Complete weird tales of.., p.472
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 472
“Nevertheless, I must claim your promise,” he said.
There was a silence; she stood for a moment gazing at nothing, with the same bright, fixed smile, then turned and glanced at Dysart. The glance was his dismissal and he knew it.
“If I must give you up,” he said cheerfully, at his ease, “please pronounce sentence.”
“I am afraid you really must, Mr. Dysart.”
There was another interval of constraint; then Dysart spoke. His self-possession was admirable, his words perfectly chosen, his exit in faultless taste.
They looked after him until he was lost to view in the throngs beyond, then the girl slowly reseated herself, eyes again fixed on the water, hands clasped tightly upon her knee, and Duane found a place at her elbow. So they began a duet of silence.
The little wavelets came dancing shoreward out of the darkness, breaking with a thin, splashing sound against the shale at their feet. Somewhere in the night a restless heron croaked and croaked among the willows.
“Well, little girl?” he asked at last.
“Well?” she inquired, with a calmness that did not mislead him.
“I couldn’t come to you after the third dance,” he said.
“Why?”
He evaded the question: “When I came back to the glade the dancing was already over; so I got Kathleen and Naïda to save a table.”
“Where had you been all the while?”
“If you really wish to know,” he said pleasantly, “I was talking to Jack Dysart on some rather important matters. I did not realise how the time went.”
She sat mute, head lowered, staring out across the dark water. Presently he laid one hand over hers, and she straightened up with a tiny shock, turned and looked him full in the eyes.
“I’ll tell you why you failed me — failed to keep the first appointment I ever asked of you. It was because you were so preoccupied with a mask in flame colour.”
He thought a moment:
“Did you believe you saw me with somebody in a vermilion costume?”
“Yes; I did see you. It was too late for me to retire without attracting your attention. I was not a willing eavesdropper.”
“Who was the girl you thought you saw me with?”
“Sylvia Quest. She unmasked. There is no mistake.”
So he was obliged to lie, after all.
“It must have been Dysart you saw. His costume is very like mine, you know — —”
“Does Jack Dysart stand for minutes holding Sylvia’s hands — and is she accustomed to place her hands on his shoulders, as though expecting to be kissed? And does he kiss her?”
So he had to lie again: “No, of course not,” he said, smiling. “So it could not have been Dysart.”
“There are only two costumes like yours and Mr. Dysart’s. Do you wish me to believe that Sylvia is common and depraved enough to put her arms around the neck of a man who is married?”
There was no other way: “No,” he said, “Sylvia isn’t that sort, of course.”
“It was either Mr. Dysart or you.”
He said nothing.
“Then it was you!” in hot contempt.
Still he said nothing.
“Was it?” with a break in her voice.
“Men can’t admit things of that kind,” he managed to say.
The angry colour surged up to her cheeks, the angry tears started, but her quivering lips were not under command and she could only stare at him through the blur of grief, while her white hands clinched and relaxed, and her fast-beating heart seemed to be driving the very breath from her body.
“Geraldine, dear — —”
“It wasn’t fair!” she broke out fiercely; “there is no honour in you — no loyalty! Oh, Duane! Duane! How could you — at the very moment we were nearer together than we had ever been! It isn’t jealousy that is crying out in me; it is nothing common or ignoble in me that resents what you have done! It is the treachery of it! How could you, Duane?”
The utter hopelessness of clearing himself left him silent. How much was to be asked of him as sacrifice to code? How far was he expected to go to shield Sylvia Quest — this unhappy, demoralised girl, whose reputation was already at the mercy of two men?
