The Fighting Chance Part 60

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 pa.s.sion, 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 p.r.i.c.ked the soil's dark surface; here and there in the spa.r.s.e 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 m.u.f.fled 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 facades 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 a.s.sent, or a reply.

Sparing words--cautious, chary of self-commitment, and seldom offering to a.s.sume 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 pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.sion, 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?"