Complete weird tales of.., p.375
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 375
She surveyed him, head a trifle on one side — the very incarnation of youthful malice in process of satisfying a desire for tormenting. Never before had she experienced that desire so keenly, so unreasoningly; never before had she found such a curious pleasure in punishing without cause. A perfectly inexplicable exhilaration possessed her — a gaiety quite reasonless, until every pulse in her seemed singing with laughter and quickening with the desire for his torment.
“When I pretended I was annoyed by what men said to me, I was only a yearling,” she observed. “Now I’m a two-year, Captain Selwyn. . . . Who can tell what may happen in my second season?”
“You said that you were not the — the marrying sort,” he insisted.
“Nonsense. All girls are. Once I sat in a high chair and wore a bib and banqueted on cambric-tea and prunes. I don’t do it now; I’ve advanced. It’s probably part of that progress which you are so opposed to.”
He did not answer, but stood, head bent, looping on a new leader.
“All progress is admirable,” she suggested.
No answer.
So, to goad him:
“There are men,” she said dreamily, “who might hope for a kinder reception next winter—”
“Oh, no,” he said coolly, “there are no such gentlemen. If there were you wouldn’t say so.”
“Yes, I would. And there are!”
“How many?” jeeringly, and now quite reassured.
“One!”
“You can’t frighten me” — with a shade less confidence. “You wouldn’t tell if there was.”
“I’d tell you.”
“Me?” — with a sudden slump in his remaining stock of reassurance.
“Certainly. I tell you and Nina things of that sort. And when I have fully decided to marry I shall, of course, tell you both before I inform other people.”
How the blood in her young veins was racing and singing with laughter! How thoroughly she was enjoying something to which she could give neither reason nor name! But how satisfying it all was — whatever it was that amused her in this man’s uncertainty, and in the faint traces of an irritation as unreasoning as the source of it!
“Really, Captain Selwyn,” she said, “you are not one of those old-fashioned literary landmarks who objects through several chapters to a girl’s marrying — are you?”
“Yes,” he said, “I am.”
“You are quite serious?”
“Quite.”
“You won’t let me?”
“No, I won’t.”
“Why?”
“I want you myself,” he said, smiling at last.
“That is flattering but horridly selfish. In other words you won’t marry me and you won’t let anybody else do it.”
“That is the situation,” he admitted, freeing his line and trying to catch the crinkled silvery snell of the new leader. It persistently avoided him; he lowered the rod toward Miss Erroll; she gingerly imprisoned the feathered fly between pink-tipped thumb and forefinger and looked questioningly at him.
“Am I to sit here holding this?” she inquired.
“Only a moment; I’ll have to soak that leader. Is the water visible under that log you’re sitting on?”
She nodded.
So he made his way through the brush toward her, mounted the log, and, seating himself beside her, legs dangling, thrust the rod tip and leader straight down into the stream below.
Glancing around at her he caught her eyes, bright with mischief.
“You’re capable of anything to-day,” he said. “Were you considering the advisability of starting me overboard?” And he nodded toward the water beneath their feet.
“But you say that you won’t let me throw you overboard, Captain Selwyn!”
“I mean it, too,” he returned.
“And I’m not to marry that nice young man?” — mockingly sweet. “No? What! — not anybody at all — ever and ever?”
“Me,” he suggested, “if you’re as thoroughly demoralised as that.”
“Oh! Must a girl be pretty thoroughly demoralised to marry you?”
“I don’t suppose she’d do it if she wasn’t,” he admitted, laughing.
She considered him, head on one side:
“You are ornamental, anyway,” she concluded.
“Well, then,” he said, lifting the leader from the water to inspect it, “will you have me?”
“Oh, but is there nothing to recommend you except your fatal beauty?”
“My moustache,” he ventured; “it’s considered very useful when I’m mentally perplexed.”
“It’s clipped too close; I have told you again and again that I don’t care for it clipped like that. Your mind would be a perfect blank if you couldn’t get hold of it.”