“Geraldine,” he said, “it was nothing but a carnival flirtation — a chance encounter that meant nothing — the idlest kind of — —”
“Is it idle to do what you did — and what she did? Oh, if I had only not seen it — if I only didn’t know! I never dreamed of such a thing in you. Bunny Gray and I were taking a short cut to the Gray Water to sit out the rest of his dance — and he saw it, too — and he was furious — he must have been — because he’s devoted to Sylvia.” She made a hopeless gesture and dropped her hand to her side: “What a miserable night it has been for me! It’s all spoiled — it’s ended.... And I — my courage went.... I’ve done what I never thought to do again — what I was fighting down to make myself safe enough for you to marry — you to marry!” She laughed, but the mirth rang shockingly false.
“You mean that you had one glass of champagne,” he said.
“Yes, and another with Jack Dysart. I’ll have some more presently. Does it concern you?”
“I think so, Geraldine.”
“You are wrong. Neither does what you’ve been doing concern me — the kind of man you’ve been — the various phases of degradation you have accomplished — —”
“What particular species of degradation?” he asked wearily, knowing that Dysart was now bent on his destruction. “Never mind; don’t answer, Geraldine,” he added, “because there’s no use in trying to set myself right; there’s no way of doing it. All I can say is that I care absolutely nothing for Sylvia Quest, nor she for me; that I love you; that if I have ever been unworthy of you — as God knows I have — it is a bitterer memory to me than it could ever be to you.”
“Shall we go back?” she said evenly.
“Yes, if you wish.”
They walked back together in silence; a jolly company claimed them for their table; Geraldine laughingly accepted a glass of champagne, turning her back squarely on Duane.
Naïda and Kathleen came across.
“We waited for you as long as we could,” said his pretty sister, smothering a yawn. “I’m horribly sleepy. Duane, it’s three o’clock. Would you mind taking me across to the house?”
He cast a swift, anxious glance at Geraldine; her vivid colour, the splendour of her eyes, her feverish laughter were ominous. With her were Gray and Sylvia, rather noisy in their gaiety, and the boisterous Pink ‘uns, and Jack Dysart, lingering near, the make-up on his face in ghastly contrast to his ashen pallor and his fixed and unvaried grin.
“I’m waiting, Duane,” said Naïda plaintively.
So he turned away with her through the woods, where one by one the brilliant lantern flames were dying out, and where already in the east a silvery lustre heralded the coming dawn.
When he returned, Geraldine was gone. At the house somebody said she had come in with Kathleen, not feeling well.
“The trouble with that girl,” said a man whom he did not know, “is that she’s had too much champagne.”
“You lie,” said Duane quietly. “Is that perfectly plain to you?”
For a full minute the young man stood rigid, crimson, glaring at Duane. Then, having the elements of decency in him, he said:
“I don’t know who you are, but you are perfectly right. I did lie. And I’ll see that nobody else does.”
* * *
CHAPTER XII. THE LOVE OF THE GODS
TWO DAYS LATER the majority of the people had left Roya-Neh, and the remainder were preparing to make their adieux to the young chatelaine by proxy; for Geraldine had kept her room since the night of the masked fête, and nobody except Kathleen and Dr. Bailey had seen her.
“Fashionable fidgets,” said Dr. Bailey, in answer to amiable inquiries; “the girl has been living on her nerves, like the rest of you, only she can’t stand as much as you can.”
To Duane he said, in reply to persistent questions:
“As a plain and unromantic proposition, young man, it may be her liver. God alone knows with what young women stuff their bodies in those bucolic solitudes.”
To Kathleen he said, after questioning her and listening in silence to her guarded replies:
“I don’t know what is the matter, Mrs. Severn. The girl is extremely nervous. She acts, to me, as though she had something on her mind, but she insists that she hasn’t. If I were to be here, I might come to some conclusion within the next day or two.”
Which frightened Kathleen, and she asked whether anything serious might be anticipated.
“Not at all,” he said.
So, as he was taking the next train, there was nothing to do. He left a prescription and whizzed away to the railroad station with the last motor-load of guests.
There remained only Duane, Rosalie Dysart, Grandcourt, and Sylvia Quest, a rather subdued and silent group on the terrace, unresponsive to Scott’s unfeigned gaiety to find himself comparatively alone and free to follow his own woodland predilections once more.
