Short Stories - - (story books to read .TXT) 📗
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Ah, indeed, old Marchis could call himself a fortunate man!
Fortunate? Yes, he ought to have considered himself so. When he set himself to reason about it, to describe mentally his conjugal situation, he had to conclude that he would have done wrong to complain of his destiny. And yet....
What of the terribly unexpected had he now discovered in the depths of the pure sapphire of Gemma’s eyes? Was there arisen in his soul the doubt that that faithfulness against every trial, that coldness toward her admirers was nothing but the wish to preserve intact a position acquired with difficulty, and that precisely to that position was directed all the tenderness shown toward himself! I do not know; but the vivid and impetuous joy of the wedding was no longer in him, although his love remained the same; and a painful doubt thrilled in his voice when he replied to the playful confidence of Gemma, forcing himself to laugh too:
“Take care, now, take care.... The vengeance of the tyrant hangs over you....”
Ah, the poor tyrant, how he loved her! How she had known how to bind him with her little hands, white and perfumed as two lilies. For nothing in the world would he have discovered the truth, changed into certainty his fomenting doubt; so, she had only to ask in order to obtain; for now for him that love of which he doubted, had become his life; and he felt a painful stricture at his heart at the mere thought that a day might come when he would be obliged to refuse her something. Yet that day came. Suddenly, by one of those mysterious complications of business his bank, which until then had gone from triumph to triumph, underwent a violent shock. Not a noisy downfall, one of those open, public ruins, which produce great failures; but one of those deep, intimate secret crises, that must be borne without a word, a lament, under penalty of death; that can be overcome only by force of small privations, little hidden savings; it is then that strict economy in the family becomes necessary. The luxury of Gemma, in those moments, became absolutely ruinous for her husband; he ought to have warned her, sought to check her; he dared not; and continued to content her, but very soon came the time when he could do so no more.
It was on the occasion of a great ball to which she was to go; she had ordered from Paris a marvelous gown that became her to perfection; still she was not satisfied. Some days before, in the showcase of the most fashionable jeweler of the city, a diadem had set in revolution all the feminine imaginations; a superb jewel, of antique style, set in silver gilt, of a starry pallor, where the brilliants seemed drops of flame. Gemma wished to have it and indeed it would be difficult to find a face adapted to the almost religious richness of that jewel, more than her snowy profile of an angel in ecstacy.
Ten thousand francs was the price of that jewel; and Marchis did not have them. Mute, immovable, his heart oppressed, he listened to Gemma’s words as she described it to him. How could he tell her, how could he even tell her that he had not the ten thousand francs. It was terrible. To another woman who should have had that caprice, one might have proposed to have her own diamonds reset after that model or perhaps even to have an imitation diadem made; no one would have suspected it; but he felt that the danger lay in confessing his powerlessness. Yet, it must be done.... And he made an effort at courage.
Gemma had seated herself beside him, throwing back and bending a little to one side her blonde head, with that irresistible feminine movement which displays the white throat, the pure line descending from the slender neck to the full-bloomed bust down to the round and flexible waist.
“I would like to have it, it seems to me that I should look well.... Don’t you think so? I have a great wish to be beautiful.... If you knew why?”
She laughed, now, deliciously, with the air of her roguish hours. He was silent for a moment; then, fixing a vague look upon the delicate designs of the oriental carpet, paling as if from an inward wound, he murmured:
“The fact is that I do not know.... I do not really know whether ... whether I shall be able to buy it for you....”
“Why?”
She had quickly raised her head, much surprised, uneasy, looking at him. Such a thing had never happened to her.
Marchis wiped his forehead and resumed his discourse.
“The fact is ... you see, in a bank like ours, there are moments that ... certain moments in which one cannot ... in which it is impossible.”
What was impossible for him, in that moment, was to finish the phrase. He stopped, and lifted his eyes timidly to her, desolately, as if to beg her to help him. She was very pale, with a sudden hardness in all her features, in her compressed mouth, in her knit brows, in her sparkling eyes.
“Have you not ten thousand francs? Is it possible?”
And her voice was hard as her look ... a profound hardness that startled him. But all at once her face changed expression, she recovered her fresh, tuneful laugh, the sweet and limpid ray was rekindled in her blue eyes.
“Come you want to tell me stories, so as not to buy me anything.... Deceiver! I that wished to be beautiful in order to drive Vico Molise a little crazy; he has declared to me that he is tired of my perfidy.... See, you deserve.... Do you know that I am becoming angry with you?”
She really believed that she had hit the truth, with her words. Indeed, he had so well kept up the illusion with her, he had hidden so jealously his embarrassment, that she did not know how to explain this sudden restriction. But meanwhile, every word of hers was a blow to the heart of Marchis; he saw her already at the ball, passing from arm to arm with her step like a flying angel; listening to the insidious compliments of Vico Molise and his kind, and keeping meantime in her heart that leaven of rancor against him because of his refusal; and he saw himself again, as he had seen himself a little while before in the mirror, old, weary, worn, beside her so fresh, young, with eyes sparkling from the cruel scorn of one who has made an unequal bargain.
Suddenly he rose, like one who has taken a decision, passed his hand across his brow, and without replying, went away to go out of the house. She believed that she had conquered, and let him go without moving herself, only with a flash of cunning in her eyes; but when he was on the stairs the door opened, a blonde head appeared between the folding-doors—
“We are agreed, then?”
He did not reply; and she heard his step down the stairway, slow, heavy, weary.
The evening of the ball, Marchis knocked at the door of his wife’s dressing-room. “Come in,” and he entered.
In the little dressing-room so illumined as to seem on fire, with the air filled with fragrance from the little unstoppered bottle of perfume, all gleaming white with the disorder of feminine apparel scattered about, Gemma stood erect before the mirror, between two kneeling maids, ready dressed for the ball. She was truly radiant in her gown of white satin with almond blossoms, with fresh sprays of almond flowers around the neck of the dress, at the waist, among the waving folds of the train, issuing from that covering of delicate, pale, dawn-tinted flowers, she too was fresh as they, with her faintly rosy complexion, as if she were one of those flowers become a person. But under her lashes gleamed anon the flash of cold and cruel rancor.
Her husband had not given her the diadem!
But hearing him enter, she turned, and seeing that he held a casket in his hands, she comprehended everything. With a bound, she was beside him, her arms twined around his neck.
“Oh, how good you are! How good you are! How I love you!” He trembled all over, and was very pale. Gemma did not even perceive it. All at once, with one of her irresistible movements, she loosened her arms from his neck, took with one hand the casket and with the other holding her husband’s hand, she led him after her to the mirror. She seated herself and opened the casket. Among puffs of red plush, under the burning light, the diadem sent forth sparks like a flame. She had a new outburst of joy, took the husband’s head between her hands, drew it down, and kissed his forehead—oh! the forehead of a corpse, icy and livid; then without looking at his features, his wandering gaze, she offered him the diadem and bent before him her blonde head, which was so well suited to that mystical jewel.
“Come sir, crown me!”
And while he sought to unite with trembling hands the clasp of the gems among those marvelous blonde curls, waving and breaking into ripples of gold at every movement, she, still with bent head, lifted her smiling eyes to meet his look. And he answered with a resigned gentleness to the smile of those perilous blue eyes; he, the poor man who deceived for the sake of desire to be deceived, and who bought for himself a little mock love with ... mock diamonds.
(E. Henderson: For Short Stories.)
A bleak afternoon in Dakota ... a sledge containing two women and several men is driven rapidly across the prairie.
Alighting at a “shanty,” the women and one of the men enter. The rest of the men immediately begin digging, or rather “chopping” a grave in the frozen ground. They work silently and unceasingly, by turns, for the short winter afternoon already shows signs of merging into night.
The three that entered the house are standing, nervously looking on the scene before them. A fireless stove, unmade beds, everything desolate and untidy. In the middle of the room, a table; on it a motionless form, covered with a coarse gray blanket; on the bed a much smaller, shrouded, form.
One of the women advances to the table, and summoning all her fortitude, throws aside the blanket, and looks on the face of the frozen woman ... frozen solid as a block of ice, the clenched hands, filled with fine, dry snow, fine as sand, sifted into every tress of hair, into her eyes, her ears, down into her bosom, that lay bare, showing how she had tried to nourish her babe, in the face of that pitiless storm ... what availed the warmest mother love, against that relentless cold ... frozen with the blood still in her cheeks and lips ... no time for the crimson stream of life to leave the face.
Bare and comfortless as their home was, no one knows what tempted them to leave it that terrible day. They were bound for a neighbor’s house half a mile distant but had not gone quarter the way when they turned in the wrong direction. They struggled on, husband and wife, carrying the babe less than a year old, until the woman could go no further, and throwing up her hands, fell down. Laying the now stiffening form of the child beside its mother, the bewildered father wandered on, on, until he reached by chance, miles distant, a place to incoherently tell his story and—perish.
The family belonged to the poor “dumb driven cattle” class of Russian Jews. Their own kind had left them to their fate. So the settlers had turned out to give them
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