Complete weird tales of.., p.399
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 399
“No, I don’t,” said Hamil sincerely.
“We’ll probably have rows,” suggested Cardross; “I may want vistas and terraces and fountains where they ought not to be.”
“Oh, no, you won’t,” replied Hamil, laughing; “you’ll understand things when I give reasons.”
“That’s what I want — reasons. If anybody would only give me reasons! — but nobody does. Listen; will you come up to the house with me and meet my family? And then you’ll lunch with them — I’ve a business luncheon at the club — unfortunately — but I’ll come back. Meanwhile there’ll be somebody to show you about, or you can run out to the Inlet in one of the motor-boats if you like, or do anything you like that may amuse you; the main thing is for you to be amused, to find this place agreeable, to like this kind of country, to like us. Then you can do good work, Mr. Hamil.”
A grinning negro shuffled up and closed the gate as they left the grove together and started across the lawn. Cardross, cordial in his quick, vigorous manner, strolled with his hands in his coat pockets, planting each white-shod foot firmly as he walked, frequently turning head and shoulders squarely toward his companion when speaking.
He must have been over fifty; he did not appear forty; still, on closer and more detailed inspection Hamil understood how much his alert, well-made figure had to do with the first impression of youth. Yet his expression had nothing in it of that shadow which falls with years — nothing to show to the world that he had once taken the world by the throat and wrung a fortune out of it — nothing of the hard gravity or the underlying sadness of almost ruthless success, and the responsibility for it.
Yet, from the first, Hamil had been aware of all that was behind this unstudied frankness, this friendly vigour. There was a man, there — every inch a man, but exactly of what sort the younger man had not yet decided.
* * *
A faded and very stout lady, gowned with elaborate simplicity, yet somehow suggesting well-bred untidiness, rolled toward them, propelled in a wheeled-chair by a black servant.
“Dear,” said Mr. Cardross, “this is Mr. Hamil.” And Mrs. Cardross offered him her chubby hand and said a little more than he expected. Then, to her husband, languidly:
“They’re playing tennis, Neville. If Mr. Hamil would care to play there are tennis-shoes belonging to Gray and Acton.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Cardross,” said Hamil, “but, as a matter of fact, I am not yet acclimated.”
“You feel a little sleepy?” drawled Mrs. Cardross, maternally solicitous; “everybody does for the first few days.” And to her husband: “Jessie and Cecile are playing; Shiela must be somewhere about — You will lunch with us, Mr. Hamil? There’s to be a tennis luncheon under the oaks — we’d really like to have you if you can stay.”
Hamil accepted as simply as the invitation was given; Mrs. Cardross exchanged a few words with her husband in that perfectly natural drawl which at first might have been mistaken for languid affectation; then she smiled at Hamil and turned around in her basket chair, parasol tilted, and the black boy began slowly pedalling her away across the lawn.
“We’ll step over to the tennis-courts,” said Cardross, replacing the straw hat which he had removed to salute his wife; “they’re having a sort of scratch-tournament I believe — my daughters and some other young people. I think you’ll find the courts rather pretty.”
The grounds were certainly quaint; spaces for four white marl courts had been cleared, hewn out of the solid jungle which walled them in with a noble living growth of live oak, cedar, magnolia, and palmetto. And on these courts a very gay company of young people in white were playing or applauding the players while the snowy balls flew across the nets and the resonant blows of the bats rang out.
And first Mr. Cardross presented Hamil to his handsome married daughter, Mrs. Acton Carrick, a jolly, freckled, young matron who showed her teeth when she smiled and shook hands like her father; and then he was made known to the youngest daughter, Cecile Cardross, small, plump, and sun-tanned, with ruddy hair and mischief in every feature.
There was, also, a willowy Miss Staines and a blond Miss Anan, and a very young Mr. Anan — a brother — and a grave and gaunt Mr. Gatewood and a stout Mr. Ellison, and a number of others less easy to remember.
