The Fighting Chance

“Quite flawless—perfect,” he said aloud to himself.

“Do you—read hands?”

“Vaguely.” He touched the smooth palm: “Long life, clear mind, and”—he laughed—“heart supreme over reason! There is written a white lie—but a pretty one.”

“It is no lie.”

He laughed again, unconvinced.

“It is the truth,” she said, seriously insisting and bending sideways above her own hand where it lay in his. “It is a miserable confession to admit it, but I’m afraid intelligence would fight a losing battle with heart if the conflict ever came. You see, I know, having nobody to study except myself all these years.... There is the proof of it—that selfish, smooth contour, where there should be generosity. Then, look at the tendency of imagination toward mischief!” She laid her right forefinger on the palm of the left hand which he held, and traced the developments arising in the Mount of Hermes. “Is it not a horrid hand, Mr. Siward? I don’t know how much you know about palms, but—” She suddenly flushed, and attempted to close her hand, doubling the thumb over. There was a little half-hearted struggle, freeing one of his arms, which fell, settling about her slender waist; a silence, a breathless moment, and he had kissed her. Her lips were warm, this time.

She recovered herself, avoiding his eyes, and moved backward, shielding her face with pretty upflung elbows out-turned. “I told you it was becoming a habit with you!” The loud beating of her pulses marred her voice. “Must I establish a dead-line every time I commit the folly of being alone with you?”

“I’ll draw that line,” he said, taking her in his arms.

“I—I beg you will draw it quickly, Mr. Siward.”

“I do; it passes through your heart and mine!”

“Is—do you mean a declaration—again? You are compromising yourself, you know. I warn you that you are committing yourself.”

“So are you. Look at me!”

In his arms, her own arms pressed against his breast, resisting, she raised her splendid youthful eyes; and through and through her shot pulse on pulse, until every nerve seemed aquiver.

“While I’m still sane,” he said with a dry catch in his throat, “before I tell you that I love you, look at me.”

“I will, if you wish,” she said with a trembling smile, “but it is useless—”

“That is what I shall find out in time.... You must meet my eyes. That is well; that is frank and sweet—”

“And useless—truly it is.... Please don’t tell me—anything.”

“You will not listen?”

“There is no chance for you—if you mean love. I—I tell you in time, you see.... I am utterly frivolous—quite selfish and mercenary.”

“I take my chance!”

“No, I give you none! Why do you interfere! A—a girl’s policy costs her something if it be worth anything; whatever it costs it is worth it to me.... And I do not love you. In so short a time how could I?”

Then in his arms she fell a-trembling. Something blinded her eyes, and she turned her head sharply, only to encounter his lips on hers in a deep, clinging embrace that left her dazed, still resisting with the fragments of breath and voice.

“Not again—I beg—you. Let me go now. It is not best. Oh! truly, truly it is all wrong with us now.” She bent her head, blinded with tears, swaying, stunned; then, with a breathless sound, turned in his arms to meet his lips, her hands contracting in his; and, confronting, they paused, suspending the crisis, young faces close, and hearts afire.

“Sylvia, I love you.”

For an instant their lips clung; she had rendered him his kiss. Then, tremblingly, “It is useless… even though I loved you.”

“Say it!”

“I do.”

“Say it!”

“I—I cannot!… And it is no use—no use! I do not know myself—this way. My eyes—are wet. It is not like me; there is nothing of me in this girl you hold so closely, so confidently.... I do care for you—how can I help it? How could any woman help it? Is not that enough?”

“Until you are a bride, yes.”

“A bride? Stephen!—I cannot—”

“You cannot help it, Sylvia.”

“I must! I have my way to go.”

“My way lies that way.”

“No! no! I cannot do it; it is not best for me—not best for you.... I do care for you; you have taught me how to say it. But—you know what I have done—and mean to do, and must carry through. Then, how can you love a girl like that?”

“Dear, I know the woman I love.”

“Silly, she is what her life has made her—material, passionately selfish, unable to renounce the root of all evil.... Even if this—this happiness were ours always—I mean, if this madness could last our wedded life—I am not good enough, not noble enough, to forget what I might have had, and put away.... Is it not dreadful to admit it? Do you not know that self-contempt is part of the price?… I have no money. I know what you have.... I asked. And it is enough for a man who remains unmarried.... For I cannot ‘make things do’; I cannot ‘contrive’; I will not cling to the fringe of things, or play that heartbreaking rôle of the shabby expatriated on the Continent.... No person in this world ever had enough. I tell you I could find use for every flake of metal ever mined!… You see you do not know me. From my pretty face and figure you misjudge me. I am intelligent—not intellectual, though I might have been, might even be yet. I am cultivated, not learned; though I care for learning—or might, if I had time.... My rôle in life is to mount to a security too high for any question as to my dominance.... Can you take me there?”

“There are other heights, Sylvia.”

“Higher?”

“Yes, dear.”

“The spiritual; I know. I could not breathe there, if I cared to climb. …And I have told you what I am—all silk and lace and smooth-skinned selfishness.” She looked at him wistfully. “If you can change me, take me.” And she rose, facing him.

“I do not give you up,” he said, with a savage note hardening his voice; and it thrilled her to hear it, and every drop of blood in her body leaped as she yielded to his arms again, heavy-lidded, trembling, confused, under the piercing sweetness of contact.

The perfume of her mouth, her hair, the consenting fingers locked in his, palm against palm, the lips, acquiescent, then afire at last, responsive to his own; and her eyes opening from the dream under the white lids—these were what he had of her till every vein in him pulsed flame. Then her voice, broken, breathless:

“Good night. Love me while you can—and forgive me!… Good night.... Where are we? All—all this must have stunned me, blinded me.... Is this my door, or yours? Hush! I am half dead with fear—to be here under the light again.... If you take me again, my knees will give way.... And I must find my door. Oh, the ghastly imprudence of it!… Good night… good night. I—I love you!”

CHAPTER VI MODUS VIVENDI

After the first few days of his arrival at Shotover time had threatened to hang heavily on Mortimer’s mottled hands. After the second day afield he recognised that his shooting career was practically over; he had become too bulky during the last year to endure the physical exertion; his habits, too, had at length made traitors of his eyes; a half hour’s snipe-shooting in the sun, and the veins in his neck swelled ominously. Panting, eyes inflamed, fat arms wobbly, he had scored miss after miss, and laboured onward, sullenly persistent to the end. But it was the end. That cup day finished him; he recognised that he was done for. And, following the Law of Pleasure, which finishes us before we are finished with it, he did not experience any particular sense of deprivation in the prospect. Only the wholesome dread caging. But Mortimer, not yet done with self-indulgence in more convenient forms, cast about him within his new limits for occupation between those hours consecrated to the rites of the table and the card-room.

He drove four, but found that it numbed his arms, and that the sea air made him sleepy. Motor-cars agreed with him only when driving with a pretty woman. Forced through ennui to fish off the rocks, he soon tired of the sea-perch and rock-cod and the malodours of periwinkle and clam.

Then he frankly took to Major Belwether’s sunny side of the gun-room, with illustrated papers and apples and decanter. But Major Belwether, always as careful of his digestion as of his financial secrets, blandly dodged the pressing invitations to rum and confidence, until Mortimer sulkily took up his headquarters in the reading-room, on the chance of his wife’s moving elsewhere. Which she did, unobtrusively carrying Captain Voucher with her in a sudden zeal for billiard practice on rainy mornings now too frequent along the coast.

Mortimer possessed that mysterious talent, so common among the financially insolvent, for living lavishly on an invisible income. But, plan as he would, he had never been able to increase that income through confidential gossip with men like Quarrier or Belwether, or even Ferrall. What information his pretty wife might have extracted he did not know; her income had never visibly increased above the vanishing point, although, like himself, she denied herself nothing. One short, lively interview with her had been enough to drive all partnership ideas out of his head. If he wanted to learn anything financially advantageous to himself he must do it without her aid; and as he was perpetually in hopes of the friendly hint that never came, he still moused about when opportunity offered; and this also helped to kill time.

Besides, he was always studying women. Years before, Grace Ferrall had snapped her slim fingers in his face; and here, at Shotover, the field was limited. Mrs. Vendenning had left; Agatha Caithness was still a pale and reticent puzzle; Rena, Katharyn, and Eileen tormented him; Marion Page, coolly au fait, yawned in his face. There remained Sylvia, who, knowing nothing about his species, met him half-way with the sweet and sensitive deference due a somewhat battered and infirm gentleman of forty-eight—until a sleek aside from Major Belwether spoiled everything, as usual, for her, leaving her painfully conscious and perplexed between doubt and disgust.