“Good night,” she managed to say, her disgust almost strangling her.
And he went, furtively, heavy-footed, perplexed, inwardly cursing his blunder in stirring up a sleeping lioness whom he had so long mistaken for a dozing cat.
For hours he sat in his room, or paced the four walls, doubtful, chagrined, furious by turns. Once he drew out a memorandum-book and stood under a lighted sconce, studying the figures. His losses at Shotover staggered him, but he had looked to his wife heretofore in such emergencies.
Certainly the time had come for him to do something. But what? — if his wife was going to strike such attitudes in the very face of decency? Certainly a husband in these days was without honour in his own household.
His uneasiness had produced a raging thirst. He punched an electric button with his fleshy thumb, and prowled around, waiting. Nobody came; he punched again, and looked at his watch. It astonished him to find the hour was three o’clock in the morning. That discovery, however, only appeared to increase his thirst. He opened the hall door, prepared to descend into the depths of the house and raid a sideboard; and as he thrust his heavy head out into the lighted corridor his eyes fell upon two figures standing at the open door of a bedroom. One was Siward; that was plain. Who was the girl he had kissed? One of the maids? Somebody’s wife? Who?
Every dull pulse began to hammer in Mortimer’s head. In his excitement he stepped half-way into the corridor, then skipped nimbly back, closing his door without a sound.
“Sylvia Landis, by all that’s holy!” he breathed to himself, and sat down rather suddenly on the edge of the bed.
After a while he rose and crept to the door, opened it, glued his eyes to the crack, in time to catch a glimpse of Siward entering his own corridor alone.
And that night, Mortimer, lying awake in bed, busy with schemes, became conscious of a definite idea. It took shape and matured so suddenly that it actually shocked his moral sense. Then it scared him.
“But — but that is blackmail!” he whispered aloud. “A man can’t do that sort of thing. What the devil ever put it into my head?... And there are men I know — women, too — scoundrelly blackguards, who’d use that information somehow; and make it pay, too. The scoundrels!”
He squirmed down among the bedclothes with a sudden shiver; but the night had turned warm.
“Scoundrels!” he said, with milder emphasis. “Blackmailers! Contemptible pups!”
He fell asleep an hour later, muttering something incoherent about scoundrels and blackmail.
And meanwhile, in the darkened house, from all round came the noise of knocking on doors, sounds of people stirring — a low voice here and there, lights breaking out from transoms, the thud of rubber-shod heels, the rattle of cartridges from the echoing gun-room. For the guests at Shotover were awaking, lest the wet sky, whitening behind the east, ring with the whimpering wedges of wild-fowl rushing seaward over empty blinds.
The unusual stillness of the house in the late morning sunshine was pleasant to Miss Landis. She had risen very late, unconscious of the stir and movement before dawn; and it was only when a maid told her, as she came from her bath, that she remembered the projected point-shooting, and concluded, with an odd, happy sense of relief, that she was almost alone in the house.
A little later, glancing from her bedroom window for a fulfilment of the promise of the sun which a glimpse of blue sky heralded, she saw Leila Mortimer settling herself in the forward seat of a Mercedes, and Beverly Plank climbing in beside her; and she watched Plank steer the big machine across the wet lawn, while the machinist swung himself into the tonneau; and away they rolled, faster, faster, rushing out into the misty hinterland, where the long streak of distant forest already began to brighten, edged with the first rays of watery sunshine.
So she had the big house to herself — every bit of it and with it freedom from obligation, from comment, from demand or exaction; freedom from restraint; liberty to roam about, to read, to dream, to idle, to remember! Ah, that was what she needed — a quiet interval in this hurrying youth of hers to catch her breath once more, and stand still, and look back a day or two and remember.
So, to breakfast all alone was delicious; to stroll, unhurried, to the sideboard and leisurely choose among the fresh cool fruits; to loiter over cream-jug and cereal; to saunter out into the freshness of the world and breathe it, and feel the sun warming cheek and throat, and the little breezes from a sunlit sea stirring the bright strands of her hair.
