Complete weird tales of.., p.1349
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1349
“You really like me.”
“Yes — certainly.”
“Much?”
“Very much.... Very, very much. You know that, don’t you?”
He was becoming conscious of the warmth of her arm and hand clasping his arm — and was annoyed with himself for noticing it or that her nearness to him was subtly disturbing him — so soft and gentle the contact seemed.
And there was something — some faint, warm fragrance about her — from her skin or hair perhaps; or it may have been her breath, which he noticed even amid the confusing sweetness of wild jasmine odour and the scent from opening magnolia and china flower.
“Your Iris moth,” she said, “is supposed to feed on magnolia. Father said so. We are in the magnolia forest now.”
He looked about him at the dark straight trunks, the splendid glossy foliage set with countless snowy chalices breathing perfume in the amber half-light of the woods.
“Shall we search?” he asked.
“Yes; let us look about a bit—” releasing his arm from her light clasp. But when he approached a great tree and began to examine the bark, she went there too, and presently took possession of his arm again.
“Such a moth as that,” he said, “must resemble a heap of jewels when resting on a tree trunk. Evidently it requires no protective colouring.”
“Would you be very happy if you discovered one?”
“Happy?” He laughed. “Nothing on this earth could make me as happy. But the chance is not one in a million, I fancy.”
She said:
“Do you know what would make me happier than anything in the world?”
“No. What?”
“To find that moth for you.”
He remained silent, stupidly so, the lump in his throat surprising him. And what was happening to him, anyway? How had he become so swiftly entangled in a friendship of a few hours’ birth — already an intimacy — if this young girl’s confidence in her new friendship could be so termed.
He understood, of course, that her loneliness, her isolation, magnified and exaggerated his importance to her — coloured him suddenly in rainbow tints, made of his coming a magic thing.
What confused and disturbed him was that he was conscious of responding to the unconscious appeal of her loneliness — to her candour, her fearless liking for him.
He no longer was aware of her shabbiness, of her limp, ragged riding clothes, worn boots, and the rusty spurs.
Only concerned him her narrow delicate wrist and hand hanging from the shrunken sleeves — the slim but rounded figure under the dingy, misfitting habit, the honest grey eyes, and winning mouth — and the fresh, sweet youth of her, ardent, frank, innocent.
In possession of his arm — youth seeking youth instinctively, unreasoningly, after lifelong deprivation — she searched the bark of the trees they stopped at, talking continually in a happy and almost childish monologue, content with the world and with her first glimpse of its meaning.
“Ole Hawg must die,” she chattered on; “he’s a bad old boar and he’ll get somebody yet and slash him all to pieces.... You and I must shoot him — you and I together.... What is your name, anyway?”
“Jim.”
“Am I to say that?”
“Do you care to?”
She looked at him and laughed:
“I don’t know.... Yes.... Unless you think you’re too old.”
“Old!” he said, amused.
“Oh, you’re not, I know! But I’m younger. You don’t think I’m too young to call you Jim?”
“No, Celia.”
She laughed and he felt the momentary pressure of her hand on his arm.
It was growing late when they returned. A squashy, messy, greasy dinner, mitigated only by fruit, was what Gray sat down to on the veranda.
Red level rays from the setting sun lighted the table to a rosy glow and made pink the limp white gown that Celia wore.
“See anything?” asked the Doctor, eating fried chicken as a man eats who has no sense of taste and is thinking of anything except what he’s doing.
“No,” admitted Gray, “I saw nothing resembling our Iris moth.”
“And you never will in this region. Celia, did you take him to the magnolia woods?”
“Yes. We saw nothing. Tomorrow we are going out to kill Ole Hawg.”
“Good idea. Clear him out, Celia,” nodded her father, absently swallowing a bit of pork. Then he rose from the table and went back to his collecting boxes.
“Nomenclature is another thing that infuriates me,” he remarked; “every Tom, Dick and Harry has a shy at it, and the result is sickening. Sometimes I’ve a mind to knock down every family, subfamily, and species and erect a brand-new structure founded on common sense, and with a sensible and systematic nomenclature of my own.”
