Laughter thawed her; for notwithstanding the fearless confidence she had been taught for men of her own kind, self-possession and reserve, if not inherent, had also been drilled into her, and she required a great deal in a man before she paid him the tribute of one of her pretty laughs.
Apparently they were advancing rather rapidly.
“Don’t you think we ought to call the dog in, Mr. Siward?”
“Yes; he’s had enough!”
She drew rein; he sprang out and whistled; and the Sagamore pup, dusty and happy came romping back. Siward motioned him to the rumble, but the dog leaped to the front.
“I don’t mind,” said the girl. “Let him sit here between us. And you might occupy yourself by pulling some of those burrs from his ears — if you will?”
“Of course I will. Look up here, puppy! No! Don’t try to lick my face, for that is bad manners. Demonstrations are odious, as the poet says.”
“It’s always bad manners, isn’t it?” asked Miss Landis.
“What? Being affectionate?”
“Yes, and admitting it.”
“I believe it is. Do you hear that — Sagamore? But never mind; I’ll break the rules some day when we’re alone.”
The dog laid one paw on Siward’s knee, looking him wistfully in the eyes.
“More demonstrations,” observed the girl. “Mr. Siward! You are hugging him! This amounts to a dual conspiracy in bad manners.”
“Awfully glad to admit you to the conspiracy,” he said. “There’s one vacancy — if you are eligible.”
“I am; I was discovered recently kissing my saddle-mare.”
“That settles it! Sagamore, give the young lady the grip.”
Sylvia Landis glanced at the dog, then impulsively shifting the whip to her left hand, held out the right. And very gravely the Sagamore pup laid one paw in her dainty white gloved palm.
“You darling!” murmured the girl, resuming her whip.
“I notice,” observed Siward, “that you are perfectly qualified for membership in our association for the promotion of bad manners. In fact I should suggest you for the presidency—”
“I suppose you think all sorts of things because I gushed over that dog.”
“Of course I do.”
“Well you need not,” she rejoined, delicate nose up-tilted. “I never kissed a baby in all my life — and never mean to. Which is probably more than you can say.”
“Yes, its more than I can say.
“That admission elects you president,” she concluded. But after a moment’s silent driving she turned partly toward him with mock seriousness: “Is it not horridly unnatural in me to feel that way about babies? And about people, too; I simply cannot endure demonstrations. As for dogs and horses — well, I’ve admitted how I behave; and, being so shamelessly affectionate by disposition, why can’t I be nice to babies? I’ve a hazy but dreadful notion that there’s something wrong about me, Mr. Siward.”
He scrutinised the pretty features, anxiously; “I can’t see it,” he said.
“But I mean it — almost seriously. I don’t want to be so aloof, but — I don’t like to touch other people. It is rather horrid of me I suppose to be like those silky, plumy, luxurious Angora cats who never are civil to you and who always jump out of your arms at the first opportunity.”
He laughed — and there was malice in his eyes, but he did not know her well enough to pursue the subject through so easy an opening.
It had occurred to her, too, that her simile might invite elaboration, and she sensed the laugh in his silence, and liked him for remaining silent where he might easily have been wittily otherwise.
This set her so much at ease, left her so confident, that they were 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. Siward?” — very gently. It was her way to be gentle when generous.
“I think,” he said, “that you are beginning to remember where you may have heard my name.”
“Yes — a little—” She looked at him with the direct gaze of a child, but the lovely eyes were troubled. His smile was not very genuine, but he met her gaze steadily enough.
“It was rather nice of Mrs. Ferrall to ask me,” he said, “after the mess I made of things last spring.”
“Grace Ferrall is a dear,” she replied.
After a moment he ventured: “I suppose you saw it in the papers.”
“I think so; I had completely forgotten it; your name seemed to—”
“I see.” Then, listlessly: “I couldn’t have ventured to remind you that — that perhaps you might not care to be so amiable—”
“Mr. Siward,” she said impulsively, “you are nice to me! Why shouldn’t I be amiable? It was — it was — I’ve forgotten just how dreadfully you did behave—”
“Pretty badly.”
“Very?”
“They say so.”
“And what is your opinion Mr. Siward?”
“Oh, I ought to have known better.” Something about him reminded her of a bad small boy; and suddenly in spite of her better sense, in spite of her instinctive caution, she found herself on the very verge of laughter. What was it in the man that disarmed and invited a confidence — scarcely justified it appeared? What was it now that moved her to overlook what few overlook — not the fault, but its publicity? Was it his agreeable bearing, his pleasant badinage, his amiably listless moments of preoccupation, his youth that appealed to her — aroused her charity, her generosity, her curiosity?
