Book: The Fighting Chance

R >> Robert W. Chambers >> The Fighting Chance





“He kissed you!” repeated Grace Ferrall incredulously.

“Yes--a number of times. He was silly enough to do it, and I let him.”

“Did--did he say--”

“I don’t know what he said; I was all nerves--confused--scared--a perfect
stick in fact! … I don’t believe he’d care to try again.”

Then Mrs. Ferrall deliberately settled down in her furs to extract from
the girl beside her every essential detail; and the girl, frank at
first, grew shy and silent--reticent enough to worry her friend into a
silence which lasted a long while for a cheerful little matron of her
sort.

Presently they spoke of other matters--matters interesting to pretty
women with much to do in the coming winter between New York, Hot
Springs, and Florida; surmises as to dinners, dances, and the newcomers
in the younger sets, and the marriages to be arranged or disarranged,
and the scandals humanity is heir to, and the attitude of the bishop
toward divorce.

And the new pavillion to be built for Saint Berold’s Hospital, and the
various states of the various charities each was interested in, and the
chances of something new at the opera, and the impossibility of saving
Fifth Avenue from truck traffic, and the increasing importance of
Washington as a social centre, and the bad manners of a foreign
ambassador, and the better manners of another diplomat, and the lack of
discrimination betrayed by our ambassador to a certain great Power in
choosing people for presentation at court, and the latest unhappy
British-American marriage, and the hopelessness of the French as decent
husbands, and the recent accident to the Claymores’ big yacht, and the
tendency of well-born young men toward politics, and the anything but
distinguished person of Lord Alderdene, which was, however, vastly
superior to the demeanour and person of others of his rank recently
imported, and the beauty of Miss Caithness, and the chance that Captain
Voucher had if Leila Mortimer would let him alone, and the absurdity of
the Page twins, and the furtive coarseness of Leroy Mortimer and his
general badness, and the sadness of Leila Mortimer’s lot when she had
always been in love with other people,--and a little scandalous surmise
concerning Tom O’Hara, and the new house on Seventy-ninth Street
building for Mrs. Vendenning, and that charming widow’s success at last
year’s horse show--and whether the fashion of the function was reviving,
and whether Beverly Plank had completely broken into the social sets he
had besieged so long, or whether a few of the hunting and shooting
people merely permitted him to drive pheasants for them, and why
Katharyn Tassel made eyes at him, having sufficient money of her own to
die unwed, and--and--and then, at last, as the big motor car swung in a
circle at Wenniston Cross-Roads, and poked its brass and lacquer muzzle
toward Shotover, the talk swung back to Siward once more--having
travelled half the world over to find him.

“He is the sweetest fellow with his mother,” sighed Grace; “and that
counts heavily with me. But there’s trouble ahead for her--sorrow and
trouble enough for them both, if he is a true Siward.”

“Heredity again!” said Sylvia impatiently. “Isn’t he man enough to win
out? I’ll bet you he settles down, marries, and--”

“Marries? Not he! How many girls do you suppose have believed that--were
justified in believing he meant anything by his attractive manner and
nice ways of telling you how much he liked you? He had a desperate
affair with Mrs. Mortimer--innocent enough I fancy. He’s had a dozen
within three years; and in a week Rena Bonnesdel has come to making eyes
at him, and Eileen gives him no end of chances which he doesn’t see. As
for Marion Page, the girl had been on the edge of loving him for years!
You laugh? But you are wrong; she is in love with him now as much as she
ever can be with anybody.”

“You mean--”

“Yes I do. Hadn’t you suspected it?”

And as Sylvia had suspected it she remained silent.

“If any woman in this world could keep him to the mark, she could,”
continued Mrs. Ferrall. “He’s a perfect fool not to see how she cares
for him.”

Sylvia said: “He is indeed.”

“It would be a sensible match, if she cared to risk it, and if he would
only ask her. But he won’t.”

“Perhaps,” ventured Sylvia, “she’ll ask him. She strikes me as that
sort. I do not mean it unkindly--only Marion is so tailor-made and
cigaretteful--”

Mrs. Ferrall looked up at her.

“Did he propose to you?”

“Yes--I think so.”

“Then it’s the first time for him. He finds women only too willing to
play with him as a rule, and he doesn’t have to be definite. I wonder
what he meant by being so definite with you?”

“I suppose he meant marriage,” said Sylvia serenely; yet there was the
slightest ring in her voice; and it amused Mrs. Ferrall to try her a
little further.

“Oh, you think he really intended to commit himself?”

“Why not?” retorted Sylvia, turning red. “Do you think he found me over-
willing, as you say he finds others?”

