Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “While I’m still sane,” he said with a dry catch in his throat, “before I tell you that I love you, look at me.”

  “I will, if you wish,” she said with a trembling smile, “but it is useless—”

  “That is what I shall find out in time.... You must meet my eyes. That is well; that is frank and sweet—”

  “And useless — truly it is.... Please don’t tell me — anything.”

  “You will not listen?”

  “There is no chance for you — if you mean love. I — I tell you in time, you see.... I am utterly frivolous — quite selfish and mercenary.”

  “I take my chance!”

  “No, I give you none! Why do you interfere! A — a girl’s policy costs her something if it be worth anything; whatever it costs it is worth it to me.... And I do not love you. In so short a time how could I?”

  Then in his arms she fell a-trembling. Something blinded her eyes, and she turned her head sharply, only to encounter his lips on hers in a deep, clinging embrace that left her dazed, still resisting with the fragments of breath and voice.

  “Not again — I beg — you. Let me go now. It is not best. Oh! truly, truly it is all wrong with us now.” She bent her head, blinded with tears, swaying, stunned; then, with a breathless sound, turned in his arms to meet his lips, her hands contracting in his; and, confronting, they paused, suspending the crisis, young faces close, and hearts afire.

  “Sylvia, I love you.”

  For an instant their lips clung; she had rendered him his kiss. Then, tremblingly, “It is useless... even though I loved you.”

  “Say it!”

  “I do.”

  “Say it!”

  “I — I cannot!... And it is no use — no use! I do not know myself — this way. My eyes — are wet. It is not like me; there is nothing of me in this girl you hold so closely, so confidently.... I do care for you — how can I help it? How could any woman help it? Is not that enough?”

  “Until you are a bride, yes.”

  “A bride? Stephen! — I cannot—”

  “You cannot help it, Sylvia.”

  “I must! I have my way to go.”

  “My way lies that way.”

  “No! no! I cannot do it; it is not best for me — not best for you.... I do care for you; you have taught me how to say it. But — you know what I have done — and mean to do, and must carry through. Then, how can you love a girl like that?”

  “Dear, I know the woman I love.”

  “Silly, she is what her life has made her — material, passionately selfish, unable to renounce the root of all evil.... Even if this — this happiness were ours always — I mean, if this madness could last our wedded life — I am not good enough, not noble enough, to forget what I might have had, and put away.... Is it not dreadful to admit it? Do you not know that self-contempt is part of the price?... I have no money. I know what you have.... I asked. And it is enough for a man who remains unmarried.... For I cannot ‘make things do’; I cannot ‘contrive’; I will not cling to the fringe of things, or play that heartbreaking rôle of the shabby expatriated on the Continent.... No person in this world ever had enough. I tell you I could find use for every flake of metal ever mined!... You see you do not know me. From my pretty face and figure you misjudge me. I am intelligent — not intellectual, though I might have been, might even be yet. I am cultivated, not learned; though I care for learning — or might, if I had time.... My rôle in life is to mount to a security too high for any question as to my dominance.... Can you take me there?”

  “There are other heights, Sylvia.”

  “Higher?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “The spiritual; I know. I could not breathe there, if I cared to climb. ...And I have told you what I am — all silk and lace and smooth-skinned selfishness.” She looked at him wistfully. “If you can change me, take me.” And she rose, facing him.

  “I do not give you up,” he said, with a savage note hardening his voice; and it thrilled her to hear it, and every drop of blood in her body leaped as she yielded to his arms again, heavy-lidded, trembling, confused, under the piercing sweetness of contact.

  The perfume of her mouth, her hair, the consenting fingers locked in his, palm against palm, the lips, acquiescent, then afire at last, responsive to his own; and her eyes opening from the dream under the white lids — these were what he had of her till every vein in him pulsed flame. Then her voice, broken, breathless:

  “Good night. Love me while you can — and forgive me!... Good night.... Where are we? All — all this must have stunned me, blinded me.... Is this my door, or yours? Hush! I am half dead with fear — to be here under the light again.... If you take me again, my knees will give way.... And I must find my door. Oh, the ghastly imprudence of it!... Good night... good night. I — I love you!”

