Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Why did you have it served?” she asked directly. “Do you know what this wine of Sarna signifies? Do you know every drop is worth ten times its weight in gold? Do you know there are not three other bottles of it known in the world?”

  “I knew all that. I believed that Sarna alone was worthy of — of” — he met her level gaze—” of our first anniversary.”

  “No; it is inappropriate,” she replied steadily. “Do you not know the legend?”

  “It is the only wine not forbidden by the Koran. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean—” He hesitated.

  “Yes, that. The last Khedive emptied the last glass of the last but three bottles remaining in all the world while his bride’s lips were still wet with the dew of Sarna. It is the custom of Emperors and Sultans — ask me for how long, and my answer is: as long as the saros; compute it, oh, Heaven-born!” She crossed her pretty hands below her throat, a smile, half gay, half tender, parting her lips.

  “How did you know such things?” he asked.

  “My father was a judge of the Mixed Tribunal,” she answered gravely. “My mother was married there; I was born in Cairo.”

  “Fate!” he said excitedly—” sheer Fate! My father was the ex-Confederate, Hildreth Pasha, of the Khedival Court! The Sarna — that bottle cradled there — came from a judge of the Mixed Tribunal! Shall not their children touch the same glass?”

  They both were excited, flushed, a little bewildered.

  “Do you know the custom?” he asked recklessly.

  “Y-es.” She held up one slender finger; her mother’s betrothal ring, set with the diamond scarab, sparkled on the white skin; and she drew the thin circlet from her finger and held it suspended over the glass of golden Sarna. The single brilliant flashed and flashed as though the sacred beetle were struggling to be free.

  “Shall I?”

  “Try it,” he laughed. “Who knows what sign of fortune the dead Sultans may send?”

  “They — they only send a sign to — to brides—”

  “I know it. Try!”

  “But the mechanism is unknown to me; it is not possible that a bath of this scented wine could start it—”

  “Try!”

  There was a glimmer, a little clinking splash in the slim wineglass. They inspected the ring lying in the amber wine; they glanced at one another rather foolishly. Then, looking at him, she raised the glass, tasted, passed it to him. He tasted, his eyes on her, and set the half-empty glass before her.

  “I — I believe there’s something happening to that ring,” said Hildreth suddenly, rising and passing around the table to her side.

  Breathless, they bent over the glass, heads close together.

  “Doesn’t it look to you as though that diamond scarab were moving?” he said in a low voice.

  “Yes; but it can’t be — how can it—”

  “Look!”

  “Oh — h!” she whispered—” see! It — it’s alive! It is unfolding arms and legs like a crab.”

  “What on earth—” he stammered, but got no further, for the girl caught him by the arm: “Look! Look Î The swastika! It means fortune! It means — it means—”

  His hand shook as he lifted the glass and reversed it. A shower of perfumed wine sprinkled the lace centerpiece; the mystic swastika, glittering, magnificent, fell heavily upon the mahogany — a dull, gem-incrusted lump of purest gold.

  “What is it?” he gasped. “I thought it was alive, like one of those jeweled Egyptian beetles! I thought those things were legs!”

  “It is the swastika,” she whispered, laying it in her pink palm. “Who wears it shall always—” She stopped short, hesitated, then the color in her face deepened, and she looked up over her shoulder at him. “Will you do something for me?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Wear this. Will you?” She drew her tiny handkerchief from her sleeve, tore a shred of cambric from it, passed it through the swastika, and, before he knew what she meant to do, had tied it to his lapel.

  “Just to see what happens,” she said, laughing almost hysterically. If there was the slightest chance of any luck in the world she wished it to be his. It was all she had to give.

  “You resign your chance of fortune to me?” he asked curiously — and, as she only nodded: “There is but one happiness Fortune can bring me. Are you willing to trust it to me?”