“And to become imbecile,” he said, “I’ve only to shave it.”
She threw back her head and her clear laughter thrilled the silence. He laughed, too, and sat with elbows on his thighs, dabbling the crinkled leader to and fro in the pool below.
“So you won’t have me?” he said.
“You haven’t asked me — have you?”
“Well, I do now.”
She mused, the smile resting lightly on lips and eyes.
“Wouldn’t such a thing astonish Nina!” she said.
He did not answer; a slight colour tinged the new sunburn on his cheeks.
She laughed to herself, clasped her hands, crossed her slender feet, and bent her eyes on the pool below.
“Marriage,” she said, pursuing her thoughts aloud, “is curiously unnecessary to happiness. Take our pleasure in each other, for example. It has, from the beginning, been perfectly free from silliness and sentiment.”
“Naturally,” he said. “I’m old enough to be safe.”
“You are not!” she retorted. “What a ridiculous thing to say!”
“Well, then,” he said, “I’m dreadfully unsafe, but yet you’ve managed to escape. Is that it?”
“Perhaps. You are attractive to women! I’ve heard that often enough to be convinced. Why, even I can see what attracts them” — she turned to look at him— “the way your head and shoulders set — and — well, the — rest. . . . It’s rather superior of me to have escaped sentiment, don’t you think so?”
“Indeed I do. Few — few escape where many meet to worship at my frisky feet, and this I say without conceit is due to my mustachios. Tangled in those like web-tied flies, imprisoned hearts complain in sighs — in fact, the situation vies with moments in Boccaccio.”
Her running comment was her laughter, ringing deliciously amid the trees until a wild bird, restlessly attentive, ventured a long, sweet response from the tangled green above them.
After their laughter the soberness of reaction left them silent for a while. The wild bird sang and sang, dropping fearlessly nearer from branch to branch, until in his melody she found the key to her dreamy thoughts.
“Because,” she said, “you are so unconscious of your own value, I like you best, I think. I never before quite realised just what it was in you.”
“My value,” he said, “is what you care to make it.”
“Then nobody can afford to take you away from me, Captain Selwyn.”
He flushed with pleasure: “That is the prettiest thing a woman ever admitted to a man,” he said.
“You have said nicer things to me. That is your reward. I wonder if you remember any of the nice things you say to me? Oh, don’t look so hurt and astonished — because I don’t believe you do. . . . Isn’t it jolly to sit here and let life drift past us? Out there in the world” — she nodded backward toward the open— “out yonder all that ‘progress’ is whirling around the world, and here we sit — just you and I — quite happily, swinging our feet in perfect content and talking nonsense. . . . What more is there after all than a companionship that admits both sense and nonsense?”
She laughed, turning her chin on her shoulder to glance at him; and when the laugh had died out she still sat lightly poised, chin nestling in the hollow of her shoulder, considering him out of friendly beautiful eyes in which no mockery remained.
“What more is there than our confidence in each other and our content?” she said.
And, as he did not respond: “I wonder if you realise how perfectly lovely you have been to me since you have come into my life? Do you? Do you remember the first day — the very first — how I sent word to you that I wished you to see my first real dinner gown? Smile if you wish — Ah, but you don’t, you don’t understand, my poor friend, how much you became to me in that little interview. . . . Men’s kindness is a strange thing; they may try and try, and a girl may know they are trying and, in her turn, try to be grateful. But it is all effort on both sides. Then — with a word — an impulse born of chance or instinct — a man may say and do that which a woman can never forget — and would not if she could.”
“Have I done — that?”
“Yes. Didn’t you understand? Do you suppose any other man in the world could have what you have had of me — of my real self? Do you suppose for one instant that any other man than you could ever obtain from me the confidence I offer you unasked? Do I not tell you everything that enters my head and heart? Do you not know that I care for you more than for anybody alive?”
“Gerald—”
She looked him straight in the eyes; her breath caught, but she steadied her voice:
“I’ve got to be truthful,” she said; “I care for you more than for Gerald.”
