“Can’t you care for a man who loves you, Strelsa?” he said again, turning toward her.
“Is that your idea of love?”
He shook his head, hopelessly:
“Oh, it’s everything else, too — everything on earth — and afterward — everything — mind, soul and body — birth, life, death — sky and land and sea — everything that is or was or will be — —”
His hands clenched, relaxed; he made a gesture, half checked — looked up at her, looked long and steadily into her expressionless eyes.
“You care for money, position, ease, security, tranquillity — more than for love; do you?”
“Yes.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes. Because, unless you mean friendship, I care nothing for love.”
“That is your answer.”
“It is.”
“Then there is something lacking in you.”
“Perhaps. I have never loved in the manner you mean. I do not wish to. Perhaps I am incapable of it.... I hope I am; I believe — I believe—” But she fell silent, standing with eyes lowered and the warm blood once more stinging her cheeks.
Presently she looked up, calm, level-eyed:
“I think you had better ask my forgiveness before you go.”
He shrugged:
“Yes, I’ll ask it if you like.”
To keep her composure became difficult:
“It is your affair, Mr. Quarren — if you still care to preserve our friendship.”
“Would a kiss shatter it?”
She smiled:
“A look, a word, the quiver of an eyelash is enough.”
“It doesn’t seem to be very solidly founded, does it?”
“Friendship is the frailest thing in the world — and the mightiest.... I am waiting for your decision.”
He walked up to her again, and she steeled herself, not knowing what to expect.
“Will you marry me, Strelsa?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I have told Mr. Sprowl that I will marry him.”
“Also because you don’t love me; is that so?”
She said tranquilly: “I can’t afford to marry you. I wouldn’t love you anyway.”
“Couldn’t?”
“Wouldn’t,” she said calmly; but her face was crimson.
“Oh,” he said under his breath— “you are capable of love.”
“I think not, Mr. Quarren; but I am very capable of hate.”
And, looking up, he saw it for an instant, clear in her eyes. Then it died out; she turned a trifle pale, walked to the window and stood leaning against it, one hand on the curtain.
She did not seem to hear him when he came up behind her, and he touched her lightly on the arm:
“I ask your forgiveness,” he said.
“It is granted, Mr. Quarren.”
“Have I ruined our friendship?”
“I don’t know what you have done,” she said wearily.
A few moments later the motor arrived; Quarren turned on the electric lights in the room; Strelsa walked across to the piano and seated herself.
She was playing rag-time when the motor party entered; Quarren came forward and shook hands with Chrysos Lacy and Sir Charles; Langly Sprowl passed him with a short nod, saying “How are you, Quarren?” — and kept straight on to Strelsa.
“Rotten luck,” he said in his full, careless voice; “I’d meant to ride over and chance a gallop with you but Wycherly picked me up and started on one of his break-neck tears.... What have you been up to all day?”
“Nothing — Mr. Quarren came.”
“I see — showed him about, I expect.”
“A — little.”
“Are you feeling fit, Strelsa?”
“Perfectly.... Why?”
“You look a bit streaky — —”
“Thank you!”
“‘Pon my word you do — a bit under the weather, you know — —”
“Woman’s only friend and protector — a headache,” she said, gaily rattling off more rag-time. “Where did you go, Langly?”
“To look over some silly horses — —”
“They’re fine nags!” remonstrated Molly— “and I was perfectly sure that Langly would buy half a dozen.”
“Not I,” said that hatchet-faced young man; and into his sleek and restless features came a glimmer of shrewdness — the sly thrift that lurks in the faces of those who bargain much and wisely in petty wares. It must have been a momentary ancestral gleam from his rum-smuggling ancestors, for Langly Sprowl had never dealt in little things.
Chrysos Lacy was saying: “It’s adorable to see you again, Ricky. What is this we hear about you and Lord Dankmere setting up shop?”
“It’s true,” he laughed. “Come in and buy an old master, Chrysos, at bargain prices.”
“I shall insist on Jim buying several,” said Molly.
Her husband laughed derisively:
“When I can buy a perfectly good Wright biplane for the same money? Come to earth, Molly!”
“You’ll come to earth if you go sky-skating around the clouds in that horrid little Stinger, Jim,” she said. “Why couldn’t you take out the Stinger for a little exercise?” — turning to Sprowl.
“I’m going to,” said Sprowl in his full penetrating voice, not conscious that it required courage to risk a flight with the Stinger. Nobody had ever imputed any lack of that sort of courage to Langly Sprowl. He simply did not understand bodily fear.
Strelsa glanced up at him from the piano:
“It’s rather risky, isn’t it?”
He merely stared at her out of his slightly protruding eyes as though she were speaking an unfamiliar language.
“Jim,” said Quarren, “would you mind taking me as a passenger?”
Wycherly, reckless enough anyway, balked a little at the proposition:
“That Stinger is too light and too tricky I’m afraid.”
“Isn’t she built for two?”
“Well, I suppose she could get off the ground with you and me — —”
“All right; let’s try her?”
“Jim! I won’t let you,” said his wife.
