The Breath of the G.o.ds.
by Sidney McCall.
CHAPTER ONE
The stone dwelling of Senator Cyrus C. Todd, usually as indistinguishable from its neighbors as is one piano key from another, presented at nine o"clock on this night of November third, nineteen hundred and three, a claim to individuality in the excess of light pouring from every window, from the perpendicular wink of every opening door (opened but to close again as quickly); oozing, it would seem, from the very pores of the pale facade, thereby giving to the great flat rectangle of the house a phosph.o.r.escent value that set it six feet out into the night.
The upper windows shone more brilliantly than those below. A roller shade had been carelessly left high. Through the film of chamber curtains heads could be seen pa.s.sing. Once, there was the outflung gesture of a slim, bare arm. Everything bespoke approaching festivity.
At this brightest window a silhouette suddenly appeared, sharp, dark, complete. It was that of a j.a.panese girl with wonderfully looped and curved coiffure, shoulders that sloped tenderly, and a small, straight throat.
Just at this moment, on the shadowed entrance-steps below, answering silhouettes began noiselessly to climb. These were men with thin black legs, and strange burdens, black like themselves. They showed angles as of gnarled roots; one, the great curved body of a gigantic spider. The front door, opening instantly to a ring, disclosed them merely as musicians,--Signor Marcellini of Milan and his colleagues,--bearing ba.s.so, cello, and flutes, secure in swart cases.
The lower rooms of the house were slightly chill. Though flooded with soft light, they were not yet fully illuminated. All doors within stood open. It looked almost as if walls had been taken down, so long and mysterious had grown the vistas. Through all tingled an aromatic smell, something a little alien, like crushed herbs,--pungent, and full of vague suggestion. Mrs. Cyrus C. Todd, flowing now down the palm-set stairway in a purple tide of skirts, frothed with dim lace, stopped at a switchboard half concealed in vines, sent forth a gloved, determined hand, and in an instant the secret of the odor was revealed. The rooms, to their farthest angles, literally exuded chrysanthemums. Senator Todd was said to have expended five thousand dollars for these flowers alone.
Perhaps he wished to stamp in gold upon the memory of Washington this coming-out party of his idolized, only child. The conceit was fair enough, for Gwendolen was bright, and blonde, and golden in herself.
Statesmen and the wives of statesmen did not fail to observe that chrysanthemums were the insignia of official j.a.pan, and that November third happened,--they emphasized "happened,"--to be the birthday of j.a.pan"s beloved Emperor. These two facts, joined with the third, that Senator Todd even now had aspirations to the Tokio mission, made a trio of keen angles to be used as wedges for further speculation.
The walls of the lower story had been spread for the occasion with yellow satin, upon which alternated delicate upright strokes of silver and of white. Around, under the ceiling, grew a frieze of living flowers. The great, coa.r.s.e, woody stems crossed in a lattice-work, with cl.u.s.ters of huge blossoms and green leaves breaking the angles at points of decision possible only to a trained artist, or to a j.a.panese. The white duck floor-covering spread to a border hand-painted, to match the frieze. Where wall and canvas met, the real flowers again arose,--thick parallel stalks of differing heights, upholding a wainscot border of s.h.a.ggy gold. Mantles were heaped with them. j.a.panese pots of them in bloom alternated with conventional ferns and palms. Each electric bulb jutted from the heart of a living flower. The very air had an amber tone.
Overhead, invisible footsteps scurried in short flights. They sounded feminine, young, full of excitement. "Heavens!" Miss Gwendolen de Lancy Todd was crying, "where on earth _is_ my other glove? I am sure I just laid it here! And my orchids! Has anybody sat on my orchids? I think I"ll have to marry the young person who sent them, though I forget now who it was!"
"A person of the name Dodge, n"est-ce-pas?" ventured the little French dressmaker, on her knees beside the fair white vision. Pins, retained at the corners of her mouth, added a crushed softness to the p.r.o.nunciation.
She rhymed it with "targe."
"Yes, a name like that, I believe," said Gwendolen, indifferently, and craned her long neck over. "Mother called him some sort of a snip. Are you certain that my dress hangs right now, Madame?"
"Oui, oui. It is perfection," declared Madame, sticking the remaining pins into the black front of her dress.
"Then at last I am actually ready. I believe there"s mother calling now.
Where did Yuki go? Oh, I see, over there by the window, as calm and cool as if we were going to church instead of to our first ball!"
