Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

“It cannot end this way,” she said; “I want you to know how — to know — to know that I — am — sensible of w-what honour you have done me. Wait! I — I can’t let you think that I — do not — care, Mr. Hamil. Believe that I do! — oh, deeply. And forgive me—” She stretched out one hand. He took it, holding it between both of his for a moment, lightly.

  “Is all clear between us, Calypso dear?”

  “It will be — when I have courage to tell you.”

  “Then all’s well with the world — if it’s still under-foot — or somewhere in the vicinity. I’ll find it again; you’ll be good enough to point it out to me, Shiela.... I’ve an engagement to improve a few square miles of it.... That’s what I need — plenty of work — don’t I, Shiela?”

  The clear mellow horn of a motor sounded from the twilit lawn; the others were arriving. He dropped her hand; she gathered her filmy skirts and swiftly mounted the great stairs, leaving him to greet her father and Gray on the terrace.

  “Hello, Hamil!” called out Cardross, senior, from the lawn, “are you game for a crack at the ducks to-morrow? My men report Ruffle Lake full of coots and blue-bills, and there’ll be bigger duck in the West Lagoons.”

  “I’m going too,” said Gray, “also Shiela if she wants to — and four guides and that Seminole, Little Tiger.”

  Hamil glanced restlessly at the forest where his work lay. And he needed it now. But he said pleasantly, “I’ll go if you say so.”

  “Of course I say so,” exclaimed Cardross heartily. “Gray, does Louis Malcourt still wish to go?”

  “He spoke of it last week.”

  “Well, if he hasn’t changed his rather volatile mind telephone for Adams, We’ll require a guide apiece. And he can have that buckskin horse; and tell him to pick out his own gun.” And to Hamil, cordially: “Shiela and Louis and Gray will probably wander about together and you and I will do the real shooting. But Shiela is a shot — if she chooses. Gray would rather capture a scarce jungle butterfly. Hello, here’s Louis now! Are you glad we’re going at last?”

  “Very,” replied Hamil as Malcourt strolled up and airily signified his intention of making one of the party. But as soon as he learned that they might remain away three days or more he laughingly demurred.

  The four men lingered for a few minutes in the hall discussing guns, dogs, and guides; then Hamil mounted the stairs, and Malcourt went with him, talking all the while in that easy, fluent, amusing manner which, if he chose, could be as agreeably graceful as every attitude and movement of his lithe body. His voice, too, had that engagingly caressing quality characteristic of him when in good-humour; he really had little to say to Hamil, but being on such excellent terms with himself he said a great deal about nothing in particular; and as he persistently lingered by Hamil’s door the latter invited him in.

  There Malcourt lit a cigarette, seated lazily astride a chair, arms folded across the back, aimlessly humourous in recounting his adventures at the Ascott function, while Hamil stood with his back to the darkening window, twisting his unlighted cigarette into minute shreds and waiting for him to go.

  “Rather jolly to meet Miss Suydam again,” observed Malcourt. “We were great friends at Portlaw’s camp together two years ago. I believe that you and Miss Suydam are cousins after a fashion.”

  “After a fashion, I believe.”

  “She’s tremendously attractive, Hamil.”

  “What? Oh, yes, very.”

  “Evidently no sentiment lost between you,” laughed the other.

  “No, of course not; no sentiment.”

  Malcourt said carelessly: “I’m riding with Miss Suydam to-morrow. That’s one reason I’m not going on this duck-hunt.”

  Hamil nodded.

  “Another reason,” he continued, intent on the glowing end of his cigarette, “is that I’m rather fortunate at the Club just now — and I don’t care to disturb any run of luck that seems inclined to drift my way. Would you give your luck the double cross?”

  “I suppose not,” said Hamil vaguely— “if I ever had any.”

  “That’s the way I feel. And it’s all kinds of luck that’s chasing me. All kinds, Hamil. One kind, for example, wears hair that matches my cuff-links. Odd, isn’t it?” he added, examining the golden links with a smile.

  Hamil nodded inattentively.

  “I am about seven thousand dollars ahead on the other sort of luck,” observed Malcourt. “If it holds to-night I’ll inaugurate a killing that will astonish the brothers B. yonder. By the way, now that you have your club ticket why don’t you use it? — one way or another.”

  “Perhaps,” replied Hamil listlessly.

  A few minutes later Malcourt, becoming bored, genially took his leave; and Hamil turned on an electric jet and began to undo his collar and tie.

  He was in no hurry; at times he suspended operations to pace aimlessly to and fro; and after a while, half undressed, he dropped into an arm-chair, clinched hands supporting his temples.

  Presently he said aloud to himself: “It’s absolutely impossible. It can’t happen this way. How can it?”

  His heavy pulse answered the question; a tense strain, irksome as an ache, dragged steadily at something within him which resisted; dulling reason and thought.

  For a long time he sat there inert, listening for the sound of her voice which echoed at moments through the stunned silence within him. And at last he stumbled to his feet like a stricken man on the firing line, stupefied that the thing had happened to him; and stood unsteadily, looking around. Then he went heavily about his dressing.

  Later, when he was ready to leave his room, he heard Malcourt walking through the corridor outside — a leisurely and lightly stepping Malcourt, whistling a lively air. And, when Malcourt had passed came Cecile rustling from the western corridor, gay, quick-stepping, her enchanting laughter passing through the corridor like a fresh breeze as she joined Mrs. Carrick on the stairs. Then silence; and he opened his door. And Shiela Cardross, passing noiselessly, turned at the sound.

  His face must have been easy to read for her own promptly lost its colour, and with an involuntary recoil she stepped back against the wall, staring at him in pallid silence.

  “What is the matter?” he asked, scarcely recognising his own voice. And striving to shake off the unreality of it all with a laugh: “You look like some pretty ghost from dreamland — with your white gown and arms and face. Shall we descend into the waking world together?”

  They stood for a moment motionless, looking straight at one another; then the smile died out on his face, but he still strove to speak lightly, using effort, like a man with a dream dark upon him: “I am waiting for your pretty ghostship.”

  Her lips moved in reply; no sound came from them.

  “Are you afraid of me?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Of me, Shiela?”

  “Of us both. You don’t know — you don’t know!”

  “Know what, Shiela?”

  “What I am — what I have done. And I’ve got to tell you.” Her mouth quivered suddenly, and she faced him fighting for self-control. “I’ve got to tell you. Things cannot be left in this way between us. I thought they could, but they can’t.”

  He crossed the corridor, slowly; she straightened up at his approach, white, rigid, breathless.

  “What is it that has frightened you?” he said.

  “What you — said — to me.”

  “That I love you?”

  “Yes; that.”

  “Why should it frighten you?”

  “Must I tell you?”

  “If it will help you.”

  “I am past help. But it will end you’re caring for me. And from making me — care — for you. I must do it; this cannot go on—”

  “Shiela!”

  She faced him, white as death, looking at him blindly.

  “I am trying to think of you — because you love me—”

  Fright chilled her blood, killing pulse and colour. “I am
trying to be kind — because I care for you — and we must end this before it ends us.... Listen to my miserable, pitiful, little secret, Mr. Hamil. I — I have — I am not — free.”

  “Not free!”

  “I was married two years ago — when I was eighteen years old. Three people in the world know it: you, I, and — the man I married.”

  “Married!” he repeated, stupefied.

  She looked at him steadily a moment.

  “I think your love has been done to death, Mr. Hamil. My own danger was greater than you knew; but it was for your sake — because you loved me. Good night.”

  Stunned, he saw her pass him and descend the stairs, stood for a space alone, then scarce knowing what he did he went down into the great living-room to take his leave of the family gathered there before dinner had been announced. They all seemed to be there; he was indifferently conscious of hearing his own words like a man who listens to an unfamiliar voice in a distant room.

  The rapid soundless night ride to the hotel seemed unreal; the lights in the café, the noise and movement, the pretty face of his aunt with the pink reflection from the candle shades on her cheeks — all seemed as unconvincing as himself and this thing that he could not grasp — could not understand — could not realise had befallen him — and her.

  If Miss Palliser was sensible of any change in him or his voice or manner she did not betray it. Wayward came over to speak to them, limping very slightly, tall, straight, ruddy, the gray silvering his temples and edging his moustache.

  And after a while Hamil found himself sitting silent, a partly burnt cigar between his fingers, watching Wayward and his youthful aunt in half-intimate, half-formal badinage, elbow to elbow on the cloth. For they had known one another a long time, and through many phases of Fate and Destiny.

  “That little Cardross girl is playing the devil with the callow hereabout,” Wayward said; “Malcourt, house-broken, runs to heel with the rest. And when I see her I feel like joining the pack. Only — I was never broken, you know—”

  “She is a real beauty,” said Miss Palliser warmly; “I don’t see why you don’t enlist, James.”

  “I may at that. Garry, are you also involved?”

  Hamil said, “Yes — yes, of course,” and smiled meaninglessly at Wayward.

  For a fraction of a second his aunt hesitated, then said: “Garry is naturally among the devoted — when he’s not dog-tired from a day in the cypress-swamps. Have you been out to see the work, James? Oh, you should go; everybody goes; it’s one of the things to do here. And I’m very proud when I hear people say, ‘There’s that brilliant young fellow, Hamil,’ or, in a tone which expresses profound respect, ‘Hamil designed it, you know’; and I smile and think, ‘That’s my boy Garry!’ James, it is a very comfortable sensation for an old lady to experience.” And she looked at Wayward out of her lovely golden eyes, sweet as a maid of twenty.

  Wayward smiled, then absently bent his gaze on his wine-glass, lying back in his chair. Through his spectacles his eyes seemed very intent on the frail crystal stem of his glass.

  “What are you going to do for the rest of the winter?” she asked, watching him.

  “What I am doing,” he replied with smiling bitterness. “The Ariani is yonder when I can’t stand the shore.... What else is there for me to do — until I snuff out!”

  “Build that house you were going to build — when we were rather younger, Jim.”

  “I did; and it fell,” he said quietly; but, as though she had not heard. “ — Build that house,” she repeated, “and line it with books — the kind of books that were written and read before the machine-made sort supplanted them. One picture to a room — do you remember, Jim? — or two if you find it better; the kind men painted before Rembrandt died.... Do you remember your plan? — the plans you drew for me to look at in our front parlour — when New York houses had parlours? You were twenty and I fourteen.... Garry, yonder, was not.... And the rugs, you recollect? — one or two in a room, Shiraz, Ispahan — nothing as obvious as Sehna and Saraband — nothing but Moresque and pure Persian — and one agedly perfect gem of Asia Minor, and one Tekke, so old and flawless that only the pigeon-blood fire remained under the violet bloom.... Do you remember?”

  Wayward’s shoulders straightened with a jerk. For twenty years he had not remembered these things; and she had not only remembered but was now reciting the strange, quaint, resurrected words in their forgotten sequence; the words he had uttered as he — or what he had once been — sat in the old-time parlour in the mellow half light of faded brocades and rosewood, repeating to a child the programme of his future. Lofty aim and high ideal, the cultivated endeavour of good citizenship, loyalty to aspiration, courage, self-respect, and the noble living of life; they had also spoken of these things together — there in the golden gloom of the old-time parlour when she was fourteen and he master of his fate and twenty.

  But there came into his life a brilliant woman who stayed a year and left his name a mockery: Malcourt’s only sister, now Lady Tressilvain, doubtfully conspicuous with her loutish British husband, among those continentals where titles serve rather to obscure than enlighten inquiry.

  The wretched affair dragged its full offensive length through the international press; leaving him with his divorce signed and a future endurable only when his senses had been sufficiently drugged. In sober intervals he now had neuritis and a limp to distract his mind; also his former brother-in-law with professions of esteem and respect and a tendency to borrow. And drunk or sober he had the Ariani. But the house that Youth had built in the tinted obscurity of an old New York parlour — no, he didn’t have that; and even memory of it were wellnigh gone had not Constance Palliser spoken from the shadows of the past.

