Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  It was a death’s-head moth.

  * * * *

  I wish I had time to tell you how Lys outgrew superstitions for she never knew the truth about the affair, and she never will know, since she has promised not to read this book. I wish I might tell you about the king and his coronation, and how the coronation robe fitted. I wish that I were able to write how Yvonne and Herbert Stuart rode to a boar hunt in Quimperlé, and how the hounds raced the quarry right through the town, overturning three gendarmes, the notary, and an old woman. But I am becoming garrulous, and Lys is call- ing me to come and hear the king say that he is sleepy. And his Highness shall not be kept waiting.

  THE KING’S CRADLE SONG.

  Seal with a seal of gold

  The scroll of a life unrolled;

  Swathe him deep in his purple stole;

  Ashes of diamonds, crystalled coal.

  Drops of gold in each scented fold.

  Crimson wings of the Little Death,

  Stir his hair with your silken breath;

  Flaming wings of sins to be,

  Splendid pinions of prophecy,

  Smother his eyes with hues and dyes,

  While the white moon spins and the winds arise,

  And the stars drip through the skies.

  Wave, O wings of the Little Death!

  Seal his sight and stifle his breath,

  Cover his breast with the gemmed shroud pressed;

  From north to north, from west to west,

  Wave, wings of the Little Death!

  Till the white moon reels in the cracking skies,

  And the ghosts of God arise.

  We are no other than a moving row

  Of magic shadow-shapes, that come and go

  Round with this sun-illumined lantern, held

  In midnight by the master of the show.

  A moment’s halt — a momentary taste

  Of being from the well amid the waste —

  And lo! the phantom caravan has reached

  The nothing it set out from. Oh, make haste!

  Ah, Love! could you and I with him conspire

  To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,

  Would not we shatter it to bits — and then

  Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire!

  FITZGERALD.

  THE WHITE SHADOW.

  Listen, then, love, and with your white hand clear

  Your forehead from its cloudy hair.

  I.

  “THREE great hulking cousins,” said she, closing her gray eyes disdainfully.

  We accepted the rebuke in astonished silence. Presently she opened her eyes, and seemed surprised to see us there yet.

  “O,” she said, “if you think I am going to stay here until you make up your minds — —”

  “I’ve made up mine,” said Donald. “We will go to the links. You may come.”

  “I shall not,” she announced. “Walter, what do you propose?”

  Walter looked at his cartridge belt and then at the little breech-loader standing in a corner of the arbour.

  “Oh, I know,” she said, “but I won’t! I won’t! I won’t!”

  The uncles and aunts on the piazza turned to look at us; her mother arose from a steamer-chair and came across the lawn.

  “Won’t what, Sweetheart?” she asked, placing both hands on her daughter’s shoulders.

  “Mamma, Walter wants me to shoot, and Don wants me to play golf, and I — won’t!”

  “She doesn’t know what she wants,” said I.

  “Don’t I?” she said, flushing with displeasure.

  “Her mother might suggest something,” hazarded Donald. We looked at our aunt.

  “Sweetheart is spoiled,” said that lady decisively. “If you children don’t go away at once and have a good time, I shall find employment for her.”

  “Algebra?” I asked maliciously.

  “How dare you!” cried Sweetheart, sitting up. “Oh, isn’t he mean! isn’t he ignoble! — and I’ve done my algebra; haven’t I, mamma?”

  “But your French?” I began.

  Donald laughed, and so did Walter. As for Sweetheart, she arose in all the dignity of sixteen years, closed her eyes with superb insolence, and, clasping her mother’s waist with one round white arm, marched out of the arbour.

  “We tease her too much,” said Donald.

  “She’s growing up fast; we ought not to call her Sweetheart when she puts her hair up,” added Walter.

  “She’s going to put it up in October, when she goes back to school,” said Donald. “Jack, she will hate you if you keep reminding her of her algebra and French.”

