The Cup of Fury.

by Rupert Hughes.

CHAPTER I

Then the big door swung back as if of itself. Marie Louise had felt that she would scream if she were kept a moment outside. The luxury of simply wishing the gate ajar gave her a fairy-book delight enhanced by the pleasant deference of the footman, whose face seemed to be hung on the door like a j.a.panese mask.

Marie Louise rejoiced in the dull splendor of the hall. The obsolete gorgeousness of the London home had never been in good taste, but had grown as lovable with years as do the gaudy frumperies of a rich old relative. All the good, comfortable shelter of wealth won her blessing now as never before. The stairway had something of the grand manner, too, but it condescended graciously to escort her up to her own room; and there, she knew, was a solitude where she could cry as hard as she wanted to, and therefore usually did not want to. Besides, her mood now was past crying for.

She was afraid of the world, afraid of the light. She felt the cave-impulse to steal into a deep nook and cower there till her heart should be replenished with courage automatically, as ponds are fed from above.

Marie Louise wanted walls about her, and stillness, and people shut out. She was in one of the moods when the soul longs to gather its faculties together in a family, making one self of all its selves.

Marie Louise had known privation and homelessness and the perils they bring a young woman, and now she had riches and a father and mother who were great people in a great land, and who had adopted her into their own hearts, their lives, their name. But to-day she asked nothing more than a deep cranny in a dark cave.

She would have said that no human voice or presence could be anything but a torture to her. And yet, when she hurried up the steps, she was suddenly miraculously restored to cheerfulness by the tiny explosion of a child's laughter instantly quenched. She knew that she was about to be ambushed as usual. She must pretend to be completely surprised once more, and altogether terrified with her perfect regularity.

Her soul had been so utterly surprised and terrified in the outer world that this infantile parody was curiously welcome, since nothing keeps the mind in balance on the tight-rope of sanity like the counterweight that comedy furnishes to tragedy, farce to frenzy, and puerility to solemnity.

The children called her "Auntie," but they were not hers except through the adoption of a love that had to claim some kinship. They looked like her children, though--so much so, indeed, that strangers thought that she was their young mother. But it was because she looked like their mother, who had died, that the American girl was a member of this British household, inheriting some of its wealth and much of its perilous destiny.

She had been ambuscaded in the street to-day by demons not of faery, but of fact, that had leaped out at her from nowhere. It solaced her somehow to burlesque the terror that had whelmed her, and, now that she was a.s.sailed by ruthless thugs of five and seven years, the shrieks she had not dared to release in the street she gave forth with vigor, as two nightgowned tots flung themselves at her with milk-curdling cries of:

"Boo-ooh!"

Holding up pink fat hands for pistols, they snapped their thumbs at her and said:

"Bang! Bang!"

And she emitted most amusing squeals of anguish and staggered back, stammering:

"Oh, p-p-please, Mr. Robbobber and Miss Burgurgular, take my l-l-life but spare my m-m-money."

She had been so genuinely scared before that she marred the sacred text now, and the First Murderer, who had all the conservative instincts of childhood, had to correct her misquotation of the sacred formula:

"No, no, Auntie. Say, 'Take my money but spare my life!' Now we dot to do it all over."

"I beg your pardon humbly," she said, and went back to be ambushed again. This time the boy had an inspiration. To murder and robbery he would add scalping.

But Marie Louise was tired. She had had enough of fright, real or feigned, and refused to be scalped. Besides, she had been to the hairdresser's, and she explained that she really could not afford to be scalped. The boy was bitterly disappointed, and he grew furious when the untimely maid came for him and for his ruthless sister and demanded that they come to bed at once or be reported.

As the warriors were dragged off to shameful captivity, Marie Louise, watching them, was suddenly shocked by the thought of how early in life humanity begins to revel in slaughter. The most innocent babes must be taught not to torture animals. Cruelty comes with them like a caul, or a habit brought in from a previous existence. They always almost murder their mothers and sometimes quite slay them when they are born. Their first pastimes are killing games, playing dead, stories of witches, cannibalistic ogres. The American Indian is the international nursery pet because of his traditional fiendishness.

It seemed inconsistent, but it was historically natural that the boy interrupted in his ma.s.sacre of his beloved aunt should hang back to squall that he would say his prayers only to her. Marie Louise glanced at her watch. She had barely time to dress for dinner, but the children had to be obeyed. She made one weak protest.

"Fraulein hears your prayers."

"But she's wented out."

"Well, I'll hear them, then."

"Dot to tell us fairy-'tory, too," said the girl.