  He lifted his glass unsteadily and replaced it. Then slowly he raised his head and looked full at Constance Palliser.

  “It’s too late,” he said; “but I wish I had known that you remembered.”

  “Would you have built it, Jim?”

  He looked at her again, then shook his head: “For whom am I to build, Constance?”

  She leaned forward, glancing at the unconscious Hamil, then dropped her voice: “Build it for the Boy that Was, Jim.”

  “A headstone would be fitter — and less expensive.”

  “I am not asking you to build in memory of the dead. The Boy who Was is only asleep. If you could let him wake, suddenly, in that house—”

  A clear flush of surprise stained his skin to the hair. It had been many years since a woman had hinted at any belief in him.

  “Don’t you know that I couldn’t endure the four walls of a house, Constance?”

  “You have not tried this house.”

  “Men — such men as I — cannot go back to the House of Youth.”

  “Try, Jim.”

  His hand was shaking as he lifted it to adjust his spectacles; and impulsively she laid her hand on his twitching arm:

  “Jim, build it! — and see what happens.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Build it. You will not be alone and sad in it if you remember the boy and the child in the parlour. They — they will be good company — if you wish.”

  He rested his elbows on the table, head bent between his sea-burned hands.

  “If I could only, only do something,” she whispered. “The boy has merely been asleep, Jim. I have always known it. But it has taken many years for me to bring myself to this moment.”

  “Do you think a man can come back through such wreckage and mire — do you think he wants to come back? What do you know about it? — with your white skin and bright hair — and that child’s mouth of yours — What do you know about it?”

  “Once you were the oracle, Jim. May I not have my turn?”

  “Yes — but what in God’s name do you care?”

  “Will you build?”

  He looked at her dumbly, hopelessly; then his arm twitched and he relieved the wrist from the weight of his head, sitting upright,
his eyes still bent on her.

  “Because — in that old parlour — the child expected it of the boy,” she said. “And expects it yet.”

  Hamil, who, chair pushed back, had been listlessly watching the orchestra, roused himself and turned to his aunt and Wayward.

  “You want to go, Garry?” said Constance calmly. “I’ll walk a little with James before I compose my aged bones to slumber.... Good night, dear. Will you come again soon?”

  He said he would and took his leave of them in the long corridor, traversing it without noticing which direction he took until, awaking from abstraction, he found himself at the head of a flight of steps and saw the portico of the railroad station below him and the signal lamps, green and red and white, burning between the glistening rails.

  Without much caring where he went, but not desiring to retrace his steps over half a mile or so of carpet, he went out into the open air and along the picket fence toward the lake front.

  As he came to the track crossing he glanced across at the Beach Club where lights sparkled discreetly amid a tropical thicket and flowers lay in pale carpets under the stars.

  Portlaw had sent him a member’s card; he took it out now and scanned it with faint curiosity. His name was written on the round-cornered brown card signed by a “vice-president” and a “secretary,” under the engraved notice: “To be shown when requested.”

  But when he ascended the winding walk among the palms and orange blossoms, this “suicide’s tag,” as Malcourt called it, was not demanded of him at the door.

  The restaurant seemed to be gay and rather noisy, the women vivacious, sometimes beautiful, and often respectable. A reek of cigarette smoke, wine, and orange blossoms hung about the corridors; the tiny glittering rotunda with its gaming-tables in a circle was thronged.

  He watched them lose and win and lose again. Under the soft tumult of voices the cool tones of the house attachés sounded monotonously, the ball rattled, the wheels spun. But curiosity had already died out within him; gain, loss, chance, Fate — and the tense white concentration of the man beside him no longer interested him; nor did a sweet-faced young girl in the corridor who looked a second too long at him; nor the handsome over-flushed youth who was with her and who cried out in loud recognition: “Gad, Hamil; why didn’t you tell me you were coming? There’s somebody here who wants to meet you, but Portlaw’s got her — somewhere. You’ll take supper with us anyway! We’ll find you a fair impenitent.”