The fierce Sun flames from East to West;
The flower of Love within my breast
Blooms only when the Moon is high
And Thou art nigh.”
The dropping notes of her lute answered her, rippled on, and were lost like a little rill trickling into darkness.
“The Day burns like a Dragon’s flight
Until Thou comest in the night
With thy cool Moon of gold —
Then I unfold.”
A faint stirring of the strings, silence; then she struck with her plectrum the weird opening chord of that sixth century song called “The Night Revel”; and sang to the end the ancient verses set to modern music by an unknown composer:
“Along the River scarlet Lanterns glimmer,
Where gilded Boats and darkling Waters shimmer;
Laughter with Singing blends;
But Love begins and ends
Forever with a sigh —
A whispered sigh.
“In fire-lit pools the crimson Carp are swirling;
The painted peacocks shining plumes are furling;
Now in the torch-light by the Gate
A thousand Lutes begin the Fête
With one triumphant Cry!
Why should Love sigh?”
The curtain slowly closed on the echoes of her lute; there came an interval of absolute silence, then an uproar of cries and of people getting to their feet, calling out: “Go on! Go on! Don’t stop!” No applause except this excited clamour for more, and the racket of moving chairs.
“Good Lord!” muttered Captain Herrendene. “Did you ever see anything as beautiful as that girl?”
And: “Where did she learn such things?” demanded people excitedly of one another. “It must be the real business! How does she know?”
The noise became louder and more emphatic; calls for her reappearance redoubled and persisted until the gong again sounded, the lights went out, and the curtains twitched once more and parted.
She slid down from her cradled perch between the forelegs of the shadowy dragon and came to the edge of the footlights.
“I was going to show you one or two jades from the Desboro collection, and tell you a little about them,” she began, “but my lute and I will say for you another song of ancient China, if you like. It was made by Kao-Shih about seven hundred years after the birth of Christ. He was one of the T’ang poets — and not a very cheerful one. This is his song.”
And she recited for them: “There was a king of Liang.”
After that she stepped back; but they would not have it, to the point of enthusiastic rudeness.
She recited for them Mêng Hao-Jan’s “A Friend Expected,” from “The Maker of Moons,” and the quatrains of the lovely, naïve little “Spring Dream,” written by Ts’en-Ts’an in the eighth century.
But they demanded still more. She laid aside her lute and intoned for them the noble lines of China’s most famous writer:
“Thou that hast seen six kingdoms pass away — —”
Then, warming to her audience, and herself thrilled with the spirit of the ancient splendour, she moved forward in her whispering silks, and, slightly bending, her finger lifted like one who hushes children with a magic tale, she spoke to them of Fei-yen, mistress of the Emperor; and told them how T’ai-Chên became an empress; sang for them the song of Yu Lao, the “Song of the Moon Moth”:
“The great Night Moth that bears her name
Is winged in green,
Pale as the June moon’s silver flame
Her silken sheen:
No other flame they know, these twain
Where dark dews rain —
This great Night Moth that bears her name
And my sweet Queen;
So let me light my Lantern flame
And breathe Her name.”
She held her audience in the palm of her smooth little hand; she knew it, and tasted power. She told them of the Blue Mongol’s song, reciting:
“From the Gray Plains I ride,
Where the gray hawks wheel,
In armour of lacquered hide,
Sabre and shield of steel;
The lance in my stirrup rattles,
And the quiver and bow at my back
Clatter! I sing of Battles,
Of Cities put to the sack!
Where is the Lord of the West,
The Golden Emperor’s son?
I swung my Mongol sabre; —
He and the Dead are one.
For the tawny Lion of the Iort
And the Sun of the World are One!”
Then she told them the old Chinese tale called “The Never-Ending Wrong” — the immortal tragedy of that immortal maid, “a reed in motion and a rose in flame,” from where she alights “in the white hibiscus bower” to where “death is drumming at the door” and “ten thousand battle-chariots on the wing” come clashing to a halt; and the trapped King, her lover, sends her forth
“Lily pale,
Between tall avenues of spears, to die.”
And so, amid “the sullen soldiery,” white as a flower, and all alone in soul, she “shines through tall avenues of spears, to die.”
“The King has sought the darkness of his hands,” standing in stricken grief, then turns and gazes at what lies there at his feet amid its scattered
“ — Ornaments of gold,
One with the dust; and none to gather them; —
Hair-pins of jade and many a costly gem,
Kingfishers’ wings and golden beads scarce cold.”
Lingering a moment in the faint reflection of the low-turned footlights, she stood looking out over the silent audience; and perhaps her eyes found what they had been seeking, for she smiled and stepped back as the curtain closed. And no uproar of applause could lure her forth again until the lights had been long blazing and the dancers were whirling over the armoury floor, and she had washed the paint from lid and lip and cheek, and put off her rustling antique silken splendour to bewitch another century scarce begun.
Desboro, waiting at her dressing-room door for her, led her forth.
“You have done so much for me,” he whispered. “Is there anything in all the world I can do for you, Jacqueline?”
She was laughing, flushed by the flattery and compliments from every side, but she heard him; and after a moment her face altered subtly. But she answered lightly:
“Can I ask for more than a dance or two with you? Is not that honour enough?” Her voice was gay and mocking, but the smile had faded from eye and lip; only the curved sweetness of the mouth remained.
They caught the music’s beat and swung away together among the other dancers, he piloting her with great adroitness between the avenues of armoured figures.
When he had the opportunity, he said: “What may I send you that you would care for?”
“Send me?” She laughed lightly again. “Let me see! Well, then, perhaps you may one day send me — send me forth ‘between tall avenues of spears, to die.’”
“What!” he said sharply.
“The song is still ringing in my head — that’s all. Send me any inexpensive thing you wish — a white carnation — I don’t really care—” she looked away from him— “as long as it comes from you.”
CHAPTER X
Desboro’s guests were determined to turn the house out of the windows; its stodgy respectability incited them; every smug, smooth portrait goaded them to unusual effort, and they racked their brains to invent novelties.
On one day they opened all the windows in the disused west wing, flooded the ground floor, hung the great stone room with paper lanterns, and held an ice carnival. As masks and costumes had been made entirely out of paper, there were several startling effects and abrupt retirements to repair damages; but the dancing on skates in the lantern light was very pretty, and even the youth and pride of Westchester found the pace not unsuitably rapid.
On another day, Desboro’s feminine guests sent to town for e
nough green flannel to construct caricatures of hunting coats for everybody.
The remains of a stagnant pack of harriers vegetated on a neighbouring estate; Desboro managed to mount his guests on his own live-stock, including mules, farm horses, polo ponies, and a yoke of oxen; and the county saw a hunting that they were not likely to forget.
Reggie Ledyard was magnificent astride an ox, with a paper megaphone for a hunting horn, rubber boots, and his hastily basted coat split from skirt to collar. The harriers ran wherever they pleased, and the astonished farm mules wouldn’t run at all. There was hysterical excitement when one cotton-tail rabbit was started behind a barn and instantly lost under it.
The hunt dinner was a weird and deafening affair, and the Weber-Field ball costumes unbelievable.
Owing to reaction and exhaustion, repentant girls came to Jacqueline requesting an interim of intellectual recuperation; so she obligingly announced a lecture in the jade room, and talked to them very prettily about jades and porcelains, suiting her words to their intellectual capacity, which could grasp Kang-he porcelains and Celedon and Sang-de-bœuf, but balked at the “three religions,” and found blanc de Chine uninspiring. So she told them about the famille vert and the famille rose; about the K’ang Hsi period, which they liked, and how the imperial kilns at Kiangsi developed the wonderful clair de lune “turquoise blue” and “peach bloom,” for which some of their friends or relatives had paid through their various and assorted noses.
All of this her audience found interesting because they recognised in the exquisite examples from Desboro’s collection, with which Jacqueline illustrated her impromptu lecture, objects both fashionable and expensive; and what is both fashionable and expensive appeals very forcibly to mediocrity.
“I saw a jar like that one at the Clydesdales’,” said Reggie Ledyard, a trifle excited at his own unexpected intelligence. “How much is it worth, Miss Nevers?”
She laughed and looked at the vase between her slender fingers.
“Really,” she said, “it isn’t worth very much. But wealthy people have established fictitious values for many rather crude and commonplace things. If people had the courage to buy only what appealed to them personally, there would be a mighty crash in tumbling values.”
“We’d all wake up and find ourselves stuck,” remarked Van Alstyne, who possessed some pictures which he had come to loathe, but for which he had paid terrific prices. “Jim, do you want to buy any primitives, guaranteed genuine?”
“There’s the thrifty Dutch trader for you,” said Reggie. “I’m loaded with rickety old furniture, too. They got me to furnish my place with antiques! But you don’t see me trying to sell ’em to my host at a house party!”
“Stop your disputing,” said Desboro pleasantly, “and ask Miss Nevers for her professional opinion later. The chances are that you both have been properly stuck, and I never had any sympathy for wealthy ignorance, anyway.”
But Ledyard and Van Alstyne, being very wealthy, became frightfully depressed over the unfeeling jibes of Desboro; and Jacqueline seemed to be by way of acquiring a pair of new clients.
In fact, both young men at various moments approached her on the subject, but Desboro informed them that they might with equal propriety ask a physician to prescribe for them at a dance, and that Miss Nevers’ office was open from nine until five.
“Gad,” remarked Ledyard to Van Alstyne, with increasing respect, “she is some girl, believe me, Stuyve. Only if she ever married up with a man of our kind — good-night! She’d quit him in a week.”
Van Alstyne touched his forehead significantly.
“Sure,” he said. “Nothing doing inside our conks. But why the Lord made her such a peach outside as well as inside is driving me to Jersey! Most of ’em are so awful to look at, don’t y’know. Come on, anyway. I can’t keep away from her.”
“She’s somewhere with the others playing baseball golf,” said Reggie, gloomily, following his friend. “Isn’t it terrible to see a girl in the world like that — apparently created to make some good gink happy — and suddenly find out that she has even more brains than beauty! My God, Stuyve, it’s hard on a man like me.”
