year later, she had uttered the sigh, or suppressed moan, and stepped to his arms; and out into the hall, which was finely proportioned and with a graceful stair; and into a small, shadowy library; and to a kind of back hall, which was a well “protected nook or angle” and had, as a matter of fact, furniture adequate to the occasion. Jack Burden stood in the main hall, which was cool and dim, with dully glittering floors, and, in the silence of the house, recalled that period, some seventy years before, of the covert glances, the guarded whispers, the abrupt rustling of silk in the silence (the costume of the period certainly had not been designed to encourage casual vice), the sharp breath, the reckless sighs. Well, all of that had been a long time before, and Annabelle Trice and Cass Mastern were long since deader than mackerel, and Mrs. Miller, who came down to give Jack Burden a cup of tea (she was flattered by the “historical” interest in her house, though she didn’t guess the exact nature of the case), certainly was not “agile” and didn’t look “resourceful” and probably had used up all her energy in the Ladies Altar Guild of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and in the D. A. R.

The period of the intrigue, the second phase of the story of Cass Mastern, lasted all of one academic year, part of the summer (for Cass was compelled to go back to Mississippi for his plantation affairs and to attend the wedding of his sister Lavinia, who married a well-connected young man named Willis Burden), and well through the next winter, when Cass was back in Lexington. Then, on March 19, 1854, Duncan Trice died, in his library (which was a “protected nook or angle” of his house), with a lead slug nearly the size of a man’s thumb in his chest. It was quite obviously an accident.

The widow sat in church, upright and immobile. When she once raised her veil to touch at her eyes with a handkerchief, Cass Mastern saw that the cheek was “pale as marble but for a single flushed spot, like the flush of fever.” But even when the veil was lowered he detected the fixed, bright eyes glittering “within that artificial shadow.”

Cass Mastern, with five other young men of Lexington, cronies and boon companions of the dead man, carried the coffin. “The coffin which I carried seemed to have no weight, although my friend had been of large frame and had inclined to stoutness. As we proceeded with it, I marveled at the fact of its lightness, and once the fancy flitted into my mind that he was not in the coffin at all, that it was empty, and that all the affair was a masquerade or mock show carried to ludicrous and blasphemous length, for no purpose, as in a dream. Or to deceive me, the fancy came. I was the object of the deception, and all the other people were in a league and conspiracy against me. But when that thought came, I suddenly felt a sense of great cunning and a wild exhilaration. I had been too sharp to be caught so. I had penetrated the deception. I had the impulse to hurl the coffin to the ground and see its emptiness burst open and to laugh in triumph. But I did not, and I saw the coffin sink beneath the level of the earth on which we stood and receive the first clods upon it.

“As soon as the sound of the first clods striking the coffin came to me, I felt a great relief, and then a most overmastering desire. I looked toward her. She was kneeling at the foot of the grave, with what thought I could not know. Her head was inclined slightly and the veil was over her face. The bright sun poured over her black-clad figure. I could not take my eyes from the sight. The posture seemed to accentuate the charms of her person and to suggest to my inflamed senses the suppleness of her members. Even the funeral tint of her costume seemed to add to the provocation. The sunshine was hot upon my neck and could be felt through the stuff of my coat upon my shoulders. It was preternaturally bright so that I was blinded by it and my eyes were blinded and my senses swam. But all the while I could hear, as from a great distance, the scraping of the spades upon the piled earth and the muffled sound of earth falling into the excavation.”

That evening Cass went to the summerhouse in the garden. It was not by appointment, simply on impulse. He waited there a long time, but she finally appeared, dressed in black “which was scarce darker than the night.” He did not speak, or make any sign as she approached, “gliding like a shadow among shadows,” but remained standing where he had been, in the deepest obscurity of the summerhouse. Even when she entered, he did not betray his presence. “I can not be certain that any premeditation was in my silence. It was prompted by an overpowering impulse which gripped me and sealed my throat and froze my limbs. Before that moment, and afterwards, I knew that it is dishonorable to spy upon another, but at the moment no such considerations presented themselves. I had to keep my eyes fixed upon her as she stood there thinking herself alone in the darkness of the structure. I had the fancy that since she thought herself alone I might penetrate into her being, that I might learn what change, what effect, had been wrought by the death of her husband. The passion which had seized me to the very extent of paroxysm that afternoon at the brink of my friend’s grave was gone. I was perfectly cold now. But I had to know, to try to know. It was as though I might know myself by knowing her. (It is human defect–to try to know oneself by the self of another. One can only know oneself in God and in His great eye.)

“She entered the summerhouse and sank upon one of the benches, not more than a few feet from my own location. For a long time I stood there, peering at her. She sat perfectly upright and rigid. At last I whispered her name, as low as might be. If she heard it, she gave no sign. So I repeated her name, in the same fashion, and again. Upon the third utterance, she whispered, ‘Yes,’ but she did not change her posture or turn her head. Then I spoke more loudly, again uttering her name, and instantly, with a motion of wild alarm she rose, with a strangled cry and her hands lifted toward her face. She reeled, and it seemed that she would collapse to the floor, but she gained control of herself and stood there staring at me. Stammeringly, I made my apology, saying that I had not wanted to startle her, that I had understood her to answer yes to my whisper before I spoke, and I asked her, ‘Did you not answer to my whisper?’

“She replied that she had.

” ‘Then why were you distressed when I spoke again?’ I asked her.

” ‘Because I did not know that you were here,’ she said ” ‘But,’ I said, ‘you say that you had just heard my whisper and had answered to it, and now you say that you did not know I was here.’

” ‘I did not know that you were here,’ she repeated, in a low voice, and the import of what she was saying dawned upon me.

” ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘when you heard the whisper–did you recognize it as my voice?’

“She stared at me, not answering.

” ‘Answer me,’ I demanded, for I had to know.

“She continued to stare, and finally replied hesitantly, ‘I do not know.’

” ‘You thought it was–’ I began, but before I could utter the words she had flung herself upon me, clasping me in desperation like a person frantic with drowning, and ejaculating, ‘No, no, it does not matter what I thought, you are here, you are here!’ And she drew my face down and pressed her lips against mine to stop my words. Her lips were cold, but they hung upon mine.

“I too was perfectly cold, as of a mortal chill. And the coldness was the final horror of the act which we performed, as though two dolls should parody the shame and filth of man to make it doubly shameful.

“After, she said to me, ‘Had I not found you here tonight, it could never have been between us again.’

” ‘Why?’ I demanded ” ‘It was a sign,’ she said.

” ‘A sign?’ I demanded.

” ‘A sign that we cannot escape, that we–’ and she interrupted herself, to resume, whispering fiercely in the dark–’I do not want to escape–it is a sign–whatever I have done is done.’ She grew quiet for a moment, then she said, ‘Give me your hand.’

“I gave her my right hand. She grasped it, dropped it, and said, ‘The other, the other hand.’

“I held it out, across my own body, for I was sitting on her left. She seized it with her own left hand, bringing her hand upward from below to press my hand flat against her bosom. Then, fumblingly, she slipped a ring upon my finger, the finger next to the smallest.

” ‘What id that?’ I asked.

” ‘A ring,’ she answered, paused, and added, ‘It is his ring.’

“Then I recalled that he, my friend, had always worn a wedding ring, and I felt the metal cold upon my flesh. ‘Did you take it off of his finger?’ I asked, and the thought shook me.

” ‘No,’ she said.

” ‘No?’ I questioned.

” ‘No,’ she said, ‘ he took it off. It was the only time he ever took it off.’

“I sat beside her, waiting for what, I did not know, while she held my hand pressed against her bosom. I could feel it rise and fall. I could say nothing.

“Then she said, ‘Do you want to know how–how he took it off?’

” ‘Yes,’ I said in the dark, and waiting for her to speak, I moved my tongue out upon my dry lips.

” ‘Listen,’ she commanded me in an imperious whisper, ‘that evening after–after it happened–after the house was quiet again, I sat in my room, in the little chair by the dressing table, where I always sit for Phebe to let down my hair. I had sat there out of habit, I suppose, for I was numb all over. I watched Phebe preparing the bed for the night.’ (Phebe was her waiting maid, a comely yellow wench somewhat given to the fits and sulls.) ‘I saw Phebe remove the bolster and then look down at a spot where the bolster had lain, on my side of the bed. She picked something up and came toward me. She stared at me–and her eyes, they are yellow, you look into them and you can’t see what is in them–she stared at me–a long time–and then she held out her hand, clenched shut and she watched me–and then–slow, so slow–she opened up the fingers–and there lay the ring on the palm of her hand–and I knew it was his ring but all I thought was, it is gold and it is lying in a gold hand. For Phebe’s hand was gold–I had never noticed how her hand is the color of pure gold. Then I looked up and she was still staring at me, and her eyes were gold, too, and bright and hard like gold. And I knew that she knew.’

” ‘Knew?” I echoed, like a question, but I knew, too, now. My friend had learned the truth–from the coldness of his wife, from the gossip of servants–and had drawn the gold ring from his finger and carried to the bed where he had lain with her and had put it beneath her pillow and had gone down and shot himself but under such circumstances that no one save his wife would ever guess it to be more than an accident. But he had made one fault of calculation. The yellow wench had found the ring.

” ‘She knows,’ she whispered, pressing my hand hard against her bosom, which heaved and palpitated with a new wildness. ‘She knows–and she looks at me–she will always look at me.’ Then suddenly her voice dropped, and a wailing intonation came into it: ‘She will tell. All of them will know. All of them in the house will look at me and know–when they hand me the dish–when they come into the room–and their feet don’t make any noise!’ She rose abruptly, dropping my hand. I remained seated, and she stood there beside me, her back toward me, the whiteness of her face and hands no longer visible, and to my sight the blackness of her costume faded into the shadow, even in such proximity. Suddenly, in a voice which I did not recognize for its hardness, she said in the darkness above me, ‘I will not abide it, I will not abide it!’ Then she turned, and with a swooping motion leaned to kiss me upon the mouth. Then she was gone from my side and I heard her feet running up the gravel of the path. I sat there in the darkness for a time longer, turning the ring upon my finger.”

After that meeting in the summerhouse, Cass did not see Annabelle Trice for some days. He learned that she had gone to Louisville, where, he recalled, she had close friends. She had, as was natural, taken Phebe with her. Then he heard that she had returned, and that night, late, went to the summerhouse in the garden. She was there, sitting in the dark. She greeted him. She seemed, he wrote later, peculiarly cut off, remote, and vague in manner, like a somnambulist or a person drugged. He asked about her trip to Louisville, and she replied briefly that she had been down the river in Paducah, and she said that she had none there. Then, all at once, she turned on him, the vagueness changing to violence, and burst out, “You are prying–you are prying into my affairs–and I will not tolerate it.” Cass stammered out some excuse before she cut in to say, “But if you must know, I’ll tell you. I took her there.”