Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  She had forgiven, had tried to readjust herself before her mystic altar. There was nothing else to do. And the awakened woman in her aided her and taught her, inspiring, exciting her with a knowledge new to her, the knowledge of her power.

  Then, as she sat there looking at this man and at the brown-eyed girl beside him, suddenly she experienced a subtle sense of fear: fear of what? She did not know, did not ask herself. Not even the apprehension, the dread of parting with him had made her afraid; not even the certainty that he was going to join his regiment had aroused in her more than a sense of impending loneliness.

  But something was waking it now — something that pierced her through and through: and she caught her breath sharply, like a child who has been startled.

  For the first time in her life the sense of possession had been aroused in her, and with it the subtle instinct to defend what was her own.

  She looked very intensely at the brown eyes of the young girl who stood laughing and gossiping there with the man she did not know how to answer — the man with whom she did not know what to do. But every instinct in her was alert to place upon this man the unmistakable sign of ownership. He was hers, no matter what she might do with him.

  To Darrel, trying to converse with her, she replied smilingly, mechanically; but her small ears were ringing with the gay laughter of Valentine and the quick, smiling responses of Guild as they stood with their heads together over the contents of the fly-book, consulting, advising, and selecting the most likely and murderous lures.

  Neither of them glanced in her direction; apparently they were most happily absorbed in this brand new friendship of theirs.

  Very slowly and thoughtfully Karen’s small head sank; and she sat gazing at the brilliant masses of salvia bloom clustering at her feet, silent, overwhelmed under the tremendous knowledge of what had come upon her here in the sunshine of a cloudless sky.

  “Au revoir!” called back Valentine airily; “we shall return before dusk with a dozen very large trout!”

  Guild turned to make his adieux, hat in hand; caught Karen’s eye, nodded pleasantly, and walked away across the lawn, with Valentine close beside him, still discussing and fussing over the cast they had chosen for the trout’s undoing.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE LIAR

  The lamps had not yet been lighted in the big, comfortable living-room and late sunlight striped wall and ceiling with rose where Karen sat sewing, and Darrel, curled up in a vast armchair, frowned over a book. And well he might, for it was a treatise on German art.

  His patience arriving at the vanishing point he started to hurl the book from him, then remembering that it was not his to hurl, slapped it shut.

  Which caused Karen to lift her deep violet eyes inquiringly.

  “Teutonic Kultur! I’ve got its number,” he said. Which observation conveyed no meaning to Karen.

  “German art,” he explained. “It used to be merely ample, adipose, and indigestible. Now the moderns have made it sinister and unclean. The ham-fist has become the mailed fist; the fat and trickling source of Teutonic inspiration has become polluted. There is no decadence more hideous than the brain cancer of a Hercules.”

  Karen followed him with intelligent interest. She said with hesitation: “The moderns, I think, are wandering outside immutable boundaries. Frontiers are eternal. If any mind believes the inclosed territory exhausted, there is nothing further to be found outside in the waste places — only chaos. And the mind must shift to another and totally different pasture — which also has its boundaries eternal and fixed.”

  “Right!” exclaimed Darrel. “No sculptor can find for sculpture any new mode of expression beyond the limits of the materials which have always existed; no painter can wander outside the range of black and white, or beyond the surface allotted him; the composer can express himself in music only within the limits of the audible scale; the writer is a prisoner to grammatical expression, walled always within the margins of the printed page. Outside, as you say, lies chaos, possibly madness. The moderns are roaming there. And some of them are announcing the discovery of German Kultur where they have barked their mental shins in outer darkness.”

  Karen smiled. “It is that way in music I think. The dissonance of mental disturbance warns sanity in almost every bar of modern music. It is that which is so appalling to me, Mr. Darrel — that in some modernism is visible and audible more and more the menace of mental and moral disintegration. And the wholesome shrink from it.”

  Darrel said: “Three insane ‘thinkers’ have led Germany to the brink where she now stands swaying. God help her, in the end, to convalescence—” he stared at the fading sunbeams on the wall, and staring, quoted:

  “‘Over broken oaths and

  Through a sea of blood.’”

  He looked up. “I’m sorry: I forget you are German.”

  “I forget that I am supposed to be, too.... But you have not offended me. I know war is senseless. I know that war will not always be the method used to settle disputes. There will be great changes beginning very soon in the world, I think.”

  “I believe so, too. It will begin by a recognition of the rights of smaller nations to self-government. It will be an area of respect for the weak. Government by consent is not enough; it must become government by request. And the scriptures shall remain no more sacred than the tiniest ‘scrap of paper’ in the archives of the numerically smallest independent community on earth.

  “The era of physical vastness, of spheres of influence, of scope is dying. The supreme wickedness of the world is Force. That must end for nations and for men. Only one conflict remains inevitable and eternal; the battle of minds, which can have no end.”

  For an American and an operator in real estate, Darrel’s philosophy was harmlessly respectable if not very new. But he thought it both new and original, which pleased him intensely.

  As for Karen, she had been thinking of Guild for the last few minutes. Her sewing lay in her lap, her dark, curly head rested in the depths of her arm-chair. Sunlight had almost faded on the wall.

  Through the window she could see the trees. The golden-green depths of the beech-wood were growing dusky. Against the terrace masses of salvia and geraniums glowed like coals on fire. The brown-eyed girl had been away with him a long while.

  Mrs. Courland came in, looking more youthful and pretty than ever, and seated herself with her knitting. The very last ray from the sinking sun fell on her ruddy hair.

  “Think you are right, Harry,” she said quietly to Darrel. “I think we will sail when you do. The men on the place are becoming very much excited over this Uhlan raid on the cattle. I could hear them from my bedroom window out by the winter fold, and they were talking loudly as well as recklessly.”

  “There’s no telling what these forest people may do,” admitted Darrel. “I am immensely relieved to know that you and Valentine are to sail when I do. As for Kervyn Guild—” he made a hopeless gesture— “his mind is made up and that always settles it with him.”

  “He won’t return with you?”

  “No. He’s joining the Belgians.”

  “Really!”

  “Yes. You see his people were Belgian some generations back. It’s a matter of honour with him and argument is wasted. But it hits me pretty hard.”

  “I can understand. He is a most delightful man.”

  “He is as straight and square as he is delightful. His mother is charming; his younger brother is everything you’d expect him to be after knowing Kervyn. Theirs is a very united family, but, do you know I am as certain as I am of anything that his mother absolutely approves of what he is about to do. She is that sort. It may kill her, but she’ll die smiling.”

  Mrs. Courland’s serious, sweet eyes rested on him, solemn with sympathy for the mother she had never met.

  “The horrid thing about it all,” continued Darrel, “is that Kervyn is one man in a million; — and in a more terrible sense that is all he can be in this frightful and e
ndless slaughter which they no longer even pretend to call one battle or many.

  “He’s a drop in an ocean, only another cipher in the trenches where hell’s hail rains day and night, day and night, beating out lives without distinction, without the intelligence of choice — just raining, raining, and beating out life!... I can scarcely endure the thought of Kervyn ending that way — such a man — my friend — —”

  His voice seemed hoarse and he got up abruptly and walked to the window.

  Ashes of roses lingered in the west; the forest was calm; not a leaf stirred in the lilac-tinted dusk.

  Karen, who had been listening, stirred in the depths of her chair and clasped her fingers over her sewing.

  Mrs. Courland said quietly:

  “It is pleasant for any woman to have known such a man as Mr. Guild.”

  “Yes,” said Karen.

  “If the charm of his personality so impresses us who have known him only a very little while, I am thinking what those who are near and dear to him must feel.”

  “I, too,” said Karen, faintly.

  “Yet she loves him best who would not have it otherwise it seems.”

  “Yes; he must go,” said Karen. “Some could not have it — otherwise.”

  A man came to light the lamps. And a little while after they were lighted Mrs. Courland quietly looked up from her knitting. One swift, clear glance she gave; saw in the young girl’s eyes what she had already divined must be there. Then bent again above her ivory needles. After a while she sighed, very lightly.

  “They’re late,” remarked Darrel from the window.

  “They are probably strolling up the drive; Valentine knows enough not to get lost,” said her mother.

  After a few moments Karen said: “Would my playing disturb you?”

  “No, dear. Please!”

  So Karen rose and walked to the piano. Presently Darrel turned and seated himself to listen to the deathless sanity of Beethoven flowing from the keys under a young girl’s slender fingers.

  She was still seated there when Valentine came in, and turned her head from the keyboard, stilling the soft chords.

  “We had such a good time,” said Valentine. “We caught half a dozen trout, and then I took him to the Pulpit where we sat down and remained very quiet; and just at sunset three boar came out to feed on the oak mast; and he said that one of them was worth shooting!”

  “You evidently have had a good time,” said Darrel, smiling. “What happened to Guild. Did the boar tree him?”

  “I think he’d be more likely to tree the boar,” remarked the girl. And to her mother she said: “He went on toward the winter fold to talk to Michaud who has just returned from Trois Fontaines. There were a lot of men there, ours and a number of strangers. So I left him to talk to Michaud. What have you all been doing this afternoon?” turning to Karen, and from her, involuntarily to Darrel.

  “Miss Girard and I have conversed philosophically and satisfactorily concerning everything on earth,” he said. “I wish my conversations with you were half as satisfactory.”

  Valentine laughed, but there was a slight flush on her cheeks, and again she glanced at Karen, whose lovely profile only was visible where she bent in silence above the keyboard.

  “Your mother,” remarked Darrel, “has decided to sail with me. Would you condescend to join us, Valentine?”

  “Mother, are you really going back when Harry sails?”

  “Yes. I don’t quite like the attitude of the men here. And Harry thinks there is very likely to be trouble between them and the Germans across the border.”

  The girl looked thoughtfully at her mother, then at Darrel, rather anxiously.

  “Mother,” she said, “I think it is a good idea to get Harry out of the country. He is very bad-tempered, and if the Germans come here and are impudent to us he’ll certainly get himself shot!”

  “I! I haven’t the courage of a caterpillar!” protested Darrel.

  “You’re the worst fibber in the Ardennes! You did kill that grey boar this morning! What do you mean by telling us that you went up a tree! Maxl, the garde-de-chasse at the Silverwiltz gate, heard your shot and came up. And you told him to dress the boar and send a cart for it. Which he did! — you senseless prevaricator!”

  “Oh, my!” said Darrel meekly.

  “And you’re wearing a bandage below your knee where the boar bit you when you gave him the coup-de-grâce! Maxl washed and bound it for you! What a liar you are, Harry! Does it hurt?”

  “To be a liar?”

  “No! where you were tusked?”

  “Maxl was stringing you, fair maid,” he said lightly.

  “He wasn’t! You walk lame!”

  “Laziness and gout account for that débutante slouch of mine. But of course if you care to hold my hand — —”

  The girl looked at him, vexed, yet laughing:

  “I don’t want people who do not know you to think you really are the dub you pretend to be! Do you wish Miss Girard to believe it?”

  “Truth is mighty and must — —”

  “I know more about you than you think I do, Harry. Mr. Guild portrayed for me a few instances of your ‘mouse’-like courage. And I don’t wish you to lose your temper and be shot if the Uhlans ride into Lesse and insult us all! Therefore I approve of our sailing for home. And the sooner the better!”

  “You frighten me,” he said; “I think I’ll ask Jean to pack my things now.” And he got up, limping, and started for the door.

  “Mother,” she said, “that boar’s tusks may poison him. Won’t you make him let us bandage it properly?”

  “I think you had better, Harry,” said Mrs. Courland, rising.

  “Oh, no; it’s all right — —”

  “Harry!” That was all Valentine said. But he stopped short.