“You were probably a new sensation for him,” inferred Mrs. Ferrall
musingly. “You mustn’t take him seriously, child--a man with his record.
Besides, he has the same facility with a girl that he has with
everything else he tries; his pen--you know how infernally clever he is;
and he can make good verse, and write witty jingles, and he can carry
home with him any opera and play it decently, too, with the proper
harmonies. Anything he finds amusing he is clever with--dogs, horses,
pen, brush, music, women”--that was too malicious, for Sylvia had flushed
up painfully, and Grace Ferrall dropped her gloved hand on the hand of
the girl beside her: “Child, child,” she said, “he is not that sort; no
decent man ever is unless the girl is too.”

Sylvia, sitting up very straight in her furs, said: “He found me
anything but difficult--if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t. Please don’t be vexed, dear. I plague everybody when I see an
opening. There’s really only one thing that worries me about it all.”

“What is that?” asked Sylvia without interest.

“It’s that you might be tempted to care a little for him, which, being
useless, might be unwise.”

“I am … tempted.”

“Not seriously!”

“I don’t know.” She turned in a sudden nervous impatience foreign to
her. “Howard Quarrier is too perfectly imperfect for me. I’m glad I’ve
said it. The things he knows about and doesn’t know have been a
revelation in this last week with him. There is too much surface, too
much exterior admirably fashioned. And inside is all clock-work. I’ve
said it; I’m glad I have. He seemed different at Newport; he seemed nice
at Lenox. The truth is, he’s a horrid disappointment--and I’m bored to
death at my brilliant prospects.”

The low whizzing hum of the motor filled a silence that produced
considerable effect upon Grace Ferrall. And, after mastering her wits,
she said in a subdued voice:

“Of course it’s my meddling.”

“Of course it isn’t. I asked your opinion, but I knew what I was going
to do. Only, I did think him personally possible--which made the
expediency, the mercenary view of it easier to contemplate.”

She was becoming as frankly brutal as she knew how to be, which made the
revolt the more ominous.

“You don’t think you could endure him for an hour or two a day, Sylvia?”

“It is not that,” said the girl almost sullenly.

“But--”

“I’m afraid of myself--call it inherited mischief if you like! If I let a
man do to me what Mr. Siward did when I was only engaged to Howard, what
might I do--”

“You are not that sort!” said Mrs. Ferrall bluntly. “Don’t be exotic,
Sylvia.”

“How do you know--if I don’t know? Most girls are kissed; I--well I didn’t
expect to be. But I was! I tell you, Grace, I don’t know what I am or
shall be. I’m unsafe; I know that much.”

“It’s moral and honest to realize it,” said Mrs. Ferrall suavely; “and
in doing so you insure your own safety. Sylvia dear, I wish I hadn’t
meddled; I’m meddling some more I suppose when I say to you, don’t give
Howard his congé for the present. It is a horridly common thing to dwell
upon, but Howard is too materially important to be cut adrift on the
impulse of the moment.”

“I know it.”

“You are too clever not to. Consider the matter wisely, dispassionately,
intelligently, dear; then if by April you simply can’t stand it--talk the
thing over with me again,” she ended rather vaguely and wistfully; for
it had been her heart’s desire to wed Sylvia’s beauty and Quarrier’s
fortune, and the suitability of the one for the other was apparent
enough to make even sterner moralists wobbly in their creed. Quarrier,
as a detail of modern human architecture, she supposed might fit in
somewhere, and took that for granted in laying the corner stone for her
fairy palace which Sylvia was to inhabit. And now!--oh, vexation!--the
neglected but essentially constructive detail of human architecture had
buckled, knocking the dream palace and its princess and its splendour
about her ears.

“Things never happen in real life,” she observed plaintively; “only
romances have plots where things work out. But we people in real life,
we just go on and on in a badly constructed, plotless sort of way with
no villains, no interesting situations, no climaxes, no ensemble. No, we
grow old and irritable and meaner and meaner; we lose our good looks and
digestions, and we die in hopeless discord with the unity required in a
dollar and a half novel by a master of modern fiction.”

“But some among us amass fortunes,” suggested Sylvia, laughing.

“But we don’t live happy ever after. Nobody ever had enough money in
real life.”

“Some fall in love,” observed Sylvia, musing.

“And they are not content, silly!”

“Why? Because nobody ever had enough love in real life,” mocked Sylvia.

“You have said it, child. That is the malady of the world, and nobody
knows it until some pretty ninny like you babbles the truth. And that is
why we care for those immortals in romance, those fortunate lovers who,
in fable, are given and give enough of love; those magic shapes in verse
and tale whose hearts are satisfied when the mad author of their being
inks his last period and goes to dinner.”

