Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “What are you trying to do, Delancy? Do you want to embrace me? I wish you wouldn’t leap about me like a great Dane puppy!”

  The red surged up into his face anew:

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”

  She looked at him curiously: “I beg yours — you big, silly boy. Don’t blush at me. Great Danes are exceedingly desirable property, you know.... Did you wish to be forgiven for anything? What on earth are you doing with that horrid fistful of muck?”

  “I only want to put some mud on that wound, if you’ll let me. It’s good for hornet stings — —”

  She laughed and backed away: “Do you believe there is any virtue in mud, Delancy? — good, deep mire — when one is bruised and sore and lonely and desperate? Oh, don’t try to understand — what a funny, confused, stupid way you have of looking at me! I remember you used to look at me that way sometimes — oh, long ago — before I was married, I think.”

  The heavy colour which surged so readily to his temples began to amuse her; she leaned back against the bridge rail and contemplated him with smiling disdain.

  “Do you know,” she said, “years ago, I had a slight, healthy suspicion that you were on the verge of falling in love with me.”

  He tried to smile, but the colour died out in his face.

  “Yes, I was on the verge,” he contrived to answer.

  “Why didn’t you fall over?”

  “I suppose it was because you married Jack Dysart,” he said simply.

  “Was that all?”

  “All?” He thought he perceived the jest, and managed to laugh again.

  “Really, I am perfectly serious,” repeated Rosalie. “Was that all that prevented you from falling in love with me — because I was married?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Wasn’t it reason enough?”

  “I didn’t know it was enough for a man. I don’t believe I know exactly how men consider such matters.... You’ve managed to hook that fly into my gown again! And now you’ve torn the skirt hopelessly! What a devastating sort of creature you are, Delancy! You used to step on my slippers at dancing school, and, oh, Heaven! how I hated you.... Where are you going?” for he had begun to walk away, reeling in his wet line as he moved, his grave, highly coloured face lowered, troubled eyes intent on what he was doing.

  When she spoke, he halted and raised his head, and she saw the muscles flexed under the bronze skin of the jaw — saw the lines of pain appear where his mouth tightened. All of the clumsy boy in him had vanished; she had never troubled herself to look at him very closely, and it surprised her to see how worn his face really was under the eyes and cheek-bones — really surprised her that there was much of dignity, even of a certain nobility, in his quiet gaze.

  “I asked you where you are going?” she repeated with a faint smile.

  “Nowhere in particular.”

  “But you are going somewhere, I suppose.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “In my direction?”

  “I think not.”

  “That is very rude of you, Delancy — when you don’t even know where my direction lies. Do you think,” she demanded, amused, “that it is particularly civil of a man to terminate an interview with a woman before she offers him his congé?”

  He finished reeling in his line, hooked the drop-fly into the reel-guide, shifted his creel, buttoned on the landing-net, and quietly turned around and inspected Mrs. Dysart.

  “I want to tell you something,” he said. “I have never, even as a boy, had from you a single word which did not in some vague manner convey a hint of your contempt for me. Do you realise that?”

  “W-what!” she faltered, bewildered.

  “I don’t suppose you do realise it. People generally feel toward me as you feel; it has always been the fashion to tolerate me. It is a legend that I am thick-skinned and stupidly slow to take offence. I am not offended now.... Because I could not be with you.... But I am tired of it, and I thought it better that you should know it — after all these years.”

  Utterly confounded, she leaned back, both hands tightening on the hand-rail behind her, and as she comprehended the passionless reproof, a stinging flush deepened over her pretty face.

  “Had you anything else to say to me?” he asked, without embarrassment.

  “N-no.”

  “Then may I take my departure?”

  She lifted her startled blue eyes and regarded him with a new and intense curiosity.

  “Have I, by my manner or speech, ever really hurt you?” she asked. “Because I haven’t meant to.”

  He started to reply, hesitated, shook his head, and his pleasant, kindly smile fascinated her.

  “You haven’t intended to,” he said. “It’s all right, Rosalie — —”

  “But — have I been horrid and disagreeable? Tell me.”

