Роберт Чамберс - The Dark Star

The girl was silent.

"You're everything in the world to me, Rue."

The same little mechanical smile fixed itself on her lips, and she looked straight ahead of her.

"Haven't you begun to love me just a little bit, Rue?"

"I like you. You are very kind to us."

"Don't your affection seem to grow a little stronger now?" he urged.

"You are so kind to us," she repeated gratefully; "I like you for it."

The utterly unawakened youth of her had always alternately fascinated and troubled him. Gambler that he was, he had once understood that patience is a gambler's only stock in trade. But now for the first time in his career he found himself without it.

"You said," he insisted, "that you'd love me when we were married."

She turned her child's eyes on him in faint surprise:

"A wife loves her husband always, doesn't she?"

"Do you ?"

"I suppose I shall…. I haven't been married very long—long enough to feel as though I am really married. When I begin to realise it I shall understand, of course, that I love you."

It was the calm and immature reply of a little girl playing house. He knew it. He looked at her pure, perplexed profile of a child and knew that what he had said was futile—understood that it was meaningless to her, that it was only confusing a mind already dazed—a mind of which too much had been expected, too much demanded.

He leaned over and kissed the cold, almost colourless cheek; her little mechanical smile came back. Then they remembered the chauffeur behind them and Brandes reddened. He was unaccustomed to a man on the rumble.

"Could I talk to mother on the telephone when we get to New York?" she asked presently, still painfully flushed.

"Yes, darling, of course."

"I just want to hear her voice," murmured Rue.

"Certainly. We can send her a wireless, too, when we're at sea."

That interested her. She enquired curiously in regard to wireless telegraphy and other matters concerning ocean steamers.

In Albany her first wave of loneliness came over her in the stuffy dining–room of the big, pretentious hotel, when she found herself seated at a small table alone with this man whom she seemed, somehow or other, to have married.

As she did not appear inclined to eat, Brandes began to search the card for something to tempt her. And, glancing up presently, saw tears glimmering in her eyes.

For a moment he remained dumb as though stunned by some sudden and terrible accusation—for a moment only. Then, in an unsteady voice:

"Rue, darling. You must not feel lonely and frightened. I'll do anything in the world for you. Don't you know it?"

She nodded.

"I tell you," he said in that even, concentrated voice of his which scarcely moved his narrow lips, "I'm just crazy about you. You're my own little wife. You're all I care about. If I can't make you happy somebody ought to shoot me."

She tried to smile; her full lips trembled; a single tear, brimming, fell on the cloth.

"I—don't mean to be silly…. But—Brookhollow seems—ended—forever…."

"It's only forty miles," he said with heavy joviality. "Shall we turn around and go back?"

She glanced up at him with an odd expression, as though she hoped he meant it; then her little mechanical smile returned, and she dried her eyes naïvely.

"I don't know why I cannot seem to get used to being married," she said. "I never thought that getting married would make me so—so—lonely."

"Let's talk about art," he suggested. "You're crazy about art and you're going to Paris. Isn't that fine."

"Oh, yes―"

"Sure, it's fine. That's where art grows. Artville is Paris' other name. It's all there, Rue—the Loove, the palaces, the Latin Quarter, the statues, the churches, and all like that."

"What is the Louvre like?" she asked, tremulously, determined to be brave.

As he had seen the Louvre only from the outside, his imaginary description was cautious, general, and brief.

After a silence, Rue asked whether he thought that their suitcases were quite safe.

"Certainly," he smiled. "I checked them."

"And you're sure they are safe?"

"Of course, darling. What worries you?"

And, as she hesitated, he remembered that she had forgotten to put something into her suitcase and that the chauffeur had driven her back to the house to get it while he himself went into the Gayfield House to telephone Stull.

"What was it you went back for, Rue?" he asked.

"One thing I went back for was my money."

"Money? What money?"

"Money my grandmother left me. I was to have it when I married—six thousand dollars."

"You mean you have it in your suitcase?" he asked, astonished.

"Yes, half of it."

"A cheque?"

"No, in hundreds."

"Bills?"

"Yes. I gave father three thousand. I kept three thousand."

"In bills," he repeated, laughing. "Is your suitcase locked?"

"Yes. I insisted on having my money in cash. So Mr. Wexall, of the Mohawk Bank, sent a messenger with it last evening."

"But," he asked, still immensely amused, "why do you want to travel about with three thousand dollars in bills in your suitcase?"

She flushed a little, tried to smile:

"I don't know why. I never before had any money. It is—pleasant to know I have it."

"But I'll give you all you want, Rue."

"Thank you…. I have my own, you see."

"Of course. Put it away in some bank. When you want pin money, ask me."

She shook her head with a troubled smile.

"I couldn't ask anybody for money," she explained.

"Then you don't have to. We'll fix your allowance."

"Thank you, but I have my money, and I don't need it."

This seemed to amuse him tremendously; and even Rue laughed a little.

"You are going to take your money to Paris?" he asked.

"Yes."

"To buy things?"

"Oh, no. Just to have it with me."

His rather agreeable laughter sounded again.

"So that was what you forgot to put in your suitcase," he said. "No wonder you went back for it."

"There was something else very important, too."

"What, darling?"

"My drawings," she explained innocently.

"Your drawings! Do you mean you've got them, too?"

"Yes. I want to take them to Paris and compare them with the pictures I shall see there. It ought to teach me a great deal. Don't you think so?"

"Are you crazy to study?" he asked, touched to the quick by her utter ignorance.

"It's all I dream about. If I could work that way and support myself and my father and mother―"

"But, Rue! Wake up! We're married, little girl. You don't have to work to support anybody!"

"I—forgot," said the girl vaguely, her confused grey eyes resting on his laughing, greenish ones.

Still laughing, he summoned the waiter, paid the reckoning; Ruhannah rose as he did; they went slowly out together.

On the sidewalk beside their car stood the new chauffeur, smoking a cigarette which he threw away without haste when he caught sight of them. However, he touched the peak of his cap civilly, with his forefinger.

Brandes, lighting a cigar, let his slow eyes rest on the new man for a moment. Then he helped Rue into the tonneau, got in after her, and thoughtfully took the wheel, conscious that there was something or other about his new chauffeur that he did not find entirely to his liking.

It was mid–afternoon when they began to pass through that series of suburbs which the city has flung like a single tentacle northward for a hundred miles along the eastern banks of the Hudson.

A smooth road of bluestone with a surface like velvet, rarely broken by badly paved or badly worn sections, ran straight south. Past mansions standing amid spacious lawns all ablaze with late summer and early autumn flowers they sped; past parks, long stretches of walls, high fences of wrought iron through which brief glimpses of woodlands and splendid gardens caught Rue's eye. And, every now and then, slowing down to traverse some village square and emerging from the further limits, the great river flashed into view, sometimes glassy still under high headlands or along towering parapets of mountains, sometimes ruffled and silvery where it widened into bay or inland sea, with a glimmer of distant villages on the further shore.