Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Amused with his own disrespectful reflections, he stood before the picture, turning from it with a grin from time to time to compare it with some dozen vigorous canvases hanging along the studio wall — studies that he knew would instantly command the owlish respect of the truly earnest — connoisseurs, critics, and academicians in this very earnest land of ours.

  There was a Sargent-like portrait of old Miller, with something of that great master’s raucous colouring and perhaps intentional discords, and all of his technical effrontery; and here, too, lurked that shadow of mockery ever latent in the young man’s brush — something far more subtle than caricature or parody — deeper than the imitation of manner — something like the evanescent caprice of a strong hand, which seems to threaten for a second, then passes on lightly, surely, transforming its menace into a caress.

  There were two adorable nude studies of Miller’s granddaughters, aged six and seven — quaintly and engagingly formal in their naïve astonishment at finding themselves quite naked. There was a fine sketch of Howker, wrinkled, dim-eyed, every inch a butler, every fibre in him the dignified and self-respecting, old-time servant, who added his dignity to that of the house he had served so long and well. The latter picture was masterly, recalling Gandara’s earlier simplicity and Whistler’s single-minded concentration without that gentleman’s rickety drawing and harmonious arrangements in mud.

  For in Duane’s work, from somewhere deep within, there radiated outward something of that internal glow which never entirely fades from the canvases of the old masters — which survives mould and age, the opacity of varnish, and the well-intentioned maltreatment of unbaked curators.

  There was no mystery about it; he prepared his canvas with white-lead, gave it a long sun-bath, modelled in bone-black and an earth-red, gave it another bath in the sun, and then glazed. This, a choice of permanent colours, and oil as a medium, was the mechanical technique.

  Standing there, thoughts remote, idly sorting and re-sorting his brushes, he heard the birds singing on the forest’s edge, heard the wind in the pines blowing, with the sound of flowing water, felt the warmth of the sun, breathed the mounting freshness from the fields. Life was still very, very young; it had only begun since love had come, and that was yesterday.

  And as he stood there, happy, a trifle awed as he began to understand what life might hold for him, there came quick steps on the stair, a knock, her voice outside his door:

  “Duane! May I come in?”

  He sprang to the door; she stepped inside, breathing rapidly, delicately flushed from her haste.

  “I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I left Scott to scrape and bow and pull his forelock. I’ve got to go back in a few minutes. Are you glad to see me?”

  He took her in his arms.

  “Dearest, dearest!” she murmured, looking at him with all her heart in her brown eyes.

  So they stood for a little while, her mouth and body acquiescent to his embrace.

  “Such a long, long time since I saw you. Nearly half an hour,” he said.

  “Yes.” She drew away a little:

  “Do you know,” she said, looking about her, over his shoulder, “I have never been here since you took it as a studio.”

  She caught a glimpse of the picture on the easel, freed herself, and, retaining his hand in both of hers, gazed curiously at Rosalie’s portrait.

  “How perfectly charming!” she said. “But, Duane, there’s a sort of exquisite impudence about what you’ve done! Did you mean to gently and disrespectfully jeer at our mincing friends, Boucher, Nattier, et al.?”

  “I knew you’d understand!” he exclaimed, delighted. “Oh, you wonderful little thing — you darling!” He caught her to him again, but she twisted away and tucked one arm under his:

  “Don’t, Duane; I want to see these things. What a perfectly dear study of Miller’s kiddies! Oh, it is too lovable, too adorable! You wouldn’t sell that — would you?”

  “Of course not; it’s yours, Geraldine.”

  After a moment she looked up at him:

  “Ours?” she asked; but the smile faded once more from eyes and lips; she suffered him to lead her from canvas to canvas, approved them or remained silent, and presently turned and glanced toward the small iron bed. Manner and gaze had become distrait.

  “You think this will be comfortable, Duane?” she inquired listlessly.

  “Perfectly,” he said.

