Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Her eyes missed nothing; her dainty close-set ears heard all — the short, dry note of a chewink, the sweet, wholesome song of the cardinal, the thrilling cries of native jays and woodpeckers, the heavenly outpoured melody of the Florida wren, perched on some tiptop stem, throat swelling under the long, delicate, upturned bill.

  Void of self-consciousness, sweetly candid in her wisdom, sharing her lore with him as naturally as she listened to his, small wonder that to him the wilderness was paradise, and she with her soft full voice, a native guide. For all around them lay an enchanted world as young as they — the world is never older than the young! — and they “had eyes and they saw; ears had they and they heard” — but not the dead echoes of that warning voice, alas! calling through the ancient wilderness of fable.

  CHAPTER XI

  PATHFINDERS

  Considerably impressed by her knowledge he was careful not to embarrass her by saying so too seriously.

  “For a frivolous and fashionable girl who dances cotillions, drives four, plays polo, and reviews her serious adorers by regiments, you’re rather perplexing,” he said. “Of course you don’t suppose that I really believe all you say about these beasts and birds and butterflies.”

  “What has disturbed your credulity?” she laughed.

  “Well, that rabbit which crossed ahead, for one thing. You promptly called it a marsh rabbit!”

  “Lepus palustris” she nodded, delighted.

  “By all means,” he retorted, pretending offensive scepticism, “but why a marsh rabbit?”

  “Because, monsieur, its tail was brown, not white. Didn’t you notice that?”

  “Oh, it’s all very well for you to talk that way, but I’ve another grievance. All these holes in the sand you call gopher burrows sometimes, sometimes salamander holes. And I saw a thing like a rat run into one of them and a thing like a turtle run into another and I think I’ve got you now—”

  Her delightful laughter made the forest silence musical.

  “You poor boy! No wonder your faith is strained. The Crackers call the gopher a salamander, and they also call the land turtle a gopher. Their burrows are alike and usually in the same neighbourhood.”

  “Well, what I want to know is where you had time to learn all this?” he persisted.

  “From my tame Seminole, if you please.”

  “Your Seminole!”

  “Yes, indeed, my dear, barelegged, be-turbaned Seminole, Little Tiger. I am now twenty, Mr. Hamil; for ten years every winter he has been with us on our expeditions. A week before we start Eudo Stent goes to the north-west edge of the Everglades, and makes smoke talk until he gets a brief answer somewhere on the horizon. And always, when we arrive in camp, a Seminole fire is burning under a kettle and before it sits my Little Tiger wearing a new turban and blinking through the smoke haze like a tree-lynx lost in thought.”

  “Do you mean that this aboriginal admirer of yours has already come out of the Everglades to meet you at your camp?”

  “Surely he is there, waiting at this moment,” she said. “I’d as soon doubt the stars in their courses as the Seminole, Coacochee. And you will see very soon, now, because we are within a mile of camp.”

  “Within a mile!” he scoffed. “How do you know? For the last two hours these woods and glades have all looked precisely alike to me. There’s no trail, no blaze, no hills, no valleys, no change in vegetation, not the slightest sign that I can discover to warrant any conclusion concerning our whereabouts!”

  She threw back her head and laughed deliciously.

  “My pale-face brother,” she said, “do you see that shell mound?”

  “Is that hump of rubbish a shell mound?” he demanded scornfully.

  “It certainly is; did you expect a pyramid? Well, then, that is the first sign, and it means that we are very near camp.... And can you not smell cedar smoke?”

  “Not a whiff!” he said indignantly.

  “Can’t you even see it?”

  “Where in Heaven’s name, Shiela?”

  Her arm slanted upward across his saddle: “That pine belt is too blue; do you notice it now? That is smoke, my obstinate friend.”

  “It’s more probably swamp mist; I think you’re only a pretty counterfeit!” he said, laughing as he caught the volatile aroma of burning cedar. But he wouldn’t admit that she knew where she was, even when she triumphantly pointed out the bleached skull of an alligator nailed to an ungainly black-jack. So they rode on, knee to knee, he teasing her about her pretended woodcraft, she bantering him; but in his lively skirmishes and her disdainful retorts there was always now an undertone which they both already had begun to detect and listen for: the unconscious note of tenderness sounding at moments through the fresh, quick laughter and gayest badinage.

  But under all her gaiety, at moments, too, the dull alarm sounded in her breast; vague warning lest her heart be drifting into deeper currents where perils lay uncharted and unknown.

  With every intimate and silent throb of warning she shivered, responsive, masking her growing uncertainty with words. And all the while, deep in her unfolding soul, she was afraid, afraid. Not of this man; not of herself as she had been yesterday. She was afraid of the unknown in her, yet unrevealed, quickening with instincts the parentage of which she knew nothing. What might be these instincts of inheritance, how ominous their power, their trend, she did not know; from whom inherited she could never, never know. Would engrafted and acquired instincts aid her; would training control this unknown heritage from a father and a mother whose very existences must always remain without concrete meaning to her?