“This wholesale introduction business is always perplexing,” observed Cardross; “but they’ll all remember you, and after a time you’ll begin to distinguish them from the shrubbery. No” — as Mrs. Carrick asked Hamil if he cared to play— “he would rather look on this time, Jessie. Go ahead; we are not interrupting you; where is Shiela—”
And Hamil, chancing to turn, saw her, tennis-bat tucked under one bare arm, emerging from the jungle path; and at the same instant she caught sight of him. Both little chalked shoes stood stockstill — for a second only — then she came forward, leisurely, continuing to eat the ripe guava with which she had been occupied.
Cardross, advancing, said: “This is Mr. Hamil, dearest; and,” to the young man: “My daughter Shiela.”
She nodded politely.
“Now I’ve got to go, Shiela,” continued Cardross. “Hamil, you’ll amuse yourself, won’t you, until I return after luncheon? Shiela, Mr. Hamil doesn’t care to play tennis; so if you’ll find out what he does care to do—” He saluted the young people gaily and started across the lawn where a very black boy with a chair stood ready to convey him to the village and across the railroad tracks to that demure little flower-embowered cottage the interior of which presents such an amazing contrast to the exterior.
* * *
CHAPTER VI
ARMISTICE
THE YOUNG GIRL beside him had finished her guava, and now, idly swinging her tennis-bat, stood watching the games in the sunken courts below.
“Please don’t consider me a burden,” he said. “I would be very glad to sit here and watch you play.”
“I have been playing, thank you.”
“But you won’t let me interfere with anything that—”
“No, Mr. Hamil, I won’t let you interfere — with anything.”
She stood swinging her bat, apparently preoccupied with her own thoughts — like a very grave goddess, he thought, glancing at her askance — a very young goddess, immersed in celestial reverie far beyond mortal comprehension.
“Do you like guavas?” she inquired. And, closing her own question: “But you had better not until you are acclimated. Do you feel very sleepy, Mr. Hamil?”
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“Oh! You ought to conform to tradition. There’s a particularly alluring hammock on the veranda.”
“To get rid of me is it necessary to make me take a nap?” he protested.
“So you refuse to go to sleep?”
“I certainly do.”
She sighed and tucked the tennis-bat under her left arm. “Come,” she said, moving forward, “my father will ask me what I have done to amuse you, and I had better hunt up something to tell him about. You’ll want to see the groves of course—”
“Yes, but I’m not going to drag you about with me—”
“Come,” she repeated; and as he stood his ground obstinately: “Please?” — with a rising inflection hinting at command.
“Why on earth don’t you play tennis and let me sit and watch you?” he asked, joining and keeping step with her.
“Why do you ask a woman for reasons, Mr. Hamil?”
“It’s too bad to spoil your morning—”
“I know it; so in revenge I’m going to spoil yours. Our trip is called ‘Seeing Florida,’ so you must listen to your guide very attentively. This is a pomelo grove — thank you,” to the negro who opened the gate— “here you see blossoms and ripe fruit together on the same tree. A few palmettos have been planted here for various agricultural reasons. This is a camphor bush” — touching it with her bat— “the leaves when crushed in the palm exhale a delightful fragr—”
“Calypso!”
She turned toward him with coldest composure. “That never happened, Mr. Hamil.”
“No,” he said, “it never did.”
A slight colour remained in his face; hers was cool enough.
“Did you think it happened?” she asked. He shook his head. “No,” he repeated seriously, “I know that it never happened.”
She said: “If you are quite sure it never happened, there is no harm in pretending it did.... What was it you called me?”
“I could never remember, Miss Cardross — unless you tell me.”
“Then I’ll tell you — if you are quite sure you don’t remember. You called me ‘Calypso.’”
And looking up he surprised the rare laughter in her eyes.
“You are rather nice after all,” she said, “or is it only that I have you under such rigid discipline? But it was very bad taste in you to recall so crudely what never occurred — until I gave you the liberty to do it. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “I’ve made two exhibitions of myself since I knew you—”
“One, Mr. Hamil. Please recollect that I am scarcely supposed to know how many exhibitions of yourself you may have made before we were formally presented.”
