Complete weird tales of.., p.1292
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1292
“But who is that in the glass?”
“It is you — your profile. I don’t exactly understand. Good Lord! It’s turning away from us!”
She shrank against the wall, wide-eyed, breathing rapidly.
“There is no use in our being frightened,” he said, scarcely knowing what he uttered. “This is Fifty-eighth Street, New York, 1903.” He shook his shoulders, squaring them, and forced a smile. “Don’t be frightened; there’s an explanation for all this. You are not asleep in Westchester; you are here in your own house. You mustn’t tremble so. Give me your hand a moment.”
She laid her hand in his obediently; it shook like a leaf. He held it firmly, touching the fluttering pulse.
“You are certainly no spirit,” he said, smiling; “your hand is warm and yielding. Ghosts don’t have hands like that, you know.”
Her fingers lay in his, quite passive now, but the pulse quickened.
“The explanation of it all is this,” he said: “You have had a temporary suspension of consciousness, during which time you, without being aware of what you were doing, came to town from Willow Brook. You believe you went to the dance at the Hunt Club, but probably you did not. Instead, during a lapse of consciousness, you went to the station, took a train to town, came straight to your own house—” He hesitated.
“Yes,” she said, “I have a key to the door. Here it is.” She drew it from the bosom of her gown; he took it triumphantly.
“You simply awoke to consciousness while you were groping for the matches. That is all there is to it; and you need not be frightened at all!” he announced.
“No, not frightened,” she said, shaking her head; “only — only I wonder how I can get back. I’ve tried to fix my mind on my ring — on the Sign of Venus — I cannot seem to—”
“But that’s nonsense!” he protested cheerfully. “That ring has nothing to do with the matter.”
“But it brought me here! Truly I am asleep in my hammock. Won’t you believe it?”
“No; and you mustn’t, either,” he said impatiently. “Why, just now I explained to you—”
“I know,” she said, looking down at the ring on her hand; “but you are wrong — truly you are.”
“I am not wrong,” he said, laughing. “It was only a dream — the dance, the return, the hammock — all these were parts of a dream so intensely real that you cannot shake it off at once.”
“Then — then who was that we saw in the mirror?”
“Let us try it again,” he said confidently. She suffered him to lead her again to the mirror; again they peered into its glimmering depths, heads close together.
A second’s breathless silence, then she caught his hand in both of hers with a low cry; for the strange profile was slowly turning toward them a face of amazing beauty — her own face transfigured, radiantly glorified.
“My soul!” she gasped, and would have fallen at his feet had he not held her and supported her to the stairs, where she sank down, hiding her face in her arms.
As for him, he was terribly shaken; he strove to speak, to reason with her, with himself, but a stupor chained body and mind, and he only leaned there on the newel post, vaguely aware of his own helplessness.
Far away in the night the bells of a church began striking the hour — one, two, three, four. Presently the distant rattle of a wagon sounded. The city stirred in its slumbers.
He found himself bending beside her, her passive hands in his once more, and he was saying: “As a matter of fact, all this is quite capable of an explanation. Don’t be distressed — please don’t be frightened or sad. We’ve both had some sort of hallucination, that’s all — really that is all.”
“I am not frightened now,” she said dreamily. “I am quite sure that — that I am not dead. I am only asleep in my hammock. When I awake—”
Again, in spite of himself, he shivered.
“Will you do one more thing for me?” she asked.
“Yes — a million.”
“Only one. It is unreasonable, it is perhaps silly — and I have no right to ask—”
“Ask it,” he begged.
“Then — then, will you go to Willow Brook? Now?”
“Now?” he repeated blankly.
“Yes.” She looked down at him with the shadow of a smile touching lips and eyes. “I am asleep in the hammock; I sleep very, very soundly — and very, very late into the morning. They may not find me there for a long while. So would you mind going to Willow Brook to awaken me?”
“I — I — but you do not expect me to leave you here and find you in Westchester!” he stammered.
“You need not go,” she said quietly. “If you will telephone to the house and ask somebody to go out to the pergola—”
“No,” he said, “I will go; I will go anywhere on earth for you.”
He stood up, his senses in a whirl. She rose, too, leaning lightly on the balustrade.
“Thank you,” she said sweetly. “When you awake me, give me this.” She held out the Signum Veneris; and he took it, and bending his head slowly, raised it to his lips.
It was almost morning when he entered his own house. In a dull trance he dressed, turned again to the stairs, and crept out into the shadowy street.
People began to pass him; an early electric tram whizzed up Forty-second Street as he entered the railway station. Presently he found himself in a car, clutching his ticket in one hand, her ring in the other.
“It is I who am mad, not she,” he muttered as the train glided from the station, through the long yard, dim in morning mist, where green and crimson lanterns still sparkled faintly.
Again he pressed the Signum Veneris to his lips. “It is I who am mad — love mad!” he whispered as the far treble warning of the whistle aroused him and sent him stumbling out into the soft fresh morning air.
The rising sun smote him full in the eyes as he came in sight of the club house among the still green trees, and the dew on the lawn flashed like the gems of the Signum Veneris on the ring he held so tightly.
