Complete weird tales of.., p.469
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 469
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CHAPTER X. DUSK
THE MASKED DANCE was to begin at ten that evening; for that reason dinner had been served early at scores of small tables on the terrace, a hilarious and topsy-turvy, but somewhat rapid affair, because everybody required time for dressing, and already throughout the house maids and valets were scurrying around, unpacking masks and wigs and dainty costumes for the adorning of the guests at Roya-Neh.
Toward nine o’clock the bustle and confusion became distracting; corridors were haunted by graceful flitting figures in various stages of deshabille, in quest of paraphernalia feminine and maids to adjust the same. A continual chatter filled the halls, punctuated by smothered laughter and subdued but insistent appeals for aid in the devious complications of intimate attire.
On the men’s side of the house there was less hubbub and some quiet swearing; much splashing in tubs, much cigarette smoke. Men entered each other’s rooms, half-clad in satin breeches, silk stockings, and ruffled shirts, asking a helping hand in tying queue ribbons or adjusting stocks, and lingered to smoke and jest and gossip, and jeer at one another’s finery, or to listen to the town news from those week-enders recently arrived from the city.
The talk was money, summer shows, and club gossip, but financial rumours ruled.
Young Ellis, in pale blue silk and wig, perched airily, on a table, became gloomily prophetic concerning the steady retirement of capital from philanthropic enterprises hatched in Wall Street; Peter Tappan saw in the endlessly sagging market dire disaster for the future digestions of wealthy owners of undistributed securities.
“Marble columns and gold ceilings don’t make a trust company,” he sneered. “There are a few billionaire gamblers from the West who seem to think Wall Street is Coney Island. There’ll be a shindy, don’t make any mistake; we’re going to have one hell of a time; but when it’s over the corpses will all be shipped — ahem! — west.”
Several men laughed uneasily; one or two old line trust companies were mentioned; then somebody spoke of the Minnisink, lately taken over by the Algonquin.
Duane lighted a cigarette and, watching the match still burning, said:
“Dysart is a director. You can’t ask for any more conservative citizen than Dysart, can you?”
Several men looked around for Dysart, but he had stepped out of the room.
Ellis said, after a silence:
“That gambling outfit from the West has bedevilled one or two good citizens in Gotham town.”
Dr. Bailey shrugged his big, fat shoulders.
“It’s no secret, I suppose, that the Minnisink crowd is being talked about,” he grunted.
Ellis said in a low but perfectly distinct voice:
“Neither is it any secret that Jack Dysart has been hit hard in National Ice.”
Peter Tappan slipped from his seat on the table and threw away his cigarette:
“One thing is sure as soubrettes,” he observed; “the Clearing House means to get rid of certain false prophets. The game law is off prophets — in the fall. There’ll be some good gunning — under the laws of New Jersey.”
“I hope they’ll be careful not to injure any marble columns or ruin the gold-leaf on the ceilings,” sneered Ellis. “Come on, some of you fellows, and fix the buckle in this cursed stock of mine.”
“I thought fixing stocks was rather in your own line,” said Duane to the foxy-visaged and celebrated manipulator, who joined very heartily in the general and unscrupulous laugh.
A moment later, Dysart, who had heard every word from the doorway, walked silently back to his own room and sat down, resting his temples between his closed fists.
The well-cut head was already silvery gray at the temples; one month had done it. When animated, his features still appeared firm and of good colour; relaxed, they were loose and pallid, and around the mouth fine lines appeared. Often a man’s hands indicate his age, and his betrayed him, giving the lie to his lithe, straight, graceful figure. The man had aged amazingly in a month or two.
Matters were not going very well with him. For one thing, the Half-Moon Trust Company had finally terminated all dealings with the gorgeous marble-pillared temple of high finance of which he was a director. For another, he had met the men of the West, and for them he had done things which he did not always care to think about. For another, money was becoming disturbingly scarce, and the time was already past for selling securities.
During the last year he had been vaguely aware of some occult hostility to himself and his enterprises — not the normal hostility of business aggression — but something indefinable — merely negative at first, then more disturbing, sinister, foreboding; something in the very air to which he was growing more sensitive every day.
By all laws of finance, by all signs and omens, a serious reaction from the saturnalia of the last few years was already over-due. He had felt it, without alarm at first, for the men of the West laughed him to scorn and refused to shorten sail. They still refused. Perhaps they could not. One thing was certain: he could scarcely manage to take in a single reef on his own account. He was beginning to realise that the men with whom rumour was busy were men marked down by their letters; and they either would not or could not aid him in shortening sail.
For a month, now, under his bland and graceful learning among the intimates of his set, Dysart had been slowly but steadily going to pieces. At such moments as this it showed on the surface. It showed now in his loose jaw and flaccid cheeks; in the stare of the quenched eyes.
He was going to pieces, and he was aware of it. For one thing, he recognised the physical change setting in; for another, his cool, selfish, self-centred equanimity was being broken down; the rigorous bodily régime from which he had never heretofore swerved and which alone enabled him to perform the exacting social duties expected of him, he had recently neglected. He felt the impending bodily demoralisation, the threatened mental disintegration; he suspected its symptoms in a new nervous irritability, in lapses of self-command, in unaccountable excesses utterly foreign to his habitual self-control.
