Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  At last Haviland Dumaresq, beside himself with remorse, almost gave way. Her earnestness was so great that he dared not refuse her. He consented against his better judgment: ‘You may go, then, Psyche.’ At that, Psyche rose once more from her chair. As she did so, she staggered and almost fell. She had used up her small remaining strength in the argument. A great horror seemed to come over her all at once. ‘I can’t,’ she cried, flinging her arms up in a passion of despair. ‘I’m too weak, too feeble. I can’t even stand. Lay me on the bed — papa — Sirena!’

  They lifted her up and laid her on the bed. There she lay long, sobbing low and quietly. It was a relief to her even to be able to sob. After a great pause, she felt about with her pale white fingers for her father’s hand. ‘Papa,’ she murmured once more, ‘do you believe in presentiments?’

  ‘Me, my child!’ Haviland Dumaresq answered with a start. ‘No, no, decidedly. No thought or feeling of any human being is worth anything at all as a matter of evidence, except it be the outcome of direct intimation received by the ordinary channels of sense in touch, or sight, or smell, or hearing.’

  ‘Papa,’ Psyche went on, with unnatural calmness, never heeding his disclaimer, ‘I think, in certain states of mind, one sees and feels internally somehow. I have a presentiment that it isn’t Him. It’s the other man, the cousin. And He’s really dead. As I tried to rise from my chair that moment, a flash came over me. I had a strange sense that I saw him lying dead on the sand — alone and bleeding — away in the desert.’

  She said it so solemnly, in the full force of some strange internal conviction pressing itself upon her, as such convictions will at certain times, that for a few seconds nobody spoke. They were overawed by the profound and unearthly certainty of her calm tone. Her sightless eyes were straining into space. She seemed like one who can penetrate the secrets of space to the remotest distance.

  But Haviland Dumaresq, philosopher to the core, knew it was all mere baseless illusion.

  After awhile she turned her white face towards them again.

  ‘I feel he was murdered,’ she said with solemn persistence— ‘murdered in the sands — by some other white man. Somebody who escaped with him away from Khartoum. Some cruel traitor who killed him, perhaps, to save himself. I see it somehow, clearly, in my own mind. It’s borne in upon me now. I can read it like a picture.’

  ‘My child,’ her father cried, wringing his hands in his misery, ‘don’t trust these pictures. They’re fancy, fancy. Your brain’s overwrought, and it leads you astray. We’ll send to Biskra — we’ll send and find out all about him.’

  ‘I’ll go myself,’ Sirena said, with a choking voice, swallowing down her sobs. ‘I’ll go and speak to Cyrus this very minute. We’ll set out from Algiers by the first train to-morrow.’

  Psyche rose up on the bed where she lay, and clutched her arm hard. ‘Not you,’ she cried, ‘Sirena; I can’t do without you. Send Corona and Mr. Vanrenen, if you will; but you must stop. I can’t let you go; you’re so very dear to me. I want you — I want you.’

  Sirena stooped down and kissed her white forehead.

  ‘Thank you, my darling,’ she said, profoundly touched. ‘If you want me to stop on that account, why, Psyche, I’d give up even the pleasure of going to Biskra to serve you; though if they do find him, I shall just envy them.’

  ‘They won’t find him,’ Psyche answered, with the same unnatural quiet as before in her tone.

  It frightened Sirena to hear her so calm. She feared such restraint must mean serious mischief in the long-run.

  ‘But if they do,’ she said, ‘they’ll be able to tell him all about you, and that’ll be so delightful. I just envy them.’

  ‘If they do,’ Psyche cried, with something like the old shrinking reserve coming over her with a rush, ‘they mustn’t tell him anything, not even that I’m here at all. If he’s alive, how do I know he even remembers me? All I want is to know he isn’t dead. To me he was, oh! so much, so much. But to him, perhaps, I was never really anything.’

  She turned and moaned inarticulately on the bed. Shame and despair divided her soul. Then she felt once more for Sirena’s hand.

  ‘And if they don’t,’ she cried, grasping it convulsively, ‘I shall want you here; I shall want you to help me bear the news; I shall want you to hold my head while I die; I shall want you to give me a last, last kiss, next to yours, father.’

  The American girl stood and held her own bosom tight to keep it from bursting. Neither of them could answer her a single word. They felt what she said was only too true. They knew in their hearts evil news must kill her.