"Then all my coolness is stopping on my outsides," said the j.a.panese girl, with a little incipient shrug and giggle, breaking at once into the merriest of low laughs. She crossed the room swiftly, with an unusual, swaying rhythm of movement. "Ah, Gwendolen, my heart it go like yellow b.u.t.terflies to be downstairs."
Gwendolen turned a radiant face to greet her. "Now isn"t she a vision!"
cried the girl aloud, in fresh access of admiration for her friend.
"Madame, what do you think those French painters of yours would say to her--Chavannes, De Monvel, Besnard,--who owe so much to Yuki"s art?"
"You omit Monsieur Le Beau, who is a painter," said the little woman, shyly. She was on good terms with the girls, and had made Yuki, as well as Gwendolen, chic gowns with the breath of Paris upon them. "I knew well the family of Monsieur Le Beau in France," she hurried on, seeing the distressed flush in Yuki"s face. "Non, non, Mamselles. I am a chattering old femme. Let me look at you together before you descend the stair." She sat back upon her heels to enjoy the picture.
"Yes," cried Gwendolen, "that"s right. Take us both in." Laughingly she drew Yuki"s arm, with its long, trailing sleeve of gray, tightly within her own. They rested together, swaying,--smiling,--Yuki"s cheek still warm with the name of Pierre Le Beau, two types as far apart as the two sides of earth which had given them race.
Gwendolen was fair almost to the extreme of golden blondness. Her features were small and perfectly related; her nose deliciously interrogative at the tip. Her brows and lashes, drawn in a darker hue, gave touches of character and distinction. She was very slender, erect, and was poised as though she grew in the wind. The long tulle draperies shook and stirred as if vitalized by her energy. She was all white and gold. Her heaped-up skeins of hair, amber necklace, gloves, slippers, and stockings gleamed with a primrose hue, and the freckles on her orchids (poor flowers, just caught up hastily from an ignominious corner) repeated the yellow note.
Beside her, Yuki Onda, a few inches lacking in height, impressive, nevertheless, and held with a striking yet indefinable difference of line, smiled out like a frail Astarte. Her pallor had an undernote of ivory, where Gwendolen"s was of pearl. Her head, with its pointed chin, bore, like a diadem of jet,--balanced, like a regal burden,--the spread wings of her hair. Beneath a white, low brow her eyes made almost a continuous, gleaming line. The little nose came down, straight and firm, with a single brush stroke. All the humanity, the tenderness, the womanhood of her face lay in the red mouth and the small, round chin.
Her smile was startling, even pathetic, in beauty. Gwendolen had once said, "There is sometimes something in Yuki"s smile that makes me want to fight G.o.d for her."
Yuki"s robe, in deference to hours of pleading from Gwendolen and Pierre Le Beau, was j.a.panese to the least detail. Mrs. Todd had protested in vain for the "civilized" coming-out gown of white. The robe hung about the girl in long, loose folds of craepe, mist-gray, rising in soft transitions from the dark band of the hem to pearl tones at the throat.
Under it were garments of heavier silk, dawn-colored, showing like morning through thin clouds. Into the curdled substance of the craepe, cherry-flowers were dyed, or rather, breathed in, by a smiling, wrinkled brown magician at the rim of Yuzen Creek,--pale shapes which glimmered and were gone, rose to the surface and sank again, as though borne in moving water. Besides the black note of her hair there was one strong crash of contrast in the obi, or sash, a broad and dominating zone, black, too, with fire-flies of gold upon it. For hair-ornaments she wore a cl.u.s.ter of small pink flowers that had the look of cherry-blooms, and a great carved ivory pin, p.r.o.nged like a tuning-fork, an heirloom in her father"s family.
"Gwendo--_len_! Yu-_kee_! Come down instantly!" rose the voice of Mrs.
Todd. "You should have been down ten minutes ago."
"Ah, Madame Todd calls," exclaimed the dressmaker, scrambling to her feet.
"But you are sure you really admire us, Madame?" challenged Gwendolen, before she would stir.
"Oui, charmante, charmante, both are perfection apart--and a vision of paradise together. But go, young ladies, the good mother calls again."
The spoiled child stopped for another instant, this time in the doorway.
"All right, mother. Coming this instant!" she hurled downstairs; then to the little Frenchwoman she said, "Do not attempt to sit up, Madame. Yuki is to stay all night, and will help me with the pins. After a glimpse at the reception and some of the goodies below, you must hurry home to your little Jeanne. Take plenty of bonbons with you, and I wish to send that great bunch of daisies, with my love. All children love daisies, n"est-ce-pas?"
