The Fighting Chance Part 35

A pleasantly morbid suggestion for a day like this, is it not?

Shall we take a farewell plunge, and dress? You know we say good-bye to-morrow."

"Where do you go from here?"

"To Lenox; the Claymores have asked us for a week; after that, Hot Springs for another two weeks or so; after that, to Oyster Bay.

Mr.

Quarrier opens his house on Sedge Point," she added demurely, "but I don't think he expects to invite you to 'The Sedges.'"

"How long do you stay there?" asked Siward irritably.

"Until we go to town in December."

"What will you find to do all that time in Oyster Bay?" he asked more irritably.

"What a premature question! The yacht is there. Besides, there's the usual neighbourhood hunting, with the usual packs and inevitable set; the usual steeple-chasing; the usual exchange of social amenities; the usual driving and riding; the usual, my poor friend, the usual, in all its uncompromising certainty.

And what are you to do?"

"When?"

"After you leave here?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know where you are going?"

"I'm going to town."

"And then?"

"I don't know."

"Oh, but haven't you been asked somewhere? You have, of course."

"Yes, and I have declined."

"Matters of business," she inferred. "Too bad!"

"Oh, no."

"Then," she concluded, laughing, "you don't care to tell me where you are going."

"No," he said thoughtfully, "I don't care to tell you."

She laughed again carelessly, and, placing one hand on the tiled pavement, sprang lightly to her feet.

"A last plunge?" she asked, as he rose at her side.

"Yes, one last plunge together. Deep! Are you ready?"

She raised her white arms above her head, finger-tips joined, poised an instant on the brink, swaying forward; then, at his brief word, they flashed downward together, cutting the crystalline sea-water, shooting like great fish over the gla.s.s-tiled bed, shoulder to shoulder under the water; and opening their eyes, they turned toward one another with a swift outstretch of hands, an uncontrollable touch of lips, the very shadow of contact; then cleaving upward, rising to the surface to lie breathlessly floating, arms extended, and the sun filtering down through the ground-gla.s.s roof above.

"We are perfectly crazy," she breathed. "I'm quite mad; I see that. On land it's bad enough for us to misbehave; but submarine sentiment! We'll be growing scales and tails presently.

Did you ever hear of a Southern bird--a sort of hawk, I think--that almost never alights; that lives and eats and sleeps its whole life away on the wing? and even its courts.h.i.+p, and its honeymoon? Grace Ferrall pointed one out to me last winter, near Palm Beach--a slender bird, part black, part snowy white, with long, pointed, delicate wings like an enormous swallow; and all day, all night, it floats and soars and drifts in the upper air, never resting, never alighting except during its brief nesting season.

Think of the exquisite bliss of drifting one's life through in mid-air--to sleep, balanced on light wings, upborne by invisible currents flowing under the stars--to sail dreamily through the long suns.h.i.+ne, to float under the moon!

And at last, I suppose, when its time has come, down it whirls out of the sky, stone dead!

There is something thrilling in such a death--something magnificent.

And in the exquisitely spiritual honeymoon, vague as the shadow of a rainbow, is the very essence and aroma of that impalpable Paradise we women prophesy in dreams!

More sentiment! Heigho! My brother is the weeping crocodile, and the five winds are my wits.

Shall we dress? Even with a maid and the electric air-blast it will take time to dry my hair and dress it."

When he came out of his dressing-room she was apparently still in the hands of the maid. So he sauntered through the house as far as the library, and drawing a cheque-book from one pocket, fished out a memorandum-book from another, and began to cast up totals with a view to learning something about the various debts contracted at Shotover.

He seemed to owe everybody. Fortune had smitten him hip and thigh; and, a trifle concerned, he began covering a pad with figures until he knew where he stood. Then he drew a considerable cheque to Major Belwether's order, another to Alderdene. Others followed to other people for various amounts; and he was very busily at work when, aware of another presence near, he turned around in his chair. Sylvia Landis was writing at a desk in the corner, and she looked up, nodding the little greeting that she always reserved for him even after five minutes' separation.

"I'm writing cheques," she said. "I suppose you're writing to your mother."

"Why do you think so?" he asked curiously.

"You write to her every day, don't you?"

"Yes," he said, "but how do you know?"

She looked at him with unblus.h.i.+ng deliberation. "You wrote every day.

If it was to a woman, I wanted to know.

And I told Grace Ferrall that it worried me. And then Grace told me. Is there any other confession of my own pettiness that I can make to you."

"Did you really care to whom I was writing?" he asked slowly.

"Care? I--it worried me. Was it not a pitifully common impulse? 'Sisters under our skin,' you know--I and the maid who dresses me. She would have snooped; I didn't; that's the only generic difference. I wanted to know just the same.

But--that was before--"

"Before what?"

"Before I--please don't ask me to say it.

I did, once, when you asked me."

"Before you cared for me. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes. You are so cruelly literal when you wish to punish me.

You are interrupting me, too. I owe that wretched Kemp Ferrall a lot of money, and I'm trying to find out how much seven and nine are, to close accounts with Marion Page."

Siward turned and continued his writing. And when the little sheaf of cheques was ready he counted them, laid them aside, and, drawing a flat packet of fresh bank-notes from his portfolio, counted out the tips expected of him below stairs. These arranged for, he straightened up and glanced over his shoulder at Sylvia, but she was apparently absorbed in counting something on the ends of her fingers, so he turned smilingly to his desk and wrote a long letter to his mother--the same tender, affectionately boyish letter he had always written her, full of confidences, full of humour, gaily antic.i.p.ating his own return to her on the heels of the letter.

In his first letter to her from Shotover he had spoken casually of a Miss Landis. It seemed the name was familiar enough to his mother, who asked about her; and he had replied in another letter or two, a trifle emphatic in his praise of her, because from his mother's letters it was quite evident that she knew a good deal concerning the very unconventional affairs of Sylvia's family.

Of his swift and somewhat equivocal courts.h.i.+p he had had nothing to say in his letters; in fact recently he had nothing to say about Sylvia at all, reserving that vital confidence for the clear sympathy and understanding which he looked forward to when he should see her, and which, through dark days and bitter aftermaths, through struggle and defeat by his master-vice, had never failed him yet, never faltered for an instant.