She closed her painted fan slowly, slowly left her seat, took from the blue bowl on the window-sill the wild rose blooming there, turned and looked back at him, half smiling, waiting.
He sprang to his feet, scarcely knowing now what he was about; she waited, tall, slender, and fresh as the lovely flower she held.
Then, as he came close to her, she drew the wild rose through the lapel of his coat, and he bent his head and touched his lips to the blossom.
“When she and you — and Love — shall meet at last, you will first know her by her eyes,” she began; and the next instant the smile froze on her face and she caught his arm in both hands and clung there, white to the lips.
XXI
“Listen!” she whispered; “did you hear that?”
“What?” he asked, dazed.
“On the Bedford road! do you hear the horses? Do you hear them running?”
“W-what horses?”
“Tarleton’s!” she gasped, pressing her white face between her hands. “Can’t you hear their iron scabbards rattle? Can’t you hear their bugle horn? Where is Jack? Where is Jack?”
A flurry of mellow music burst out among the trees, followed by a loud report.
“Oh, God!” she whispered, “the British!”
Brown stared at her.
“Why, that’s only an automobile horn — and their tire just blew out,” he began, astonished.
But she sprang past him, calling, “Jack! Jack! Where are you?” and he heard the door fly open and her childish cry of terror outside in the sunshine.
The next second he followed her, running through the hall and out through the door to the porch; and at the same moment a big red touring car came to a standstill before the house; the chauffeur descended to put on a new tire, and a young girl in motor duster and hood sprang lightly from the tonneau to the tangled grass. As she turned to look at the house she caught sight of him.
Brown took an uncertain step forward; and she came straight toward him.
Neither spoke as they met face to face. He looked at her, passed his hand over his eyes, bewildered, and looked again.
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 a hazel-grey.
She looked at him, and it seemed to him as though, in the fearless gravity of her regard, somewhere, somehow — 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 her gaze.
“I suppose you have come to look at this old-time place?” she said. “People often come. You are perfectly welcome.”
And, as he made no answer:
“If you care to see the inside of the house I will be very glad to show it to you,” she added pleasantly.
“Is — is it yours?” he managed to say, “or — or your sister’s?”
She smiled. “You mistake me for somebody else. I have no sister. This is the old Brown place — a very, very old house. It belonged to my great grandmother. If you are interested I will be glad to show you the interior. I brought the key with me.”
“But people — relatives of yours — are living there now,” he stammered.
“Oh, no,” she said, smiling, “the house is empty. We are thinking of putting it in shape again. If you care to come in I can show you the quaint old fireplaces and wainscoting — if you don’t mind dust.”
She mounted the step lightly and, fitting the key and unlocking the door — which he thought he had left open — entered.
“Come in,” she called to him in a friendly manner.
He crossed the threshold to her side and halted, stunned. An empty house, silent, shadowy, desolate, confronted him.
The girl beside him shook out her skirts and glanced at her dusty gloves.
“A vacuum cleaner is what this place requires,” she said. “But isn’t it a quaint old house?”
He pressed his shaking hands to his closed eyes, then forced them to open upon the terrible desolation where she had stood a moment since — and saw bare boards under foot, bare walls, cobwebs, dust.
The girl was tiptoeing around the four walls examining the condition of the woodwork.
“It only needs electric lights and a furnace in the cellar and some kalsomine and pretty wall paper — —”
She turned to glance back at him, and stood so, regarding him with amused curiosity — for he had dropped on his knees in the dust, groping in an odd blind way for a flower that had just fallen from his coat.
“There are millions of them by the roadside,” she said as he stumbled to his feet and drew the frail blossom through his buttonhole with unsteady fingers.
“Yes,” he said, “there are other roses in the world.” Then he drew a deep, quiet breath and smiled at her.
She smiled, too.
“This was her room,” she explained, “the room where she first met her husband, the room into which she came a bride, the room where she died, poor thing. Oh, I forgot that you don’t know who she was!”
“Elizabeth Tennant,” he answered calmly.
“Why — how did you know?”
“God knows,” he said; and bent his head, touching the petals of the wild rose with his lips. Then he looked up straight into her eyes — one was hazel-brown, one hazel tinged with grey.
XXII
As they left the house an hour later, walking down the path slowly, shoulder to shoulder, she said:
“Mr. Brown, I want you to like that house.”
A sudden and subtly hideous idea glided into his brain.
“You don’t believe in suffragettes, do you?” he said, forcing a hollow laugh.
“Why, I am one. Didn’t you know it?”
“You!”
“Certainly. Goodness! how you did run! But,” she added with innocent satisfaction, “I think I have secured every bit as good a one as the one Gladys chased out of a tree with her horrid marmoset.”
XXIII
The Eugenic Revolution might fairly be said to have begun with the ignominious weddings of Messrs. Reginald Willett, James Carrick, De Lancy Smith, and Alphonso W. Green.
