Complete weird tales of.., p.629
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 629
Wycherly, reckless enough anyway, balked a little at the proposition:
“That Stinger is too light and too tricky I’m afraid.”
“Isn’t she built for two?”
“Well, I suppose she could get off the ground with you and me — —”
“All right; let’s try her?”
“Jim! I won’t let you,” said his wife.
“Don’t be silly, Molly. Rix and I are not going up if she won’t take us — —”
“I forbid you to try! It’s senseless!”
Her husband laughed and finished his whisky and soda. Then twirling his motor goggles around his fingers he stood looking at Strelsa.
“You’re a pretty little peach,” he said sentimentally, “and I’m sorry Molly is here or — —”
“Do you care?” laughed Strelsa, looking around at him over her shoulder. “I don’t mind being adored by you, Jim.”
“Don’t you, sweetness?”
“Indeed I don’t.”
Wycherly started toward her: Langly Sprowl, who neither indulged in badinage nor comprehended it in others, turned a perfectly expressionless face on his host, who said:
“You old muffin head, did you ever smile in your life? You’d better try now because I’m going to take your best girl away from you!”
Which bored Sprowl; and he turned his lean, narrow head away as a sleek and sinister dog turns when laughed at.
Strelsa slipped clear of the piano and vanished, chased heavily by Wycherly.
Molly said: “It’s time to dress, good people. Langly, your man is upstairs with your outfit. Come, Chrysos, dear — Rix, have you everything you want?” she added in a low voice as he stood aside for her to pass: “Have you everything, Ricky?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“The little minx! Is it Langly?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear!” And, aloud: “Jim! Do let Langly try out the Stinger to-morrow.”
Her husband, who had given up his search for Strelsa, said that Sprowl was welcome.
People scattered to their respective quarters; Quarren walked slowly to his. Sprowl, passing with his mincing, nervous stride, said: “How’s little Dankmere?”
“All right,” replied Quarren briefly.
“Cheap little beggar,” commented Sprowl.
“He happens to be my partner,” said the other.
“He suits your business no doubt,” said Sprowl with a contempt he took no pains to conceal — a contempt which very plainly included Quarren as well as the Earl and the picture business.
Arrived at his door he glanced around to stare absently at Quarren. The latter said, pleasantly:
“I don’t suppose you meant to be offensive, Sprowl; you simply can’t help it; can you?”
“What?”
“I mean, you can’t help being a bounder. It’s just in you, isn’t it?”
For a moment Sprowl’s hatchet face was ghastly; he opened his mouth to speak, twice, then jerked open his door and disappeared.
* * *
CHAPTER X
QUARREN HAD BEEN at Witch-Hollow three days when Dankmere called him on the long-distance telephone.
“Do you want me to come back?” asked the young fellow. “I don’t mind if you do; I’m quite ready to return — —”
“Not at all, my dear chap,” said his lordship. “I fancied you might care to hear how matters are going in the Dankmere Galleries.”
“Of course I do, but I rather hoped nothing in particular would happen for a week or so — —”
“Plenty has. You know those experts of yours, Valasco, Drayton-Quinn, and that Hollander Van Boschoven. Well, they don’t get on. Each has come to me privately, and in turn, and told me that the others were no good — —”
“Your rôle is to remain amiable and non-committal,” said Quarren. “Let them talk — —”
“Valasco and Drayton-Quinn won’t speak, and Van Boschoven has notified me that he declines to come to the house as long as either of the others are there.”
“Very well; arrange to have them there on different days.”
“I don’t think Valasco will come back at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because — the fact is — I believe I practically — so to speak — hit him.”
“What!”
“Fact, old chap.”
“Why?”
“Well, he asked me if I knew more about anything than I did about pictures. I didn’t catch his drift for about an hour — but then it came to me, and I got up out of my chair and walked over and punched his head. I don’t think he’ll come back, do you?”
“No, I don’t. What else have you been doing?” said Quarren angrily.
“Nothing. One picture — the Raeburn portrait — has a bad hole in it.”
“How did it happen?”
“Rather extraordinary thing, that! I was giving a most respectable card party — some ladies and gentlemen of sorts — from the Winter Garden I believe — and one of the ladies inadvertently shyed a glass at another lady — —”
“For Heaven’s sake, Dankmere — —”
“Quite right old chap — my fault entirely — I won’t do it again. But, do you know, the gallery already has become a most popular resort. People are coming and going all day — a lot of dealers among them I suspect — and there have been a number of theatrical people who want to hire pictures for certain productions to be staged next winter — —”
“We don’t do that sort of thing!”
“That’s what I thought; but there was one very fetching girl who opens in ‘Ancestors’ next October — —”
“No, no, no!”
“Right-o! I’ll tell her at luncheon.... I say, Quarren: Karl Westguard wants the gallery to-night. May I let him have it?”
“Certainly. What for?”
“Oh, some idea of his — I’ve forgotten what he said.”
“I believe I’d better come down,” said Quarren bluntly.
“Don’t dream of it, old fellow. Everything is doing nicely. My respects to the fair. By-the-bye — anything in my line up there?”
