The Firing Line Part 50

All day long brilliant b.u.t.terflies hover on great curved wings over the jungle edge; all day long the c.o.c.k-quail whistles from wall and hedge, and the crestless jays, sapphire winged, flit across the dunes.

Red-bellied woodp.e.c.k.e.rs gossip in live-oak, sweet-gum, and ancient palm; gray squirrels chatter from pine to bitter-nut; the iridescent little ground-doves, mated for life, run fearlessly under foot or leap up into snapping flight with a flash of saffron-tinted wings. Under the mangroves the pink ajajas preen and wade; and the white ibis walks the woods like a little absent-minded ghost buried in unearthly reverie.

Truly when madam closes her Villa Tillandsia, and when Coquina Court is bereft of mistress and household--butler, footman, maid, and flunky; and when Tsa-na Lah-ni is abandoned by its handsome chatelaine, and the corridors of the vast hotels are dark, it is fashion, not common sense that stirs the flock of gaily gregarious immigrants into premature northern flight; for they go, alas! just as the southland clothes itself in beauty, and are already gone when the Poinciana opens, leaving Paradise to blossom for the lesser brothers of the woodland and the dark-skinned children of the sun.

The toddling Moses of the Exodus, as usual, was Courtlandt Cla.s.son; the ornamental Miriam, Mrs. O'Hara; and the children of the preferred stock started North with cymbals and with dances, making a joyful noise, and camping en route at Ormond--vastly more beautiful than the fashion-infested coral reef from which they started--at Saint Augustine, on corporate compulsion, at the great inns of Hampton, Hot Springs, and Old Point, for fashion's sake--taking their falling temperature by degrees--as though any tropic could compare with the scorching suffocation of Manhattan town.

Before the Beach Club closed certain species of humanity left in a body, including a number of the unfledged, and one or two pretty opportunists.

Portlaw went, also Malcourt.

It required impudence, optimism, and executive ability for Malcourt to make his separate adieux and render impartial justice on each occasion.

There was a girl at "The Breakers" who was rather apt to slop over, so that interview was timed for noon, when the sun dries up everything very quickly, including such by-products as tears.

Then there was Miss Suydani to ride with at five o'clock on the beach, where the chain of destruction linked mullet and osprey and ended with the robber eagle--and Malcourt--if he chose.

But here there were no tears for the westering sun to dry, only strangely quenched eyes, more green than blue, for Malcourt to study, furtively; only the pale oval of a face to examine, curiously, and not too cynically; and a mouth, somewhat colourless, to rea.s.sure without conviction--also without self-conviction. This was all--except a pair of slim, clinging hands to release when the time came, using discretion--and some amiable firmness if required.

They were discussing the pa.s.sing of the old regime, for lack of a safer theme; and he had spoken flippantly of the decadence of the old families--his arm around her and her pale cheek against his shoulder.

She listened rather absently; her heart was very full and she was thinking of other matters. But as he continued she answered at length, hesitating, using phrases as trite and quaintly stilted as the theme itself, gently defending the old names he sneered at. And in her words he savoured a certain old-time flavour of primness and pride--a vaguely delicate hint of resentment, which it amused him to excite. Pacing the dunes with her waist enlaced, he said, to incite retort:

"The old families are done for. Decadent in morals, in physique, mean mentally and spiritually, they are even worse off than respectfully cherished ruins, because they are out of fashion; they and their dingy dwellings. Our house is on the market; I'd be glad to see it sold only Tressilvain will get half."

"In you," she said, "there seems to be other things, besides reverence, which are out of fashion."

He continued, smilingly: "As the old mansions disappear, Virginia, so disintegrate those families whose ancestors gave names to the old lanes of New Amsterdam. I reverence neither the one nor the other. Good riddance! The fit alone survive."

"I still survive, if you please."

"Proving the rule, dear. But, yourself excepted, look at the few of us who chance to be here in the South. Look at Courtlandt Cla.s.son, intellectually dest.i.tute! Cuyp, a mental brother to the ox; and Vetchen to the a.s.s; and Mrs. Van Dieman to somebody's maidservant--that old harridan with all the patrician distinction of a Dame des Halles--"

"Please, Louis!"

"Dear, I am right. Even Constance Palliser, still physically superb, but mentally morbid--in love with what once was Wayward--with the ghost she raised in her dead girlhood, there on the edge of yesterday--"

"Louis! Louis! And _you_! What were you yesterday? What are you to-day?"