Its crisis culminated in the Long Acre riots. But the great suffragette revolution was now coming to its abrupt and predestined end; the reaction, already long overdue, gathered force with incredible rapidity and exploded from Yonkers to Coney Island, in a furious counter-revolution. The revolt of the Unfit was on at last.
Mobs of maddened spinsters paraded the streets of the five boroughs demanding spouses. Maidens of uncertain age and attractions who, in the hysterical enthusiasm of the eugenic revolution, had offered themselves the pleasures of martyrdom by vowing celibacy and by standing aside while physically perfect sister suffragettes pounced upon and married all flawless specimens of the opposite sex, now began to demand for themselves the leavings among the mature, thin-shanked, and bald-headed.
In vain their beautiful comrades attempted to explain the eugenistic principles — to point out that the very essence of the entire cult lay in non-reproduction by the physically unfit, and in the ultimate extinction of the thin, bald, and meagre among the human race.
But thousands and thousands of the love-maddened rose up and denounced the Beauty Trust, demanded a return to the former conditions of fair competition in the open shop of matrimony.
They were timidly encouraged by thousands of middle-aged gentlemen who denied that either excessive meagreness or baldness was hereditary; they even dared to assert that the suffragette revolution had been a mistake, and pointed out that only an average of one in every hundred women had taken the trouble to exercise her privilege at the polls in the recent election, and that ninety per cent. of those who voted marked their ballots wrong or forgot to mark them at all, or else invalidated them by writing suggestions to the candidates on the back
s of the ballots.
A week of terrible confusion ensued, and, in the very midst of it, news came from London that Miss Pondora Bottomly, who, after throwing bricks all day through the back windows of Windsor Castle, had been arrested by a very thin Scotch policeman, had suddenly seized the policeman and married him in spite of his terrified cries.
A shout of protest arose from every human man in the civilised world; a groan of dismay burst from every human woman. It was the beginning of the end; the old order of things was already in sight; men, long hidden, reappeared in public places; wives shyly began to respond to the cautious “good-mornings” of their long ignored husbands, the wealthy and socially desirable but otherwise unattractive plucked up spirits; florists, caterers, modistes, ministers came out of seclusion and began to prowl around the débris of their ruined professions with a view to starting out again in business; and here and there the forgotten art of flirting was furtively resurrected and resumed in the awaking metropolis.
“Perfection,” said America’s greatest orator on the floor of the Senate, “is endurable only because unattainable. The only things on earth that make this world interesting are its sporting chances, its misfortunes, and its mutts!”
And within a month after the delivery of this classic the American nation had resumed its normal, haphazard aspect. The revolution, the riots on Fifth Avenue and Long Acre, the bachelors’ St. Bartholomew were all forgotten; Tammany Hall and the Republican State Organization yawned, stretched, rubbed their eyes, awoke, and sat up licking their hungry chops; the gentlemen in charge of the Bureau of Special Privileges opened the long-locked drawers of that piece of furniture, and looked over the ledgers; trusts, monopolies, systems came out of their cyclone cellars; turf associations dredged the dump-docks for charters, whither a feminine municipal administration had consigned them; all-night cafés, dance-halls, gambling houses reopened, and the electric lights sparkled once more on painted cheeks and tinted lips.
The good old days of yore were returning fast on the heels of the retreat of woman; capital shook hands with privilege; the prices of staples soared; joints, dives, and hospitals were fast filling up; jails and prisons and asylums looked forward to full houses. It was the same old world again — the same dear old interesting, exciting, grafting, murdering, diseased planet, spinning along through space — just as far as usual from other worlds and probably so arranged in order that other worlds might not suffer from its aroma.
And over it its special, man-designed god was expected to keep watch and deal out hell or paradise as the man-made regulations which governed the deity and his abode required.
So once again the golden days of yore began; congregations worshipped in Fifth Avenue churches and children starved on Avenue A; splendid hospitals were erected, palatial villas were built in the country; and department stores paid Mamie and Maud seven dollars a week — but competed in vain, sometimes, with smiling and considerate individuals who offered them more, including enough to eat.
The world’s god was back in his heaven; the world would, therefore, go very well; and woman, at last, was returning to her own sphere to mind her own business — and a gifted husband, especially created as her physical and mental lord and master by a deity universally regarded as masculine in sex.
LEFT OVER
XXIV
She knew so little about the metropolis that, on her first visit, a year before, she had asked the driver of the taxicab to recommend a respectable hotel for a lady travelling alone; and he had driven her to the Hotel Aurora Borealis — that great, gay palace of Indiana limestone and plate glass towering above the maelstrom of Long Acre.
When, her business transacted, she returned to the Westchester farm, still timid, perplexed, and partly stunned by the glitter and noise of her recent metropolitan abode, she determined never again to stop at that hotel.
But when the time came for her to go again the long list of hotels confused her. She did not know one from the other; she shrank from experimenting; and, at least, she knew something about the Aurora Borealis and she would not feel like an utter stranger there.
That was the only reason she went back there that time. And the next time she came to town that was the principal reason she returned to the Aurora Borealis. But the next time, she made up her mind to go elsewhere; and in the roaring street she turned coward, and went to the only place she knew. And the time after that she fought a fierce little combat with herself all the way down in the train; and, with flushed cheeks, hating herself, ordered the cabman to take her to the Hotel Aurora Borealis.
But it was not until several trips after that one — on a rainy morning in May — that she found courage to say to the maid at the cloak-room door:
“Who is that young man? I always see him in the lobby when I come here.”
The maid cast an intelligent glance toward a tall, well-built young fellow who stood pulling on his gloves near the desk.
“Huh!” she sniffed; “he ain’t much.”
“What do you mean?” asked the girl.
“Why, he’s a capper, mem.”
“A — a what?”
“A capper — a gambler.”
The girl flushed scarlet. The maid handed her a check for her rain-coat and said: “They hang around swell hotels, they do, and pick up acquaintance with likely looking and lonely boobs. Then the first thing the lonely boob knows he’s had a good dinner with a new acquaintance and is strolling into a quiet but elegant looking house in the West Forties or Fifties.” And the maid laughed, continuing her deft offices in the dressing-room, and the girl looked into the glass at her own crimson cheeks and sickened eyes.
At luncheon he sat at a little table by a window, alone, indolently preoccupied with a newspaper and a fruit salad. She, across the room, kept her troubled eyes away. Yet it was as though she saw him — perhaps the mental embodiment of him was the more vivid for her resolutely averted head.
Every detail of his appearance was painfully familiar to her — his dark eyes, his smooth face which always seemed a trifle sun-tanned, the fastidious and perfect taste of his dress in harmony with his boyish charm and quiet distinction — and the youth of him — the wholesome and self-possessed youth — that seemed to her the most dreadful thing about him in the new light of her knowledge. For he could scarcely be twenty-five.
Every movement he made had long since fascinated her; his unconscious grace had been, to her, the unstudied assurance of a man of the world bred to a social environment about which she knew only through reading.
Never had she seen him but straightway she began to wonder who and what exalted person in the unknown metropolitan social circle he might be.
She had often wondered, speculated; sometimes dreamily she had endowed him with name and position — with qualities, too — ideal qualities suggested by his air of personal distinction — delightful qualities suggested by his dark, pleasant eyes, and by the slight suspicion of humour lurking so often on the edges of his smoothly shaven lips.
He was so clean-looking, so nice — and he had the shoulders and the hands and the features of good breeding! And, after all — after all, he was a gambler! — a derelict whose sinister living was gained by his wits; a trailer and haunter and bleeder of men! Worse — a decoy sent out by others!
She had little appetite for luncheon; he seemed to have less. But she remembered that she had never seen him eat very much — and never drink anything stronger than tea.
“At least,” she thought with a mental quiver, “he has that to his credit.”
The quiver surprised her; she was scarcely prepared for any emotion concerning him except the natural shock of disillusion and the natural pity of a young girl for anything ignoble and hopelessly unworthy.
Hopelessly? She wondered. Was it possible that God could ever find the means of grace for such a man? It could be done, of course; it were a sin for her to doubt it. Yet she could not see how.
Still, he was young enough to have parents living somew
here; unmarred enough to invite confidence if he cared to. . . . And suddenly it struck her that to invite confidence was part of his business; his charm part of his terrible equipment.
She sat there breathing faster, thinking.
His charm was part of his equipment — an infernal weapon! She understood it now. Long since, innocently speculating, she had from the very beginning and without even thinking, conceded to him her confidence in his worthiness. And — the man was a gambler!
For a few moments she hated him hotly. After a while there was more sorrow than heat in her hatred, more contempt for his profession than for him. . . . And somebody had led him astray; that was certain, because no man of his age — and appearance — could have deliberately and of his own initiative gone so dreadfully and cruelly wrong in the world.
Would God pity him? Would some means be found for his salvation? Would salvation come? It must; she could not doubt it — after she had lifted her eyes once more and looked at him where he sat immersed in his newspaper, a pleasant smile on his lips.
A bar of sunlight fell across his head, striping his shoulder; the scarlet flowers on the table were becoming to him. And, oh! he seemed so harmless — so delightfully decent; there where the sunlight fell across his shoulder and spread in a golden net across the white cloth under his elbows.
She rose, curiously weary; a lassitude lay upon her as she left the room and went out into the city about her business — which was to see her lawyer concerning the few remaining details of her inheritance.
The inheritance was the big, prosperous Westchester farm where she lived — had always lived with her grandfather since her parents’ death. It was turning out to be very valuable because of the mania of the wealthy for Westchester acreage and a revival in a hundred villages of the magnificence of the old Patroons.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 630