  In his troubled eyes she could see he was still searching to excuse her; slowly she began to recognise the sensitive simplicity of the man, the innate courtesy so out of harmony with her experience among men. What, after all, was there about him that a woman should treat with scant consideration, impatience, the toleration of contempt? His clumsy manner? His awkwardness? His very slowness to exact anything for himself? Or had it been the half-sneering, half-humourous attitude of her husband toward him which had insensibly coloured her attitude?

  She had known Delancy Grandcourt all her life — that is, she had neglected to know him, if this brief revelation of himself warranted the curiosity and interest now stirring her.

  “Were you really ever in love with me?” she asked, so frankly that the painful colour rose to his hair again, and he stood silent, head lowered, like a guilty boy caught in his sins.

  “But — good heavens!” she exclaimed with an uneasy little laugh, “there’s nothing to be ashamed of in it! I’m not laughing at you, Delancy; I am thinking about it with — with a certain re—” She was going to say regret, but she substituted “respect,” and, rather surprised at her own seriousness, she fell silent, her uncertain gaze continually reverting to him.

  She had never before noticed how tall and well-built he was, in spite of the awkwardness with which he moved — a great, big powerful machine, continually checked and halted, as though by some fear that his own power might break loose and smash things. That seemed to be the root of his awkwardness — unskilful self-control — a vague consciousness of the latent strength of limb and body and will, which habit alone controlled, and controlled unskilfully.

  She had never before known a man resembling this new revelation of Grandcourt. Without considering or understanding why, she began to experience an agreeable sense of restfulness and security in the silence which endured between them. He stood full in the sunlight, very deeply preoccupied with the contents of his fly-book; she leaned back on the sun-scorched railing of the bridge, bathing-suit tucked under one arm, listening to the melody of the rushing stream below. It seemed almost like the intimacy of old friendship, this quiet interval in the sun, with the moving shadows of leaves at their feet and the music of the water in their ears — a silence unbroken save by that, and the pure, sweet call-note of some woodland bird from the thickets beyond.

  “What fly are you trying?” she asked, dreamily conscious of the undisturbed accord.

  “Wood-ibis — do you think they might come to it?” he asked so naturally that a sudden glow of confidence in him, in the sunlit world around her, warmed her.

  “Let me look at your book?”

  He brought it. Together they fumbled the brilliantly patterned aluminum leaves, fumbling with tufted silks and feathers, until she untangled a most alluringly constructed fly and drew it out, presenting it to him between forefinger and thumb.

  “Shall we try it?”

  “Certainly,” he said.

  Duane, carving hieroglyphics on the bark of the big beech, raised his head and looked after them.

  “That’s a pretty low trick,” he said to himself, as they saun
tered away toward the Gray Water. And he scowled in silence and continued his carving.

  CHAPTER IX. CONFESSION

  So many guests were arriving from Iron Hill, Cloudy Mountain, and West Gate Village that the capacity of Roya-Neh was overtaxed. Room had to be made somehow; Geraldine and Naïda Mallett doubled up; twin beds were installed for Dysart and Bunny Gray; Rosalie took in Sylvia Quest with a shrug, disdaining any emotion, even curiosity, concerning the motherless girl whose imprudences with Jack Dysart had furnished gossip sufficient to last over from the winter.

  The Tappans appeared with their guests, old Tappan grimmer, rustier, gaunter than usual; his son and heir, Peter — he of the rambling and casual legs — more genial, more futile, more acquiescent than ever. The Crays, Beckmans, Ellises, and Grandcourts arrived; Catharine Grandcourt shared Mrs. Severn’s room; Scott Seagrave went to quarters at the West Gate, and Duane was driven forth and a cot-bed set up for him in his studio at Hurryon Lodge.

  The lawns and terraces of Roya-Neh were swarming with eager, laughing young people; white skirts fluttered everywhere in the sun; tennis-courts and lake echoed with the gay tumult, motors tooted, smart horses and showy traps were constantly drawing up or driving off; an army of men from West Gate Village were busy stringing lanterns all over the grounds, pitching pavilions in the glade beyond Hurryon Gate, and decorating everything with ribbons, until Duane suggested to Scott that they tie silk bows on the wild squirrels, as everything ought to be as Louis XVI as possible. He himself did actually so adorn several respectable Shanghai hens which he caught at their oviparous duties, and the spectacle left Kathleen weak with laughter.

  As for Duane, he suddenly seemed to have grown years younger. All that was careless, inconsequential, irresponsible, seemed to have disappeared in a single night, leaving a fresh, boyish enthusiasm quite free from surface cynicism — quite innocent of the easy, amused mockery which had characterised him. The subtle element of self-consciousness had disappeared, too. If it had remained unnoticed, even undetected before, now its absence was noticeable, for there was no longer any attitude about him, no policy to sustain, nothing of that humourous, bantering sophistication which ignores conventionality. For it is always a conscious effort to ignore it, an attitude to disregard what custom has sanctioned.

  Kathleen had never realised what a really sweet and charming fellow he was until that morning, when he took her aside and told her of his engagement.

  “Do you know,” he said, “it is as though life had stopped for me many years ago when Geraldine and I were playmates; it’s exactly as though all the interval of years in between counted less than a dream, and now, at last, I am awake and taking up real life again.... You see, Kathleen, as a matter of fact, I’m incomplete by myself. I’m only half of a suit of clothes; Geraldine always wore the rest of me.”

  “However,” said Kathleen mischievously, “you’ve been very tireless in trying on, they say. It’s astonishing you never found a good fit — —”

  “That was all part of the dream interval,” he interrupted, a little out of countenance, “everything was absurdly unreal. Are you going to be nice to me, Kathleen?”

  “Of course I am, you blessed boy!” she said, taking him in her vigorous young arms and kissing him squarely and thoroughly. Then she held him at arms’ length and looked him very gravely in the eyes:

  “Love her a great deal, Duane,” she said in a low voice; “she needs it.”

  “I could not help doing it.”

  But Kathleen repeated:

  “Love her enough. She will be yours to make — yours to unmake, to mould, fashion, remould — with God’s good help. Love her enough.”

  “Yes,” he said, very soberly.

  A slight constraint fell between them; they spoke of the fête, and Kathleen presently left to superintend details which never worried her, never disturbed the gay and youthful confidence which had always from the beginning marked her successful superintendence of the house of Seagrave.

  Geraldine and Scott were very busy playing hostess and host, receiving new-comers, renewing friendships interrupted by half a summer’s separation; but there was very little to do except to be affable, for Kathleen’s staff of domestics was perfectly adequate — the old servants of the house of Seagrave, who were quite able by themselves to maintain the household traditions and whip into line of duty the new and less conscientious recruits below stairs.

  A great many people were gathered on the terrace when Duane descended the stairs, on his way to inspect his temporary quarters in Miller’s loft, at Hurryon Lodge.

  He stopped and spoke to many, greeted Delancy Grandcourt’s loquacious and rotund mother, politely listened to her scandalous budget of gossip, shook hands cordially with her big, handsome daughter, Catharine, a strapping girl, with the shyly honest eyes of her brother and the rather heavy but shapely body and limbs of an indolent Juno. A harsh voice pronounced his name; old Mr. Tappan extended a dry hand and bored him through with eyes like holes burnt in a blanket.

  “And do you still cultiwate the fine arts, young man?” he inquired, as sternly as though he privately suspected Duane of maltreating them.

  Duane shook hands with him.

  “The school of the indiwidool,” continued Mr. Tappan, “is what artists need. Woo the muses in solitude; cultiwate ’em in isolation. Didn’t Benjamin West live out in the backwoods? And I guess he managed to make good without raising hell in the Eekole di Boze Arts with a lot of dissipated wagabonds at his elbow, inculcating immoral precepts and wasting his time and his father’s money.”

  And he looked very hard at Duane, who winced, but agreed with him solemnly.

  Geraldine, on the edge of a circle of newly arrived guests, leaned over and whispered mischievously:

  “Is that what you did at the Ecole des Beaux Arts? Did you behave like all that or did you cultivate the indiwidool?”

