Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “See the lizards,” said Edgeworth sitting up beside her, “see them race over the dry leaves! There! They’ve run up a tree! Look, Io.”

  “I see,” she said. But she was looking up at him.

  He bent over her and kissed her, both hands clasped in hers.

  “You didn’t look at all,” he said.

  “Didn’t I?” whispered Yo Espero.

  It was true that she had not looked. When her eyes were not fastened upon his face, they were closed.

  So he sat smiling down at her with her slim fingers twisted in his; and that shadow of wistfulness that ever hovers close to happiness, fell over his eyes. And he said: “Do you ever regret — anything — Io?”

  She smiled faintly.

  “No — nothing, dear.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then you are happy.”

  “Yes.”

  What had she to regret? She loved him. To him she came, sick at heart for the companionship which she had never known. He had delivered her from her loneliness. First she listened to him with the fierce happiness of the lonely; then she idolized him; then she loved him. Love was all she had to give; and she gave it, even before he asked, — gave it without thought or regret.

  “Do you know,” he said, “that you have the prettiest hands in the world?”

  “Have I?”

  “Don’t you know that your whole figure is exquisite?”

  She raised one hand indolently and placed the fingers across his lips.

  “What do I care, — if you love me?” she said.

  “But I care,” he said; “to think that you, — all, all of you, — with your beautiful eyes and your neck and your lips and these two little hands, are mine — all mine!—”

  “And that brown hair above me — is mine, — isn’t it?” murmured the girl; “I never asked you before, but don’t — don’t I own some of you too? I have given you all of myself.”

  It was little to ask; — the question was a new one though, and he suddenly began to wonder how much of him she did own. He looked at her half curiously as she lay there, her innocent face upturned, her young figure flung across the pine-needle matting of the forest. Her eyes told him she loved him; every line and curve of her sweet body solemnized the vow.

  “Io,” he said, “all of me that is worth owning you own.”

  “This hand?” she asked, locking her fingers in his. “Both,” he said.

  “Everything? All — all?”

  “All, Yo Espero.”

  “You never said so — before.”

  “I say it now; all! all! all!”

  * * * * * *

  “We will go to Silver Mine Creek,” said Yo Espero, “and we will fish there for a little fish. There are bass in the French Broad, and you shall catch them from the rifts below Deepwater Bridge. We will gallop on horseback to Sunset Sands and we will go to Bubbling Spring. All this will take time, you know, but you are never going away, are you? Hush! I could not live until sunrise. Then, in the fall, we will go across to the little Hurricane where there are deer. You shall shoot a great wild-turkey also! Dear me! What more can a man ask for? And then there are teal and mallard on the French Broad before the ice has bridged the Little Red Horse. You will love the South.”

  “Yes, dear,” he answered, soberly; but his eyes were turned to the North.

  “I know lots of springs in the forest,” she said, watching his face.

  “And blockade stills?” he smiled.

  She laughed outright and sat up, gathering her heavy hair into a twist.

  “There is one within a few steps of. where we sit; you could never find it,” she said, tauntingly.

  “Oho!” he exclaimed, “whose?”

  “Zeke’s,” said the girl, “I could go to it in two minutes, — hark! — was that a gunshot from the valley?”

  “I think it was,” he said, “it came from that way,” and he pointed to the west.

  “From Painted Mountain! Did it sound like a rifle, Jim?”

  Her eyes were very bright. Two red spots glowed on either cheek.

  “I don’t know, dear,” he said, “why?”

  As he spoke he rose and stepped back two paces. And as he took the second step there came a whirr, a girl’s scream, and a rattlesnake struck him twice above the ankle.

  For one second the forest swam before his eyes; then a cold sweat started from the roots of his hair and he bent and picked up a stick, shaking in every limb. It was over in a moment; the snake lay dead, shuddering and twisting among the rocks, but it was Yo Espero who had crushed it, and now she turned to him a face as bloodless as his own.

  “Wait!” she panted, “there’s whisky at Zeke’s!” and she sprang across the mountain-side and vanished among the thickets.

  He bent over and tore down his stocking; then his head whirled and he sank trembling upon the ground.

  As he lay there great throbs of pain swept through him in waves, succeeded by momentary numbness, but through the mist of faintness and the delirium of pain he heard the dead snake thumping among the leaves. Then all was one great thrill of agony, but, as his senses reeled again, a touch fell upon his arm and he heard her voice:

  “Drink, — quickly — all — all you can!”

  And he did, blindly, guided by her arm. She held the demijohn until his head fell back.

  Then she knelt, ripped her own sleeve from wrist to shoulder and stared at her round white arm. Two blue marks, close together, capped the summit of a terrible swelling, and she cried out once for help. With all the strength that remained, she dragged the demijohn to her mouth and stretched out on the ground, the crystal clear liquor running between her teeth. She tried hard to swallow. Once she murmured, “I knew there was not enough for both, — I guess there isn’t much left; I guess — it’s — too late—”

  After a minute or two she wandered in her delirium, but still she swallowed desperately until the demijohn rolled away from her nerveless grasp, and she seemed to lose consciousness. With the last spark of understanding left in her numbed brain, she turned over and stretched out, her lips crushed against his face.

  Zeke found them. Whether it was the smell of blockade whisky, coupled with the absence of his demijohn, or whether it was Providence, cannot be successfully argued here. But he found them, and he carried them into his ramshackle cabin and laid them side by side across his mattress.

  After he had looked at them for half an hour’s absolute silence, he spat the remains of a hard-chewed quid into a corner, picked up his gun, and wended his way down the mountain-side to the Diamond Springs Hotel.

  Here he was promptly arrested by two pale-faced Revenue Officers, and here, for the first time, he learned that Clyde, the tenant of Yo Espero on Painted Mountain, had been shot dead, two hours before, for resisting arrest at the hands of United States officers.

  The hotel was in commotion, but when Zeke drawled out his story, panic reigned supreme, and the Beezeleys started in a body for Zeke’s hut.’ How they got lost on the mountain and were frightened by snakes, and how Dr. Samuel Meeke headed a rescue party in their behalf, has no place in this story, — nor, I imagine, in any story. O’Hara went on Zeke’s bond, and Zeke, followed by O’Hara and the proprietor of the Diamond Springs Hotel, started for the blockader’s burrow. The proprietor’s name was Eph Doom, but, unlike his namesake, nothing about him was sealed, not even his lips, and he chattered continually until Zeke drawled out: “O shet up, yew mewl o’ misery!”

  Once O’Hara spoke:

  “You left them both lying across your bed, Zeke?”

  “‘Bout a foot apart,” drawled Zeke.

  But when O’Hara burst into the cabin, he cried: “Thank God!” For they were in each other’s arms.

  * * * * * *

  And that is all there is to say.

  Eph Doom recounts a great deal more; he tells how those two striplings, dazed by alcohol and numbed with poison, clung together blindly; he tells
how he, personally, drove a shoal of Beezeleys and Meekes and Dills from the door of the cabin, and he relates with fire how young Edgeworth sat up, pale, trembling, and demanded that he, Ephraim Doom, should, as a Justice of the Peace, then and there instantly unite in holy wedlock James Edgeworth and Yo Espero Clyde: which he did not do, because O’Hara whispered: “Wait till he’s sober.” How Zeke escaped the clutches of the law needs a story by itself.

  How Dr. Samuel Meeke and Mrs. Dill — but that is scandal.

  How Yo Espero and Edgeworth loved is all that concerns this story.

  COLLECTOR OF THE PORT

  “‘Why do you limp?’ asked the maid.

  ‘I always stumble when the path is smooth,’ said Love.”

  I will grow round him in his place,

  Grow, live, die looking on his face,

  Die, dying clasp’d in his embrace.

  TENNYSON.

  In winter the Port is closed, the population migrates, the Collector of the Port sails southward. There is nothing left but black rocks sheathed in ice where icy seas clash and splinter and white squalls howl across the headland. When the wind slackens and the inlet freezes, spotted seals swim up and down the ragged edges of the ice, sleek restless heads raised, mild eyes fixed on the turbid shallows.

