On the River Styx Read Online Free PDF Page A

the snow.
    “All right,” I said, seizing it, “but you’re spoiling everything.” I ran back up the path, my mission a delightful failure.
    The wreathed light from the windows gave body to the darkness, breathing tracery into the slow arras of snow. It gave the house a snug, enchanted air, like some magic sanctuary of childhood deep in a wood. The holly berries on the door wreath, round red as picture peasants’ cheeks, and the deep green halo of ground pine itself were as fresh as our New World winter. Inside, the voices traveled on pine-scented air, safe from the future and from Millicent’s war.
    “Silly Milly lost the candy in the snow and won’t come in,” I reported, swallowing the last of it.
    There was a pause, and eyes turned to Madrina for her dictum.
    Madrina said, “How very foolish.”
    She rang for Clara, who presently appeared with a copper caldron of brandy and milk and nutmeg, and a set of silver mugs. There was a fine bowl of nuts by the fire, blackwalnuts, butternuts, and hazel nuts, and seated in warmth, one eye cast luxuriously on my presents, I indulged myself in contempt for Milly and pity for Madrina, undone by the rude granddaughter outside.
    Seated in her flowered chair as still and enduring as the dry cattails and bittersweet in the vase behind her, her face alive with soft expressive rhythms, like a moment of birds in a winter tree, Madrina told us a tale of another Christmas, another century.
    Her German cousin Ernst was traveling with his mother to a Hartlingen Christmas of long ago, and as the carriage was to pass the region of the Black Forest, the coachman advised his passengers of the danger of brigands, then very numerous in the byways. The brigands were captained by a well-mannered man of noble extraction, so it was said, who treated his victims with great courtesy so long as they offered no resistance, but dealt very harshly with objectors. Madrina’s cousin Ernst was just the sort to object, he had no sense of humor in such matters, and his mother cautioned him strongly against rash actions in the event of trouble. No sooner had she spoken than the carriage halted, and she was handed down by an enormous bearded gentleman, who relieved her discreetly of all jewelery but a family brooch, of the sentimental value of which she had managed to persuade him. At this moment Ernst sprang from the carriage, brandishing a pistol, and was on the point of
taking a stand
on the matter, Madrina said tartly, when his head, parted from his shoulders by the sword of a mounted henchman, rolled ignominiously under the carriage. Very regrettable, the chieftain remarked, and seized the brooch.
    Madrina’s aunt was inconsolable. She bent and peered under the carriage, where, catching the eye of her son, sheshouted at him: “I told you, Ernst! I told you, you blockhead!”
    Madrina peered from one descendant to the next, as if seeking a successor by the gauge of laughter. But her own smile faltered, then disappeared entirely. “We shall go to dinner,” she whispered. The family stared toward the hallway, where not Milly but Clara, her hands prim on her apron, leaned sepulchrally into the room. “We will start without Miss Millicent, Clara,” Madrina said, less to Clara than to Milly herself, as if she had said, I told you, Ernst, I told you!
    Marching past the faded tapestries and bronze-green urns from the halls of her forebears, artifacts far too ponderous for the houses of her children, Madrina entered the dining room, touching the oaken chairs fondly as she journeyed to her place.
    “She will come in a minute, Madrina,” Aunt Alice said.
    “She will do as she pleases,” said Madrina.
    From my position, far away below the salt, the centerpiece stretched eternally between the two lines of heads which converged on the white face of Madrina. She gave a whispered benediction, and afterward the family toasted her, holding high the glasses of Rhenish wine. Against the candlelight and the