In the increasing brilliancy of the sunshine she stretched out her hands, warming them daintily as she might twist them before the fire on the hearth. And here, at the fragrant hearth of the world, she stood, sweet and fresh as the morning itself, untroubled gaze intensely blue with the tint of the purple sea, sensitive lips scarcely parting in the dreaming smile that made her eyes more wonderful.
As the warmth grew on land and water, penetrating her body, a faintly delicious glow responded in her heart, — nothing at first wistful in the serene sense of well-being, stretching her rounded arms skyward in the unaccustomed luxury of a liberty which had become the naively unconscious licence of a child. The poise of sheer health stretched her to tiptoe; then the graceful tension relaxed, and her smooth fingers uncurled, tightened, and fell limp as her arms fell and her superb young figure straightened, confronting the sea.
Out over the rain-wet, odorous grass she picked her way, skirts swung high above the delicate contour of ankle and limb, following a little descending path she knew full of rocky angles, swept by pendant sprays of blackberry, and then down under the jutting rock, south through thickets of wild cherry along the crags, until, before her the way opened downward again where a tiny crescent beach glimmered white hot in the sun.
From his bedroom window Mortimer peeped forth, following her progress with a leer.
As she descended, noticing the rifts of bronzing seaweed piled along the tide mark, her foot dislodged a tiny triangle of rock, which rolled clattering and ringing below; and as she sprang lightly to the sand, a man, lying full length and motionless as the heaped seaweed, raised himself on one arm, turning his sun-dazzled eyes on her.
The dull shock of surprise halted her as Siward rose to his feet, still dazed, the sand running from his brown shooting-clothes over his tightly strapped puttees.
“Have you the faintest idea that I supposed you were here?” she asked briefly. Then, frank in her disappointment, she looked up at the cliffs overhead, where her line of retreat lay.
“Why did you not go with the others?” she added, unsmiling.
“I — don’t know. I will, if you wish.” He had coloured slowly, the frank disappointment in her face penetrating his surprise; and now he turned around, instinctively, also looking for the path of retreat.
“Wait,” she said, aware of her own crude attitude and confused by it; “wait a moment, Mr. Siward. I don’t mean to drive you away.”
“It’s self-exile,” he said quietly; “quite voluntary, I assure you.”
“Mr. Siward!”
And, as he looked up coolly, “Have you nothing more friendly to say to me? Is your friendship for me so limited that my first caprice oversteps the bounds? Must I always be in dread of wounding you when I give you the privilege of knowing me better than anybody ever knew me — of seeing me as I am, with all my faults, my failings, my impulses, my real self? ...I don’t know why the pleasure of being alone to-day should have meant exclusion for you, too. It was the unwelcome shock of seeing anybody — a selfish enjoyment of myself — that surprised me into rudeness. That is all.... Can you not understand?”
“I think so. I meant no criticism—”
“Wait, Mr. Siward!” as he moved slowly toward the path. “You force me to say other things, which you have no right to hear.... After last night” — the vivid tint grew in her face— “after such a night, is it not — natural — for a girl to creep off somewhere by herself and try to think a little?”
He had turned full on he
r; the answering colour crept to his forehead.
“Is that why?” he asked slowly.
“Is it not a reason?”
“It was my reason — for being here.”
She bit her bright lip. This trend to the conversation was ominous, and she had meant to do her drifting alone in still sun-dreams, fearing no witness, no testimony, no judgment save her own self in court with herself.
“I — I suppose you cannot go — now,” she reflected innocently.
“Indeed I can, and must.”
“And leave me here to dig in the sand with my heels? Merci!”
“Do you mean—”
“I certainly do, Mr. Siward. I don’t want to dream, now; I don’t care to reflect. I did, but here you come blundering into my private world and upset my calculations and change my intentions! It’s a shame, especially as you’ve been lying here doing what I wished to do for goodness knows how long!”
