Complete weird tales of.., p.1213
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1213
“My aunt is well, thank you, Bobby; did you like the sherbet she made?”
“Yes — that’s six times you have asked me.”
I was wearying of lying. The sherbet reposed among the soapsuds of my toilet jar.
Ysonde’s aunt, a tall aristocratic beauty, whose perfectly arched eye-brows betrayed the complacent vacancy of her mind, had actually prepared, with her own fair hands, a sherbet for me. I cannot bear sweets of any kind.
“Aunt Lynda will make another to-morrow,” cooed Ysonde through the key-hole.
“Thank her for me,” said I faintly; “Ysonde, I am coming out to-night.”
“It is not yet three weeks!” cried Ysonde.
“It will be three weeks to-morrow at 1 p m. My eyes won’t suffer at night. I should like to smell the woods a little. Will you walk with me this evening?”
“If Aunt Lynda will allow me,” said Ysonde. After a moment she added: “I will ask her now”; and I heard her rise from her chair outside my door.
When she came back, I was lying face downwards on my bed, miserable, dreading the hour when I should first face my own reflection in a mirror. I heard her step on the stairs, and I jumped up and groped my way toward the door.
“Bobby,” she called softly.
“Ysonde,” I answered, with my mouth close to the key-hole. She started — I heard her — for she did not know I was so near. I bent my head to listen.
“Aunt Lynda says you are foolish to go out before to-morrow—”
“The evening won’t hurt me.”
“But suppose — only suppose your disobedience should cost you the sight of your eye?”
“It won’t,” said I.
“Think how I should feel?”
“It won’t,” I repeated. The perspiration suddenly dampened my forehead, and I wiped it away.
“Can’t you wait?” she pleaded.
“No. Have you your aunt’s permission to walk with me this evening?”
“Yes,” she said. “Shall I read to you a little while?”
For an hour I listened to her voice, and if it was Lovelace or Herrick or Isaac Walton, I do not know upon my soul, but I do know that my dark room was filled with the delicious murmur; and I heard the trees moving in the evening wind and the twitter of sleepy birds from the hedge. It might have been the perfume from the roses under my window — perhaps it was the fragrance of her hair — she bent so close to my door outside — but a sweet smell tinctured the darkness about me, stealing into my senses; and I rose and opened my blinds a little way.
It was night. I heard the rocky river rushing through the alders and the pines swaying on the ridge. The ray from the moon which silvered the windows caused my eyes no pain.
I listened. Through the low music of her voice crept the song of a night-thrush. A breeze stirred the roses under my window; the music of voice and thrush was stilled. Then, in the silence, some wild creature cried out from the mountain side.
“me damnée!” I muttered; for my soul was heavy with the dread of the coming morning.
“What are you murmuring in there by yourself?” whispered Ysonde, through the door.
“Nothing — was it a lynx on Noon Peak?”
“I heard nothing,” she said.
“Nor I,” said I, opening the door.
The light from the lamp dazzled but did not hurt me. She laid down the book and came swiftly toward me.
“Now,” said I, ‘‘we will walk under the stars — with your aunt’s permission.”
I heard her sigh as she took my arm; “Bobby, I am so glad your eye is well. What could you have done if you had lost the sight of an eye?”
III.
THE morning was magnificent. A gentleman with symmetrical whiskers named Blylock, and I were standing on the verandah of the Rosebud Inn. Blylock’s mind was neutral. His lineage was long, his voice modulated, his every action acutely impersonal. The subdued polish of Harvard was reflected from his shoes to his collar. When he smoked he smoked judiciously, joylessly.
“And you lost the fish?” said I.
“Yes,” said Blylock, with colourless enthusiasm.
“In the West Branch?”
“Near the Forks,” said Blylock. “Do you know the pool?”
I regretted that I did not. He had once asked me whether I knew the Stryngbenes of Beacon Street, and I had replied with the same regret. Now he learned that I was culpably ignorant of the pool at the West Branch Forks.
Blylock looked at the mountains. The White Lady was capped with mist, but except for that there was not a cloud in the sky. The Gilded Dome towered, clear cut as a cameo, against the pure azure of the northern horizon; Lynx Peak, jagged and cold, shot up above the pines of Crested Hawk, whose sweeping base was washed by the icy river.