At last they were off. Madame could hear Mrs. Todd, relieved, yet petulant, scolding them the whole descending scale of the stairs. Moving through the perfumed disorder of the room, Madame sought out the daisies, and, with filling eyes, whispered aloud in French, "Now may the good G.o.d be kind to that loving heart, and send to it only blessing."
Stockings, scarfs, fans, underwear,--a thousand dainty trifles must be gathered up before the little Frenchwoman could give herself consent to go. Madame and Miss Todd had been kind friends to the widowed exile.
Far over to one side of the room she stumbled upon a dark heap that showed gleams of a cherry-colored lining. It emitted, as if consciously, an aroma, subtle, faint, unforgettable, strange scented echoes of a distant land. It was Yuki"s long black "adzuma-coat," worn from the j.a.panese Legation, where Baroness Kanrio and the maids had a.s.sisted her to dress, and which, in this bright room, she had slipped laughingly to the floor and forgotten. Madame held it out for a moment. Then she folded and laid it softly on the foot of the bed. Her expression had changed slightly. As if with relief, she s.n.a.t.c.hed up a dressing-gown of blue flannel, that cried "Gwendolen" from every turquoise fold.
"Gwendolen, where is your father hiding?" demanded Mrs. Todd, severely, as the two girls reached the hall.
"Why, how should I know? Dad hasn"t worried my mind. Isn"t Yuki simply a dream of spring?"
"You forget that I have admired Yuki upstairs," said the hara.s.sed matron, and turned her back. "There"s another carriage sounding as if it wanted to stop! Every wheel goes over my nerve-centre. Cy, _Cy_--rus!
Where _is_ that wretched man? The musicians should be playing now. The guests will pour in any instant. There is a carriage stopping! It _has_ stopped! Heavens, I shall go mad!"
"Shall Yuki and I run for the drawing-room, mother?"
"Yes, yes, dear. Right under that tallest palm. Be sure to stand ahead of Yuki. Cyrus! Cy--_rus_! Oh, he is never anywhere when I want him."
Her wails preceded her down the hall.
"Are you looking for me, dear?" asked the senator, innocently, strolling out in a leisurely manner from his study, where, against orders, he had been smoking a cigar.
"_Am_ I!" panted his wife. "And you"ve been smoking!" But indignation must be swept aside. "The carriages are stopping, man! Don"t you hear them? I"ll be in bed for a month if I live through this night! Start up the musicians, and join us immediately in the front drawing-room."
"Musicians,--musicians?" murmured Cyrus, looking about, "where are the musicians?"
"Not under the hatrack, nor yet in my china-closet," cried his lady, with angry vehemence. "Over there! Yes, there--where you saw the piano wheeled this afternoon; behind that hedge of chrysanthemums!"
"Oh, yes, there in the duck-shooters" lodge. All right, old lady. I"ll start "em. Don"t get excited!"
Guests now streamed upstairs toward the dressing-rooms. Signor Marcellini began his most seductive waltz; and the senator stood beside his heaving spouse just as the first smiling acquaintance crossed the door-sill.
"Ah, Governor! Ah, my _dear_ Mrs. Jink!" chortled Mrs. Todd. "This is surely a good omen,--my daughter"s first official congratulations to come from you. Gwendolen, let me present Governor Jink and Mrs. Jink, fresh from our own dear Western state. Miss Yuki Onda of Tokio, Mrs.
Jink,--Gwendolen"s most intimate school-friend, and my Oriental daughter, as I call her. Ah, Sir George! Punctuality is one of the British virtues. Mrs. Blachouse, my daughter, Miss Todd."
The reception swung now, full and free, into the sparkling waters of felicity. Laughter, lights, and the rustling of silken skirts on inner mysteries of silk; music held back by the mult.i.tudinous small sounds of human intercourse, with now and then a protesting wail from violins and the guttural short snore of a cello! Laughter, and the clink of gla.s.ses on metal trays, the sc.r.a.ping of spoons against porcelain, tinkling of ice in fragile vessels, and incessantly the shuffle of footsteps on soundless, unseen floors! Perfumes of dying flowers and foliage, odors of essences, fumes of fresh-cut lemons, and of wine!
Outside, at the curbing, a continuous roar and rattling of carriages went on. The covered entrance-way, like an elastic tent drawn out, sheltered a thin moving stream of faces. Behind them the sc.r.a.pe of wheels, stamping of horses, and vociferous bawling of drivers sent a premonitory tingling through the blood. At intervals there came the snort and hiss of that modern Fafnir, the automobile, followed by the nauseating taint of gasoline.