Across the club house lawn stood another house, circled with gardens in full bloom; and to the left, among young trees, the white columns of a pergola glistened, tinted with rose from the early sun.
There was not a soul astir as he crossed the lawn and entered the garden, brushing the dew from overweighted blossoms as he passed.
Suddenly, at a turn in the path, he came upon the pergola, and saw a brilliant hammock hanging in the shadow.
Over the hammock’s fringe something light and fluffy fell in folds like the billowy frills of a ball gown. He stumbled forward, dazed, incredulous, and stood trembling for an instant.
Then, speechless, he sank down beside her, and dropped the ring into the palm of her half-closed and unconscious hand.
A ray of sunlight fell across her hair; slowly her blue eyes unclosed, smiling divinely.
And in her partly open palm the Sign of Venus glimmered like dew silvering a budding rose.
CHAPTER III
THE CASE OF MR. HELMER
HE HAD REALLY been too ill to go; the penetrating dampness of the studio, the nervous strain, the tireless application, all had told on him heavily. But the feverish discomfort in his head and lungs gave him no rest; it was impossible to lie there in bed and do nothing; besides, he did not care to disappoint his hostess. So he managed to crawl into his clothes, summon a cab, and depart. The raw night air cooled his head and throat; he opened the cab window and let the snow blow in on him.
When he arrived he did not feel much better, although Catharine was glad to see him. Somebody’s wife was allotted to him to take in to dinner, and he executed the commission with that distinction of manner peculiar to men of his temperament.
When the women had withdrawn and the men had lighted cigars and cigarettes, and the conversation wavered between municipal reform and contes drolatiques, and the Boznovian attaché had begun an interminable story, and Count Fantozzi was emphasizing his opinion of women by joining the tips of his overmanicured thumb and forefinger and wafting spectral kisses at an annoyed Englishman opposite, Helmer laid down his unlighted cigar and, leaning over, touched his host on the sleeve.
“Hello! what’s up, Philip?” said his host cordially; and Helmer, dropping his voice a tone below the sustained pitch of conversation, asked him the question that had been burning his feverish lips since dinner began.
To which his host replied, “What girl do you mean?” and bent nearer to listen.
“I mean the girl in the fluffy black gown, with shoulders and arms of ivory, and the eyes of Aphrodite.”
His host smiled. “Where did she sit, this human wonder?”
“Beside Colonel Farrar.”
“Farrar? Let’s see” — he knit his brows thoughtfully, then shook his head. “I can’t recollect; we’re going in now and you can find her and I’ll—”
His words were lost in the laughter and hum around them; he nodded an abstracted assurance at Helmer; others claimed his attention, and by the time he rose to signal departure he had forgotten the girl in black.
As the men drifted toward the drawing-rooms, Helmer moved with the throng. There were a number of people there whom he knew and spoke to, although through the increasing feverishness he could scarce hear himself speak. He was too ill to stay; he would find his hostess and ask the name of that girl in black, and go.
The white drawing-rooms were hot and overthronged. Attempting to find his hostess, he encountered Colonel Farrar, and together they threaded their way aimlessly forward.
“Who is the girl in black, Colonel?” he asked; “I mean the one that you took in to dinner.”
“A girl in black? I don’t think I saw her.”
“She sat beside you!”
“Beside me?” The Colonel halted, and his inquiring gaze rested for a moment on the younger man, then swept the crowded rooms.
“Do you see her now?” he asked.
“No,” said Helmer, after a moment.
They stood silent for a little while, then parted to allow the Chinese minister thoroughfare — a suave gentleman, all antique silks, and a smile “thousands of years old.” The minister passed, leaning on the arm of the general commanding at Governor’s Island, who signaled Colonel Farrar to join them; and Helmer drifted again, until a voice repeated his name insistently, and his hostess leaned forward from the brilliant group surrounding her, saying: “What in the world is the matter, Philip? You look wretchedly ill.”
“It’s a trifle close here — nothing’s the matter.”
He stepped nearer, dropping his voice: “Catharine, who was that girl in black?”
“What girl?”
“She sat beside Colonel Farrar at dinner — or I thought she did—”
“Do you mean Mrs. Van Siclen? She is in white, silly!”
“No — the girl in black.”
His hostess bent her pretty head in perplexed silence, frowning a trifle with the effort to remember.
“There were so many,” she murmured; “let me see — it is certainly strange that I cannot recollect. Wait a moment! Are you sure she wore black? Are you sure she sat next to Colonel Farrar?”
“A moment ago I was certain—” he said, hesitating. “Never mind, Catharine; I’ll prowl about until I find her.”
His hostess, already partly occupied with the animated stir around her, nodded brightly; Helmer turned his fevered eyes and then his steps toward the cool darkness of the conservatories. But he found there a dozen people who greeted him by name, demanding not only his company but his immediate and undivided attention.
“Mr. Helmer might be able to explain to us what his own work means,” said a young girl, laughing.