“Do you think he might weigh five pounds?” I asked.
“Possibly,” replied Blylock; “I regret exceedingly that I lost him.”
“But, thank God, Plymouth Rock still stands!” was what I felt he expected me to say. I did not; I merely asked him if he had ever experienced emotion. “Why, of course,” he answered seriously, but when I begged him to tell me when, he suspected a joke and smiled. If I had a son who smiled like that I would send him to Tony Pastor’s. Oh, that smile! — gentle, vacant, blank as the verses of a Brook Farm Bard, bleaker than Bunker Hill.
“For sweet charity’s sake,” said I, “tell me why you do it, Blylock.”
“Do what?” he asked.
“Oh,” said I wearily, “nothing — lose a five-pound trout, for instance.”
“I had on a brown hackle,” said Blylock; “it was defective.”
“It bust,” said I, brutally, “did you curse?”
“No,” replied Blylock. Ysonde came out and we took off our shooting-caps.
“Put them on again directly,” said Ysonde, nestling deep into the collar of her jacket; “is it too cold for the trout to rise, Mr. Blylock?”
Blylock looked at the sky and then at his finger tips. There was a seal ring on one of his fingers which I was tired of seeing.
I listened to his even voice, I noticed his graceful carriage — I even noticed the momentary flush on his cold cheeks. Oh, how tired I was of looking at him; it wearied me as it wearies me to read advertisements in the cars of the elevated railroad. But I liked him.
“Blylock,” said I, “get a gait on you, and we’ll whip the stream to the Intervale before dinner.”
“The water will be cold,” said Ysonde. “You ought to have waders.”
Now Ysonde knew that I had no waders. I loathed them. Blylock always wore waders.
“Thank you,” said Blylock, “I will not neglect to wear them.”
I looked at Ysonde and met her eyes.
“Oh,” said I, spoiling everything with intentional obstinacy, “Mr. Blylock never forgets his waders.” For a moment the colour touched her cheek, but she treated me much better than I deserved.
“Bobby,” said Ysonde, “remember that you have been ill, and if you wade the river in knickerbockers you will be obliged to eat sherbert again.”
So she knew the mystery of the soapsuds.
“I have no waders, Ysonde,” I said humbly, “do you think I had better not go?”
“You know best,” she said indifferently; and I got my deserts to the placid satisfaction of Blylock.
Ysonde walked away to join her aunt and I loafed about, sniffing the breeze, sulky, undecided, until Blylock appeared with rod and creel.
“Going?” enquired Blylock.
“No, I shall paint,” I said, after a moment’s silence.
He joined Ysonde and her aunt, and I saw them all walking toward the trail that crosses the river by the White Cascade. Blylock had undertaken to teach Ysonde to cast. I was surprised when she accepted, for I myself had taught her to cast. However I never asked any explanation and she never offered any — to my secret annoyance.
It was just two weeks that I had been out of the dark room. I was totally blind in my right eye, but nobody except Keen and myself knew it. I was becoming used to it — I was only too thankful that the eye, to all appearances, was as perfect as the other eye. But I dreaded to begin painting again. I feared that everything might be colourless and lop-sided, that I should be a ruined man as far as my profession was concerned. I had put off the beginning of work from sheer cowardice. Nobody but an artist can appreciate my mental suffering; — nobody but an artist knows that two eyes are little enough to see with. Had the accident destroyed the balance of my sight? Would my drawing be exaggerated, unstable, badly constructed, out of proportion? Would my colour be weak or brutally crude? I decided to find out without further delay, so when Ysonde and her aunt and Blylock had disappeared, I went to my room, gathered up my well-worn sketching kit, screwed two canvases into the holder, and marched manfully out the door into the sunlit forest.
Ridiculous Billy followed me. This capricious porcupine had taken a violent fancy to me, from the moment I emerged from the dark room. Of course I preferred his friendship to his enmity — I still bore a red scar on my ankle — but what soothed me most was his undisguised hatred of Blylock. Billy bit him whenever he could, and the blood of Bunker Hill appealed to Heaven from the piazza of the Rosebud Inn!
