Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Anything you please, governor,” I said, and read on rapidly until I came to the paragraph concerning Jacqueline:

  ``THE WONDER OF EARTH AND HEAVEN!

  THE UNUTTERABLY BEAUTIFUL FLYING

  MERMAID! CAUGHT ON THE

  COAST OF BRITTANY!

  WHAT IS SHE?

  FISH? BIRD? HUMAN? DIVINE?

  WHO KNOWS?

  THE SCIENTISTS OF FRANCE DO NOT KNOW!!

  THE SCIENTISTS OF THE WORLD

  ARE CONFOUNDED!

  IS SHE

  A LOST SOUL

  FROM THE SUNKEN CITY OF KER-YS?

  50,000 FRANCS REWARD FOR THE BRETON WHO CAN

  PROVE THAT SHE DID NOT COME STRAIGHT FROM

  PARADISE!!!’’

  “That’s a damn good bill,” said Byram, suddenly.

  He was so seldom profane that I stared at him, worried lest his misfortunes had unbalanced him. But a faint, healthy color was already replacing the pallor in his loose cheeks, a glint of animation came into his sunken eyes. He lifted his battered silk hat, replaced it at an angle almost defiant, and scowled at Horan, who passed us sullenly, driving the camel tentwards with awful profanity.

  “Don’t talk such langwidge in my presence, Mr. Horan,” he said, sharply; “a camuel is a camuel, but remember: ‘kind hearts is more than cornets,’ an’ it’s easier for that there camuel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a cussin’ cuss to cuss his way into Kingdom Come!”

  Horan, who had betrayed unmistakable symptoms of insubordination that morning, quailed under the flowing rebuke. He was a man of muscular strength and meagre intellect; words hit him like trip-hammers.

  “Certainly, governor,” he stammered, and spoke to the camel politely, guiding that enraged and squealing quadruped to his manger with a forced smile.

  With mallet, hammer, saw, and screw-driver I worked until noon, maturing my plans all the while. These plans would take the last penny in the treasury and leave us in debt several thousand francs. But it was win or go to smash now, and personally I have always preferred a tremendous smash to a slow and oozy fizzle.

  A big pot of fragrant soup was served to the company at luncheon; and it amused me to see Jacqueline troop into the tent with the others and sit down with her bit of bread and her bowl of broth.

  She was flushed and excited, and she talked to her instructor, Speed, all the while, chattering like a linnet between mouthfuls of bread and broth.

  “How is she getting on?” I called across to Speed.

  “The child is simply startling,” he said, in English. “She is not afraid of anything. She and Miss Crystal have been doing that hair-raising ‘flying swing’ without rehearsal!”

  Jacqueline, hearing us talking in English, turned and stared at me, then smiled and looked up sweetly at Speed.

  “You seem to be popular with your pupil,” I said, laughing.

  “She’s a fine girl — a fine, fearless, straight-up-and-down girl,” he said, with enthusiasm.

  Everybody appeared to like her, though how much that liking might be modified if prosperity returned I was unable to judge.

  Now all our fortunes depended on her. She was not a ballon d’essai; she was literally the whole show; and if she duplicated the sensational success of poor little Miss Claridge, we had nothing to fear. But her troubles would then begin. At present, however, we were waiting for her to pull us out of the hole before we fell upon her and rent her professionally. And I use that “we” not only professionally, but with an attempt at chivalry.

  Byram’s buoyancy had returned in a measure. He sat in his shirt-sleeves at the head of the table, vigorously sopping his tartine in his soup, and, mouth full, leaned forward, chewing and listening to the conversation around him.

  Everybody knew it was life or death now, that each one must drop petty jealousies and work for the common salvation. An artificial and almost feverish animation reigned, which I adroitly fed with alarming allusions to the rigor of the French law toward foreigners and other malefactors who ran into debt to French subjects on the sacred soil of France. And, having lived so long in France and in the French possessions, I was regarded as an oracle of authority by these ambulant professional people who were already deadly homesick, and who, in eighteen months of Europe, had amassed scarcely a dozen French phrases among them all.

  “I’ll say one thing,” observed Byram, with dignity; “if ever I git out of this darn continong with my circus, I’ll recooperate in the undulatin’ medders an’ j’yful vales of the United States. Hereafter that country will continue to remain good enough for me.”

  All applauded — all except Jacqueline, who looked around in astonishment at the proceedings, and only smiled when Speed explained in French.

  “Ask maddermoselle if she’ll go home with us?” prompted Byram. “Tell her there’s millions in it.”

  Speed put the question; Jacqueline listened gravely, hesitated, then whispered to Speed, who reddened a trifle and laughed.

  Everybody waited for a moment. “What does she say?” inquired Byram.

  “Oh, nothing; she talked nonsense.”

  But Jacqueline’s dignity and serene face certainly contradicted Speed’s words.

  Presently Byram arose, flourishing his napkin. “Time’s up!” he said, with decision, and we all trooped off to our appointed labors.

  Now that I had stirred up this beehive and set it swarming again, I had no inclination to turn drone. Yet I remembered my note to the Countess de Vassart and her reply. So about four o’clock I made the best toilet I could in my only other suit of clothes, and walked out of the bustling camp into the square, where the mossy fountain splashed under the oaks and the children of Paradise were playing. Hands joined, they danced in a ring, singing:

  “Barzig ha barzig a Goneri

  Ari e mab roue gand daou pe dri” —

  “Little minstrel-bard of Conéri

  The son of the King has come with two or three —

  Nay, with a whole bright flock of paroquets,

  Crimson, silver, and violet.”

  And the children, in their white coiffes and tiny wooden shoes, moved round and round the circle, in the middle of which a little lad and a little lass of Paradise stood motionless, hand clasping hand.

  The couplet ended, the two children in the middle sprang forward and dragged a third child out of the circle. Then the song began again, the reduced circle dancing around the three children in the middle.

  “ — The son of the King has come with two or three —

  Nay, with a whole bright flock of paroquets,

  Crimson, silver, and violet.”

  It was something like a game I had played long ago — in the age of fable — and I lingered, touched with homesickness.

  The three children in the middle took a fourth comrade from the circle, crying, “Will you go to the moon or will you go to the stars?”

  “The moon,” lisped the little maid, and she was led over to the fountain.

  “The stars,” said the first prisoner, and was conducted to the stone bridge.

  Soon a small company was clustered on the bridge, another band at the fountain. Then, as there were no more to dance in a circle, the lad and lassie who had stood in the middle to choose candidates for the moon and stars clasped hands and danced gayly across the square to the group of expectant children at the fountain, crying:

  “Baradoz! Baradoz!”

  (Paradise! Paradise!)

  and the whole band charged on the little group on the bridge, shouting and laughing, while the unfortunate tenants of the supposed infernal regions fled in every direction, screaming:

  “Pater noster

  Dibi doub!

  Dibi doub!

  Dibi doub!”

  Their shouts and laughter still came faintly from the tree-shaded square as I crossed the bridge and walked out into the moorland toward the sea, where I could see the sun gilding the headland and the spouting-rocks of Point Paradise.

&n
bsp; Over the turning tide cormorants were flying, now wheeling like hawks, now beating seaward in a duck-like flight. I passed little, lonely pools on the moor, from which snipe rose with a startling squak! squak! and darted away inland as though tempest blown.

  Presently a blue-gray mass in mid-ocean caught my eye. It was the island of Groix, and between it and Point Paradise lay an ugly, naked, black shape, motionless, oozing smoke from two stubby funnels — the cruiser Fer-de-Lance! So solidly inert lay the iron-clad that it did not seem as if she had ever moved or ever could move; she looked like an imbedded ledge cropping up out of the sea.

  Far across the hilly moorland the white semaphore glistened like a gull’s wing — too far for me to see the balls and cones hoisted or the bright signals glimmering along the halyards as I followed a trodden path winding south through the gorse. Then a dip in the moorland hid the semaphore and at the same moment brought a house into full view — a large, solid structure of dark stone, heavily Romanesque, walled in by an ancient buttressed barrier, above which I could see the tree-tops of a fruit-garden.

  The Château de Trécourt was a fine example of the so called “fortified farm”; it had its moat, too, and crumbling wing-walls, pierced by loop-holes and over-hung with miniature battlements. A walled and loop-holed passageway connected the house with another stone enclosure in which stood stable, granary, cattle-house, and sheepfold, all of stone, though the roofs of these buildings were either turfed or thatched. And over them the weather-vane, a golden Dorado, swam in the sunshine.

  One thing I noticed as I crossed the unused moat on a permanent bridge: the youthful Countess no longer denied herself the services of servants, for I saw a cloaked shepherd and his two wolf-like and tailless sheep-dogs watching the flock scattered over the downs; and there were at least half a dozen farm servants pottering about from stable to granary, and a toothless porter to answer the gate-bell and pilot me past the tiny loop-holed lodge-turret to the house. There was also a man, lying belly down in the bracken, watching me; and as I walked into the court I tried to remember where I had seen his face before.

  The entire front of the house was covered with those splendid orange-tinted tea-roses that I had noticed in Paradise; thicket on thicket of clove-scented pinks choked the flower-beds; and a broad mat of deep-tinted pansies lay on the lawn, spread out for all the world like a glorious Eastern rug.

  There was a soft whirring in the air like the sound of a humming-bird close by; it came from a spinning-wheel, and grew louder as a servant admitted me into the house and guided me to a sunny room facing the fruit garden.

  The spinner at the wheel was singing in an undertone — singing a Breton “gwerz,” centuries old, retained in memory from generation to generation:

  “Woe to the Maids of Paradise,

  Yvonne!

  Twice have the Saxons landed; twice!

  Yvonne!

  Yet must Paradise see them thrice!

  Yvonne! Yvonne! Marivonik.”

  Old as were the words, the melody was older — so old and quaint and sweet that it seemed a berceuse fashioned to soothe the drowsing centuries, lest the memories of ancient wrongs awake and rouse the very dead from their Gothic tombs.

  All the sad history of the Breton race was written in every minor note; all the mystery, the gentleness, the faith of the lost people of Armorica.

  And now the singer was intoning the “Gwerz Ar Baradoz” — the “Complaint of Paradise” — a slow, thrilling miséréré, scarcely dominating the velvet whir of the spinning-wheel.

  Suddenly the melody ceased, and a young Bretonne girl appeared in the doorway, courtesying to me and saying in perfect English: “How do you do, Mr. Scarlett; and how do you like my spinning songs, if you please?”

  The girl was Mademoiselle Sylvia Elven, the marvellously clever actress from the Odéon, the same young woman who had played the Alsacienne at La Trappe, as perfectly in voice and costume as she now played the Bretonne.

  “You need not be astonished at all,” she said, calmly, “if you will only reflect that my name is Elven, which is also the name of a Breton town. Naturally, I am a Bretonne from Elven, and my own name is Duhamel — Sylvenne Duhamel. I thought I ought to tell you, so that you would not think me too clever and try to carry me off on your horse again.”

  I laughed uncertainly; clever women who talk cleverly always disturb me. Besides, somehow, I felt she was not speaking the truth, yet I could not imagine why she should lie to me.

  “You were more fluent to the helpless turkey-girl,” she suggested, maliciously.

  I had absolutely nothing to say, which appeared to gratify her, for she dimpled and smiled under her snowy-winged coiffe, from which a thick gold strand of hair curled on her forehead — a sad bit of coquetry in a Bretonne from Elven, if she told the truth.

  “I only came to renew an old and deeply valued friendship,” she said, with mock sentimentality; “I am going back to my flax now.”

  However, she did not move.

  “And, by-the-way,” she said, languidly, “is there in your intellectual circus company a young gentleman whose name is Eyre?”

  “Kelly Eyre? Yes,” I said, sulkily.

  “Ah.”

  She strolled out of the room, hesitated, then turned in the doorway with a charming smile.

  “The Countess will return from her gallop at five.”

  She waited as though expecting an answer, but I only bowed.

  “Would you take a message to Mistaire Kelly Eyre for me?” she asked, sweetly.

  I said that I would.

  “Then please say that: ‘On Sunday the book-stores are closed in Paris.’”

  “Is that what I am to say?”

  “Exactly that.”

  “Very well, mademoiselle.”

  “Of course, if he asks who told you — you may say that it was a Bretonne at Point Paradise.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing, monsieur.”

  She courtesied and vanished.

  “Little minx,” I thought, “what mischief are you preparing now?” and I rested my elbow on the window-sill and gazed out into the garden, where apricot-trees and fig-trees lined the winding walks between beds of old-fashioned herbs, anise, basil, caraway, mint, sage, and saffron.

  Sunlight lay warm on wall and gravel-path; scarlet apples hung aloft on a few young trees; a pair of trim, wary magpies explored the fig-trees, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes making common cause against the shy wild-birds that twittered everywhere among the vines.

  I fancied, after a few moments, that I heard the distant thudding of a horse’s hoofs; soon I was sure of it, and rose to my feet expectantly, just as a flushed young girl in a riding-habit entered the room and gave me her gloved hand.

  Her fresh, breezy beauty astonished me; could this laughing, gray-eyed girl with her silky, copper-tinted hair be the same slender, grave young Countess whom I had known in Alsace — this incarnation of all that is wholesome and sweet and winning in woman? What had become of her mission and the soiled brethren of the proletariat? What had happened?

  I looked at her earnestly, scarcely understanding that she was saying she was glad I had come, that she had waited for me, that she had wanted to see me, that she had wished to tell me how deeply our tragic experience at La Trappe and in Morsbronn had impressed her. She said she had sent a letter to me in Paris which was returned, opened, with a strange note from Monsieur Mornac. She had waited for some word from me, here in Paradise, since September; “waited impatiently,” she added, and a slight frown bent her straight brows for a moment — a moment only.

  “But come out to my garden,” she said, smiling, and stripping off her little buff gauntlets. “There we will have tea a l’Anglaise, and sunshine, and a long, long, satisfying talk; at least I will,” she added, laughing and coloring up; “for truly, Monsieur Scarlett, I do not believe I have given you one second to open your lips.”

  Heaven knows I was perfectly content to watch her lips a
nd listen to the music of her happy, breathless voice without breaking the spell with my own.

  She led the way along a path under the apricots to a seat against a sunny wall, a wall built of massive granite, deeply thatched with fungus and lichens, where, palpitating in the hot sun, the tiny lizards lay glittering, and the scarlet-banded nettle-butterflies flitted and hovered and settled to sun themselves, wings a-droop.

  Here in the sunshine the tea-rose perfume, mingling with the incense of the sea, mounted to my head like the first flush of wine to a man long fasting; or was it the enchantment of her youth and loveliness — the subtle influence of physical vigor and spiritual innocence on a tired, unstrung man?

  “First of all,” she said, impulsively, “I know your life — all of it in minute particular. Are you astonished?”

  “No, madame,” I replied; “Mornac showed you my dossier.”

  “That is true,” she said, with a troubled look of surprise.

  I smiled. “As for Mornac,” I began, but she interrupted me.

  “Ah, Mornac! Do you suppose I believed him? Had I not proof on proof of your loyalty, your honor, your courtesy, your chivalry—”

  “Madame, your generosity — and, I fear, your pity — overpraises.”

  “No, it does not! I know what you are. Mornac cannot make white black! I know what you have been. Mornac could not read you into infamy, even with your dossier under my own eyes!”

  “In my dossier you read a sorry history, madame.”

  “In your dossier I read the tragedy of a gentleman.”

  “Do you know,” said I, “that I am now a performer in a third-rate travelling circus?”

  “I think that is very sad,” she said, sweetly.

  “Sad? Oh no. It is better than the disciplinary battalions of Africa.”

  Which was simply acknowledging that I had served a term in prison.

  The color faded in her face. “I thought you were pardoned.”

  “I was — from prison, not from the battalion of Biribi.”

  “I only know,” she said, “that they say you were not guilty; that they say you faced utter ruin, even the possibility of death, for the sake of another man whose name even the police — even Monsieur de Mornac — could never learn. Was there such a man?”