Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Very much,” said Chrysis innocently.

  “Then I’ll go back and get it—” He turned and looked deliberately into the blue eyes of Cisthene. The eyes of Cisthene seemed to be perfectly guileless. Judge for yourself, however, for upon the cheeks of that maiden a slight flush came, and, still looking at Jones, she said:

  “Why not walk down there yourself, Chrysis? It’s only a step.”

  Upon the fair cheek of Chrysis the faintest tinge of rose settled. She looked silently at her sister, then smiled upon Jones:

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ll walk over myse’f and look at that interesting beetle. And perhaps I may discover another one for Mr. Scott.”

  She went, gracefully, lightly; her sister looked after her; Jones marked her progress with thumping heart. His doom was upon him. He felt it, knew it, and derived from the knowledge alternate jabs and thrills of ecstasy and gloom.

  Cisthene, seated on the horse block, waited very courteously to the limit of her youthful patience. Then she said:

  “What was it you desired to say to me alone, Mr. Jones?”

  But he simply couldn’t say it that way, here in the full sunshine, and her father reading on the veranda above, and a row of pickaninnies staring at them from the quarters and sucking their dusky thumbs.

  “It — it was — concerned — the — your — your father’s furniture,” he stammered.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s — it’s very handsome furniture — very valuable—”

  She shook her pretty head:

  “Father told us what you had said. He has offered to part with the furniture — if Chrysis and I wish it.... But we couldn’t do it. We have talked it over this morning.... We couldn’t do it.”

  “But your father—”

  “I know, Mr. Jones. I know what this house and everything in it means to him. No, Chrysis and I could not do it.”

  “And yet,” he said, “your father’s reasoning was logical and just.”

  “Are logic and justice the only things in life, Mr. Jones?” She lifted her blue eyes to his: “Love reasons more truly,” she said.

  “You love him too dearly to accept such a sacrifice from him,” said Jones under his breath.

  “Of course. What is there that money could give to Chrysis and to me that could console us for such a loss to him?”

  Jones’ heart began to cut up, and for a moment he decided not to try to say anything.

  Cisthene sat very still on the horse block, gazing into space.

  “I wonder if you’d let me t-tell you s-s-something?” he stammered.

  She looked up, inquiringly, her lips already parting to grant his request, when a something in the eyes of Jones checked her.

  She sat motionless, stiller than before. As for Jones, he appeared to be petrified.

  The throbbing seconds raced away; sunlight set ruddy threads gleaming in her hair and fell on her shabby riding skirt and on her slender hands clasped tightly in her lap.

  Her head still remained lifted; a quick little pulse was beating in the delicate, white throat. But her eyes closed.

  “Cisthene!”

  She rose as a dreamer stirs at the sound of a familiar name, turned, slowly mounted the veranda steps, and passing her father as though unconscious of his presence, entered the dim house.

  Jones found her in the parlour, sitting at one end of a sofa, her fair head bowed in her arms.

  He gazed at her for a moment, then turned and walked out to where her father was sitting.

  “I don’t know what you will think of me, sir,” he said, “but I’m so deeply in love with Cisthene that I scarcely know what I’m saying. Do you think you could possibly give me permission to pay my addresses to your daughter?”

  The Professor had closed his book and bowed his head on one thin wrist.

  For a long while he sat there, motionless, listening to Jones’ account of himself, his family, his profession, his fortune, and his ambitions. There was no mistaking the boy’s candour, his earnestness, his frank but youthfully exaggerated self-depreciation.

  “I am not worthy of her,” he said: “no man ever could be. I know that, sir. But if — —”

  “Yes—” said the elder man quietly, “‘if!’... The answer to all riddles halts there.... ‘If!’... And ‘if she could care for you — I should not — interfere.... My inclination is to like you.... It is perhaps more than an inclination. So— ‘if my daughter cares to listen to you—”

  He passed his frail hand over his eyes, and let it remain there.