  Since that dreadful day two years ago when a word spoken inadvertently, perhaps maliciously, by Mrs. Van Dieman, made it necessary that she be told the truth; since the dazed horror of that revelation when, beside herself with grief and shame, she had turned blindly to herself for help; and, childish impulse answering, had hurled her into folly unutterable, she had, far in the unlighted crypt of her young soul, feared this unknown sleeping self, its unfolded intelligence, its passions unawakened.

  Through many a night, wet-eyed in darkness, she had wondered whose blood it was that flowed so warmly in her veins; what inherited capacity for good and evil her soul and body held; whose eyes she had; whose hair, and skin, and hands, and who in the vast blank world had given colour to these eyes, this skin and hair, and shaped her fingers, her mouth, her limbs, the delicate rose-tinted nails whitening in the clinched palm as she lay there on her bed at night awake.

  The darkness was her answer.

  And thinking of these things she sighed unconsciously.

  “What is it, Shiela?” he asked.

  “Nothing; I don’t know — the old pain, I suppose.”

  “Pain?” he repeated anxiously.

  “No; only apprehension. You know, don’t you? Well, then, it is nothing; don’t ask me.” And, noting the quick change in his face— “No, no; it is not what you think. How quickly you are hurt! My apprehension is not about you; it concerns myself. And it is quite groundless. I know what I must do; I know!” she repeated bitterly. “And there will always be a straight path to the end; clear and straight, until I go out as nameless as I came in to all this.... Don’t touch my hand, please.... I’m trying to think.... I can’t, if we are in contact.... And you don’t know who you are touching; and I can’t tell you. Only two in all the world, if they are alive, could tell you. And they never will tell you — or tell me — why they left me here alone.”

  With a little shiver she released her hand, looking straight ahead of her for a few moments, then, unconsciously up into the blue overhead.

  “I shall love you always,” he said. “Right or wrong, always. Remember that, too, when you think of these things.”

  She turned as though slowly aroused from abstraction, then shook her head.

  “It’s very brave and boyish of you to be loyal—”

  “You speak to me as though I were not years older than you!”

  “I c
an’t help it; I am old, old, sometimes, and tired of an isolation no one can break for me.”

  “If you loved me—”

  “How can I? You know I cannot!”

  “Are you afraid to love me?”

  She blushed crimson, saying: “If I — if such a misfortune—”

  “Such a misfortune as your loving me?”

  “Yes; if it came, I would never, never admit it! Why do you say these things to me? Won’t you understand? I’ve tried so hard — so hard to warn you!” The colour flamed in her cheeks; a sort of sweet anger possessed her.

  “Must I tell you more than I have told before you can comprehend the utter impossibility of any — love — between us?”

  His hand fell over hers and held it crushed.

  “Tell me no more,” he said, “until you can tell me that you dare to love!”

  “What do you mean? Do you mean that a girl does not do a dishonourable thing because she dares not? — a sinful thing because she’s afraid? If it were only that—” She smiled, breathless. “It is not fear. It is that a girl can not love where love is forbidden.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “Believe it!” — in astonishment.

  “Yes; do you believe it?”

  She had never before questioned it. Dazed by his impatience, dismayed, she affirmed it again, mechanically. And the first doubt entered as she spoke, confusing her, awakening a swarm of little latent ideas and misgivings, stirring memories of half-uttered sentences checked at her entrance into a room, veiled allusions, words, nods, that she remembered but had never understood. And, somehow, his question seemed a key to this cipher, innocently retained in the unseen brain-cells, stored up without suspicion — almost without curiosity.

  For all her recent eloquence upon unhappiness and divorce, it came to her now in some still subtle manner, that she had been speaking concerning things in the world of which she knew nothing. And one of them, perhaps, was love.

  Then every instinct within her revolted, all her innate delicacy, all the fastidious purity recoiled before the menace of his question. Love! Was it possible? Was this that she already felt, love? Could such treachery to herself, such treason to training and instinct arise within her and she not know it?

  Panic-stricken she raised her head; and at sight of him a blind impulse to finish with him possessed her — to crush out that menace — end it for ever — open his eyes to the inexorable truth.

  “Lean nearer,” she said quietly. Every vestige of blood had left her face.

  “Listen to me. Two years ago I was told that I am a common foundling. Under the shock of that — disclosure — I ruined my life for ever.... Don’t speak! I mean to check that ruin where it ended — lest it spread to — others. Do you understand?”

  “No,” he said doggedly.

  She drew a steady breath. “Then I’ll tell you more if I must. I ruined my life for ever two years ago!... I must have been quite out of my senses — they had told me that morning, very tenderly and pitifully — what you already know. I — it was — unbearable. The world crashed down around me — horror, agonized false pride, sheer terror for the future—”

  She choked slightly, but went on:

  “I was only eighteen. I wanted to die. I meant to leave my home at any rate. Oh, I know my reasoning was madness, the thought of their charity — the very word itself as my mind formed it — drove me almost insane. I might have known it was love, not charity, that held me so safely in their hearts. But when a blow falls and reason goes — how can a girl reason?”

  She looked down at her bridle hand.