Sylvia laughed awhile, then, chin on wrist, sat musing there, muffled in
her furs.

“As for love, I think I should be moderate in the asking, in the giving.
A little--to flavour routine--would be sufficient for me I fancy.”

“You know so much about it,” observed Mrs. Ferrall ironically.

“I am permitted to speculate, am I not?”

“Certainly. Only speculate in sound investments, dear.”

“How can you make a sound investment in love? Isn’t it always sheerest
speculation?”

“Yes, that is why simple matrimony is usually a safer speculation than
love.”

“Yes, but--love isn’t matrimony.”

“Match that with its complementary platitude and you have the essence of
modern fiction,” observed Mrs. Ferrall. “Love is a subject talked to
death, which explains the present shortage in the market I suppose.
You’re not in love and you don’t miss it. Why cultivate an artificial
taste for it? If it ever comes naturally, you’ll be astonished at your
capacity for it, and the constant deterioration in quantity and quality
of the visible supply. Goodness! my epigrams make me yawn--or is it age
and the ill humour of the aged when the porridge spills over on the
family cat?”

“I am the cat, I suppose,” asked Sylvia, laughing.

“Yes you are--and you go tearing away, back up, fur on end, leaving me by
the fire with no porridge and only the aroma of the singeing fur to
comfort me. … Still there’s one thing to comfort me.”

“What?”

“Kitty-cats come back, dear.”

“Oh, I suppose so. … Do you believe I could induce him to wear his hair
any way except pompadour? … and, dear, his beard is so dreadfully silky.
Isn’t there anything he could take for it?”

“Only a razor I’m afraid. Those long, thick, soft, eyelashes of his are
ominous. Eyes of that sort ruin a man for my taste. He might just as
reasonably wear my hat.”

“But he can’t follow the fashions in eyes,” laughed Sylvia. “Oh, this is
atrocious of us--it is simply horrible to sit here and say such things. I
am cold-blooded enough as it is--material enough, mean, covetous,
contemptible--”

“Dear!” said Grace Ferrall mildly, “you are not choosing a husband; you
are choosing a career. To criticise his investments might be bad taste;
to be able to extract what amusement you can out of Howard is a direct
mercy from Heaven. Otherwise you’d go mad, you know.”

“Grace! Do you wish me to marry him?”

“What is the alternative, dear?”

“Why, nothing--self-respect, dowdiness, and peace.”

“Is that all?”

“All I can see.”

“Not Stephen Siward?”

“To marry? No. To enjoy, yes. … Grace, I have had such a good time with
him; you don’t know! He is such a boy--sometimes; and I--I believe that I
am rather good for him. … Not that I’d ever again let him do that sort
of thing. … Besides, his curiosity is quenched; I am the sort he
supposed. Now he’s found out he will be nice. … It’s been days since
I’ve had a talk with him. He tried to, but I wouldn’t. Besides, the
major has said nasty things about him when Howard was present; nothing
definite, only hints, smiling silences, innuendoes on the verge of
matters rather unfit; and I had nothing definite to refute. I could not
even appear to understand or notice--it was all done in such a horridly
vague way. But it only made me like him; and no doubt that actress he
took to the Patroons is better company than he finds in nine places out
of ten among his own sort.”

“Oh,” said Grace Ferrall slowly, “if that is the way you feel, I don’t
see why you shouldn’t play with Mr. Siward whenever you like.”

“Nor I. I’ve been a perfect fool not to. … Howard hates him.”

“How do you know?”

“What a question! A woman knows such things. Then, you remember that
caricature--so dreadfully like Howard? Howard has no sense of humour; he
detests such things. It was the most dreadful thing that Mr. Siward
could have done to him.”

“Meddled again!” groaned Grace. “Doesn’t Howard know that I did that?”

“Yes, but nothing I can say alters his conviction that the likeness was
intended. You know it was a likeness! And if Mr. Siward had not told me
that it was not intended, I should never have believed it to be an
accident.”

After a prolonged silence Sylvia said, overcarelessly: “I don’t quite
understand Howard. With me anger lasts but a moment, and then I’m open
to overtures for peace … I think Howard’s anger lasts.”

“It does,” said Grace. “He was a muff as a boy--a prig with a prig’s
memory under all his shallow, showy surface. I’m frank with you; I never
could take my cousin either respectfully or seriously, but I’ve known
him to take his own anger so seriously that years after he has visited
it upon those who had really wronged him. And he is equipped for
retaliation if he chooses. That fortune of his reaches far. … Not that I
think him capable of using such a power to satisfy a mere personal
dislike. Howard has principles, loads of them. But--the weapon is there.”

“Is it true that Mr. Siward is interested in building electric roads?”
asked Sylvia curiously.

“I don’t know, child. Why?”

“Nothing. I wondered.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Mortimer said so.”

“Then I suppose he is. I’ll ask Kemp if you like. Why? Isn’t it all
right to build them?”

“I suppose so. Howard is in it somehow. In fact Howard’s company is
behind Mr. Siward’s, I believe.”

Grace Ferrall turned and looked at the girl beside her, laughing
outright.

“Oh, Howard doesn’t do mysterious financial things to nice young men
because they draw impudent pictures of him running after his dog--or for
any other reason. That, dear, is one of those skilfully developed
portions of an artistic plot; and plots exist only in romance. So do
villains; and besides, my cousin isn’t one. Besides that, if Howard is
in that thing, no doubt Kemp and I are too. So your nice young man is in
very safe company.”

“You draw such silly inferences,” said Sylvia coolly; but there was a
good deal of colour in her cheeks; and she knew it and pulled her big
motor veil across her face, fastening it under her chin. All of which
amused Grace Ferrall infinitely until the subtler significance of the
girl’s mental processes struck her, sobering her own thoughts. Sylvia,
too, had grown serious in her preoccupation; and the partie-à-deux
terminated a few minutes later in a duet of silence over the tea-cups in
the gun-room.

The weather had turned warm and misty; one of those sudden sea-coast
changes had greyed the blue in the sky, spreading a fine haze over land
and water, effacing the crisp sparkle of the sea, dulling the westering
sun.

A few moments later Sylvia, glancing over her shoulder, noticed that a
fine misty drizzle had clouded the casements. That meant that her usual
evening stroll on the cliffs with Quarrier, before dressing for dinner,
was off. And she drew a little breath of unconscious relief as Marion
Page walked in, her light woollen shooting-jacket, her hat, shoes, and
the barrels of the fowling-piece tucked under her left arm-pit, all
glimmering frostily with powdered rain drops.

She said something to Grace Ferrall about the mist promising good point-
shooting in the morning, took the order book from a servant, jotted down
her request to be called an hour before sunrise, filled in the gun-room
records with her score--the species and number bagged, and the number of
shells used--and accepting the tea offered, drew out a tiny cigarette-
case of sweet-bay wood heavily crusted with rose-gold.

“With whom were you shooting?” asked Grace, as Marion dropped one well-
shaped leg over the other and wreathed her delicately tanned features in
smoke.

“Stephen Siward and Blinky. They’re at it yet, but I had some letters to
write.” She glanced leisurely at Sylvia and touched the ash-tray with
the whitening end of her cigarette. “That dog you let Mr. Siward have is
a good one. I’m taking him to Jersey next week for the cock-shooting.”

Sylvia returned her calm gaze blankly.

An unreasonable and disagreeable shock had passed through her.

“My North Carolina pointers are useless for close work,” observed Marion
indifferently; and she leaned back, watching the blue smoke curling
upward from her cigarette.

Sylvia, distrait, but with downcast eyes on fire under the fringed lids,
was thinking of the cheque Siward had given her for Sagamore. The
transaction, for her, had been a business one on the surface only. She
had never meant to use the cheque. She had laid it away among a few
letters, relics, pleasant souvenirs of the summer. To her the affair had
been softened by a delicate hint of intimacy,--the delight he was to take
in something that had once been hers had given her a faint taste of the
pleasure of according pleasure to a man. And this is what he had done!

The drizzle had turned to fog, through which rain was now pelting the
cliffs; people were returning from the open; a motor-car came whizzing
into the drive, and out of it tumbled Rena and Eileen and the faithful
Pages, the girls irritable and ready for tea, and the boys like a pair
of eager, wagging, setter puppies, pleased with everything and
everybody, utterly oblivious to the sombre repose brooding above the
tea-table.

Their sister calmly refused them the use of her cigarettes. Eileen
presented her pretty shoulder, Rena nearly yawned at them, but, nothing
dampened, they recounted a number of incidents with reciprocal
enthusiasm to Sylvia, who was too inattentive to smile, and to Grace
Ferrall, who smiled the more sweetly through sheer inattention.

Then Alderdene came in, blinking a greeting through his foggy goggles,
sloppy, baggy, heavy shoes wheezing, lingered in the vicinity long
enough to swallow his “peg” and acquire a disdainful opinion of his
shooting from Marion, and then took himself off, leaving the room noisy
with his laugh, which resembled the rattle of a startled kingfisher.