  Sirena tried to disengage her hand.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Psyche asked, with quick perception of her intended movement.

  ‘To tell Cyrus,’ her friend sobbed back.

  ‘Not yet — not yet. Wait with me a little. Do you think he’ll go? Do you think he’ll do it for me?’

  ‘Why, we’d any of us go to the ends of the earth or cut off our right hands to serve you, dear,’ Sirena answered, bursting afresh into tears. ‘We feel it’s an honour, Psyche, to do anything for you, any way.’

  CHAPTER XXXVII.

  FROM CINCINNATI.

  Meanwhile, Cyrus and Geraldine Maitland were sitting out with half a dozen others around the tennis-court in the valley, all unconscious of the tragedy that was taking place within, so close to where they sat, in Psyche’s bedroom. They had played a set on the ground themselves, and fearing to monopolize the court too long, were now looking on and criticising their four successors, or indulging in the cheap recreation, so popular at health-resorts, of grumbling freely at all their friends and acquaintances. Presently the talk turned, as it was apt to do, upon poor Psyche and her chances of recovery.

  ‘Do you think she’ll ever get well?’ Geraldine asked anxiously, for the fiftieth time during the last fortnight.

  ‘Oh, she’s all right,’ Cyrus answered offhand, with the easy and unthinking optimism of his countrymen. ‘Give her time, and she’ll come round right so: in my opinion, it’s quite a circumstance. I presume she’ll worry over it for a month or two more — women do feel bad about such things, I know — but then she’ll get better. In our country we see a lot of these nervous women, and we don’t trouble much about ’em, even when they’re high-toned. They often seem real sick for a time; but they hang on to life in the long-run, by the skin of their teeth, more than the most of folks.’

  ‘I wonder if she will,’ Geraldine sighed reflectively. ‘I hardly believe it. It makes me awfully depressed at times to see her so miserable. Do you know, Mr. Vanrenen, I’d do a great deal, if only I could, to help her.’

  ‘Why, so’d I, you bet,’ Cyrus responded, open-eyed, with naïf surprise that anybody should think such a truism worth uttering. ‘I’d be real pleased, you may put your money on it, if I could do anything to be any sort of use to her. But drug stores ain’t much good for a case like hers. Time’s the only Sequah’s Soothing Syrup that’ll suit her malady. And I guess it’ll bring her round all right in the end. You see, she’s one of these high-toned girls that take things to heart a good deal just at first more than most other folks.’

  ‘I don’t believe anything’ll ever do her any good, unless that Mr. Linnell of hers were to turn up again,’ Geraldine answered suddenly. ‘She never thinks of anything else, I’m sure. She fancies she sent him off to his death; and it preys upon her spirits, and she won’t be comforted.’

  ‘Do you think he ever will turn up?’ Cyrus asked, describing a circle on the ground with his light cane. ‘I don’t. Sirena told me all about it that day when we came along up from the city with Miss Dumaresq. She told me all you said to her on the subject. And I wouldn’t like to lay ten dollars myself on the gentleman’s life. They were all cut off, you know — or almost all — by the Mahdi’s niggers.’

  ‘I can’t make my mind up,’ Geraldine replied slowly, looking down at the path. ‘Sometimes I think there’s a chance of it stil
l — you see, he knew Arabic so awfully well — and sometimes I think the wish alone was father to the thought, Mr. Vanrenen. But I hope even now; and so I’m pretty sure does Psyche.’

  But poor Psyche was that very moment absorbed in her own room by that despairing vision of Linnell lying dead in a pool of his blood on the sands of the desert.

  ‘If he does,’ Cyrus remarked with a quiet sigh, ‘it’ll be pretty awkward for me, that’s just about all. I’d better go back, right away, to Amurrica.’

  ‘Are you so very much in love with her?’ Geraldine asked, with a frankness equalling his own— ‘that you must go back to Amurrica if she won’t have you?’

  ‘I guess so,’ the young Westerner answered without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I always do like these high-toned English girls, you know, Miss Maitland. I liked you first, because you were so high-toned; I was death on you, as long as I thought I’d got a ghost of a chance; and when you wouldn’t as much as look at me, and I saw it was no use fooling around any longer — why, by Sirena’s advice, I caught on elsewhere, and transferred my affections, intact, to Miss Dumaresq. She’s a girl any man might be real proud to marry, that one. And then, you see, her father’s quite a prominent author.’