“Why not?” said Gray, smiling.
“Maybe I will some day. The idea, for instance, of lumping structurally different genera — but, Oh, damn it! What’s the use? When the time comes I’ll have something to say about the diurnal Lepidoptera of Iris Creek. I’ve forty notebooks full already. I’ve over forty more devoted to the life histories alone of the Noctuida? of this region. Some day I’ll publish ‘em. Then we’ll see!”
Gray nodded, but he was looking rather intently at Celia Stevens, who sat with her childlike head resting on her hand, gazing out into the sunset forest.
During the next two weeks they hunted Ole Hawg afoot and ahorse, but did not run across him, although they jumped and rode down, roped and branded dozens of other wild hogs.
It was a mad, exhilarating, and somewhat reckless business, this furious, headlong galloping through the forest with Scipio, mounted, cracking his lash and cheering on the hounds, and Celia riding like a lithe and graceful demon through branch, over hammock, swale, and swamp. Gray rode his level best to keep up with her, and be in at the roping and branding when the hounds held to the squealing, snarling, biting pig, and Scipio passed the ropes, and Celia built the fire and set the iron to heat in the quick-leaping blaze.
And in the course of the next two weeks, the furry black hide of many a wild hog was marked as property of the house of Stevens. Many a singed and demoralized razorback went shying and bucketting and caracolling away through the forest wearing a neat fleur-de-lis on his withers. Scores of razorbacks were rounded up and driven back from the northern boundary — all marked with the home brand.
“Any cracker who shoots branded pigs is liable to stop a charge of buckshot,” explained Celia blandly. “But I wouldn’t do that; I’d only dust them with quail shot, wouldn’t I, Scipio?”
“I done see you duss ‘em, Miss Celia,” grinned Scipio.
“Did you ever do that?” inquired Gray, amazed.
“Once. The Crawfords started in to cut loose in the hickory woods and gallop everything piggy across the boundary; and I saw my pin money going and dozens of my newly branded razorbacks stampeding over the line. So when I heard the dogs I rode out in front of them and lashed every hound off the scent till they ran scuttling and ki-yiing and yelping in every direction. And then I saw Wilfred Crawford, afoot, streaking off across the swale, and I dusted his leather breeches with number twelve. I reckon he thought he was murdered,” she continued, laughing, “for I never did hear such howling.”
“What did you do then?” asked Gray, aghast, and trying to reconcile such proceedings with the youthful, grey-eyed, softly feminine rider beside him.
“Why, then I saw Alfred Crawford pull up his horse and begin fiddling with his sawed-off shotgun — to frighten me, I reckon. And I said: ‘You’ll end in the chain gang, that’s what you’ll do!’ And I rode into him so hard that his horse spilled him; and Alfred ran one way and his horse ran home, I reckon. And that’s all the Crawfords have ever bothered me — except I’d like to know whether the hams they smoke ever wore overcoats with my trade-mark on them.”
Her unfeigned laughter and Scipio’s boisterous mirth, provoked by the memory of these episodes, offered to Gray a new angle from which to scrutinize Celia Stevens.
Whatever opinion he might entertain concerning the propriety of her behaviour, there could be very little doubt that she was a good deal of a girl.
Within the next two weeks this conclusion became certainty. Once, when suddenly all around him the palmetto scrub clattered with the deadly castanets of a rattler, and instinct had nearly jerked him back straight into the aroused diamond-back over which he had just stepped unknowingly her cool, clear voice halted him:
“Don’t move, Jim!” And bang! — the whistling charge went ripping through the scrub, and the shattered snake was tumbling and twisting around his paralyzed feet.
And once he thought somebody had hurled a handful of gravel at his flat shooting helmet; and the next instant he found himself on the ground, her arms frantically clasping his throat and shoulders, rolling over and over with her down the hammock slope and into the sparkling water of a branch. From which they emerged on the other bank, dripping with black silt, but safe from the dusky whirlwind of hornets whose enormous grey paper nest he had scraped with his helmet as he passed.
