Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Starlight sparkled on the stream just beyond the deeper shade of an enormous elm; the rushing noise of the water was in his ears; a fresh fragrance grew in the still night air; contentment grew within him.

  Beyond the bridge a few lighted windows in the scattered houses gleamed through the trees. But the candles were extinguished very soon, one after another. It was evident that early hours were the fashion at Anne’s Bridge.

  Now and then he could hear sounds in the house behind him indicative of various domestic duties in process of execution — the clink of dishes, light, swift footsteps across the creaking boards.

  She came out to the doorstep where he was seated, after a while, wearing a clean white waist and skirt. They were limp and mended in many places; but it was dark; and probably he would not have noticed it anyway.

  “This is very charming and peaceful,” he said, pleasantly, as he rose. “I am wondering what that haunting fragrance is.”

  She lifted her dainty nose and sniffed the air:

  “Bergamot,” she said, looking out into the darkness.

  “May I bring you a chair?” he suggested.

  She thanked him but said that she was going to retire in a few minutes. However, presently she seated herself on the doorsill, and he resumed his place on the doorstep below.

  “I have been wondering,” he remarked, “why the little village here is not more prosperous. It’s a pretty country.”

  She sat silent for a while, her chin supported by one hand, elbow on knee.

  “The place is ruined,” she said in a colorless voice. “Only those remain who are too poor to go.”

  “Ruined!” he repeated.

  “The soil is poor. It is not possible to make a living from sand and rock.”

  “But why did people come here and clear the land for farms?”

  “That was long ago. Forest mold covered the sandy soil. Farmers plowed a shallow furrow.... You would scarcely believe it, Mr. Dean, but there was a flourishing village here seventy years ago — sawmills, tanneries, a newspaper. And some farms were even being marked out into city lots.” She sat, now, with both hands framing her face, her dark eyes staring straight before her.

  “It is the history of other villages in this county. They cut away the woods and peeled the hemlock bark. When these were gone nothing remained except the land, and that proved to be only sand under the thin surface soil.”

  She made a slight discouraged gesture:

  “You guess the rest; drought and winds dried up and blew away the soil; sand is not worth cultivating; mills were abandoned when the timber had gone; tan-vats fell into ruins; people left their houses and went elsewhere. And Anne’s Bridge became — what you Dean was already wondering how it was that she existed there — how she contrived to live amid the ruins of such a remote rural desolation.

  “This would make a splendid preserve for some wealthy man, or for some club,” he suggested, cheerfully.

  The idea seemed new to her.

  “Land here ought to be picked up for almost nothing,” he went on, developing his theory. “The waters certainly look like trout waters; the cover is mostly second-growth and excellent for game. There’s lots of marketable white pine and hemlock, too — enough to afford an income to anybody who started scientific forestry here.”

  He turned and encountered her dark eyes. They were regarding him intently, almost wistfully.

  “Do you think it possible,” she said, “that anybody could want land at Anne’s Bridge?”

  “I don’t know. I could tell better to-morrow.” He hesitated, then added with a smile: “Have you any woodland here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there much of it?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought for a moment, conscious all the while that her eyes were fixed on him.

  “Could we take a look at it to-morrow?” he suggested.

  “Yes. The stream runs through it.” After a moment’s silence she rose, said good night and went away into the unlighted house.

  Dean resumed his seat. His dogs came and lay down beside him, resting their silky heads on his knees. —

  Around him in the darkness stood the crumbling ruins of human hopes. He could not see them, but he seemed to feel the presence of each stark, dismantled habitation. And those still inhabited seemed even sadder in the process of decay over the very heads of their destitute and hopeless tenants.

  “What a place to be caged in,” he muttered to himself under his breath— “with no chance to escape! What a place to be trapped in, with no money, no hope, no aid! The poor are better off in the slums; they die quicker.”

  And all the while the memory of her dark, wistful eyes persisted, of her passionless voice, of her flushed cheeks and dewy forehead as she came from the kitchen fire with his supper — and, remoter memory — her pink dress and sunbonnet — fallen to her shoulders —

  He tried to account for her, and could not. He wondered why she was alone in such a house, living in such a place. Her soft voice and accent, her choice of words and vocabulary forbade any idea that she had always lived here.

  She must be somewhere between twenty and twenty-five — he could not guess any nearer than that — could form no conclusion from the vigorous young figure under the pink print dress, nor from her light swift movements, nor yet from her face tanned to a creamy tint and touched with carnation on lip and cheek.

  The girl appeared to be educated, unusually pretty, unusually silent — with that silence which comes from no surfeit of happiness.

  Yet she was not sullen either — not naturally lacking in animation, he imagined.

  But it seemed to him as he sat thinking of her that something had been killed in her — the careless insouciance of youth — something swift had killed it suddenly, not by degrees; and had slain with it other and naturally youthful qualities.

  In her eyes, and under them, and in the rather sweet curve of her mouth he had detected no traces such as the slow erosion of long unhappy years leaves visible — no hardness, either, no imprint of trouble long endured and long resented.