  Before she could reply a maid appeared with a telegram; he asked her pardon, and opened it. Twice he read it, read it again, nodded a dazed dismissal to the maid, read it again very carefully, and finally, with a smile that was somewhat sickly, handed it across the table to her.

  What she read was this:

  ADRINTHA LODGE, MOHAWK COUNTY, NEW YORK.

  JOHN HILDRETH: I know what you’re up to, and you had better stop. — PETER HILDRETH.

  “Peter Hildreth,” she repeated blankly.

  “My uncle.”

  “But — but what does he mean?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” said the young fellow uneasily.

  “Is he in the habit of telegraphing you?”

  “No, he isn’t; he never did such a thing.”

  She turned the yellow leaf of paper over and over thoughtfully. Then he suddenly encountered her disturbed gaze.

  “He says that he knows what you’re up to, and you’d better stop,” she said. “What are you up to, Mr. Hildreth?”

  “Up to? Absolutely nothing! I’m fairly tingling with the consciousness of innocence, righteousness, and good intentions. I don’t know what that old crank means — any mare than you know.”

  “I — I am dreadfully afraid that I know what he means.”

  “What?”

  “I think he means me.”

  “You! Why?”

  “Because I’m here — here lunching with you. He might draw — dreadful conclusions.”

  “What on earth do you mean, Miss Grey? He never even heard of you. How can he know you are here?”

  “Suppose — suppose he is — is looking into his crystal!”

  A sudden silence fell, lasting until the coffee was served.

  “It is nonsense to suppose that people can do such things,” said Hildreth abruptly.

  “What things?” she asked, watching him set fire to a cigarette.

  “Such things as looking into crystals and seeing nephews. Anyway, what is there to see?” He waved his hands as though scattering suspicion to the four winds. “What is there to see except a future financier and his principal chief of department at a purely business luncheon—”

  With silver souvenirs and Sarna,” she murmured.

  They laughed, feeling the constraint subsiding once more.

  “Please let us talk a little business — for form’s sake, if nothing else,” she said.

  “All right; your salary is to be increased—”

  “Mr. Hildreth, you cannot afford any extravagances, and you know it.”

  “I am not going to let you write my verses, and profit by it to your exclusion! Besides, this swastika is going to enable me to afford anything, I understand.”

  “But you already divide your salary with me. You can’t do more!”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “No, no, no! Wait until you are promoted to be the advertising artist. Wait until the swastika begins to help us — you.”

  “No; because then you’ll have to draw all my pictures for me, and your salary must be increased again.”

  “At that rate,” she said, laughing, “I’ll be half partner when you are.”

  “Full partner — if the swastika knows its business. I — I — wish he didn’t have that crystal up there at Adrintha. I’ve a mind to buy a rabbit’s foot. With a rabbit’s foot and a swastika we ought to checkmate any crystal-gazing, pink-eyed clairvoyants.”

  “But — what have they to do with us?” she asked gently.

  What he was about to say he only half divined — for she was bewilderingly pretty — and perhaps she dimly fores
aw it, too, for they both flushed with a sudden constraint that was abruptly broken by the entrance of the maid with another telegram.

  “What the deuce—” stammered Hildreth, tearing open the yellow envelope; and he read:

  ADRINTHA LODGE.

  JOHN HILDRETH: I’m watching you in my crystal. If you want the Society for Psychical Research to become my heirs, do exactly what you’re doing with that girl.

  PETER HILDRETH.

  “Is — is it anything alarming?” asked the pretty stenographer as he crumpled the paper.

  “Alarming? I don’t know — no! What the mischief has got into that uncle of mine?”

  “Is it from him?” she asked, turning pale.

  “Yes — it is. But if he thinks he can make me believe that he sees me in his dinky little crystal—”

  “Oh, don’t talk that way,” she pleaded; “there may be things that we don’t understand happening all the while—”

  “There can’t be!”

  For a while she was dumb, mutely refusing to be reassured, and presently, rising from the table, they passed into the gay little room where her desk stood.

