Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 578
“But I am very sure that I could show my gratitude in no more welcome manner than by doing what I have done this morning and by expressing that obligation to you in writing.
“Before I close may I ask you to believe that I had no intention of seeking shelter at your house? Until I heard Mr. Neville’s voice I had no idea where I was. I merely made my way toward the first lighted windows that I saw, never dreaming that I had come to Ashuelyn.
“I am sorry that my stupid misadventure has caused you and your family so much trouble and annoyance. I feel it very keenly — more keenly because of your kindness in making the best of what must have been to you and your family a most disagreeable episode.
“May I venture to express to you my thanks to Miss Swift who so generously remained in my room last night? I am deeply sensible of her sweetness to an unwelcome stranger — and of Mrs. Neville’s gentle manner toward one who, I am afraid, has caused her much anxiety.
“To the very amiable physician who did so much to calm a foolish and inexcusable nervousness, I am genuinely grateful. If I knew his name and address I would write and properly acknowledge my debt.
“There is one thing more before I close: I am sorry that I wrote you so ungraciously after receiving your last letter. It would have been perfectly easy to have thanked you courteously, whatever private opinion I may have entertained concerning a matter about which there may be more than my own opinion.
“And now, please believe that I will never again voluntarily cause you and your family the slightest uneasiness or inconvenience; and believe me, too, if you care to. Very gratefully yours,
“VALERIE WEST.”
She directed and sealed the letter, then drew toward her another sheet of paper:
“DEAREST: I could die of shame for having blundered into your family circle. I dare not even consider what they must think of me now. You will know how innocently and unsuspiciously it was done — how utterly impossible it would have been for me to have voluntarily committed such an act even in the last extremity. But what they will think of my appearance at your door last night, I don’t know and I dare not surmise. I have done all I could; I have rid them of me, and I have written to your sister to thank her and your family for their very real kindness to the last woman in the world whom they would have willingly chosen to receive and entertain.
“Dear, I didn’t know I had nerves; but this experience seems to have developed them. I am perfectly well, but the country here has become distasteful to me, and I am going to town in a few minutes. I want to get away — I want to go back to my work — earn my living again — live in blessed self-respect where, as a worker, I have the right to live.
“Dearest, I am sorry about not meeting you at the station and going back to town with you. But I simply cannot endure staying here after last night. I suppose it is weak and silly of me, but I feel now as though your family would never be perfectly tranquil again until I am out of their immediate vicinity. I cannot convey to you or to them how sorry and how distressed I am that this thing has occurred.
“But I can, perhaps, make you understand that I love you, dearly — love you enough to give myself to you — love you enough to give you up forever.
“And it is to consider what is best, what to do, that I am going away quietly somewhere by myself to think it all out once more — and to come to a final decision before the first of June.
“I want to search my heart, and let God search it for any secret selfishness and unworthiness that might sway me in my choice — any overmastering love for you that might blind me. When I know myself, you shall know me. Until then I shall not write you; but sometime before the first of June — or on that day, you shall know and I shall know how I have decided wherein I may best serve you — whether by giving or withholding — whether by accepting or refusing forever all that I care for in the world — you, Louis, and the love you have given me.
“VALERIE WEST.”
She sealed and directed this, laid it beside the other, and summoned the maid:
“Have these sent at once to Ashuelyn,” she said; “let Jimmy go on his bicycle. Are my things ready? Is the buck-board still there? Then I will leave a note for the Countess.”
And she scribbled hastily:
“HÉLÈNE DEAR: I’ve got to go to town in a hurry on matters of importance, and so I am taking a very unceremonious leave of you and of your delightful house.
“They’ll tell you I got lost in the woods last night, and I did. It was too stupid of me; but no harm came of it — only a little embarrassment in accepting a night’s shelter at Ashuelyn among people who were everything that was hospitable, but who must have been anything but delighted to entertain me.
“In a few weeks I shall write you again. I have not exactly decided what to do this summer. I may go abroad for a vacation as I have saved enough to do so in an economical manner; and I should love to see the French cathedrals. Perhaps, if I so decide, you might be persuaded to go with me.
“However, it is too early to plan yet. A matter of utmost importance is going to keep me busy and secluded for a week or so. After that I shall come to some definite decision; and then you shall hear from me.
“In the meanwhile — I have enjoyed Estwich and you immensely. It was kind and dear of you to ask me. I shall never forget my visit.
“Good-bye, Hélène dear.
“VALERIE WEST.”
This note she left on Hélène’s dresser, then ran downstairs and sprang into the buck-board.
They had plenty of time to catch the train; and on the train she had plenty of leisure for reflection. But she could not seem to think; a confused sensation of excitement invaded her mind and she sat in her velvet armed chair alternately shivering with the memory of Cardemon’s villainy, and quivering under the recollection of her night at Ashuelyn.
