Chambers Robert William
The Fighting Chance
And now Ferrall was climbing into his saddle beside his pretty wife, who sat her horse like a boy, the white flag lifted high in the sunshine, watching the firing line until the last laggard was in position.
“All right, Grace!” said Ferrall briskly. Down went the white flag; the far-ranged line started into motion straight across country, dogs at heel.
From her saddle Mrs. Ferrall could see the advance, strung out far afield from the dark spots moving along the Fells boundary, to the two couples traversing the salt meadows to north. Crack! A distant report came faintly over the uplands against the wind.
“Voucher,” observed Ferrall; “probably a snipe. Hark! he’s struck them again, Grace.”
Mrs. Ferrall, watching curiously, saw Siward’s gun fly up as two big dark spots floated up from the marsh and went swinging over his head. Crack! Crack! Down sheered the black spots, tumbling earthward out of the sky.
“Duck,” said Ferrall; “a double for Stephen. Lord Harry! how that man can shoot! Isn’t it a pity that—”
He said no more; his pretty wife astride her thoroughbred sat silent, grey eyes fixed on the distant figures of Sylvia Landis and Siward, now shoulder deep in the reeds.
“Was it—very bad last night?” she asked in a low voice.
Ferrall shrugged. “He was not offensive; he walked steadily enough up-stairs. When I went into his room he lay on the bed as if he’d been struck by lightning. And yet—you see how he is this morning?”
“After a while,” his wife said, “it is going to alter him some day—dreadfully—isn’t it, Kemp?”
“You mean—like Mortimer?”
“Yes—only Leroy was always a pig.”
As they turned their horses toward the high-road Mrs. Ferrall said: “Do you know why Sylvia isn’t shooting with Howard?”
“No,” replied her husband indifferently; “do you?”
“No.” She looked out across the sunlit ocean, grave grey eyes brightening with suppressed mischief. “But I half suspect.”
“What?”
“Oh, all sorts of things, Kemp.”
“What’s one of ‘em?” asked Ferrall, looking around at her; but his wife only laughed.
“You don’t mean she’s throwing her flies at Siward—now that you’ve hooked Quarrier for her! I thought she’d played him to the gaff—”
“Please don’t be coarse, Kemp,” said Mrs. Ferrall, sending her horse forward. Her husband spurred to her side, and without turning her head she continued: “Of course Sylvia won’t be foolish. If they were only safely married; but Howard is such a pill—”
“What does Sylvia expect with Howard’s millions? A man?”
Grace Ferrall drew bridle. “The curious thing is, Kemp, that she liked him.”
“Likes him?”
“No, liked him. I saw how it was; she took his silences for intellectual meditation, his gallery, his library, his smatterings for expressions of a cultivated personality. Then she remembered how close she came to running off with that cashiered Englishman, and that scared her into clutching the substantial in the shape of Howard.... Still, I wish I hadn’t meddled.”
“Meddled how?”
“Oh, I told her to do it. We had talks until daylight.... She may marry him—I don’t know—but if you think any live woman could be contented with a muff like that!”
“That’s immoral.”
“Kemp, I’m not. She’d be mad not to marry him; but I don’t know what I’d do to a man like that, if I were his wife. And you know what a terrific capacity for mischief there is in Sylvia. Some day she’s going to love somebody. And it isn’t likely to be Howard. And, oh, Kemp! I do grow so tired of that sort of thing. Do you suppose anybody will ever make decency a fashion?”
“You’re doing your best,” said Ferrall, laughing at his wife’s pretty, boyish face turned back toward him over her shoulder; “you’re presenting your cousin and his millions to a girl who can dress the part—”
“Don’t, Kemp! I don’t know why I meddled!… I wish I hadn’t—”
“I do. You can’t let Howard alone! You’re perfectly possessed to plague him when he’s with you, and now you’ve arranged for another woman to keep it up for the rest of his lifetime. What does Sylvia want with a man who possesses the instincts and intellect of a coachman? She is asked everywhere, she has her own money. Why not let her alone? Or is it too late?”