  The fire was glowing very brightly in the carved fireplace of golden and pearl-tinted onyx. He drew up his uncle’s great chair for her; she shook her head and looked meaningly at her pad and pencil, but after a silent struggle with indecision and inclination she seated herself by the gilt fender, pretty hands folded in acquiescence.

  “Now,” he said, “let us speak of those things that have come true.”

  “What has come true, Mr. Hildreth?”

  “You.”

  The slightest of rose tints touched her cheeks.

  “Did you believe me unreal?” she asked.

  He was leaning forward, looking up into her face, which reflected the pink light of the fire.

  And what he started to say Heaven alone knows, for his voice was dreadfully unsteady. However, it ceased quickly enough when the maid knocked rather loudly and presented a third telegram to her disconcerted master; and this was what he read:

  ADRINTHA LODGE.

  JOHN HILDRETH: If you kiss that girl you’re talking to I’ll disinherit you. — PETER HILDRETH.

  Stunned, the young man sat for a moment, vacant eyes fixed on the writing that alternately blurred and sprang into dreadful distinctness under his gaze. Presently he heard a voice not much like his own saying: “It’s nonsense; things like this don’t happen in 1907 in the borough of Manhattan. Why, that’s Fifth Avenue out there, and there’s Thirtieth Street, too; besides, the town’s full of police; and they pinch star-readers and astrologers these days. Anyway, we have the swastika, and it will put any Sixth Avenue astrologer out of business—”

  “I — I don’t think I quite understand you,” faltered the girl.

  He looked at her; the scared expression died out.

  “I’ll get my uncle on the long-distance ‘phone in a moment,” he said irritably. “Then we’ll clear up this business. Meanwhile—” He twisted up the telegram as though to cast it on the coals.

  “Let me see it,” she said calmly.

  “I — it is — no — I can’t—”

  “Then it concerns me?”

  He was silent.

  “Very well,” she said. “Don’t burn it; leave it for a moment.”

  He laid the telegram on the arm of his chair. “It’s more crystal-gazing,” he said, trying to laugh easily, and failing. “It is rather extraordinary, too. But — see here, Miss Grey, it’s utter nonsense to believe that my uncle can actually see us here in this room!

  “I concede that it is rather odd, even, perhaps, exceedingly remarkable,” he added slowly; “but I cannot believe that my uncle, two hundred miles north of us, can see you and me in his confounded crystal. My explanation of his telegrams is this: he has merely taken the precaution, at intervals, to try to frighten me, assuming that I am in mischief. It’s coincidence—”

  “Mr. Hildreth!”

  “Not that I admit for one moment that you and I are in mischief!” he explained hastily.

  “But I admit it. It is all wrong, and we both know it. If I am not here officially I ought not to be here at all.”

  “Can’t I talk to you except on business?”

  “Why should you?”

  “Because I want to — because it is pleasant — because it’s the pleasantest thing that has ever come into my life!”

  “That cannot be,” she said, paling. “You know many people, you go everywhere — everywhere that I do not—”

  “If I were not an advertising poet at thirty dollars a week,” he said, “I’d not care where my uncle left his millions. I’d do what I pleased — what I ought to do — what any man with a grain of sense would do.”

  “What would you do, Mr. Hildreth?”

  “Make love to the girl I love, and not be scared away like a rabbit!”

  She was still paler when she said: “Are you — in love, then?”

  “Yes; but I can’t tell her.”

  She was silent, staring into the fire.

  “I can’t tell her, can I? I have nothing to offer — nothing except a prospect of losing my expectations. A man can’t tell a girl that he loves her under such circumstances, can he?”

  “I — don’t know.”

  “Do you suppose a — a girl like that would wait for him — until he got into the firm?”

  “If she loved him,” said Miss Grey in a low voice, “there is absolutely no telling what that girl might do.”

