When Agatha’s maid arrived, Quarrier also started to take his leave; but Sylvia, seated at a card-table, idly arranging the cards in geometrical designs and fanciful arabesques, looked up at him, saying:
“I wanted to say something to you, Howard.”
Agatha passed them, going into Sylvia’s room for her wraps; and Quarrier turned to Sylvia:
“Well?” he said, with the slightest hint of impatience.
“Can’t you stay a minute?” asked Sylvia, surprised.
“Agatha is going in the motor with me. Is it anything important?”
She considered him without replying. She had never before detected that manner, that hardness in a voice always so even in quality.
“What is it?” he repeated.
She thought a moment, putting aside for the time his manner, which she could not comprehend; then:
“I wanted to ask you a question — a rather ignorant one, perhaps. It’s about your Amalgamated Electric Company. May I ask it, Howard?”
After a second’s stare, “Certainly,” he said.
“It’s only this: If the other people — the Inter-County, I mean — are slowly ruining Amalgamated, why don’t you stop it?”
Quarrier’s eyes narrowed. “Oh! And who have you been discussing the matter with?”
“Mr. Plank,” she said simply. “I asked him. He shook his head, and said I’d better ask you. And I do ask you.”
For a moment he stood mute; then his lips began to shrink back over his beautiful teeth in one of his rare laughs.
“I’ll be very glad to explain it some day,” he said; but there was no mirth in his voice or eyes, only the snickering lip wrinkling the pallor.
“Will you not answer now?” she asked.
“No, not now. But I desire you to understand it some day — some day before November. And one or two other matters that it is necessary for you to understand. I want to explain them, Sylvia, in such a manner that you will never be likely to forget them. And I mean to; for they are never out of my mind, and I wish them to be as ineffaceably impressed on yours.... Good night.”
He took her limp hand almost briskly, released it, and stepped down the stairs as Agatha entered, cloaked, to say good night.
They kissed at parting— “life embracing death” — as Mortimer had sneered on a similar occasion; then Sylvia, alone, stood in her bedroom, hands linked behind her, her lovely head bent, groping with the very ghosts of thought which eluded her, fleeing, vanishing, reappearing, to peep out at her only to fade into nothing ere she could follow where they flitted through the dark labyrinths of memory.
The major, craning his neck in the bay-window, saw Agatha and Quarrier enter the big, yellow motor, and disappear behind the limousine. And it worried him horribly, because he knew perfectly well that Quarrier had lied to him about a jewelled collar precisely like the collar worn by Agatha Caithness; and what to do or what to say to anybody on the subject was, for the first time in his life, utterly beyond his garrulous ability. So, for the first time also in his chattering career, he held his tongue, reassured at moments, at other moments panic-stricken lest this marriage he had engineered should go amiss, and his ambitions be nipped at the very instant of triumphant maturity.
“This sort of thing — in your own caste — among your own kind,” his panicky thoughts ran on, “is b-bad form — rotten bad taste on both sides. If they were married — one of them, anyway! But this isn’t right; no, by gad! it’s bad taste, and no gentleman could countenance it!”
It was plain that he could, however, his only fear being that somebody might whisper something to turn Sylvia’s innocence into a terrible wisdom which would ruin everything, and knock the underpinning from the new tower which his inflated fancy beheld slowly growing heavenward, surmounting the house of Belwether.
Another matter: he had violated his word, and had been caught at it by his prospective nephew-in-law — broken his pledged word not to sell his Amalgamated Electric holdings, and had done it. Yet, how could Plank dominate, unless another also had done what he had done? And it made him a little more comfortable to know he was sharing the fault with somebody — probably with Siward, whom he now had the luxury of despising for the very thing he himself had done.
“Drunkard!” he muttered to himself; “he’s in the gutter at last!”
And he repeated it unctuously, almost reconciled to his own shortcoming, because it was the first time, as far as he knew, that a Belwether might legitimately enjoy the pleasures of holding the word of a Siward in contempt.