“You mean let her make a fool of herself with Stephen Siward? That is where she is drifting.”
“Do you think—”
“Yes, I do. She has a perfect genius for selecting the wrong man; and she’s already sorry for this one. I’m sorry for Stephen, too; but it’s safe for me to be.”
“She might make something of him.”
“You know perfectly well no woman ever did make anything of a doomed man. He’d kill her—I mean it, Kemp! He would literally kill her with grief. She isn’t like Leila Mortimer; she isn’t like most girls of her sort. You men think her a rather stunning, highly tempered, unreasonable young girl, with a reserve of sufficiently trained intelligence to marry the best our market offers—and close her eyes;—a thoroughbred with the caprices of one, but also with the grafted instinct for proper mating.”
“Well, that’s all right, isn’t it?” asked Ferrall. “That’s the way I size her up. Isn’t it correct?”
“Yes, in a way. She has all the expensive training of the thoroughbred—and all the ignorance, too. She is cold-blooded because wholesome; a trifle sceptical because so absolutely unawakened. She never experienced a deep emotion. Impulses have intoxicated her once or twice—as when she asked my opinion about running off with Cavendish, and that boy and girl escapade with Rivington; nothing at all except high mettle, the innocent daring lurking in all thoroughbreds, and a great deal of very red blood racing through that superb young body. But,” Ferrall reined in to listen, “but if ever a man awakens her—I don’t care who he is—you’ll see a girl you never knew, a brand-new creature emerge with the last rags and laces of conventionality dropping from her; a woman, Kemp, heiress to every generous impulse, every emotion, every vice, every virtue of all that brilliant race of hers.”
“You seem to know,” he said, amused and curious.
“I know. Major Belwether told me that he had thought of Howard as an anchor for her. It seemed a pity—Howard with all his cold, heavy negative inertia.... I said I’d do it. I did. And now I don’t know; I wish, almost wish I hadn’t.”
“What has changed your ideas?”
“I don’t know. Howard is safer than Stephen Siward, already in the first clutches of his master-vice. Would you mate what she inherits from her mother and her mother’s mother, with what is that poor boy’s heritage from the Siwards?”
“After all,” observed Ferrall dryly, “we’re not in the angel-breeding business.”
“We ought to be. Every decent person ought to be. If they were, inherited vice would be as rare in this country as smallpox!”
“People don’t inherit smallpox, dear.”
“Never mind! You know what I mean. In our stock farms and kennels, we weed out, destroy, exterminate hereditary weakness in everything. We pay the greatest attention to the production of all offspring except our own. Look at Stephen! How dared his parents bring him into the world? Look at Sylvia! And now, suppose they marry!”
“Dearest,” said Ferrall, “my head is a whirl and my wits are spinning like five toy tops. Your theories are all right; but unless you and I are prepared to abandon several business enterprises and take to the lecture platform, I’m afraid people are going to be wicked enough to marry whom they like, and the human race will he run as usual with money the favourite, and love a case of ‘also-ran.’… By the way, how dared you marry me, knowing the sort of demon I am?”
The gathering frown on Mrs. Ferrall’s brow faded; she raised her clear grey eyes and met her husband’s gaze, gay, humourous, and with a hint of tenderness—enough to bring the colour into her pretty face.
“You know I’m right, Kemp.”
“Always, dear. And now that we have the world off our hands for a few minutes, suppose we gallop?”
But she held her horse to a walk, riding forward, grave, thoughtful, preoccupied with a new problem, only part of which she had told her husband.
