Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “‘Boots!’ Here!”

  “Arrived from Manila Sunday. Sans gêne as usual he introduced you as the subject, and told me — oh, dozens of things about you. I suppose he began inquiring for you before he crossed the troopers’ gangplank; and somebody sent him to Neergard & Co. Haven’t you seen him?”

  “No,” he said, staring at the brilliant fish, which glided along the crystal tank, goggling their eyes at the lights.

  “You — you are living with the Gerards, I believe,” she said carelessly.

  “For a while.”

  “Oh, ‘Boots’ says that he is expecting to take an apartment with you somewhere.”

  “What! Has ‘Boots’ resigned?”

  “So he says. He told me that you had resigned. I did not understand that; I imagined you were here on leave until I heard about Neergard & Co.”

  “Do you suppose I could have remained in the service?” he demanded. His voice was dry and almost accentless.

  “Why not?” she returned, paling.

  “You may answer that question more pleasantly than I can.”

  She usually avoided champagne; but she had to do something for herself now. As for him, he took what was offered without noticing what he took, and grew whiter and whiter; but a fixed glow gradually appeared and remained on her cheeks; courage, impatience, a sudden anger at the forced conditions steadied her nerves.

  “Will you please prove equal to the situation?” she said under her breath, but with a charming smile. “Do you know you are scowling? These people here are ready to laugh; and I’d much prefer that they tear us to rags on suspicion of our over-friendliness.”

  “Who is that fool woman who is monopolising your partner?”

  “Rosamund Fane; she’s doing it on purpose. You must try to smile now and then.”

  “My face is stiff with grinning,” he said, “but I’ll do what I can for you—”

  “Please include yourself, too.”

  “Oh, I can stand their opinions,” he said; “I only meet the yellow sort occasionally; I don’t herd with them.”

  “I do, thank you.”

  “How do you like them? What is your opinion of the yellow set? Here they sit all about you — the Phoenix Mottlys, Mrs. Delmour-Carnes yonder, the Draymores, the Orchils, the Vendenning lady, the Lawns of Westlawn—” he paused, then deliberately— “and the ‘Jack’ Ruthvens. I forgot, Alixe, that you are now perfectly equipped to carry aloft the golden hod.”

  “Go on,” she said, drawing a deep breath, but the fixed smile never altered.

  “No,” he said; “I can’t talk. I thought I could, but I can’t. Take that boy away from Mrs. Fane as soon as you can.”

  “I can’t yet. You must go on. I ask your aid to carry this thing through. I — I am afraid of their ridicule. Could you try to help me a little?”

  “If you put it that way, of course.” And, after a silence, “What am I to say? What in God’s name shall I say to you, Alixe?”

  “Anything bitter — as long as you control your voice and features. Try to smile at me when you speak, Philip.”

  “All right. I have no reason to be bitter, anyway,” he said; “and every reason to be otherwise.”

  “That is not true. You tell me that I have ruined your career in the army. I did not know I was doing it. Can you believe me?”

  And, as he made no response: “I did not dream you would have to resign. Do you believe me?”

  “There is no choice,” he said coldly. “Drop the subject!”

  “That is brutal. I never thought—” She forced a smile and drew her glass toward her. The straw-tinted wine slopped over and frothed on the white skin of her arm.

  “Well,” she breathed, “this ghastly dinner is nearly ended.”

  He nodded pleasantly.

  “And — Phil?” — a bit tremulous.

  “What?”

  “Was it all my fault? I mean in the beginning? I’ve wanted to ask you that — to know your view of it. Was it?”

  “No. It was mine, most of it.”

  “Not all — not half! We did not know how; that is the wretched explanation of it all.”

  “And we could never have learned; that’s the rest of the answer. But the fault is not there.”

  “I know; ‘better to bear the ills we have.’”

  “Yes; more respectable to bear them. Let us drop this in decency’s name, Alixe!”

  After a silence, she began: “One more thing — I must know it; and I am going to ask you — if I may. Shall I?”

  He smiled cordially, and she laughed as though confiding a delightful bit of news to him:

  “Do you regard me as sufficiently important to dislike me?”

  “I do not — dislike you.”

  “Is it stronger than dislike, Phil?”

  “Y-es.”

  “Contempt?”

  “No.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is that — I have not yet — become — reconciled.”

  “To my — folly?”

  “To mine.”

  She strove to laugh lightly, and failing, raised her glass to her lips again.

  “Now you know,” he said, pitching his tones still lower. “I am glad after all that we have had this plain understanding. I have never felt unkindly toward you. I can’t. What you did I might have prevented had I known enough; but I cannot help it now; nor can you if you would.”

  “If I would,” she repeated gaily — for the people opposite were staring.

  “We are done for,” he said, nodding carelessly to a servant to refill his glass; “and I abide by conditions because I choose to; not,” he added contemptuously, “because a complacent law has tethered you to — to the thing that has crawled up on your knees to have its ears rubbed.”

  The level insult to her husband stunned her; she sat there, upright, the white smile stamped on her stiffened lips, fingers tightening about the stem of her wine-glass.

  He began to toss bread crumbs to the scarlet fish, laughing to himself in an ugly way. “I wish to punish you? Why, Alixe, only look at him! — Look at his gold wristlets; listen to his simper, his lisp. Little girl — oh, little girl, what have you done to yourself? — for you have done nothing to me, child, that can match it in sheer atrocity!”

  Her colour was long in returning.

  “Philip,” she said unsteadily, “I don’t think I can stand this—”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I am too close to the wall. I—”

  “Talk to Scott Innis. Take him away from Rosamund Fane; that will tide you over. Or feed those fool fish; like this! Look how they rush and flap and spatter! That’s amusing, isn’t it — for people with the intellects of canaries. . . . Will you please try to say something? Mrs. T. West is exhibiting the restless symptoms of a hen turkey at sundown and we’ll all go to roost in another minute. . . . Don’t shiver that way!”

  “I c-can’t control it; I will in a moment. . . . Give me a chance; talk to me, Phil.”

  “Certainly. The season has been unusually gay and the opera most stupidly brilliant; stocks continue to fluctuate; another old woman was tossed and gored by a mad motor this morning. . . . More time, Alixe? . . . With pleasure; Mrs. Vendenning has bought a third-rate castle in Wales; a man was found dead with a copy of the Tribune in his pocket — the verdict being in accordance with fact; the Panama Canal—”

  But it was over at last; a flurry of sweeping skirts; ranks of black and white in escort to the passage of the fluttering silken procession.

  “Good-bye,” she said; “I am not staying for the dance.”

  “Good-bye,” he said pleasantly; “I wish you better fortune for the future. I’m sorry I was rough.”

  He was not staying, either. A dull excitement possessed him, resembling suspense — as though he were awaiting a dénouement; as though there was yet some crisis to come.

  Several men leaned forward to talk to him; he heard without heeding, replied at hazard, lighte
d his cigar with the others, and leaned back, his coffee before him — a smiling, attractive young fellow, apparently in lazy enjoyment of the time and place and without one care in the world he found so pleasant.

  For a while his mind seemed to be absolutely blank; voices were voices only; he saw lights, and figures moving through a void. Then reality took shape sharply; and his pulses began again hammering out the irregular measure of suspense, though what it was that he was awaiting, what expecting, Heaven alone knew.

  And after a while he found himself in the ballroom.

  The younger set was arriving; he recognised several youthful people, friends of Eileen Erroll; and taking his bearings among these bright, fresh faces — amid this animated throng, constantly increased by the arrival of others, he started to find his hostess, now lost to sight in the breezy circle of silk and lace setting in from the stairs.

  He heard names announced which meant nothing to him, which stirred no memory; names which sounded vaguely familiar; names which caused him to turn quickly — but seldom were the faces as familiar as the names.

  He said to a girl, behind whose chair he was standing: “All the younger brothers and sisters are coming here to confound me; I hear a Miss Innis announced, but it turns out to be her younger sister—”

  “By the way, do you know my name?” she asked.

  “No,” he said frankly, “do you know mine?”

  “Of course, I do; I listened breathlessly when somebody presented you wholesale at your sister’s the other day. I’m Rosamund Fane. You might as well be instructed because you’re to take me in at the Orchils’ next Thursday night, I believe.”

  “Rosamund Fane,” he repeated coolly. “I wonder how we’ve avoided each other so consistently this winter? I never before had a good view of you, though I heard you talking to young Innis at dinner. And yet,” he added, smiling, “if I had been instructed to look around and select somebody named Rosamund, I certainly should have decided on you.”

  “A compliment?” she asked, raising her delicate eyebrows.

  “Ask yourself,” he said.

  “I do; and I get snubbed.”

  And, smiling still, he said: “Do you know the most mischievous air that Schubert ever worried us with?”

  “‘Rosamund,’” she said; “and — thank you, Captain Selwyn.” She had coloured to the hair.

  “‘Rosamund,’” he nodded carelessly— “the most mischievous of melodies—” He stopped short, then coolly resumed: “That mischievous quality is largely a matter of accident, I fancy. Schubert never meant that ‘Rosamund’ should interfere with anybody’s business.”

  “And — when did you first encounter the malice in ‘Rosamund,’ Captain Selwyn?” she asked with perfect self-possession.

  He did not answer immediately; his smile had died out. Then: “The first time I really understood ‘Rosamund’ was when I heard Rosamund during a very delightful dinner.”

  She said: “If a woman keeps at a man long enough she’ll extract compliments or yawns.” And looking up at a chinless young man who had halted near her: “George, Captain Selwyn has acquired such a charmingly Oriental fluency during his residence in the East that I thought — if you ever desired to travel again—” She shrugged, and, glancing at Selwyn: “Have you met my husband? Oh, of course.”

  They exchanged a commonplace or two, then other people separated them without resistance on their part. And Selwyn found himself drifting, mildly interested in the vapid exchange of civilities which cost nobody a mental effort.

  His sister, he had once thought, was certainly the most delightfully youthful matron in New York. But now he made an exception of Mrs. Fane; Rosamund Fane was much younger — must have been younger, for she still had something of that volatile freshness — that vague atmosphere of immaturity clinging to her like a perfume almost too delicate to detect. And under that the most profound capacity for mischief he had ever known of. Sauntering amiably amid the glittering groups continually forming and disintegrating under the clustered lights, he finally succeeded in reaching his hostess.

  And Mrs. T. West Minster disengaged herself from the throng with intention as he approached.

  No — and he was so sorry; and it was very amiable of his hostess to want him, but he was not remaining for the dance.

  So much for the hostess, who stood there massive and gem-laden, her kindly and painted features tinted now with genuine emotion.

  “Je m’accuse, mon fils! — but you acted like a perfect dear,” she said. “Mea culpa, mea culpa; and can you forgive a very much mortified old lady who is really and truly fond of you?”

  He laughed, holding her fat, ringed hands in both of his with all the attractive deference that explained his popularity. Rising excitement had sent the colour into his face and cleared his pleasant gray eyes; and he looked very young and handsome, his broad shoulders bent a trifle before the enamelled and bejewelled matron.

  “Forgive you?” he repeated with a laugh of protest; “on the contrary, I thank you. Mrs. Ruthven is one of the most charming women I know, if that is what you mean?”

  Looking after him as he made his way toward the cloak room: “The boy is thoroughbred,” she reflected cynically; “and the only amusement anybody can get out of it will be at my expense! Rosamund is a perfect cat!”

  He had sent for his cab, which, no doubt, was in line somewhere, wedged among the ranks of carriages stretching east and west along the snowy street; and he stood on the thick crimson carpet under the awning while it was being summoned. A few people like himself were not staying for the dance; others who had dined by prearrangement with other hostesses, had now begun to arrive, and the confusion grew as coach and brougham and motor came swaying up through the falling snow to deposit their jewelled cargoes of silks and laces under the vast awning picketed by policemen and lined with fur-swathed grooms and spindle-legged chauffeurs in coats of pony-skin.

  The Cornelius Suydams, emerging from the house, offered Selwyn tonneau room, but he smilingly declined, having a mind for solitude and the Lenox Club. A phalanx of débutantes, opera bound, also left. Then the tide set heavily the other way, and there seemed no end to the line of arriving vehicles and guests, until he heard a name pronounced; a policeman warned back an approaching Fiat; and Selwyn saw Mrs. Ruthven, enveloped in white furs, step from the portal.

  She saw him as he moved back, nodded, passed directly to her brougham, and set foot on the step. Pausing here, she looked about her, right and left, then over her shoulder straight back at Selwyn; and as she stood in silence evidently awaiting him, it became impossible for him any longer to misunderstand without a public affront to her.

  When he started toward her she spoke to her maid, and the latter moved aside with a word to the groom in waiting.

  “My maid will dismiss your carriage,” she said pleasantly when he halted beside her. “There is one thing more which I must say to you.”

  Was this what he had expected hazard might bring to him? — was this the prophecy of his hammering pulses?

  “Please hurry before people come out,” she added, and entered the brougham.

  “I can’t do this,” he muttered.

  “I’ve sent away my maid,” she said. “Nobody has noticed; those are servants out there. Will you please come before anybody arriving or departing does notice?”

  And, as he did not move: “Are you going to make me conspicuous by this humiliation before servants?”

  He said something between his set teeth and entered the brougham.

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” he demanded harshly.

  “Yes; nothing yet. But you would have done enough to stir this borough if you had delayed another second.”

  “Your maid saw—”

  “My maid is my maid.”

  He leaned back in his corner, gray eyes narrowing.

  “Naturally,” he said, “you are the one to be considered, not the man in the case.”

  “Thank you. Are you the ma
n in the case?”

  “There is no case,” he said coolly.

  “Then why worry about me?”

  He folded his arms, sullenly at bay; yet had no premonition of what to expect from her.

  “You were very brutal to me,” she said at length.

  “I know it; and I did not intend to be. The words came.”

  “You had me at your mercy; and showed me little — a very little at first. Afterward, none.”

  “The words came,” he repeated; “I’m sick with self-contempt, I tell you.”

  She set her white-gloved elbow on the window sill and rested her chin in her palm.

  “That — money,” she said with an effort. “You set — some — aside for me.”

  “Half,” he nodded calmly.

  “Why?”

  He was silent.

  “Why? I did not ask for it? There was nothing in the — the legal proceedings to lead you to believe that I desired it; was there?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then,” her breath came unsteadily, “what was there in me to make you think I would accept it?”

  He did not reply.

  “Answer me. This is the time to answer me.”

  “The answer is simple enough,” he said in a low voice. “Together we had made a failure of partnership. When that partnership was dissolved, there remained the joint capital to be divided. And I divided it. Why not?”

  “That capital was yours in the beginning; not mine. What I had of my own you never controlled; and I took it with me when I went.”

  “It was very little,” he said.

  “What of that? Did that concern you? Did you think I would have accepted anything from you? A thousand times I have been on the point of notifying you through attorney that the deposit now standing in my name is at your disposal.”

  “Why didn’t you notify me then?” he asked, reddening to the temples.

  “Because — I did not wish to hurt you — by doing it that way. . . . And I had not the courage to say it kindly over my own signature. That is why, Captain Selwyn.”

  And, as he remained silent: “That is what I had to say; not all — because — I wish to — to thank you for offering it. . . . You did not have very much, either; and you divided what you had. So I thank you — and I return it.”. . . The tension forced her to attempt a laugh. “So we stand once more on equal terms; unless you have anything of mine to return—”