Sylvia had dismissed her maid, the old feeling of distaste for the touch of another had returned since the last mad, crushed embrace in Siward’s arms had become a memory. More and more she was returning to old instincts, old habits of thought, reverting to type once more, virgin of lip and thought and desire, save when the old memory stopped her heart suddenly, then sent it racing, touching her face with quick, crimson imprint.
Now, blue eyes dreaming under the bright masses of her loosened hair, she sat watching the last glimmer amid the ashes whitening on the hearth, thinking of Siward and of what had been between them, and of what could never be — never, never be.
One red spark among the ashes — her ambition, deathless amid the ashes of life! When that, too, went out, life must be extinct.
What he had roused in her had died when he went away. It could never awake again, unless he returned to awaken it. And he never would; he would never come again.
One brief interlude of love, of passion, in her life could neither tint nor taint the cool, normal sequence of her days. All that life held for a woman of her caste — all save that — was hers when she stretched out her hand for it — hers by right of succession, of descent; hers by warrant unquestioned, by the unuttered text of the ukase to be launched, if necessary, by that very, very old lady, drowsing, enthroned, as the endless pageant wound like a jewelled river at her feet.
So Siward could never come again, sauntering toward her through the sunlight, smiling his absent smile. She caught her breath painfully, straightening up; a single ash fell in the fire; the last spark went out.
CHAPTER XI THE CALL OF THE RAIN
The park was very misty and damp and still that morning.
There was a scent of sap and new buds in the February haze, a glimmer of green on southern slopes, a distant bird note, tentative, then confident, rippling from the gray tangle of naked thickets. Here and there in hollows the tips of amber-tinted shoots pricked the soil’s dark surface; here and there in the sparse woodlands a withered leaf still clinging to oak or beech was forced to let go by the swelling bud at its base and fell rustling stiffly in the silence.
Far away on the wooded bridle-path the dulled double gallop of horses sounded, now muffled in a hollow, now louder, jarring the rising ground, nearer, heavier, then suddenly checked to a trample, as Sylvia drew bridle by the reservoir, and, straightening in her saddle, raised her flushed face to the sky.
“Rain?” she asked, as Quarrier, controlling his beautiful, restive horse, ranged up beside her.
“Probably,” he said, scarcely glancing at the sky, where, above the great rectangular lagoons, hundreds of sea-gulls, high in the air, hung flapping, stemming some rushing upper gale unfelt below.
She walked her mount, head lifted, watching the gulls; he followed, uninterested, imperturbable in his finished horsemanship. With horses he always appeared to advantage, whether on the box of break or coach, or silently controlling a spike or tandem, or sitting his saddle in his long-limbed, faultless fashion, maintaining without effort the very essence of form. Here he was at his best, perfectly informal, informally perfect.
They had ridden every day since the weather permitted — even before it permitted — thrashing and slashing through the rotting ice and snow, galloping over the frozen, gravelly loam, amid leafless trees and a winter-smitten perspective — drearier for the distant, eastern glimpse of the avenue’s marble and limestone façades and the vast
cliffs of masonry and brick looming above the west and south.
On these daily rides together it was her custom to discuss practical matters concerning their future; and it was his custom to listen until pressed for a suggestion, an assent, or a reply.
Sparing words — cautious, chary of self-commitment, and seldom offering to assume the initiative — this was the surface character which she had come to recognise and acquiesce in; this was Quarrier as he had been developed from her hazy, preconceived ideas of the man before she had finally accepted him at Shotover the autumn before. She also knew him as a methodical man, exacting from others the orderly precision which characterised his own dealings; a man of education and little learning, of attainments and little cultivation, conversant with usages, formal, intensely sensitive to ridicule, incapable of humour.
This was Quarrier as she knew him or had known him. Recently she had, little by little, become aware of an indefinable change in the man. For one thing, he had grown more reticent. At times, too, his reserve seemed to have something almost surly about it; under his cold composure a hint of something concealed, watchful, and very quiet.
