The Crimson Gardenia and Other Tales of Adventure

Rex Ellingwood Beach

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• Publié par: sulev
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 16
• Langue: English

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Crimson Gardenia and Other Tales of
Adventure, by Rex Beach
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Title: The Crimson Gardenia and Other Tales of Adventure
Author: Rex Beach
Release Date: April 23, 2010 [EBook #32101]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRIMSON GARDENIA ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.netThe Crimson Gardenia
and Other Tales of Adventure
BY REX BEACH
AUTHOR OF "HEART OF THE SUNSET" "THE SPOILERS" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Crimson Gardenia and Other Tales of Adventure
Copyright, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1916, by Harper & Brothers
Copyright, 1910, 1913, by Cosmopolitan Magazine
Copyright, 1906, by The Metropolitan Magazine Co.
Printed in the United States of America
Published April, 1916Her eyes flashed to the white gardenia on his breast, then up
to his own.
CONTENTS
THE CRIMSON GARDENIA
I
II
III
ROPE'S END
I
II
INOCENCIO
I
II
THE WAG-LADY
"MAN PROPOSES—"
I
II
TOLD IN THE STORM
THE WEIGHT OF OBLIGATION
THE STAMPEDEWHEN THE MAIL CAME IN
McGILL
THE BRAND
I
II
Books by REX BEACH
ILLUSTRATIONS
Her Eyes Flashed to the White Gardenia on His Breast, Then Up to His Own
As Floréal Rose from His Father's Body He Heard a Shot and Saw the Soldiers
of the Republic Charging Him
"Take Your Hand off That Gun, Barclay"
"Barclay Wasn't More 'n Half Dead, and the Woman Fell to Beggin' for His Life
Again"
THE CRIMSON GARDENIA
I
The royal yacht had anchored amid a thunder of cannon, and the king had
gone ashore. The city was bright with bunting; a thousand whistles blew. Up
through the festooned streets His Majesty was escorted between long rows of
blue-coated officers, behind which the eager crowds were massed for mile
upon mile. Thin wire cables were stretched along the curbs, to hold the people
back, but these threatened to snap before the weight of the multitude.
In the neighborhood of the raised pavilion where the queen and her maids of
honor waited, the press was thickest; here rows of stands had been erected that
groaned beneath their freight, while roof-tops and windows, trees and
telegraph-poles, were black with clustered humanity.
The king was tall and dark; a long beard hid his face. But the queen was young
and blushing, and her waiting-women were fairer than springtime flowers. To a
crashing martial air, she handed him a sparkling goblet in which he pledged
her happiness, while the street rocked to the roar of many voices, and in the
open spaces youths, grotesquely costumed, danced with goblin glee.
Mr. Roland Van Dam secretly thought it all quite fine and inspiriting, but he was
too highly schooled to allow himself much emotion. He had been hard put to
obtain seats, and had succeeded only through the efforts of a friend, the Duke
of Cotton; therefore, he felt, the members of his party might have shown at least
a perfunctory appreciation. But they were not the appreciative kind, and theirattitude was made plain by Eleanor Banniman's languid words:
"How dull! It's nothing like the carnival at Nice, and the people seem very
common."
Her father was dozing uncomfortably, with his two lower chins telescoped into
his billowing chest; Mrs. Banniman complained of the heat and the glare, and
predicted a headache for herself. Near by, the rest of the party were striving to
conceal their lack of interest by guying the crowd below. Van Dam had been
the one to suggest this trip to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, and he felt the
weight of entertainment bearing heavily upon him. In consequence, he
assumed a sprightly interest that was very far from genuine.
"This sort of thing awakens something medieval inside of one, don't you know,"
he said.
Miss Banniman regarded him with a bland lack of comprehension; her mother
moaned weakly, the burden of her complaint being, as usual:
"Why did we leave Palm Beach?"
"All those dukes and things make me feel as if it were real," Van Dam
explained further. "They say this Rex fellow is a true king during Mardi Gras
week, and those chaps in masks are quite like court jesters. Maybe they sing of
wars and love and romance—and all that rot."
"I dare say life was just as uninteresting in olden days as it is now," Eleanor
remarked. "Love and romance exist mainly in books, I fancy. If they ever did
exist, we've outgrown them, eh, Roly?"
Being a very rich and a very experienced young woman, Miss Banniman prided
herself upon her lack of illusion. To be sure, she occasionally permitted Roland
to kiss her in celebration of their engagement, but such caresses left her
unperturbed; her pulses had never been stirred. She looked upon marriage as
a somewhat trying, although necessary, institution. Van Dam, being equally
modern and equally satiated by life's blessings, shared her beliefs in a vague
way.
Manifestly, no lover could allow such an assertion as this to go unchallenged,
so he rose to the defense of romance, only to hear her say:
"Nonsense! Do be sensible, Roly. Such things aren't done nowadays."
"What things aren't done?"
"Oh, those crude, primitive performances we read about in novels. Nice people
don't fall in love overnight, for instance. They don't allow themselves to hate,
and be jealous, and to rage about like wild animals any more."
"The idea! Your father is a perfect savage, at heart," said Mrs. Banniman. She
nodded at her sleeping husband, who was roused at that moment by a fly that
had strayed into his right nostril. Mr. Banniman sneezed, half opened his eyes,
and murmured a feeble anathema before dozing off again. It was plain that he
was not greatly enjoying the Mardi Gras.
"All men are primitive," said Roly, quoting some forgotten author, at which
Eleanor eyed him languidly.
"Could you love at first sight and run off with a girl?"
"Certainly not. I'd naturally have to know something about her people—""Were you ever jealous?"
"You've never given me an occasion," he told her, gallantly.
"Did you ever hate anybody?"
"Um-m—no!"
"Ever been afraid?"
"Not exactly."
"Revengeful?"
"Certainly not."
She smiled. "It's just as I said. Respectable people don't allow themselves to be
harrowed by crude emotions. I hate my modiste when she fails to fit me; I was
jealous of that baroness at the Poinciana—the one with all those gorgeous
gowns; I'm afraid of flying-machines; but that is as deep as such things go,
nowadays—in our set."
Van Dam was no hand at argument, and he had a great respect for Miss
Banniman's observation; moreover, he had been discussing something of
which he possessed no first-hand knowledge. Therefore, he said nothing
further. No one had a greater appreciation of, or took a keener pleasure in, life's
unruffled placidity than the young society man. No one had a denser ignorance
of its depths, its hidden currents, and its uncharted channels than he; for
adventure had never come his way, romance had never beckoned him from
rose-embowered balconies. And yet, as the world goes, he was a normal
individual, save for the size of his income. He had not lost interest in life; he
was merely interested in things which did not matter. That, after all, is quite
different.
There were times, nevertheless, when he longed vaguely for something thrilling
to happen, when he regretted the Oslerization of romance and the
commercializing of love. Of course, adventure still existed; one could hunt big
game in certain hidden quarters, if one chose. Van Dam detested stuffed
heads, and it took so much time to get them. These unformed desires came to
him only now and then, and he felt ashamed of them, in an idle way.
Now that the parade had passed, the visitors lost no time in leaving, and a
dignified stampede toward the hotel occurred, for the gentlemen were thirsty
and the ladies wished to smoke. It was due to their haste, perhaps, that Van
Dam became separated from them and found himself drifting along Canal
Street alone in a densely packed crowd of merrymakers. A masked woman in a
daring Spanish dress chucked him under the chin; her companion showered
him with confetti. A laughing Pierrot whacked him with a noisy bladder; boys
and girls in ragged disguises importuned him for pennies. A very, very shapely
female person, in what appeared to be the beginnings of a bathing suit,
laughed over her shoulder, inviting him, with eyes that danced.
"My word!" murmured the New-Yorker. "This is worth while."
Ahead of him, he caught a glimpse of Miss Banniman's aigrettes and the
ponderous figure of her father. But the gaiety of the carnival crowd had in