  “There was a man,” she said in a low voice; “he was only a boy then.”

  Hamil’s face hardened.

  “Until he asked me I never supposed any man could ever want to marry me. I took it for granted.... He was Gray’s friend; I had always known him.... He had been silly sometimes. He asked me to marry him. Then he asked me again.

  “I was a débutante that winter, and we were rehearsing some theatricals for charity which I had to go through with.... And he asked me to marry him. I told him what I was and he still wished it.”

  Hamil bent nearer from his saddle, face tense and colourless.

  “I don’t know exactly what I thought; I had a dim notion of escaping from the disgrace of being nameless. It was the mad clutch of the engulfed at anything.... Not with any definite view — partly from fright, partly I think for the sake of those who had been kind to a — a foundling; some senseless idea that it was my duty to relieve them of a squalid burden—” She shook her head vaguely: “I don’t know exactly — I don’t know.”

  “You married him.”

  “Yes — I believe so.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said wearily, “I know what I did. It was that.”

  And after he had waited for her in silence for fully a minute she said in a low voice:

  “I was very lonely, very, very tired; he urged me; I had been crying. I have seldom cried since. It is curious, isn’t it? I can feel the tears in my eyes at night sometimes. But they never fall.”

  She passed her gloved hand slowly across her forehead and eyes.

  “I — married him. At first I did not know what to do; did not realise, understand. I scarcely do yet. I had supposed I was to go to mother and dad and tell them that I had a name in the world — that all was well with me at last. But I could not credit it myself; the boy — I had known him always — went and came in our house as freely as Gray. And I could not convince myself that the thing that had happened was serious — had really occurred.”

  “How did it occur?”

  “I will tell you exactly. We were walking home, all of us, along Fifth Avenue, that winter afternoon. The avenue was gay and densely crowded; and I remember the furs I wore and the western sunset crimsoning the cross-streets, and the early dusk — and Jessie ahead with Cecile and the dogs. And then he said that now was the time, for he was going back to college that same day, and would not return before Easter — and he urged it, and hurried me — and — I couldn’t think; and I went with him, west, I believe — yes, the sky was red over the river — west, two blocks, or more.... There was a parsonage. It lasted only a few minutes.... We took the elevated to Fifty-ninth Street and hurried east, almost running. They had just reached the Park and had not yet missed us.... And that is all.”

  “All?”

  “Yes,” she said, raising her pale face to his. “What more is there?”

  “The — man.”

  “He was as frightened as I,” she said simply, “and he went back to college that same evening. And when I had become still more frightened and a little saner I wrote asking him if it was really true. It was. There seemed to be nothing to do; I had no money, nor had he. And there was no love — because I could not endure even his touch or suffer the least sentiment from him when he came back at Easter. He was a boy and silly. He annoyed me. I don’t know why he persisted so; and finally I became thoroughly exasperated.... We did not part on very friendly terms; and I think that was why he did not return to us from college when he graduated. A man offered him a position, and he went away to try to make a place for himself in the world. And after he had gone, somehow the very mention of his name began to chill me. You see nobody knew. The deception became a shame to me, then a dull horror. But, little by little, not seeing him, and being young, after a year the unreality of it all grew stronger, and it seemed as though I were awaking from a nightmare, among familiar things once more.... And for a year it has been so, though at night, sometimes, I still lie awake. But I have been contented — until — you came.... Now you know it all.”

  “All?”

  “Every word. And now you understand why I cannot care for you, or you for me.”

  He said in a deadened voice: “There is a law that deals with that sort of man—”

  “What are you saying?” she faltered.

  “That you cannot remain bound! It
s monstrous. There is a law—”

  “I cannot disgrace dad!” she said. “There is no chance that way! I’d rather die than have him know — have mother know — and Jessie and Cecile and Gray! Didn’t you understand that?”

  “You must tell them nevertheless, and they must help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “To free yourself—”

  Flushed with anger and disdain she drew bridle and faced him.

  “If this is the sort of friendship you bring me, what is your love worth?” she asked almost fiercely. “And — I cared for you — cared for the man I believed you to be; bared my heart to you — wrung every secret from it — thinking you understood! And you turn on me counselling the law, divorce, horrors unthinkable! — because you say you love me!... And I tell you that if I loved you — dearly — blindly — I could not endure to free myself at the expense of pain — to them — even for your sake! They took me, nameless, as I was — a — a foundling. If they ever learn what I have done I shall ask their pardon on my knees, and accept life with the man I married. But if they never learn I shall remain with them — always. You have asked me what chance you have. Now you know! It is useless to love me. I cared enough for you to try to kill what you call love last night. I cared enough to-day to strip my heart naked for you — to show you there was no chance. If I have done right or wrong I do not know — but I did it for your sake.”

  His face reddened painfully, but as he offered no reply she put her horse in motion and rode on, proud little head averted. For a few minutes neither he nor she spoke, their horses pacing neck and neck through the forest. At last he said: “You are right, Shiela; I am not worth it. Forgive me.”

  She turned, eyes level and fearless. Suddenly her mouth quivered.