“A cordial host you are,” observed Rosalie; “you’re guests are scarcely out of sight before you break into inhuman chuckles.”
“Speed the parting,” observed Scott, in excellent spirits; “that’s the truest hospitality.”
“I suppose your unrestrained laughter will be our parting portion in a day or two,” she said, amused.
“No; I don’t mind a few people. Do you want to come and look for scarabs?”
“Scarabs? Do you imagine you’re in Egypt, my poor friend?”
Scott sniffed: “Didn’t you know we had a few living species around here? Regular scarabs. Kathleen and I found three the other day — one a regular beauty with two rhinoceros horns on the thorax and iridescent green and copper tinted wing-covers. Do you want to help me hunt for some more? You’ll have to put on overshoes, for they’re in the cow-yards.”
Rosalie, intensely bored, thanked him and declined. Later she opened a shrimp-pink sunshade and, followed by Grandcourt, began to saunter about the lawn in plain sight, as people do preliminary to effacing themselves without exciting comment.
But there was nobody to comment on what they did; Duane was reading a sporting-sheet, souvenir of the departed Bunbury; Sylvia sat pallid and preoccupied, cheek resting against her hand, looking out over the valley. Her brother, her only living relative, was supposed to have come up that morning to take her to the next house party on the string which linked the days of every summer for her. But Stuyvesant had not arrived; and the chances were that he would turn up within a day or two, if not too drunk to remember her.
So Sylvia, who was accustomed to waiting for her brother, sat very colourless and quiet by the terrace parapet, pale blue eyes resting on the remoter hills — not always, for at intervals she ventured a furtive look at Duane, and there was something of stealth and of fright in the stolen glance.
As for Scott, he sat on the parapet, legs swinging, fussing with a pair of binoculars and informing the two people behind him — who were not listening — that he could distinguish a black-billed cuckoo from a thrasher at six hundred yards.
Which edified neither Sylvia nor Duane, but the boy continued to impart information with unimpaired cheerfulness until Kathleen came out from the house.
“How’s Sis?” he inquired.
“I think she has a headache,” replied Kathleen, looking at Duane.
“Could I see her?” he asked.
Kathleen said gently that Geraldine did not feel like seeing anybody at that time. A moment later, in obedience to Scott’s persistent clamouring for scarabs, she went across the lawn with the young master of Roya-Neh, resigned to the inevitable in the shape of two-horned scarabs or black-billed cuckoos.
It had always been so with her; it would always be so. Long ago the Seagrave twins had demanded all she had to give; now, if Geraldine asked less, Scott exacted double. And she gave — how happily, only her Maker and her conscience knew.
Duane was still reading — or he had all the appearance of reading — when Sylvia lifted her head from her hand and turned around with an effort that cost her what colour had remained under the transparent skin of her oval face.
“Duane,” she said, “it occurred to me just now that you might have really mistaken what I said and did the other night.” She hesitated, nerving herself to encounter his eyes, lifted and levelled across the top of his paper at her.
He waited; she retained enough self-command to continue with an effort at lightness:
“Of course it was all carnival fun — my pretending to mistake you for Mr. Dysart. You understood it, didn’t you?”
“Why, of course,” he said, smiling.
She went on: “I — don’t exactly remember what I said — I was trying to mystify you. But it occurred to me that perhaps it was rather imprudent to pretend to be on — on such impossible terms with Mr. Dysart — —”
There was something too painful in her effort for him to endure. He said laughingly, not looking at her:
“Oh, I wasn’t ass enough to be deceived, Sylvia. Don’t worry, little girl.” And he resumed the study of his paper.
Minutes passed — terrible minutes for one of them, who strove to find relief in his careless reassurance, tried desperately to believe him, to deceive that intuition which seldom fails her sex.
He, with the print blurred and meaningless before him, sat miserable, dumb with the sympathy he could not show, hot with the anger he dared not express. He thought of Dysart as he had revealed himself, now gone back to town to face that little crop of financial rumours concerning the Algonquin that persisted so wickedly and would not be quieted. For the first time in his life, probably, Dysart was compelled to endure the discomforts of a New York summer — more discomforts this summer than mere dust and heat and noise. For men who had always been on respectful financial terms with Dysart and his string of banks and his Algonquin enterprise were holding aloof from him; men who had figured for years in the same columns of print where his name was so often seen as director and trustee and secretary — fellow-members who served for the honour of serving on boards of all sorts, charity boards, hospital, museum, civic societies — these men, too, seemed to be politely, pleasantly, even smilingly edging away from him in some indefinable manner.
Which seemed to force him toward certain comparatively newcomers among the wealthy financiers of the metropolis — brilliant, masterful, restless men from the West, whose friendship in the beginning he had sought, deeming himself farsighted.
Now that his vision had become normally adjusted he cared less for this intimacy which it was too late to break — at least this was not the time to break it with money becoming unbelievably scarcer every day and a great railroad man talking angrily, and another great railroad man preaching caution at a time when the caution of the man in the Street might mean something so serious to Dysart that he didn’t care to think about it.
Dysart had gone back to New York in company with several pessimistic gentlemen — who were very open about backing their fancy; and their fancy fell on that old, ramshackle jade, Hard Times, by Speculation out of Folly. According to them there was no hope of her being scratched or left at the post.
“She’ll run like a scared hearse-horse,” said young Grandcourt gloomily. There was reason for his gloom. Unknown to his father he had invested heavily in Dysart’s schemes. It was his father’s contempt that he feared more than ruin.
So Dysart had gone to town, leaving behind him the utter indifference of a wife, the deep contempt of a man; and a white-faced girl alone with her memories — whatever they might be — and her thoughts, which were painful if one might judge by her silent, rigid abstraction, and the lower lip which, at moments, escaped, quivering, from the close-set teeth.
When Duane rose, folding his paper with a carelessly pleasant word or two, she looked up in a kind of naïve terror — like a child startled at prospect of being left alone. It was curious how those adrift seemed always to glide his way. It had always been so; even stray cats followed him in the streets; unhappy dogs trotted persistently at his heels; many a journey had he made to the Bide-a-wee for some lost creature’s sake; many a softly purring cat had he caressed on his way through life — many a woman.
As he strolled toward the eastern end of the terrace, Sylvia looked after him; and, suddenly, unable to endure isolation, she rose and followed as instinctively as her lesser sisters-errant.
It was the trotting of little footsteps behind him on the gravel that arrested him. A glance at her face was enough; vexed, shocked, yet every sympathy instantly aroused, he resigned himself to whatever might be required of him; and within him a bitter mirth stirred — acrid, unpleasant; but his smile indicated only charmed surprise.
“I didn’t suppose you’d care for a stroll with me,” he said; “it is exceedingly nice of you to give me the chance.”
“I didn’t want to be left alone,” she said.
“It is rather quiet here since our gay birds have migrated,” he said in a matter-of-fact way. “Which direction shall we take?”
“I — don’t care.”
“The woods?”
“No,” with a shudder so involuntary that he noticed it.
“Well, then, we’ll go cross country — —”
She looked at her thin, low shoes and then at him.
“Certainly,” he said, “that won’t do, will it?”
She shook her head.
They were passing the Lodge now where his studio was and where he had intended to pack up his canvases that afternoon.
“I’ll brew you a cup of tea if you like,” he said; “that is, if it’s not too unconventional to frighten you.”
She smiled and nodded. Behind the smile her heavy thoughts throbbed on: How much did this man know? How much did he suspect? And if he suspected, how good he was in every word to her — how kind and gentle and high-minded! And the anguish in her smile caused him to turn hastily to the door and summon old Miller to bring the tea paraphernalia.
