Complete weird tales of.., p.698
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 698
Pale as the June moon’s silver flame
Her silken sheen:
No other flame they know, these twain
Where dark dews rain —
This great Night Moth that bears her name
And my sweet Queen;
So let me light my Lantern flame
And breathe Her name.”
She held her audience in the palm of her smooth little hand; she knew it, and tasted power. She told them of the Blue Mongol’s song, reciting:
“From the Gray Plains I ride,
Where the gray hawks wheel,
In armour of lacquered hide,
Sabre and shield of steel;
The lance in my stirrup rattles,
And the quiver and bow at my back
Clatter! I sing of Battles,
Of Cities put to the sack!
Where is the Lord of the West,
The Golden Emperor’s son?
I swung my Mongol sabre; —
He and the Dead are one.
For the tawny Lion of the Iort
And the Sun of the World are One!”
Then she told them the old Chinese tale called “The Never-Ending Wrong” — the immortal tragedy of that immortal maid, “a reed in motion and a rose in flame,” from where she alights “in the white hibiscus bower” to where “death is drumming at the door” and “ten thousand battle-chariots on the wing” come clashing to a halt; and the trapped King, her lover, sends her forth
“Lily pale,
Between tall avenues of spears, to die.”
And so, amid “the sullen soldiery,” white as a flower, and all alone in soul, she “shines through tall avenues of spears, to die.”
“The King has sought the darkness of his hands,” standing in stricken grief, then turns and gazes at what lies there at his feet amid its scattered
“ — Ornaments of gold,
One with the dust; and none to gather them; —
Hair-pins of jade and many a costly gem,
Kingfishers’ wings and golden beads scarce cold.”
Lingering a moment in the faint reflection of the low-turned footlights, she stood looking out over the silent audience; and perhaps her eyes found what they had been seeking, for she smiled and stepped back as the curtain closed. And no uproar of applause could lure her forth again until the lights had been long blazing and the dancers were whirling over the armoury floor, and she had washed the paint from lid and lip and cheek, and put off her rustling antique silken splendour to bewitch another century scarce begun.
Desboro, waiting at her dressing-room door for her, led her forth.
“You have done so much for me,” he whispered. “Is there anything in all the world I can do for you, Jacqueline?”
She was laughing, flushed by the flattery and compliments from every side, but she heard him; and after a moment her face altered subtly. But she answered lightly:
“Can I ask for more than a dance or two with you? Is not that honour enough?” Her voice was gay and mocking, but the smile had faded from eye and lip; only the curved sweetness of the mouth remained.
They caught the music’s beat and swung away together among the other dancers, he piloting her with great adroitness between the avenues of armoured figures.
When he had the opportunity, he said: “What may I send you that you would care for?”
“Send me?” She laughed lightly again. “Let me see! Well, then, perhaps you may one day send me — send me forth ‘between tall avenues of spears, to die.’”
“What!” he said sharply.
“The song is still ringing in my head — that’s all. Send me any inexpensive thing you wish — a white carnation — I don’t really care—” she looked away from him— “as long as it comes from you.”
* * *
CHAPTER X
DESBORO’S GUESTS WERE determined to turn the house out of the windows; its stodgy respectability incited them; every smug, smooth portrait goaded them to unusual effort, and they racked their brains to invent novelties.
On one day they opened all the windows in the disused west wing, flooded the ground floor, hung the great stone room with paper lanterns, and held an ice carnival. As masks and costumes had been made entirely out of paper, there were several startling effects and abrupt retirements to repair damages; but the dancing on skates in the lantern light was very pretty, and even the youth and pride of Westchester found the pace not unsuitably rapid.
On another day, Desboro’s feminine guests sent to town for enough green flannel to construct caricatures of hunting coats for everybody.
The remains of a stagnant pack of harriers vegetated on a neighbouring estate; Desboro managed to mount his guests on his own live-stock, including mules, farm horses, polo ponies, and a yoke of oxen; and the county saw a hunting that they were not likely to forget.
Reggie Ledyard was magnificent astride an ox, with a paper megaphone for a hunting horn, rubber boots, and his hastily basted coat split from skirt to collar. The harriers ran wherever they pleased, and the astonished farm mules wouldn’t run at all. There was hysterical excitement when one cotton-tail rabbit was started behind a barn and instantly lost under it.
The hunt dinner was a weird and deafening affair, and the Weber-Field ball costumes unbelievable.
Owing to reaction and exhaustion, repentant girls came to Jacqueline requesting an interim of intellectual recuperation; so she obligingly announced a lecture in the jade room, and talked to them very prettily about jades and porcelains, suiting her words to their intellectual capacity, which could grasp Kang-he porcelains and Celedon and Sang-de-bœuf, but balked at the “three religions,” and found blanc de Chine uninspiring. So she told them about the famille vert and the famille rose; about the K’ang Hsi period, which they liked, and how the imperial kilns at Kiangsi developed the wonderful clair de lune “turquoise blue” and “peach bloom,” for which some of their friends or relatives had paid through their various and assorted noses.
All of this her audience found interesting because they recognised in the exquisite examples from Desboro’s collection, with which Jacqueline illustrated her impromptu lecture, objects both fashionable and expensive; and what is both fashionable and expensive appeals very forcibly to mediocrity.
“I saw a jar like that one at the Clydesdales’,” said Reggie Ledyard, a trifle excited at his own unexpected intelligence. “How much is it worth, Miss Nevers?”
She laughed and looked at the vase between her slender fingers.
“Really,” she said, “it isn’t worth very much. But wealthy people have established fictitious values for many rather crude and commonplace things. If people had the courage to buy only what appealed to them personally, there would be a mighty crash in tumbling values.”
“We’d all wake up and find ourselves stuck,” remarked Van Alstyne, who possessed some pictures which he had come to loathe, but for which he had paid terrific prices. “Jim, do you want to buy any primitives, guaranteed genuine?”
“There’s the thrifty Dutch trader for you,” said Reggie. “I’m loaded with rickety old furniture, too. They got me to furnish my place with antiques! But you don’t see me trying to sell ’em to my host at a house party!”
“Stop your disputing,” said Desboro pleasantly, “and ask Miss Nevers for her professional opinion later. The chances are that you both have been properly stuck, and I never had any sympathy for wealthy ignorance, anyway.”
But Ledyard and Van Alstyne, being very wealthy, became frightfully depressed over the unfeeling jibes of Desboro; and Jacqueline seemed to be by way of acquiring a pair of new clients.
In fact, both young men at various moments approached her on the subject, but Desboro informed them that they might with equal propriety ask a physician to prescribe for them at a dance, and that Miss Nevers’ office was open from nine until five.
“Gad,” remarked Ledyard to Van Alstyne, with increasing respect, “she is some girl, believe me, Stuyve. Only if she ever married up with a man of our kind — good-night! She’d quit him in a week.”
Van Alstyne touched his forehead significantly.
“Sure,” he said. “Nothing doing inside our conks. But why the Lord made her such a peach outside as well as inside is driving me to Jersey! Most of ’em are so awful to look at, don’t y’know. Come on, anyway. I can’t keep away from her.”
“She’s somewhere with the others playing baseball golf,” said Reggie, gloomily, following his friend. “Isn’t it terrible to see a girl in the world like that — apparently created to make some good gink happy — and suddenly find out that she has even more brains than beauty! My God, Stuyve, it’s hard on a man like me.”
“Are you really hard hit?”
“Am I? And how about you?”
“It’s the real thing here,” admitted Van Alstyne. “But what’s the use?”
They agreed that there was no use; but during the dance that evening both young men managed to make their intentions clear to Jacqueline.
Reggie Ledyard had persuaded her to a few minutes’ promenade in the greenhouse; and there, standing amid thickets of spicy carnations, the girl listened to her first proposal from a man of that outer world about which, until a few days ago, she had known nothing.
The boy was not eloquent; he made a clumsy attempt to kiss her and was defeated. He seemed to her very big, and blond, and handsome as he stood there; and she felt a little pity for him, too, partly because his ideas were so few and his vocabulary so limited.
Perplexed, silent, sorry for him, yet still conscious of a little thrill of wonder and content that a man of the outer world had found her eligible, she debated within herself how best to spare him. And, as usual, the truth presented itself to her as the only explanation.
“You see,” she said, lifting her troubled eyes, “I am in love with some one else.”
“Good God!” he muttered. After a silence he said humbly: “Would it be unpardonable if I — would you tell me whether you are engaged?”
She blushed with surprise at the idea.
“Oh, no,” she said, startled. “I — don’t expect to be.”
“What?” he exclaimed incredulously. “Is there a man on earth ass enough not to fall in love with you if you ever condescended to smile at him twice?”
But the ideas which he was evoking seemed to distress her, and she averted her face and stood twisting a long-stemmed carnation with nervous fingers.
Not even to herself, either before or since Desboro’s letter which had revealed him so unmistakably, had the girl ventured in her inmost thoughts to think the things which this big, blond, loutish boy had babbled.
What Desboro was, she understood. She had had the choice of dismissing him from her mind, with scorn and outraged pride as aids to help the sacrifice, or of accepting him as he was — as she knew him to be — for the sake of something about him as yet inexplicable even to herself.
And she had chosen.
But now a man of Desboro’s world had asked her to be his wife. More than that; he had assumed that she was fitted to be the wife of anybody.
* * *
They walked back together. She was adorable with him, kind, timidly sympathetic and smilingly silent by turns, venturing even to rally him a little, console him a little, moved by an impulse toward friendship wholly unfeigned.
“All I have to say is,” he muttered, “that you’re a peach and a corker; and I’m going to invent some way of marrying you, even if it lands me in an East Side night-school.”
Even he joined in her gay laughter; and presently Van Alstyne, who had been glowering at them, managed to get her away. But she would have nothing further to do with greenhouses, or dark landings, or libraries; so he asked her bluntly while they were dancing; and she shook her head, and very soon dropped his arm.
There was a bay-window near them; she made a slight gesture of irritation; and there, in the partly curtained seclusion, he learned that she was grateful and happy that he liked her so much; that she liked him very much, but that she loved somebody else.
He took it rather badly at first; she began to understand that few girls would have lightly declined a Van Alstyne; and he was inclined to be patronising, sulky and dignified — an impossible combination — for it ditched him finally, and left him kissing her hands and declaring constancy eternal.
That night, at parting, Desboro retained her offered hand a trifle longer than convention required, and looked at her more curiously than usual.
“Are you enjoying the party, Jacqueline?”
“Every minute of it. I have never been as happy.”
“I suppose you realise that everybody is quite mad about you.”
“Everybody is nice to me! People are so much kinder than I imagined.”
“Are they? How do you get on with the gorgon?”
“Mrs. Hammerton? Do you know she is perfectly sweet? I never dreamed she could be so gentle and thoughtful and considerate. Why — and it seems almost ridiculous to say it — she seems to have the ideas of a mother about whatever concerns me. She actually fusses over me sometimes — and — it is — agreeable.”
An inexplicable shyness suddenly overcame her, and she said good-night hastily, and mounted the stairs to her room.
Later, when she was prepared for bed, Mrs. Hammerton knocked and came in.
“Jacqueline,” she said bluntly, “what was Reggie Ledyard saying to you this evening? I’ll box his ears if he proposed to you. Did he?”
“I — I am afraid he did.”
“You didn’t take him?”
“No.”
“I should think not! I’d as soon expect you to marry a stable groom. He has all the beauty and healthy colour of one. Also the distinguished mental capacity. You don’t want that kind.”
“I don’t want any kind.”
“I’m glad of it. Did any other fool hint anything more of that sort?”
“Mr. Van Alstyne.”
“Oho! Stuyvesant, too? Well, what did you say to him?” asked the old lady, with animation.
“I said no.”
“What?”
“Of course, I said no. I am not in love with Mr. Van Alstyne.”
“Child! Do you realise that you had the opportunity of your life!”
Jacqueline’s smile was confused and deprecating.
“But when a girl doesn’t care for a man — —”
“Do you mean to marry for love?”
The girl sat silent a moment, then shook her head.
“I shall not marry,” she said.
“Nonsense! And if you feel that way, what am I good for? What earthly use am I to you? Will you kindly inform me?”
She had seated herself on the bed’s edge, leaning over the girl where she lay on her pillows.
“Answer me,” she insisted. “Of what use am I to you?”
For a full minute the girl lay there looking up at her without stirring. Then a smile glimmered in her eyes; she lifted both arms and laid them on the older woman’s shoulders.
“You are useful — this way,” she said; and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
The effect on Aunt Hannah was abrupt; she caught the girl to her breast and held her there fiercely and in silence for a moment; then, releasing her, tucked her in with mute violence, turned off the light and marched out without a word.
* * *
Day after day Desboro’s guests continued to turn the house inside out, ransacking it from garret to cellar.
“We don’t intend to do anything in this house that anybody has ever done here, or at any house party,” explained Reggie Ledyard to Jacqueline. “So if any lady cares to walk down stairs on her head the incident will be quite in order.”
“Can she slide down the banisters instead?” asked Helsa Steyr.
“Oh, you’ll have to slide up to be original,” said Betty Barkley.
“How can anybody slide up the banisters?” demanded Reggie hotly.
“You’ve the intellect of a terrapin,” said Betty scornfully. “It’s because nobody has ever done it that it ought to be done here.”
Desboro, seated on the pool table, told her she could do whatever she desired, including arson, as long as she didn’t disturb the Aqueduct Police.
Katharine Frere said to Jacqueline: “Everything you do is so original. Can’t you invent something new for us to do?”
“She might suggest that you all try to think,” said Mrs. Hammerton tartly. “That would be novelty enough.”
Cairns seized the megaphone and shouted: “Help! Help! Aunt Hannah is after us!”
Captain Herrendene, seated beside Desboro with a half smile on his face, glanced across at Jacqueline who stood in the embrasure of a window, a billiard cue resting across her shoulders.
“Please invent something for us, Miss Nevers,” he said.
“Why don’t you play hide and seek?” sneered Mrs. Hammerton, busily knitting a tie. “It’s suited to your intellects.”
“Let Miss Nevers suggest a new way of playing the oldest game ever invented,” added Betty Barkley. “There is no possibility of inventing anything new; everything was first done in the year one. Even protoplasmic cells played hide-and-seek together.”
“What rot!” said Reggie. “You can’t play that in a new way.”
“You could play it in a sporting way,” said Cairns.
“How’s that, old top?”
“Well, for example, you conceal yourself, and whatever girl finds you has got to marry you. How’s that for a reckless suggestion?”
But it had given Reggie something resembling an idea.
“Let us be hot sports,” he said, with animation; “draw lots to see which girl will hide somewhere in the house; make a time-limit of one hour; and if any man finds her she’ll marry him. There isn’t a girl here,” he added, jeeringly, “who has the sporting nerve to try it!”
A chorus of protests greeted the challenge. Athalie Vannis declared that she was crazy to marry somebody; but she insisted that the men would only pretend to search, and were really too cowardly to hunt in earnest. Cairns retorted that the girl in concealment would never permit a real live man to miss her hiding place while she possessed lungs to reveal it.
