Читать книгу Jim the Conqueror - Peter B. Kyne - Страница 4

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Continue to advertise yourself, son.... How about an old-fashioned Bourbon-whisky cocktail?”

Hackett, remembering his host had had his liquor for a decade, nodded gloomy assent, and Crooked Bill went inside to mix the drinks himself, for there were certain duties which his early training indicated should never be entrusted to a butler!

Pausing not an instant in her precipitate flight from the most amazing and impossible male biped she had ever encountered, Roberta Antrim fled to her room, locked the door, lay down on her bed and indulged herself for ten minutes in that delight of her sex customarily known as a good cry.

“The wretch!” she soliloquized. “The odious boor! He had the effrontery to talk to me exactly as if I were a refractory client instead of the girl he had but a moment before assured he loved to distraction. Oh, dear, what humiliation! I hate him, I hate him, I hate him. I’ll never speak to him again as long as I live.”

When a woman has come to that conclusion, quite usually she finds it time to cease vain repining and weeping, lave her inflamed eyes with some soothing lotion and powder her nose. So presently Roberta did all of these things and while doing them appraised herself very critically in her mirror. At bottom she was much too wholesome to entertain a cheap vanity, so she did not waste time in an extended inventory. She knew she had a medium-sized, well-shaped head covered with the sort of golden-tinted auburn hair which so many women attempt, but which few achieve. Catty girls often said of Roberta’s hair that a chemical analysis would develop a trace of henna in it, but this was not true and even her detractors knew it. She had the sort of rich creamy skin that goes with such hair; her eyebrows and eyelashes were darker than her hair, their luxuriance conveying a hint of Celtic blood.

Her eyes, large, brown and a trifle sleepy, owing to her acquired trick of gazing up at men from under the lids, were ideal for setting the reason of an impressionable male tottering on its throne. Her nose had just escaped being snubby and was tilted at so gentle an angle as to confer upon her a faintly haughty expression when her face was in repose. She had a short, beautifully curved upper lip—which adorable malformation permitted much too easy a display of even, hard white teeth. Her lower lip was full, tender and just a shade wilful. Roberta’s was no sad, gentle, resigned, wise Mona Lisa smile; it reminded one of the flash of a heliograph. Her chin was full and aggressive, her body beautifully formed, lithe as a cat’s and suggestive of abounding health and much outdoor exercise.

Despite her almost startling beauty one realized instinctively that Roberta was not (sentimentally speaking) a clinging vine. One felt, too, that she had a healthy temper, despite her perennial good nature and her tolerance for her own sex. As a matter of fact Roberta did possess a temper readily aroused, but she had the saving grace of refusing to admit it except under extraordinary circumstances. A certain coolness, a quiet flash of the brown eyes, a more meticulous graciousness, an infinitesimal lift of the firm chin were the signs Crooked Bill had learned to associate with squalls from that quarter, and for her repression he loved her dearly. He, knowing the blood that was in her, was the only human being who knew also how difficult it was for Roberta, under stress, to refrain from hurling books and traveling clocks! Also, because he had access to these private founts of information and understanding, the old rascal knew how short-lived exasperation was in that jaunty, saucy, lovable soul.

Appraising herself in her mirror now, Roberta twisted her lovely head and cocked it at various angles. No, decidedly her neck was not scrawny, nor was her skin pallid or dull. She was looking and feeling her best, mentally and physically, and she knew that the light green romaine crêpe dress, the “nude” stockings and green suède pumps with the plain cut-steel buckles set her off to additional advantage. In the stilted language of the American fashion writer, they constituted the dernier cri of perfect taste, for Roberta was one of those women to whom a clash of colors was impossible. She reflected with a sort of sweet bitterness that she had dressed that afternoon with an eye single to impinging herself upon the cool, quietly impersonal glance of Glenn Hackett. “If I were a girl who wore diamonds to the breakfast table,” she told her reflection, “there might have been some excuse for his gauche conduct. One moment he had proposed and the next he was withdrawing the proposal. I wouldn’t have accepted him on a bet, nice as he is and comfortable as he is to have around, but he might have given me an opportunity to say so! He was terrible! He gave me the impression that, in one revealing moment, he had seen something in me that revolted him—and I’m not revolting, I’m not, I’m not—”