And had other people continued to accept him, too? What would Quarrier think of his presence at Shotover? She began to realise that she was a little afraid of Quarrier’s opinions. And his opinions were always judgments. However Grace Ferrall had thought it proper to ask him, and that meant social absolution. As far as that went she also was perfectly ready to absolve him if he needed it. But perhaps he didn’t care! — She looked at him, furtively. He seemed to be tranquil enough in his abstraction. Trouble appeared to slide very easily from his broad young shoulders. Perhaps he was already taking much for granted in her gentleness with him. And gradually speculation became interest and interest a young girl’s innocent curiosity to learn something of a man whose record it seemed almost impossible to reconcile with his personality.
“I was wondering,” he said looking up to encounter her clear eyes, “whose house that is over there?”
“Beverly Plank’s shooting-box; Black Fells,” she replied nodding toward the vast pile of blackish rocks against the sky, upon which sprawled a heavy stone house infested with chimneys.
“Plank? Oh yes.”
He smiled to remember the battering blows rained upon the ramparts of society by the master of Black Fells.
But the smile faded; and, glancing at him, the girl was surprised to see the subtle change in his face — the white worn look, then the old listless apathy which, all at once to her, hinted of something graver than preoccupation.
“Are we near the sea?” he asked.
“Very near. Only a moment to the top of this hill.... Now look!”
There lay the sea — the same grey-blue crawling void that had ever fascinated and repelled him — always wrinkled, always in flat monotonous motion, spreading away, away to the sad world’s ends.
“Full of menace — always,” he said, unconscious that he had spoken aloud.
“The sea!”
He spoke without turning: “The sea is a relentless thing for a man to fight.... There are other tides more persistent than the sea, but like it — like it in its menace.”
His face seemed thinner, older; she noticed his cheek bones for the first time. Then, meeting her eyes, youth returned with a laugh and a touch of colour; and, without understanding exactly how, she was aware, presently, that they had insensibly slipped back to their light badinage and gay inconsequences — back to a footing which, strangely, seemed to be already an old footing, familiar, pleasant, and natural to return to.
“Is that Shotover House?” he asked as they came to the crest of the last hillock between them and the sea.
“At last, Mr. Siward,” she said mockingly; “and now your troubles are nearly ended.”
“And yours, Miss Landis?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured to herself, thinking of the telegram with the faintest misgiving.
For she was very young, and she had not had half enough out of life as yet; and besides, her theories and preconceived plans for the safe and sound ordering of her life appeared to lack weight — nay, they were dwindling already into insignificance.
Theory had almost decided her to answer Mr. Quarrier’s suggestion with a ‘Yes.’ However, he was coming from the Lakes in a day or two. She could decide definitely when she had discussed the matter with him.
“I wish that I owned th
is dog,” observed Siward, as the phaeton entered the macadamised drive.
“I wish so, too,” she said, “but he belongs to Mr. Quarrier.”
CHAPTER II IMPRUDENCE
A house of native stone built into and among weather-scarred rocks, one massive wing butting seaward, others nosing north and south among cedars and outcropping ledges — the whole silver-grey mass of masonry reddening under a westering sun, every dormer, every leaded diamond pane aflame; this was Shotover as Siward first beheld it.
Like the craggy vertebrae of a half-buried fossil splitting the sod, a ragged line of rock rose as a barrier to inland winds; the foreland, set here and there with tiny lawns and pockets of bright flowers, fell away to the cliffs; and here, sheer wet black rocks fronted the eternal battering of the Atlantic.
As the phaeton drew up under a pillared porte-cochere, one or two servants appeared; a rather imposing specimen bowed them through the doors into the hall where, in a wide chimney place, the embers of a drift-wood fire glimmered like a heap of dusty jewels. Bars of sunlight slanted on wall and rug, on stone floor and carved staircase, on the bronze foliations of the railed gallery above, where, in the golden gloom through a high window, sun-tipped tree tops against a sky of azure stirred like burnished foliage in a tapestry.
“There is nobody here, of course,” observed Miss Landis to Siward as they halted in front of the fire-place; “the season opens to-day in this county, you see.” She shrugged her pretty shoulders: “And the women who don’t shoot make the first field-luncheon a function.”
She turned, nodded her adieux, then, over her shoulder, casually: “If you haven’t an appointment with the Sand-Man before dinner you may find me in the gun-room.”
“I’ll be there in about three minutes,” he said; “and what about this dog?” — looking down at the Sagamore pup who stood before him, wagging, attentive, always the gentleman to the tips of his toes.
Miss Landis laughed. “Take him to your room if you like. Dogs have the run of the house.”
So he followed a servant to the floor above where a smiling and very ornamental maid preceded him through a corridor and into that heavy wing of the house which fronted the sea.
“Tea is served in the gun-room, sir,” said the pretty maid, and disappeared to give place to a melancholy and silent young man who turned on the bath, laid out fresh raiment, and whispering, “Scotch or Irish, sir?” presently effaced himself.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 280