They had evidently been discussing his sculptured group, just completed for the new façade of the National Museum. Press and public had commented very freely on the work since the unveiling a week since; critics quarreled concerning the significance of the strange composition in marble. The group was at the same time repellent and singularly beautiful; but nobody denied its technical perfection. This was the sculptured group: A vaquero, evidently dying, lay in a loose heap among some desert rocks. Beside him, chin on palm, sat an exquisite winged figure, calm eyes fixed on the dying man. It was plain that death was near; it was stamped on the ravaged visage, on the collapsed frame. And yet, in the dying boy’s eyes there was nothing of agony, no fear, only an intense curiosity as the lovely winged figure gazed straight into the glazing eyes.
“It may be,” observed an attractive girl, “that Mr. Helmer will say with Mr. Gilbert, “‘ It is really very clever, But I don’t know what it means.’”
Helmer laughed and started to move away. “I think I’d better admit that at once,” he said, passing his hand over his aching eyes; but the tumult of protest blocked his retreat, and he was forced to find a chair under the palms and tree ferns. “It was merely an idea of mine,” he protested, good-humoredly, “an idea that has haunted me so persistently that, to save myself further annoyance, I locked it up in marble.”
“Demoniac obsession?” suggested a very young man, with a taste for morbid literature.
“Not at all,” protested Helmer, smiling; “the idea annoyed me until I gave it expression. It doesn’t bother me any more.”
“You said,” observed the attractive girl, “that you were going to tell us all about it.”
“About the idea? Oh, no, I didn’t promise that—”
“Please, Mr. Helmer!” A number of people had joined the circle; he could see others standing here and there among the palms, evidently pausing to listen.
“There is no logie in the idea,” he said, uneasily—” nothing to attract your attention. I have only laid a ghost—”
He stopped short. The girl in black stood there among the others, intently watching him. When she caught his eye, she nodded with the friendliest little smile; and as he started to rise she shook her head and stepped back with a gesture for him to continue.
They looked steadily at one another for a moment.
“The idea that has always attracted me,” he began slowly, “is purely instinctive and emotional, not logical. It is this: As long as I can remember I have taken it for granted that a person who is doomed to die, never dies utterly alone. We who die in our beds — or expect to — die surrounded by the living. So fall soldiers on the firing line; so end the great majority — never absolutely alone. Even in a murder, the murderer at least must be present. If not, something else is there.
“But how is it with those solitary souls isolated in the world — the lone herder who is found lifeless in some vast, waterless desert, the pioneer whose bones are stumbled over by the tardy pickets of civilization — and even those nearer us — here in our city — who are found in silent houses, in deserted streets, in the solitude of salt meadows, in the miserable desolation of vacant lands beyond the suburbs?”
The girl in black stood motionless, watching him intently.
“I like to believe,” he went on, “that no living creature dies absolutely and utterly alone. I have thought that, perhaps in the desert, for instance, when a man is doomed, and there is no chance that he could live to relate the miracle, some winged sentinel from the uttermost outpost of Eternity, putting off the armor of invisibility, drops through space to watch beside him so that he may not die alone.”
There was absolute quiet in the circle around him. Looking always at the girl in black, he said: “Perhaps those doomed on dark mountains or in solitary deserts, or the last survivor at sea, drifting to certain destruction after the wreck has foundered, finds death no terror, being guided to it by those invisible to all save the surely doomed. That is really all that suggested the marble — quite illogical, you see.”
In the stillness, somebody drew a long, deep breath; the easy reaction followed; people moved, spoke together in low voices; a laugh rippled up out of the darkness. But Helmer had gone, making his way through the half light toward a figure that moved beyond through the deeper shadows of the foliage — moved slowly and more slowly. Once she looked back, and he followed, pushing forward and parting the heavy fronds of fern and palm and masses of moist blossoms. Suddenly he came upon her, standing there as though waiting for him.
“There is not a soul in this house charitable enough to present me,” he began.
“Then,” she answered laughingly, “charity should begin at home. Take pity on yourself — and on me. I have waited for you.”
“Did you really care to know me?” he stammered.
“Why am I here alone with you?” she asked, bending above a scented mass of flowers. “Indiscretion may be a part of valor, but it is the best part of — something else.”
That blue radiance which a starless sky sheds lighted her white shoulders; transparent shadow veiled the contour of neck and cheeks.
“At dinner,” he said, “I did not mean to stare so — but I simply could not keep my eyes from yours—”
“A hint that mine were on yours, too?”
She laughed a little laugh so sweet that the sound seemed part of the twilight and the floating fragrance. She turned gracefully, holding out her hand.
“Let us be friends,” she said, “after all these years.”
Her hand lay in his for an instant; then she withdrew it and dropped it caressingly upon a cluster of massed flowers.
“Forced bloom,” she said, looking down at them, where her fingers, white as the blossoms, lay half buried. Then, raising her head, “You do not know me, do you?”
“Know you?” he faltered; “how could I know you? Do you think for a moment that I could have forgotten you?”
“Ah, you have not forgotten me!” she said, still with her wide smiling eyes on his; “you have not forgotten. There is a trace of me in the winged figure you cut in marble — not the features, not the massed hair, nor the rounded neck and limbs — but in the eyes. Who living, save yourself, can read those eyes?”
“Are you laughing at me?”