Dissolute heretofore only in the negative form, whatever it was that impended threatening him, seemed also to be driving him into an utter and monstrous lack of caution, and — God alone knew how — he had at last done the one thing that he never dreamed of doing. And the knowledge of it, and the fear of it, bit deeper into his shallow soul every hour of the day and night. And over all, vague, indefinite, hung something that menaced all that he cared for most on earth, held most sacred — his social position in the Borough of Manhattan and his father’s pride in him and it.
After a while he stood up in his pale blue silken costume of that mincing, smirking century which valued a straight back and a well-turned leg, and very slowly, as though tired, he walked to the door separating his wife’s dressing-room from his own.
“May I come in?” he asked.
A maid opened the door, saying that Mrs. Dysart had gone to Miss Quest’s room to have her hair powdered. He seated himself; the maid retired.
For a while he sat there, absently playing with his gilt-hilted sword, sombre-eyed, preoccupied, listening to the distant joyous tumult in the house, until quick, light steps and a breezy flurry of satin at the door announced his wife’s return.
“Oh,” she said coolly; “you?”
That was her greeting; his was a briefer nod.
She went to her mirror and studied her face, trying a patch here, a hint of vermilion there, touching up brow and lashes and the sweet, curling corners of her mouth.
“Well?” she inquired, over her shoulder, insolently.
He got up out of the chair, shut the door, and returned to his seat again.
“Have you made up your mind about the D and P securities?” he asked.
“I told you I’d let you know when I came to any conclusion,” she replied drily.
“Yes, I know what you said, Rosalie. But the time is shortening. I’ve got to meet certain awkward obligations — —”
“So you intimated before.”
He nodded and went on amiably: “All I ask of you is to deposit those securities with us for a few months. They are as safe with us as they are with the Half-Moon. Do you think I’d let you do it if I were not certain?”
She turned and scrutinised him insultingly:
“I don’t know,” she said, “how many kinds of treachery you are capable of.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I say. Frankly, I don’t know what you are capable of doing with my money. If I can judge by what you’ve done with my married life, I scarcely feel inclined to confide in you financially.”
“There is no use in going over that again,” he said patiently. “We differ little from ordinary people, I fancy. I think our house is as united as the usual New York domicile. The main thing is to keep it so. And in a time of some slight apprehension and financial uneasiness — perhaps even of possible future stress — you and I, for our own sakes, should stand firmly together to weather any possible gale.”
“I think I am able to weather whatever I am responsible for,” she said. “If you do the same, we can get on as well as we ever have.”
“I don’t believe you understand,” he persisted, forcing a patient smile. “All business in the world is conducted upon borrowed capital. I merely — —”
“Do you need more capital?” she inquired, so bluntly that he winced.
“Yes, for a few months. I may require a little additional collateral — —”
“Why don’t you borrow it, then?”
“There is no necessity if you will temporarily transfer — —”
“Can you borrow it? Or is the ice in your trust company too rotten to stand the strain?”
He flushed darkly and the temper began to escape in his voice:
“Has anybody hinted that I couldn’t? Have you been discussing my personal business affairs with any of the pups whom you drag about at your heels? No matter what your personal attitude toward me may be, only a fool would undermine the very house that — —”
“I don’t believe you understand, Jack,” she said quietly; “I care absolutely nothing about your house.”
“Well, you care about your own social status, I suppose!” he retorted sharply.
“Not very much.”
“That’s an imbecile thing to say!”
“Is it?” She turned to the mirror and touched her powdered hair lightly with both hands, and continued speaking with her back turned toward him:
“I married you for love. Remember that. There was even something of it alive in the roots, I think, until within a few days — in spite of what you are, what you have done to me. Now the thing is dead. I can tell you when it died, if you like.”
And as he said nothing:
“It died when I came in late one evening, and, passing my corridor and a certain locked door, I heard a young girl sobbing. Then it died.”
She turned on him, contemptuously indifferent, and surveyed him at her leisure:
“Your conduct to me has been such as to deliberately incite me to evil. Your attitude has been a constant occult force, driving me toward it. By the life you have led, and compelled me to lead, you have virtually set a premium upon my infidelity. What you may have done, I don’t know; what you have done, even recently, I am not sure of. But I know this: you took my life and made a parody of it. I never lived; I have been tempted to. If the opportunity comes, I will.”
Dysart rose, his face red and distorted:
“I thought young Mallett had taught you to live pretty rapidly!” he said.
“No,” she replied, “you only thought other people thought so. That is why you resented it. Your jealousy is of that sort — you don’t care what I am, but you do care what the world thinks I am. And that is all there ever was to you — all there ever will be: desperate devotion to your wretched little social status, which includes sufficient money and a chaste wife to make it secure.”
She laughed; fastened a gardenia in her hair:
“I don’t know about your money, and I don’t care. As for your wife, she will remain chaste as long as it suits her, and not one fraction of a second longer.”
