The Fighting Chance. Chambers Robert William
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on terms of gayest understanding presently, she gossiping about the guests at Shotover House, outlining the diversions planned for the two weeks before them.
“But we shall see little of one another; you will be shooting most of the time,” she said—with the very faintest hint of challenge—too delicate, too impersonal to savour of coquetry. But the germ of it was there.
“Do you shoot?”
“Yes; why?”
“I am reconciled to the shooting, then.”
“Oh, that is awfully civil of you. Sometimes I’d rather play Bridge.”
“So should I—sometimes.”
“I’ll remember that, Mr. Siward; and when all the men are waiting for you to start out after grouse perhaps I may take that moment to whisper: ‘May I play?’”
He laughed.
“You mean that you really would stay and play double dummy when every other living man will be off to the coverts? Double dummy—to improve my game?”
“Certainly! I need improvement.”
“Then there is something wrong with you, too, Mr. Siward.”
She laughed and started to flick her whip, but at her first motion the horse gave trouble.
“The bit doesn’t fit,” observed Siward.
“You are perfectly right,” she returned, surprised. “I ought to have remembered; it is shameful to drive a horse improperly bitted.” And, after a moment: “You are considerate toward animals; it is good in a man.”
“Oh, it’s no merit. When animals are uncomfortable it worries me. It’s one sort of selfishness, you see.”
“What nonsense,” she said; and her smile was very friendly. “Why doesn’t a nice man ever admit he’s nice when told so?”
It seems they had advanced that far. For she was beginning to find this young man not only safe but promising; she had met nobody recently half as amusing, and the outlook at Shotover House had been unpromising with only the overgrateful Page twins to practise on—the other men collectively and individually boring her. And suddenly, welcome as manna from the sky, behold this highly agreeable boy to play with—until Quarrier arrived. Her telegram had been addressed to Mr. Quarrier.
“What was it you were saying about selfishness?” she asked. “Oh, I remember. It was nonsense.”
“Certainly.”
She laughed, adding: “Selfishness is so simply defined you know.”
“Is it? How.”
“A refusal to renounce. That covers everything,” she concluded.
“Sometimes renunciation is weakness—isn’t it?” he suggested.
“In what case for example?”
“Well, suppose we take love.”
“Very well, you may take it if you like it.”
“Suppose you loved a man!” he insisted.
“Let him beware! What then?”
“—And, suppose it would distress your family if you married him?”
“I’d give him up.”
“If you loved him?”
“Love? That is the poorest excuse for selfishness, Mr. Siward.”
“So you would ruin your happiness and his—”
“A girl ought to find more happiness in renouncing a selfish love than in love itself,” announced Miss Landis with that serious conviction characteristic of her years.
“Of course,” assented Siward with a touch of malice, “if you really do find more happiness in renouncing love than in love itself, it would be foolish not to do it—”
“Mr. Siward! You are derisive. Besides, you are not acute. A woman is always an opportunist. When the event takes place I shall know what to do.”
“You mean when you want to marry the man you mustn’t?
“Exactly. I probably shall.”
“Marry him?
“Wish to!”
“I see. But you won’t, of course.”
She drew rein, bringing the horse to a walk at the foot of a long hill.
“We are going much too fast,” said Miss Landis, smiling.
“Driving too fast for—”
“No, not driving, going—you and I.”
“Oh, you mean—”
“Yes I do. We are on all sorts of terms, already.”
“In the country, you know, people—”
“Yes I know all about it, and what old and valued friends one makes at a week’s end. But it has been a matter of half-hours with us, Mr. Siward.”
“Let us sit very still and think it over,” he suggested. And they both laughed.
It was perhaps the reaction of her gaiety that recalled to her mind her telegram. The telegram had been her promised answer after she had had time to consider a suggestion made to her by a Mr. Howard Quarrier. The last week at Shotover permitted reflection; and while her telegram was no complete answer to the suggestion he had made, it contained material of interest in the eight words: “I will consider your request when you arrive.
“I wonder if you know Howard Quarrier?” she said.
After a second’s hesitation he replied: “Yes—a little. Everybody does.”
“You do know him?”
“Only at—the club.”
“Oh, the Lenox?”
“The Lenox—and the Patroons.”
Preoccupied, driving with careless, almost inattentive perfection, she thought idly of her twenty-three years, wondering how life could have passed so quickly leaving her already stranded on the shoals of an engagement to marry Howard Quarrier. Then her thoughts, errant, wandered half the world over before they returned to Siward; and when at length they did, and meaning to be civil, she spoke again of his acquaintance with Quarrier at the Patroons Club—the club itself being sufficient to settle Siward’s status in every community.
“I’m trying to remember what it is I have heard about you,” she continued amiably; “you are—”
An odd expression in his eyes arrested her—long enough to note their colour and expression—and she continued, pleasantly; “—you are Stephen Siward, are you not? You see I know your name perfectly well—” Her straight brows contracted a trifle; she drove on, lips compressed, following an elusive train of thought which vaguely, persistently, coupled his name with something indefinitely unpleasant. And she could not reconcile this with his appearance. However, the train of unlinked ideas which she pursued began to form the semblance of a chain. Coupling his name with Quarrier’s, and with a club, aroused memory; vague uneasiness stirred her to a glimmering comprehension. Siward? Stephen Siward? One of the New York Siwards then;—one of that race—
Suddenly the truth flashed upon her,—the crude truth lacking definite detail, lacking circumstance and colour and atmosphere,—merely the raw and ugly truth.
Had he looked at her—and he did, once—he could have seen only the unruffled and very sweet profile of a young girl. Composure was one of the masks she had learned to wear—when she chose.
And she was thinking very hard all the while; “So this is the man? I might have known his name. Where were my five wits? Siward!—Stephen Siward!… He is very young, too… much too young to be so horrid.... Yet—it wasn’t so dreadful, after all; only the publicity! Dear me! I knew we were going too fast.”
“Miss Landis,” he said.
“Mr.