Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  He had not heard it when the door opened and a young girl appeared on the threshold, standing with one hand resting on the inner knob; the other touching the pocket of her apron, in which was a ball of yarn stuck through with two needles.

  She was slim and red-haired and slightly freckled, and her mouth was perhaps a shade large, and it curled slightly at the corners; and her eyes were quite perfectly made, except that one was hazel-brown and the other hazel-grey.

  Hat in hand, Brown bowed; and then she did a thing which interested him; she lifted the edges of her apron between slender white thumbs and forefingers and dropped him the prettiest courtesy he had ever seen off the stage.

  “I came to inquire,” he said, “whether you ever take summer boarders.”

  “What are boarders?” she asked. “I never heard of them except in naval battles.”

  “Thank heaven,” he thought; “this is remote, all right; and I have discovered pristine innocence in the nest.”

  “Modern boarders,” he explained politely, “are unpleasant people who come from the city to enjoy the country, and who, having no real homes, pay farmers to lodge and feed them for a few days of vacation and dyspepsia.”

  “You mean is this a tavern?” she asked, unsmiling.

  “No, I don’t. I mean, will you let me live here a little while as though I were a guest, and then permit me to settle my reckoning in accordance with your own views upon the subject?”

  She hesitated as though perplexed.

  “Suppose you ask your father or mother,” he suggested.

  “They are absent.”

  “Will they return this morning?”

  “I don’t know exactly when they expect to return.”

  “Well, couldn’t you assume the responsibility?” he asked, smiling.

  She looked at him for a few moments, and it seemed to him as though, in the fearless gravity of her regard, somehow, somewhere, perhaps in the curled corners of her lips, perhaps in her pretty and unusual eyes, there lurked a little demon of laughter. Yet it could not be so; there were only serenity and a child’s direct sweetness in the gaze.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “John Brown 4th.”

  “Mine is Elizabeth Tennant. Where do you live?”

  “In — New York,” he admitted, watching her furtively.

  “I was there once — at a ball — many years ago,” she observed.

  “Not very many years ago, I imagine,” he said, smiling at her youthful reminiscence.

  “Many, many years ago,” she said thoughtfully. “I shall go again some day.”

  “Of course,” he murmured politely, “it’s a thing to do and get done — like going abroad.”

  She looked up at him quickly.

  “Years ago I knew a boy — with your easy humour and your trick of speech. He resembled you otherwise; and he wore your name becomingly.”

  He tried to recall knowing her in his extreme youth, but made no definite connection.

  “You wouldn’t remember,” she said gravely; “but I think I know you now. Who is your father?”

  “My father?” he repeated, surprised and smiling. “My father is John Brown 3rd.”

  “And his father?”

  “My grandfather?” he asked, very much amused. “Oh, he was John Brown 2nd. And his father was Captain John Brown of Westchester; but I don’t want to talk D. A. R. talk to you about my great grandfather — —”

  “He fought at Pound Ridge,” said the girl, slowly.

  “Yes,” said Brown, astonished.

  “Tarleton’s cavalry — the brutal hussars of the legion — killed him on the Stamford Road,” she said; “and he lay there in the field all day with one dead arm over his face and his broken pistol in his hand, and the terrible galloping fight drove past down the stony New Canaan road — and the smoke from the meeting house afire rolled blacker and blacker and redder and redder — —”

  With a quickly drawn breath she covered her face with both hands and stood a moment silent; and Brown stared at her, astonished, doubting his eyes and ears.

  The next moment she dropped her hands and looked at him with a tremulous smile.

  “What in the world can you be thinking of me?” she said. “Alone in this old house, here among the remoter hills of Westchester. I live so vividly in the past that these almost forgotten tragedies seem very real to me and touch me closely. To me the present is only a shadow; the past is life itself. Can you understand?”