  ‘Well, which did you like best?’ Geraldine asked with a dash, turning round upon him so quickly with that strange question that he almost jumped away from her. Could she be piqued at his ‘transferring’ his affections, he wondered?

  ‘Why,’ he answered deliberately, after a moment’s pause, for he was a truthful and honest, if somewhat inept young man, ‘that’s not a question I feel prepared to meet in either direction right away, Miss Maitland. I don’t seem to hook on to it as quick as I might. It kind of beats me. One ways, I don’t believe in a man crying for the moon; but then, if I was offered the moon at a gift, and no mistake, I might perhaps be inclined to reopen the subject. However, what I say now is, without any comparisons (which are always odious, the copy-book tells us), she’s a fine high-toned girl, this Miss Dumaresq, and I do admire at her.’

  As they spoke, a little French telegraph boy appeared at the gate, and was walking up to the house in a leisurely way, with a blue scrap of the well-known flimsy official paper carelessly dangled between his thumb and finger. Cyrus looked up and beckoned the lad to come over. ‘It’s a cablegram for me, I guess,’ he said with languid interest. ‘Things in Cincinnati ain’t been going as smooth as papier-maché wheels on steel rails lately. Tenez, mon ami. Just you hand that telegram right over to me, here, will you? “Vanrenen, Orangers;” that’s me, I reckon. C’est pour moi, monsieur. Excuse my looking at it right away, Miss Maitland.’

  He tore the envelope open, and read it with a stare. His face grew pale. Then he whistled to himself a long low whistle. ‘Well,’ he said, looking hard at it and pulling himself together with an evident effort, ‘that’s plain enough, anyhow. No fooling around after phrases there. This won’t be cured inside of four weeks, I guess. It’ll take a year or two to pile that small lot up again.’

  He spoke to himself, meditatively and absorbedly; but Geraldine gathered, from his sudden paleness and his vacant gaze at the flimsy blue paper he held before him, that some real calamity had fallen upon him all unawares. ‘Nothing wrong in Amurrica, I hope?’ she interposed interrogatively.

  ‘Well, it ain’t exactly right, any way,’ Cyrus answered, with a quaint reserve in his measured tone. Your American rarely admits himself beaten. ‘It’s a little askew, I admit: gone wrong somewhere. Just you read that, Miss Maitland. You’ll see what it indicates. It’s from my partner in Cincinnati, in charge of our business.’

  Geraldine took the telegram in her own hands, and read in a bewildered, half-conscious way:

  ‘Fifth National Bank suspended payment yesterday. Pork trust burst up. Firm stone broke. Will cable particulars as soon as I know extent of our losses. Am meeting creditors to-day for first arrangement. Assets nil. — Eselstein.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ the English girl asked, with a vague sense of chilly apprehension stealing over her suddenly, though the words in which the message was couched were pure Greek to her.

  ‘Well, it means — ruin,’ the American answered with quick returning cheerfulness, continuing to draw circles with his stick on the gravel carelessly.

  ‘Ruin!’ Geraldine echoed, drawing back with a start.

  ‘Yes, there or thereabouts,’ Cyrus replied, with something like a smile of amusement at her incredulous stare. ‘R-U-I-N, I’ve always been given to understand, spells Ruin. That’s how I read it. Vanrenen and Eselstein’s the name of our firm. We went it blind on the Fifth National Bank, which was largely interested in the Cincinnati pork trust. Now the trust’s burst, and the firm’s ruined. Fact is, we put on our bottom dollar. I’m real sorry, and no mistake, for it’s an awkward event. It don’t so much matter for me, of course; or even for the girls. I can go back, and begin fresh; and a year or two’ll pile up that lot again, I reckon. But it’s rough on Eselstein, I don’t deny. He’s an elderly citizen, Eselstein, and he’s got a rising family of his own to look after. His eldest son’s just graduated at Columbia College, and was going into pork on his own account next fall, if this awkward affair hadn’t intervened to stop him.’

  ‘But you haven’t lost everything!’ Geraldine cried, astonished.

  ‘I guess that’s just about the name of it,’ Cyrus answered coolly, completing his pattern on the gravel path. ‘Perhaps things mayn’t be as bad as the old man thinks; and perhaps they may: but if they are, why, we’ve got to face ’em, like all the others. I’m not the only man, by a long shot, stone-broke to-day in Cincinnati, any way.’