  After a moment Jones rose quietly and went into the dim parlour. Cisthene still sat there, her head on her arm, a slim figure in the dusk, amid the stiff shapes of the old-time furniture.

  In the vague, gracious half-light of that old and formal room, Jones dropped on one knee at the little feet of Cisthene. And she sat upright to listen to him.

  And after she had listened, and when the room had become very still again, she bent forward slightly and placed her hands lightly on the shoulders of Jones. It was the very ghost of contact.

  “Could you care for me?” he whispered.

  “Yes.”

  Down in the woods it was different. Chrysis, cheeks flushed, blue eyes hostile, stood looking sideways at Scott.

  “I reckon,” she said, “it’s your Yankee bringing up, but it is not the custom here.”

  “What on earth am I to do?” asked Scott, piteously. “I fell in love? with you and I thought I ought to tell “Why ought you to tell me, Mr. Scott?”

  “Why — why, I have no right to do such a thing unless you are informed—”

  “You have no right to do it at all!”

  “I know it — I know it,” he said, despairingly. “I’m a chump — an idiot — an ass—”

  “You are not!” she cried.

  “I am!”

  “Then if you are, will you kindly tell me why you suppose me capable of — of c-caring for an idiot?”

  “That’s the horrible part of it,” he said. “I know you — you couldn’t fall in love with an idiot.”

  “How do you know? How do you know what sort of man I could care for? I am at liberty to care for whom I please. I am at liberty to care for an idiot if I choose to.”

  “But you never would,” he said. And he went and sat down on a fallen tree and laid his head in his hands.

  For ten minutes she said nothing. Neither did she go away. Finally he dropped his hands and looked up at her.

  “I don’t know w-what I might do,” she said, “when I have time to think it over.”

  She walked over to a tree and seemed to be examining the bark for borers. After a moment she rested one arm across the trunk, doubled back the elbow, and hid her face in it. She was crying when he came up. But she let her right hand remain in his, and did not flinch very much when he kissed it.

  CARONDELET

  ON the other side of Jasmine Inlet, out toward the flat-woods and the rougher “hammock,” beyond the outlet to the Gold Lagoon, stood Carondelet, home of the Carons, mother and daughter.

  I say “stood”; perhaps “floated” better describes the house — if a converted barge might so be called. It had a roof, chimneys, dormers, gallery, and a semi-circle of pillars with Doric capitals for a porch. Porch and pillars had been built on shore.

  A dry path through the saw-grass led to a bridge connecting with the porch: the back door opened upon the sunny waters of the Gold Lagoon.

  As Tiger-foot said:

  “Him a helluva house, heap dam fine!”

  Carondelet was sometimes afloat; usually it rested in three feet of silt which covered the vast sheet of rock forming the bottom of the Gold Lagoon.

  The late husband of Mrs. Caron had named his home Carondelet, partly from reasons not too subtle for any reader, partly in derisive compliment to a Federal gunboat of the same name, Carondelet, which craft had hurled a number of gigantic but ineffectual shells at his regiment during the late fraternal misunderstanding
.

  The circumstance of the barge and its conversion to a mansion was as follows: the fortunes of the Carons had vanished amid the smoke and flame of Northern victory; and, undaunted, the Colonel and his young wife had set their faces toward the wilderness where courage and faith led them to believe a place had been “prepared for them of God.”

  There certainly seemed to be something in the idea; a record storm on the Atlantic scattered a string of transports and barges destined for the Federal guard fleet in the Gulf, piled the lagoons full of water, backing and heaping it up till every coast forest was afloat to the tree tops.

  And into this driving deluge, across twelve miles of shoal, across beach, hammock, saw-grass, and lagoon, Providence had hurled a big, fat, empty barge on the crest of the tidal comber, and landed it in the Gold Lagoon.

  Where it stuck when the deluge ebbed; and where Colonel Caron and his young wife found it very conveniently situated to command several acres of excellent hammock, a lagoon full of fish and wild-fowl, and a vast forest region where big game, welcome and unwelcome, roamed in fear only of the Seminoles.

