Chambers Robert William
The Firing Line
CHAPTER XVIII
PERIL
Shelia, standing by the lamplit table and resting one slim hand on the edge of it, waited for Hamil to give the signal for separation.
Instead he said: "Are you really sleepy?"
"No."
"Then—"
"I dare not—to-night."
"For any particular reason?"
"For a thousand.... One is that I simply can't believe you are really going North to-morrow. Why do you?" She had asked it nearly a thousand times.
"I've got to begin Portlaw's park; and, besides, my work here is over—"
"Is that all you care about me? Oh, you are truly like the real Ulysses:
"Now toils the hero, trees on trees o'erthrown
Fall crackling round him, and the forests groan!"
Do you remember, in the Odyssey, when poor Calypso begs him to remain?
"Thus spoke Calypso to her god-like guest:
'This shows thee, friend, by old experience taught,
And learn'd in all the wiles of human thought,
How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!
Thus wilt thou leave me? Are we thus to part?
Is Portlaw's Park the passion of thy heart?'"
Laughing, he answered in the Grecian verse:
"Whatever the gods shall destine me to bear,
'Tis mine to master with a constant mind;
Inured to peril, to the worst resigned,
Still I can suffer; their high will be done."
From the soft oval of her face the smile faded, but her voice was still carelessly gay:
"And so he went away. But, concerning his nymph, Calypso, further Homer sayeth not. Yet—in the immortal verse it chanced to be he, not she, who was—married.... And I think I'll retire now—if you have nothing more agreeable to say to me—"
"I have; in the garden—"
"No, I dare not risk it to-night. The guards are about—"
"It is my last night here—"
"We will see each other very soon in New York. And I'll be up in the morning to drive you to the station—"
"But, Shiela, dear—"
"There was a bad nigger hanging around the groves last night and our patrols are out.... No, it's too risky. Besides—"
"Besides—what?"
"I've been thinking."
He said, tenderly impatient:
"You little witch of Ogygia, come into the patio then, and do your thinking and let me make love to you."
But she would not raise her eyes, standing there in the rose lamplight, the perverse smile still edging her lips.
"Calypso," he repeated persuasively.
"No.... Besides, I have nothing to offer you, Ulysses.... You remember what the real Calypso offered the real Ulysses if he'd remain with her in Ogygia?"
"Eternal youth and love?" He bent over the table, moving his hand to cover hers where it rested in the lamplight. "You have given me eternity in love already," he said.
"Have I?" But she would not lift her eyes.... "Then why make love to me if you have it ready-made for you?"
"Will you come?"
And she, quoting the Odyssey again:
"Swear, then, thou mean'st not what my soul forebodes;
Swear by the solemn oath that binds the gods!"
And in turn he quoted:
"Loved and adored, O goddess as thou art,
Forgive the weakness of a human heart."
But she said with gay audacity, "I have nothing to forgive you—yet."
"Are you challenging me? Because I am likely to take you into my arms at any moment if you are."
"Not here—Garry!"—looking up in quick concern, for his recklessness at times dismayed her. Considering him doubtfully she made up her mind that she was safe, and her little chin went up in defiance.
"The hammock's in the patio," he said.
"There's moonlight there, too. No, thank you—with Cissy wakeful and her windows commanding every nook!… Besides—as I told you, I've been thinking."
"And what have you concluded?"
Delicate straight nose in the air, eyebrows arched in airy disdain, she stood preoccupied with some little inward train of thought that alternately made grave and gay the upcurled corners of her lips.
"About this question of—ah—love-making—" dropping her eyes in pretence of humility.
"It is no longer a question, you know."
She would not look up; her lashes seemed to rest on the bloom of the rounded cheek as though the lids were shut, but there came from the shadows between the lids a faint glimmer; and he thought of that first day when from her lifted gaze a thousand gay little demons seemed to laugh at him.
"I've been thinking," she remarked, "that this question of making love to me should be seriously discussed."
"That's what I've been asking you to do in the patio—"
"I've been thinking, with deep but rather tardy concern, that it is not the best policy for me to be—courted—any more."
She glanced up; her entire expression had suddenly altered to a gravity unmistakable.
"What has happened?" he asked.
"Can you tell me? I ask you, Garry, what has happened?"
"I don't understand—"
"Nor I.... Because that little fool you kissed—so many, many centuries ago—is not this disillusioned woman who is standing here!… May I be a little bit serious with you?"
"Of course," he said, amused; "come out on the east balcony and tell me what troubles you."
She considered him, smilingly suspicious of his alacrity.
"I don't think we had better go to the balcony." "Shiela, can't you ever get over being ashamed when I make love to you?"
"I don't want to get over it, Garry."
"Are you still afraid to let me love you?"
Her mouth curved gravely as a perplexed child's; she looked down at the table where his sun-burnt hand now lay lightly across hers.
"I wished to speak to you about myself—if, somehow you could help me to say what—what is very difficult for a girl to say to a man—even when she loves him.... I don't think I can say it, but I'll try."
"Then if you'll come to the balcony—"
"No, I can't trust you—or myself—unless we promise each other."
"Have I got to do that again?"
"Yes, if I am to go with you. I promise! Do you?"
"If I must," he said with very bad grace—so ungraciously in fact that as they passed from the eastern corridor on to the Spanish balcony she forgot her own promise and slipped her hand into his in half-humourous, half-tender propitiation.
"Are you going to be disagreeable to me, Garry?"
"You darling!" he said; and, laughing, yet secretly dismayed at her own perversion, she hurriedly untwisted her fingers from his and made a new and fervid promise to replace the one just broken.
The moonlight was magnificent, silvering forest, dune, and chaparral. Far to the east a thin straight gleam revealed the sea.
She seated herself under the wall, lying back against it; he lay extended on the marble shelf beside her, studying the moonlight on her face.
"What was it you had to tell me, Shiela? Remember I am going in the morning."
"I've turned cowardly; I cannot tell you.... Perhaps later.... Look at the Seminole moon, Garry. They have such a pretty name for it in March—Tau-sau-tchusi—'Little Spring Moon'! And in May they call it the 'Mulberry Moon'—Kee-hassi, and in November it is a charming name—Hee-wu-li—'Falling Leaf Moon'!—and August is Hyothlucco—'Big Ripening Moon.' … Garry, this moonlight is filling my veins with quicksilver. I feel very restless, very heathenish." … She cast a slanting side-glance at him, lips parting with soundless laughter; and in the witchery of the moon she seemed exquisitely unreal, head tipped back, slender throat and shoulders snow-white in the magic lustre that enveloped them.
Resting one bare arm on the marble she turned, chin on shoulder, looking mischievously down at him, lovely, fresh, perfect as the Cherokee roses that spread their creamy, flawless beauty across the wall behind her.
Imperceptibly her expression changed to soft friendliness, to tenderness, to a hint of deeper emotion; and her lids drooped a little, then opened gravely under the quick caress of his eyes; and very gently she moved her head from side to side as reminder and refusal.
"Another man's wife," she said deliberately.... "Thy neighbour's wife.... That's what we've done!"
Like a cut of a whip her words brought him upright to confront her, his blood tingling on the quick edge of anger.
For always, deep within him, lay that impotent anger latent; always his ignorance of this man haunted him like the aftermath of an ugly dream. But of the man himself she had never spoken since that first day in the wilderness. And then she had not named him.
Her face had grown very serious, but her eyes remained unfathomable under his angry gaze.
"Is there any reason to raise that spectre between us?" he demanded.
"Dear, has it ever been laid?" she asked sorrowfully.
The muscles in his cheeks tightened and his eyes narrowed unpleasantly. Only the one feature saved the man from sullen commonness in his suppressed anger—and that was his boyish mouth, clean, sweet, nobly moulded, giving the lie to the baffled brutality gleaming in the eyes. And the spark died out as it had come, subdued, extinguished when he could no longer sustain the quiet surprise of her regard.
"How very, very young you are after all," she said gently. "Come nearer. Lift your sulky, wicked head. Now ask my pardon for not understanding."
"I ask it.... But when you speak of him—"
"Hush. He is only a shadow to you—scarcely more to me. He must remain so. Do you not understand that I wish him to remain a shadow to you—a thing without substance—without a name?"
He bent his head, nodding almost imperceptibly.
"Garry?"
He looked up in response.
"There is something else—if I could only say it.... I might if you would close your eyes." … She hesitated, half-fearful, then drew his head down on her knees, daintily, using her finger-tips only in the operation.
"Are you listening to what I am trying to tell you?"
"Yes, very intently."
"Then—it's about my being afraid—of love.... Are you listening?… It is very difficult for me to say this.... It is about my being afraid.... I used to be when I did not know enough to be. And now, Garry, when I am less ignorant than I was—when I have divined enough of my unknown self to be afraid—dearest, I am not."
She bent gently above the boyish head lying face downward on her knees—waited timidly for some response, touched his hair.
"I am listening," he nodded.
She said: "My will to deny you, my courage to control myself seem to be waning. I love you so; and it is becoming so much worse, such a blind, unreasoning love.... And—do you think it will grow so much worse that I could be capable of anything ignoble? Do you think I might be mad enough to beg my freedom? I—I don't know where it is leading me, dear. Do you? It is that which bewilders me—that I should love you so—that I should not be afraid to love you so.... Hush, dear! Don't speak—for I shall never be able to tell you this if you speak, or look at me. And I want to ask you a question. May I? And will you keep your eyes covered?"
"Yes."
"Then—there are memories which burn my cheeks—hush!—I do not regret them.... Only, what am I changing into that I am capable of forgetting—everything—in the happiness of consenting to things I never dreamed of—like this"—bending and laying her lips softly against his cheek.... "That was wrong; it ought to frighten me. But it does not."
He turned, looking up into the flushed young face and drew it closer till their cheeks touched.
"Don't look at me! Why do you let me drift like this? It is madness—to give up to each other the way we do—"
"I wish we could give up the world for each other."
"I wish so too. I would—except for the others. Do you suppose I'd hesitate if it were not for them?"
They looked at each other with a new and subtler audacity.
"You see," she said with a wistful smile, "this is not Shiela Cardross who sits here smiling into those brown eyes of yours. I think I died before you ever saw me; and out of the sea and the mist that day some changeling crept into your boat for your soul's undoing. Do you remember in Ingoldsby—'The cidevant daughter of the old Plantagenet line '?"
They laughed like children.
"Do you think our love-tempted souls are in any peril?" he asked lightly.
The question arrested her mirth so suddenly that he thought she must have misunderstood.
"What is it, Shiela?" he inquired, surprised.
"Garry—will you tell me something—if you can?… Then, what does it mean, the saying—'souls lost through love'? Does it mean what we have done?—because I am married? Would people think our souls lost—if they knew?"
"No, you blessed child!"
"Well, how can—"
"It's a lie anyway," he said. "Nothing is lost through love. It is something very different they mean."
"Yes," she said calmly, "something quite inconceivable, like 'Faust' and 'The Scarlet Letter,' … I thought that was what they meant!"
Brooding over him, silent, pensive, clear eyes fearlessly meeting his, she drifted into guiltless retrospection.
"After all," she said, "except for letting everybody know that we belong to each other this is practically like marriage. Look at that honeymoon up there, Garry.... If, somehow, they could think we are engaged, and would let us alone for the rest of our lives, it would not matter.... Except I should like to have a house alone with you."
And she stooped, resting her cheek lightly against his, eyes vaguely sweet in the moonlight.
"I love you so," she murmured, as though to herself, "and there seems no end to it. It is such a hopeless sequence when yesterday's love becomes to-day's adoration and to-morrow's worship. What am I to do? What is the use of saying I am not free to love you, when I do?" She smiled dreamily. "I was silly enough to think it impossible once. Do you remember?"
"You darling!" he whispered, adoring her innocence. Then as he lay, head cradled on her knees, looking up at her, all unbidden, a vision of the future in its sharp-cut ominous desolation flashed into his vision—the world without her!—the endless stretch of time—youth with no meaning, effort wasted, attainment without desire, loneliness, arid, terrible days unending.
"It is too—too senseless!" he breathed, stumbling to his feet as the vague, scarcely formulated horror of it suddenly turned keen and bit into him as he began to realise for the first time something of what it threatened.
