Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  So all that sunny afternoon she lay in the chaise-longue, alternately reading and dreaming, her scented bonbons at her elbow. Later a maid brought tea; and a little later Duane Mallett was announced. He sauntered in, a loosely knit, graceful figure, still wearing his riding-clothes and dusty boots of the morning.

  Geraldine Seagrave had had time enough to discover, during the past winter, that her old playfellow was not at all the kind of man he appeared to be. Women liked him too easily and he liked them without effort. There was always some girl in love with him until he was found kissing another. His tastes were amiably catholic; his caress instinctively casual. Beauty when responsive touched him. No girl he knew needed to remain unconsoled.

  The majority of women liked him; so did Geraldine Seagrave. The majority instinctively watched him; so did she. In close acquaintance the man was a disappointment. It seemed as though there ought to be something deeper in him than the lightly humourous mockery with which he seemed to regard his very great talent — a flippancy that veiled always what he said and did and thought until nobody could clearly understand what he really thought about anything; and some people doubted that he thought at all — particularly the thoughtless whom he had carelessly consoled.

  Women were never entirely indifferent concerning him; there remained always a certain amount of curiosity, whether they found him attractive or otherwise.

  His humourous indifference to public opinions, bordering on effrontery, was not entirely unattractive to women, but it always, sooner or later, aroused their distrust.

  The main trouble with Duane Mallett seemed to be his gaily cynical willingness to respond to any advance, however slight, that any pretty woman offered. This responsive partiality was disconcerting enough to make him dreaded by ambitious mothers, and an object of uneasy interest to their decorative offspring who were inclined to believe that a rescue party of one might bring this derelict into port and render him seaworthy for the voyage of life under their own particular command.

  Besides, he was a painter. Women like them when they are carefully washed and clothed.

  As Duane Mallett strolled into the living-room, Geraldine felt again, as she so often did, a slight sense of insecurity mingle with her liking for the man, or what might have been liking if she could ever feel absolute confidence in him. She had been, at times, very close to caring a great deal for him, when now and again it flashed over her that there must be in him something serious under his brilliant talent and the idle perversity which mocked at it.

  But now she recognised in his smile and manner everything that kept her from ever caring to understand him — the old sense of insecurity in his ironical formality; and her outstretched hand fell away from his with indifference.

  “I didn’t have the happiness of riding with you, after all,” he said, serenely seating himself and dropping one lank knee over the other. “Promises wouldn’t be valuable unless somebody broke a lot now and then.”

  “You probably had the happiness of riding with some other woman.”

  He nodded.

  “Who, this time?”

  “Rosalie Dysart.”

  Rumour had been busy with their names recently. The girl’s face became expressionless.

  “Sorry you didn’t come,” he said, looking out of the window where the flapping shade revealed a lilac in bloom.

  “How long did you wait for me?”

  “About a minute. Then Rosalie passed — —”

  “Rosalies will always continue to pass through your career, my omnivorous friend.... Did it even occur to you to ride over here and find out why I missed our appointment?”

  “No; why didn’t you come?”

  “Bibi went lame. I’d have had another horse saddled if I hadn’t seen you, over my shoulder, join Mrs. Dysart.”

  “Too bad,” he commented listlessly.

  “Why? You had a perfectly good time without me, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes, pretty good. Delancy Grandcourt was out after luncheon, and when Rosalie left he stuck to me and talked about you until I let my horse bolt, and it stirred up a few mounted policemen and riding-schools, I can tell you!”

  “Oh, so you lunched with Mrs. Dysart?”

  “Yes. Where is Kathleen?”

  “Driving,” said the girl briefly. “If you don’t care for any tea, there is mineral water and a decanter over there.”

  He thanked her, rose and mixed himself what he wanted, and began to walk leisurely about, the ice tinkling in the glass which he held. At intervals he quenched his thirst, then resumed his aimless promenade, a slight smile on his face.

  “Has anything particularly interesting happened to you, Duane?” she asked, and somehow thought of Rosalie Dysart.

  “No.”

  “How are your pictures coming on?”

  “The portrait?” he asked absently.

  “Portrait? I thought all the very grand ladies you paint had left town. Whose portrait are you painting?”

  Before he answered, before he even hesitated, she knew.

  “Rosalie Dysart’s,” he said, gazing absently at the lilac-bush in flower as the wind-blown curtain revealed it for a moment.

  She lifted her dark eyes curiously. He began to stir the ice in his glass with a silver paper-cutter.

  “She is wonderfully beautiful, isn’t she?” said the girl.

  “Overwhelmingly.”

  Geraldine shrugged and gazed into space. She didn’t exactly know why she had given that little hitch to her shoulders.

  “I’d like to paint Kathleen,” he observed.

  A flush tinted the girl’s cheeks. She said nervously:

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I’ve meant to. Somehow, one doesn’t ask things lightly of Kathleen.”

  “One doesn’t ask things of some women at all,” she remarked.

  He looked up; she was examining her empty teacup with fixed interest.

  “Ask what sort of thing?” he inquired, walking over to the table and resting his glass on it.

  “Oh, I don’t know what I meant. Nothing. What is that in your glass? Let me taste it.... Ugh! It’s Scotch!”

  She set back the glass with a shudder. After a few moments she picked it up again and tasted it disdainfully.

  “Do you like this?” she demanded with youthful contempt.

  “Pretty well,” he admitted.

  “It tastes something like brandied peaches, doesn’t it?”

  “I never noticed that it did.”

  And as he remained smilingly aloof and silent, at intervals, tentatively, uncertain whether or not she exactly cared for it, she tasted the iced contents of the tall, frosty glass and watched him where he sat loosely at ease flicking at sun-moats with the loop of his riding-crop.

  “I’d like to see a typical studio,” she said reflectively.

  “I’ve asked you to mine often enough.”

  “Yes, to tea with other people. I don’t mean that way. I’d like to see it when it’s not all dusted and in order for feminine inspection. I’d like to see a man’s studio when it’s in shape for work — with the gr-r-reat painter in a fine frenzy painting, and the model posing madly — —”

  “Come on, then! If Kathleen lets you, and you can stand it, come down and knock some day unexpectedly.”

  “O Duane! I couldn’t, could I?”

  “Not with propriety. But come ahead.”

  “Naturally, impropriety appeals to you.”

  “Naturally. To you, too, doesn’t it?”

  “No. But wouldn’t it astonish you if you heard a low, timid knocking some day when you and your Bohemian friends were carousing and having a riotous time there — —”

  “Yes, it would, but I’m afraid that low, timid knocking couldn’t be heard in the infernal uproar of our usual revelry.”

  “Then I’d knock louder and louder, and perhaps kick once or twice if you didn’t come to the door and let me in.”

  He laughed. After a moment she
laughed, too; her dark eyes were very friendly now. Watching the amusement in his face, she continued to sip from his tall, frosted glass, quite unconscious of any distaste for it. On the contrary, she experienced a slight exhilaration which was gradually becoming delightful to her.

  “Scotch-and-soda is rather nice, after all,” she observed. “I had no idea — What is the matter with you, Duane?”

  “You haven’t swallowed all that, have you?”

  “Yes, is it much?”

  He stared, then with a shrug: “You’d better cut out that sort of thing.”

  “What?” she asked, surprised.

  “What you’re doing.”

  “Tasting your Scotch? Pooh!” she said, “it isn’t strong. Do you think I’m a baby?”

  “Go ahead,” he said, “it’s your funeral.”

  Legs crossed, chin resting on the butt of his riding-crop, he lay back in his chair watching her.

  Women of her particular type had always fascinated him; Fifth Avenue is thronged with them in sunny winter mornings — tall, slender, faultlessly gowned girls, free-limbed, narrow of wrist and foot; cleanly built, engaging, fearless-eyed; and Geraldine was one of a type characteristic of that city and of the sunny Avenue where there pass more beautiful women on a December morning than one can see abroad in half a dozen years’ residence.

  How on earth this hemisphere has managed to evolve them out of its original material nobody can explain. And young Mallett, recently from the older hemisphere, was still in a happy trance of surprise at the discovery.

  Lounging there, watching her where she sat warmly illumined by the golden light of the window-shade, he said lazily:

  “Do you know that Fifth Avenue is always thronged with you, Geraldine? I’ve nearly twisted my head off trying not to miss the assorted visions of you which float past afoot or driving. Some day one of them will unbalance me. I’ll leap into her victoria, ask her if she’d mind the temporary inconvenience of being adored by a stranger; and if she’s a good sport she’ll take a chance. Don’t you think so?”

  “It’s more than I’d take with you,” said the girl.

  “You’ve said that several times.”

  He laughed, then looked up at her half humorously, half curiously.

  “You would be taking no chances, Geraldine.”

  “I’d be taking chances of finding you holding some other girl’s hands within twenty-four hours. And you know it.”

  “Hasn’t anybody ever held yours?”

  Displeasure tinted her cheeks a deeper red, but she merely shrugged her shoulders.

  It was true that in the one evanescent and secret affair of her first winter she had not escaped the calf-like transports of Bunbury Gray. She had felt, if she had not returned them, the furtively significant pressure of men’s hands in the gaiety and whirl of things; ardent and chuckle-headed youth had declared itself in conservatories and in corners; one impetuous mauling from a smitten Harvard boy of eighteen had left her furiously vexed with herself for her passive attitude while the tempest passed. True, she had vigorously reproved him later. She had, alas, occasion, during her first season, to reprove several demonstrative young men for their unconventionally athletic manner of declaring their suits. She had been far more severe with the humble, unattractive, and immobile, however, than with the audacious and ornamental who had attempted to take her by storm. A sudden if awkward kiss followed by the fiery declaration of the hot-headed disturbed her less than the persistent stare of an enamoured pair of eyes. As a child the description of an assault on a citadel always interested her, but she had neither sympathy nor interest in a siege.

  Now, musing there in the sunlight on the events of her first winter, she became aware that she had been more or less instructed in the ways of men; and, remembering, she lifted her disturbed eyes to inspect this specimen of a sex which often perplexed but always interested her.

  “What are you smiling about, Duane?” she asked defiantly.

  “Your arraignment of me when half the men in town have been trying to marry you all winter. You’ve made a reputation for yourself, too, Geraldine.”

  “As what?” she asked angrily.

  “A head-twister.”

  “Do you mean a flirt?”

  “Oh, Lord! Only the French use that term now. But that’s the idea, Geraldine. You are a born one. I fell for the first smile you let loose on me.”

  “You seem to have been a sort of general Humpty Dumpty for falls all your life, Duane,” she said with dangerous sweetness.

  “Like that immortal, I’ve had only one which permanently shattered me.”

  “Which was that, if you please?”

  “The fall you took out of me.”

  “In other words,” she said disdainfully, “you are beginning to make love to me again.”

  “No.... I was in love with you.”

  “You were in love with yourself, young man. You are on such excellent terms with yourself that you sympathise too ardently with any attractive woman who takes the least and most innocent notice of you.”

  He said, very much amused: “I was perfectly serious over you, Geraldine.”

  “The selfish always take themselves seriously.”

  It was she, however, who now sat there bright-eyed and unsmiling, and he was still laughing, deftly balancing his crop on one finger, and glancing at her from time to time with that glimmer of ever-latent mockery which always made her restive at first, then irritated her with an unreasoning desire to hurt him somehow. But she never seemed able to reach him.

  “Sooner or later,” she said, “women will find you out, thoroughly.”

  “And then, just think what a rush there will be to marry me!”

  “There will be a rush to avoid you, Duane. And it will set in before you know it—” She thought of the recent gossip coupling his name with Rosalie’s, reddened and bit her lip in silence. But somehow the thought irritated her into speech again:

  “Fortunately, I was among the first to find you out — the first, I think.”

  “Heavens! when was that?” he asked in pretended concern, which infuriated her.

  “You had better not ask me,” she flashed back. “When a woman suddenly discovers that a man is untrustworthy, do you think she ever forgets it?”

  “Because I once kissed you? What a dreadful deed!”

  “You forget the circumstances under which you did it.”

  He flushed; she had managed to hurt him, after all. He began patiently:

  “I’ve explained to you a dozen times that I didn’t know — —”

  “But I told you!”

  “And I couldn’t believe you — —”

  “But you expect me to believe you?”

  He could not exactly interpret her bright, smiling, steady gaze.

  “The trouble with you is,” she said, “that there is nothing to you but good looks and talent. There was once, but it died — over in Europe — somewhere. No woman trusts a man like you. Don’t you know it?”

  His smile did not seem to be very genuine, but he answered lightly:

  “When I ask people to have confidence in me, it will be time for them to pitch into me.”

  “Didn’t you once ask me for your confidence — and then abuse it?” she demanded.

  “I told you I loved you — if that is what you mean. And you doubted it so strenuously that, perhaps I might be excused for doubting it myself.... What is the use of talking this way, Geraldine?”

  There was a ring of exasperation in her laughter. She lifted his glass, sipped a little, and, looking over it at him:

  “I drink to our doubts concerning each other: may nothing ever occur to disturb them.”

  Her cheeks had begun to burn, her eyes were too bright, her voice unmodulated.

  “Whether or not you ever again take the trouble to ask me to trust you in that way,” she said, “I’ll tell you now why I don’t and why I never could. It may amuse you. Shall I?”

  “By all mean
s,” he replied amiably; “but it seems to me as though you are rather rough on me.”

  “You were rougher with me the first time I saw you, after all those years. I met you with perfect confidence, remembering what you once were. It was my first grown-up party. I was only a fool of a girl, merely ignorant, unfit to be trusted with a liberty I’d never before had.... And I took one glass of champagne and it — you know what it did.... And I was bewildered and frightened, and I told you; and — you perhaps remember how my confidence in my old play-fellow was requited. Do you?”

  Reckless impulse urged her on. Heart and pulses were beating very fast with a persistent desire to hurt him. Her animation, brilliant colour, her laughter seemed to wing every word like an arrow. She knew he shrank from what she was saying, in spite of his polite attention, and her fresh, curved cheek and parted lips took on a brighter tint. Something was singing, seething in her veins. She lifted her glass, set it down, and suddenly pushed it from her so violently that it fell with a crash. A wave of tingling heat mounted to her face, receded, swept back again. Confused, she straightened up in her chair, breathing fast. What was coming over her? Again the wave surged back with a deafening rush; her senses struggled, the blood in her ran riot. Then terror clutched her. Neither lips nor tongue were very flexible when she spoke.

  “Duane — if you don’t mind — would you go away now? I’ve a wretched headache.”

  He shrugged and stood up.

  “It’s curious,” he said reflectively, “how utterly determined we seem to be to misunderstand each other. If you would give me half a chance — well — never mind.”

  “I wish you would go,” she murmured, “I really am not well.” She could scarcely hear her own voice amid the deafening tumult of her pulses. Fright stiffened the fixed smile on her lips. Her plight paralysed her for a moment.

  “Yes, I’ll go,” he answered, smiling. “I usually am going somewhere — most of the time.”

  He picked up hat, gloves, and crop, looked down at her, came and stood at the table, resting one hand on the edge.

  “We’re pretty young yet, Geraldine.... I never saw a girl I cared for as I might have cared for you. It’s true, no matter what I have done, or may do.... But you’re quite right, a man of that sort isn’t to be considered” — he laughed and pulled on one glove— “only — I knew as soon as I saw you that it was to be you or — everybody. First, it was anybody; then it was you — now it’s everybody. Good-bye.”