“Don’t be silly, Molly. Rix and I are not going up if she won’t take us — —”
“I forbid you to try! It’s senseless!”
Her husband laughed and finished his whisky and soda. Then twirling his motor goggles around his fingers he stood looking at Strelsa.
“You’re a pretty little peach,” he said sentimentally, “and I’m sorry Molly is here or — —”
“Do you care?” laughed Strelsa, looking around at him over her shoulder. “I don’t mind being adored by you, Jim.”
“Don’t you, sweetness?”
“Indeed I don’t.”
Wycherly started toward her: Langly Sprowl, who neither indulged in badinage nor comprehended it in others, turned a perfectly expressionless face on his host, who said:
“You old muffin head, did you ever smile in your life? You’d better try now because I’m going to take your best girl away from you!”
Which bored Sprowl; and he turned his lean, narrow head away as a sleek and sinister dog turns when laughed at.
Strelsa slipped clear of the piano and vanished, chased heavily by Wycherly.
Molly said: “It’s time to dress, good people. Langly, your man is upstairs with your outfit. Come, Chrysos, dear — Rix, have you everything you want?” she added in a low voice as he stood aside for her to pass: “Have you everything, Ricky?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“The little minx! Is it Langly?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, dear, oh, dear!” And, aloud: “Jim! Do let Langly try out the Stinger to-morrow.”
Her husband, who had given up his search for Strelsa, said that Sprowl was welcome.
People scattered to their respective quarters; Quarren walked slowly to his. Sprowl, passing with his mincing, nervous
stride, said: “How’s little Dankmere?”
“All right,” replied Quarren briefly.
“Cheap little beggar,” commented Sprowl.
“He happens to be my partner,” said the other.
“He suits your business no doubt,” said Sprowl with a contempt he took no pains to conceal — a contempt which very plainly included Quarren as well as the Earl and the picture business.
Arrived at his door he glanced around to stare absently at Quarren. The latter said, pleasantly:
“I don’t suppose you meant to be offensive, Sprowl; you simply can’t help it; can you?”
“What?”
“I mean, you can’t help being a bounder. It’s just in you, isn’t it?”
For a moment Sprowl’s hatchet face was ghastly; he opened his mouth to speak, twice, then jerked open his door and disappeared.
CHAPTER X
Quarren had been at Witch-Hollow three days when Dankmere called him on the long-distance telephone.
“Do you want me to come back?” asked the young fellow. “I don’t mind if you do; I’m quite ready to return — —”
“Not at all, my dear chap,” said his lordship. “I fancied you might care to hear how matters are going in the Dankmere Galleries.”
“Of course I do, but I rather hoped nothing in particular would happen for a week or so — —”
“Plenty has. You know those experts of yours, Valasco, Drayton-Quinn, and that Hollander Van Boschoven. Well, they don’t get on. Each has come to me privately, and in turn, and told me that the others were no good — —”
“Your rôle is to remain amiable and non-committal,” said Quarren. “Let them talk — —”
“Valasco and Drayton-Quinn won’t speak, and Van Boschoven has notified me that he declines to come to the house as long as either of the others are there.”
“Very well; arrange to have them there on different days.”
“I don’t think Valasco will come back at all.”
“Why not?”
“Because — the fact is — I believe I practically — so to speak — hit him.”
“What!”
“Fact, old chap.”
“Why?”
“Well, he asked me if I knew more about anything than I did about pictures. I didn’t catch his drift for about an hour — but then it came to me, and I got up out of my chair and walked over and punched his head. I don’t think he’ll come back, do you?”
“No, I don’t. What else have you been doing?” said Quarren angrily.
“Nothing. One picture — the Raeburn portrait — has a bad hole in it.”
“How did it happen?”
“Rather extraordinary thing, that! I was giving a most respectable card party — some ladies and gentlemen of sorts — from the Winter Garden I believe — and one of the ladies inadvertently shyed a glass at another lady — —”
“For Heaven’s sake, Dankmere — —”
“Quite right old chap — my fault entirely — I won’t do it again. But, do you know, the gallery already has become a most popular resort. People are coming and going all day — a lot of dealers among them I suspect — and there have been a number of theatrical people who want to hire pictures for certain productions to be staged next winter — —”
“We don’t do that sort of thing!”
“That’s what I thought; but there was one very fetching girl who opens in ‘Ancestors’ next October — —”
“No, no, no!”
“Right-o! I’ll tell her at luncheon.... I say, Quarren: Karl Westguard wants the gallery to-night. May I let him have it?”
“Certainly. What for?”
“Oh, some idea of his — I’ve forgotten what he said.”
“I believe I’d better come down,” said Quarren bluntly.
“Don’t dream of it, old fellow. Everything is doing nicely. My respects to the fair. By-the-bye — anything in my line up there?”
Quarren laughed:
“I’m afraid not, Dankmere.”
“Very well,” said the Earl, airily. “I’m not worrying now, you know. Good-bye, old sport!”
And he rang off.
