Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

“On the lawn out there — farther out, in the starlight,” he whispered — his voice broke— “my darling—”

  She bent her head, passing slowly before him, turned, looked back, her answer in her eyes, her lips, in every limb, every line and contour of her, as she stood a moment, looking back.

  Austin and Boots were talking volubly when he returned to the tables now veiled in a fine haze of aromatic smoke. Gerald stuck close to him, happy, excited, shy by turns. Others came up on every side — young, frank, confident fellows, nice in bearing, of good speech and manner.

  And outside waited their pretty partners of the younger set, gossiping in hall, on stairs and veranda in garrulous bevies, all filmy silks and laces and bright-eyed expectancy.

  The long windows were open to the veranda; Selwyn, with his arm through Gerald’s, walked to the railing and looked out across the fragrant starlit waste. And very far away they heard the sea intoning the hymn of the four winds.

  Then the elder man withdrew his arm and stood apart for a while. A little later he descended to the lawn, crossed it, and walked straight out into the waste.

  The song of the sea was rising now. In the strange little forest below, deep among the trees, elfin lights broke out across the unseen Brier water, then vanished.

  He halted to listen; he looked long and steadily into the darkness around him. Suddenly he saw her — a pale blur in the dusk.

  “Eileen?”

  “Is it you, Philip?”

  She stood waiting as he came up through the purple gloom of the moorland, the stars’ brilliancy silvering her — waiting — yielding in pallid silence to his arms, crushed in them, looking into his eyes, dumb, wordless.

  Then slowly the pale sacrament changed as the wild-rose tint crept into her face; her arms clung to his shoulders, higher, tightened around his neck. And from her lips she gave into his keeping soul and body, guiltless as God gave it, to have and to hold beyond such incidents as death and the eternity that no man clings to save in the arms of such as she.

  THE END

  THE FIRING LINE

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  TO

  MARGERY CHAMBERS

  CHAPTER I

  A SKIRMISH

  As the wind veered and grew cooler a ribbon of haze appeared above the Gulf-stream.

  Young Hamil, resting on his oars, gazed absently into the creeping mist. Under it the ocean sparkled with subdued brilliancy; through it, shoreward, green palms and palmettos turned silvery; and, as the fog spread, the sea-pier, the vast white hotel, bathing-house, cottage, pavilion, faded to phantoms tinted with rose and pearl.

  Leaning there on his oars, he could still make out the distant sands flecked with the colours of sunshades and bathing-skirts; the breeze dried his hair and limbs, but his swimming-shirt and trunks still dripped salt water.

  Inshore a dory of the beach guard drifted along the outer line of breakers beyond which the more adventurous bathers were diving from an anchored raft. Still farther out moving dots indicated the progress of hardier swimmers; one in particular, a girl capped with a brilliant red kerchief, seemed to be already nearer to Hamil than to the shore.

  It was all very new and interesting to him — the shore with its spectral palms and giant caravansary, the misty, opalescent sea where a white steam-yacht lay anchored north of him — the Ariani — from which he had come, and on board of which the others were still doubtless asleep — Portlaw, Malcourt, and Wayward. And at thought of the others he yawned and moistened his lips, still feverish from last night’s unwisdom; and leaning forward on his oars, sat brooding, cradled by the flowing motion of the sea.

  The wind was still drawing into the north; he felt it, never strong, but always a little cooler, in his hair and on his wet swimming-shirt. The flat cloud along the Gulf-stream spread thickly coastward, and after a little while the ghosts of things terrestrial disappeared.

  All around him, now, blankness — save for the gray silhouette of the Ariani. A colourless canopy surrounded him, centred by a tiny pool of ocean. Overhead through the vanishing blue, hundreds of wild duck were stringing out to sea; under his tent of fog the tarnished silver of the water formed a floor smoothly unquiet.

  Sounds from the land, hitherto unheard, now came strangely distinct; the cries of bathers, laughter, the muffled shock of the surf, doubled and redoubled along the sands; the barking of a dog at the water’s edge. Clear and near sounded the ship’s bell on the Ariani; a moment’s rattle of block and tackle, a dull call, answered; and silence. Through which, without a sound, swept a great bird with scarce a beat of its spread wings; and behind it, another, and, at exact intervals another and another in impressive processional, sailing majestically through the fog; white pelicans winging inland to the lagoons.

  A few minutes later the wind, which had become fitful, suddenly grew warm. All around him now the mist was dissolving into a thin golden rain; the land-breeze freshened, blowing through distant jasmine thickets and orange groves, and a soft fragrance stole out over the sea.

  As the sun broke through in misty splendour, the young man, brooding on his oars, closed his eyes; and at the same instant his boat careened violently, almost capsizing as a slender wet shape clambered aboard and dropped into the bows. As the boat heeled under the shock Hamil had instinctively flung his whole weight against the starboard gunwale. Now he recovered his oars and his balance at the same time, and, as he swung half around, his unceremonious visitor struggled to sit upright, still fighting for breath.

  “I beg your pardon,” she managed to say; “may I rest here? I am—” She stopped short; a flash of sudden recognition came into her eyes — flickered, and faded. It was evident to him that, for a moment, she thought she had met him before.

  “Of course you may stay here,” he said, inclined to laugh.

  She settled down, stretching slightly backward as though to give her lungs fuller play. In a little while her breathing grew more regular; her eyes closed for a moment, then opened thoughtfully, skyward.

  Hamil’s curious and half-amused gaze rested on her as he resumed the oars. But when he turned his back and headed the boat shoreward a quick protest checked him, and oars at rest, he turned again, looking inquiringly at her over his shoulder.

  “I am only rowing you back to the beach,” he said.

  “Don’t row me in; I am perfectly able to swim back.”

  “No doubt,” he returned drily, “but haven’t you played tag with Death sufficiently for one day?”

  “Death?” She dismissed the grotesque suggestion with a shrug, then straightened up, breathing freely and deeply. “It is an easy swim,” she remarked, occupied with her wet hair under the knotted scarlet; “the fog confused me; that was all.”

  “And how long could you have kept afloat if the fog had not lifted?” he inquired with gentle sarcasm. To which, adroitly adjusting hair and kerchief, she made no answer. So he added: “There is supposed to be a difference between mature courage and the fool-hardiness of the unfledged—”

  “What?”

  The quick close-clipped question cutting his own words silenced him. And, as he made no reply, she continued to twist the red kerchief around her hair, and to knot it s
ecurely, her doubtful glance returning once or twice to his amused face.

  When all had been made fast and secure she rested one arm on the gunwale and dropped the other across her knees, relaxing in every muscle a moment before departure. And, somehow, to Hamil, the unconscious grace of the attitude suggested the “Resting Hermes” — that sculptured concentration of suspended motion.

  “You had better not go just yet,” he said, pointing seaward.

  She also had been watching the same thing that he was now looking at, a thin haze which again became apparent over the Gulf-stream.

  “Do you think it will thicken?” she asked.

  “I don’t know; you had a close call last time—”

  “There was no danger.”

  “I think there was danger enough; you were apparently headed straight out to sea—”

  “I heard a ship’s bell and swam toward it, and when the fog lifted I found you.”

  “Why didn’t you swim toward the shore? You could hear the surf — and a dog barking.”

  “I” — she turned pink with annoyance— “I suppose I was a trifle tired — if you insist. I realised that I had lost my bearings; that was all. Then I heard a ship’s bell.... Then the mist lifted and I saw you — but I’ve explained all that before. Look at that exasperating fog!”

  Vexation silenced her; she sat restless for a few seconds, then:

  “What do you think I had better do?”

  “I think you had better try to endure me for a few minutes longer. I’m safer than the fog.”

  But his amusement left her unresponsive, plainly occupied with her own ideas.

  Again the tent of vapour stretched its magic folds above the boat and around it; again the shoreward shapes faded to phantoms and disappeared.

  He spoke again once or twice, but her brief replies did not encourage him. At first, he concluded that her inattention and indifference must be due to self-consciousness; then, slightly annoyed, he decided they were not. And, very gradually, he began to realise that the unconventional, always so attractive to the casual young man, did not interest her at all, even enough to be aware of it or of him.

  This cool unconsciousness of self, of him, of a situation which to any wholesome masculine mind contained the germs of humour, romance, and all sorts of amusing possibilities, began to be a little irksome to him. And still her aloofness amused him, too.

  “Do you know of any decorous reason why we should not talk to each other occasionally during this fog?” he asked.

  She turned her head, considered him inattentively, then turned it away again.

  “No,” she said indifferently; “what did you desire to say?”

  Resting on his oars, the unrequited smile still forlornly edging his lips, he looked at his visitor, who was staring into the fog, lost in her own reflections; and never a glimmer in her eyes, never a quiver of lid or lash betrayed any consciousness of his gaze or even of his presence. And he continued to inspect her with increasing annoyance.

  The smooth skin, the vivid lips slightly upcurled, the straight delicate nose, the cheeks so smoothly rounded where the dark thick lashes swept their bloom as she looked downward at the water — all this was abstractly beautiful; very lovely, too, the full column of the neck, and the rounded arms guiltless of sunburn or tan.

  So unusually white were both neck and arms that Hamil ventured to speak of it, politely, asking her if this was not her first swim that season.

  Voice and question roused her from abstraction; she turned toward him, then glanced down at her unstained skin.

  “My first swim?” she repeated; “oh, you mean my arms? No, I never burn; they change very little.” Straightening up she sat looking across the boat at him without visible interest at first, then doubtfully, as though in an effort to say something polite.

  “I am really very grateful to you for letting me sit here. Please don’t feel obliged to amuse me during this annoying fog.”

  “Thank you; you are rather difficult to talk to. But I don’t mind trying at judicious intervals,” he said, laughing.

  She considered him askance. “If you wish to row in, do so. I did not mean to keep you here at sea—”

  “Oh, I belong out here; I’m from the Ariani yonder; you heard her bell in the fog. We came from Nassau last night.... Have you ever been to Nassau?”

  The girl nodded listlessly and glanced at the white yacht, now becoming visible through the thinning mist. Somewhere above in the viewless void an aura grew and spread into a blinding glory; and all around, once more, the fog turned into floating golden vapour shot with rain.

  The girl placed both hands on the gunwales as though preparing to rise.

  “Not yet!” said Hamil sharply.

  “I beg your pardon?” — looking up surprised, still poised lightly on both palms as though checked at the instant of rising into swift aërial flight — so light, so buoyant she appeared.

  “Don’t go overboard,” he repeated.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m going to row you in.”

  “I wish to swim; I prefer it.”

  “I am only going to take you to the float—”

  “But I don’t care to have you. I am perfectly able to swim in—”

  “I know you are,” he said, swinging clear around in his seat to face her, “but I put it in the form of a request; will you be kind enough to let me row you part way to the float? This fog is not ended.”

  She opened her lips to protest; indeed, for a moment it looked as if she were going overboard without further argument; then perhaps some belated idea of civility due him for the hospitality of his boat restrained her.

  “You understand, of course, that I am quite able to swim in,” she said.

  “Yes; may I now row you part way? The fog is closing in again.”

  She yielded with a pretty indifference, none the less charming because there was no flattery in it for him. He now sat facing her, pushing his oars through the water; and she stole a curious glance at his features — slightly sullen for the moment — noticing his well-set, well-shaped head and good shoulders.

  That fugitive glance confirmed the impression of recognition in her mind. He was what she had expected in breeding and physique — the type usually to be met with where the world can afford to take its leisure.

  As he was not looking at her she ventured to continue her inspection, leaning back, and dropping her bare arm alongside, to trail her fingers through the sunlit water.

  “Have we not rowed far enough?” she asked presently. “This fog is apparently going to last forever.”

  “Like your silence,” he said gaily.

  Raising her eyes in displeasure she met his own frankly amused.

  “Shall I tell you,” he asked, “exactly why I insisted on rowing you in? I’m afraid” — he glanced at her with the quick smile breaking again on his lips— “I’m afraid you don’t care whether I tell you or not. Do you?”

  “If you ask me — I really don’t,” she said. “And, by the way, do you know that if you turned around properly and faced the stern you could make better progress with your oars?”

  “By ‘better’ do you mean quicker progress?” he asked, so naïvely that she concluded he was a trifle stupid. The best-looking ones were usually stupid.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, impatient. “It’s all very well to push a punt across a mill-pond that way, but it’s not treating the Atlantic with very much respect.”

  “You were not particularly respectful toward the Atlantic Ocean when you started to swim across it.”

  But again the echo of amusement in his voice found no response in her unsmiling silence.

  He thought to himself: “Is she a prude, or merely stupid! The pity of it! — with her eyes of a thinking goddess! — and no ideas behind them! What she understands is the commonplace. Let us offer her the obvious.”

  And, aloud, fatuously: “This is a rarely beautiful scene—”

  “What?�
�� crisply.

  And feeling mildly wicked he continued:

  — “Soft skies, a sea of Ionian azure; one might almost expect to see a triareme heading up yonder out of the south, festooned with the golden fleece. This is just the sort of a scene for a triareme; don’t you think so?”

  Her reply was the slightest possible nod.

  He looked at her meanly amused:

  “It’s really very classical,” he said, “like the voyage of Ulysses; I, Ulysses, you the water nymph Calypso, drifting in that golden ship of Romance—”

  “Calypso was a land nymph,” she observed, absently, “if accuracy interests you as much as your monologue.”

  Checked and surprised, he began to laugh at his own discomfiture; and she, elbow on the gunwale, small hand cupping her chin, watched him with an expressionless directness that very soon extinguished his amusement and left him awkward in the silence.

  “I’ve tried my very best to be civil and agreeable,” he said after a moment. “Is it really such an effort for you to talk to a man?”

  “Not if I am interested,” she said quietly.

  He felt that his ears were growing red; she noticed it, too, and added: “I do not mean to be too rude; and I am quite sure you do not either.”

  “Of course not,” he said; “only I couldn’t help seeing the humour of romance in our ocean encounter. I think anybody would — except you—”

  “What?”

  The crisp, quick question which, with her, usually seemed like an exclamation, always startled him into temporary silence; then he began more carefully:

  “There was one chance in a million of your finding my boat in the fog. If you hadn’t found it—” He shook his head. “And so I wish you might recognise in our encounter something amusing, humourous” — he looked cautiously at her— “even mildly romantic — ah — enough to — to—”

  “To what?”

  “Why — to say — to do something characteristically — ah—”

  “What?”

  “ — Human!” he ventured — quite prepared to see her rise wrathfully and go overboard.

  Instead she remained motionless, those clear, disconcerting eyes fixed steadily on him. Once or twice he thought that her upper lip quivered; that some delicate demon of laughter was trying to look out at him under the lashes; but not a lid twitched; the vivid lips rested gravely upon each other. After a silence she said: