Diane of the Green Van | Page 8

through the Westfalls, nobody knows. I was a cheerful, happy person
until I knew the Westfalls. And your father was notional too. I was a
Gregg, Diane, until I married your uncle--he wasn't really your uncle,
but a sort of cousin--and the Greggs, thank heavens! are mild and quiet
and never wander about. Dear me, if a Gregg should take to sleeping by
a lake in spring-time under a planting moon, I would be surprised, I
would indeed! There was only one in our whole family who ever
galloped about to any extent--Uncle Peter Gregg--and you really
couldn't blame him. Bulls were perpetually running into him, and once
he fell overboard and a whale chased him to shore. Isn't it funny?
Strangest thing! But there, Diane, I wonder your poor dear grandfather
doesn't turn straight over in his grave--I do indeed. Many and many a
time your poor father tried him sorely--and Carl's mother too." Aunt
Agatha sniffed meekly.
"Will you go alone?" she ventured, wiping her eyes.
"Bless your heart, Aunt Agatha, no!" laughed Diane radiantly. "I'm
going to take old Johnny Jutes with me!"
Diane kissed her aunt lightly on the forehead.
"Well," said Aunt Agatha in melancholy resignation, "if you must turn
gypsy, my dear, and wander about the country, Johnny Jutes is the best
one to go along. He's old and faithful and used to your whims and
surely after thirty years of service, he won't break into tantrums."
Silver-sweet through the quiet house came the careless ripple of a flute,
showering light and sensuous music. There was a dare-devil lilt and
sway to the flippant strains and Aunt Agatha covered her face with her

hands.
"Oh, Diane," she whispered, shuddering, "when he plays like that he
drinks and drinks and drinks until morning."
"Poor Aunt Agatha!" said the girl pityingly. "What troublesome folk
we Westfalls are! And I no less than Carl."
"No, no, my dear!" murmured Aunt Agatha. "It's only when Carl plays
like that--that I grow afraid."
Aunt Agatha went to bed to listen tremblingly while the dare-devil
dance of the flute tripped ghostlike through the corridors. And falling
asleep with the laughing demon of wind and melody cascading wildly
through the mad scene from Lucia, she dreamt that Carl had captured
an Esquimau with his flute and weaving a suit of basket armor for him,
had dispatched him by aeroplane to lead Diane's gypsy cart into the
Everglades of Florida, the home-state of Norman Westfall until his
ill-fated marriage.

CHAPTER V
THE PHANTOM THAT ROSE FROM THE BOTTLE
The demon of the flute laughed and fell silent. The house grew very
quiet. A fresh log built its ragged shell of color within the library and
Carl drank again and again, watching the play of firelight upon the
amber liquor in his glass. It pleased him idly to build up a philosophy
of whiskey, an impudent, fearless reverie of fact and fancy.
"So," he finished carelessly, "every bottle is a crystal temple to the
great god Bacchus and who may know what phantom lurks within,
ready to rise and grow from the fumes of its fragrant incense into a
nebulous wraith of gigantic proportions. Many a bottle such as this has
made history and destroyed it. A sparkling essence of tears and jest, of
romance and passion and war and grotesquerie, of treachery and irony

and blood and death, whose temper no man may know until he tests it
through the alchemy of his brain and soul!"
To Starrett it gave a heavy courtesy; to Payson a mad buffoonery; to
Wherry pathos; to Carl himself--ah!--there was the rub! To Carl its
message was as capricious as the wind--a moon-mad chameleon
changing its color with the fickle light. And in the bottle to-night lay a
fierce, unreasoning resentment against Diane.
"Fool!" said Carl. "One mad, eloquent lie of love and she would have
softened. Women are all like that. Tell me," Carl stared whimsically
into his glass as if it were a magic crystal of revelation, "why is it that
when I am scrupulously honest no one understands? . . . Why that mad
stir of love-hunger to-night as Diane stood in the doorway? Why the
swift black flash of hatred now? Are love and hatred then akin?"
The clock struck three. Carl's brain, flaming, keen, master of the bottle
save for its subtle inspiration of wounded pride and resentment,
brooded morosely over Diane, over the defection of his parasitic
companions, over the final leap into the abyss of parsimony and Diane's
flash of contempt at the mention of his mother. Half of Diane's money
was rightly his--his mother's portion. And he could love vehemently,
cleanly, if he willed, with the delicate white fire which few men were
fine enough to know. . . .