Minutes passed; the first line blurred under his vacant gaze, for his eyes travelled no farther. Then the letter fell to the table; he dropped his head in his arms.
It was a curiously calm letter when he found courage to read it:
“I’ve lost a battle after many victories. It went against me after a hard fight here alone at Roya-Neh. I think you had better come up. The fight was on again the next night — that is, night before last, but I’ve held fast so far and expect to. Only I wish you’d come.
“It is no reproach to you if I say that, had you been here, I might have made a better fight. You couldn’t be here; the shame of defeat is all my own.
“Duane, it was not a disastrous defeat in one way. I held out for four days, and thought I had won out. I was stupefied by loss of sleep, I think; this is not in excuse, only the facts which I lay bare for your consideration.
“The defeat was in a way a concession — a half-dazed compromise — merely a parody on a real victory for the enemy; because it roused in me a horror that left the enemy almost no consolation, no comfort, even no physical relief. The enemy is I myself, you understand — that other self we know about.
“She was perfectly furious, Duane; she wrestled with me, fought to make me yield more than I had — which was almost nothing — begged me, brutalised me, pleaded, tormented, cajoled. I was nearly dead when the sun rose; but I had gone through it.
“I wish you could come. She is still watching me. It’s an armed truce, but I know she’ll break it if the chance comes. There is no honour in her, Duane, no faith, no reason, no mercy. I know her.
“Can you not come? I won’t ask it if your father needs you. Only if he does not, I think you had better come very soon.
“When may I restore the red cross to the top of my letters to you? I suppose I had better place it on the next letter, because if I do not you might think that another battle had gone against me.
“Don’t reproach me. I couldn’t stand it just now. Because I am a very tired girl, Duane, and what has happened is heavy in my heart — heavy on my head and shoulders like that monster Sindbad bore.
“Can you come and free me? One word — your arms around me — and I am safe.
“G.S.”
As he finished, a maid came bearing a telegram on a salver.
“Tell him to wait,” said Duane, tearing open the white night-message:
“Your father is ill at San Antonio and wishes you to come at once. Notify your mother but do not alarm her. Your father’s condition is favorable, but the outcome is uncertain.
“Wells, Secretary.”
Duane took three telegram blanks from the note-paper rack and wrote:
“My father is ill at San Antonio. They have just wired me, and I shall take the first train. Stand by me now. Win out for my sake. I put you on your honour until I can reach you.”
And to his father:
“I leave on first train for San Antonio. It’s going to be all right, father.”
And to his mother:
“Am leaving for San Antonio because I don’t think father is well enough to travel alone. I’ll write you and wire you. Love to you and Naïda.”
He gave the maid the money, turned, and unhooking the receiver of the telephone, called up the Grand Central Station.
CHAPTER XVI. THROUGH THE WOODS
The autumn quiet at Roya-Neh was intensely agreeable to Scott Seagrave. No social demands interfered with a calm and dignified contemplation of the Rose-beetle, Melolontha subspinosa, and his scandalous “Life History”; there was no chatter of girls from hall and stairway to distract the loftier inspirations that possessed him, no intermittent soprano noises emitted by fluttering feminine fashion, no calflike barytones from masculine adolescence to drive him to the woods, where it was always rather difficult for him to focus his attention on printed pages. The balm of heavenly silence pervaded the house, and in its beneficent atmosphere he worked in his undershirt, inhaling inspiration and the aroma of whale-oil, soap, and carbolic solutions.
Neither Kathleen nor his sister being present to limit his operations, the entire house was becoming a vast mess. Living-rooms, library, halls, billiard-room, were obstructed with “scientific” paraphernalia; hundreds of glass fruit jars, filled with earth containing the whitish, globular eggs of the Rose-beetle, encumbered mantel and furniture; glass aquariums half full of earth, sod, and youthful larvæ of the same sinful beetle lent pleasing variety to the monotony of Scott’s interior decorative effects. Microscopes, phials, shallow trays bristling with sprouting seeds, watering-cans, note-books, buckets of tepid water, jars brimming with chemical solutions, blockaded the legitimate and natural runways of chamber-maid, parlour-maid, and housekeeper; a loud scream now and then punctured the scientific silence, recording the Hibernian discovery of some large, green caterpillar travelling casually somewhere in the house.
“Mr. Seagrave, sir,” stammered Lang, the second man, perspiring horror, “your bedroom is full of humming birds and bats, sir, and I can’t stand it no more!”
But it was only a wholesale hatching of huge hawk-moths that came whizzing around Lang when he turned on the electric lights; and which, escaping, swarmed throughout the house, filling it with their loud, feathery humming, and the shrieks of Milesian domestics.
And it was into these lively household conditions that Kathleen and Geraldine unexpectedly arrived from the Berkshires, worn out with their round of fashionable visits, anxious for the quiet and comfort that is supposed to be found only under one’s own roof-tree. This is what they found:
In Geraldine’s bath-tub a colony of water-lilies were attempting to take root for the benefit of several species of water-beetles. The formidable larvæ of dragon-flies occupied Kathleen’s bath; turtles peered at them from vantage points under the modern plumbing; an enormous frog regarded Kathleen solemnly from the wet, tiled floor. “Oh, dear,” she said as Scott greeted her rapturously, “have I got to move all these horrid creatures?”
“For Heaven’s sake don’t touch a thing,” protested Scott, welcoming his sister with a perfunctory kiss; “I’ll find places for them in a minute.”
“How could you, Scott!” exclaimed Geraldine, backing hastily away from a branch of green leaves on which several gigantic horned caterpillars were feeding. “I don’t feel like ever sleeping in this room again,” she added, exasperated.
“Why, Sis,” he explained mildly, “those are the caterpillars of the magnificent Regal moth! They’re perfectly harmless, and it’s jolly to watch them tuck away walnut leaves. You’ll like to have them here in your room when you understand how to weigh them on these bully little scales I’ve just had sent up from Tiffany’s.”
But his sister was too annoyed and too tired to speak. She stood limply leaning against Kathleen while her brother disposed of his uncanny menagerie, talking away very cheerfully all the while absorbed in his grewsome pets.
But it was not to his sister, it was to Kathleen that his pride in his achievements was naïvely displayed; his running accompaniment of chatter was for Kathleen’s benefit, his appeals were to her sympathy and understanding, not to his sister’s.
Geraldine watched him in silence. Tired, not physically very well, this home-coming meant something to her. She had looked forward to it, and to her brother, unconsciously wistful for the protection of home and kin. For the day had been a hard one; she was able to affix the red-cross mark to her letter to Duane that morning, but it had been a bad day for her, very bad.
And now as she stood there, white, nerveless, fatigued, an ache grew in her breast, a dull desire for somebody of her own kin to lean on; and, following it, a slow realisation of how far apart from her brother she had drifted since the old days of cordial understanding in the schoolroom — the days of loyal sympathy through calm and stress, in predatory alliance or in the frank conflicts of the squared circle.
Suddenly her whole heart filled with a blind need of her brother’s sympathy — a desire to return
to the old intimacy as though in it there lay comfort, protection, sanctuary for herself from all that threatened her — herself!
Kathleen was assisting Scott to envelop the frog in a bath towel for the benevolent purpose of transplanting him presently to some other bath-tub; and Kathleen’s golden head and Scott’s brown one were very close together, and they were laughing in that intimate undertone characteristic of thorough understanding. Her brother’s expression as he looked up at Kathleen Severn, was a revelation to his sister, and it pierced her with a pang of loneliness so keen that she started forward in sheer desperation, as though to force a path through something that was pushing her away from him.
“Let me take his frogship,” she said with a nervous laugh. “I’ll put him into a jolly big tub where you can grow all the water-weeds you like, Scott.”
Her brother, surprised and gratified, handed her the bath-towel in the depths of which reposed the batrachian.
“He’s really an interesting fellow, Sis,” explained Scott; “he exudes a sticky, viscous fluid from his pores which is slightly toxic. I’m going to try it on a Rose-beetle.”
Geraldine shuddered, but forced a smile, and, holding the imprisoned one with dainty caution, bore him to a palatial and porcelain-lined bath-tub, into which she shook him with determination and a suppressed shriek.
That night at dinner Scott looked up at his sister with something of the old-time interest and confidence.
“I was pretty sure you’d take an interest in all these things, sooner or later. I tell you, Geraldine, it will be half the fun if you’ll go into it with us.”
“I want to,” said his sister, smiling, “but don’t hurry my progress or you’ll scare me half to death.”
The tragic necessity for occupation, for interesting herself in something sufficient to take her out of herself, she now understood, and the deep longing for the love of all she had of kith and kin was steadily tightening its grip on her, increasing day by day. Nothing else could take its place; she began to understand that; not her intimacy with Kathleen, not even her love for Duane. Outside of these there existed a zone of loneliness in which she was doomed to wander, a zone peopled only by the phantoms of the parents she had never known long enough to remember — a dreaded zone of solitude and desolation and peril for her. The danger line marked its boundary; beyond lay folly and destruction.
Little by little Scott began to notice that his sister evidently found his company desirable, that she followed him about, watching his so-called scientific pursuits with a curiosity too constant to be assumed. And it pleased him immensely; and at times he held forth to her and instructed her with brotherly condescension.
He noticed, too, that her spirits did not appear to be particularly lively; there were often long intervals of silence when, together by the window in the library where he was fussing over his “Life History,” she never spoke, never even moved from her characteristic attitude — seated deep in a leather chair, arms resting on the padded chair-arms, ankles crossed, and her head a trifle lowered, as though absorbed in studying the Herati design on a Persian rug.
Once, looking up suddenly, he surprised her brown eyes full of tears.
“Hello!” he said, amazed; “what’s the row, Sis?”
But she only laughed and dried her eyes, denying that there was any explanation except that girls were sometimes that way for no reason at all.
One day he asked Kathleen privately about this, but she merely confirmed Geraldine’s diagnosis of the phenomenon:
“Tears come into girls’ eyes,” she said, “and there isn’t anybody on earth who can tell a man why, and he wouldn’t comprehend it if anybody did tell him.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said sceptically; “if Rose-beetles shed tears, I’d never rest until I found out why. You bet there’s always a reason that starts anything and always somebody to find it out and tell another fellow who can understand it!”
With which brilliant burst of higher philosophy they went out into the October woods together to hunt for cocoons.
Geraldine, rather flushed and nervous, met them at Hurryon Gate, carrying a rifle and wearing the shortest skirts her brother had ever beheld. The symmetry of her legs moved him to reproof:
“I thought people looked that way only in tailor’s fashion plates,” he said. “What are you after — chipmunks?”
“Not at all,” said his sister. “Do you know what happened to me an hour ago? I was paddling your canoe into the Hurryon Inlet, and I suppose I made no noise in disembarking, and I came right on a baby wild boar in the junipers. It was a tiny thing, not eighteen inches long, Kathleen, and so cunning and furry and yellowish, with brown stripes on its back, that I tried to catch it — just to hug it.”
“That was silly,” said her brother.
“I know it was, now. Because I ran after it, and it ran; and, one by one, a whole herd of the cunning little things sprang out of the hemlock scrub and went off bucking and bucketing in all directions, and I, like a simpleton, hard after one of them — —”
“Little idiot,” said her brother solicitously. “Are you stark mad?”
“No, I’m just plain mad. Because, before I knew it, there came a crash in the underbrush and the biggest, furriest, and wickedest wild boar I ever saw halted in front of me, ears forward, every hair on end — —”
“Lord save us, you jumped the sow!” groaned her brother. “She might have torn you to pieces, you ninny!”
“She meant to, I think. The next thing I knew she came headlong, mouth open, fairly screaming at me; and I turned and jumped clean into the Gray Water. Oh, Scott, it was humiliating to have to swim to the point with all my clothes on, scramble into the canoe, and shove off because a very angry wild creature drove me out of my own woods!”
“Well, dear, you won’t ever interfere with a sow and pigs again, will you?” said Kathleen so earnestly that everybody laughed.
“What’s the rifle for?” inquired Scott. “You don’t intend to hunt for her, do you?”
“Of course not. I’m not vindictive or cruel. But old Miller said, when I came past the lodge, dripping wet, that the boar are increasing too fast and that you ought to keep them down either by shooting or by trapping them, and sending them to other people for stocking purposes. The Pink ‘uns want some; why don’t you?”
“I don’t want to shoot or trap them,” said Scott obstinately.
“Miller says they pulled down deer last winter and tore them to shreds. Everything in the forest is afraid of them; they drive the deer from the feeding-grounds, and I don’t believe a lynx or even any of the bear that climb over the fence would dare attack them.”
Kathleen said: “You really ought to ask some men up here to shoot, Scott. I don’t wish to be chased about by a boar.”
“They never bother people,” he protested. “What are you going to do with that rifle, Geraldine?”
“My nerve has gone,” she confessed, laughing; “I prefer to have it with me when I take walks. It’s really safer,” she added seriously to Kathleen. “Miller says that a buck deer can be ugly, too.”
“Oh, Lord!” said her brother, laughing; “it’s only because you’re the prettiest thing ever, in that hunting dress! Don’t tell me; and kindly be careful where you point that rifle.”
“As if I needed instructions!” retorted his sister. “I wish I could see a boar — a big one with a particularly frightful temper and tusks to match.”
“I’ll bet you that you can’t kill a boar,” he said in good-humoured disdain.
“I don’t see any to kill.”
“Well, I bet you can’t find one. And if you do, I bet you don’t kill him.”
“How long,” asked Geraldine dangerously, “does that bet hold good?”
“All winter, if you like. It’s the prettiest single jewel you can pick out against a new saddle-horse. I need a gay one; I’m getting out of condition. And all our horses are as interesting as chevaux de bois when the mechanism
is freshly oiled and the organ plays the ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’”
“I’ve half a mind to take that wager,” said Geraldine, very pink and bright-eyed. “I think I will take it if — —”
“Please don’t, dear,” said Kathleen anxiously. “The keepers say that a wounded boar is perfectly horrid sometimes.”
“Dangerous?” Her eyes glimmered brighter still.
“Certainly, a wounded boar is dangerous. I heard Miller say — —”
“Bosh!” said Scott. “They run away from you every time. Besides, Geraldine isn’t going to have enough sporting blood in her to take that bet and make good.”
Something in the quick flush and tilt of her head reminded Scott of the old days when their differences were settled with eight-ounce gloves. The same feeling possessed his sister, thrilled her like a sudden, unexpected glimpse of a happiness which apparently had long been ended for ever.
“Oh, Scott,” she exclaimed, still thrilling, “it is like old times to hear you try to bully me. It’s so long since I’ve had enough spirit to defy you. But I do now! — oh, yes, I do! Why, I believe that if we had the gloves here, I’d make you fight me or take back what you said about my not having any sporting spirit!”
He laughed: “I was thinking of that, too. You’re a good sport, Sis. Don’t bother to take that wager — —”
“I do take it!” she cried; “it’s like old times and I love it. Now, Scott, I’ll show you a boar before we go to town or I’ll buy you a horse. No backing out; what’s said can’t be unsaid, remember:
“King, king, double king,
Can’t take back a given thing!
Queen, queen, queen of queens,
What she promises she means!”
That was a very solemn incantation in nursery days; she laughed a little in tender tribute to the past.
Scott was a trifle perturbed. He glanced uneasily at Kathleen, who told him very plainly that he had contrived to make her anxious and unhappy. Then she fell back into step with Geraldine, letting Scott wander disconsolately forward:
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 451