  “Suppose,” he said carelessly, “for the sake of illustration, that I was, at this moment, with that girl. For example” — he waved his hand airily—” for example, suppose you were that girl. Now, suppose that I told her I loved her; do you imagine that uncle of mine could see what I was about — if I worked the swastika on him vigorously?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, staring at the fire, “how to work the swastika.”

  “If you — if you would consent to aid me — just a little,” he ventured, “I could soon prove whether it was safe to speak to the — the other girl.”

  “How, Mr. Hildreth?”

  “By just — just pretending that you were that other girl.”

  “You mean that you might practice a declaration — test it — on me? Just to see how it might affect your uncle?”

  “Yes,” he said eagerly, “and if my uncle doesn’t telegraph again that he disowns me, why, I’ll know that his other telegrams were merely coincidences!”

  “And if he does telegraph that he has seen — everything — in his crystal?”

  “Why — we’ll have to wait—”

  “The other girl and you? I see. You and I can truthfully deny our apparent guilt, can’t we?... I will do what I can, Mr. Hildreth.”

  She stood up, one little hand on the back of the chair. He hesitated, then picked up the last telegram, opened it, and handed it to her, reading it again over her shoulder:

  “If you kiss that girl you’re talking to I’ll disinherit you.”

  A bright blush stained her skin.

  “It is only — only to test his power,” he managed to say, but the thumping of his heart jarred his speech and scared him into silence.

  “You — is it necessary to kiss me?”

  “Yes — absolutely.

  She met his gaze, standing erect, one hand on the chair: Then she drew a long breath as he lifted her hand; her eyes closed. He said: “I love you — I loved you the moment I saw you — a month ago!” This was no doubt a mistake; he was mixing the two girls. “What do I care for a crystal-squinting uncle, or for those accursed Honey Wafer verses? If he’s looking at us now let us convince him; shall we — sweetheart?”

  She unclosed her eyes. “Am I to play my part when you speak to me like that? I don’t know how—”

  “Do what I do,” he stammered; and he encircled her slender waist and kissed her until, cheeks aflame, she swayed a moment in his arms, freed herself, and sank breathless into t
he chair, covering her face. And he knelt beside her by the gilt fender, his lips to her fingers, stammering words that almost stunned her and left her faint with their passion and sweetness:

  “You must have known that it was you I loved — that you were that other girl. You must have seen it a thousand times!”

  She was crying silently; she could not speak, but one arm tightened around his neck in tremulous assent.

  The telephone bell had been ringing for some time in their ears, deaf to all sounds except each other’s whispers; but at length he stumbled to his feet, cleared his eyes of enchantment, and made his way across the room to the receiver.

  “What the deuce is the matter?”

  * * * *

  “Who?”

  * * * *

  “Oh, is that you, Uncle Peter?”

  * * * *

  “Yes, I did get your telegrams, but I thought — :—”

  * * * *

  “You mean to say you can see us now?”

  * * * *

  “No, I don’t deny it; I did kiss her.”

  * * * *

  “Because I love her!”

  * * * *

  “I can’t help it; you can do as you please. And I may as well tell you that I’m not afraid of your professors, or clairvoyants, or your crystals, because I’ve got a swastika—”

  * * * *

  “Yes, a swastika!”

  * * * *

  “You don’t know what a swastika is? Well, let me tell you it’s about five thousand times more powerful than a rabbit’s foot.... What?... Yes, I’ll hold the wire till you look it up in the dictionary.”

  A throbbing silence. Then:

  “Yes, Uncle Peter, I’m here.”

  * * * *

  “Very well; I’m sorry you’re angry, and I regret that you’re not afraid of the swastika. I am quite willing to trust to it; the swastika gave me the girl I love. And, by the way, Uncle Peter, didn’t you write me that my advertising poems made a fortune for you out of your wafers?... All right; I only wanted to confess that she, not I, wrote them.”

  * * * *

  “Don’t believe it? Why, I could no more write those charming verses than you could!”

  * * * *