Blylock took it very decently — the porcupine was Ysonde’s property — but although he himself suffered in silence, and Ysonde darned his golf-stockings as partial reparation, I always fancied that his blood was importuning Heaven, and, remembering George III, I trembled for Ridiculous Billy.
Sometimes I was sorry for Blylock, sometimes I was not, especially when Ysonde darned his golf-stockings. Blylock was Lynda Sutherland’s cousin, but I demonstrated to Ysonde that this did not concern her. Sometimes I wished that Blylock would go back to Beacon Street, and yet I had grown fond of him in a way.
The porcupine followed me into the forest, poking his rat-like muzzle into every soft rotten stump, twitching his white whiskers. A red squirrel followed him from tree to tree, chattering and squealing with rage, but Billy lumbered along, stolid, blasé, entirely wrapped up in his own business. What that business was I dared not enquire, for Billy’s malicious eyes boded evil for interlopers, and I respected his privacy.
Walking along the fragrant brown trail, barred with sunlight, I recalled that cold gray morning in camp when Sutherland — Lynda’s late lamented — waking from the troubled dreams incident on an overdose of hot whiskey and water, called to me, to take “that thing away!”
“That thing” was Billy. From his nest among the pine-clad ridges, he had smelled our pork, and being a freeborn American, he had descended to appropriate it. In the gray of the morning, through the smouldering camp-fire smoke, I saw Billy in the act of removing the pork from the crotches of a spruce tree.
“What is it? Take it away for God’s sake!” bellowed Sutherland, associating Billy with other grotesque phantoms incident on overdoses.
“It’s a porcupine,” said I.
“Pink?” faltered Sutherland.
“Go to sleep, you brute,” I muttered, not addressing the porcupine. I took a poncho, a thick one, and ran the porcupine down. Then I enveloped him in the blanket, and got a rope about his neck, tied him to a tree and examined my wounds. One of our guides helped me pull the spines from my person, and that night the other guide led Ridiculous Billy into the settlement which consists of the Rosebud Inn and three barns.
The taking of Billy preceded Sutherland’s death by twenty-four hours; he was mauled by a panther whose cubs he was investigating. His wife, Lynda, who had secured a few month’s reprieve from his presence, and who first heard of his death at Fortress Monroe, came north with Ysonde. Sutherland was buried in New York, and two weeks later Lynda and Ysonde came to the Rosebud Inn. All this happened three years ago, and during those three years, Billy, gorgeous with a silver collar, had never forgiven me for removing him from his native wilds. His attitude toward the household was unmistakable. Lynda he avoided, Ysonde he followed with every mark of approbation, Blylock he loathed, and now, he had taken this sudden shine to me.
Billy and I followed the trail, solemnly, deliberately. The trail was a blind one, now plain, brown and gold with trampled wet leaves, now invisible, a labyrinth of twisted moose-bush and hemlock, badly blazed. But we knew our business, Billy and I, for presently we crossed a swift brook, darkling among mossy hollows, and turning to the right, entered a moist glade all splashed with dewy sunlight.
“Here,” said I, unstrapping my camp-stool, “is a woodland Mecca”; and I drove my white umbrella deep into the bank, where the brook widened in sunny shallows.
Billy eyed me a moment, rolled a pine-cone over with his nose, and mounted a tree. I liked to watch him mount trees. He did not climb, he neither scrambled nor scratched, he simply flowed up the trunk.
“Pleasant dreams,” said I, as he curled up in the first moss-covered crotch; and I began to set my palette.
In the fragrant sun-soaked glade the long grass, already crisp as hay, was vibrating with the hum of insects. Shy forest butterflies waved their soft wings over the Linnea, long-legged gnats with spotted wings danced across the fern patches, and I saw a great sleepy moth hanging from a chestnut twig among the green branches overhead. His powdery wings, soft as felt, glistened like gilded dust.
“An Imperial Moth,” said I to myself, for I was glad to recognize a friend. Then a wood-thrush ruffled his feathers under the spreading ferns, and I saw a baby rabbit sit up and wriggle its nose at me.