Once, also, he found a black, crimson and yellow Elaps, and he picked it up and set it in the palm of his hand. It had already begun the ominous, uneasy, sidling movement, when Celia sauntered up.
Fortunately he wore leather-tipped shooting gloves; fortunately, also, the fangs of the Elaps are almost microscopic, which accounts for the chewing habit of the venomous little thing.
The snake had already seized Gray’s forefinger; and the girl did not even hesitate, but clutched the harlequin behind its unobtrusive head with her bare hand, tore it loose, and flung it to the ground.
Wherefore, in the light of these and similar incidents, he concluded that she was a good deal of a girl.
Every morning and evening her father jeered at him as he went forth to the magnolia woods to search for the great, jewelled moth. Always with him, gay and undaunted, went Celia, frankly happy to share any obloquy and scorn levelled at this young man, her friend.
From the very beginning her quick liking for him, her rapid advance in the unknown art of friendship, had caused him concern as well as surprise.
But the progress of Celia was quicker than his own credulity and comprehension; and a young girl’s pure and generous friendship was already fast developing into a passionate attachment.
Not that she realized it; not that her innocence was ignorance, either. She had heard of things. But it was her confidence in this man — her friend — the first she had ever had — that made it impossible for her even to dream that he might mistake her.
She did things without thought or hesitation, which would have instantly damned her among the godly. And Gray didn’t know how to tell her not to, dreading to awaken to consciousness and comprehension the whitest soul he had ever known.
She formed the habit of trotting into his room as soon as she sprang from her own bed, and of perching at the foot of his, swathed in a blanket, until he awoke, At night she sometimes got up and sauntered in to see if he slept or whether he was willing to converse with her.
Once, much worried, he took the Doctor out to the orange grove and suggested that he prescribe a more conventional routine for the girl.
“Young man,” said the Doctor, looking Gray very quietly in the eye, “your conduct in this matter stamps you as what I had already labelled you. You need not worry, sir. Neither I nor my daughter have mistaken you. Therefore, I shall decline to inoculate her with the unhappy constraint incident to a wisdom as yet unnecessary to her security. But I thank you for your delicacy.” And, gazing at a tuft of citrous leaves enclosed in a bag of mosquito netting: “The caterpillars inside that bag, sir, are the hybrid progeny of Papüio turnus, var. Glaucus; and of Papilio palomedes — naturally fathered by the latter.”
“Very interesting,” murmured Gray, thinking hard and fast of something more deeply significant than caterpillars — of an interest to him far more vital. For he had never been in love and he was beginning to wonder somewhat anxiously if he would know enough to recognize the malady when it attacked him — if it ever did. Or whether he was incapable of any passion except the overwhelming desire for the jewelled Sphinx Iris.
And, thinking very, very hard, he concluded that this ruling desire was his master passion, and that within his heart there remained no room for any other desire.
Somewhat grimly reconciled to this conclusion, he went out every day to his magnolia forest, examined trunk after trunk, spread sheets and beat the glossy foliage with long poles, examined droppings that might indicate the presence of some high feeding larvae, set tallow dips afloat in pails of water.
Always Celia went with him.
Sometimes, toward late afternoon, they still hunted Ole Hawg, sometimes Scipio brought out their horses and the melancholy-jowled hounds, and they galloped till sunset with the optimistic negro intent upon jumping the big, fierce old boar from his lurking place in hammock or cypress tangle.
But Ole Hawg remained invisible; and Celia began to believe that the murderous old reprobate had gone clean off, when, one afternoon as she was watching Gray climbing among the lower branches of a slender magnolia tree, something unusual caught her eye.
It seemed to be stirring, too; and after a moment she rose and walked forward through the woods, her grey eyes fixed on the dark and distant mass which certainly stirred at intervals yet did not move from the place where it lay.
A moment later she comprehended: a dead deer lay there, dreadfully mutilated and slashed by the villainous fury of a boar; and on the motionless carcass sat a dozen gorged vultures, too logy to fly or to do more than ruffle their unclean plumage and sidle heavily from the dead flesh they perched upon.