“And I for you more than anybody living,” he said.
“Is it true?”
“It is the truth, Eileen.”
“You — you make me very happy, Captain Selwyn.”
“But — did you not know it before I told you?”
“I — y-yes; I hoped so.” In the exultant reaction from the delicious tension of avowal she laughed lightly, not knowing why.
“The pleasure in it,” she said, “is the certainty that I am capable of making you happy. You have no idea how I desire to do it. I’ve wanted to ever since I knew you — I’ve wanted to be capable of doing it. And you tell me that I do; and I am utterly and foolishly happy.” The quick mischievous sparkle of gaminerie flashed up, transforming her for an instant— “Ah, yes; and I can make you unhappy, too, it seems, by talking of marriage! That, too, is something — a delightful power — but” — the malice dying to a spark in her brilliant eyes— “I shall not torment you, Captain Selwyn. Will it make you happier if I say, ‘No; I shall never marry as long as I have you’? Will it really? Then I say it; never, never will I marry as long as I have your confidence and friendship. . . . But I want it all! — every bit, please. And if ever there is another woman — if ever you fall in love! — crack! — away I go” — she snapped her white fingers— “like that!” she added, “only quicker! Well, then! Be very, very careful, my friend! . . . I wish there were some place here where I could curl up indefinitely and listen to your views on life. You brought a book to read, didn’t you?”
He gave her a funny embarrassed glance: “Yes; I brought a sort of a book.”
“Then I’m all ready to be read to, thank you. . . . Please steady me while I try to stand up on this log — one hand will do—”
Scarcely in contact with him she crossed the log, sprang blithely to the ground, and, lifting the hem of her summer gown an inch or two, picked her way toward the bank above.
“We can see Nina when she signals us from the lawn to come to luncheon,” she said, gazing out across the upland toward the silvery tinted hillside where Silverside stood, every pane glittering with the white eastern sunlight.
In the dry, sweet grass she found a place for a nest, and settled into it, head prone on a heap of scented bay leaves, elbows skyward, and fingers linked across her chin. One foot was hidden, the knee, doubled, making a tent of her white skirt, from an edge of which a russet shoe projected, revealing the contour of a slim ankle.
“What book did you bring?” she asked dreamily.
He turned red: “It’s — it’s just a chapter from a little book I’m trying to write — a — a sort of suggestion for the establishment of native regiments in the Philippines. I thought, perhaps, you might not mind listening—”
Her delighted surprise and quick cordiality quite overwhelmed him, so, sitting flat on the grass, hat off and the hill wind furrowing his bright crisp hair, he began, naïvely, like a schoolboy; and Eileen lay watching him, touched and amused at his eager interest in reading aloud to her this mass of co-ordinated fact and detail.
There was, in her, one quality to which he had never appealed in vain — her loyalty. Confident of that, and of her intelligence, he wasted no words in preliminary explanation, but began at once his argument in favour of a native military establishment erected on the general lines of the British organisation in India.
He wrote simply and without self-consciousness; loyalty aroused her interest, intelligence sustained it; and when the end came, it came too quickly for her, and she said so frankly, which delighted him.
At her invitation he outlined for her the succeeding chapters with terse military accuracy; and what she liked best and best understood was avoidance of that false modesty which condescends, turning technicality into pabulum.
Lying there in the fragrant verdure, blue eyes skyward or slanting sideways to watch his face, she listened, answered, questioned, or responded by turns; until their voices grew lazy and the light reaction from things serious awakened the gaiety always latent when they were together.
“Proceed,” she smiled; “Arma virumque — a noble theme, Captain Selwyn. Sing on!”
He shook his head, quoting from “The Dedication”:
“Arms and the Man!
A noble theme I ween!
Alas! I cannot sing of these, Eileen;
Only of maids and men and meadow-grass,
Of sea and tree and woodlands where I pass —
Nothing but these I know, Eileen — alas!
* * *
Clear eyes, that lifted up to me
Free heart and soul of vanity;
Blue eyes, that speak so wistfully —
Nothing but these I know, alas!”