  And, after thinking for another hour, he did not know what to think. So he rose and walked through the starlight to the barn. Here he left his dogs wagging their tails madly where they lay on the fresh sweet straw looking back at him. Then he returned to his room.

  And in a very few minutes he was sound asleep.

  II

  When he appeared in the morning dressed in flannel shirt, knickerbockers, and hob-nailed shoes, his dogs, who had been awaiting him, greeted him with the manners characteristic of each, Clarence cordially but with every mark of good breeding, Mike boisterously and with so much noise that the mistress of the house came from the kitchen to reconnoitre.

  “Good morning, Miss Allende,” said Dean. “Have you already accomplished those amazingly complicated duties which you mentioned to me last evening?”

  The ghost of a smile curved her lips: “I have accomplished everything necessary except your breakfast, Mr. Dean.”

  “I’ll accomplish that when it’s ready.”

  “It is ready.”

  So he walked into the dining alcove and presently became very busy with coffee, eggs, cereal, and hot Johnny-cake.

  “Miss Allende,” he said, “your cooking is absolutely delicious. That is not a compliment; it is a tribute.”

  She was smiling while he spoke, then a swift change altered her features. She said in a low and somewhat hurried voice that she was glad he found the breakfast to his taste; and she went into the kitchen again.

  Later he picked up his rod and strolled out to the door-step. Here he lighted his pipe, drew the silk line from the reel through the guides of his four-ounce rod, knotted on a nine-foot leader and a single fly, and, standing on the grass under the big elm, practiced a cast or two with much satisfaction.

  “Aha!” he observed to Mike, the red Irish setter, “if any trout are looking for trouble to-day they’ll find plenty.”

&n
bsp; “Plenty of trouble! Plenty of trouble!” said a voice behind him in a light conversational tone: “I wish you a Merry Christmas!”

  Dean turned around, surprised, but could see nobody.

  Perplexed, he stood looking about him for a moment or two, then, chancing to lift his eyes a trifle he found himself gazing at a gray African parrot which was seated just above him on the limb of an ancient apple tree.

  “Plenty of trouble!” repeated the parrot, staring at Dean out of a cold pale eye.

  “Hello!” said Dean, affably; “how are you?”

  “I’m in trouble,” remarked the parrot.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Dean, smiling.

  “Plenty of trouble, plenty of trouble,” repeated the bird, gravely lifting one claw, then the other. Then seizing the branch with powerful beak he turned completely over and hung head downward surveying Dean with a sort of sinister seriousness.

  “Plenty of trouble,” he said, hoarsely; “I wish you a Merry Christmas!”

  The dogs, astounded, stood staring as though frozen. Never had they beheld such a fearsome fowl in all their wide experience with feathered game.

  It was Mike who stirred first, lifting one paw and making a shivering, halfhearted attempt to point.

  “Oh, my God!” burst out the parrot. And the dogs gave it one horrified glance and fled.

  Dean was laughing without restraint as Miss Allende came to the door.

  “Aunty,” she said sternly to the parrot, “are you making more trouble?”

  “Plenty — plenty of trouble,” admitted the parrot, sliding along the branch toward the girl who lifted her hand and took the bird on her forefinger.

  “Does Aunty go about outdoors at will?” asked Dean, much amused.

  “Yes; she follows me about, or climbs into the trees.” The girl placed a melon seed between her lips; Aunty took it, cracked it and proceeded to enjoy it at leisure. After a few moments Miss Allende transferred the bird to the apple bough.

  “If you are ready, Mr. Dean,” she said, quietly.

  The girl herself was evidently ready for the woods; she wore a faded waist of gray flannel open at the throat, a skirt of the same considerably shrunken, and heavy little boots and leggins. Straps crossed her breast; from one hung a canvas bag, empty, from the other another bag, containing luncheon. —

  “I’ll take those,” he said.

  “Thank you, it is not necessary.” He smiled: “As you like, Miss Allende. But you need not feel that there are any duties of a guide incumbent upon you except to show me where to fish and take care that I don’t get lost.”

  For a moment she seemed embarrassed, then, in a grave, hesitating voice: “I am asking a dollar a day for guiding you. I should have told you that yesterday.”

  “A dollar a day!” he repeated, in laughing surprise.

  She flushed painfully: “Yes. Does it seem to you too much?”

  He laughed outright. “The guides north of us get five dollars a day. You are asking me too little, Miss Allende.”

  “Five dollars — a day!” she faltered, astonished; “that is — is absurd!”

  He was still laughing: “Let us compromise on two and a half — as long as you are to carry no pack and do no camp work.”

  “I cannot ask so much — merely to go with you—”

  “I should feel very uncomfortable if you do not ask me that much at least,” he insisted.

  She lifted her troubled eyes to his, unresponsive to the frank amusement in his.

  “I had rather you did not offer me so much,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because” — and she became graver, “I do not think I am worth it, or that you — you can afford it.”

  Varying and inscrutable emotions possessed him and were reflected in his features; but he managed to subdue every trace of amusement when he spoke.

  “Why don’t you think I can afford it, Miss Allende?” he asked pleasantly.