For that night she had been awakened in her bed to find standing beside her a white, wide-eyed figure, shivering, limbs a-chill beneath her clinging lace. She had taken the pallid visitor to her arms and warmed her and soothed her and whispered to her, murmuring the thousand little words and sounds, the breathing magic mothers use with children. And Sylvia lay there, chilled, nerveless, silent, ignorant why her sleeplessness had turned to restlessness, to loneliness, to an awakening perception of what she lacked and needed and began to desire. For that sad void, peopled at intervals through her brief years with a vague mother-phantom, had, in the new crisis of her career, become suddenly an empty desolation, frightening her with her own utter isolation. Fill it now she could not, now that she needed that ghost of child-comfort, that shadowy refuge, that sweet shape she had fashioned out of dreams to symbolise a mother she had never known.
Driven she knew not why, she had crept from her room in search of the still, warm, fragrant nest and the whispered reassurance and the caress she had never before endured. Yes, now she craved it, invited it, longed for safe arms around her, the hovering hand on her hair. Was this Sylvia?
And Grace Ferrall, clearing her sleepy eyes, amazed, incredulous of the cold, child-like hands upon her shoulders, caught her in her arms with a little laugh and sob and drew her to her breast, to soothe and caress and reassure, to make up to her all she could of what is every child’s just heritage.
And for a long while Sylvia, lying there, told her nothing—because she did not know how—merely a word, a restless question half ashamed, barely enough to shadow forth the something stirring her toward an awakening in a new world, where with new eyes she might catch glimpses of those dim and splendidly misty visions that float through sunlit silences when a young girl dreams awake.
And at length, gravely, innocently, she spoke of her engagement, and the worldly possibilities before her; of the man she was to marry, and her new and unexpected sense of loneliness in his presence, now that she had seen him again after months.
She spoke, presently, of Siward—a fugitive question or two, offered indifferently at first, then with shy persistence and curiosity, knowing nothing of the senseless form flung face downward across the sheets in a room close by. And thereafter the murmured burden of the theme was Siward, until one, heavy eyed, turned from the white dawn silvering the windows, sighed, and fell asleep; and one lay silent, head half buried in its tangled gold, wide awake, thinking vague thoughts that had no ending, no beginning. And at last a rosy bar of light fell across the wall, and the warm shadows faded from corner and curtain; and, turning on the pillow, her face nestled in her hair, she fell asleep.
Nothing of this had Mrs. Ferrall told her husband.
For the first time in her life had Sylvia suffered the caresses most women invite or naturally lavish; for the first time had she attempted confidences, failing because she did not know how, but curiously contented with the older woman’s arms around her.
There was a change in Sylvia, a great change stealing in upon her as she lay there, breathing like a child, flushed lips scarcely parted. Through the early slanting sunlight the elder woman, leaning on one arm, looked down at her, grey eyes very grave and tender—wise, sweet eyes that divined with their pure clairvoyance all that might happen or might fail to come to pass in this great change stealing over Sylvia.
Nothing of this could her husband understand had she words to convey it. There was nothing he need understand except that his wife, meaning well, had meddled and regretted.
And now, turning in her saddle with a pretty gesture of her shoulders:
“I meddle no more! Those who need me may come to me. Now laugh at my tardy wisdom, Kemp!”
“It’s no laughing matter,” he said, “if you’re going to stand back and let this abandoned world spin itself madly to the bow-wows—”
“Don’t be horrid. I repent. The mischief take Howard Quarrier!”
“Amen! Come on, Grace.”
She gathered bridle. “Do you suppose Stephen Siward is going to make trouble?”
“How can he unless she helps him? Nonsense! All’s well with Siward and Sylvia. Shall we gallop?”
All was very well with Siward and Sylvia. They had passed the rabbit-brier country scathless, with two black mallard, a jack-snipe, and a rabbit to the credit of their score, and were now advancing through that dimly lit enchanted land of tall grey alders where, in the sudden twilight of the leaves, woodcock after woodcock fluttered upward twittering, only to stop and drop, transformed at the vicious crack of Siward’s gun to fluffy balls of feather whirling earthward from mid-air.
Sagamore came galloping back with a soft, unsoiled mass of chestnut and brown feathers in his mouth. Siward took the dead cock, passed it back to the keeper who followed them, patted the beautiful eager dog and signalled him forward once more.