  She disengaged her hand from his, walked over to the lounge, turned, and signed for him to seat himself. Then she dropped to her knees and settled down on the rug at his feet, laying her soft cheek against his arm.

  “I have some things to tell you,” she said in a low voice.

  “Very serious things?” he asked, smiling.

  “Very.”

  “All right; I am listening.”

  “Very serious things,” she repeated, gazing through the window, where green tree-tops swayed in the breezy sunlight; and she pressed her cheek closer to his arm.

  “I have not been very — good,” she said.

  He looked at her, suppressed the smile that twitched at his mouth, and waited.

  “I wish I could give myself to you as clean and sweet and untainted as — as you deserve.... I can’t; and before we go any further I must tell you — —”

  “Why, you blessed child,” he exclaimed, half laughing, half serious. “You are not going to confess to me, are you?”

  “Duane, I’ve got to tell you everything. I couldn’t rest unless I was perfectly honest with you.”

  “But, dear,” he said, a trifle dismayed, “such confidences are not necessary. Nor am I fit to hear your list of innocent transgressions — —”

  “Oh, they are not very innocent. Let me tell you; let me cleanse myself as much as I can. I don’t want to have any secrets from you, Duane. I want to go to you as guiltless as confession can make me. I want to begin clean. Let me tell you. Couldn’t you let me tell you, Duane?”

  “And I, dear? Do — do you expect me to tell you? Do you expect me to do as you do?”

  She looked up at him surprised; she had expected it. Something in his face warned her of her own ignorance.

  “I don’t know very much about men, Duane. Are there things you cannot say to me?”

  “One or two, dear.”

  “Do you mean until after we are married?”

  “Not even then. There is no use in your knowing.”

  She had never considered that, either.

  “But ought I to know, Duane?”

  “No,” he said miserably, “you ought not.”

  She sat upright for a few seconds longer, gazing thoughtfully at space, then pressed her pale face against his knee again in silent faith and confidence.

  “Anyway, I know you will be fair to me in your own way,” she said. “There is only one way that I know how to be fair to you. Listen.”

  And in a shamed voice she forced herself to recite her list of sins; repeating them as she had confessed them to Kathleen. She told him everything; her silly and common imprudence with Dysart, which, she believed, had bordered the danger mark; her ignoble descent to what she had always held aloof from, meaning demoralisation in regard to betting and gambling and foolish language; and last, but most shameful, her secret and perilous temporising with a habit which already was making self-denial very difficult for her. She did not spare herself; she told him everything, searching the secret recesses of her heart for some small sin in hiding, some fault, perhaps, overlooked or forgotten. All that she held unworthy in her she told this man; and the man, being an average man, listened, head bowed over her fragrant hair, adoring her, wretched in heart and soul with the heavy knowledge of all he dare not tell or forget or cleanse from him, kneeling repentant, in the sanctuary of her love and confidence.

  She told him everything — sins of omission, childish depravities, made real only by the decalogue. Of indolence, selfishness, unkindness, she accused herself; strove to count the times when sh
e had yielded to temptation.

  He was reading the first human heart he had ever known — a heart still strangely untainted, amid a society where innocence was the exception, doubtful wisdom the rule, and where curiosity was seldom left very long in doubt.

  His hands fell over hers as her voice ceased, but he did not speak.

  She waited a little while, then, with a slight nestling movement, turned and hid her face on his knees.

  “With God’s help,” she whispered, “I will subdue what threatens me. But I am afraid of it! Oh, Duane, I am afraid.”

  He managed to steady his voice.

  “What is it, darling, that seems to tempt you,” he asked; “is it the taste — the effect?”

  “The — effect. If I could only forget it — but I can’t help thinking about it — I suppose just because it’s forbidden — For days, sometimes, there is not the slightest desire; then something stirs it up in me, begins to annoy me; or the desire comes sometimes when I am excited or very happy, or very miserable. There seems to be some degraded instinct in me that seeks for it whenever my emotions are aroused.... I must be honest with you; I — I feel that way now — because, I suppose, I am a little excited.”

