After the final course, Dwight asked to be excused and told Clara that he would have coffee and brandy in the library. This was predictable. Dwight was always proper. He was always dull. He always had coffee and brandy in the library. As for Neva, who was not always proper and rarely dull, she excused him gravely and escaped, when he had retired, to the living room.
Dinner had not taken long. Consulting her jeweled watch, Neva saw that it was just past seven-thirty. Seven-thirty from nine left one-thirty; an hour and a half. Ninety minutes. This was a long time to wait under the circumstances, a very long time, but Neva was not, strangely enough, impatient or apprehensive. She was, indeed, almost serene. A little restless, perhaps, but nothing more. She considered television and rejected it. She thought of reading and was not tempted. Music, she decided, was what she needed now. Not, however, just any music. Music to excite the mind and heat the blood. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss? Yes, Strauss. Richard, not Johann. Moving to the stereo, she selected a recording and put it on the machine. Don Quixote. Standing there, her head bowed, her fingers spread and touching tips to the console top, she listened intently to the sounds of a madman’s dream.
Clara came into the room. She walked a few steps toward Neva and stopped, not speaking, her eyes fixed on the back of her mistress. Neva could not see her and did not hear her, but she knew, after a while, that Clara was there. She could sense it in the electric prickling of her skin. She was certain from her sudden illusion of nakedness. She stood quite still for a few moments longer, listening in illusory nakedness to the fantasies of madness, and then she raised her head and turned it slowly to look at Clara over a shoulder, turned her body as slowly afterward to conform.
“There you are, Clara,” she said.
“Have you served Mr. Durward his coffee and brandy?”
“Yes, Mrs. Durward.”
“We’re alone here, Clara. Never mind the formality.”
Clara’s lips had been set in the faintest of smiles, and now the smile, with no change whatever in the set of the lips, seemed to spread subtly and gather in her eyes with bright intensity.
“Yes, Neva.”
“That’s better. I have enough of propriety. Do you want something, Clara?”
“I was wondering if you’d like some coffee and brandy yourself.”
“Brandy. No coffee.”
Clara turned and went out the way she had come. She was a lovely girl, Neva thought. A strange and lovely girl with strange and mute commitments. Being herself a beautiful woman, Neva could afford the generosity of such a concession. She had no cause to envy the endowments of her maid. Crossing the room to a sofa near the fireplace, in which there was no fire, she sat down at one end, resting in a corner against an arm and the back. She wondered what Dwight was doing this moment in the library. This, too, like so many other things Dwight did, was predictable. He was surely sitting in the deep leather chair under the reading lamp, surrounded by shadow outside a small perimeter of light, his glasses slipped down on the bridge of his nose, and in his lap, lying open, whatever book he had chosen to read in snatches between naps until it was ten o’clock and time for bed.
The book, whatever its exact title, would be in some way related to the life and times of Savanarola. Since his heart attack and his subsequent retirement from active engagement in his business affairs, Dwight had sustained the fiction, somehow essential to his vision of himself, that he was hard at work on what would be the definitive biography of the Florentine friar. His work had never progressed beyond the preparatory stage, undisciplined reading and disorderly data, and Neva knew, as he did in his heart, that it never would. No loss to the world, Neva thought. It was evidence of the quality of Dwight’s character that he had chosen to admire, from a time of renaissance literally glutted with giants of the arts, a strident and bothersome reformer who had eventually succeeded, quite properly, in getting himself burned at the stake. Dwight’s nose, unfortunately, was as blue as litmus paper in an alkaline solution.
Clara returned with a bottle of brandy and a snifter on a silver tray. She set the tray on a low table at Neva’s elbow and poured from the bottle into the snifter. Stepping back, she stood watching her mistress with the faint, strange smile that gathered intensity in her eyes.
“Will there be anything else?” she said.
“No. Nothing. Thank you, Clara.”
“May I offer a suggestion?”
“Yes. Of course. What is it, Clara?”
“I’d drink lightly of the brandy if I were you.”
“So I shall. So I always do. Have you ever known me to drink to excess, Clara?”
“Never. I thought, however, that you might be tempted tonight.”
“You’re mistaken. I don’t need to look for courage in a bottle.”
“Are you offended? I’m sorry.”
“Offended, Clara? On the contrary, I’m touched by your concern.”
“I should be very unhappy if you came to harm.”
“Believe me, so should I. We must do our best to avoid it. Tell me, Clara, are you certain that you want to play a part in this?”
“Yes. I’m certain.”
“Why should you do so much for me?”
“Because you ask it.”
“I have no right. You might be wise to refuse.”
“I don’t think so at all, Neva.”
“Are you so devoted to me, then?”
“I would do a great deal more if more were needed.”
“How much more, Clara? Would you die for me?”
“It takes courage to die. If I had the courage, I would die for you.”
“Well, you are committed to enough as it is. I prefer you alive.”
“Thank you, Neva.”
“Has Mrs. Kelsey gone yet?”
“She’s just finishing in the kitchen. She’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”
“Good. Make sure the back door is locked behind her.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure. Shall I remind you when it is a quarter to nine?”
“It won’t be necessary. I’ll not fail to watch the time.”
It was then eight. Turning away, Clara left the room. Neva watched her go. From the shining goblet which she had lifted from the tray beside her, the bouquet of the brandy drifted up to her and seeped into her head. She raised the glass and tilted a little of the brandy into her mouth. Don Quixote’s mad dream, diminishing on the sound of a mellow horn, was interrupted by the click of automatic mechanism and ensuing silence. Neva sat still, draining her goblet by sips in the silence, and then she set it aside, got up and started the latter half of the dream. Returning to the sofa, she poured more brandy and sat down. Time passed. Don Quixote floated down the Ebro in an enchanted boat. Mrs. Kelsey, her kitchen clean, was surely gone. Somewhere near was Clara, and in the library was Dwight, napping and waking and reading on an island of light in a sea of shadows. They were alone in the house, she and Clara and Dwight, and it was eight-thirty. His mad dream done, Don Quixote died slowly to the sad, sane sound of strings.
When Neva looked at her watch again, it was seventeen minutes till nine. She sat without moving, holding her arm bent at a right angle across her breasts, staring steadily at the face of the watch. The hour and minute hands crept imperceptibly. The sweep hand, measuring the swift flight of seconds, rushed apace around the dial. Once. Twice. At a quarter to nine precisely, as if a second or a minute soon or late would somehow be disastrous, she stood up and walked across the room and into the hall. Clara was standing there, across the hall at the foot of the stairs, and may have been waiting there in silence, for all that Neva knew or could guess, for most of an hour.