Quarren laughed:
“I’m afraid not, Dankmere.”
“Very well,” said the Earl, airily. “I’m not worrying now, you know. Good-bye, old sport!”
And he rang off.
Quarren meeting Molly in the hall said:
“I think I’d better leave this afternoon. Dankmere is messing matters.”
“Are you going to run away?” she said in a low voice, glancing sideways at Strelsa who had just passed them wearing her riding habit.
“Run away,” he repeated, also lowering his voice. “From whom?”
“From Langly Sprowl.”
He shrugged and looked out of the window.
“It is running away,” insisted his pretty hostess. “You have a chance I think.”
“Not the slightest.”
“You are wrong. Strelsa wept in her sleep all night. How does that strike you?”
“Not over me,” he said grimly; but added: “How do you know she did?”
“Her maid told mine,” admitted Molly shamelessly. “Now if you are going to criticise my channels of information I’ll remind you that Richelieu himself — —”
“Oh, Molly! Molly! What a funny girl you are!” he said, laughing. “You’re a sweet, loyal little thing, too — but there’s no use—” His face became expressionless, almost haggard— “there’s no use,” he repeated under his breath.
Slowly, side by side, they walked out to the veranda, her hand resting lightly just within the crook of his arm, he, absent-mindedly filling his pipe.
“Strelsa likes you,” she said.
“With all the ardour and devotion of a fish,” he returned, coolly.
“Rix?”
“What?”
“Do you know,” said Molly, thoughtfully, “she is a sort of a fish. She has the emotions of a mollusc as far as your sex is concerned. Some women are that way — more women than men would care to believe.... Do you know, Ricky, if you’ll let us alone, it is quite natural for us to remain indifferent to considerations of that sort?”
She stood watching the young fellow busy with his pipe.
“It’s only when you keep at us long enough that we respond,” she said. “Some of us are quickly responsive; it takes many of us a long while to catch fire. Threatened emotion instinctively repels many of us — the more fastidious among us, the finer grained and more delicately nerved, are essentially reserved. Modesty, pride, a natural aloofness, are as much a part of many women as their noses and fingers — —”
“What becomes of modesty and pride when a girl marries for money?” he asked coolly.
“Some women can give and accept in cold blood what it would be impossible for them to accord to a more intimate and emotional demand.”
“No doubt an ethical distinction,” he said, “but not very clear to me.”
“I did not argue that such women are admirable or excusable.... But how many modern marriages in our particular vicinity are marriages of inclination, Ricky?”
“You’re a washed-out lot,” he said— “you’re satiated as schoolgirls. If you have any emotions left they’re twisted ones by the time you are introduced. Most débutantes of your sort make their bow equipped for business, and with the experience of what, practically, has amounted to several seasons.
“If any old-fashioned young girls remain in your orbit I don’t know where to find them. Why, do you suppose any young girl, not yet out, would bother to go to a party of any sort where there was not champagne and a theatre-box and a supper in prospect? That’s a fine comment on your children, Molly, but you know it’s true and so does everybody who pretends to know anything about it.”
“You talk like Karl Westguard,” she said, laughing. “Anyway, what has all this to do with you and Strelsa Leeds?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “She is part of your last word in social civilisation — —”
“She is a very normal, sensitive, proud girl, who has known little except unhappiness all her life, Rix — including two years of marital misery — two years of horror. — And you forget that those two years were the result of a demand purely and brutally emotional — to which, a novice, utterly ignorant, she yielded — pushed on by her mother.... Please be fair to her; remember that her childhood was pinched with poverty, that her girlhood in school was a lonely one, embarrassed by lack of everything which her fashionable schoolmates had as matters of course.
“She could not go to the homes of her schoolmates in vacation times, because she could not ask them, in turn, to her own. She was still in school when Reggie Leeds saw her — and misbehaved — and the poor little thing was sent home, guiltless but already half-damned. No wonder her mother chased Reggie Leeds half around the world dragging her daughter by the wrist!”
“Did it make matters any better to force that drunken cad into a marriage?” asked Quarren coldly.
“It makes another marriage possible for Strelsa.”
Quarren gazed out across the country where a fine misty rain was still falling. Acres of clover stretched away silvered with powdery moisture; robins and bluebirds covered the soaked lawns, and their excited call-notes prophesied blue skies.
“It doesn’t make any difference one way or the other,” said Quarren, half to himself. “She will go on in the predestined orbit — —”
“Not if a stronger body pulls her out of it.”
“There is nothing to which she responds — except what I have not.”
“Make what you do possess more powerful, then.”
“What do I possess?”
“Kindness. And also manhood, Ricky. Don’t you?”
“Perhaps so — now — after a fashion.... But I am not the man who could ever attract her — —”
“Wake her, and find out.”
“Wake her?”
“Didn’t I tell you that many of us are asleep, and that few of us awake easily? Didn’t I tell you that nobody likes to be awakened from the warm comfort and idle security of emotionless slumber? — that it is the instinct of many of us to resist — just as I hear my maid speak to me in the morning and then turn over for another forty winks, hating her!”
They both laughed.
“My maid has instructions to persist until I respond,” said Molly. “Those are my instructions to you, also.”
“Suppose, after all, I were knocking at the door of an empty room?”
“You must take your chances of course.”
There was a noise of horses on the gravel: Langly cantered up on a handsome hunter followed by a mounted groom leading Strelsa’s mare.
Sprowl dismounted and came up to pay his respects to Molly, scarcely troubling himself to recognise Quarren’s presence, and turning his back to him immediately, although Molly twice attempted to include him in the conversation.
Strelsa in the library, pulling on her gloves, was silent witness to a pantomime unmistakable; but her pretty lips merely pressed each other tighter, and she sauntered out, crop under one arm, with a careless greeting to Langly.
“Strelsa in the library, pulling on her gloves, was silent witness to a pantomime unmistakable.”
He came up offering his hand and she took it, then stood a moment in desultory conversation, facing the others so as to include Quarren.
“I thought I overheard you say to Molly that you were going back to town this afternoon,” she remarked, casting a brief glance in his direction.
“I think I’d better go,” he said, pleasantly.
“A matter of business I suppose?” eyebrows slightly lifted.
“In a way. Dankmere is alone, poor fellow.”
Molly laughed:
“It is not good for man to be alone.”
Sprowl said:
“There’s a housemaid in my employ — she’s saved something I understand. You might notify Dankmere—” he half wheeled toward Quarren, eyes slightly bulging without a shadow of expression on his sleek, narrow face.
Molly flushed; Quarren glanced at Sprowl, amazed at his insolence out of a clear sky.
“What?” he said slowly — then stepped back a pace as Strelsa passed close in front of him, apparently perfectly unconscious of any discord:
“Will you get me a lump of sugar, Mr. Quarren? My mare must be pampered or she’ll start that jiggling Kentucky amble and never walk one step.”
Quarren swung on his heel and entered the house; Molly, ignoring Strelsa, turned sharply on Sprowl:
“If you are insolent to my guests you need not come here,” she said briefly.
Langly’s restless eyes protruded; he glanced from Molly to Strelsa, then his indifferent gaze wandered over the landscape. It was plain that the rebuke had not made the slightest impression. Molly looked angrily at Strelsa, but the latter, eyes averted, was gazing at her horse. And when Quarren came back with a handful of sugar she took it and, descending the steps, fed it, lump by lump to the two horses.
Langly put her up, shouldered aside the groom, and adjusted heel-loop and habit-loop. Then he mounted, saluted Molly and followed Strelsa at a canter without even noticing his bridle.
“What have you done to Langly?” asked Molly.
“Characterised his bad manners the other day. It wasn’t worth while; there’s no money in cursing.... And I think, Molly dear, that I’ll take an afternoon train — —”
“I won’t let you,” said his hostess. “I won’t have you treated that way under my roof — —”
“It was outdoors, dear lady,” said Quarren, smiling. “It’s only his rudeness before you that I mind. Where is Sir Charles?”
“Off with Chrysos somewhere on the river — there’s their motor-launch, now.... Ricky!”
“Yes.”
“I’m angry all through.... Strelsa might have said something — showed her lack of sympathy for Langly’s remark by being a little more cordial to you.... I don’t like it in her. I don’t know whether I am going to like that girl or not — —”
“Nonsense. There was nothing for her to say or do — —”
“There was! She is a fish! — unless she gives Langly the dickens this morning.... Will you motor with Jim and me, Ricky dear?”
“If you like.”
She did like. So presently a racing car was brought around, Jim came reluctantly from the hangar, and away they tore into the dull weather now faintly illuminated by the prophecy of the sun.
Everywhere the mist was turning golden; faint smears of blue appeared and disappeared through the vapours passing overhead. Then, all at once the sun’s glaring lens played across the drenched meadows, and the shadows of tree and hedge and standing cattle streamed out across the herbage.
In spite of the chains the car skidded dangerously at times; mud flew and so did water, and very soon Molly had enough. So they tore back again to the house, Molly to change her muddy clothes and write letters, her husband to return to his beloved Stinger, Quarren to put on a pair of stout shoes and heather spats and go wandering off cross-lots — past woodlands still dripping with golden rain from every leaf, past tiny streams swollen amber where mint and scented grasses swayed half immersed; past hedge and orchard and wild tangles ringing with bird music — past fields of young crops of every kind washed green and fresh above the soaking brown earth.
Swallows settled on the wet road around every puddle; bluebirds fluttered among the fruit trees; the strident battle note of the kingbird was heard, the unlovely call of passing grackle, the loud enthusiasm of nesting robins. Everywhere a rain-cleansed world resounded with the noises of lesser life, flashed with its colour in a million blossoms and in the delicately brilliant wings hovering over them.
Far away he could see the river and the launch, too, where Sir Charles and Chrysos Lacy were circling hither and thither at full speed. Once, across a distant hill, two horses and their riders passed outlined against the sky; but even the eyes of a lover and a hater could not identify anybody at such a distance.
So he strolled on, taking roads when convenient, fields when it suited him, neither knowing nor caring where he was going.