  He raised her and took her in his arms.

  “But you won’t, will you? Simply tell me that you won’t.”

  She looked at him, appalled by her own hesitation. Was it possible, after the words she had just uttered, the exaltation of confession still thrilling her, that she could hesitate? Was it morbid over-conscientiousness in the horror of a broken promise to him that struck her silent?

  “Say it, Geraldine.”

  “Oh, Duane! I’ve said it so often to Kathleen and myself! Let me promise myself again — and keep my word. Let me try that way, dear, before I — I promise you?”

  There was a feverish colour in her face; she spoke rapidly, like one who temporises, trying to convince others and over-ride the inward voice; her slender hands were restless on his shoulders, her eyes lowered, avoiding his.

  “Perhaps if you and Kathleen, and I, myself, were not so afraid — perhaps if I were not forbidden — if I had your confidence and my own that I would not abuse my liberty, it might be easier to refrain. Shall we try it that way, Duane?”

  “Do you think it best?”

  “I think — I might try that way. Dear, I have so much to sustain me now — so much more at stake! Because there is the dread of losing you — for, Duane, until I am mistress of myself, I will never, never marry you — and do you suppose I am going to risk our happiness? Only leave me free, dear; don’t attempt to wall me in at first, and I will surely find my way.”

  She sprang up, trying to smile, hesitated, then slowly came back to where he was standing and put her arms around his neck.

  “Good-bye until luncheon,” she said. “I must go back to my neglected guests — I am going to run all the way as fast as my legs can carry me! Kathleen will be dreadfully mortified. Do you love me?... Even after my horrid confessions?... Oh, you darling!... Now that you know the very worst, I begin to feel as clean and fresh as though I had just stepped from the bath.... And I will try to be what you would have me, dear.... Because I am quite crazy about you — oh, completely mad!”

  She bent impulsively and kissed his hands, freed herself with a breathless laugh, and turned and fled.

  For a long time her lover stood there, motionless, downcast, clenched fists in his pockets, face to face with the past. And that which lay behind him was that which lies behind what is commonly known to the world as the average man.

  CHAPTER X. DUSK

  The Masked Dance was to begin at ten that evening; for that reason dinner had been served early at scores of small tables on the terrace, a hilarious and topsy-turvy, but somewhat rapid affair, because everybody required time for dressing, and already throughout the house maids and valets were scurrying around, unpacking masks and wigs and dainty costumes for the adorning of the guests at Roya-Neh.

  Toward nine o’clock the bustle and confusion became distracting; corridors were haunted by graceful flitting figures in various stages of deshabille, in quest of paraphernalia feminine and maids to adjust the same. A continual chatter filled the halls, punctuated by smothered laughter and subdued but insistent appeals for aid in the devious complications of intimate attire.

  On the men’s side of the house there was less hubbub and some quiet swearing; much splashing in tubs, much cigarette smoke. Men entered each other’s rooms, half-clad in satin breeches, silk stockings, and ruffled shirts, asking a helping hand in tying queue ribbons or adjusting stocks, and lingered to smoke and jest and gossip, and jeer at one another’s finery, or to listen to the town news from those week-enders recently arrived from the city.

  The talk was money, summer shows, and club gossip, but financial rumours ruled.

  Young Ellis, in pale blue silk and wig, perched airily, on a table, became gloomily prophetic concerning the steady retirement of capital from philanthropic enterprises hatched in Wall Street; Peter Tappan saw in the endlessly sagging market dire disaster for the future digestions of wealthy owners of undistributed securities.

  “Marble columns and gold ceilings don’t make a trust company,” he sneered. “There are a few billionaire gamblers from the West who seem to think Wall Street is Coney Island. There’ll be a shindy, don’t make any mistake; we’re going to have one hell of a time; but when it’s over the corpses will all be shipped — ahem! — west.”

  Several men laughed uneasily; one or two old line trust companies were mentioned; then somebody spoke of the Minnisink, lately taken over by the Algonquin.

