Motion Picture Classic (Jan-Dec 1916)

MOTION PICTURE manner among the “Gaiety Girls” and others up in London. Madge kept her magnet eyes upon him. Her lips spoke what her eyes denied. “His — release,” she said at last. Harold nodded curtly, and spoke an order to the keepers. Then he turned again to the gypsy girl. "We must meet again,” he said. She nodded. Her throat felt thick and choked. Her temples beat with an influx of blood. She quivered, and her nostrils distended. Harold watched her, and he leaned nearer. “You ” he broke off and tried to smile. “Come back again — tomorrow ” he begged. She smiled slowly, then turned to John, who was awaiting her with the smile of servility on his lips and an evil passion in his eyes. Harold watched them as they left. “She is the kind of a woman men dream about,” he thought, “and read about, and crave while they take what's served up to them. She’s the meaning of sex — the answer to the needs of the heart and flesh. God ! how that woman could love — to what frenzied depths she could go!” She came back the next day, and the next and the next. Wonderful, illicit, maddening days they were — days when the heart of the gypsy woke to vivid life, like the heavy, odorous, cloying leaves of the scarlet passionflower ; days when they clung together, lip to lip and breast to bTeast — when heaven seemed to reach down its ineffable lips and kiss the earth to a riotous exuberance of verve and glamour. “There is no love like ours,” she sighed. “World without end — amen !” added he. And neither dreamed that they were plagiarizing from the Eden romance. John ceased to obsess her with the old fear. She felt as tho the love of this man wrapt her about in a garment of soft flame — as tho nothing but his voice could penetrate — nothing but his touch reach. Then, one day, John found them. The look in his eyes stirred the gypsy’s heart to a poignant fear. She jumped to her feet and faced the enraged man, arms akimbo. “Well,” she mocked into his face, “are you ready to take me home — husband ?” She drew near to him, and her nearness promised him her lips, her caresses. He swayed a bit, and his savage eyes softened imperceptibly. “By Gar! I’ll knife ye if I find ye this way again,” he hissed, and he grabbed her rudely by the arm. Harold watched her swaggering exit, and waited. An instant later she was flying back thru the trees, but her daring face was white. “I have knifed liim !" she cried ; “he will be after me ! Cant you find me work in your home ? Cant you take me?” Harold noducd eagerly. “I will,” he assented. They were young, and their passion flamed in the gray life of the baronial hall like some incongruous exotic. The startling beauty of the girl, the rapt eyes of the younger son, the alltoo-frequent meetings penetrated the dullest consciousness at last. When it came to Lionel, the elder son and direct heir to the title, he was enraged. In his aristocratic veins ran the undiluted blue blood of his forebears. The family name, the family tree, the family seat — these were the things that mattered to brother Lionel. If he had ever stooped from his correct deportment to the crude sowing of wild oats, he had stooped in guarded privacy, atoned, and gone his untroubled way. An English gentleman was Lionel — one who would marry the pale, proud daughter of an adjoining lineal estate and breed a race of pale, proud children. The clarion-calls of the flesh were for beefy-faced housemaids and obnoxious “fellers” who walked out Chelsea way of a Sunday afternoon, or for variety actresses and cheap, stage-door habitues with a horrid ambiguity as to their immediate parentage. The idea caused Lionel a shudder down his unbending spine. His brother’s taste was reprehensible. Breach of good taste was the unpardonable. And to bring the wench to Maldon Towers! To defile the peopled corridors where had paced their lady-mother and stately duchesses before ! As for her beauty — one could go to the zoo, if one cared for the purely feline, and watch the great cats swing gracilely, evilly by, with fitful, savage lights in their yellow eyes and impossible contortions of their lithe bodies. When the gossip reached the tenantry, Lionel took it upon himself to speak. Harold took the rebuke vehemently. “I wont be dictated to,” he bawled forth ; “you can have the d — d name, Lionel, dontcher know, and the estate and all. I want the girl, and I mean to have her.” “You admit ” gasped Lionel, his delicate ears affronted by the boy’s brutality. “I admit nothing but what your near-sighted eyes have probably already seen,” protested Harold. “I love her, if you ask me, yes — yes — such a love as a Maldon has never had the red blood to feel. I love her, and I always shall.” Lionel spoke despairingly to the aged Duke. "He is disgracing us,” he lamented. “Young blood,” countered the father, harking back to certain halcyon days before his spirit and his flesh became over-oppressed with titular glories. “Bad blood!” grunted the heir, and the matter dropped. Two weeks later the Duke of Maldon stumbled across the dead body of his son and heir in the great livinghall of the castle. Harold was sent for, and when he saw his lifeless body he collapsed. “We quarreled,” he admitted to his accusative, implacable father, “over — the girl. I struck him ; but it seems impossible that it could have killed him. Still it must have. God above me ! I have murdered my brother ; I Call the police, father — I'll give myself up. The old man raised his sunken eyes and looked at his youngest born. All irrelevantly, he recalled him as a sunny-headed baby rollicking on the spacious nursery floor and a nurse predicting .a famous future for the lusty youngster.. A murderer ! The slayer of his own blood ! The father shuddered, and his gaze burned from the dead son to the living. “Go forth and wander as did Cain when he killed Abel,” he pronounced, “and may the brand of Cain be upon you. Go !” Harold bent his head. The spilt blood of his brother must wash away the craving of his heart and wipe out the lusts of his flesh. Seven years later a lone horseman rode down the dusty road in the heart of Never-Never land. His wearied eyes gazed straight ahead of him as tho he saw a duty to be fulfilled in which was only the dry comfort of the duty done. Abnegation was written on his face, and the starved heart of the much-denied pleaded in his eyes. A cabin showed in the distance with spirals of smoke curling from its chimney. “I'll stop here,” the horseman said, “and put up for the night, if they’ll have me.” A woman stood facing the cabin as the man rode quietly into the clearing, and as he looked at her an appreciative light fired his dulled eye. “What lines !” he thought — '“what an easy — yet what a weary grace !” “I beg pardon,” he spoke aloud ; “I „ The woman turned, with a springing, startled movement of her body. Her yellow, cat’s eyes widened, then narrowed ; her vivid, tired mouth opened. “Harold !” she cried ; then, sibilantly, yearningly, like a woman (Thirty-six)