“I am so surprised,” she said softly — but his dark eyes noted that she was still busy with her tea paraphernalia— “I scarcely know what to think, Mr. Querida—”
“Think that I love you—” breathed Querida, his dark and beautiful head very near to her blond one.
“I — am — thinking of it…. But—”
“Hélène,” he whispered musically; — and suddenly stiffened in his chair as the maid came clattering in over the rugless and polished parquet to announce Mr. Ogilvy, followed san façon by that young man, swinging a straw hat and a malacca stick.
“Sam!” said the pretty Countess, changing countenance.
“Hello, Hélène! How-do, Querida! I heard you were temporarily in town, dear lady—” He kissed a hand that was as faltering and guilty as the irresolute eyes she lifted to his.
Ten minutes later Querida took his leave. He dismissed the expensive taxi which had been devouring time outside, and walked thoughtfully away down the fashionable street.
Because the machinery had chanced to clog twice did not disturb his theory; but the trouble with him was local; he was intensely and personally annoyed, nervous, irritated unspeakably. Because, except for Valerie, these two, Alma Hind-Willet and Hélène d’Enver, were the only two socially and financially suitable women in whom he took the slightest physical interest.
There is, in all women, one moment — sometimes repeated — in which a sudden yielding to caprice sometimes overturns the logical plans laid out and inexorably followed for half a lifetime. And there was much of the feminine about Querida.
And it chanced to happen on this day — when no doubt all unsuspected and unperceived some lurking jettatura had given him the evil eye — that he passed by hazard through the block where Valerie lived, and saw her mounting the steps.
“Why, José!” she exclaimed, a trifle confused in her smiling cordiality as he sprang up the steps behind her — for Rita’s bitterness, if it had not aroused in her suspicions, had troubled her in spite of her declaration of unbelief.
He asked for a cup of tea, and she invited him. Rita was in the room when they entered; and she stood up coolly, coolly returned Querida’s steady glance and salutation with a glance as calm, as detached, and as intelligent as a surgeon’s.
Neither he nor she referred to his recent call; he was perfectly self-possessed, entirely amiable with that serene and level good-humour which sometimes masks a defiance almost contemptuous.
But Rita’s engagements required her to leave very shortly after his advent; and before she went out she deliberately waited to catch Valerie’s eye; and Valerie coloured deeply under her silent message.
Then Rita went away with a scarcely perceptible nod to Querida; and when, by the clock, she had been gone twenty minutes, Querida, without reason, without preparation, and perfectly aware of his moment’s insanity, yielded to a second’s flash of caprice — the second that comes once in the lives of all women — and now, in the ordered symmetry of his life, had come to him.
“Valerie,” he said, “I love you. Will you marry me?”
She had been leaning sideways on the back of her chair, one hand supporting her cheek, gazing almost listlessly out of the open window.
She did not stir, nor did her face alter, but, very quietly she turned her head and looked at him.
He spoke, breathlessly, eloquently, persuasively, and well; the perfect machinery was imitating for him a single-minded, ardent, honourable young man, intelligent enough to know his own mind, manly enough to speak it. The facsimile was flawless.
He had finished and was waiting, long fingers gripping the arms of his chair; and her face had altered only to soften divinely, and her eyes were very sweet and untroubled.
“I am glad you have spoken this way to me, José. Something has been said about you — in connection with Mr. Cardemon — which disturbed me and made me very sad and miserable, although I would not permit myself to believe it…. And now I know it was a mistake — because you have asked me to be your wife.”
She sat looking at him, the sadness in her eyes emphasised by the troubled smile curving her lips:
“I couldn’t marry you, José, because I am not in love with you. If I were I would do it…. But I do not care for you that way.”
For an instant some inner flare of madness blinded his brain and vision. There was, in his face, something so terrible that Valerie unconsciously rose to her feet, bewildered, almost stunned.
“I want you,” he said slowly.
“José! What in the world—”
His dry lips moved, but no articulate sound came from them. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, and out of his twisted, distorted mouth poured a torrent of passion, of reproach, of half-crazed pleading — incoherency tumbling over incoherency, deafening her, beating in upon her, till she swayed where she stood, holding her arms up as though to shield herself.
The next instant she was straining, twisting in his arms, striving to cry out, to wrench herself free to keep her feet amid the crash of the overturned table and a falling chair.
“José! Are you insane?” she panted, tearing herself free and springing toward the door. Suddenly she halted, uttered a cry as he jumped back to block her way. The low window-ledge caught him under both knees; he clutched at nothing, reeled backward and outward and fell into space.
For a second she covered her white face with both hands, then turned, dragged herself to the open window, forced herself to look out.
He lay on his back on the grass in the rear yard, and the janitor was already bending over him. And when she reached the yard Querida had opened both eyes.
Later the ambulance came, and with its surgeon came a policeman.
Querida, lying with his head on her lap, opened his eyes again:
“I was — seated — on the window-ledge,” he said with difficulty— “and overbalanced myself…. Caught the table — but it fell over…. That’s all.”
The eyes in his ghastly face closed wearily, then fluttered:
“Awfully sorry, Valerie — make such a mess — in your house.”
“Oh-h — José,” she sobbed.
After that they took him away to the Presbyterian Hospital; and nobody seemed to find very much the matter with him except that he’d been badly shocked.
But the next day all sensation ceased in his body from the neck downward.
And they told Valerie why.
For ten days he lay there, perfectly conscious, patient, good-humored, and his almond-shaped and hollow eyes rested on Valerie and Rita with a fatalistic serenity subtly tinged with irony.
John Burleson came to see him, and cried. After he left, Querida said to
Valerie:
“John and I are destined to remain near neighbours; his grief is well meant, but a trifle premature.”
“You are not going to die, José!” she said gently.
But he only smiled.
Ogilvy came, Annan came, the Countess Hélène, and even Mrs. Hind-Willet. He inspected them all with his shadowy and mysterious smile, answered them gently deep in his sunken eyes a sombre amusement seemed to dwell. But there was in it no bitterness.
Then Neville came. Valerie and Rita were absent that day but their roses filled the private ward-room with a hint of the coming summer.
Querida lay looking at Neville, the half smile resting on his pallid face like a slight shadow that faintly waxed and waned with every breath he drew.
“Well,” he said quietly, “you are the man I wished to see.”
“Querida,” he said, deeply affected, “this thing isn’t going to be permanent—”
“No; not permanent. It won’t last, Neville. Nothing does last…. unless you can tell me whether my pictures are going to endure. Are they? I know that you will be as honest with me as I was — dishonest with you. I will believe what you say. Is my work destined to be permanent?”
“Don’t you know it is?”
“I thought so…. But you know. Because,
Neville, you are the man who is coming into what was mine, and what will be your own; — and you are coming into more than that, Neville, more than I ever could have attained. Now answer me; will my work live?”
“Always,” said Neville simply.
Querida smiled:
“The rest doesn’t matter then…. Even Valerie doesn’t matter…. But you may hand me one of her roses…. No, a bud, if you don’t mind — unopened.”
When it was time for Neville to go Querida’s smile had faded and the pink rose-bud lay wilted in his fingers.
“It is just as well, Neville,” he said. “I couldn’t have endured your advent. Somebody has to be first; I was — as long as I lived…. It is curious how acquiescent a man’s mind becomes — when he’s like this. I never believed it possible that a man really could die without regret, without some shadow of a desire to live. Yet it is that way, Neville…. But a man must lie dying before he can understand it.”
* * * * *
A highly tinted uncle from Oporto arrived in New York just in time to see Querida alive. He brought with him a parrot.
“Send it to Mrs. Hind-Willet,” whispered Querida with stiffening lips; “uno lavanta la caça y otro la nata.”
A few minutes later he died, and his highly coloured uncle from Oporto sent the bird to Mrs. Hind-Willet and made the thriftiest arrangement possible to transport what was mortal of a great artist to Oporto — where a certain kind of parrot comes from.
CHAPTER XVI
On the morning of the first day of June Neville came into his studio and found there a letter from Valerie:
“DEAREST: I am not keeping my word to you; I am asking you for more time; and I know you will grant it.
“José Querida’s death has had a curious effect on me. I was inclined to care very sincerely for him; I comprehended him better than many people, I think. Yet there was much in him that I never understood. And I doubt that he ever entirely understood himself.
“I believe that he was really a great painter, Louis — and have sometimes thought that his character was mediæval at the foundations — with five centuries of civilisation thinly deposited over the bed-rock…. In him there seemed to be something primitive; something untamable, and utterly irreconcilable with, the fundamental characteristics of modern man.
“He was my friend…. Friendship, they say, is a record of misunderstandings; and it was so with us But may I tell you something? José Querida loved me — in his own fashion.
“What kind of a love it was — of what value — I can not tell you. I do not think it was very high in the scale. Only he felt it for me, and for no other woman, I believe.
“It never was a love that I could entirely understand or respect; yet, — it is odd but true — I cared something for it — perhaps because, in spite of its unfamiliar and sometimes repellent disguises — it was love after all.
“And now, as at heart and in mind you and I are one; and as I keep nothing of real importance from you — perhaps can not; I must tell you that José Querida came that day to ask me to marry him.
“I tried to make him understand that I could not think of such a thing; and he lost his head and became violent. That is how the table fell: — I had started toward the door when he sprang back to block me, and the low window-sill caught him under the knees, and he fell outward into the yard.
“I know of course that no blame could rest on me, but it was a terrible and dreadful thing that happened there in one brief second; and somehow it seems to have moved in me depths that have never before been stirred.
“The newspapers, as you know, published it merely as an accident — which it really was. But they might have made it, by innuendo, a horror for me. However, they put it so simply and so unsuspiciously that José Querida might have been any nice man calling on any nice woman.
“Louis, I have never been so lonely in my life as I have been since José Querida died; alas! not because he has gone out of my life forever, but because, somehow, the manner of his death has made me realise how difficult it is for a woman alone to contend with men in a man’s own world.