"All right, one fairy-'tory--"

She went to the nursery, and the cherubs swarmed up to her lap demanding "somefin bluggy."

Invention failed her completely. She hunted through her memory among the Grimms' fairy-tales. She could recall nothing that seemed sweet and guileless enough for these two lambs.

All that she could think of seemed to be made up of ghoulish plots; of children being mistreated by harsh stepmothers; of their being turned over to peasants to slay; of their being changed into animals or birds; of their being seized by wolves, or by giants that drank blood and crunched children's bones as if they were reed birds; of hags that cut them up into bits or thrust them into ovens and cooked them for gingerbread. It occurred to her that all the German fairy-stories were murderously cruel. She felt a revulsion against each of the legends. But her mind could not find subst.i.tutes.

After a period of that fearful ordeal when children tyrannize for romances that will not come, her mind grew mutinous and balked. She confessed her poverty of ideas.

The girl, Bettina, sulked; the boy screamed:

"Aw, botheration! We might as well say our prayers and go to bed."

In the least pious of moods they dropped from her knees to their own and put their clasped hands across her lap. They became in a way hallowed by their att.i.tude, and the world seemed good to her again as she looked down at the two children, beautiful as only children can be, innocent of wile, of hardship and of crime, safe at home and praying to their heavenly Father from whose presence they had so recently come.

But as she brooded over them motherly and took strength from them as mothers do, she thought of other children in other countries orphaned in swarms, starving in mult.i.tudes, waiting for food like flocks of lambs in the blizzard of the war. She thought still more vividly of children flung into the ocean. She had seen these children at her knees fighting against bitter medicines, choking on them and blurting them out at mouth and nose and almost, it seemed, at eyes. So it was very vivid to her how children thrown into the sea must have gagged with terror at the bitter medicine of death, strangled and smothered as they drowned.

She heard the prayers mumbled through, but at the hasty "Amen" she protested.

"You didn't thank G.o.d for anything. Haven't you anything to thank G.o.d for?"

If they had expressed any doubt, she would have told them of dozens of special mercies, but almost instantly they answered, "Oh yes!" They looked at each other, understood, nodded, clapped their hands, and chuckled with pride. Then they bent their heads, gabled their finger-tips, and the boy said:

"We t'ank Dee, O Dod, for making sink dat old _Lusitania_." And the girl said, "A-men!"

Marie Louise gave a start as if she had been stabbed. It was the loss of the _Lusitania_ that had first terrified her. She had just seen it announced on the placards of newsboys in London streets, and had fled home to escape from the vision, only to hear the children thank Heaven for it! She rose so suddenly that she flung the children back from their knees to their haunches. They stared up at her in wondering fear. She stepped outside the baleful circle and went striding up and down the room, fighting herself back to self-control, telling herself that the children were not to blame, yet finding them the more repulsive for their very innocence. The purer the lips, the viler the blasphemy.

She was not able to restrain herself from denouncing them with all her ferocity. She towered over them and cried out upon them: "You wicked, wicked little beasts, how dare you put such loathsome words into a prayer! G.o.d must have gasped with horror in heaven at the shame of it.

Wherever did you get so hateful an idea?"

"Wicked your own self!" the boy snapped back. "Fraulein read it in the paper about the old boat, and she walked up and down the room like what you do, and she said, '_Ach, unser_ Dott--how dood you are to us, to make sink dat _Lusitania_!'"

He was going on to describe her ecstasy, but Marie Louise broke in: "It's Fraulein's work, is it? I might have known that! Oh, the fiend, the harpy!"

The boy did not know what a harpy was, but he knew that his beloved Fraulein was being called something, and he struck at Marie Louise fiercely, kicked at her shins and tried to bite her hands, screaming: "You shall not call our own precious Fraulein names. Harpy, your own self!"

And the little girl struck and scratched and made a curdled face and echoed, "Harpy, your own self!"

It hurt Marie Louise so extravagantly to be hated by these irascible cherubs that her anger vanished in regret. She pleaded: "But, my darlings, you don't know what you are saying. The _Lusitania_ was a beautiful ship--"

The boy, Victor, was loyal always to his own: "She wasn't as beautiful as my yacht what I sail in the Round Pond."

Marie Louise condescended to argue: "Oh yes, she was! She was a great ship, n.o.ble like Saint Paul's Cathedral, and she was loaded with pa.s.sengers, men and women and children: and then suddenly she was ripped open and sunk, and little children like you were thrown into the water, into the deep, deep, deep ocean. And the big waves tore them from their mothers' arms and ran off with them, choking and strangling them and dragging them down and down--forever down."