  “Take his other arm, mother,” said the girl with decision.

  She looked over her shoulder at Karen; the two young girls exchanged a smile; then Valentine marched off with her colossal liar.

  CHAPTER XX

  BEFORE DINNER

  Michaud, head forester, had taken off his grey felt hat respectfully when Valentine introduced him to Guild, there in the lantern light of the winter sheep fold. A dozen or more men standing near by in shadowy groups had silently uncovered at the same time. Two wise-looking sheep dogs, squatted on their haunches, looked at him.

  Then the girl had left Guild there and returned to the house.

  “I should like to have a few moments quiet conversation with you,” said Guild; and the stalwart, white-haired forester stepped quietly aside with him, following the younger man until they were out of earshot of those gathered by the barred gate of the fold.

  “You are Belgian?” inquired Guild pleasantly.

  “De Trois Fontaines, monsieur.”

  It was a characteristic reply. A Belgian does not call himself a Belgian. Always he designates his nationality by naming his birthplace — as though the world must know that it is in Belgium.

  “And those people over there by the sheep fold?” asked Guild.

  “Our men — some of them — from Ixl, from the Black Erenz and the White, from Lesse — one from Liège. And there is one, a stranger.”

  “From where?”

  “Moresnet.”

  “Has he any political opinions?”

  “He says his heart is with us. It is mostly that way in Moresnet.”

  “In Moresnet ten per cent of the people are Germans in sympathy,” remarked Guild. “What is this man? A miner?”

  “A charcoal burner.”

  “Does he seem honest?”

  “Yes, Monsieur,” said the honest forester, simply.

  Guild laid one hand on the man’s broad shoulder:

  “Michaud,” he said quietly, “I know I am among friends if you say I am. I mean friends to Belgium.”

  The dark eyes of the tall forester seemed to emit a sudden sparkle in the dusk.

  “Monsieur is American?”

&
nbsp; “Yes. My grandfather was Belgian.”

  “Monsieur is a friend?”

  “Michaud, my name, in America is Guild. My name in Belgian is Kervyn Gueldres. Judge, then, whether I am a friend to your country and your king.”

  “Gueldres!” whispered the forester, rigid. “Kervyn of Gueldres, Comte d’Yvoir, Hastiere — —”

  “It is so written on the rolls of the Guides.”

  “Monsieur le Comte has served!”

  “Two years with the colours. I am here to report for duty. Do you feel safe to trust me now, Michaud, my friend?”

  The tall, straight forester uncovered. “Trust a Gueldres! My God!”

  “Put on your hat,” said Guild, bluntly, “I am American when I deal with men!”

  “Monsieur le Comte — —”

  “‘Monsieur’ will do. Give me your hand! That is as it should be. We understand each other I think. Now tell me very clearly exactly what happened this morning on the hill meadows of the Paillard estate.”

  “Monsieur le — —”

  “Please remember!”

  “Pardon! Monsieur Guild, the Grey Uhlans rode over the border and laughed at the gendarme on duty. Straight they made for our hill meadows, riding at ease and putting their horses to the hedges. Schultz, our herdsman, saw them trotting like wolves of the Black Erenz, ran to the wooden fence to close the gate, but their lances rattling on the pickets frightened him.

  “They herded the cattle while their officers sat looking on by the summer fold.

  “‘Do not these cattle and sheep belong to the Paillard estate?’ asks one of the officers of Schultz. And, ‘Very well then!’ says he; ‘we are liquidating an old account with Monsieur Paillard!’

  “And with that a company of the Grey Ones canters away across the valley and up the slope beyond where our shepherd, Jean Pascal, is sitting with his two dogs.

  “‘You, there!’ they call out to him. ‘Send out your dogs and herd your sheep!’ And, when he only gapes at them, one of their riders wheels on him, twirling his lance and shoves him with the counter-balance.

  “So they make him drive his flock for them across the valley, and then over the border — all the way on foot, Monsieur; and then they tell him to loiter no more but to go about his business.