“I’m going,” he said, looking at her curiously.
“Then you are very selfish, Mr. Siward.”
“We will call it that,” he said with an odd laugh.
“Very well.” She seated herself on the sand and calmly shook out her skirts.
“About what time would you like to be called?” he asked smilingly.
“Thank you, I shall do no sun-dreaming.”
“Please. It is good for you.”
“No, it isn’t good at all. And I am grateful to you for waking me,” she retorted with a sudden gay malice that subdued him. And she, delicate nose in the air, laughingly watching him, went on with her punishment: “You see what you’ve done, don’t you? — saved me from an entire morning wasted in sentimental reverie over what might have been. Now you can appreciate it, can’t you? — your wisdom in appearing in the flesh to save a silly girl the effort of evoking you in the spirit! Ah, Mr. Siward, I am vastly obliged to you! Pray sit here beside me in the flesh, for fear that in your absence I might commit the folly that tempted me here.”
His low running laughter accompanying her voice had stimulated her to a gay audacity, which for the instant extinguished in her the little fear of him she had been barely conscious of.
“Do you know,” he said, “that you also aroused me from my sun-dreams?”
“Did I? And can’t you resume them?”
“You save me the necessity.”
“Oh, that is a second-hand compliment,” she said disdainfully— “a weak plagiarism on what I conveyed very wittily. You were probably really asleep, and dreaming of bird-murder.”
He waited for her to finish, then, amused eyes searching, he roamed about until high on a little drifted sand dune he found a place for himself; and while she watched him indignantly, he curled up in the sunshine, and, dropping his head on the hot sand, calmly closed his eyes.
“Upon — my word!” she breathed aloud.
He unclosed his eyes. “Now you may dream; you can’t avoid it,” he observed lazily, and closed his eyes; and neither taunts nor jeers nor questions, nor fragments of shells flung with intent to hit, stirred him from his immobility.
She tired of the attempt presently, and sat silent, elbows on her thighs, hands propping her chin. Thoughts, vague as the fitful breeze, arose, lingered, and, like the breeze, faded, dissolved into calm, through which, cadenced by the far beat of the ebb tide, her heart echoed, beating the steady intervals of time.
She had not meant to dream, but as she sat there, the fine-spun golden threads flying from the whirling loom of dreams floated about her, settling over her, entangling her in unseen meshes, so that she stirred, groping amid the netted brightness, drawn onward along dim paths and through corridors of thought where, always beyond, vague splendours seemed to beckon.
Now lost, now restless, conscious of the perils of the shining path she followed, the rhythm of an ocean soothing her to false security, she dreamed on awake, unconscious of the tinted sea and sky which stained her eyes to hues ineffable. A long while afterward a small cloud floated across the sun; and, in the sudden shadow on the world, doubt sounded its tiny voice, and her ears listened, and the enchantment faded and died away.
Turning, she looked across the sand at the man lying there; her eyes considered him — how long she did not know, she did not heed — until, stirring, he looked up; and she paled a trifle and closed her eyes, stunned by the sudden clamour of pulse and heart.
When he rose and walked over, she looked up gravely, pouring the last handful of white sand through her stretched fingers.
“Did you dream?” he asked lightly.
“Yes.”
“Did you dream true?”
“Nothing of my dream can happen,” she said. “You know that,... don’t you?”
“I know that we love... and that we dare not ignore it.”
She suffered his arm about her, his eyes looking deeply into hers — a close, sweet caress, a union of lips, and her dimmed eyes’ response.
“Stephen,” she faltered, “how can you make it so hard for me? How can you force me to this shame!”
“Shame?” he repeated vaguely.
“Yes — this treachery to myself — when I cannot hope to be more to you — when I dare not love you too much!”
“You must dare, Sylvia!”