  In January, blizzard-driven, snowy owls whirl into the pines and sit all day in the demi-twilight, the white ptarmigan covers the softer snow with winding tracks, and the white hare, huddled in his whiter “form,” plays hide and seek with his own shadow.

  In February the Port-of-Waves is still untenanted. A few marauders appear, now and then a steel grey panther from the north frisking over the snow after the white hares, now and then a stub-tailed lynx, mean-faced, famished, snarling up at the white owls who look down and snap their beaks and hiss.

  The first bud on the Indian-willow brings the first inhabitant back to the Port-of-Waves, Francis Lee, superintendent of the mica quarry. The quarry-men follow in batches; the willow-tassels see them all there; the wind-flowers witness the defile of the first shift through the pines.

  On the last day of May the company’s flag was hoisted on the tool-house, the French-Canadians came down to repair the rusty narrow-gauge railroad, and Lee, pipe lighted, sea-jacket buttoned to the throat, tramped up and down the track with the lumber detail, chalking and condemning sleepers, blazing spruce and pine, sounding fish-plate and rail, and shouting at intervals until the washouts were shored up, windfalls hacked through, and landslide and boulder no longer blocked the progress of the company’s sole locomotive.

  The first of June brought sunshine and black flies, but not the Collector of the Port. The Canadians went back to Sainte Isole across the line, the white-throated sparrows’ long dreary melody broke out in the clearing’s edge, but the Collector of the Port did not return.

  That evening, Lee, smoking his pipe on the headland, looked out across the sunset-tinted ocean and saw the white gulls settling on the shoals and the fish-hawks soaring overhead with the red sunglint on their wings. The smoke of a moss smudge kept the flies away, his own tobacco smoke drove away care. Incidentally both drove Williams away, — a mere lad in baggy blue-jeans, smooth-faced, cleareyed, with sea-tan on wrist and cheek.

  “How did you cut your hand?” asked Lee, turning his head as Williams moved away.

  “Mica,” replied Williams briefly. After a moment Williams started on again.

  “Come back,” said Lee; “that wasn’t what I had to tell you.”

  He sat down on the headland, opened a jack-knife, and scraped the ashes out of his pipe. Williams came slowly up and stood a few paces behind his shoulder.

  “Sit down,” said Lee.

  Williams did not stir. Lee waited a moment, head slightly turned, but not far enough for him to see the figure motionless behind his shoulder.

  “It’s none of my business,” began Lee, “but perhaps you had better know that you have deceived nobody. Finn came and spoke to me to-day. Dyce knows it, Carrots and Lefty Sawyer know it, — I should have known it myself had I looked at you twice.”

  The June wind blowing across the grass, carried two white butterflies over the cliff. Lee watched them struggle back to land again. Williams watched Lee.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Lee, after a silence; “it is not forbidden for women to work in the quarry — that I am aware of. If you need work and prefer that sort, and if you perform your work properly, I shall not interfere with you. And I’ll see that the men do not.”

  Williams stood motionless; the smoke from the smudge shifted west, then south.

  “But,” continued Lee, “I must enter you properly on the pay-roll; I cannot approve of this masquerade. Finn will see you in the morning; it is unnecessary for me to repeat that you will not be disturbed.”

  There was no answer. After a silence Lee turned, then rose to his feet. Williams was weeping.

  Lee had never noticed her face; both sun-tanned hands hid it now; her felt hat was pulled down over the forehead.

  “Why did you come to the quarry?” he asked soberly. She did not reply.

  “It is men’s work,” he said; “look at your hands! You cannot do it.”

  She tightened her hands over her eyes; tears stole between her fingers and dropped, one by one, on the young grass.

  “If you need work — if you can find nothing else — I — I think perhaps I may manage something better,” he said. “You must not stand there crying — listen! Here come Finn and Dyce, and I don’t want them to talk all over the camp.” Finn and Dyce came toiling up the headland with news that the west drain was choked. They glanced askance at Williams, who turned her back. The sea-wind dried her eyes; it stung her torn hands too. She unconsciously placed one aching finger in her mouth and looked out to sea.

  “The dreen’s bust by the second windfall,” said Dyce, with a jerk of his stunted thumb toward the forest. “If them sluice-props caves in, the timber’s wasted.”

  Finn proposed new sluice gates; Lee objected, and swore roundly that if the damage was not repaired by next evening he’d hold Finn responsible. He told them he was there to save the company’s money, not to experiment with it; he spoke sharply to Finn of last year’s extravagance, and warned him not to trifle with orders.

  “I pay you to follow my directions,” he said. “Do so and I’ll be responsible to the company; disobey, and I’ll hold you to the chalk-mark every time.”

  Finn sullenly shifted his quid and nodded; Dyce looked rebellious.

  “You might as well know,” continued Lee, “that I mean what I say. You’ll find it out. Do your work and we’ll get on without trouble. You’ll find I’m just.”

  When Dyce and Finn had shuffled away toward the coast, Lee looked at the figure outlined on the cliffs against the sunset sky, — a desolate, lonely little figure in truth.

  “Come,” said Lee; “if you must have work I will give you enough to keep you busy; not in the quarry either, — do you want to cripple yourself in that pit? It’s no place for children anyway. Can you write properly?”

  The girl nodded, back turned toward him.

  “Then you can keep the rolls, duplicates, and all. You’ll have a room to yourself in my shanty. I’ll pay quarry wages.”

  He did not add that those wages must come out of his own pocket. The company allowed him no secretary, and he was too sensitive to suggest one.

  “I don’t ask you where you came from or why you are here,” he said a little roughly. “If there is gossip I cannot help it.” He walked to the smudge and stood in the smoke, for the wind had died out and the black flies were active.

  “Perhaps,” he hazarded, “you would like to go back to — to where you came from? I’ll send you back.”

  She shook her head.

  “There may be gossip in camp.”

  The slightest movement of her shoulders indicated her indifference. Lee re-lighted his pipe, poked the smudge, and piled damp moss on it.

  “All right,” he
said, “don’t be unhappy; I’ll do what I can to make you comfortable. You had better come into the smudge, to begin with.”

  She came, touching her eyes with her hands, awkward, hesitating. He looked gravely at her clumsy boots, at the loose, toil-stained overalls.

  “What is your name?” he said, without embarrassment.

  “My name is Helen Pine.” She looked up at him steadily; after a moment she repeated her name as though expecting him to recognise it. He did not; he had never before heard it, as far as he knew. Neither did he find in her eager, wistful face anything familiar. How should he remember her? Why should he remember? It was nearly six months ago that, snow-bound in the little village on the Mohawk, he and the directors of his company left their private Pullman car to amuse themselves at a country dance. How should he recollect the dark-eyed girl who had danced the “fireman’s quadrille” with him, who had romped through a reel or two with him, who had amused him through a snowy evening? How should he recall the careless country incident, — the corn popping, the apple race, the flirtation on the dark, windy stairway? Who could expect him to remember the laughing kiss, the meaningless promise to write, the promises to return some day for another dance, and kiss? A week later he had forgotten the village, forgotten the dance, the pop-corn, the stairway, and the kiss. She never forgot. Had he told her he loved her? He forgot it before she replied. Had he amused himself? Passably. But he was glad that the snow-plows cleared the track next morning, for there was trouble in Albany and lobbying to do, and a rival company was moving wheels within wheels to lubricate the machinery of honest legislation.

  So it meant nothing to him, this episode of a snow blockade; it meant all the world to her. For months she awaited the letter that never came. An Albany journal mentioned his name and profession. She wrote to the company and learned where the quarry lay. She was young and foolish and nearly brokenhearted, so she ran away. Her first sentimental idea was to work herself to death, disguised, under his very eyes. When she lay dying she would reveal herself to him, and he should know too late the value of such a love. To this end she purchased some shears to cut her hair with; but the mental picture she conjured was not improved by such a sacrifice. She re-coiled her hair tightly and bought a slouched hat, too big.