“You should have fired that time,” he said to Sylvia—“that is, if you care to kill anything.”
“But I don’t seem to be able to,” she said. “It isn’t a bit like shooting at clay targets. The twittering whirr takes me by surprise—it’s all so charmingly sudden—and my heart seems to stop in one beat, and I look and look and then—whisk! the woodcock is gone, leaving me breathless—”
Her voice ceased; the white setter, cutting up his ground ahead, had stopped, rigid, one leg raised, jaws quivering and locking alternately.
“Isn’t that a stunning picture!” said Siward in a low voice. “What a beauty he is—like a statue in white and blue-veined marble. You may talk, Miss Landis; woodcock don’t flush at the sound of the human voice as grouse do.”
“See his brown eyes roll back at us! He wonders why we don’t do something!” whispered the girl. “Look, Mr. Siward! Now his head is moving—oh so gradually to the left!”
“The bird is moving on the ground,” nodded Siward; “now the bird has stopped.”
“I do wish I could see a woodcock on the ground,” she breathed. “Do you think we might by any chance?”
Siward noiselessly sank to his knees and crouched, keen eyes minutely busy among the shadowy browns and greys of wet earth and withered leaf. And after a while, cautiously, he signalled the girl to kneel beside him, and stretched out one arm, forefinger extended.
“Sight straight along my arm,” he said, “as though it were a rifle barrel.”
Her soft cheek rested against his shoulder; a stray strand of shining hair brushing his face.
“Under that bunch of fern,” he whispered; “just the colour of the dead leaves. Do you see?… Don’t you see that big woodcock squatted flat, bill pointed straight out and resting on the leaves?”
After a long while she saw, suddenly, and an exquisite little shock tightened her fingers on Siward’s extended arm.
“Oh, the feathered miracle!” she whispered; “the wonder of its cleverness to hide like that! You look and look and stare, seeing it all the while and not knowing that you see it. Then in a flash it is there, motionless, a brown-shaped shadow among shadows.... The dear little thing!… Mr. Siward, do you think—are you going to—”
“No, I won’t shoot it.”
“Thank you.... Might I sit here a moment to watch it?”
She seated herself soundlessly among the dead leaves; he sank into place beside her, laying his gun aside.
“Rather rough on the dog,” he said with a grimace.
“I know. It is very good of you, Mr. Siward to do this for my pleasure. Oh—h! Do you see! Oh, the little beauty!”
The woodcock had risen, plumage puffed out, strutting with wings bowed and tail spread, facing the dog. The sudden pigmy defiance thrilled her. “Brave! Brave!” she exclaimed, enraptured; but at the sound of her voice the bird crouched like a flash, large dark liquid eyes shining, long bill pointed straight toward them.
“He’ll fly the way his bill points,” said Siward. “Watch!”
He rose; she sprang lightly to her feet; there came a whirring flutter, a twittering shower of sweet notes, soft wings beating almost in their very faces, a distant shadow against the sky, and the woodcock was gone.
Quieting the astounded dog, gun cradled in the hollow of his left arm, he turned to the girl beside him: “That sort of thing wins no cups,” he said.
“It wins something else, Mr. Siward,—my very warm regard for you.”
“There is no choice between that and the Shotover Cup,” he admitted, considering her.
“I—do you mean it?”
“Of course I do, vigorously!”
“Then you are much nicer than I thought you.... And after all, if the price of a cup is the life of that brave little bird, I had rather shoot clay pigeons. Now you will scorn me I suppose. Begin!”
“My ideal woman has never been a life-taker,” he said coolly. “Once, when I was a boy, there was a girl—very lovely—my first sweetheart. I saw her at the traps once, just after she had killed her seventh pigeon straight, ‘pulling it down’ from overhead, you know—very clever—the little thing was breathing on the grass, and it made sounds—” He shrugged and walked on. “She killed her twenty-first bird straight; it was a handsome cup, too.”