  “I see,” he said, intensely relieved concerning her mental stability; “you are a Daughter of the American Revolution or a Society of Colonial Wars or — er — something equally — er — interesting and desirable — —”

  “I am a Daughter of the American Revolution,” she said proudly.

  “Exactly,” he smiled with an inward shudder. “A — a very interesting — er — and — exceedingly — and — all that sort of thing,” he nodded amiably. “Don’t take much interest in it myself — being a broker and rather busy — —”

  “I am sorry.”

  He looked up quickly and met her strange eyes, one hazel-grey, one hazel-brown.

  “I — I’ll be delighted to take an interest in anything you — in — er — this Revolutionary business if you — if you don’t mind telling me about it,” he stammered. “Evenings, now, if you have time to spare — —”

  She smiled, opened the door wider, and looked humorously down at him where he stood fidgeting on the step.

  “Will you come in?” she asked serenely.

  XX

  He went, first depositing his suit-case on the step outside by the cats, and followed her into a large, comfortable sitting room.

  “By jove,” he said, “you know this is really mighty pretty! What a corking collection of old furniture! Where in the world did you find — or perhaps this is the original furniture of the place?”

  She said, looking around the room as though slightly perplexed: “This furniture was made to order for me in Boston.”

  “Then it isn’t genuine,” he said, disappointed. “But it’s a very clever imitation of antique colonial. It is really a wonderful copy.”

  “I don’t think it is a copy.”

  “It certainly doesn’t look like it; but it must be if it was made in Boston for you. They’re ingenious fellows, these modern makers of colonial furniture. Every antique shop in New York is loaded up with excellent copies of this sort — only not nearly as well done.”

  She assented, apparently with no very clear understanding of what he meant.

  “What a charming setting this old house makes for such things,” he said.

  She nodded, looking doubtfully at the rag carpet.

  “The Manor House was much finer,” she observed. “Come to the window and I’ll show you where it stood. They were fine folk, the Lockwoods, Hunts, and Fanchers.”

  They rose and she laid one pretty hand on his sleeve and guided him into a corner of the window, where he could see.

  “Hello,” he said uneasily, “there is a main travelled road! I thought that here we were at the very ends of civilisation!”

  “That is the Bedford road,” she said. “Over there, beyond those chestnuts, is the Stamford road. Can you see those tall old poplars? Beyond the elms I mean — there — where the crows are flying?”

  “Yes. Eight tall poplars.”

  “The Manor House stood there. Tarleton burnt it — set it afire with all its beautiful furniture and silver and linen! His hussars ran through it, setting it afire and shooting at the mirrors and slashing the silks and pictures! And when the Major’s young wife entered the smoking doorway to try to save a pitiful little trinket or two, an officer — never mind who, for his descendants may be living to-day in England — struck her with the flat of his sword and cut her and struck her to her knees! That is the truth!”

  He said politely: “You are intensely interested in — er — colonial and revolutionary history.”

  “Ye
s. What else have I to think of — here?”

  “I suppose many interesting memories of those times cluster around this old place,” he said, violently stifling a yawn. He had risen early and run far. Hunger and slumber contended for his mastery.

  “Many,” she said simply. “Just by the gate yonder they captured young Alsop Hunt and sent him away to the Provost Prison in New York. In the road below John Buckhout, one of our dragoons, was trying to get away from one of Tarleton’s dragoons of the 17th Regiment; and the British trooper shouted, ‘Surrender, you damned rebel, or I’ll blow your brains out!’ and the next moment he fired a bullet through Buckhout’s helmet. ‘There,’ said the dragoon, ‘you damned rebel, a little more and I should have blown your brains out!’ ‘Yes, damn you,’ replied John, ‘and a little more and you wouldn’t have touched me!’”

  Brown looked at her amused and astonished to hear such free words slip so eagerly from a mouth which, as he looked at it, seemed to him the sweet mouth of a child.

  “Where did you ever hear such details?” he asked.

