Read Ebook: Diane of the Green Van by Dalrymple Leona Birch Reginald Bathurst Illustrator

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Ebook has 2577 lines and 89266 words, and 52 pages

"If you've gone through all your money," resumed Starrett offensively, "I'd marry Diane."

"Diane!" persisted Starrett.

With one of his incomprehensible whims, Carl swept the cards into a disorderly heap and shrugged.

"I'm through," he said curtly. "Wherry, take the pot. You need it."

"Damned irregular!" snapped Starrett sourly.

"So?" said Carl, and stared the recalcitrant into sullen silence. Rising, he crossed to the fire, his dark, impudent eyes lingering reflectively upon Starrett's moody face.

"Starrett," he mused, "I wonder what I ever saw in you anyway. You're infernally shallow and alcoholic and your notions of poker are as distorted as your morals. I'm not sure but I think you'd cheat." He shrugged wearily. "Get out," he said collectively. "I'm tired."

Starrett rose, sneering. There had been a subtle change to-night in his customary attitude of parasitic good-fellowship.

"I'm tired, too!" he exclaimed viciously. "Tired of your infernal whims and insults. You're as full of inconsistencies as a lunatic. When you ought to be insulted, you laugh, and when a fellow least expects it, you blaze and rave and stare him out of countenance. And I'm tired of drifting in here nights at your beck and call, to be sent home like a kid when your mood changes. Mighty amusing for us! If you're not vivisecting our lives and characters for us in that impudent, philosophical way you have, you're preaching a sermon that you couldn't--and wouldn't--follow yourself. And then you end by messing everybody's cards in a heap and sending us home with the last pot in Dick Wherry's pocket whether it belongs there or not. I tell you, I'm tired of it."

Carl laughed, a singularly musical laugh with a note of mockery in it.

To Starrett, hot of temper and impulse, his graceful mockery was maddening. Cursing under his breath, he seized a glass and flung it furiously at his host, who laughed and moved aside with the litheness of a panther. The glass crashed into fragments upon the wall of the marble fireplace. Payson and Wherry hurriedly pushed back their chairs. Then, suddenly conscious of a rustle in the doorway, they all turned.

Wide dark eyes flashing with contempt, Diane Westfall stood motionless upon the threshold. The aesthete in Carl thrilled irresistibly to her vivid beauty, intensified to-night by the angry flame in her cheeks and the curling scarlet of her lips. There were no semi-tones in Diane's dark beauty, Carl reflected. It was a thing of sable and scarlet, and the gold-brown satin of her gypsy skin was warm with the tints of an autumn forest. Carelessly at his ease, Carl noted how the bold eyes of the painted Spanish grandee above the mantel, the mild eyes of the saint in the Tintoretto panel across the room and the flashing eyes of Diane seemed oddly to converge to a common center which was Starrett, white and ill at ease. And of these the eyes of Diane were loveliest.

With the swift grace which to Carl's eyes always bore in it something of the primitive, Diane swept away, and the staring tableau dissolved into a trio of discomfited men of whom Carl seemed But an indifferent onlooker.

"Well," fumed Starrett irritably, "why in thunder don't you say something?"

"Permit me," drawled Carl impudently, with a lazy flicker of his lashes, "to apologize for my cousin's untimely intrusion. I really fancied she was safe at the farm. Unfortunately, the house belongs to her. Besides, your crystal gymnastics, Starrett, were as unscheduled as her arrival. As it is, you've nobly demonstrated an unalterable scientific fact. The collision of marble and glass is unvaryingly eventful."

Bellowing indignantly, Starrett charged into the hallway, followed by Payson. Presently the outer door slammed violently behind them. Wherry lingered.

Carl glanced curiously at his flushed and boyish face.

"Well?" he queried lightly.

Wherry colored.

"Carl," he stammered, "you've been talking a lot about parasites to-night and I'd like you to know that--money hasn't made a jot of difference to me." He met Carl's laughing glance with dogged directness and for a second something flamed boyishly in his face from which Carl, frowning, turned away.

"Why don't you break away from this sort of thing, Dick?" he demanded irritably. "Starrett and myself and all the rest of it. You're sapping the splendid fires of your youth and inherent decency in unholy furnaces. Yes, I know Starrett drags you about with him and you daren't offend him because he's your chief, but you're clever and you can get another job. In ten years, as you're going now, you'll be an alcoholic ash-heap of jaded passions. What's more, you have infernal luck at cards and you haven't money enough to keep on losing so heavily. Half of the poker sermons Starrett's been growling about were preached for you."