"What is it, Garry?" she asked in gentle concern, as he stood looking darkly at her. "Is it time to go? You are tired, I know." She rose and opened the great glass doors. "You poor tired boy," she whispered, waiting for him. And as he did not stir: "What is the matter, Garry?"
"Nothing. I am trying to understand that our winter is ended."
She nodded. "Mother and Gray and Cecile and I go North in April.... I wish we might stay through May—that is, if you—" She looked at him in silent consternation. "Where will you be!"
He said in a sullen voice: "That is what I was thinking of—our separation.... Do you realise that it is almost here?"
"No," she said faintly, "I cannot."
He moved forward, opening the glass doors wider; she laid one hand on his arm as though to guide herself; but the eastern corridors were bright with moonlight, every corner illuminated.
They were very silent until they turned into the south corridor and reached her door; and there he suddenly gave way to his passionate resentment, breaking out like a spoiled boy:
"Shiela, I tell you it's going to be unendurable! There must be some way out, some chance for us.... I don't mean to ask you to do what is—what you consider dishonourable. You wouldn't do it anyway, whether or not I asked you—"
"But don't ask me," she said, turning very white. "I don't know what I am capable of if I should ever see you suffer!"
"You couldn't do it!" he repeated; "it isn't in you to take your happiness at their expense, is it? You say you know how they would feel; I don't. But if you're asking for an annulment—"
"What? Do you mean divorce?"
"No.... That is—different—"
"But what—"
"You dear," he said, suddenly gentle, "you have never been a—wife; and you don't know it."
"Garry, are you mad?"
"Shiela, dear, some day will you very quietly ask some woman the difference between divorce and annulment?"
"Y-yes, if you wish.... Is it something you mayn't tell me, Garry?"
"Yes.... I don't know! You sometimes make me feel as though I could tell you anything.... Of course I couldn't … you darling!" He stepped nearer. "You are so good and sweet, so utterly beyond evil, or the vaguest thought of it—"
"Garry—I am not! And you know it!"
He only laughed at her.
"You don't think I am a horrid sort of saint, do you?"
"No, not the horrid sort—"
"Garry! How can you say such things when I'm half ready now to run away with you!"
The sudden hint of fire in her face and voice, and something new in her eyes, sobered him.
"Now do you know what I am?" she said, breathing unevenly and watching him. "Only one thing keeps me respectable. I'd go with you; I'd live in rags to be with you. I ask nothing in the world or of the world except you. You could make me what you pleased, mould me—mar me, I believe—and I would be the happiest woman who ever loved. That is your saint!"
Flushed with her swift emotion, she stood a minute facing him, then laid her hand on the door knob behind her, still looking him in the eyes. Behind her the door slowly swung open under the pressure.
His own self-control was fast going; he dared not trust himself to speak lest he break down and beg for the only chance that her loyalty to others forbade her to take. But the new and deeper emotion which she had betrayed had awakened the ever-kindling impatience in him, and now, afire, he stood looking desperately on all he must for ever lose, till the suffering seemed unendurable in the checked violence of his revolt.
"Good night," she whispered sorrowfully, as the shadow deepened on his altered face.
"Are you going!"
"Yes.... And, somehow I feel that perhaps it is better not to—kiss me to-night. When I see you—this way—Garry, I could find it in me to do anything—almost.... Good night."
Watching him, she waited in silence for a while, then turned slowly and lighted the tiny night-lamp on the table beside her bed.
When she returned to the open door there was no light in the hall. She heard him moving somewhere in the distance.
"Where are you, Garry?"
He came back slowly through the dim corridor.
"Were you going without a word to me?" she asked.
He came nearer and leaned against the doorway.
"You are quite right," he said sullenly. "I've been a fool to let us drift in this way. I don't know where we're headed for, and it's time I did."
"What do you mean?"—in soft consternation.
"That there is no hope left for us—and that we are both pretty young, both in love, both close to desperation. At times I tell you I feel like a cornered beast—feel like showing my teeth at the world—like tearing you from it at any cost. I'd do it, too, if it were not for your father and mother. You and I could stand it."
"I would let you do it—if it were not for them," she said.
They looked at one another, both pale.
"Would you give up the whole moral show for me?" he demanded.