  And there they had lived and toiled and builded Carondelet, and cleared the hammock, and set orange groves, so that the wilderness blossomed like a garden.

  Late in life to them came ease, prosperity, and surcease from troublous toil once more: also late in life came their child, Damaris, with hair as dark as the brown velvet of a great moth’s wing, and eyes to match the sapphire blue of the lagoon, and a skin like the lustrous and creamy petals of a magnolia blossom.

  That occurred twenty years ago; and a year later the trumpeter wind in the saw-grass sounded a last “lights out” for Colonel Ashley Caron, C. S. A.

  Damari s stood on the portico of Carondelet, fresh from her annual Northern sojourn, and gazed affectionately out over the broad acres of the paternal estate.

  The wilderness bounded it; sunny fields and orange groves stretched away toward the blue palisades of woods; east, west, south, northward spread the Gold Lagoon, sapphire blue beyond the “leads” — broad lanes of water between the towering and terrible green walls of saw-grass.

  She saw the high osprey circling; the sea-eagle towering higher still; she saw the blue heron in the sedge and the limpkin slipping along the shore.

  It was a vast, silent, sunny world that lay so still under the crystal clearness of a sky as limpid as the water.

  The path that her father had made through the saw-grass to the front porch was now a wide, smooth road made of shell and marl, and snowy white: and it ran straight away ahead of her down a vast avenue of water oaks to the forest, the unfading green ramparts of which bordered it like the evenly clipped hedges of some giant’s garden.

  Maybe the girl was thinking of her Northern sojourn — thinking of New York in springtime, of Long Island, of Newport and Bar Harbor later: and of all the gallant men and pretty women that she had seen or met or known a little better than what is meant by “meeting” them.

  It had been the usual happy journey through wonderland that she and her mother had taken every year since Damaris was twelve — memories of shop windows and glittering motor-cars on Fifth Avenue still slightly dazzled her; rocks, foam, brilliant gardens, palaces of grey or white stone, pleasure fleets and war fleets, and dancing everywhere — always dancing! — and a world full of sleek-headed young men and of perfectly gowned women — these were her souvenirs of Newport and the coast resorts.

  But what slightly perplexed her almost to the verge of annoyance was the persistence of one perfectly negligible scene in her memory. Neither New York, nor Newport, nor, in fact, the entire kaleidoscopic recollections of the summer could entirely crowd out, smother, bury, or even dim the startling and photographic accuracy of this scene in her mind.

  She had been following a drag-hunt in the Queens Landing country, Long Island, and her horse bolted, took a roadside wall, and in half a minute had kicked to pieces a very lovely, old-fashioned garden.

  A young man in a very shabby coat had come out of the house, picked her up from a bed of crushed lilies, set her on her saddle, and dryly advised her not to ride such an animal until she had learned a little more about horsemanship.

  This infuriated her; but the dreadful wreck of her insulter’s garden kept her resentment within control.

  She said:

  “Thank you so much. I shall notify the nearest florist to repair the damage. I am Damaris Caron, of Carondelet, Inca County, Florida, and I am quite capable of riding this horse.” A statement which, considering the condition of the garden and her own inglorious situation among the lilies, had been scarcely opportune.

  Had the young man laughed she could have found it in her heart to slay him; but he didn’t. He merely opened the gate for her when she bit her lip, winked back the tears in her eyes, and swung her horse toward the open.

  And then she had done a silly thing, childish, petty, unworthy, inexcusable: she had ignored the open gate and had lifted her horse over the wall.

  That was the last she had seen of the man; the last he had ever seen of her.

  A brief note to her at the Queens Landing Hunt Club informed her that he had already engaged a florist to repair damages and that he could not accept any reparation at her expense.

  Except for a civilly expressed hope that she had not been hurt, the note contained nothing further than his name, “George Smith.”

  She replied as briefly, expressing regret that he had refused the only reparation she could offer, said that she had not been hurt, and, for some reason unknown to herself, she repeated in ink the information she had so haughtily given him — to wit, the following subscription:

  Damans Caron, Carondelet, Inca County, Florida.

