The Business of Life

Where dark dews rain —
This great Night Moth that bears her name
And my sweet Queen;
So let me light my Lantern flame
And breathe Her name."

She held her audience in the palm of her smooth little hand; she knew it, and tasted power. She told them of the Blue Mongol's song, reciting:

"From the Gray Plains I ride,
Where the gray hawks wheel,
In armour of lacquered hide,
Sabre and shield of steel;
The lance in my stirrup rattles,
And the quiver and bow at my back
Clatter! I sing of Battles,
Of Cities put to the sack!
Where is the Lord of the West,
The Golden Emperor's son?
I swung my Mongol sabre; —
He and the Dead are one.
For the tawny Lion of the Iort
And the Sun of the World are One!"

Then she told them the old Chinese tale called "The Never-Ending Wrong" – the immortal tragedy of that immortal maid, "a reed in motion and a rose in flame," from where she alights "in the white hibiscus bower" to where "death is drumming at the door" and "ten thousand battle-chariots on the wing" come clashing to a halt; and the trapped King, her lover, sends her forth

"Lily pale,

Between tall avenues of spears, to die."

And so, amid "the sullen soldiery," white as a flower, and all alone in soul, she "shines through tall avenues of spears, to die."

"The King has sought the darkness of his hands," standing in stricken grief, then turns and gazes at what lies there at his feet amid its scattered

" —Ornaments of gold,
One with the dust; and none to gather them; —
Hair-pins of jade and many a costly gem,
Kingfishers' wings and golden beads scarce cold."

Lingering a moment in the faint reflection of the low-turned footlights, she stood looking out over the silent audience; and perhaps her eyes found what they had been seeking, for she smiled and stepped back as the curtain closed. And no uproar of applause could lure her forth again until the lights had been long blazing and the dancers were whirling over the armoury floor, and she had washed the paint from lid and lip and cheek, and put off her rustling antique silken splendour to bewitch another century scarce begun.

Desboro, waiting at her dressing-room door for her, led her forth.

"You have done so much for me," he whispered. "Is there anything in all the world I can do for you, Jacqueline?"

She was laughing, flushed by the flattery and compliments from every side, but she heard him; and after a moment her face altered subtly. But she answered lightly:

"Can I ask for more than a dance or two with you? Is not that honour enough?" Her voice was gay and mocking, but the smile had faded from eye and lip; only the curved sweetness of the mouth remained.

They caught the music's beat and swung away together among the other dancers, he piloting her with great adroitness between the avenues of armoured figures.

When he had the opportunity, he said: "What may I send you that you would care for?"

"Send me?" She laughed lightly again. "Let me see! Well, then, perhaps you may one day send me – send me forth 'between tall avenues of spears, to die.'"

"What!" he said sharply.

"The song is still ringing in my head – that's all. Send me any inexpensive thing you wish – a white carnation – I don't really care – " she looked away from him – "as long as it comes from you."

CHAPTER X

Desboro's guests were determined to turn the house out of the windows; its stodgy respectability incited them; every smug, smooth portrait goaded them to unusual effort, and they racked their brains to invent novelties.

On one day they opened all the windows in the disused west wing, flooded the ground floor, hung the great stone room with paper lanterns, and held an ice carnival. As masks and costumes had been made entirely out of paper, there were several startling effects and abrupt retirements to repair damages; but the dancing on skates in the lantern light was very pretty, and even the youth and pride of Westchester found the pace not unsuitably rapid.

On another day, Desboro's feminine guests sent to town for enough green flannel to construct caricatures of hunting coats for everybody.

The remains of a stagnant pack of harriers vegetated on a neighbouring estate; Desboro managed to mount his guests on his own live-stock, including mules, farm horses, polo ponies, and a yoke of oxen; and the county saw a hunting that they were not likely to forget.

Reggie Ledyard was magnificent astride an ox, with a paper megaphone for a hunting horn, rubber boots, and his hastily basted coat split from skirt to collar. The harriers ran wherever they pleased, and the astonished farm mules wouldn't run at all. There was hysterical excitement when one cotton-tail rabbit was started behind a barn and instantly lost under it.

The hunt dinner was a weird and deafening affair, and the Weber-Field ball costumes unbelievable.

Owing to reaction and exhaustion, repentant girls came to Jacqueline requesting an interim of intellectual recuperation; so she obligingly announced a lecture in the jade room, and talked to them very prettily about jades and porcelains, suiting her words to their intellectual capacity, which could grasp Kang-he porcelains and Celedon and Sang-de-bœuf, but balked at the "three religions," and found blanc de Chine uninspiring. So she told them about the famille vert and the famille rose; about the K'ang Hsi period, which they liked, and how the imperial kilns at Kiangsi developed the wonderful clair de lune "turquoise blue" and "peach bloom," for which some of their friends or relatives had paid through their various and assorted noses.

All of this her audience found interesting because they recognised in the exquisite examples from Desboro's collection, with which Jacqueline illustrated her impromptu lecture, objects both fashionable and expensive; and what is both fashionable and expensive appeals very forcibly to mediocrity.

"I saw a jar like that one at the Clydesdales'," said Reggie Ledyard, a trifle excited at his own unexpected intelligence. "How much is it worth, Miss Nevers?"

She laughed and looked at the vase between her slender fingers.

"Really," she said, "it isn't worth very much. But wealthy people have established fictitious values for many rather crude and commonplace things. If people had the courage to buy only what appealed to them personally, there would be a mighty crash in tumbling values."

"We'd all wake up and find ourselves stuck," remarked Van Alstyne, who possessed some pictures which he had come to loathe, but for which he had paid terrific prices. "Jim, do you want to buy any primitives, guaranteed genuine?"

"There's the thrifty Dutch trader for you," said Reggie. "I'm loaded with rickety old furniture, too. They got me to furnish my place with antiques! But you don't see me trying to sell 'em to my host at a house party!"

"Stop your disputing," said Desboro pleasantly, "and ask Miss Nevers for her professional opinion later. The chances are that you both have been properly stuck, and I never had any sympathy for wealthy ignorance, anyway."

But Ledyard and Van Alstyne, being very wealthy, became frightfully depressed over the unfeeling jibes of Desboro; and Jacqueline seemed to be by way of acquiring a pair of new clients.

In fact, both young men at various moments approached her on the subject, but Desboro informed them that they might with equal propriety ask a physician to prescribe for them at a dance, and that Miss Nevers' office was open from nine until five.

"Gad," remarked Ledyard to Van Alstyne, with increasing respect, "she is some girl, believe me, Stuyve. Only if she ever married up with a man of our kind – good-night! She'd quit him in a week."

Van Alstyne touched his forehead significantly.

"Sure," he said. "Nothing doing inside our conks. But why the Lord made her such a peach outside as well as inside is driving me to Jersey! Most of 'em are so awful to look at, don't y'know. Come on, anyway. I can't keep away from her."

"She's somewhere with the others playing baseball golf," said Reggie, gloomily, following his friend. "Isn't it terrible to see a girl in the world like that – apparently created to make some good gink happy – and suddenly find out that she has even more brains than beauty! My God, Stuyve, it's hard on a man like me."