So Dies the Dreamer
trying to split herself in two to absorb both factions, was still dazzled by the beautiful, surprisingly calm birds who walked the immaculately-kept wire pens in the angle behind the attached barn. They were black and silver, flame-red and green and cream, bronze and yellow and blue—and then, when the sun struck them, an indescribable range of colors in-between.While Sarah watched, a dun-brown bird walked into a shaft of light and became a precise pattern of shimmering blue-eyeleted copper. She was afraid to move, for fear of alarming this exquisite creature, but Charles bent carelessly, plucked a handful of grass blades, and held them to the wire. The pheasant came forward at a delicate questing walk, tipped its head to give Sarah a curious round-eyed glance, and took the grass hungrily.
“They love dandelion greens,” Charles said, “and they will go anywhere for raisins or boiled potatoes. Look at them, they expect some now.”
It was August, and the late-afternoon hour when the low sun, in spite of its richness, recaptures the absolute clarity of early morning. The shadows on the clipped grass were deep and exact, the pines that formed a windbreak beyond the far pens seemed to show forth every needle. The air was faintly fragrant, the lacing of bird-calls so peaceful that it was a part of the silence.
Charles was watching the pheasants; briefly, Sarah watched Charles. His face was quiet with pleasure, clear, uncomplicated. The particular segment of New York she lived in, the barbed brilliance, the smiling, deadly, daily competition, had never seemed more impossible, nor farther away.
“Time for a drink,” said Charles, almost reluctantly. “I’m sorry about Evelyn. Once she’s run through all her allergies she’ll go off and fasten on somebody else. In a way, they’re the only distinction she has. The thing to do is get your mind firmly on something else, she won’t notice anyway. I’ve composed a lot of letters in my head listening to Evelyn.”
Sarah, still spellbound with peace, said that she didn’t mind Evelyn at all. They were turning to go back into the house through the stable and barn when a woman’s deep clear voice behind them said, “Charles?”
Even before she turned, Sarah’s mind registered the impression that this was not a cousinish voice, nor an auntish one. Kate Clemence was obviously neither. She was a tall woman, as tall as Charles, with ragged black hair, cut that way out of carelessness or immense guile, black-lashed gray eyes, and an air of unbreakable calm. She wore dungarees and a man’s white shirt, open at the throat, and if she had walked down Madison Avenue just as she was she would have been snapped up instantly by scouts for something or other. Sarah hated her with a hearty intuitive hatred before she said so much as another word.
The Clemences—Kate and her brother—lived, Charles told Sarah in the course of introductions, in the house just visible through the pines. (How nice for them, thought Sarah, faintly shocked at her own spite.) Kate was wonderful with birds, it was a touch she had—(Oh, better and better) —and had often helped Bess Gideon doctor an ailing cock, or set traps for an occasional marauding mink from the farm nearby.
Sarah and Kate exchanged smiles of practised sincerity, and Sarah wandered tactfully away, given an excuse by the sudden appearance of a small, feather-hatted, pantaletted black hen. It was, Charles told her later, one of the Japanese Silkies, bantams kept to hatch the pheasant eggs. Pheasants would not hatch their own young in captivity, while the Silkies would sit on anything, or, if there weren’t anything, on nothing, folding their wings dedicatedly on bare boards. A deep square of sod had to be placed under the nest to provide the dampness necessary for hatching pheasant eggs, but once the chicks had emerged the Silkie would treat them like the one of her own in the same hatch, although hers did not have to be taught how to eat as the pheasant chicks did.
The hen at Sarah’s feet seemed expectant and a little cross; when she knelt and held out her hand it pecked at her palm and gave her an injured look. Behind her, perhaps ten feet away, Kate Clemence said murmuringly to Charles, “They’ve found out who the dead woman on the mink farm was—did Bess tell you?”
“No.”
Kate’s voice dropped cautiously on a name. Charles was not as cautious; Sarah, vainly offering grass to the black hen, heard him say in an oddly fumbling way, “Not the Miss Braceway . . . not the nurse—?”
Kate Clemence must have nodded. “You know that little hut out there, at the edge of the woods? The police think some man . . .”
Sarah strolled farther away on that; the compassionate note in the other woman’s voice was not for her ears. The nurse—what echo did that bring up? That Charles’s stepmother, of whom he had been very fond, had died several months ago of pneumonia. Here in this house, in fact. Charles had stayed here toward the end, and he would naturally have gotten to know the nurse.
Found out who she was. That suggested something singularly unpleasant, some unthinkable effort to prevent identification . . . “Here,” said Sarah summarily to the black hen. “Pheasants like dandelion greens, why don’t you?” Some man. She must have been young, then, or youngish. Above her, Charles said in an almost normal voice, “That’s Midnight. She was raised in the house, and she’s very spoiled. Let’s go in and get that drink, shall we?”
His face looked strained when Sarah rose. Kate Clemence had gone—having thrown her bombshell, Sarah thought angrily, having wiped out Charles’s quiet contentment. He said abruptly, “That was rather unpleasant. The nurse who took care of my stepmother has turned up dead, in—” he nodded vaguely at pine-hidden distance “—a field up the road. She was fifty if she was a day, sensible, immensely competent— I can’t imagine . . .”
He broke off, shaking his head. Sarah,