"Yes."
"You'd get a first-rate scoundrel."
"I wouldn't care if it were you."
"There's one thing," he said with a bluntness bordering on brutality, "all this is changing me into a man unfit to touch you. I warn you."
"What!"
"I tell you not to trust me!" he said almost savagely. "With heart and soul and body on fire for you—mad for you—I'm not to be trusted!"
"And I?" she faltered, deadly pale.
"You don't know what you're saying!" he said violently.
"I—I begin to think I do.... Garry—Garry—I am learning very fast!… How can I let you go!"
"The idea is," he said grimly, "for me to go before I go insane.... And never again to touch you—"
"Why?"
"Peril!" he said. "I'm just a plain blackguard, Shiela."
"Would it change you?"
"What do you mean?"
"Not to touch me, not to kiss me. Could you go on always just loving me?… Because if you could not—through the years that are coming—I—I had rather take the risk—with you—than lose you."
He stood, head bent, not trusting himself to speak or look at her.
"Good-night," she said timidly.
He straightened up, stared at her, and turned on his heel, saying good night in a low voice.
"Garry!"
"Good-night," he muttered, passing on.
Her heart was beating so violently that she pressed her hand to it, leaning against the door sill.
"Garry!" she faltered, stretching out the other hand to him in the darkness, "I—I do not care about the—risk—if you care to—kiss me—"
He swung round from the shadows to the dimly lighted sill; crossed it. For a moment they looked into one another's eyes; then, blinded, she swayed imperceptibly toward him, sighing as his arms tightened and her own crept up around his neck.
She yielded, resigning lips, and lids, and throat, and fragrant hair, and each slim finger in caress unending.
Conscious of nothing save that body and soul were safe in his beloved keeping, she turned to him in all the passion of a guiltless love, whispering her adoration, her faith, her trust, her worship of the man who held her; then, adrift once more, the breathless magic overwhelmed her; and she drew him to her, closer, desperately, hiding her head on his breast.
"Take me away, Garry," she stammered—"take me with you. There is no use—no use fighting it back. I shall die if you leave me.... Will you take me? I—will be—everything that—that you would have me—that you might wish for—in—in a—wife—"
She was crying now, crying her heart out, her face crushed against his shoulder, clinging to him convulsively.
"Will you take me, Garry? What am I without you? I cannot give you up! I will not.... Nobody can ask that of me—How can they ask that of me?—to give you up—to let you go out of my little world for ever—to turn from you, refuse you!… What a punishment for one instant's folly! If they knew they would not let me suffer this way!—They would want me to tell them—"
His dry lips unclosed. "Then tell them!" he tried to say, but the words were without sound; and, in the crisis of temptation, at the very instant of yielding, suddenly he knew, somehow, that he would not yield.
It came to him calmly, without surprise or shock, this stupid certainty of himself. And at the same moment the crisis was passing, leaving him stunned, impassive, half senseless as the resurgent passion battered at his will power, to wreck and undo it—deafening, imperative, wave on wave, in vain.
The thing to do was to hold on. One of them was adrift; the other dared not let go; he seemed to realise it, somehow. Odd bits of phrases, old-fashioned sayings, maxims long obsolete came to him without reason or sequence—"Greater love hath no man—no man—no man—" and "As ye do unto the least of these "—odd bits of phrases, old-fashioned sayings, maxims, alas! long obsolete, long buried with the wisdom of the dead.
He held her still locked in his arms. From time to time, unconsciously, as her hot grief spent itself, he bent his head, laying his face against hers, while his haggard, perplexed gaze wandered about the room.
In the dimness the snowy bed loomed beside them; pink roses patterned curtain and wall; the tiny night-light threw a roseate glow across her gown. In the fresh, sweet stillness of the room there was no sound or stir save their uneven breathing.
Very gently he lifted one of her hands and looked at it almost curiously—this small white hand so innocently smooth—as unblemished as a child's—this unsullied little hand that for an instant seemed to be slowly relaxing its grasp on the white simplicity around her—here in this dim, fresh, fragrant world of hers, called, intimately, her room.
And here where night and morning had so long held sacred all that he cared for upon earth—here in the white symbol of the world—her room—he gave himself again to her, without a word, without hope, knowing the end of all was near for them.