  They paused for a moment; and Cyrus, a little more discomposed now, crumpled the telegram nervously in his trembling fingers. Then he said with a jerk:

  ‘It’s lucky, as it happens, Miss Dumaresq hadn’t — acceded to my wishes before this thing turned up. I’m glad for her sake it had gone no further. It might have made her father feel quite uncomfortable if she’d accepted a man who, as it turns out, wasn’t worth the paper he was written on.’

  Geraldine looked up at him with undisguised admiration.

  ‘Very few men,’ she said, with a burst of spontaneity, ‘would have thought of that at such a moment, Mr. Vanrenen.’

  ‘No, wouldn’t they, though?’ the Westerner answered with a naïve surprise. ‘Well, now, it just seemed to me about the most natural idea a man could hit upon.’

  ‘There is an answer, monsieur?’ the French boy asked, standing by all this time, bareheaded and expectant.

  ‘Well, no,’ Cyrus replied in English, putting his hand inquiringly into his waistcoat-pocket. ‘There ain’t no answer possible, thank you, mister, as far as I’m aware — but there’s a franc for you.’

  At that moment Sirena, white with awe from the scene she had just been witnessing in Psyche’s room, rushed out to join them.

  ‘Cyrus,’ she cried, in a fever of excitement, ‘that poor girl’s in a terrible state of mind. Corona and you have got to go right away this minute to Biskra.’

  ‘Biskra!’ Cyrus answered in blank surprise. ‘Biskra! Why, what’s the trouble? That’s away off in the desert, isn’t it?’

  ‘I know it is,’ Sirena answered hastily. ‘But, desert or no desert, you’ve got to go there. Just look at this paper!’ And then in brief and very hurried words she told them the story of poor Psyche’s shock and her present condition.

  Cyrus’s face was all aglow in a moment with horror and sympathy. He forgot his own troubles at once in listening to Psyche’s. Geraldine couldn’t help noticing that this strain on somebody else’s hopes and affections seemed to strike the simple-hearted fellow far more profoundly than the crushing news of his own altered fortunes. He listened with evident distress and alarm. Then he said quickly:

  ‘When does the morning train for Constantine start to-morrow?’

  ‘I’ve looked it up,’ Sirena answered, all aglow with the crisis. ‘It starts early —
quite a Western hour — 5.30 a.m. But you’ve got to catch it!’

  ‘Will Corona hook on?’ Cyrus asked, without a single second’s hesitation.

  ‘Yes. She wants to help all she can in this terrible business.’

  ‘Very well,’ Cyrus answered, moving towards the house. ‘I’m ready to start. I can go right off. We’ve got to see this thing straight through to the bitter end, and the sooner we set about it now, the better.’

  ‘And suppose you find him?’ Geraldine suggested with a whitening cheek.

  ‘Well, suppose we find him,’ Cyrus said decisively, ‘I reckon this girl’s got to marry him, Miss Maitland.’

  ‘I hope you will!’ Geraldine cried with fervour.

  ‘I hope so, too — for her sake. Oh, say, Sirena! here’s a telegram the old man’s sent me from Cincinnati. Make your mind up for bad news from home, my dear. It ain’t a pleasant one.’

  Sirena took it and glanced over it rapidly.

  ‘Well, I presume,’ she said, with perfect soberness, after she’d chewed and digested the whole contents, ‘this means we must go back, first mail, to Ohio?’

  ‘It does so,’ her brother answered with dogged good-humour. ‘It means we’ve got to begin life over again, and you won’t get your portrait done at all now with Vesuvius in the background.’

  ‘I don’t care a red cent about Vesuvius,’ Sirena replied, flushing, as she tore up the telegram into a hundred shreds, and scattered its fragments on the breeze among the aloes and cactuses. ‘But what I do feel is this — I would like to stop along and help Psyche.’

  ‘So you can,’ Cyrus answered with promptitude, reckoning up internally. ‘I guess I can raise enough for that, any way; but all this is neither here nor there just now. The business before the meeting at the present moment is to get started off straight ahead to Biskra.’

  Sirena nodded.

  ‘That’s so,’ she said, and walked back slowly and soberly toward the house.

  Cyrus turned and raised his hat respectfully to Geraldine.