The Cream of the Jest, James Branch Cabell [smart ebook reader .TXT] 📗

“And yet⁠—” she re-began.

“And yet, I resist all these temptations? Frankly, had you been in my eyes less desirable, madam, you would not have reached home thus uneventfully; for a rich marriage is the only chance adapted to repair my tattered fortunes; and the devil is cunning to avail himself of our flesh’s frailty. Had you been the fat widow of some City knight, I would have played my lord of Umfraville’s part, upon my pettier scale. Or, had I esteemed it possible for me to have done with my old life, I would have essayed to devote a cleaner existence to your service and worship. Indeed, indeed, I speak the truth, however jestingly!” he said, with sudden wildness. “But what would you have? I would not entrust your fan, much less your happiness, to the keeping of a creature so untrustworthy as I know myself to be. In fine, I look upon you, madam, in such a rapture of veneration and tenderness and joy and heartbreaking yearning, that it is necessary I get very tipsy tonight, and strive to forget that I, too, might have lived cleanlily.”

And Kennaston, as he spoke thus, engulfed in darkness, knew it was a noble sorrow which possessed him⁠—a stingless wistful sorrow such as is aroused by the unfolding of a well-acted tragedy or the progress of a lofty music. This ruffian longing, quite hopelessly, to be made clean again, so worshipful of his loved lady’s purity and loveliness, and knowing loveliness and purity to be forever unattainable in his mean life, was Felix Kennaston, somehow.⁠ ⁠… What was it Maugis d’Aigremont had said?⁠—“I have been guilty of many wickednesses, I have held much filthy traffic such as my soul loathed; and yet, I swear to you, I seem to myself to be still the boy who once was I.” Kennaston understood now, for the first time with deep reality, what his puppet had meant; and how a man’s deeds in the flesh may travesty the man himself.

But the door opened. Confusedly Kennaston was aware of brilliantly-lighted rooms beyond, of the chatter of gay people, of thin tinkling music, and, more immediately, of two lackeys, much bepowdered as to their heads, and stately in new liveries of blue-and-silver. Confusedly he noted these things, for the woman had paused in the bright doorway, and all the loveliness of Ettarre was visible now to him, and she had given a delighted cry of recognition.

“La, it is Horvendile! and we are having the same dream again!”

This much he heard and saw as her hand went out gladly toward him. Then as she touched him the universe seemed to fold about Felix Kennaston, just as a hand closes, and he was sitting at the writing-table in the library, with a gleaming scrap of metal before him.

He sat thus for a long while.

“I can make nothing of all this. I remember of course that I saw Muriel Allardyce stand very much like that, in the doorway of the Royal Hotel, at the Green Chalybeate⁠—and how many years ago, good Lord!⁠ ⁠… And equally of course the most plausible explanation is that I am losing my wits. Or, else, it may be that I am playing blindfold with perilous matters. Felix Kennaston, my friend, the safest plan⁠—the one assuredly safe plan for you⁠—would be to throw away this devil’s toy, and forget it completely.⁠ ⁠… And, I will, too⁠—the very first thing tomorrow morning⁠—or after I have had a few days to think it over, anyway.⁠ ⁠…”

But even as he made this compact it was without much lively faith in his promises.

“Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of long day.

“Come, as thou cam’st a thousand times,
A messenger from lovelier climes,
To smile on our drear world, and be
As kind to others as to me!”

He was looking down at the most repulsive old woman he had ever seen. Hers was the abhorrent fatness of a spider; her flesh appeared to have the coloring and consistency of dough. She sat upon the stone pavement, knitting; her eyes, which raised to his unblinkingly, were black, secretive, and impersonally malevolent; and her jaws stirred without ceasing, in a loose chewing motion, so that the white hairs, rooted in the big mole on her chin, twitched and glittered in the sunlight.

“But one does not pay on entering,” she was saying. “One pays as one goes out. It is the rule.”

“And what do you knit, mother?” Kennaston asked her.

“Eh, I shall never know until God’s funeral is preached,” the old woman said. “I only know it is forbidden me to stop.”

So he went past her, aware that through some nameless grace the girl whom he had twice seen in dreams awaited him there, and that the girl’s face was the face of Ettarre. She stood by a stone balustrade, upon which squatted tall stone monsters⁠—weird and haphazard collocations, as touched anatomy, of bird and brute and fiend⁠—and she in common with these hobgoblins looked down upon a widespread comely city. The time was a bright and windy morning in spring; and the sky, unclouded, was like an inverted cup which did not merely roof Ettarre and the man who had come back to her, but enclosed them in incommunicable isolation. To the left, beyond shimmering treetops, so far beneath them that it made Felix Kennaston dizzy to look, the ruffling surface of a river gleamed.⁠ ⁠… It was in much this fashion, he recalled, that Ettarre and Horvendile had stood alone together among the turrets of Storisende.

“But now I wonder where on the face of⁠—or, rather, so far above the face of what especial planet we may happen to be?” Kennaston marveled happily⁠—“or east of the sun or west of the moon? At all events, it hardly matters. Suffice it that we are in