Rita was not at home when she came into their little apartment. The parrot greeted her, flapping his brilliant wings and shrieking from his perch; the goldfish goggled his eyes and swam ‘round and ‘round. She stood still in the centre of her room looking vacantly about her. An immense, overwhelming sense of loneliness came over her; she turned as the rush of tears blinded her and flung herself full length among the pillows of her bed.
* * * * *
Her first two or three days in town were busy ones; she had her accounts to balance, her inventories to take, her mending to do, her modest summer wardrobe to acquire, letters to write and to answer, engagements to make, to fulfill, to postpone; friends to call on and to receive, duties in regard to the New Idea Home to attend to.
[Illustration: “The parrot greeted her, flapping his brilliant wings and shrieking from his perch.”]
Also, the morning after her arrival came a special delivery letter from
Neville:
“It was a mistake to go, dear, because, although you could not have known it, matters have changed most happily for us. You were a welcome guest in my sister’s house; you would have been asked to remain after your visit at Estwich was over. My family’s sentiments are changing — have changed. It requires only you yourself to convince them. I wish you had remained, although your going so quietly commanded the respect of everybody. They all are very silent about it and about you, yet I can see that they have been affected most favourably by their brief glimpse of you.
“As for your wishing to remain undisturbed for a few days, I can see no reason for it now, dear, but of course I shall respect your wishes.
“Only send me a line to say that the month of June will mean our marriage. Say it, dear, because there is now no reason to refuse.”
To which she answered:
“Dearest among all men, no family’s sentiments change over night. Your people were nice to me and I have thanked them. But, dear, I am not likely to delude myself in regard to their real sentiments concerning me. Too deeply ingrained, too basic, too essentially part of themselves and of their lives are the creeds, codes, and beliefs which, in spite of themselves, must continue to govern their real attitude toward such a girl as I am.
“It is dear of you to wish for us what cannot be; it is kind of them to accept your wish with resignation.
“But I have told you many times, my darling, that I would not accept a status as your wife at any cost to you or to them — and I can read between the lines, even if I did not know, what it would cost them and you. And so, very gently, and with a heart full of gratitude and love for you, I must decline this public honour.
“But, God willing, I shall not decline a lifetime devoted to you when you are not with them. That is all I can hope for; and it is so much more than I ever dreamed of having, that, to have you at all — even for a part of the time — even for a part of my life, is enough. And I say it humbly, reverently, without ignoble envy or discontent for what might have been had you and I been born to the same life amid the same surroundings.
“Don’t write to me again, dear, until I have determined what is best for us. Before the first day of summer, or on that day, you will know. And so will I.
“My life is such a little thing compared to yours — of such slight value and worth that sometimes I think I am considering matters too deeply — that if I simply fling it in the scales the balance will scarcely be altered — the splendid, even tenor of your career will scarcely swerve a shade.
“Yet my life is already something to you; and besides it is all I have to give you; and if I am to give it — if it is adding an iota to your happiness for me to give it — then I must truly treat it with respect, and deeply consider the gift, and the giving, and if it shall be better for you to possess it, or better that you never shall.
“And whatever I do with myself, my darling, be certain that it is of you
I am thinking and not of the girl, who loves you.
“V.”
By degrees she cleared up her accounts and set her small house in order.
Rita seemed to divine that something radical was in progress of evolution, but Valerie offered no confidence, and the girl, already deeply worried over John Burleson’s condition, had not spirit enough to meddle.
“Sam Ogilvy’s brother is a wonder on tubercular cases,” she said to
Valerie, “and I’m doing my best to get John to go and see him at
Dartford.”
“Won’t he?”
“He says he will, but you know how horridly untruthful men are. And now John is slopping about with his wet clay again as usual — an order for a tomb in Greenwood — poor boy, he had better think how best to keep away from tombs.”
“Why, Rita!” said Valerie, shocked.
“I can’t help it; I’m really frightened, dear. And you know well enough I’m no flighty alarmist. Besides, somehow, I feel certain that Sam’s brother would tell John to go to Arizona” — she pointed piteously to her trunk: “It’s packed; it has been packed for weeks. I’m all ready to go with him. Why can’t a man mould clay and chip marble and cast bronze as well in Arizona as in this vile pest-hole?”
Valerie sat with folded hands looking at her.
“How do you think you could stand that desolation?”
“Arizona?”
“Yes.”
“There is another desolation I dread more.”
“Do you really love him so?”
Rita slowly turned from the window and looked at her.
“Yes,” she said.
[Illustration: “‘And they — the majority of them — are, after all, just men.’”]
“Does he know it, Rita?”
“No, dear.”
“Do you think — if he did—”
“No…. How could it be — after what has happened to me?”
“You would tell him?”
“Of course. I sometimes wonder whether he has not already heard — something — from that beast—”
“Does John know him?”
“He has done two fountains for his place at El Naúar. He had several other things in view—” she shrugged— “but The Mohave sailed suddenly with its owner for a voyage around the world — so John was told; — and — Valerie, it’s the first clear breath of relief I’ve drawn since Penrhyn Cardemon entered John’s studio.”