“Do what she may to maintain her freedom, her integrity, there is always, — sometimes impalpable, sometimes not — a steady, remorseless pressure on her, forcing her unwillingly to take frightened cognisance of men; — take into account their inexorable desire for domination; the subtle cohesion existent among them which, at moments, becomes like a wall of adamant barring, limiting, inclosing and forcing women toward the deep-worn grooves which women have trodden through the sad centuries; — and which they tread still — and will tread perhaps for years to come before the real enfranchisement of mankind begins.
“I do not mean to write bitterly, dear; but, somehow, all this seems to bear significantly, ominously, upon my situation in the world.
“When I first knew you I felt so young, so confident, so free, so scornful of custom, so wholesomely emancipated from silly and unjust conventions, that perhaps I overestimated my own vigour and ability to go my way, unvexed, unfettered in this man’s world, and let the world make its own journey in peace. But it will not.
“Twice, now, within a month, — and not through any conscious fault of mine — this man’s world has shown its teeth at me; I have been menaced by its innate scorn of woman, and have, by chance, escaped a publicity which would have damned me so utterly that I would not have cared to live.
“And dear, for the first time I really begin to understand now what the shelter of a family means; what it is to have law on my side, — and a man who understands his man’s world well enough to fight it with its own weapons; — well enough to protect a woman from things she never dreamed might menace her.
“When that policeman came into my room, — dear, you will think me a perfect coward — but suddenly I seemed to realise what law meant, and that it had power to protect me or destroy me…. And I was frightened, — and the table lay there with the fragments of broken china — and there was that dreadful window — and I — I who knew how he died! — Louis! Louis! guiltless as I was, — blameless in thought and deed — I died a thousand deaths there while the big policeman and the reporters were questioning me.
“If it had not been for what José was generous enough to say, I could never have thought out a lie to tell them; I should have told them how it had really happened…. And what the papers would have printed about him and about me, God only knows.
“Never, never had I needed you as I needed you at that moment…. Well; I lied to them, somehow; I said to them what José had said — that he was seated on the window-ledge, lost his balance, clutched at the table, overturned it, and fell. And they believed me…. It is the first lie since I was a little child, that I have ever knowingly told…. And I know now that I could never contrive to tell another.
“Dear, let me try to think out what is best for us…. And forgive me, Louis, if I can not help a thought or two of self creeping in. I am so terribly alone. Somehow I am beginning to believe that it may sometimes be a weakness to totally ignore one’s self…. Not that I consider myself of importance compared to you, my darling; not that I would fail to set aside any thought of self where your welfare is concerned. You know that, don’t you?
“But I have been wondering how it would be with you if I passed quietly
and absolutely out of your life. That is what I am trying to determine.
Because it must be either that or the tie unrecognised by civilisation.
And which would be better for you? I do not know yet. I ask more time.
Don’t write me. Your silence will accord it.
“You are always in my thoughts.
“VALERIE.”
Ogilvy came into the studio that afternoon, loquacious, in excellent humour, and lighting a pipe, detailed what news he had while Neville tried to hide his own deep perplexity and anxiety under a cordial welcome.
“You know,” said Ogilvy, “that all the time you’ve given me and all your kindness and encourag
ement has made a corker of that picture of mine.”
“You did it yourself,” said Neville. “It’s good work, Sam.”
“Sure it’s good work — being mostly yours. And what do you think, Kelly; it’s sold!”
“Good for you!”
“Certainly it’s good for me. I need the mazuma. A courteous multi purchased it for his Long Branch cottage — said cottage costing a million. What?”
“Oh, you’re doing very well,” laughed Neville.
“I’ve got to…. I’ve — h’m! — undertaken to assume obligations toward civilisation — h’m! — and certain duties to my — h’m — country—”
“What on earth are you driving at?” asked Neville, eying him.
“Huh! Driving single just at present; practising for tandem — h’m! — and a spike — h’m — some day — I hope — of course—”
“Sam!”
“Hey?”
“Are you trying to say something?”
“Oh, Lord, no! Why, Kelly, did you suspect that I was really attempting to convey anything to you which I was really too damned embarrassed to tell you in the patois of my native city?”
“It sounded that way,” observed Neville, smiling.
“Did it?” Ogilvy considered, head on one side. “Did it sound anything like a — h’m! — a man who was trying to — h’m! — to tell you that he was going to — h’m! — to try to get somebody to try to let him try to tell her that he wanted to — marry her?”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Neville, bewildered, “what do you mean?”
Ogilvy pirouetted, picked up a mahl-stick, and began a lively fencing bout with an imaginary adversary.
“I’m going to get married,” he said amiably.
“What!”
“Sure.”
“To whom?”
“To Hélène d’Enver. Only she doesn’t know it yet.”
“What an infernal idiot you are, Sam!”
“Ya-as, so they say. Some say I’m an ass, others a bally idiot, others merely refer to me as imbecile. And so it goes, Kelly, — so it goes.”
He flourished his mahl-stick, neatly punctured the air, and cried “Hah!” very fiercely.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 551