  “People told me. Besides, the house is full of New York newspapers. You may read them if you wish. I often do. Many details of the fight are there.”

  “Reading such things out of old newspapers published at the time certainly must bring those events very vividly before you.”

  “Yes. . . . It is painful, too. The surprise and rout of Sheldon’s 2nd dragoons — the loss of their standard; the capture, wounding, and death of more than two score — and — oh! that young death there in the wheat! the boy lying in the sun with one arm across his face and the broken pistol in his hand! and his wife — the wife of a month — dragging him back to this house — with the sunset light on his dead face!”

  “To this house?”

  She dropped her hand lightly on his shoulder and pointed.

  “Tarleton’s troopers came stamping and cursing in by that very door after they had burned Judge Lockwood’s and the meeting house — but they left her alone with her dead, here on the floor where you and I are standing. . . . She was only seventeen; she died a few months later in child-birth. God dealt very gently with her.”

  He looked around him in the pleasant light of the room, striving to comprehend that such things had happened in such a sleepy, peaceful place. Sunlight fell through the curtains, casting the wild roses’ shadow across the sill; the scent of lilacs filled the silence.

  “It’s curious — and sad,” he said in a low voice. “How odd that I should come here to the very spot where that old ancestor of mine died — —”

  “He was only twenty when he died,” she interrupted.

  “I know. But somehow a fellow seems to think of any ancestor as a snuffy old codger — —”

  “He was very handsome,” she said, flushing up.

  There was a silence; then she looked around at him with a glint of humour in her pretty eyes — one hazel-brown, one hazel tinged with grey; and the delicious mouth no longer drooped.

  “Can’t you imagine him as young as you are? gay, humorous, full of mischievous life, and the love of life? something of a dandy in his uniform — and his queue tied smartly à la Française! — gallant — oh, gallant and brave in the dragoon’s helmet and jack-boots of Sheldon’s Horse! Why, he used to come jingling and clattering into this room and catch his young wife and plague and banter and caress her till she fled for refuge, and he after her, like a pair of school children released — through the bed-rooms, out by the kitchen, and into the garden, till he caught her again in the orchard yonder and held her tight and made her press her palms together and recite:

  I love thee

  I love thee

  Through all the week and Sunday

  — until for laughing and folly — I — they — —”

  To his amazement her voice broke; into her strange eyes sprang tears, and she turned swiftly away and went and stood by the curtained window.

  “Well, by gad!” he thought, “of all morbid little things! affected to tears by what happened to somebody else a hundred and thirty odd years ago! Women are sure the limit!”

  And in more suitable terms he asked her why she should make herself unhappy.

  She said: “I am happy. It is only when I am here that I am lonely and the dead past lives again among these wooded hills.”

  “Are you not — usually — here?” he asked, surprised. “I thought you lived here.”

  “No. I live elsewhere, usually. I am too unhappy here. I never remain very long.”

  “Then why do you ever come here?” he asked, amused.

  “I don’t know. I am very happy elsewhere. But — I come. Women do such things.”

  “I don’t exactly understand why.”

  “A woman’s thoughts return eternally to one place and one person. One memory is her ruling passion.”

  “What is that memory?”

  “The Place and the Man.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean that a woman, in spirit, journeys eternally to the old, old rendezvous with love; makes, with her soul, the eternal pilgrimage back to the spot where Love and she were first acquainted. And, moreover, a woman may even leave the man with whom she is happy to go all alone for a while back to the spot where first she knew happiness because of him. . . . You don’t understand, do you?”

  Brown was a broker. He did not understand.

  She looked at him, smiling, sighing a little — and, in spite of her fresh and slender youth — and she was certainly not yet twenty — he felt curiously young and crude under the gentle mockery of her unmatched eyes — one hazel-brown, one hazel tinged with grey.