“Lucky for you I’m not a fox,” said I, picking up a pointed sable brush; and I drew the outline of the chestnut tree, omitting the porcupine in the branches.
When I had indicated a bit of the forest beyond the glade, using a pointed brush dipped in Garance Rose foncée, I touched in a mousey shadow or two, scrubbed deep warm tones among my trees, using my rag when I pleased, and then, digging up a brushful of sunny greens and yellows, slapped it boldly on the foreground. Over this I drew a wavering sky reflection, indicated a sparkle among the dewy greens, scrubbed more sunlight into the shallow depths of the brook, and leaned back with a nervous sigh. What had God taken from me when he took the light from my eye? I pondered in silence while round me the brown-winged forest flies buzzed and hummed and droned an endless symphony. To me, with my single trembling eye, my painted foreground seemed aglow with sunlight, and the depths of the quiet forest, wrapped in hazy mystery, appeared true and just, slumbering there upon my canvas.
The brook prattled to me of dreams and splendid hopes, the pines whispered of fame, the ferns rustled and nodded consolation. I raised my head. High in the circle of quivering blue above, a gray hawk hung, turning, turning, turning in silence.
A light step sounded among the fallen leaves. Slowly I turned, my sight dazzled by the sky, but before my eye had found its focus I heard her low laughter and felt her touch on my arm.
“You were asleep,” she said, “you must not deny it, do you hear me?”
“I was not asleep,” I answered, rising from my camp-stool.
“Then you are blind, — why I have been standing there for two minutes.”
“Two minutes? then I believe that I must be blind,” said I, turning so that I could see her better. She stood on my right.
“I expected to be challenged,” said she; “I did not hear your qui vive.”
Then she sat down on my camp-stool and gazed at my canvas with amazement.
I watched her in silence, proud of my work, happy that she should recognize it, for she knew good work every time. After a while I began to chafe at her silence, and I bent my head to see her face. I shall never forget the pained surprise in her eyes nor the quiver of her voice as she said:
“Bobby, this is childish, what on earth do you mean by such work?”
The blow had fallen. At first I was stunned. Then terror seized me, and I grasped a low swinging branch to steady myself, for I felt as though I were falling.
“Bobby,” she cried, “you are white — are you ill?”
“No,” said I, “that sketch was only a joke, — to tease you.”
“It is a very stupid joke,” she said coldly; “I cannot understand how an artist could bring himself to do such a thing.”
“It was a poor joke,” said I, red as fire, “pardon me, Ysonde, I don’t know what possessed me to paint like that.”
She picked up my paint rag and swept it across the face of my canvas; then turning to me:
“Now you are forgiven; come and talk to me, Bobby.”
The sun climbed to the zenith and still we sat there, she with her round white chin on her wrist, I at her feet.
Billy, who had descended from his perch in the chestnut tree as soon as he heard Ysonde’s voice, rambled about us, snuffling and snooping into every tuft of fern, one evil eye fixed on us, one on the red squirrel who chattered and twitched his brush, and rushed up and down a big oak tree in a delirium of temper.
“No,” replied Ysonde to my question, “Mr. Blylock did not fish; he talked to Lynda most of the time. I came here because I had an intuition that you were going to paint.”
“But,” said I, “how did you know I was coming here? I never before painted in this glade.”
“I don’t know how I knew it,” said Ysonde, slowly.
“Witchcraft?” I asked.
“Possibly,” she said, with an almost imperceptible frown.
“I have noticed already,” I said, “that you have a mysterious faculty for reading my thoughts and divining my intentions. Are you aware of it?”
“No,” she said shortly.
“But you have,” I persisted.
“You flatter yourself, Bobby. I am not thinking of you every minute.”
“Suppose,” said I, after a moment’s silence, “that you loved me—”
“I shall not suppose so,” she answered haughtily.
“Let us suppose, then,” said I, “that I love you—”
“Really, Bobby, you are more than tiresome.”
I thought for a while in silence. The wood-thrush, who had come quite close to Ysonde — all wild creatures loved her — began to sing. The baby rabbit sat up to listen and wriggle its nose, and the speckled gnats danced giddily.