But it was she, not he, who must make the sign that ended all. And, after a long, long time, as she made no sign:
"Dearest," he breathed, "I know now that you will never go with me—for your father's sake."
That was premature, for she only clung the closer. He waited cautiously, every instinct alert, his head close to hers. And at last the hot fragrance of her tears announced the beginning of the end.
"Shiela?"
A stifled sound from his shoulder where her head lay buried.
"Choose now," he said.
No answer.
"Choose."
She cowered in his arms. He looked at the little hand once more, no longer limp but clenched against his breast. And he knew that the end was close at hand, and he spoke again, forcing her to her victory.
"Dearest, you must choose—"
"Garry!"
"Between those others—and me—"
She shrank out of his arms, turned with a sob, swayed, and sank on her knees beside the bed, burying her head in her crossed arms.
This was her answer; and with it he went away into the darkness, reeling, groping, while every pulse in him hammered ironic salutation to the victor who had loved too well to win. And in his whirling brain sounded the mocking repetition of his own words: "Nothing is lost through love! Nothing is lost—nothing—nothing!"—flouting, taunting him who had lost love itself there on the firing line, for a comrade's sake.
His room was palely luminous with the lustre of the night. On the mantel squatted a little wizened and gilded god peering and leering at him through the shadows—Malcourt's parting gift—the ugliest of the nineteen.
"For," said Malcourt—"there ought to be only eighteen by rights—unless further complications arise; and this really belongs to you, anyway."
So he left the thing on Hamil's mantel, although the latter had no idea what Malcourt meant, or why he made the parting offering.
Now he stood there staring at it like a man whose senses waver, and who fixes some object to steady nerve and brain.
Far in the night the voice of the ocean stirred the silence—the ocean which had given her to him that day in the golden age of fable when life and the world were young together, and love wore a laughing mask.
He listened; all the night was sighing with the sigh of the surf; and the breeze in the trees mourned; and the lustre died out in thickening darkness as he stood there, listening.
Then all around him through the hushed obscurity a vague murmur grew, accentless, sad, interminable; and through the monotone of the falling rain he heard the ocean very far away washing the body of a young world dead to him for ever.
Crouched low beside her bed, face quivering in her arms, she heard, in the stillness, the call of the sea—that enchanted sea which had given him to her that day, when Time and the World were young together in the blessed age of dreams.
And she heard the far complaint of the surf, breaking unsatisfied; and a strange wind flowing through the trees; then silence, suspense; and the world's dark void slowly filling with the dreadful monotone of the rain.
Storm after storm of agony and doubt swept her; she prayed convulsively, at random, reiterating incoherence in blind, frightened repetition till the stupefying sequence lost all meaning.
Exhausted, half-senseless, her hands still clung together, her tear-swollen lips still moved to form his name, asking God's mercy on them both. But the end had come.
Yes, the end; she knew it now—understood what had happened, what must be. And, knowing, she heard the sea-rain whispering their judgment, and the winds repeating it across the wastes.
She raised her head, dumb, rigid, listening, and stared through the shaking window into obscurity. Lightning flickered along the rim of the world—a pallid threat above the sea—the sea which had given them to one another and left them stranded in each other's arms there on the crumbling edges of destruction.
Her strained eyes divined, her straining senses comprehended; she cringed lower, aghast, swaying under the menace, then fell prone, head buried in her tumbled hair.
In the morning he left for the North and Portlaw's camp. Gray drove him to the station; Cecile, in distractingly pretty negligee waved him audacious adieu from her window.
"Shiela seems to be ill," explained Gray, as the motor car shot out into the haze of early morning. "She asked me to say good-bye for her.... I say, Hamil, you're looking rather ill yourself. This climate is sure to get a white man sooner or later, if he remains too long. But the North will put you into condition. You're going straight to Portlaw's camp on Luckless Lake?"
"Yes," said Hamil listlessly.
"Well, we'll be in New York in a week or two. You'll surely look us up when you're in town, won't you? And write me a line about Acton and father—won't you?"
"Surely," nodded Hamil absently.
And they sped on, the vast distorted shadow of the car racing beside them to the station.
