Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Much?” he asked coolly.

  “No. The good folk are only asking each other why you meet her at the station with your car. They think she carries antique gems in her satchel. Later they’ll suspect who the real jewel is. Ha!”

  “I like her; that’s why I meet her,” he said coolly.

  “You like her?”

  “I sure do. She is some girl, dear lady.”

  “Do you think your pretense of guileless candour is disarming me, young man?”

  “I haven’t the slightest hope of disarming you or of concealing anything from you.”

  “Follows,” she rejoined ironically, “that there’s nothing to conceal. Bah!”

  “Quite right; there is nothing to conceal.”

  “What do you want with her, then?”

  “Initially, I want her to catalogue my collection; subsequently, I wish to remain friends with her. The latter wish is becoming a problem. I’ve an idea that you might solve it.”

  “Friends with her,” repeated Aunt Hannah. “Oh, my!

  “‘And angels whisper

  Lo! the pretty pair!’

  “I suppose! Is that the hymn-tune, James?”

  “Precisely.”

  “What does she resemble — Venus, or Rosa Bonheur?”

  “Look at her and make up your mind.”

  “Is she very pretty?”

  “I think so. She’s thin.”

  “Then what do you see unusual about her?”

  “Everything, I think.”

  “Everything — he thinks! Oh, my sense of humour!”

  “That,” said Desboro, “is partly what I count on.”

  “Have you any remote and asinine notions of educating her and marrying her, and foisting her on your friends? There are a few fools still alive on earth, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard. I haven’t the remotest idea of marrying her; she is better fitted to educate me than I am her. Not guilty on these two counts. But I had thought of foisting some of my friends on her. You, for example.”

  Aunt Hannah glared at him — that is, her tiny eyes became almost luminous, like the eyes of small animals at night, surprised by a sudden light.

  “I know what you’re meditating!” she snapped.

  “I suppose you do, by this time.”

  “You’re very impudent. Do you know it?”

  “Lord, Aunt Hannah, so are you!” he drawled. “But it takes genius to get away with it.”

  The old lady was highly delighted, but she concealed it and began such a rapid-fire tirade against him that he was almost afraid it might bewilder him enough to affect his steering.

  “Talk to me of disinterested friendship between you and a girl of that sort!” she ended. “Not that I’d care, if I found material in her to amuse me, and a monthly insult drawn to my order against a solvent bank balance! What is she, James; a pretty blue-stocking whom nobody ‘understands’ except you?”

  “Make up your own mind,” he repeated, as he brought around the car and stopped before his own doorstep. “I’m not trying to tell you anything. She is here. Look at her. If you like her, be her friend — and mine.”

  Jacqueline had waited tea for him; the table was in the library, kettle simmering over the silver lamp; and the girl was standing before the fire, one foot on the fender, her hands loosely linked behind her back.

  She glanced up with unfeigned pleasure as his step sounded outside along the stone hallway; and the smile still remained, curving her lips, but died out in her eyes, as Mrs. Hammerton marched in, halted, and stared at her unwinkingly.

  Desboro presented them; Jacqueline came forward, offering a shy hand to Aunt Hannah, and, bending her superb young head, looked down into the beady eyes which were now fairly electric with intelligence.

  Desboro began, easily:

  “I asked Mrs. Hammerton to have tea with — —”

  “I asked myself,” remarked Aunt Hannah, laying her other hand over Jacqueline’s — she did not know just why — perhaps because she was vain of her hands, as well as of her feet and “figger.”

  She seated herself on the sofa and drew Jacqueline down beside her.

  “This young man tells me that you are cataloguing his grandfather’s accumulation of ancient tin-ware.”

  “Yes,” said Jacqueline, already afraid of her. And the old lady divined it, too, with not quite as much pleasure as it usually gave her to inspire trepidation in others.

  Her shrill voice was a little modified when she said:

  “Where did you learn to do such things? It’s not usual, you know.”