“Are you really hard hit?”
“Am I? And how about you?”
“It’s the real thing here,” admitted Van Alstyne. “But what’s the use?”
They agreed that there was no use; but during the dance that evening both young men managed to make their intentions clear to Jacqueline.
Reggie Ledyard had persuaded her to a few minutes’ promenade in the greenhouse; and there, standing amid thickets of spicy carnations, the girl listened to her first proposal from a man of that outer world about which, until a few days ago, she had known nothing.
The boy was not eloquent; he made a clumsy attempt to kiss her and was defeated. He seemed to her very big, and blond, and handsome as he stood there; and she felt a little pity for him, too, partly because his ideas were so few and his vocabulary so limited.
Perplexed, silent, sorry for him, yet still conscious of a little thrill of wonder and content that a man of the outer world had found her eligible, she debated within herself how best to spare him. And, as usual, the truth presented itself to her as the only explanation.
“You see,” she said, lifting her troubled eyes, “I am in love with some one else.”
“Good God!” he muttered. After a silence he said humbly: “Would it be unpardonable if I — would you tell me whether you are engaged?”
She blushed with surprise at the idea.
“Oh, no,” she said, startled. “I — don’t expect to be.”
“What?” he exclaimed incredulously. “Is there a man on earth ass enough not to fall in love with you if you ever condescended to smile at him twice?”
But the ideas which he was evoking seemed to distress her, and she averted her face and stood twisting a long-stemmed carnation with nervous fingers.
Not even to herself, either before or since Desboro’s letter which had revealed him so unmistakably, had the girl ventured in her inmost thoughts to think the things which this big, blond, loutish boy had babbled.
What Desboro was, she understood. She had had the choice of dismissing him from her mind, with scorn and outraged pride as aids to help the sacrifice, or of accepting him as he was — as she knew him to be — for the sake of something about him as yet inexplicable even to herself.
And she had chosen.
But now a man of Desboro’s world had asked her to be his wife. More than that; he had assumed that she was fitted to be the wife of anybody.
They walked back together. She was adorable with him, kind, timidly sympathetic and smilingly silent by turns, venturing even to rally him a little, console him a little, moved by an impulse toward friendship wholly unfeigned.
“All I have to say is,” he muttered, “that you’re a peach and a corker; and I’m going to invent some way of marrying you, even if it lands me in an East Side night-school.”
Even he joined in her gay laughter; and presently Van Alstyne, who had been glowering at them, managed to get her away. But she would have nothing further to do with greenhouses, or dark landings, or libraries; so he asked her bluntly while they were dancing; and she shook her head, and very soon dropped his arm.
There was a bay-window near them; she made a slight gesture of irritation; and there, in the partly curtained seclusion, he learned that she was grateful and happy that he liked her so much; that she liked him very much, but that she loved somebody else.
He took it rather badly at first; she began to understand that few girls would have lightly declined a Van Alstyne; and he was inclined to be patronising, sulky and dignified — an impossible combination — for it ditched him finally, and left him kissing her hands and declaring constancy eternal.
That night, at parting, Desboro retained her offered hand a trifle longer than convention required, and looked at her more curiously than usual.
“Are you enjoying the part
y, Jacqueline?”
“Every minute of it. I have never been as happy.”
“I suppose you realise that everybody is quite mad about you.”
“Everybody is nice to me! People are so much kinder than I imagined.”
“Are they? How do you get on with the gorgon?”
“Mrs. Hammerton? Do you know she is perfectly sweet? I never dreamed she could be so gentle and thoughtful and considerate. Why — and it seems almost ridiculous to say it — she seems to have the ideas of a mother about whatever concerns me. She actually fusses over me sometimes — and — it is — agreeable.”
An inexplicable shyness suddenly overcame her, and she said good-night hastily, and mounted the stairs to her room.
Later, when she was prepared for bed, Mrs. Hammerton knocked and came in.
“Jacqueline,” she said bluntly, “what was Reggie Ledyard saying to you this evening? I’ll box his ears if he proposed to you. Did he?”
“I — I am afraid he did.”
“You didn’t take him?”
“No.”
“I should think not! I’d as soon expect you to marry a stable groom. He has all the beauty and healthy colour of one. Also the distinguished mental capacity. You don’t want that kind.”
“I don’t want any kind.”
“I’m glad of it. Did any other fool hint anything more of that sort?”
“Mr. Van Alstyne.”
“Oho! Stuyvesant, too? Well, what did you say to him?” asked the old lady, with animation.
“I said no.”
“What?”
“Of course, I said no. I am not in love with Mr. Van Alstyne.”
“Child! Do you realise that you had the opportunity of your life!”
Jacqueline’s smile was confused and deprecating.
“But when a girl doesn’t care for a man — —”
“Do you mean to marry for love?”
The girl sat silent a moment, then shook her head.
“I shall not marry,” she said.
“Nonsense! And if you feel that way, what am I good for? What earthly use am I to you? Will you kindly inform me?”
She had seated herself on the bed’s edge, leaning over the girl where she lay on her pillows.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 649