“No, no, no! I know myself, I tell you. I cannot give up what is offered — for you! — dearly, dearly as I do love you!” She turned and caught his hands in hers, flushed, trembling, unstrung. “I cannot — I simply cannot! How can you love me and listen to such wickedness? How can you still care for such a girl as I am — worse than mercenary, because I have a heart — or had, until you took it! Keep it; it is the only part of me not all ignoble.”
“I will keep it — in trust,” he said, “until you give yourself with it.”
But she only shook her head wearily, withdrawing her hands from his, and for a time they sat silent, eyes apart.
Then— “There is another reason,” she said wistfully.
He looked up at her, hesitated, and— “My habits?” he asked simply.
“Yes.”
“I have them in check.”
“Are you — certain?”
“I think I may be — now.”
“Yet,” she said timidly, “you lost one fight — since you knew me.”
The dull red mantling his face wrung her heart. She turned impulsively and laid both hands on his shoulders. “That chance I would take, with all its uncertainty, all the dread inheritance you have come into. I love you enough for that; and if it turned out that — that you could not stem the tide, even with me to face it with you; and if the pity of it, the grief of it, killed me, I would take that chance — if you loved me through it all.... But there is something else. Hush; let me have my say while I find the words — something else you do not understand.... Turn your face a little; please don’t look at me. This is what you do not know — that, in three generations, every woman of my race has — gone wrong.... Every one! and I am beginning — with such a marriage!... deliberately, selfishly, shamelessly, perfectly conscious of the frivolous, erratic blood in me, aware of the race record behind me.
“Once, when I knew nothing — before I — I met you — I believed such a marriage would not only permit me mental tranquillity, but safely anchor me in the harbour of convention, leaving me free to become what I am fashioned to become — autocrat and arbiter in my own world. And now! and now! I don’t know — truly I don’t know what I may become. Your love forces my hand. I am displaying all the shallowness, falseness, pettiness, all the mean, and cruel and callous character which must be truly my real self.... Only I shall not marry you! You are not to run the risk of what I might prove to be when I remember in bitterness all I have renounced. If I married you I should remember, unreconciled, what you cost me. Better for you and for me that I marry him, and let him bear with me when I remember that he cost me you!”
She bent over, almost double, closing her eyes with small clenched hands; and he saw the ring shimmering
in the sunshine, and her hair, heavily, densely gold, and the white nape of her neck, and the tiny close-set ears, and the curved softness of cheek and chin; every smooth, childlike contour and mould — rounded arms, slim, flowing lines of body and limb — all valued at many millions by her as her own appraiser.
Suddenly, deep within him, something seemed to fail, die out — perhaps a tiny newly lighted flame of unaccustomed purity, the dawning flicker of aspiration to better things. Whatever it was, material, spiritual, was gone now, and where it had glimmered for a night, the old accustomed twilit doubt crept in — the same dull acquiescence — the same uncertainty of self, the familiar lack of will, of incentive, the congenial tendency to drift; and with it came weariness — perhaps reaction from the recent skirmishes with that master-vice.
“I suppose,” he said in a dull voice, “you are right.”
“No, I am wrong — wrong!” she said, lifting her lovely face and heavy eyes. “But I have chosen my path.... And you will forget.”
“I hope so,” he said simply.
“If you hope so, you will.”
He nodded, unconvinced, watching a flock of sand-pipers whirling into the cove like a gray snow-squall and fearlessly settling on the beach.
After a while, with a long breath: “Then it is settled,” she concluded.
If she expected corroboration from him she received none; and perhaps she was not awaiting it. She sat very still, her eyes lost in thought.
And Mortimer, peeping down at them over the thicket above, yawned impatiently and glanced about him for the most convenient avenue of self-effacement when the time arrived.
CHAPTER VII PERSUASION
The days of the house-party at Shotover were numbered. A fresh relay of guests was to replace them on Monday, and so they were making the most of the waning week on lawn and marsh, in covert and blind, or motoring madly over the State, or riding in parties to Vermillion Light. Tennis and lawn bowls came into fashion; even water polo and squash alternated on days too raw for more rugged sport.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 293