  “You have heard of Jean Louis Nevers,” suggested Desboro.

  “Yes—” Mrs. Hammerton turned and looked at the girl again. “Oh!” she said. “I’ve heard Cary Clydesdale speak of you, haven’t I?”

  Jacqueline made a slight, very slight, but instinctive movement away from the old lady, on whom nothing that happened was lost.

  “Mr. Clydesdale,” said Mrs. Hammerton, “told several people where I was present that you knew more about antiquities in art than anybody else in New York since your father died. That’s what he said about you.”

  Jacqueline said: “Mr. Clydesdale has been very kind to me.”

  “Kindness to people is also a Clydesdale tradition — isn’t it, James?” said the old lady. “How kind Elena has always been to you!”

  The covert impudence of Aunt Hannah, and her innocent countenance, had no significance for Jacqueline — would have had no meaning at all except for the dark flush of anger that mounted so suddenly to Desboro’s forehead.

  He said steadily: “The Clydesdales are very old friends, and are naturally kind. Why you don’t like them I never understood.”

  “Perhaps you can understand why one of them doesn’t like me, James.”

  “Oh! I can understand why many people are not crazy about you, Aunt Hannah,” he said, composedly.

  “Which is going some,” said the old lady, with a brisk and unabashed employment of the vernacular. Then, turning to Jacqueline: “Are you going to give this young man some tea, my child? He requires a tonic.”

  Jacqueline rose and seated herself at the table, thankful to escape. Tea was soon ready; Aunt Hannah, whose capacity for browsing was infinite, began on jam and biscuits without apology. And Jacqueline and Desboro exchanged their first furtive glances — dismayed and questioning on the girl’s part, smilingly reassuring on Desboro’s. Aunt Hannah, looking intently into her teacup, missed nothing.

  “Come to see me!” she said so abruptly that even Desboro started.

  “‘I — I beg your pardon,’ said Jacqueline”

  “I — I beg your pardon,” said Jacqueline, not understanding.

  “Come to see me in town. I’ve a rotten little place in a fashionable apartment house — one of the Park Avenue kind, which they number instead of calling it the ‘Buena Vista’ or the ‘Hiawatha.’ Will you come?”

  “Thank you.”

  The old lady looked at her grimly:

  “What does ‘thank you’ mean? Yes or no? Because I really want you. Don’t you wish to come?”

  “I would be very glad to come — only, you know, I am in business — and go out very little — —”

  “Except on business,” added Desboro, looking Aunt Hannah unblushingly in the eye until she wanted to pinch him. Instead, she seized another biscuit, which Farris presented on a tray, smoking hot, and applied jam to it vigorously. After she had consumed it, she rose and marched around the room, passing the portraits and book shelves in review. Half turning toward Jacqueline:

  “I haven’t been in the musty old mansion for years; that young man never asks me. But I used to know the house. It was this sort of house that drove me out of Westchester, and I vowed I’d marry a New York man or nobody. Do you know, child, that there is a sort of simpering smugness about a house like this that makes me inclined to kick dents in the furniture?”

  Jacqueline ventured to smile; Desboro’s smile responded
in sympathy.

  “I’m going home,” announced Aunt Hannah. “Good-bye, Miss Nevers. I don’t want you to drive me, James; I’d rather have your man take me back. Besides, you’ve a train to catch, I understand — —” She turned and looked at Jacqueline, who had risen, and they stood silently inspecting each other. Then, with a grim nod, as though partly of comprehension, partly in adieu, Aunt Hannah sailed out. Desboro tucked her in beside Vail. The latter being quite deaf, they talked freely under his very nose.

  “James!”

  “Yes, dear lady.”

  “You gave yourself away about Elena Clydesdale. Haven’t you any control over your countenance?”

  “Sometimes. But don’t do that again before her! The story is a lie, anyway.”

  “So I’ve heard — from you. Tell me, James, do you think this little Nevers girl dislikes me?”

  “Do you want her to?”