She stood still under a tree which drooped like a leaf-tufted umbrella, and she said, swinging her racket: “You will always have me at a disadvantage. Do you know it?”
“That is utterly impossible!”
“Is it? Do you mean it?”
“I do with all my heart—”
“Thank you; but do you mean it with all your logical intelligence, too?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
She stood, head partly averted, one hand caressing the smooth, pale-yellow fruit which hung in heavy clusters around her. And all around her, too, the delicate white blossoms poured out fragrance, and the giant swallow-tail butterflies in gold and black fluttered and floated among the blossoms or clung to them as though stupefied by their heavy sweetness.
“I wish we had begun — differently,” she mused.
“I don’t wish it.”
She said, turning on him almost fiercely: “You persisted in talking to me in the boat; you contrived to make yourself interesting without being offensive — I don’t know how you managed it! And then — last night — I was not myself.... And then — that happened!”
“Could anything more innocent have happened?”
“Something far more dignified could have happened when I heard you say ‘Calypso.’” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s done; we’ve misbehaved; and you will have to be dreadfully careful. You will, won’t you? And yet I shall certainly hate you heartily if you make any difference between me and other women. Oh, dear! — Oh, dear! The whole situation is just unimportant enough to be irritating. Mr. Hamil, I don’t think I care for you very much.”
And as he looked at her with a troubled smile, she added:
“You must not take that declaration too literally. Can you forget — various things?”
“I don’t want to, Miss Cardross. Listen: nobody could be more sweet, more simple, more natural than the girl I spoke to — I dreamed that I talked with — last night. I don’t want to forget that night, or that girl. Must I?”
“Are you, in your inmost thoughts, fastidious in thinking of that girl? Is there any reservation, any hesitation?”
He said, meeting her eyes: “She is easily the nicest girl I ever met — the very nicest. Do you think that I might have her for a friend?”
“Do you mean this girl, Calypso?”
“Yes.”
“Then I think that she will return to you the exact measure of friendship that you offer her.... Because, Mr. Hamil, she is after all not very old in years, and a little sensitive and impressionable.”
He thought to himself: “She is a rather curious mixture of impulse and reason; of shyness and audacity; of composure and timidity; of courage and cowardice and experience. But there is in her no treachery; nothing mentally unwholesome.”
They stood silent a moment smiling at each other rather seriously; then her smooth hand slid from his, and she drew a light breath.
“What a relief!” she said.
“What?”
“To know you are the kind of man I knew you were. That sounds rather Irish, doesn’t it?...” And under her breath— “perhaps it is. God knows!” Her face grew very grave for a moment, then, as she turned and looked at him, the shadow fell.
“Do you know — it was absurd of course — but I could scarcely sleep last night for sheer dread of your coming to-day. And yet I knew what sort of a man you must be; and this morning” — she shook her head— “I couldn’t endure any breakfast, and I usually endure lots; so I took a spin down the lake in my chair. When I saw you just now I was trying to brace up on a guava. Listen to me: I am hungry!”
“You poor little thing—”
“Sympathy satisfies sentiment but appetite prefers oranges. Shall we eat oranges together and become friendly and messy? Are you even that kind of a man? Oh, then if you really are, there’s a mixed grove just beyond.”
So together, shoulder to shoulder, keeping step, they passed through the new grove with its enormous pendent bunches of grape-fruit, and into a second grove where limes and mandarins hung among clusters of lemons and oranges; where kum-quat bushes stood stiffly, studded with egg-shaped, orange-tinted fruit; where tangerines, grape-fruit, and king-oranges grew upon the same tree, and the deep scarlet of ripe Japanese persimmons and the huge tattered fronds of banana trees formed a riotous background.
“This tree!” she indicated briefly, reaching up; and her hand was white even among the milky orange bloom — he noticed that as he bent down a laden bough for her.