And at first she thought the strong rank odour in the air was from the horrid scene before her; but something drew her gaze to the left, where soft ground sloped to a branch that ran dimpling and sparkling over silvery sands out of a black and evil bog set with cypress and palmetto.
And there, almost under her feet, was the big, deep, and perfectly fresh hoofprint of Ole Hawg.
Nobody could mistake it. No other pig in the forest had such a hoof.
Silently she inspected it; water still oozed into it. Ole Hawg must have passed like a phantom. Huge, crafty, noiseless, the big boar had stolen about his murderous business with all the horrid cunning of the born assassin. To catch a deer he must have been very still about it.
And now, like other assassins, he had come back to the scene of his villainy.
Cautious, holding her breath, scarcely moving, Celia’s intent gaze searched the vicinity of the bog into which the great hoof imprints led.
Her rifle stood against a tree back there among the magnolias, where Gray was fussing about. Curiosity, fear lest Ole Hawg, in ambush somewhere, might at that very instant be watching her out of his little red and evil eyes, and that he might skulk silently away unless she started for him instantly, left her standing stock still and fairly rigid with excitement.
The next instant she had whipped the heavy revolver from her hip holster, and, half crouching, her grey eyes agleam, she took her first step toward the swamp, cautious, alert, noiseless, dainty as a velvet-footed panther gliding to its kill.
Gray, prowling from branch to branch amid the glossy foliage of his tree, had not missed her. In fact, he was far too intent on what he was doing to heed anything or anybody else.
What had happened — and so suddenly and quickly that it was all over before he could see clearly — was this: in his movement among the branches of the magnolia tree, he had disturbed something that had darted out into the sunshine, circled erratically like a disconcerted chimney swift in a lamp-lit room, and, before he could see whether it was really a bird, had fluttered back into the foliage again.
Dazed by the abruptness of the episode, almost paralyzed by what he surmised, he clung to the tree trunk to collect his ideas and steady his nerves.
For whether or not he was now the victim of a lively imagination, he did not know, but it had certainly seemed to him that his brief glimpse of the swallowlike, fluttering thing had revealed a flash of gorgeous, iridescent colour.
And there was no bird of that size which wore such metallic colours in the entire state of Florida.
He was trembling a little when he drew the big cyanide jar from his pocket, and, moving very cautiously, edged his way toward the limb of the tree where the creature had disappeared among the leaves.
Over every inch of the visible bark his eyes travelled, over patches of sunlit lichen and shadowy moss. Gingerly he gazed at the under side of the big, glossy leaves, searched patiently every crotch, every branch scar.
He had laid one hand on the main trunk, and was manœuvering noiselessly for a foothold to support him so that he might examine the other side of the trunk.
And suddenly he saw it!
Breath left him instantly; he froze where he stood, his fascinated dilated eyes fixed upon a soft dusty pyramid of living jewels — a big, downy, tent-like mass sticking to the bark.
Gold, green, violet, gleamed the slanting, burnished wings; the heavy antennae lay close to the costal margin. Two crimson and daintily-furred feet clung to the bark, flanking the head; the gemmed eyes glowed and pulsated with hidden fire.
And Gray, now icy cool and master of himself, uncorked his wide-mouthed cyanide jar. Far away, somewhere, he heard the racket of pistol shots. They meant nothing to him.
“Jim!”
In his fiercely intent and preoccupied brain a far cry was echoing. That, also, for a moment, meant nothing to him.
“Jim! Come to me!”
Suddenly he realized that it was Celia.
There are seconds so long that the agony of hesitation stretches them instantly into years. One of these was upon Gray. It was only a single second, but in it he had lived and died and learned a knowledge concerning mysteries that he had never dreamed of.
The second was not sped when he dropped from the tree: another second began as he snatched her rifle and started, throwing in a cartridge as he ran. And as he ran the jewelled moth darted from the tree and flashed away before him, deep into the uncharted forest.