  “No. You’re a very clever young one, aren’t you? Really quite an expert! Do you know, I don’t think that girl would care for what I might have to offer her. There’s more to her than to most people.”

  “How do you know? She scarcely spoke a word.”

  The old lady laughed scornfully:

  “I know people by what they don’t say. That’s why I know you so much better than you think I do — you and Elena Clydesdale. And I don’t think you’re much good, James — or some of your married friends, either.”

  She settled down among the robes, with a bright, impertinent glance at him. He shrugged, standing bareheaded by the mud-guard, a lithe, handsome young fellow. “ — A Desboro all over,” she thought, with a mental sniff of admiration.

  “Are you going to speak to Miss Nevers?” she asked, abruptly.

  “About what!”

  “About employing me, you idiot!”

  “Yes, if you like. If she comes up here as my guest, she’ll need a gorgon.”

  “I’ll gorgon you,” she retorted, wrathfully.

  “Thanks. So you’ll accept the — er — job?”

  “Of course, if she wishes. I need the money. It’s purely mercenary on my part.”

  “That’s understood.”

  “Are you going to tell her I’m mercenary?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Well, then — don’t — if you don’t mind. Do you think I want every living creature to detest me?”

  “I don’t detest you. And you have an unterrified tabby-cat at home, haven’t you?”

  She could have boxed his ears as he leaned over and deliberately kissed her cheek.

  “I love you because you’re so bad,” he whispered; and, stepping lightly aside, nodded to Vail to go ahead.

  The limousine, acetylenes shining, rolled up as the other car departed. He went back to the library and found Jacqueline pinning on her hat.

  “Well?” he inquired gaily.

  “Why did you bring her, Mr. Desboro?”

  “Didn’t you like her?”

  “Who is she?”

  “A Mrs. Hannah Hammerton. She knows everybody. Most people are afraid of her. She’s poor as a guinea-pig.”

  “She was beautifully gowned.”

  “She always is. Poor Aunt Hannah!”

  “Is she your aunt?”

  “No, she’s Lindley Hammerton’s aunt — a neighbour of mine. I call her that; it made her very mad in the beginning, but she rather likes it now. You’ll go to call on her, won’t you?”

  Jacqueline turned to him, drawing on her gloves:

  “Mr. Desboro, I don’t wish to be rude; and, anyway, she will forget that she asked me in another half-hour. Why should I go to see her?”

  “Because she’s one species of gorgon. Now, do you understand?”

  “What!”

  “Of course. It isn’t a case of pin-money with her; it’s a case of clothing, rent, and nourishment. A microscopic income, supplemented by gifts, commissions, and odd social jobs, keeps her going. What you and I want of her is for her to be seen at various times with you. She’ll do the rest in talking about you— ‘my unusually talented young friend, Miss Nevers,’ and that sort of thing. It will deceive nobody; but you’ll eventually meet some people — she knows all kinds. The main point is that when I ask you here she’ll bring you. People will understand that you are another of her social enterprises, for which she’s paid. But it won’t count against you. It will depend on yourself entirely how you are received. And not a soul will be able to say a word—” he laughed, “ — except that I am very devoted to the beautiful Miss Nevers — as everybody else will be.”

  Jacqueline remained motionless for a few moments, an incomprehensible expression on her face; then she went over to him and took one of his hands in her gloved ones, and stood looking down at it in silence.

  “Well,” he asked, smiling.

  She said, still looking down at his hand lying between her own:

  “You have behaved in the sweetest way to me—” Her voice grew unsteady, and she turned her head sharply away.

  “Jacqueline!” he exclaimed under his breath. “It’s a broken reed you’re trusting. Don’t, dear. I’m like all the others.”

  She shook her head slightly, still looking away from him. After a short silence, her voice returned to her control again.

  “You are very kind to me, Mr. Desboro. When a man sees that a girl likes him — and is kind to her — it is wonderful to her.”