  There was, naturally, no reply to this. A reply would have been an impertinence. But for several weeks Damaris ran through her mail every day, scanning all the envelopes before opening them, as a woman does when she expects a letter in a handwriting which she is capable of recognizing.

  Another thing — she rode past that wretched garden several times without looking at it or at the house — except sideways. But she had not seen him again.

  And one other thing: she had, by careless and casual inquiry, learned that the man was an artist and that the house contained his studio. Otherwise, fashion and sport wotted not of George Smith.

  She had visited several gay houses; had assisted at motor show and opera in town, before her mother and herself set their faces southward.

  And now she was back again in the sun, the broad acres and the woods before her, the Gold Lagoon behind her, and a scented wind gently stirring her thick, dark hair.

  For the last week she had played hard amid the dear, familiar scenes; she had fished for gar-pike and bass in the lagoon; she had knocked over snipe and limpkin in the saw-grass with her light fowling piece; she had rambled over every foot of the home acres, through orange grove, banana plantation, pineapple cover, through scrub palmetto glades, over shell mound and hammock, kicking happily at the brown litter under foot.

  She had taken her auxiliary sailboat to the Inlet; she had roamed the fragrant dunes, picked up shells, made memoranda of bird life, watched her mother’s negro employees making new bridle paths, dragging marl from the wet pits, and dumping cartloads of snowy shells along main roads destined to be repaired.

  Every day crates of grapefruit, oranges, tangerines, mandarins, and kumquats were shipped from their groves by water to the narrow-gauge, overgrown railroad. The perishable pines were for home consumption; the others for the Yankee. Also, the strawberries, tomatoes, and early green vegetables were for the snow-cursed, shivering North; and she saw them every day in transit from the home acres, northward bound. And once or twice she caught herself wondering whether, by any hazard, that man in the North might chance to regale himself on the fruits of Carondelet plantation.

  And was sorry she even thought of it. Because that man had been rude — or stupid, or ungracious — whatever anybody chose to call hi
s behaviour.

  Sometimes she wondered exactly how his behaviour might be characterized. Being fairly fair-minded she admitted to herself it had not been rude. Even “ungracious” seemed rather a harsh term to apply to it. After all, maybe his insulting advice concerning her horsemanship had been kindly inspired. Doubtless he meant well.

  But why hadn’t he been more civil, more sympathetic. Pretty girls don’t tumble into everybody’s gardens. He might have expressed alarm, displayed some human feeling of consternation — a great, big, broad-shouldered young man like that! Really, his dry survey of the situation and his drier advice to her disgusted her. Southern chivalry would have understood the episode better. Southern chivalry would have made it plain to her that misfortune, not fault, had involved her in that wretched garden.

  She blushed, partly with exasperation, as she remembered looking up at him from a fragrant mass of crushed lilies, and how he had lifted her with prompt decision and set her firmly in her saddle.

  How could a man do that, knowing the horse might presently break her neck? True, the miserable animal stood quietly eating up the remainder of the garden.

  It was a perfectly negligible memory, but it was, apparently, a memory of which she could not rid herself.

  She didn’t like it; she evoked it frequently nevertheless. And every time she evoked it the recollection hurt her pride till her cheeks grew slightly warm, and she vowed she’d never think of it more.

  Also, every time she thought of it, she wished that she might prove to that cool, superior, and condescending young man that she could ride anything that ever cut up on four legs.

  That morning she took a canoe and paddled up the lagoon, rifle across her knees, hoping to get a shot at a wildcat — a large and enterprising animal that had calmly emerged from the woods and had slain a dozen of her own bronze turkeys.

  But all she saw was a fat moccasin asleep, and after shooting his villainous head off she turned the canoe homeward.

  The canoe of Tiger-tail, Miami Seminole, and generally reticent except to her mother and herself, came by along the edge of the saw-grass, poled by Tiger-tail himself, and laden with crayfish which he had been spearing at the Inlet.