The House of de Mailly

by Margaret Horton Potter

Suddenly, upon the perfect stillness around her, broke a sound. Slow stealthy footsteps were crossing the floor of the spinning-room just outside. Deborah grew cold with instant terror. She heard a hand placed upon her door, and then came a voice, soft, well known, through the stillness: "Deborah—Deborah!"

It was the lightest of whispers, but every accent fell distinctly on the girl's terrified ears. Moving noiselessly in her bare feet, she carried the necklace to the bureau, took the ornament from her head, and laid each piece in its case. Then, running across the floor, she knelt in her ball-dress, at the door, grasping its handle firmly.

"Deborah—you are awake?" repeated Sir Charles, more delicately yet.

The girl breathed fast, but made not a sound. Only her hand tightened upon the handle, and her figure stiffened with determination.

"Let me come in," he said.

Then silence fell between the two, separated by three inches of board and Deborah's will, there in the August night. There was no one to know that he was there. Vincent, and Lucy, and young Charles Carroll, sound sleepers all of them, were in the body of the house; and Virginia was above her mother in the far eastern wing. The muscles in Deborah's body grew more rigid, and desperately she held herself against the door. But Fairfield was making no effort to enter. It should be only with her own consent that he would do that.

"Deborah—beloved—open to me! Deborah—hear me as I have heard you for an hour past. Let me in—Deborah—my dear!"

She shut her eyes and pressed her forehead against her arm. There was a silence, breathless, endless, terrifying to the girl in the room. Then her weight of fear was lifted. The footsteps slowly retreated from her door, out of the spinning-room, down the stairs, and entered into the room below her own. She sank weakly to her knees, and a breath like a sob shook her slight frame. She was intensely sleepy now. For very weariness, it was hard to realize the crisis through which she had passed. But there was a task still before her, and one at which she trembled. Rising unsteadily, too wise to give herself time to think, she took the jewel-cases from her toilet-table, opened her door, crept out, and down the stairs, and passed stealthily back to madam's dressing-room. The room, the drawer, were as she had left them. Replacing Virginia's pearls in their bed of lavender, she pushed the drawer to, inch by inch, till it was closed. Three minutes later she had once more crossed the threshold of her own room. And while the pale moon set and the day dawned in crimson and turquoise over the distant Chesapeake, Deborah slept dreamlessly—Claude, and the Versailles pageants, and Charles Fairfield's strange madness all lost to her for the moment under the spell of the great blessing of youth.

Matters were different with Sir Charles, below. No sleep had the dusky dawn, with its liquid bird-warblings and its fresh day-odor, for him. He was thinking of what he had done—and of what he should do. The impulse that had driven him to go to the room above was past now. He knew only that he had forfeited her very tolerance of him; and the thought quickened his half-generated love into a sudden, fervid life that swayed his senses and fired his brain to plots and plans of unwise daring. At six o'clock he was dressed, and sat him down to wait for Deborah's waking. It was an endless hour, and day had begun over the whole plantation before he heard her cross the floor over his head, and knew that his waiting was bounded at last.

Deborah was half dressed before the sudden memory of the past night flashed over her. Then her hands dropped to her sides, and she sat still for a little, thinking. How should she meet Charles Fairfield before them all—or, worse yet, if possible, alone? How could he meet her? Had she done anything wrong? No. What he had done was not her concern. And thereupon, with a lighter heart, but doubt still in her face, she finished dressing, set her room to rights—for she was immaculately neat—and started away without seeming reluctance. She was going downstairs, her thoughts centred on the breakfast-room as the place of ordeal. The door at the stair-foot opened; Sir Charles came out of his room and stood below her, barring the way.