The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode

by Marie Van Vorst

The last of the fire had flared up. The flame went out.

Sinking back in her chair, she waited in a tranced stillness, her eyes on the ashes of the fire. She had said her say out, perhaps the man knew it, and as she leaned back in the cushions he saw how completely it all lay with him at the end. She thought he came back and waited a second at her side; she thought he bent a moment over her, but she did not stir until the cold wind from an opening door, till the clicking of a latch made her start, and then she turned to see that he had gone.

Bulstrode came back to the castle Christmas Day at nine o'clock. But the hour had the effect of being much earlier. The winter morning panoplied with festivity began its life slowly, and not all the day's brightness through which he had speeded his motor had yet come into the house. Bulstrode, drawn by it, went directly back to the room he had left several hours before, as though he expected still to find the woman he loved sitting before the extinguished fire.

Two parlor maids were whisking their skirts and dusters out of the opposite door, a footman at their heels. Touches of the inevitable order which reduces an agreeable disarray to the impersonal had already been put to the scene of Jimmy's tenderness, and the curtains drawn well away from the long windows let in the morning that entered broadly and fell across the hearth and the fresh-lit fire.

Clean logs replaced the cold ashes: the match had just finished with the kindlings, and Bulstrode went over to welcome the crackling of the young blaze. The absence of his host, the castle once more handed over to him for the time, gave him a feeling of proprietorship in the bright cordial room, but looking up at the portraits of Westboro's in puffs and velvets, Jimmy couldn't find an ancestor! Their amours and indulgences had written brilliant and amusing history; the gentlemen had gone mad at ladies' carriage wheels, they had carried off their scandals with the highest of hands, and still held their heads well. They had carved and raped and loved their way down to the present time, and were none the less a proud line of pure British blood. The American bachelor, about whose fine head nothing picturesque or worthy of history circled, looked up at the Dukes of Westboro' musingly, and there was not a peer or a noble better to look upon or who had been at heart a truer lover, although he did not know it.

During the lapse of time between leaving this same room and his present return, Bulstrode had not tossed on a sleepless bed; he had slept soundly, and during his rest the several dials had called out like bells, their voice, Utere dum licet; and finally a real bell had roused him to the fact that it was day, a new day, and that unless he was killed en route to the castle, nothing could keep him from the place and from her.

He had no consolation in the fact that the honor and decency of society were by him strengthened and retained, nor did he plan out the sane, wise project of not seeing her again. Nor did he weigh or balance his charge or responsibility. There had been a cessation of vibration of any kind, and only one supreme, sovereign reality took possession of the world and of himself, and the limitless beauty and the limitless delight he had breathed in ever since he left her and knew how she loved him. Nothing in life, he had so felt, could dull or tarnish the glory of her face; nothing, no matter what life held for them both, could efface the touch she had laid upon him, as her arms were about him. Through the interval his past life appeared to have been, on through the new and unlived interval to come, she would be as last night she had been, she would look at him as last night she had looked. "Heavens!" he meditated, in the faces of the self-indulgent, cynical Westboro's, "I am not going to be blasé through six paradises just because there happens to be a seventh!"

A new fire spun its lilac flames behind his back. The spicy breath of the wreaths of hemlock was deliciously sweet. Little by little the sun had made its eastern way and sparkled at the pane outside, and in the radiant clarity the terrace and its charming railing, the urns with the little cedars, stood out clearly; and more than all else, the truth cried itself to him, that whatever happened, she was still here, still in the house with him.

He had chosen a Christmas gift for her in London, and determined to send it up to her now with some roses, and in this way to announce the fact that he had come back from The Dials and was ready to use the day as she liked. He felt only how beautiful it would be to see her, that it did not for a second occur to him to wonder if she on her part would feel a certain embarrassment.

In answer to his ring, not a man servant, but the perfect housekeeper rustled in, her crisp silks, her cameos, and her "Christmas face," as one of the little Westboro' chaps had called her rosy countenance, on one of his few Christmas days.