“Are you crazy?” he demanded.
“Why, it does seem crazy to you, I suppose — that a woman should have no regard for the sacredness of your social status. I have no regard for it. As for your honour” — she laughed unpleasantly— “I’ve never had it to guard, Jack. And I’ll be responsible for my own, and the tarnishing of it. I think that is all I have to say.”
She walked leisurely toward the door, passing him with a civil nod of dismissal, and left him standing there in his flower-embroidered court-dress, the electric light shining full on the thin gray hair at his temples.
In the corridor she met Naïda, charming in her blossom-embroidered panniers; and she took both her hands and kissed her, saying:
“Perhaps you won’t care to have me caress you some day, so I’ll take this opportunity, dear. Where is your brother?”
“Duane is dressing,” she said. “What did you mean by my not wishing to kiss you some day?”
“Nothing, silly.” And she passed on, turned to the right, and met Sylvia Quest, looking very frail and delicate in her bath-robe and powdered hair. The girl passed her with the same timid, almost embarrassed little inclination with which she now invariably greeted her, and Rosalie turned and caught her, turning her around with a laugh. “What is the matter, dear?”
“M-matter?” stammered Sylvia, trembling under the reaction.
“Yes. You are not very friendly, and I’ve always liked you. Have I offended you, Sylvia?”
She was looking smilingly straight into the blue eyes.
“No — oh, no!” said the girl hastily. “How can you think that, Mrs. Dysart?”
“Then I don’t think it,” replied Rosalie, laughing. “You are a trifle pale, dear. Touch up your lips a bit. It’s very Louis XVI. See mine?... Will you kiss me, Sylvia?”
Again a strange look flickered in the girl’s eyes; Rosalie kissed her gently; she had turned very white.
“What is your costume?” asked Mrs. Dysart.
“Flame colour and gold.”
“Hell’s own combination, dear,” laughed Rosalie. “You will make an exquisite little demon shepherdess.”
And she went on, smiling back at the girl in friendly fashion, then turned and lightly descended the stairway, snapping on her loup-mask before the jolly crowd below could identify her.
Masked figures here and there detained her, addressing her in disguised voices, but she eluded them, slipped through the throngs on terrace and lawn, ran down the western slope and entered the rose-garden. A man in mask and violet-gray court costume rose from a marble seat under the pergola and advanced toward her, the palm of his left hand carelessly balanced on his gilded hilt.
“So you did get my note, Duane?” she said, laying her pretty hand on his arm.
“I certainly did. What can I do for you, Rosalie?”
“I don’t know. Shall we sit here a moment?”
He laughed, but continued standing after she was seated.
The air was heavy with the scent of rockets and phlox and ragged pinks and candy-tuft. Through the sweet-scented dusky silence some small and very wakeful bird was trilling. Great misty-winged moths came whirring and hovering among the blossoms, pale blurs in the darkness, and everywhere the drifting lamps of fireflies lighted and died out against the foliage.
The woman beside him sat with masked head bent and slightly turned from him; her restless hands worried her fan; her satin-shod feet were crossed and recrossed.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
“Life. It’s all so very wrong.”
“Oh,” he said, smiling, “so it’s life that is amiss, not we!”
“I suppose we are.... I suppose I am. But, Duane” — she turned and looked at him— “I haven’t had much of a chance yet — to go very right or very wrong.”
“You’ve had chances enough for the latter,” he said with an unpleasant laugh. “In this sweet coterie we inhabit, there’s always that chance.”
“There are good women in it, good wives. Your sister is in it.”
“Yes, and I mean to take her out,” said Duane grimly. “Do you think I want Naïda to marry some money-fattened pup in this set?”
“Where can you take her?”
“Where I’m going in future myself — among people whose brains are not as obsolete as my appendix; where there still exist standards and old-fashioned things like principles and religion, and a healthy terror of the Decalogue!”
“Is anybody really still afraid of the Decalogue?” she asked curiously.
“Even we are, but some of us are more afraid of ennui. Fire and fear are the greatest purifiers in the world; it’s fear of some sort or other, and only fear, that keeps the world as decent as it is.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said, playing with her fan. “I’m only afraid of dying before I have lived at all.”
“What do you call living?”
“Being loved,” she said, and looked up at him.
“You poor little thing!” he said, only partly in earnest.
“Yes, I’m sorry for the girl I was.... I was rather a nice girl, Duane. You remember me before I married.”
“Yes, I do. You were a corker. You are still.”
She nodded: “Yes, outwardly. Within is — nothing. I am very, very old; very tired.”
He said no more. She sat listlessly watching the dusk-moths hovering among the pinks. Far away in the darkness rockets were rising, spraying the sky with fire; faint strains of music came from the forest.
“Their Fête Galante has begun,” she said. “Am I detaining you too long, Duane?”
“No.”
She smiled: “It is rather amusing,” she observed, “my coming to you for my morals — to you, Duane, who were once supposed to possess so few.”
“Never mind what I possess,” he said, irritated. “What sort of advice do you expect?”
“Why, moral advice, of course.”