Confidences she had never looked for in him nor desired. It appalled her at moments to realise how little they had in common, and that only on the surface — a communion of superficial interest incident to the fulfilment of social duties and the pursuit of pleasure. Beyond that she knew nothing of him, required nothing of him. What was there to know? what to require?
Now that the main line of her route through life had been surveyed and carefully laid out, what was there more for her in life than to set out upon her progress? It was her own road. Presumptive leader already, logical leader from the day she married — leader, in fact, when the ukase, her future legacy, so decreed; it was a royal road laid out for her through the gardens and pleasant places; a road for her alone, and over it she had chosen to pass. What more was there to desire?
From the going of Siward, all that he had aroused in her of love, of intelligence, of wholesome desire and sane curiosity — the intellectual restlessness, the capacity for passion, the renaissance of the simpler innocence — had subsided into the laissez faire of dull quiescence. If in her he had sown, imprudently, subtle, impulsive, unworldly ideas, flowering into sudden brilliancy in the quick magic of his companionship, now those flowers were dead under the inexorable winter of her ambition, where all such things lay; her lonely childhood, with its dimmed visions of mother-love ineffable; the strange splendour of the dreams haunting her adolescence — pageants of bravery and the glitter of the cross, altars of self-denial and pure intent, service and sacrifice and the scorn of wrong; and sometimes, seen dimly with enraptured eyes through dissolving mists — the man! glimmering for an instant, then fading, resolved into the starry void which fashioned him.
Riding there, head bent, her pulses timing the slow pacing of her horse, she presently became aware, without looking up, that Quarrier was watching her. Dreams vanished. A perfectly unreasonable sense of being spied upon, of something stealthy about it all, flashed to her mind and was gone, leaving her grave and perplexed. What a strange suspicion! What an infernal inference! What grotesque train of thought could have culminated in such a sinister idea!
She moved slightly in her saddle to look at him, and for an instant fancied that there was something furtive in his eyes; only for an instant, for he quietly picked up the thread of conversation where she had dropped it, saying that it had been raining for the last ten minutes, and that they might as well turn their horses toward shelter.
“I don’t mind the rain,” she said; “there is a spring-like odour in it. Don’t you notice it?”
“Not particularly,” he replied.
“I was miles away a moment ago,” she said; “years away, I mean — a little girl again, with two stiff yellow braids, trying to pretend that a big arm-chair was my mother’s lap and that I could hear her whispering to me. And there I sat, on a day like this, listening, pretending, cuddled up tight, and looking out at the first rain of the year falling in the backyard. There was an odour like this about it all. Memory, they say, is largely a matter of nose!” She laughed, fearing that he might have thought her sentimental, already regretting the familiarity of thrusting such trivial and personal incidents upon his notice. He was probably too indifferent to comment on it, merely nodding as she ended.
Then, without reason, through and through her shot a shiver of loneliness — utter loneliness and isolation. Without reason, because from him she expected nothing, required nothing, except what he offered — the emotionless reticence of indifference, the composure of perfect formality. What did she want, then — companions? She had them. Friends? She could scarcely escape from them. Intimates? She had only to choose one or a hundred attuned responsive to her every mood, every caprice. Lonely? With the men of New York crowding, shouldering, crushing their way to her feet? Lonely? With the women of New York struggling already for precedence in her favour? — omen significant of the days to come, of those future years diamond-linked in one unbroken, triumphant glitter.
Lonely!
The rain was falling out of the hanging mist, something more than a drizzle now. Quarrier spoke of it again, but she shook her head, walking her horse slowly onward. The train of thought she followed was slower still, winding on and on, leading her into half light and shadow, and in and out through hidden trails she should have known by this time — always on, skirting the objective, circling it through sudden turns. And now she was becoming conscious of the familiar way; now she recognised the quiet, still by-ways of the maze she seemed doomed to wander in forever. But, for that matter, all paths of thought were alike to her, for, sooner or later, all ultimately led to him; and this she was already aware of as a disturbing phenomenon to consider and account for and to provide against — when she had leisure.