“I didn’t know he had ever been there.”
“Yes; twice.”
“Did you see him there?”
“Yes. I nearly dropped. At first he did not recognise me — I was very young — when—”
“Did he speak to you?”
“Yes. I managed to answer. John was not looking at me, fortunately…. After that he wrote to me — and I burned the letter…. It was horrible; he said that José Querida was his guest at El Naúar, and he asked me to get you because you knew Querida, and be his guest for a week end…. I cried that night; you heard me.”
“Was that it!” asked Valerie, very pale.
“Yes; I was too wretched to tell you,”
Valerie sat silent, her teeth fixed in her lower lip. Then:
“José could not have known what kind of a man the — other — is.”
“I hope not.”
“Oh, he couldn’t have known! Rita, he wouldn’t have let him ask us—”
“Men seldom deceive one another.”
“You don’t think José Querida knew?”
“I — don’t — think…. Valerie, men are very — very unlike women…. Forgive me if I seem to be embittered…. Even you have had your experience with men — the men that all the world seems to like — kind, jolly, generous, jovial, amusing men — and clever men; men of attainment, of distinction. And they — the majority of them — are, after all, just men, Valerie, just men in a world made for men, a world into which we come like timid intruders; uncertain through generations of uncertainty — innocently stupid through ages of stupid innocence, ready to please though not knowing exactly how; ready to be pleased, God knows, with pleasures as innocent as the simple minds that dream of them.
“Valerie, I do not believe any evil first came into this world of men through any woman.”
Valerie looked down at her folded hands — small, smooth, white hands, pure of skin and innocent as a child’s.
“I don’t know,” she said, troubled, “how much more unhappiness arises through men than through women, if any more … I like men. Some are unruly — like children; some have the sense and the morals of marauding dogs.
“But, at worst, the unruly and the marauders seem so hopelessly beneath one, intellectually, that a girl’s resentment is really more of contempt than of anger — and perhaps more of pity than of either.”
Rita said: “I cannot feel as charitably…. You still have that right.”
“Rita! Rita!” she said softly, “we both have loved men, you with the ignorance and courage of a child — I with less ignorance and with my courage as yet untested. Where is the difference between us — if we love sincerely?”
Rita leaned forward and looked at her searchingly:
“Do you mean to do — what you said you would?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he wants me.”
Rita sprang to her feet and began pacing the floor.
“I will not have it so!” she said excitedly, “I will not have it so! If he is a man — a real man — he will not have it so, either. If he will, he does not love you; mark what I say, Valerie — he does not love you enough. No man can love a woman enough to accept that from her; it would be a paradox, I tell you!”
“He loves me enough,” said Valerie, very pale. “He could not love me as I care for him; it is not in a man to do it, nor in any human being to love as I love him. You don’t understand, Rita. I must be a part of him — not very much, because already there is so much to him — and I am so — so unimportant.”
“You are more important than he is,” said Rita fiercely— “with all your fineness and loyalty and divine sympathy and splendid humility — with your purity and your loveliness; and in spite of his very lofty intellect and his rather amazing genius, and his inherited social respectability — you are the more important to the happiness and welfare of this world — even to the humblest corner in it!”
“Rita! Rita! What wild, partisan nonsense you are talking!”
[Illustration: “His thoughts were mostly centred on Valerie.”]
“Oh, Valerie, Valerie, if you only knew! If you only knew!”
* * * * *
Querida called next day. Rita was at home but flatly refused to see him.
“Tell Mr. Querida,” she said to the janitor, “that neither I nor Miss West are at home to him, and that if he is as nimble at riddles as he is at mischief he can guess this one before his friend Mr. Cardemon returns from a voyage around the world.”
Which reply slightly disturbed Querida.
All during dinner — and he was dining alone — he considered it; and his thoughts were mostly centred on Valerie.
Somehow, some way or other he must come to an understanding with Valerie West. Somehow, some way, she must be brought to listen to him. Because, while he lived, married or single, poor or wealthy, he would never rest, never be satisfied, never wring from life the last drop that life must pay him, until this woman’s love was his.
He loved her as such a man loves; he had no idea of letting that love for her interfere with other ambitions.
Long ago, when very poor and very talented and very confident that the world, which pretended to ignore him, really knew in its furtive heart that it owed him fame and fortune and social position, he had determined to begin the final campaign with a perfectly suitable marriage.
That was all years ago; and he had never swerved in his determination — not even when Valerie West surprised his life in all the freshness of her young beauty.
And, as he sat there leisurely over his claret, he reflected, easily, that the time had come for the marriage, and that the woman he had picked out was perfectly suitable, and that the suitable evening to inform her was the present evening.
Mrs. Hind-Willet was prepossessing enough to interest him, clever enough to stop gaps in a dinner table conversation, wealthy enough to permit him a liberty of rejecting commissions, which he had never before dared to exercise, and fashionable enough to carry for him what could not be carried through his own presentable good looks and manners and fame.