  “Then I’ll stop,” said I, suddenly conscious what an awful thing it would be if she hated me.

  Donald’s two pointers came frisking across the lawn from the kennels, and Donald picked up his gun.

  “Here we go again,” said I. “Donny’s going to the coverts after grouse, Walter’s going up on the hill with his dust-shot and arsenic, and I’m going across the fields after butterflies. Why the deuce can’t we all go together, just for once?”

  “And take Sweetheart? She would like it if we all went together,” said Walter; “she is tired of seeing Jack net butterflies.”

  “Collecting birds and shooting grouse are two different things,” began Donald. “You spoil my dogs by shooting your confounded owls and humming birds.”

  “Oh, your precious dogs!” I cried. “Shut up, Donny, and give Sweetheart a good day’s tramp. It’s a pity if three cousins can’t pool their pleasures for once.”

  Donald nodded uncertainly.

  “Come on,” said Walter, “we’ll find Sweet heart. Jack, you get your butterfly togs and come back here.”

  I nodded, and watched my two cousins sauntering across the lawn — big, clean-cut fellows, resembling each other enough to be brothers instead of cousins.

  We all resembled each other more or less, Donald, Walter, and I. As for Sweetheart, she looked like none of us.

  It was all very well for her mother to call her Sweetheart, and for her aunts to echo it in chorus, but the time was coming when we saw we should have to stop. A girl of sixteen with such a name is ridiculous, and Sweetheart was nearly seventeen; and her hair was “going up” and her gowns were “coming down” in October.

  Her own name was pretty enough. I don’t know that I ought to tell it, but I will: it was the same as her mother’s. We called her Sweetheart sometimes, sometimes “The Aspen Beauty.” Donald had given her that name from a butterfly in my collection, the Vanessa Pandora, commonly known as the Aspen beauty, from its never having been captured in America except in our village of Aspen.

  Here, in the north of New York State, we four cousins spent our summers in the family house. There was not much to do in Aspen. We used the links, we galloped over the sandy roads, we also trotted our several hobbies, Donald, Walter, and I. Sweetheart had no hobby; to make up for this, however, she owned a magnificent team of bêtes-noires — Algebra and French.

  As for me, my butterfly collection languished. I had specimens of nearly every butterfly in New York State, and I rather longed for new states to conquer. Anyway, there were plenty of Aspen beauties — I mean the butterflies — flying about the roads and balm-of-Gilead trees, and perhaps that is why I lingered there long enough to collect hundreds of duplicates for exchange. And perhaps it wasn’t.

  I thought of these things as I sat in the sun-flecked arbour, watching the yellow elm leaves flutter down from the branches. I thought, too, of Sweetheart, and wondered how she would look with her hair up. And while I sat there smoking, watching the yellow leaves drifting across the lawn, a sharp explosion startled me and I raised my head.

  Sweetheart was standing on the lawn, gazing dreamily at the smoking débris of a large firecracker.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “It proclaims my independence,” said Sweetheart— “my independence forever. Here after my cousins will ask to accompany me on my wa
lks; they need no longer charitably permit me to accompany them. Are you three boys going to ride your hobbies?”

  “We are,” I said.

  “Then good-bye. I am going to walk.”

  “Can’t we come too?” I asked, laughing.

  “Oh,” she said graciously, “if you put it in that way I could not refuse.”

  “May we bring our guns?” asked Donald from the piazza.

  “May I bring my net?” I added, half amused, half annoyed.

  She made a gesture, indifferent, condescending.

  “Dear me!” murmured the aunts in chorus from the piazza as we trooped after the Aspen beauty, “Sweetheart is growing very fast.”

  I smiled vaguely at Sweetheart. I was wondering how she would look in long frocks and coiled hair.

  II.

  In the fall of the year the meadows of Aspen glimmer in the sunlight like crumpled sheets of beaten gold; for Aspen is the land of golden-rod, of yellow earth and gilded fern.

  There the crisp oaks rustle, every leaf a blot of yellow; there the burnished pines sound, sound, tremble, and resound, like gilt-stringed harps aquiver in the wind.

  Sweet fern, sun-dried, bronzed, fills all the hills with incense, vague and delicate as the white down drifting from the frothy milkweed.

  And where the meadow brook prattled, limpid, filtered with sunlight, Sweetheart stood knee-deep in fragrant mint, watching the aimless minnows swimming in circles. On a distant hill, dark against the blue, Donald moved with his dogs, and I saw the sun-glint on his gun, and I heard the distant “Hi — on! Hi — on!” long after he disappeared below the brown hill’s brow.

  “Walter, too, had gone, leaving us there by the brook together, Sweetheart and I; and I saw the crows flapping and circling far over the woods, and I heard the soft report of his dust-shot shells among the trees.

  “The ruling passion, Sweetheart,” I said. “Donny chases the phantom of pleasure with his dogs. The phantom flies from Walter, and he follows with his dust-shot.”

  “Then,” said Sweetheart, “follow your phantom also; there are butterflies everywhere.” She raised both arms and turned from the brook. “Everywhere flying I see butterflies phantoms of pleasure; and, Jack, you do not follow with your net.”

  “No,” said I, “the world to-day is too fair to — slay in. I even doubt that the happiness of empires hinges on the discovery of a new species of anything. Do I bore you?”

  “A little,” said Sweetheart, touching the powdered gold of the blossoms about her. She laid the tip of her third finger on her lips and then on the golden-rod. “I shall not pick it; the world is too fair to-day,” she said. “What are you going to do, Jack?”

  “I could doze,” I said. “Could you?”

  “Yes — if you told me stories.”

  I contemplated her in silence for a moment. After a while she sat down under an oak and clasped her hands.

  “I am growing so old,” she sighed, “I no longer take pleasure in childish things Donald’s dogs, Walter’s humming birds, your butterflies. Jack?”

  “What?”

  “Sit down on the grass.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I ask you.”

  I sat down.

  Presently she said: “I am as tall as mamma. Why should I study algebra?”

  “Because,” I answered evasively.

  “Your answer is as rude as though I were twenty, instead of sixteen,” said Sweetheart. “If you treat me as a child from this moment, I shall hate you.”

  “Me — Sweetheart?”

  “And that name! — it is good for children and kittens.”

  I looked at her seriously. “It is good for women, too when it is time,” I said. “I prophesy that one day you will hear it again. As for me, I shall not call you by that name if you dislike it.”

  “I am a woman — now,” she said.

  “Oh! at sixteen.”

  “To-morrow I am to be seventeen.”

  Presently, looking off at the blue hills, I said: “For a long time I have recognised that that subtle, indefinable attitude — we call it deference — due from men to women is due from us to you. Donny and Walter are slower to accept this. You know what you have been to us as a child; we can’t bear to lose you — to meet you in another way — to reckon with you as we reckon with a woman. But it is true: our little Sweetheart has vanished, and — you are here!”

  The oak leaves began to rustle in the hill winds; the crows cawed from the woods.

  “Oui c’est moi,” she said at length.

  “I shall never call you Sweetheart again,” I said, smiling.

  “Who knows?” she laughed, and leaned over to pick a blade of wild wheat. She coloured faintly a moment later, and said: “I didn’t mean that, Jack.”

  And so Sweetheart took her first step across that threshold of mystery, the Temple of Idols. And of the gilded idols within the temple, one shall turn to living flesh at the sound of a voice. And lo! where a child had entered, a woman returned with the key to the Temple of Gilded Idols.

  “Jack,” said Sweetheart, “you are wrong. No day is too fair to kill in. I shall pick my arms full — full of flowers.” Over the yellow fields, red with the stalks of the buckwheat, crowned with a glimmering cloud of the dusty gold of the golden-rod, Sweetheart passed, pensive, sedate, awed by the burden of sixteen years.

  I followed.

  Over the curling fern and wind-stirred grasses the silken milkweed seeds sailed, sailed, and the great red-brown butterflies drifted above, ruddy as autumn leaves aglow in the sun.

  On the sand-cliff there are marigolds,” said Sweetheart.

  I looked at the mass of wild flowers in her arms; her white polished skin reflected the blaze of colour, warming like ivory under their glow.

  “Marigolds,” I repeated; “we will get some.”

  “The sand slides on the face of the cliff; you must be careful,” she said.

  “And I may see one of those rare cliff butterflies. I haven’t any good examples.”

  I fancy she was not listening; the crows were clamouring above the beech woods; the hill winds filled our ears with a sound like the sound of the sea on shoals. Her gray eyes, touched with the sky’s deep blue and the blue of the misty hills, looked out across the miles of woods and fields, and saw a world; not a world old, scarred, rock-ribbed, and salt with tears, but a new world, youthful, ripe, sunny, hazy with the splendour of wonders hidden behind the horizon — a world jewelled with gems, spanned by rose-mist rainbows — a world of sixteen years.

  “We are already at the cliff’s edge,” I said.

  She stepped to the edge and looked over. I drew her back. The sand started among the rocks, running, running with a sound like silver water.

  “Then you shall not go either,” she said. I do not care for marigolds.”

  But I was already on the edge, stooping for a blossom. The next instant I fell.

  There was a whistle of sand, a flurry and a rush of wind, a blur of rock, fern, dead grasses — a cry!

  For I remember as I fell, falling I called, “Sweetheart!” and again “Sweetheart!” Then my body struck the rocks below.

  III.

  Of all the seconds that tick the whole year through, of all the seconds that have slipped onward marking the beat of time since time was loosed, there is one, one brief moment, steeped in magic and heavy with oblivion, that sometimes lingers in the soul of man, annihilating space and time. If, at the feet of God, a year is a second passed unnoted, this magic second, afloat on the tide of time, moves on and on till, caught in the vortex of some life’s whirl, it sinks into the soul of a being near to death.

  And in that soul the magic second glows and lingers, stretching into minutes, hours, days — aye, days and days, till, if the magic hold, the calm years crowd on one by one; and yet it all is but a second — that magic moment that comes on the tide of time — that came to me and was caught up in my life’s whirl as I fell, dropping there between sky an
d earth.

  And so that magic moment grew to minutes, to hours; and when my body, whirling, pitching, struck and lay flung out on the earth, the magic second grew until the crystal days fell from my life, as beads, one by one, fall from the rosaries that saints tell kneeling.

  Those days of a life that I have lived, those years that linger still aglow in the sun behind me, dim yet splendid as dust-dimmed jewels, they also have ended, not in vague night, but in the sunburst of another second — such a second as ticks from my watch as I write, quick, sharp, joyous, irrevocable! So, of that magic second, or day, or year, I shall tell — I, as I was, standing beside my body flung there across the earth.

  I looked at my body, lying in a heap, then turned to the sand cliff smiling.

  “Sweetheart!” I called.

  But she was already at my side.

  We walked on through fragrant pastures, watching the long shadows stretch from field to field, speaking of what had been and of all that was to be. It was so simple — everything was clear before us. Had there been doubts, fears, sudden alarms, startled heartbeats?

  If there had been, now they were ended forever.

  “Not forever,” said Sweetheart; “who knows how long the magic second may last?”

  “But we — what difference can that make?” I asked.

  “To us?”

  “Yes.”

  “None,” said Sweetheart decisively.

  We looked out into the west. The sun turned to a mound of cinders; the hills loomed in opalescent steam.

  “But — but — your shadow!” said Sweetheart.

  I bent my head, thrilled with happiness.

  “And yours,” I whispered.