  Duane lighted a cigarette and, watching the match still burning, said:

  “Dysart is a director. You can’t ask for any more conservative citizen than Dysart, can you?”

  Several men looked around for Dysart, but he had stepped out of the room.

  Ellis said, after a silence:

  “That gambling outfit from the West has bedevilled one or two good citizens in Gotham town.”

  Dr. Bailey shrugged his big, fat shoulders.

  “It’s no secret, I suppose, that the Minnisink crowd is being talked about,” he grunted.

  Ellis said in a low but perfectly distinct voice:

  “Neither is it any secret that Jack Dysart has been hit hard in National Ice.”

  Peter Tappan slipped from his seat on the table and threw away his cigarette:

  “One thing is sure as soubrettes,” he observed; “the Clearing House means to get rid of certain false prophets. The game law is off prophets — in the fall. There’ll be some good gunning — under the laws of New Jersey.”

  “I hope they’ll be careful not to injure any marble columns or ruin the gold-leaf on the ceilings,” sneered Ellis. “Come on, some of you fellows, and fix the buckle in this cursed stock of mine.”

  “I thought fixing stocks was rather in your own line,” said Duane to the foxy-visaged and celebrated manipulator, who joined very heartily in the general and unscrupulous laugh.

  A moment later, Dysart, who had heard every word from the doorway, walked silently back to his own room and sat down, resting his temples between his closed fists.

  The well-cut head was already silvery gray at the temples; one month had done it. When animated, his features still appeared firm and of good colour; relaxed, they were loose and pallid, and around the mouth fine lines appeared. Often a man’s hands indicate his age, and his betrayed him, giving the lie to his lithe, straight, graceful figure. The man had aged amazingly in a month or two.

  Matters were not going very well with him. For one thing, the Half-Moon Trust Company had finally terminated all dealings with the gorgeous marble-pillared temple of high finance of which he was a director. For another, he had met the men of the West, and for them he had done things which he did not always care to think about. For another, money was becoming disturbingly scarce, and the time was already past for selling securities.

  During the l
ast year he had been vaguely aware of some occult hostility to himself and his enterprises — not the normal hostility of business aggression — but something indefinable — merely negative at first, then more disturbing, sinister, foreboding; something in the very air to which he was growing more sensitive every day.

  By all laws of finance, by all signs and omens, a serious reaction from the saturnalia of the last few years was already over-due. He had felt it, without alarm at first, for the men of the West laughed him to scorn and refused to shorten sail. They still refused. Perhaps they could not. One thing was certain: he could scarcely manage to take in a single reef on his own account. He was beginning to realise that the men with whom rumour was busy were men marked down by their letters; and they either would not or could not aid him in shortening sail.

  For a month, now, under his bland and graceful learning among the intimates of his set, Dysart had been slowly but steadily going to pieces. At such moments as this it showed on the surface. It showed now in his loose jaw and flaccid cheeks; in the stare of the quenched eyes.

  He was going to pieces, and he was aware of it. For one thing, he recognised the physical change setting in; for another, his cool, selfish, self-centred equanimity was being broken down; the rigorous bodily régime from which he had never heretofore swerved and which alone enabled him to perform the exacting social duties expected of him, he had recently neglected. He felt the impending bodily demoralisation, the threatened mental disintegration; he suspected its symptoms in a new nervous irritability, in lapses of self-command, in unaccountable excesses utterly foreign to his habitual self-control.

  Dissolute heretofore only in the negative form, whatever it was that impended threatening him, seemed also to be driving him into an utter and monstrous lack of caution, and — God alone knew how — he had at last done the one thing that he never dreamed of doing. And the knowledge of it, and the fear of it, bit deeper into his shallow soul every hour of the day and night. And over all, vague, indefinite, hung something that menaced all that he cared for most on earth, held most sacred — his social position in the Borough of Manhattan and his father’s pride in him and it.