She laughed her acknowledgment, and lying there, face to the sky, began to sing to herself, under her breath, fragments of that ancient war-song:
“Le bon Roi Dagobert
Avait un grand sabre de fer;
Le grand Saint Éloi
Lui dit: ‘O mon Roi
Vôtre Majesté
Pourrait se blesser!’
‘C’est vrai,’ lui dit le Roi,
‘Qu’on me donne un sabre de bois!’”
“In that verse,” observed Selwyn, smiling, “lies the true key to the millennium — international disarmament and moral suasion.”
“Nonsense,” she said lazily; “the millennium will arrive when the false balance between man and woman is properly adjusted — not before. And that means universal education. . . . Did you ever hear that old, old song, written two centuries ago — the ‘Education of Phyllis’? No? Listen then and be ashamed.”
And lying there, the back of one hand above her eyes, she sang in a sweet, childish, mocking voice, tremulous with hidden laughter, the song of Phyllis the shepherdess and Sylvandre the shepherd — how Phyllis, more avaricious than sentimental, made Sylvandre pay her thirty sheep for one kiss; how, next day, the price shifted to one sheep for thirty kisses; and then the dreadful demoralisation of Phyllis:
“Le lendemain, Philis, plus tendre
Fut trop heureuse de lui rendre
Trente moutons pour un baiser!
* * *
Le lendemain, Philis, peu sage,
Aurait donné moutons et chien
Pour un baiser que le volage
À Lisette donnait pour rien!”
“And there we are,” said Eileen, sitting up abruptly and levelling the pink-tipped finger of accusation at him— “there, if you please, lies the woe of the world — not in the armaments of nations! That old French poet understood in half a second more than your Hague tribunal could comprehend in its first Cathayan cycle! There lies the hope of your millennium — in the higher education of the modern Phyllis.”
“And the up-to-date Sylvandre,” added Selwyn.
“He knows too much already,” she retorted, delicate nose in the air. . . . “Hark! Ear to the ground! My atavistic and wilder instincts warn me that somebody is coming!”
“Boots and Drina,” said Selwyn; and he hailed them as they came into view above. Then he sprang to his feet, calling out: “And Gerald, too! Hello, old fellow! This is perfectly fine! When did you arrive?”
“Oh, Gerald!” cried Eileen, both hands outstretched— “it’s splendid of you to come! Dear fellow! have you seen Nina and Austin? And were they not delighted? And you’ve come to stay, haven’t you? There, I won’t begin to urge you. . . . Look, Gerald — look, Boots — and Drina, too — only look at those beautiful big plump trout in Captain Selwyn’s creel!”
“Oh, I say!” exclaimed Gerald, “you didn’t take those in that little brook — did you, Philip? Well, wouldn’t that snare you! I’m coming down here after luncheon; I sure am.”
“You will, too, won’t you?” asked Drina, jealous lest Boots, her idol, miss his due share of piscatorial glory. “If you’ll wait until I finish my French I’ll come with you.”
“Of course I will,” said Lansing reproachfully; “you don’t suppose there’s any fun anywhere for me without you, do you?”
“No,” said Drina simply, “I don’t.”
“Another Phyllis in embryo,” murmured Eileen to Selwyn. “Alas! for education!”
Selwyn laughed and turned to Gerald. “I hunted high and low for you before I came to Silverside. You found my note?”
“Yes; I — I’ll explain later,” said the boy, colouring. “Come ahead, Eily; Boots and I will take you on at tennis — and Philip, too. We’ve an hour or so before luncheon. Is it a go?”
“Certainly,” replied his sister, unaware of Selwyn’s proficiency, but loyal even in doubt. And the five, walking abreast, moved off across the uplands toward the green lawns of Silverside, where, under a gay lawn parasol, Nina sat, a “Nature book” in hand, the centre of an attentive gathering composed of dogs, children, and the cat, Kit-Ki, blinking her topaz-tinted eyes in the sunshine.