  Then, still smiling wisely, intimately to herself, she went away into an inner room; and through the doorway he saw her slim young figure moving hither and thither, busy at shelf and cupboard. Presently she came back carrying an old silver tray on which stood a decanter and a plate of curious little cakes. He took it from her and placed it on a tip-table. Then she seated herself on the ancient sofa, and summoned him to a place beside her.

  “Currant wine,” she said laughingly; “and old-fashioned cake. Will you accept — under this roof of mine?”

  He was dreadfully hungry; the wine was mild and delicious, the crisp cakes heavenly, and he ate and ate in a kind of ecstasy, not perfectly certain what was thrilling him most deeply, the wine or the cakes or this slender maid’s fresh young beauty.

  On one rounded cheek a bar of sunlight lay, gilding the delicate skin and turning the curling strands of hair to coils of fire.

  He thought to himself, with his mouth a trifle fuller than convention expects, that he would not wish to resist falling in love with a girl like this. She would never have to chase him very far. . . . In fact, he was perfectly ready to be captured and led blushing to the altar.

  Once, as he munched away, he remembered the miserable fate of his late companion Vance, and shuddered; but, looking around at the young girl beside him, his fascinated eyes became happily enthralled, and matrimony no longer resembled doom.

  “What are these strange happenings in New York of which I hear vague rumours?” she enquired, folding her hands in her lap and looking innocently at him.

  His jaw fell.

  “Have you heard about — what is going on in town?” he asked. “I thought you didn’t know.”

  “They say that the women there are ambitious to govern the country and are even resolved to choose their own husbands.”

  “Something of that sort,” he muttered uneasily.

  “That is a very strange condition of affairs,” she murmured, brooding eyes remote.

  “It’s a darned sight worse than strange!” he blurted out — then asked pardon for his inelegant vehemence; but she only smiled dreamily and sipped her currant wine in the sunshine.

  “Shall we talk of something pleasanter?” he said, still uneasy, “ — er — about those jolly old colonial days. . . . That’s rather an odd gown you wear — er — pretty you know �
�� but — is it not in the style of — er — those days of — of yore — and all that?”

  “It was made then.”

  “A genuine antique!” he exclaimed. “I suppose you found it in the garret. There must be a lot of interesting things up there behind those flat loop-holes.”

  “Chests full,” she nodded. “We save everything.”

  He said: “You look wonderfully charming in the costume of those days. It suits you so perfectly that — as a matter of fact, I didn’t even notice your dress when I first saw you — but it’s a wonder!”

  “Men seldom notice women’s clothes, do they?”

  “That is true. Still, it’s curious I didn’t notice such a gown as that.”

  “Is it very gay and fine?” she asked, colouring deliciously. “I love these clothes.”

  “They are the garments of perfection — robing it!”

  “Oh, what a gallant thing to say to me. . . . Do you truly find me so — so agreeable?”

  “Agreeable! You — I don’t think I’d better say it — —”

  “Oh, I beg you!”

  “May I?”

  “‘Pray, observe my unmatched eyes.’”

  Her cheeks and lips were brilliant, her eyes sparkling; she leaned a trifle toward him, frail glass in hand.

  “May not a pretty woman listen without offense if a gallant man praises her beauty?”

  “You are exactly that — a beauty!” he said excitedly. “The most bewitching, exquisite, matchless — —”

  “Oh, I beg of you, be moderate,” she laughed — and picked up a fan from somewhere and spread it, laughing at him over its painted edge.

  “Pray, observe my unmatched eyes before you speak again of me as matchless.”

  “Your eyes are matchlessly beautiful! — more wonderfully beautiful than any others in all the world!” he cried.

  Yet the currant wine was very, very mild.

  “Such eyes,” he continued excitedly, “are the most strangely lovely eyes I ever saw or ever shall see. Nobody in all the world, except you, has such eyes. I — I am going quite mad about them — about you — about everything. . . . I — the plain fact is that I love — such eyes — and — and every harmonious and lovely feature that — that b-b-belongs to them — and to — to you!”