  Her frank brown eyes met his: “Because you are boarding with me for ten dollars a week, Mr. Dean.”

  He nodded thoughtfully: “I see. A man who could afford a fashionable resort does not board at Anne’s Bridge for ten dollars a week. That, of course, is obvious and logical, isn’t it?”

  She bit her lip: “I did not mean “Of course not. It was kind and thoughtful of you. A man on his vacation goes where he can afford to go. I came here for my vacation — the terms you offered being what I could afford.” He smiled gayly: “So if you ask me only a dollar a day for guiding me, maybe I can afford to remain here a little longer.... So, if you wish, I agree to that.”

  She stood motionless, her hands resting lightly on the slings of the two sacks which hung on either hip.

  “So that’s the bargain,” he said— “a dollar a day.... But where is your rod, Miss Allende?”

  “I did not know whether you cared to have me fish, too—”

  “Indeed I do! Where is your rod?” Without replying she went indoors and presently returned with a rod. Dean noticed that it was an old-fashioned but beautifully made rod of solid wood, with ring guides and a reelplate high on the butt. The reel, too, was an ancient and heavy model, very perfectly made — probably an English reel.

  As they turned toward the woods walking along the grassy bank of the stream, he spoke admiringly of the rod, and she said that it had belonged to her father.

  “It is a fine one,” he said, as she offered it for his inspection— “one of those beautiful works of early art, perfect in balance and workmanship, and fairly redolent of tradition.”

  He balanced it, switched it gently, lovingly, and with the skilful authority of an expert: “Whenever I see one of these old-time rods,” he said, “it thrills me a little just as I suppose a rare old violin thrills a connoisseur. And always these old rods seem full of the secrets of vanished years — of the romance of battles with big, wary speckled trout — the trout of long ago, Miss Allende — the trout that are no more!” He smiled, handed the rod to her, saying: “Perhaps you do not quite understand me.”

  “My father,” she said, “cared for angling — as you seem to.”

  “Surely. The owner of that rod knew the poetry of angling.”

  A line of bushes partly hid the stream as they advanced. The edge of the woods lay just beyond where the remains of a sawmill rose among willows and alders.

  Already Dean could hear the freshly pleasant noise of water falling, and the next moment he came in sight of a sagging and mossy mill-dam over which water poured into a wide pool below.

  “That looks good to me,” he suggested.

  “The trout are small in this stream,” she said. “I had meant to take you to another.”

  “Lead on, Mademoiselle!” he said gayly, and followed her into the woods.

  There seemed to be no path, no notched trees; but the girl moved forward without hesitation into the dusky stillness of the woods, leading the way, not swiftly, but with the peculiar buoyancy of youth and strength and perfect health, unspoiled, unhampered by self-consciousness. Every movement of her lithe figure seemed to Dean as charmingly unpremeditated yet as logical as the leisurely woodland progress of some shy, wild creature toward an unseen goal.

  Neither the shabby flannels nor the heavy boots could fetter the lightlimbed step, nor constrain the vigorous young body, nor conceal its grace.

  Once she turned toward him, her cheeks delicately flushed but breathing evenly:

  “Please tell me if I am walking too fast,” she said as he came up.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said, smiling.

  The woods seemed to be more open, now, and she fell back into step beside him.

  “How do you find your way?” he asked.

  “The sun — the slope of the land — various trees and rocks. These woods are familiar to me, Mr. Dean.”

  “So I notice,” he said, laughing. “As for me, I’m completely turned around except when I notice the sun. And even that seems to be in the wrong place.
”

  She smiled slightly. Always at any lightly humorous remark of his it seemed to be her first impulse to respond in kind, but always, too, he noticed the smile die swiftly in her eyes and fade from her lips as though checked by some subtle second thought.

  And now he found himself always looking for this quick change in her expression, uneasily expectant of it — the almost instant smoothing out of every feature as though to correct a momentary and forgetful animation.

  That the mask of indifference was only a mask he began to suspect, and he did not now believe that it concealed merely intellectual vacancy. For surely here was no dull mind, no personality insensible to the natural and innocent instincts of youth, no perverted primness of a warped self-consciousness in process of de-humanization.

  And it became plain to him that the girl deliberately checked herself, employing conscious effort to do so — as though following some definite policy in maintaining an indifference and an aloofness neither necessary nor natural even under the unusual circumstances of their chance companionship.

  As they walked on through the hardwood growth he speculated idly concerning this, wondering a little why she seemed to find it necessary to discipline laughter that had no more significance for either of them than that the world was young.

  “As for a mystery or a past life’s history, God forbid!” he thought, rather bored at the idea.

  And yet, thinking along that line, it occurred to him that here in this ruined hamlet of Anne’s Bridge there must have been histories aplenty, if not mysteries — the sad romance of false hopes proven false; the tragedy of failure overwhelming youth and age alike in the same fatal web.

  It was merely the history of all American pioneers — haste, waste, stupidity, stupor — the childish stupor overtaking those who had emptied the glass and who found to their amazement that the gods had not promptly refilled it for them.

  “From the way you spoke about your fishing rod,” he said, “I imagine that your father is not living.”