And after a silence, “So you didn’t love her any more, Mr. Siward?”—mockingly sweet.
They laughed, and at the sound of laughter the tall-stemmed alders echoed with the rushing roar of a cock-grouse thundering skyward. Crack! Crack! Whirling over and over through a cloud of floating feathers, a heavy weight struck the springy earth. There lay the big mottled bird, splendid silky ruffs spread, dead eyes closing, a single tiny crimson bead twinkling like a ruby on the gaping beak.
“Dead!” said Siward to the dog who had dropped to shot; “Fetch!” And, signalling the boy behind, he relieved the dog of his burden and tossed the dead weight of ruffled plumage toward him. Then he broke his gun, and, as the empty shells flew rattling backward, slipped in fresh cartridges, locked the barrels, and walked forward, the flush of excitement still staining his sunburnt face.
“You deal death mercifully,” said the girl in a low voice. “I wonder what your ci-devant sweetheart would think of you.”
“A bungler had better stick to the traps,” he assented, ignoring the badinage.
“I am wondering,” she said thoughtfully, “what I think of men who kill.”
He turned sharply, hesitated, shrugged. “Wild things’ lives are brief at best—fox or flying-tick, wet nests or mink, owl, hawk, weasel or man. But the death man deals is the most merciful. Besides,” he added, laughing, “ours is not a case of sweethearts.”
“My argument is purely in the abstract, Mr. Siward. I am asking you whether the death men deal is more justifiable than a woman’s gift of death?”
“Oh, well, life-taking, the giving of life—there can be only one answer to the mystery; and I don’t know it,” he replied smiling.
“I do.”
“Tell me then,” he said, still amused.
They had passed swale after swale of silver birches waist deep in perfumed fern and brake; the big timber lay before them. She moved forward, light gun swung easily across her leather-padded shoulder; and on the wood’s sunny edge she seated herself, straight young back against a giant pine, gun balanced across her flattened knees.
“You are feeling the pace a little,” he said, coming up and standing in front of her.
“The pace? No, Mr. Siward.”
“Are you a trifle—bored?” She considered him in silence, then leaned back luxuriously, rounded arms raised, wrists crossed to pillow her head.
“This is charmingly new to me,” she said simply.
“What? Not the open?”
“No; I have camped and done the usual roughing it with only three guides apiece and the champagne inadequately chilled. I have endured that sort of hardship several times, Mr. Siward.... What is that furry hunch up there in that tall thin tree?”
“A raccoon,” he said presently. “Can you see the foxy head peeping so slyly down at us? Look at Sagamore nosing the air in that droll blind mole-like way. He knows there’s something furry up aloft somewhere; and he knows it’s none of his business.”
They watched the motionless ball of fur in the crotch of a slim forest elm. Presently it uncurled, cautiously; a fluffy ringed tail unfolded; the rounded furry back humped up, and the animal, moving slowly into the tangent foliage of an enormous oak, vanished amid bronzing leafy depths.
In the silence the birds began to reappear. A jay screamed somewhere deep in the yellowing woods; black-capped chickadees dropped from twig to twig, cheeping inquiringly.
She sat listening, bright head pillowed in her arms, idly attentive to his low running comment on beast and bird and tree, on forest stillness and forest sounds, on life and the wild laws of life and death governing the great out-world ‘twixt sky and earth. Sunlight and shadows moving, speech and silence, waxed and waned. A listless contentment lay warm upon her, weighting the heavy white lids. The blue of her eyes was very dark now—almost purple like the colour of the sea when the wind-flaws turn the blue to violet.
“Did you ever hear of the ‘Lesser Children’?” she asked. “Listen then:
“‘Multitudes, multitudes, under the moon they stirred!
The weakerbrothers of our earthly breed;
All came about my head and at my feet
A thousand thousand sweet,
With starry eyes not even raised to plead:
Bewildered, driven, hiding, fluttering, mute!