Quarren meeting Molly in the hall said:
“I think I’d better leave this afternoon. Dankmere is messing matters.”
“Are you going to run away?” she said in a low voice, glancing sideways at Strelsa who had just passed them wearing her riding habit.
“Run away,” he repeated, also lowering his voice. “From whom?”
“From Langly Sprowl.”
He shrugged and looked out of the window.
“It is running away,” insisted his pretty hostess. “You have a chance I think.”
“Not the slightest.”
“You are wrong. Strelsa wept in her sleep all night. How does that strike you?”
“Not over me,” he said grimly; but added: “How do you know she did?”
“Her maid told mine,” admitted Molly shamelessly. “Now if you are going to criticise my channels of information I’ll remind you that Richelieu himself — —”
“Oh, Molly! Molly! What a funny girl you are!” he said, laughing. “You’re a sweet, loyal little thing, too — but there’s no use—” His face became expressionless, almost haggard— “there’s no use,” he repeated under his breath.
Slowly, side by side, they walked out to the veranda, her hand resting lightly just within the crook of his arm, he, absent-mindedly filling his pipe.
“Strelsa likes you,” she said.
“With all the ardour and devotion of a fish,” he returned, coolly.
“Rix?”
“What?”
“Do you know,” said Molly, thoughtfully, “she is a sort of a fish. She has the emotions of a mollusc as far as your sex is concerned. Some women are that way — more women than men would care to believe.... Do you know, Ricky, if you’ll let us alone, it is quite natural for us to remain indifferent to considerations of that sort?”
She stood watching the young fellow busy with his pipe.
“It’s only when you keep at us long enough that we respond,” she said. “Some of us are quickly responsive; it takes many of us a long while to catch fire. Threatened emotion instinctively repels many of us — the more fastidious among us, the finer grained and more delicately nerved, are essentially reserved. Modesty, pride, a natural aloofness, are as much a part of many women as their noses and fingers — —”
“What becomes of modesty and pride when a girl marries for money?” he asked coolly.
“Some women can give and accept in cold blood what it would be impossible for them to accord to a more intimate and emotional demand.”
“No doubt an ethical distinction,” he said, “but not very clear to me.”
“I did not argue that such women are admirable or excusable.... But how many modern marriages in our particular vicinity are marriages of inclination, Ricky?”
“You’re a washed-out lot,” he said— “you’re satiated as schoolgirls. If you have any emotions left they’re twisted ones by the time you are introduced. Most débutantes of your sort make their bow equipped for business, and with the experience of what, practically, has amounted to several seasons.
“If any old-fashioned young girls remain in your orbit I don’t know where to find them. Why, do you suppose any young girl, not yet out, would bother to go to a party of any sort where there was not champagne and a theatre-box and a supper in prospect? That’s a fine comment on your children, Molly, but you know it’s true and so does everybody who pretends to know anything about it.”
“You talk like Karl Westguard,” she said, laughing. “Anyway, what has all this to do with you and Strelsa Leeds?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “She is part of your last word in social civilisation — —”
“She is a very normal, sensitive, proud girl, who has known little except unhappiness all her life, Rix — including two years of marital misery — two years of horro
r. — And you forget that those two years were the result of a demand purely and brutally emotional — to which, a novice, utterly ignorant, she yielded — pushed on by her mother.... Please be fair to her; remember that her childhood was pinched with poverty, that her girlhood in school was a lonely one, embarrassed by lack of everything which her fashionable schoolmates had as matters of course.
“She could not go to the homes of her schoolmates in vacation times, because she could not ask them, in turn, to her own. She was still in school when Reggie Leeds saw her — and misbehaved — and the poor little thing was sent home, guiltless but already half-damned. No wonder her mother chased Reggie Leeds half around the world dragging her daughter by the wrist!”
“Did it make matters any better to force that drunken cad into a marriage?” asked Quarren coldly.
“It makes another marriage possible for Strelsa.”
Quarren gazed out across the country where a fine misty rain was still falling. Acres of clover stretched away silvered with powdery moisture; robins and bluebirds covered the soaked lawns, and their excited call-notes prophesied blue skies.
“It doesn’t make any difference one way or the other,” said Quarren, half to himself. “She will go on in the predestined orbit — —”
“Not if a stronger body pulls her out of it.”
“There is nothing to which she responds — except what I have not.”
“Make what you do possess more powerful, then.”
“What do I possess?”
“Kindness. And also manhood, Ricky. Don’t you?”
“Perhaps so — now — after a fashion.... But I am not the man who could ever attract her — —”
“Wake her, and find out.”
“Wake her?”
“Didn’t I tell you that many of us are asleep, and that few of us awake easily? Didn’t I tell you that nobody likes to be awakened from the warm comfort and idle security of emotionless slumber? — that it is the instinct of many of us to resist — just as I hear my maid speak to me in the morning and then turn over for another forty winks, hating her!”
They both laughed.
“My maid has instructions to persist until I respond,” said Molly. “Those are my instructions to you, also.”
“Suppose, after all, I were knocking at the door of an empty room?”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 600