Now there were mad, irreverent moments when Carl Granberry delivered his poker sermons with the eloquent mannerisms of the pulpit, save, as Payson held, they were infinitely more logical and eloquent, but to-night, husking his logic of these externals, he fell flatly to preaching an unadorned philosophy of continence acutely at variance with his own habits.

Wherry stared wonderingly at the tall, lithe figure by the fire.

"Carl," he said at last, "tell me, are you honestly in earnest when you rag the fellows so about work and decency and all that sort of thing?"

Carl yawned and lighted a cigar.

"I believe," said he, "in the eternal efficacy of good. I believe in the telepathic potency of moral force. I believe in physical conservation for the eugenic good of the race and mental dominance over matter. But I'm infernally lazy myself, and it's easy to preach. It's even easier to create a counter-philosophy of condonance and individualism, and I'm alternately an ethical egoist, a Fabian socialist and a cynic. Moreover, I'm a creature of whims and inconsistencies and there are black nights in my temperament when John Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights when he treacherously deepens it--but I'm peculiarly balanced and subject to irresistible fits of moral atrophy. All of which has nothing at all to do with the soundness of my impersonal philosophy. Wherefore," with a flash of his easy impudence, "when I preach, I mean it--for the other fellow."

Wherry glanced at the handsome face of his erratic friend with frank allegiance in his eyes.

Carl flung his cigar into the fire, poured himself some whiskey and pushed the decanter across the table.

"Have a drink," he said whimsically.

Dick obeyed. It was an inconsistent supplement to the sermon but characteristic.

"Carl," he said, flushing under the ironical battery of the other's eyes, "I don't think I understand you--"

Carl laughed.

"Nobody does," he said. "I don't myself."

A WHIM

The fire in the marble fireplace died down, leaping in fitful shadow over the iron-bound doors riveted in nail-heads. They too were relics from the Spanish castle which Norman Westfall had stripped of its ancient appurtenances to fashion an appropriate setting for the beautiful young Spanish wife whose death at the birth of Diane had goaded him to suicide. That Norman Westfall had regarded the vital spark within him as an indifferent thing to be snuffed out at the will of the clay it dominated, was consistent with the Westfall intolerance of custom and convention.

There remained, financially, what? Barely four thousand a year in securities so iron-bound by his mother's will that he could not touch them.

Black resentment flamed hotly up in his heart at the memory of the Westfall custom of willing the bulk of the great estate to the oldest son. It had left his mother with a patrimony which Carl, inheriting, had chosen contemptuously to regard as a dwarfish thing of gold sufficient only for the heedless purchase of one flaming, brilliant hour of life. That husbanded it might purchase a lifetime of gray hours tinged intermittently with rose or crimson, Carl had dismissed with a cynical laugh, quoting Omar Khayyam.

Starrett had sneeringly suggested that, to remedy his fallen fortunes--he might marry Diane! Carl laughed softly but recalling suddenly how Diane had looked as she stood in the doorway, the flame of her honest anger setting off her primitive grace, he frowned thoughtfully at the fire, swayed by one of the mad, reckless whims which frequently rocketed through his brain to heedless consummation. Wherefore he presently dispatched a servant to Diane with a note scribbled carelessly upon the face of the ace of diamonds.

"May I see you?" it ran. "I am still in the library. If you like, I'll come up."

She came to the library, frankly surprised. Carl rarely saw fit to apologize or seek advice.

With his ready gallantry, habitually colored by a subtle sex-mockery, Carl rose, drew a chair for her and leaned against the mantel, smiling.

"I'm sorry," said he civilly, "I'm sorry Starrett so far forgot himself."

"So am I," said Diane. "Bacchanalian tableaus are not at all to my liking."

"Nor mine," admitted Carl. "As an aesthete I must own that Starrett is too fat for a really graceful villain. I fancied you were indefinitely domiciled at the farm. Aunt Agatha has been fussing--"

"I was," nodded Diane. "A whim of mine brought me home."

Carl dropped easily into a chair and glanced at his cousin's profile. The delicate oval of her face was firelit; her night-black hair one with the deeper shadows of the room. There was mystery in the lovely dusk of Diane's eyes--and discontent--and something mute and wistful crying for expression.

"I've a proposition to make," said Carl lightly. "It's partly commercial, partly belated justice, partly eugenic and partly personal."

"Your money is quite gone, is it not?" asked Diane, raising finely arched expressive eyebrows.

"It is," admitted Carl ruefully. "My career as a bibulous meteor is over. Last night, after an exquisite shower of golden fire, I came tumbling to earth in the fashion of meteors, a disillusioned stone. In other words--stone broke. May I smoke?"

"Assuredly."

Carl lighted a cigarette.

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