And I beheld and saw them one by one
Pass, and become as nothing in the night.’
“Do you know what it means?
“‘Winged mysteries of song that from the sky
Once dashed long music down—’
“Do you understand?” she asked, smiling.
“‘Who has not seen in the high gulf of light
What, lower, was a bird!’”
She ceased, and, raising her eyes to his: “Do you know that plea for mercy on the lesser children who die all day to-day because the season opens for your pleasure, Mr. Siward?”
“Is it a woodland sermon?” he inquired, too politely.
“The poem? No; it is the case for the prosecution. The prisoner may defend himself if he can.”
“The defence rests,” he said. “The prisoner moves that he be discharged.”
“Motion denied,” she interrupted promptly.
Somewhere in the woodland world the crows were holding a noisy session, and she told him that was the jury debating the degree of his guilt.
“Because you’re guilty of course,” she continued. “I wonder what your sentence is to be?”
“I’ll leave it to you,” he suggested lazily.
“Suppose I sentenced you to slay no more?”
“Oh, I’d appeal—”
“No use; I am the tribunal of last resort.”
“Then I throw myself upon the mercy of the court.”
“You do well, Mr. Siward. This court is very merciful.... How much do you care for bird murder? Very much? Is there anything you care for more? Yes? And could this court grant it to you in compensation?”
He said, deliberately, roused by the level challenge of her gaze: “The court is incompetent to compensate the prisoner or offer any compromise.”
“Why, Mr. Siward?”
“Because the court herself is already compromised in her future engagements.”
“But what has my—engagement to do with—”
“You offered compensation for depriving me of my shooting. There could be only one adequate compensation.”
“And that?” she asked, coolly enough.
“Your continual companionship.”
“But you have it, Mr. Siward—”
“I have it for a day. The season lasts three months you know.”
“And you and I are to play a continuous vaudeville for three months? Is that your offer?”
“Partly.”
“Then one day with me is not worth those many days of murder?” she asked in pretended astonishment.
“Ask yourself why those many days would be doubly empty,” he said so seriously that the pointless game began to confuse her.
“Then”—she turned lightly from uncertain ground—“then perhaps we had better be about that matter of the cup you prize so highly. Are you ready, Mr. Siward? There is much to be killed yet—including time, you know.”
But the hinted sweetness of the challenge had aroused him, and he made no motion to rise. Nor did she.
“I am not sure,” he reflected, “just exactly what I should ask of you if you insist on taking away—” he turned and looked about him through the burnt gold foliage, “—if you took away all this out of my life.”
“I shall not take it; because I have nothing in exchange to offer… you say,” she answered imprudently.
“I did not say so,” he retorted.
“You did—reminding me that the court is already engaged for a continuous performance.”
“Was it necessary to remind you?” he asked with deliberate malice.
She flushed up, vexed, silent, then looked directly at him with beautiful hostile eyes. “What do you mean, Mr. Siward? Are you taking our harmless, idle badinage as warrant for an intimacy unwarranted?”
“Have I offended?” he asked, so impassively that a flash of resentment brought her to her feet, angry and self-possessed.
“How far have we to go?” she asked quietly.
He rose to his feet, turned, hailing the keeper, repeating the question. And at the answer they both started forward, the dog ranging ahead through a dense growth of beech and chestnut, over a high brown ridge, then down, always down along a leafy ravine to the water’s edge—a forest pond set in the gorgeous foliage of ripening maples.
“I don’t see,” said Sylvia impatiently, “how we are going to obey instructions and go straight ahead. There must be a stupid boat somewhere!”
But the game-laden keeper shook his head, pulled up his hip boots, and pointed out a line of alder poles set in the water to mark a crossing.
“Am I expected to wade?” asked the girl anxiously.
“This here,” observed the keeper, “is one of the most sportin’ courses on the estate. Last season I seen Miss Page go through it like a scared deer—the young lady, sir, that took last season’s cup”—in explanation to Siward, who stood doubtfully at the water’s edge, looking back at Sylvia.
Raising her dismayed eyes she encountered his; there was a little laugh between them. She stepped daintily across the stones to the water’s edge, instinctively gathering her kilts in one hand.
“Miles and I could chair you over,” suggested Siward.
“Is that fair—under the rules?”
“Oh, yes, Miss; as long as you go straight,” said the keeper.
So they laid aside the guns and the guide’s game-sack, and formed a chair with their hands, and, bearing the girl between them, they waded out along the driven alder stakes, knee-deep in brown water.
Before them herons rose into heavy flapping flight, broad wings glittering in the sun; a diver, distantly afloat among the lily pads, settled under the water to his eyes as a submarine settles till the conning-tower is awash.
Her arm, lightly resting around his neck, tightened a trifle as the water rose to his thighs; then the faint pressure relaxed as they thrashed shoreward through the shallows, ankle deep once more, and landed among the dry reeds on the farther bank.
Miles, the keeper, went back for the guns. Siward stamped about in the sun, shaking the drops from water-proof breeches and gaiters, only to be half drenched again when Sagamore shook himself vigorously.
“I suppose,” said Sylvia, looking sideways at Siward, “your contempt for my sporting accomplishments has not decreased. I’m sorry; I don’t like to walk in wet shoes… even to gain your approval.”
And, as the keeper came splashing across the shallows: “Miles, you may carry my gun. I shall not need it any longer—”
The upward roar of a bevey of grouse drowned her voice; poor Sagamore, pointing madly in the blackberry thicket all unperceived, cast a dismayed glance aloft where the sunlit air quivered under the winnowing rush of heavy wings. Siward flung up his gun, heading a big quartering bird; steadily the glittering barrels swept in the arc of fire, hesitated, wavered; then the possibility passed; the young fellow lowered the gun, slowly, gravely; stood a moment motionless with bent head until the rising colour in his face had faded.
And that was all, for a while. The astonished and disgusted keeper stared into the thicket; the dog lay quivering, impatient for signal. Sylvia’s heart, which had seemed to stop with her voice, silenced in the gusty thunder of heavy wings, began beating too fast. For the ringing crack of a gun shot could have spoken no louder to her than the glittering silence of the suspended barrels; nor any promise of his voice sound as the startled stillness sounded now about her. For he had made something a trifle more than mere amends for his rudeness. He was overdoing everything—a little.
He stood on the thicket’s edge, absently unloading the weapon, scarcely understanding what he had done and what he had not done.
A moment later a far hail sounded across the uplands, and against the sky figures moved distantly.
“Alderdene and Marion Page,” said Siward. “I believe we lunch yonder, do we not, Miles?”
They climbed the hill in silence, arriving after a few minutes to find others already at luncheon—the Page boys, eager, enthusiastic, recounting adventure by flood and field; Rena Bonnesdel tired and frankly bored and decorated with more than her share of mud; Eileen Shannon, very pretty, very effective, having done more execution with her eyes than with the dainty fowling-piece beside her.
Marion Page nodded to Sylvia and Siward with a crisp, business-like question or two, then went over to inspect their bag, nodding approbation as Miles laid the game on the grass.
“Eight full brace,” she commented. “We have five, and an odd cock-pheasant—from Black Fells, I suppose. The people to our left have been blazing away like Coney Island, but Rena’s guide says the ferns are full of rabbits that way, and Major Belwether can’t hit fur afoot. You,” she added frankly to Siward, “ought to take the cup. The birches ahead of you are full of woodcock. If you don’t, Howard Quarrier will. He’s into a flight of jack-snipe I hear.”
Siward’s eyes had suddenly narrowed; then he laughed, patting Sagamore’s cheeks. “I don’t believe I shall shoot very steadily this afternoon,” he said, turning toward the group at luncheon under the trees. “I wish Quarrier well—with the cup.”