"What do I care what I was and am?--Dutch, British, burgher, or cavalier?--What the deuce do I care, my dear? The Malcourts are rotten; everybody knows it. Tressilvain is worse; my sister says so. As I told you, the old families are done for--all except yours--"

"I am the last of mine, Louis."

"The last and best--"

"Are you laughing?"

"No; you are the only human one I've ever heard of among your race--the sweetest, soundest, best--"

"I?... What you say is too terrible to laugh at. I--guilty in mind--unsound--contaminated--"

"Temporarily. I'm going to-night. Time and absence are the great antiseptics. When the corrupt cause disappears the effect follows. Cheer up, dear; I take the night train."

But she only pressed her pale face closer to his shoulder. Their interlocked shadows, huge, fantastic, streamed across the eastern dunes as they moved slowly on together.

"Louis!"

"Yes?"

She could not say it. Close to the breaking point, she was ready now to give up to him more than he might care for--the only shred left which she had shrunk from letting him think was within his reach for the asking--her name.

Pride, prejudice, had died out in the fierce outbreak of a heart amazingly out of place in the body of one who bore her name.

Generations of her kinsmen, close and remote, had lived in the close confines of narrow circles--narrow, bloodless, dull folk, almost all distantly related--and they had lived and mated among themselves, coldly defiant of that great law which dooms the over-cultivated and inbred to folly and extinction.

Somewhere, far back along the race-line, some mongrel ancestor had begun life with a heart; and, unsuspected, that obsolete organ had now reappeared in her, irritating, confusing, amazing, and finally stupefying her with its misunderstood pulsations.

At first, like a wounded creature, consciousness of its presence turned her restless, almost vicious. Then from cynicism to incredulity she had pa.s.sed the bitter way to pa.s.sion, and the shamed recoil from it; to recklessness, and the contempt for it, and so through sorrow and humility to love--if it were love to endure the evil in this man and to believe in the good which he had never yet revealed to her save in a half-cynical, half-amused content that matters rest in _statu quo_.

"The trouble with us," mused Malcourt, lazily switching the fragrant beach-grapes with his riding-crop, "is inbreeding. Yes, that's it. And we know what it brings to kings and kine alike. Tressilvain is half-mad, I think. And we are used up and out of date.... The l.u.s.ty, jewelled bacchantes who now haunt the inner temple kindle the social flames with newer names than ours. Few of us count; the lumbering British or Dutch cattle our race was bred from, even in these brief generations, have become decadent and barren; we are even pa.s.sing from a fashion which we have neither intellect to sustain nor courage to dictate to. It's the raw West that is to be our Nemesis, I think.... 'Mix corpuscles or you die!'--that's what I read as I run--I mean, saunter; the Malcourts never run, except to seed. My, what phosph.o.r.escent perversion! One might almost mistake it for philosophy.... But it's only the brilliancy of decay, Virginia; and it's about time that the last Malcourt stepped down and out of the scheme of things. My sister is older, but I don't mind going first--even if it is bad manners."

"Is that why you have never asked me to marry you?" she said, white as a ghost.

Startled to silence he walked on beside her. She had pressed her pallid face against his shoulder again; one thin hand crushed her gloves and riding-crop into her hip, the other, doubled, left in the palm pale imprints of her fingers.

"Is _that_ the reason?" she repeated.

"No, dear."

"Is it because you do not care for me--enough?"

"Partly. But that is easily remedied."

"Or"--with bent head--"because you think too--lightly--of me--"

"No! That's a lie anyway."

"A--a lie?"

"Yes. You lie to yourself if you think that! You are _not_ that sort.

You are not, and you never were and never could be. Don't you suppose I know?"--almost with a sneer: "I won't have it--nor would you! It is you, not I, who have controlled this situation; and if you don't realise it I do. I never doubted you even when you prattled to me of moderation. _I_ know that you were not named with your name in mockery, or in vain."

Dumb, thrilled, understanding in a blind way what this man had said, dismayed to find safety amid the elements of destruction, a sudden belief in herself--in him, too, began to flicker. "Had the still small flame been relighted for her? Had it never entirely died?"

"If--you will have me, Louis," she whispered.

"I don't love you. I'm rather nearer than I ever have been just now. But I am not in love."

"Could you ever--"