“Pine-oranges,” she said, “the most delicious of all. I’ll pick and you hold the branch. And please get me a few tangerines — those blood-tangerines up there.... Thank you; and two Japanese persimmons — and two more for yourself.... Have you a knife? Very well; now, break a fan from that saw-palmetto and sweep a place for me on the ground — that way. And now please look very carefully to see if there are any spiders. No spiders? No scorpions? No wood-ticks? Are you sure?”
“There may be a bandersnatch,” he said doubtfully, dusting the ground with his palmetto fan.
She laughed and seated herself on the ground, drew down her short white tennis-skirt as far as it would go over her slim ankles, looked up at him confidently, holding out her hand for his knife.
“We are going to be delightfully messy in a moment,” she said; “let me show you how they prepare an orange in Florida. This is for you — you must take it.... And this is for me. The rind is all gone, you see. Now, Ulysses. This is the magic moment!”
And without further ceremony her little teeth met in the dripping golden pulp; and in another moment Hamil was imitating her.
They appeared to be sufficiently hungry; the brilliant rind, crinkling, fell away in golden corkscrews from orange after orange, and still they ate on, chattering away together between oranges.
“Isn’t this primitive luxury, Mr. Hamil? We ought to wear our bathing-clothes.... Don’t dare take my largest king-orange! Yes — you may have it; — I won’t take it.... Are you being amused? My father said that you were to be amused. What in the world are you staring at?”
“That!” said Hamil, eyes widening. “What on earth—”
“Oh, that’s nothing — that is our watchman. We have to employ somebody to watch our groves, you know, or all the negroes in Florida would be banqueting here. So we have that watchman yonder—”
“But it’s a bird!” insisted Hamil, “a big gray, long-legged, five-foot bird with a scarlet head!”
“Of course,” said the girl serenely; “it’s a crane. His name is Alonzo; he’s four feet high; and he’s horridly savage. If you came in here without father or me or some of the workmen who know him, Alonzo would begin to dance at you, flapping his wings, every plume erect; and if you didn’t run he’d attack you. That big, dagger-like bill of his is an atrocious weapon.”
The crane resembled a round-shouldered, thin-legged old gentleman with his hands tucked under his coat-tails; and as he came up, tiptoeing and peering slyly at Hamil out of two bright evil-looking eyes, the girl raised her arm and threw a kum-quat at him so accurately that the bird veered off with a huge hop of grieved astonishment.
“Alonzo! Go away this instant!” she commanded. And to Hamil: “He’s disgustingly treacherous; he’ll sidle up behind you if he can. Give me that palmetto fan.”
But the bird saw her rise, and hastily retreated to the farther edge of the grove, where presently they saw him pretending to hunt snails and lizards as innocently as though premeditated human assassination was farthest from his thoughts.
There was a fountain with a coquina basin in the grove; and here they washed the orange juice from their hands and dried them on their handkerchiefs.
“Would you like to see Tommy Tiger?” she asked. “I’m taming him.”
“Very much,” he said politely.
“Well, he’s in there somewhere,” pointing to a section of bushy jungle edging the grove and around which was a high heavy fence of closely woven buffalo wire. “Here, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy!” she called, in her fresh young voice that, at times, broke deliciously in a childish grace-note.
At first Hamil could see nothing in the tangle of brier and saw-palmetto, but after a while he became aware of a wild-cat, tufted ears flattenend, standing in the shadow of a striped bush and looking at him out of the greenest eyes he had ever beheld.
“Pretty Tom,” said the girl caressingly. “Tommy, come and let Shiela scratch his ears.”
And the lynx, disdainfully shifting its blank green gaze from Hamil, hoisted an absurd stub of a tail and began rubbing its lavishly whiskered jowl against the bush. Nearer and nearer sidled the lithe grayish animal, cautiously the girl advanced, until the cat was rubbing cheek and flank against the woven-wire fence. Then, with infinite precaution, she extended her hand, touched the flat fierce head, and slowly began to rub it.