  He shook hands again, solemnly, with Mr. Tappan, stepped back, and joined her.

  “Where on earth have you been hiding?” she inquired.

  “You said that if I carved certain cabalistic signs on the big beech-tree you would presently appear to me in a pink cloud — you faithless little wretch!”

  “How could I? Three motor-loads arrived from Iron Hill before I was half dressed, and ever since I’ve been doing my traditional duty; and,” in a lower voice, “I was perfectly crazy to go to the beech-tree all the time. Did you wait long, you poor boy?”

  “Man is born to wait. I came back just now to find you.... I told Kathleen,” he added, radiant.

  “What?” she whispered, flushing deliciously. “Oh, pooh! I told her about it this morning — the very first thing. We both snivelled. I didn’t sleep at all last night.... There’s something I wish to tell you — —”

  The gay smile suddenly died out in her eyes; a strange, wistful tenderness softened them, touching her lips, too, which always gave that very young, almost childish pathos to her expression. She put out her hand instinctively and touched him.

  “I want to be alone with you, Duane — for a little while.”

  “Shall I go to the beech-tree and wait?”

  She glanced around with a hopeless gesture:

  “You see? Other people are arriving and I’ve simply got to be here. I don’t see how I can get away before luncheon. Where were you going just now?”

  “I thought I’d step over to the studio to see what sort of a shake-down you’ve given me to repose on.”

  “I wish you would. Poor child, I do hope you will be comfortable. It’s perfectly horrid to send you out of the house — —”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” he nodded, laughing, and she gave him a shy glance of adieu and turned to receive another guest.

  In his extemporized studio at Hurryon Lodge he found that old Miller had already provided him with a washstand and accessories, a new tin tub and a very comfortable iron bed.

  The place was aromatic with the odour of paints, varnishes, turpentine, and fixati
ve; he opened the big window, let in air and sunshine, and picked up a sheaf of brushes, soft and pliable from a fresh washing in turpentine and black soap.

  Confronting him on a big improvised easel was the full-length, half-reclining portrait of Rosalie Dysart — a gay, fascinating, fly-away thing after the deliberately artificial manner of the French court painters who simpered and painted a hundred and fifty years ago. Ribbons fluttered from the throat and shoulder of this demure, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed creature, who was so palpably playing at masquerade. A silken parody of a shepherdess — a laughing, dainty, snowy-fingered aristocrat, sweet-lipped, provocative, half reclining under a purposely conventional oak, between the branches of which big white clouds rolled in a dark-blue sky — this was Rosalie as Duane had painted her with all the perversely infernal skill of a brush always tipped with a mockery as delicate as her small, bare foot, dropping below the flowered petticoat.

  The unholy ease with which he had done it gave him a secret thrill of admiration. It was apparently all surface — the exquisite masquerader, the surrounding detail, the technical graciousness and flow of line and contour, the effortless brush-work. Yet, with an ease which demanded very respectful consideration, he had absorbed and transmitted the frivolous spirit of the old French masters, which they themselves took so seriously; the portrait was also a likeness, yet delightfully permeated with the charm of a light-minded epoch; and somehow, behind and underneath it all, a brilliant mockery sparkled — the half-amused, half-indifferent brilliancy of the painter himself. It was there for any who could appreciate it, and it was quite irresistible, particularly since he had, after a dazzling preliminary study or two from a gamekeeper’s small, chubby son, added, fluttering in mid-air, a pair of white-winged Loves, chubby as cherubs but much more Gallic.

  Nobody excepting Rosalie and himself had seen the picture. What he meant to do with it he did not know, half ashamed as he was of its satiric cleverness. Painters would hate it — stand hypnotised, spellbound the while — and hate it, for they are a serious sort, your painters of pictures, and they couldn’t appreciate an art which made fun of art; they would execrate the uncanny mastery and utterly miss the gay perversity of the performance, and Duane knew it and laughed wickedly. What a shock! What would sober, seriously inclined people think if an actor who was eminently fitted to play Lear, should bow to his audience and earnestly perform a very complicated and perfect flip-flap?