attention. Unlike most, he had a great gift for anecdote and a very ready sense of humor. Caroline’s face was quite flushed, and she had barely taken her eyes off him since he began.
Tea was brought, poured and passed. This was not so bad after all.
“But you returned to New York,” Caroline asked.
“I came back east when my mother was taken ill,” Samuel answered her.
“Of course.” She nodded. “Of course. You would naturally want to take care of her. She never married again?”
A curious expression crossed Samuel’s face, a mixture of pity and something which could have been anger.
Mariah felt the chill of warning shiver through her. It was not over. She wanted to say something to cut off Caroline’s intrusive enquiries, but for once she could think of nothing which would not simply make it worse.
“I hope she recovered,” Caroline said earnestly. “She must still have been quite young.”
“Oh, yes,” Samuel responded with a smile. “It proved to be no more than a passing thing, thank heaven.”
“You must have been close,” Caroline said gently. “Having endured so much together.”
His face softened, and there was a great tenderness in his eyes. “We were. Much as I wished to find my English family as well, I don’t think I would ever have left America while she was alive. I never knew a person, man or woman, with more courage and strength of will to follow her own mind and be her own person, whatever it cost.”
Caroline smiled; there was a sweetness in her, almost a glow, as if the words held great value for her.
“It does cost,” she agreed, looking intently at Samuel. “One can be so uncertain, so filled with doubts and loneliness, and the way cannot always be retraced. Sometimes it is too late before you even realize what you have paid.”
Samuel looked at her with quite open appreciation, as though she had offered him a profound compliment.
“I see you understand very well, Mrs. Fielding. I believe you would have liked her, and she you. You seem to be of one mind.”
Mariah stiffened. What was he talking about? The woman had left her husband and run off to America. He was speaking as if it were some kind of a virtue. How much did he know? Surely she would never have-could never. . no woman would! The coldness hardened inside her like ice. Old memories of pain returned, things forgotten years ago, pushed into the oblivion at the edges of her mind.
She must do something, now, before it was too late.
“I suppose you were there during that miserable war?” she said abruptly. “It must have been most disagreeable.”
“That hardly begins to describe it, Mrs. Ellison,” Samuel said gravely. “Any war is dreadful, but one among people of one nation who are even known to each other, perhaps brothers, fathers and sons, is the most terrible. The violence and the hatred have a bitterness which does not fade.”
Mariah Ellison did not understand, nor wish to.
He perceived it quickly, and his expression changed. The sense of tragedy was wiped away; compassion and a wry humor replaced it.
He told them of events as he had perceived them.
“Sometimes it’s the silly things that hold you together,” he said, his voice dropping even lower. “If you’d ever been really sick with fear till your stomach knotted up like a fist, you’d understand that.”
A wave like a prickle of heat swept over Mariah’s skin as memory washed around her in a tide, old memory she’d buried years ago, followed by a chill that left her shaking as if she had swallowed ice. How dare he make her feel like this? How dare he arrive out of nowhere and awaken the past?
It was Caroline who cut across the silence and jerked her back to this pleasant, modest room with its well- worn, comfortable furnishings, the afternoon light streaming in through the windows onto the carpet.
“You speak of it with such passion we can feel something of what you know,” she said softly.
Samuel turned to look at her and moved momentarily as if he would have put out his hand to touch her, had he not remembered in time that it would be too familiar.
“What did you do after the war?” she asked. She heard the hard edge in her own voice, but it was beyond her control. “You must have made a living at something!”
Mariah wondered if he had ever married, and if not, then why, but she did not wish to detain him any longer by asking, nor did she have any desire to appear interested.
“What about your mother?” Caroline said gently, and Mariah could have kicked her.
Samuel’s face filled with a softness which changed him profoundly. For the first time the confidence was gone, and in its place one saw for a moment a more vulnerable man, one with more knowledge of his own need and the understanding that much of his strength came from another source. Mariah wanted to like him for it, and could not because she was afraid of what he was going to say.
“My mother cared for herself, ma’am,” he answered, and he could not keep the pride out of it. “And for a good many others also. She had all the courage in the world. She never thought twice about fighting for what she believed to be right-win or lose.” He lifted his chin a little. “She taught me all I know of how to face an enemy, no matter how you feel or what you fear the cost will be. I’ve often thought, in my worst moments, how I’d like to be worthy of her. I daresay there’s many a man the same.”
Mariah felt the misery tighten inside her, like an iron band, never to be escaped again. Damn him for coming! Damn Caroline for letting him. It’s easy to talk about courage and fighting when the battle is an honorable one and everybody understands. When you aren’t so ashamed you could die of it!
Was that what he was talking about? Did he guess-even know? She stared at his charming, humorous face, so like her own son’s in its features, but she could not read it. There was no one she could turn to, certainly never Caroline. She must not know, ever. All those times they had quarreled, the times over the years, even more often recently, when she had told Caroline what a fool she was. . marrying a man two-thirds her age instead of retiring decently into widowhood. It was bound to end in disaster, and she had told her that. It was no less than the truth. It would be unbearable now, unlivable with, if Caroline were to know all her long-buried darkness. She would rather be dead and respectably buried somewhere. . even beside Edmund. That was probably what they would do. It was what she had told them she wanted-what else could she say?
But one did not die merely of wanting to. She knew that well enough.
They were talking again. The noise buzzed around her like a jar full of flies.
“Was New York very different after the war?” Caroline asked. She was bent forward a little, the soft burgundy silk of her dress pulled tight across her shoulders, her face intent. She was very individual, the intelligence and will in her, the unusual shape of her mouth. The old lady had thought her beautiful in the beginning. Now they were too familiar for her to think in such terms. And beauty belonged to the young.
“Changed beyond belief,” Samuel was answering. A curious expression crossed his face, laughter in his eyes and something which could have been excitement, and both sadness and distaste in his mouth. “The war had left everything in a flux.” And he proceeded to describe its color, violence, corruption and excitement. He told of it so enthrallingly even the old lady listened, begrudging every vivid moment.
“I’m sure you could not imagine, Mrs. Ellison, being a young man recently returned from the fear and hardship of war, and the strange tragedies of victory which were far more bitter in the mouth than any of us had foreseen.”
He moved from the city life to his adventure westwards.
“The men and women who took the wagon trains through were among the finest and bravest I’ve ever known,” he said with fierce admiration. “The hardships they endured, without complaint, were enough to make you weep. And they were all sorts: Germans, Italians, Swedes and French, Spaniards, Irish and Russians, but so many from right here. I came across one group of English people who were pushing all their worldly possessions in handcarts, women walking beside, some with babes in arms, going all the way to the Salt Lake Valley. God knows how many died on the way.”
“I cannot imagine it,” Caroline said softly. “I don’t know how people have the courage.”
Caroline watched Samuel and thought of the previous evening at the theatre, and how utterly different that had been. She could see perfectly in her mind’s eye Cecily Antrim’s vivid figure illuminated on the stage, her hair like