  CHAPTER VI MODUS VIVENDI

  After the first few days of his arrival at Shotover time had threatened to hang heavily on Mortimer’s mottled hands. After the second day afield he recognised that his shooting career was practically over; he had become too bulky during the last year to endure the physical exertion; his habits, too, had at length made traitors of his eyes; a half hour’s snipe-shooting in the sun, and the veins in his neck swelled ominously. Panting, eyes inflamed, fat arms wobbly, he had scored miss after miss, and laboured onward, sullenly persistent to the end. But it was the end. That cup day finished him; he recognised that he was done for. And, following the Law of Pleasure, which finishes us before we are finished with it, he did not experience any particular sense of deprivation in the prospect. Only the wholesome dread caging. But Mortimer, not yet done with self-indulgence in more convenient forms, cast about him within his new limits for occupation between those hours consecrated to the rites of the table and the card-room.

  He drove four, but found that it numbed his arms, and that the sea air made him sleepy. Motor-cars agreed with him only when driving with a pretty woman. Forced through ennui to fish off the rocks, he soon tired of the sea-perch and rock-cod and the malodours of periwinkle and clam.

  Then he frankly took to Major Belwether’s sunny side of the gun-room, with illustrated papers and apples and decanter. But Major Belwether, always as careful of his digestion as of his financial secrets, blandly dodged the pressing invitations to rum and confidence, until Mortimer sulkily took up his headquarters in the reading-room, on the chance of his wife’s moving elsewhere. Which she did, unobtrusively carrying Captain Voucher with her in a sudden zeal for billiard practice on rainy mornings now too frequent along the coast.

  Mortimer possessed that mysterious talent, so common among the financially insolvent, for living lavishly on an invisible income. But, plan as he would, he had never been able to increase that income through confidential gossip with men like Quarrier or Belwether, or even Ferrall. What information his pretty wife might have extracted he did not know; her income had never visibly increased above the vanishing point, although, like himself, she denied herself nothing. One short, lively interview with her had been enough to drive all partnership ideas out of his head. If he wanted to learn anything financially advantageous to himself he must do it without her aid; and as he was perpetually in hopes of the friendly hint that never came, he still moused about when opportunity offered; and this also helped to kill time.

  Besides, he was always studying women. Years before, Grace Ferrall had snapped her slim fingers in his face; and here, at Shotover, the field was limited. Mrs. Vendenning had left; Agatha Caithness was still a pale and reticent puzzle; Rena, Katharyn, and Eileen tormented him; Marion Page, coolly au fait, yawned in his face. There remained Sylvia, who, knowing nothing about his species, met him half-way with the sweet and sensitive deference due a somewhat battered and infirm gentleman of forty-eight — until a sleek aside from Major Belwether spoiled everything, as usual, for her, leaving her painfully conscious and perplexed between doubt and disgust.

  Meanwhile, the wealthy master of Black Fells, Beverly P
lank, had found encouragement enough at Shotover to venture on tentative informality. There was no doubt that ultimately he must be counted on in New York; but nobody except him was impatiently cordial for the event; and so, at the little house party, he slipped and slid from every attempt at closer quarters, until, rolling smoothly enough, he landed without much discomfort somewhere between Mr. and Mrs. Leroy Mortimer. And it was not a question as to “which would be good to him,” observed Major Belwether, with his misleading and benevolent mirth; “it was, which would be goodest quickest!”

  And Mrs. Mortimer, abandoning Captain Voucher by the same token, displayed certain warning notices perfectly comprehensive to her husband. And at first he was inclined to recognise defeat.

  But the general insuccess which had so faithfully attended him recently had aroused the long-dormant desire for a general review of the situation with his wife — perhaps even the furtive hope of some conjugal arrangement tending toward an exchange of views concerning possible alliance.

  The evening previous, to his intense disgust, host, hostess, and guests had retired early, in view of the point-shooting at dawn. For not only was there to be no point-shooting for him, but he had risen from the card-table heavily hit; and besides, for the first time his apples and port had disagreed with him.

  As he had not risen until mid-day he was not sleepy. Books were an aversion equalled only by distaste for his own company. Irritated, bored, he had perforce sulkily entered the elevator and passed to his room, where there was nothing on earth for him to do except to thumb over last week’s sporting periodicals and smoke himself stupid.

  But it required more than that to ensnare the goddess of slumber. He walked about the room, haunted of slow thoughts; he stood at the rain-smeared pane, fat fingers resting on the glass. The richly flavoured cigar grew distasteful; and if he could not smoke, what, in pity’s name, was he to do?

  Involuntarily his distended eyes wandered to his wife’s locked and bolted door; then he thought of Beverly Plank, and his own failure to fasten himself upon that anxiously over-cordial individual with his houses and his villas and his yachts and his investments!

  He stepped to the switch and extinguished the lights in his room. Under the door, along the sill, a glimmer came from his wife’s bed-chamber. He listened; the maid was still there; so he sat down in the darkness to wait; and by-and-by he heard the outer bedroom door close, and the subdued rustle of the departing maid.

  Then, turning on his lights, he moved ponderously and jauntily to his wife’s door and knocked discreetly.

  Leila Mortimer came to the door and opened it; her hair was coiled for the night, her pretty figure outlined under a cascade of clinging lace.

  “What is the matter?” she asked quietly.

  “Are you point-shooting to-morrow?”

  “I wanted to chat with you.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m driving to Wenniston, after breakfast, with Beverly Plank, and I need sleep.”

  “I want to talk to you,” he repeated doggedly.

  She regarded him for a moment in silence, then, with an assenting gesture, turned away into her room; and he followed, heavily apprehensive but resolved.

  She had seated herself among a pile of cushions, one knee crossed over the other, her slim white foot half concealed by the silken toe of her slipper. And as he pulled a chair forward for himself, her pretty black eyes, which slanted a little, took his measure and divined trouble.

  “Leila,” he said, “why can’t we have—”

  “A cigarette?” she interrupted, indicating her dainty case on the table.

  He took one, savagely aware of defiance somewhere. She lighted her own from a candle and settled back, studying the sequence of blue smoke-rings jetting upward to the ceiling.

  “About this man Plank,” he began, louder than he had intended through sheer self-mistrust; and his wife made a quick, disdainful sign of caution, which subdued his voice instantly. “Why can’t we take him up — together, Leila?” he ended lamely, furious at his own uneasiness in a matter which might concern him vitally.

  “I see no necessity of your taking him up,” observed his wife serenely. “I can do what may be useful to him in town.”

  “So can I. There are clubs where he ought to be seen—”

  “I can manage such matters much better.”

  “You can’t manage everything,” he insisted sullenly. “There are chances of various sorts—”

  “Investments?” asked Mrs. Mortimer, with bright malice.

  “See here, Leila, you have your own way too much. I say little; I make damned few observations; but I could, if I cared to.... It becomes you to be civil at least. I want to talk over this Plank matter with you; I want you to listen, too.”

  A shade of faint disgust passed over her face. “I am listening,” she said.

  “Well, then, I can see several ways in which the man can be of use to me.... I discovered him before you did, anyway. And what I want to do is to have a frank, honourable—”

  “A — what?”

  “ — An honourable understanding with you, I said,” he repeated, reddening.

  “Oh!” She snapped her cigarette into the grate. “Oh! I see. And what then?”

  “What then?”

  “Yes; what then?”

  “Why, you and I can arrange to stand behind him this winter in town, can’t we?”

  “And then?”

  “Then — damn it! — the beggar can show his gratitude, can’t he?”

  “How?” she asked listlessly.

  “By making good. How else?” he retorted savagely. “He can’t welch because there’s little to climb for beyond us; and even if he climbs, he can’t ignore us. I can do as many things for him in my way as you can in yours. What is the use of being a pig, Leila? Anything he does for me isn’t going to cancel his obligations to you.”

  “I know him better than you do,” she observed, bending her head and pleating the lace on her knee. “There is Dutch blood in him.”

  “Not good Hollander, but common Dutch,” sneered Mortimer. “And you mean he’ll squeeze a dollar till the eagle screams-don’t you?”

  She sat silent, pleating her lace with steady fingers.

  “Well, that’s all right, too,” laughed Mortimer easily; “let the Audubon Society worry over the eagle. It’s a perfectly plain business proposition; we can do for him in a couple of winters what he can’t do for himself in ten. Figure it out for yourself, Leila,” he said, waving a mottled fat hand at her.

  “I — have,” she said under her breath.

  “Then, is it settled?

  “Settled — how?”

  “That we form ourselves into a benevolent society of two in behalf of Plank?”

  “I — I don’t want to, Roy,” she said slowly.

  “Why not?”

  She did not say why not, seated there nervously pleating the fragile stuff clinging to her knee.

  “Why not?” he repeated menacingly. Her unexpectedly quiescent attitude had emboldened him to a bullying tone — something he had not lately ventured on.

  She raised her eyes to his: “I — rather like him,” she said quietly.

  “Then, by God! he’ll pay for that!” he burst out, mask off, every inflamed feature shockingly congested.

  “Roy! You dare not—”

  “I tell you I—”

  “You dare not!”

  The palpitating silence lengthened; slowly the blood left the swollen veins. Heavy pendulous lip hanging, he stared at her from distended eyes, realising that he had forgotten himself. She was right. He dared not. And she held the whip-hand as usual.

  For every suspicion he could entertain, she had evidence of a certainty to match it; for every chance that he might have to prove anything, she had twenty proven facts. And he knew it. Why they had, during all these years, made any outward pretence of conjugal unity they alone knew. The modus vivendi suited them better than divorce: that was apparent, or had been until rec
ently. Recently Leila Mortimer had changed — become subdued and softened to a degree that had perplexed her husband. Her attitude toward him lacked a little of the bitterness and contempt she usually reserved for him in private; she had become more prudent, almost cautious at times.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said with a sudden snarl: “You’d better be careful there is no gossip about you and Plank.”

  She reddened under the insult.

  “Now we’ll see,” he continued venomously, “how far you can go alone.”

  “Do you suppose,” she asked calmly, “that I am afraid of a divorce court?”

  The question so frankly astonished him that he sat agape, unable to reply. For years he had very naturally supposed her to be afraid of it — afraid of not being qualified to obtain it. Indeed, he had taken that for granted as the very corner-stone of their mutual toleration. Had he been an ass to do so? A vague alarm took possession of him; for, with that understanding, he had not been at all careful of his own behaviour, neither had he been at any particular pains to conceal his doings from her. His alarm increased. What had he against her, after all, except ancient suspicions, now so confused and indefinite that memory itself outlawed the case, if it ever really existed. What had she against him? Facts — unless she was more stupid than any of her sex he had ever encountered. And now, this defiance, this increasing prudence, this subtle change in her, began to make him anxious for the permanency of the small income she had allowed him during all these years — doled out to him, as he believed, though her dormant fear of him.

  “What are you talking about?” he said harshly.

  “I believe I mentioned divorce.”

  “Well, cut it out! D’ye see? Cut it, I say. You’d stand as much chance before a referee as a snowball in hell.”

  “There’s no telling,” she said coolly, “until one tries.”

  He glared at her, then burst into a laugh. “Rot!” he said thickly. “Talk sense, Leila! And keep this hard-headed Dutchman for yourself, if you feel that way about it. I don’t want to butt in. I only thought — for old times’ sake — perhaps you’d—”