  He tried to take a lighter tone.

  “It’s the case of the beast born in captivity, Jacqueline. I’m only going through the tricks convention has taught me. But every instinct remains unaltered.”

  “That is civilisation, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know what it is — you wonderful little thing!”

  He caught her hand, then encircled her waist, drawing her close. After a moment, she dropped her big, fluffy muff on his shoulder and hid her flushed face in the fur.

  “Don’t trust me, will you?” he said, bluntly.

  “No.”

  “Because I — I’m an unaccountable beast.”

  “We — both have to account — sometime — to somebody. Don’t we?” she said in a muffled voice.

  “That would never check me.”

  “It would — me.”

  “Spiritual responsibility?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What else is there to remember — when a girl — cares for a man.”

  “Do you really care very much?”

  Perhaps she considered the question superfluous, for she remained silent until his nerveless arm released her. Then she lifted her face from the muff. It was pale but smiling when he met her eyes.

  “I’ll go to see Mrs. Hammerton, some day,” she said, “because it would hurt too much not to be able to come here when you ask me — and other people — like the — the Clydesdales. You were thinking of me when you thought of this, weren’t you?”

  “In a way. A girl has got to reckon with what people say.”

  She nodded, pale and expressionless, slowly brushing up the violets fastened to her muff.

  Farris appeared, announced the time, and held Desboro’s coat. They had just margin enough to make their train.

  CHAPTER IX

  The following morning, Aunt Hannah returned to her tiny apartment on Park Avenue, financially benefitted by her Westchester sojourn, having extracted a bolt of Chinese loot-silk for a gown from her nephew’s dismayed wife, and the usual check from her nephew.

  Lindley, a slow, pallid, and thrifty soul, had always viewed Aunt Hannah’s event with unfeigned alarm, because, somehow or other, at the close of every visit he found himself presenting her with a check. And it almost killed him.

  Years ago he had done it for the first time. He had never intended to; certainly never meant to continue. Every time she appeared he vowed to himself that he wouldn’t. But before her visit ended, the pressure of custom became too much for him; a deadly sense of obligation toward this dreadful woma
n — of personal responsibility for her indigence — possessed him, became gradually an obsession, until he exorcised it by the present of a check.

  She never spoke of it — never seemed to hint at it — always seemed surprised and doubtful of accepting; but some devilish spell certainly permeated the atmosphere in her immediate vicinity, drawing perfectly good money out of his innermost and tightly buttoned breast-pockets and leaving it certified and carelessly crumpled in her velvet reticule.

  It happened with a sickening regularity which now he had come to view with the modified internal fury of resignation. It had simply become a terrible custom, and, with all his respectable inertia and thrifty caution, adherence to custom ruled Lindley Hammerton. For years he had pinched roses; for years he had drawn checks for Aunt Hannah. Nothing but corporeal dissolution could terminate these customs.

  As for Aunt Hannah, she banked her check and had her bolt of silk made into a gown, and trotted briskly about her business with perennial self-confidence in her own ability to get on.

  Once or twice during the following fortnight she remembered Jacqueline, and mentally tabulated her case as a possible source of future income; but social duties were many and acridly agreeable, and pecuniary pickings plenty. Up to her small, thin ears in intrigue, harmless and not quite so harmless, she made hay busily while the social sun shone; and it was near the end of February before a stagnation in pleasure and business brought Jacqueline’s existence into her mind again.

  She called up Silverwood, and eventually got Desboro on the wire.

  “Do you know,” she said, “that your golden-headed and rather attenuated inamorata has never had the civility to call on me!”

  “She has been too busy.”

  “Too busy gadding about Silverwood with you!”

  “She hasn’t been here since you saw her.”

  “What!”

  “It’s quite true. An important collection is to be sold under the hammer on the premises; she had the contract to engineer that matter before she undertook to catalogue my stuff.”

  “Oh! Haven’t you seen her since?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not at Silverwood?”

  “No, only at her office.”