“About that Amalgamated Electric Company,” she began without prelude; “would you mind answering a question or two, Howard?”
“You could not understand it,” he said, unpleasantly disturbed by her abruptness.
“As you please. It is quite true I can make nothing of what the newspapers are saying about it, except that Mr. Plank seems to be doing a number of things.”
“Injunctions, and other matters,” observed Quarrier.
“Is anybody going to lose any money in it?”
“Who, for example?”
“Why — you, for example,” she said, laughing.
“I don’t expect to.”
“Then it is going to turn out all right? And Mr. Plank and Kemp Ferrall and the major and — the other people interested, are not going to be almost ruined by the Inter-County people?”
“Do you think a man like Plank is likely to be ruined, as you say, by Amalgamated Electric?”
“No. But Kemp and the major—”
“I think the major is out of danger,” replied Quarrier, looking at her with the new, sullen narrowing of his eyes.
“I am glad of that. Is Kemp — and the others?”
“Ferrall could stand it if matters go wrong. What others?”
“Why — the other owners and stockholders—”
“What others? Who do you mean?”
“Mr. Siward, for example,” she said in an even voice, leaning over to pat her horse’s neck with her gloved hand.
“Mr. Siward must take the chances we all take,” observed Quarrier.
“But, Howard, it would really mean ruin for him if matters went badly. Wouldn’t it?”
“I am not familiar with the details of Mr. Siward’s investments.”
“Nor am I,” she said slowly.
He made no reply.
Lack of emotion in the man beside her she always expected, and therefore this new, sullen note in his voice perplexed her. Too, at times, in his increasing reticence there seemed to be almost a hint of cold effrontery. She felt it now — an indefinite suggestion of displeasure and the power to retaliate; something evasive, watchful, patient
ly hostile; and, try as she might, she could not rid herself of the discomfort of it, and the perplexity.
She spoke about other things; he responded in his impassive manner. Presently she turned her horse and Quarrier wheeled his, facing a warm, fine rain, slanting thickly from the south.
His silky, Vandyke beard was all wet with the moisture. She noticed it, and unbidden arose the vision of the gun-room at Shotover: Quarrier’s soft beard wet with rain; the phantoms of people passing and repassing; Siward’s straight figure swinging past, silhouetted against the glare of light from the billiard-room. And here she made an effort to efface the vision, shutting her eyes as she rode there in the rain. But clearly against the closed lids she saw the phantoms passing — spectres of dead hours, the wraith of an old happiness masked with youth and wearing Siward’s features!
She must stop it! What was all this crowding in upon her as she rode forward through the driving rain — all this resurgence of ghosts long laid, long exorcised? Had the odour of the rain stolen her senses, awakening memory of childish solitude? Was it that which was drugging her with remembrance of Siward and the rattle of rain in the bay-window above the glass-roofed swimming-pool?
She opened her eyes wide, staring straight ahead into the thickening rain; but her thoughts were loosened now, tuned to the increasing rhythm of her heart: and she saw him seated there, his head buried in his hands as she stole through the dim corridors to her first tryst; saw him look up; saw herself beside him among the cushions; tasted again the rose-petals that her lips had stripped from the blossoms; saw once more the dawn of something in his steady eyes; felt his arm about her, his breath —
Her horse, suddenly spurred, bounded forward through the rain, and she rode breathless, with lips half parted, as if afraid, turning her head to look behind — as though she could outride the phantom clinging to her stirrup, masked like youth, wearing the shadowy eyes of Love!
In her drenched habit, standing before her dressing-room fire, she heard her maid soliciting entrance, and paid no heed, the door being locked — as though a spectre could be bolted out of rooms and houses! Pacing the floor, restless, annoyed, and dismayed by turns, she flung her wet skirt and coat from her, piece by piece, and stood for awhile, like some slender youth in riding breeches and shirt, facing the fire, her fingers resting on her hips.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 308