In ones and twos the guests reported as the dusk-curtained fog closed in
on Shotover. Quarrier came, dry as a chip under his rain-coat, but his
silky beard was wet with rain, and moisture powdered his long, soft
eyelashes and white skin; and his flexible, pointed fingers, as he drew
off his gloves, seemed startling in their whiteness through the
gathering gloom.

“I suppose our evening walk is out of the question,” he said, standing
by Sylvia, who had nodded a greeting and then turned her head rather
hastily to see who had entered the room. It was Siward, only a vague
shape in the gloom, but perfectly recognisable to her. At the same
moment Marion Page rose leisurely and strolled toward the billiard-room.

“Our walk?” repeated Sylvia absently--“it’s raining, you know.” Yet only
a day or two ago she had walked to church with Siward through the rain,
the irritated Major feeling obliged to go with them. Her eyes followed
Siward’s figure, suddenly dark against the door of the lighted billiard-
room, then brilliantly illuminated, as he entered, nodded acceptance to
Mortimer’s invitation, and picked up the cue just laid aside by Agatha
Caithness, who had turned to speak to Marion. Then Mortimer’s bulk
loomed nearer; voices became gay and animated in the billiard-room.
Siward’s handsome face was bent toward Agatha Caithness in gay
challenge; Mortimer’s heavy laugh broke out; there came the rattle of
pool-balls, and the dull sound of cue-butts striking the floor; then,
crack! and the game began, with Marion Page and Siward fighting Mortimer
and Miss Caithness for something or other.

Quarrier had been speaking for some time before Sylvia became aware of
it--something about a brisk walk in the morning somewhere; and she nodded
impatiently, watching Marion’s supple waist-line as she bent far over
the illuminated table for a complicated shot at the enemy.

His fiancée’s inattention was not agreeable to Quarrier. A dozen things
had happened since his arrival which had not been agreeable to him: her
failure to meet him at the Fells Crossing, and the reason for her
failure; and her informal acquaintance with Siward, whose presence at
Shotover he had not looked for, and her sudden intimacy with the man he
had never particularly liked, and whom within six months he had come to
detest and to avoid.

These things--the outrageous liberty Siward had permitted himself in
caricaturing him, the mortifying caprice of Sylvia for Siward on the day
of the Shotover cup-drive--had left indelible impressions in a cold and
rather heavy mind, slow to waste effort in the indulgence of any vital
emotion.

In a few years indifference to Siward had changed to passive
disapproval; that, again, to an emotionless dislike; and when the
scandal at the Patroons Club occurred, for the first time in his life he
understood what it was to fear the man he disliked. For if Siward had
committed the insane imprudence which had cost him his title to
membership, he had also done something, knowingly or otherwise, which
awoke in Quarrier a cold, slow fear; and that fear was dormant, but
present, now, and it, for the time being, dictated his attitude and
bearing toward the man who might or might not be capable of using
viciously a knowledge which Quarrier believed that he must possess.

For that reason, when it was not possible to avoid Siward, his bearing
toward him was carefully civil; for that reason he dampened Major
Belwether’s eagerness to tell everybody all he knew about the
shamelessly imprudent girl who had figured with Siward in the scandal,
but whose identity the press had not discovered.

Silence was always desirable to Quarrier; silence concerning all matters
was a trait inborn and congenially cultivated to a habit by him in every
affair of life--in business, in leisure, in the methodical pursuits of
such pleasures as a limited intellect permitted him, in personal and
family matters, in public questions and financial problems.

He listened always, but never invited confidences; he had no opinion to
express when invited. And he became very, very rich.

And over it all spread a thin membrane of vanity, nervous, not
intellectual, sensitiveness; for all sense of humour was absent in this
man, whose smile, when not a physical effort, was automatically and
methodically responsive to certain fixed cues. He smiled when he said
“Good morning,” when declining or accepting invitations, when taking his
leave, when meeting anybody of any financial importance, and when
everybody except himself had begun to laugh in a theatre or a drawing-
room. This limit to any personal manifestation he considered a generous
one. And perhaps it was.


A sudden rain-squall, noisy against the casements, had darkened the
room; then the electric lights broke out with a mild candle-like lustre,
and Quarrier, standing beside Sylvia’s chair, discovered it to be empty.

It was not until he had dressed for dinner that he saw her again, seated
on the stairs with Marion Page--a new appearance of intimacy for both
women, who heretofore had found nothing except a passing civility in
common.

Marion was discussing dog-breeding with that cool, crude, direct
insouciance so unpleasant to some men. Sylvia was attentive, curious,
and instinctively shrinking by turns, secretly dismayed at the
overplainness of terms employed in kennel lore by the girl at her side.

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