Once more she gave way to tears, but not for long. With Roberta tears were a sign of weakness, the weapons of the tyrannous, the first refuge of an ungallant and unsportsmanlike woman, although when her emotions were deeply stirred, as by grief or pity, she enjoyed weeping. She patronized human-interest or heart-throb plays and avoided profound books written with an obviously greater concern for style than substance. Instinctively she wanted to get her teeth into life; at least that is how Crooked Bill expressed it, and he had a peculiar gift for apt and illuminating expression.

She dried her tears and applied the powder rag again. And then the real reason for her charm—the reason men adored her and made love to her—presented itself. Roberta was a good sport—none better, and hated a quitter with all the strength of her vital, intelligent soul. She made a little grimace at herself.

“Well, Bobby Antrim, you took a man’s-size beating, didn’t you? You’re of a piece with the fellow who went hunting, promising to bring a bear back into camp. And he did—with the bear just six feet behind him! Oi-yoi! Oi-yoi! Well, that Hackett imbecile isn’t dull, at any rate. And I did start to say something banal—all about never having suspected his attachment! I see it all very clearly now. Right there little Bobby went blah! Yes, that was a sour note—and he has an ear for music. That man-animal has some pride—and I had thought they all had ego!”

She sat down in a low rocker to think it over very carefully. As usual, her resentment and rage were disappearing at the double; she was only sensible now of a feeling of humiliation, not so much because of what Glenn Hackett had said and done as because she had failed so miserably in feminine adroitness to meet an extraordinary situation. In a way of speaking he had demolished her. Paralyzed her powers of initiative and inventiveness and left her helpless to defend herself; ground her to a pulp!

The only thing he had been decent enough to refrain from doing was laugh at her, but of course he had been much too angry to do that. He had contented himself with glaring at her in a most unloverlike manner, which demonstrated all too conclusively that his protestations of love, made a minute before, had been unpremeditated, unsound, insecure, and wholly inconsequential. She was glad now that she had found him out, because for a month she had been asking herself if it could be possible that she was becoming seriously interested in the man.

She decided now that his unusualness, as compared with the average run of men, was what had challenged her interest and attention, for of course she could never afford to admit, even to herself, that he had aroused every drop of sporting blood in her sporty little body. The fact that he had been indifferent, sentimentally lethargic—a bit dull, in fact—had constituted a challenge to her; and she had resolved to demonstrate to him that he was not, nor by any possibility ever could be, where she was concerned, the captain of his soul, the master of his fate!

And he had proved to her what a monumental failure she had turned out to be in an art where, to quote Crooked Bill again, she was supposed to be one hundred and fifty per cent perfect!

Suddenly Roberta began to laugh. Such a hearty, merry, mellow little laugh it was. “Thinks he’s won a great victory,” she decided. “Well, like John Paul Jones, I have not yet begun to fight. I’ll bring that unusual man to his knees and when I have him there I’ll—well, I’ll not do anything so unladylike as to put my foot in his face, but I’ll laugh at him! I swear I will. I’ll laugh out loud!”

There is always a feeling of comfort when one has come to a decision after wrestling with a knotty problem. Roberta had her poise back again; she felt again that she was ready to conquer new worlds and make them like it. So she went into her sitting-room and opened the door leading into the hall and the window that overlooked the veranda. Then she sat down at her little boudoir grand piano and played loudly “I Don’t Care If You Never Come Back.” When she had finished that and was trying to think up another musical insult, somebody commenced whistling “In the Gloaming” from the veranda. The loathsome words of the first verse ran through Roberta’s brain: