The Firing Line

"Dear—can you give up your freedom for a girl you cannot have?"

"I did so long since."

She bent and laid her lips on his hands, gravely.

"I must say something—that disturbs me a little. May I? Then, there are perils—warnings—veiled hints.... They mean nothing definite to me.... Should I be wiser?… It is difficult to say—senseless—showing my ignorance, but I thought if there were perils that I should know about—that could possibly concern me, now, you would tell me, somehow—in time—"

For a moment the revelation of her faith and innocence—the disclosure of how strange and lost she felt in the overwhelming catastrophe of forbidden love—how ignorant, how alone, left him without a word to utter.

She said, still looking down at his hands held between her own:

"A girl who has done what I have done, loses her bearings.... I don't know yet how desperately bad I am. However, one thing remains clear—only one—that no harm could come to—my family—even if I have given myself to you. And when I did it, only the cowardly idea that I was wronging myself persisted. If that is my only sin—you are worth it. And if I committed worse—I am not repentant. But—dear, what you have done to me has so utterly changed me that—things that I never before heeded or comprehended trouble me. Yesterday I could not have understood what to-night I have done. So, if there lies any unknown peril in to-morrow, or the days to come—if you love me you will tell me.... Yet I cannot believe in it. Dearly as I love you I would not raise one finger to comfort you at their expense. I would not go away with you; I would not seek my freedom for your sake. If there is in my love anything base or selfish I am not conscious of it. I cannot marry you; I can only live on, loving you. What danger can there be in that for you and me?"

"None," he said.

She sighed happily, lifted her eyes, yielded to his arms, sighing her heart out, lips against his.

Somewhere in the forest a bird awoke singing like a soul in Paradise.

CHAPTER XVI

AN ULTIMATUM

With the beginning of March the end of the so-called social season, south of Jupiter Light, is close at hand. First, the great winter hotels close; then, one by one, doors and gates of villa and cottage are locked, bright awnings and lawn shades furled and laid away, blinds bolted, flags lowered. All summer long villa and caravansary alike stand sealed and silent amid their gardens, blazing under the pale fierce splendour of an unclouded sky; tenantless, save where, beside opened doors of quarters, black recumbent figures sprawl asleep, shiny faces fairly sizzling in the rays of a vertical sun.

The row of shops facing the gardens, the white streets, quay, pier, wharf are deserted and silent. Rarely a human being passes; the sands are abandoned except by some stray beach-comber; only at the station remains any sign of life where trains are being loaded for the North, or roll in across the long draw-bridge, steaming south to that magic port from which the white P. and O. steamers sail away into regions of eternal sunshine.

So passes Palm Beach into its long summer sleep; and the haunts of men are desolate. But it is otherwise with the Wild.

Night and the March moon awake the winter-dormant wilderness from the white man's deadening spell. Now, unrestrained, the sound of negro singing floats inland on the sea-wind from inlet, bar, and glassy-still lagoon; great, cumbersome, shadowy things lumber down to tidewater—huge turtles on egg-laying intent. In the dune-hammock the black bear, crab-hungry, awakes from his December sleep and claws the palmetto fruit; the bay lynx steals beachward; a dozen little deaths hatch from the diamond-back, alive; and the mean gray fox uncurls and scratches ticks, grinning, red-gummed, at the moon.

Edging the Everglades, flat-flanked panthers prowl, ears and tail-tips twitching; doe and buck listen from the cypress shades; the razor-back clatters his tusks, and his dull and furry ears stand forward and his dull eyes redden. Then the silver mullet leap in the moonlight, and the tiger-owl floats soundlessly to his plunging perch, and his daring yellow glare flashes even when an otter splashes or a tiny fawn stirs.

And very, very far away, under the stars, rolls the dull bull-bellow of the 'gator, labouring, lumbering, clawing across the saw-grass seas; and all the little striped pigs run, bucking madly, to their dangerous and silent dam who listens, rigid, horny nose aquiver in the wind.

So wakes the Wild when the white men turn northward under the March moon; and, as though released from the same occult restraint, tree and shrub break out at last into riotous florescence: swamp maple sets the cypress shade afire; the cassava lights its orange elf-lamps; dogwood snows in the woods; every magnolia is set with great white chalices divinely scented, and the Royal Poinciana crowns itself with cardinal magnificence.

All day long brilliant butterflies hover on great curved wings over the jungle edge; all day long the cock-quail whistles from wall and hedge, and the crestless jays, sapphire winged, flit across the dunes. Red-bellied woodpeckers gossip in live-oak, sweet-gum, and ancient palm; gray squirrels chatter from pine to bitter-nut; the iridescent little ground-doves, mated for life, run fearlessly under foot or leap up into snapping flight with a flash of saffron-tinted wings. Under the mangroves the pink ajajas preen and wade; and the white ibis walks the woods like a little absent-minded ghost buried in unearthly reverie.

Truly when madam closes her Villa Tillandsia, and when Coquina Court is bereft of mistress and household—butler, footman, maid, and flunky; and when Tsa-na Lah-ni is abandoned by its handsome chatelaine, and the corridors of the vast hotels are dark, it is fashion, not common sense that stirs the flock of gaily gregarious immigrants into premature northern flight; for they go, alas! just as the southland clothes itself in beauty, and are already gone when the Poinciana opens, leaving Paradise to blossom for the lesser brothers of the woodland and the dark-skinned children of the sun.

The toddling Moses of the Exodus, as usual, was Courtlandt Classon; the ornamental Miriam, Mrs. O'Hara; and the children of the preferred stock started North with cymbals and with dances, making a joyful noise, and camping en route at Ormond—vastly more beautiful than the fashion-infested coral reef from which they started—at Saint Augustine, on corporate compulsion, at the great inns of Hampton, Hot Springs, and Old Point, for fashion's sake—taking their falling temperature by degrees—as though any tropic could compare with the scorching suffocation of Manhattan town.

Before the Beach Club closed certain species of humanity left in a body, including a number of the unfledged, and one or two pretty opportunists. Portlaw went, also Malcourt.

It required impudence, optimism, and executive ability for Malcourt to make his separate adieux and render impartial justice on each occasion.

There was a girl at "The Breakers" who was rather apt to slop over, so that interview was timed for noon, when the sun dries up everything very quickly, including such by-products as tears.

Then there was Miss Suydani to ride with at five o'clock on the beach, where the chain of destruction linked mullet and osprey and ended with the robber eagle—and Malcourt—if he chose.

But here there were no tears for the westering sun to dry, only strangely quenched eyes, more green than blue, for Malcourt to study, furtively; only the pale oval of a face to examine, curiously, and not too cynically; and a mouth, somewhat colourless, to reassure without conviction—also without self-conviction. This was all—except a pair of slim, clinging hands to release when the time came, using discretion—and some amiable firmness if required.

They were discussing the passing of the old régime, for lack of a safer theme; and he had spoken flippantly of the decadence of the old families—his arm around her and her pale cheek against his shoulder.

She listened rather absently; her heart was very full and she was thinking of other matters. But as he continued she answered at length, hesitating, using phrases as trite and quaintly stilted as the theme itself, gently defending the old names he sneered at. And in her words he savoured a certain old-time flavour of primness and pride—a vaguely delicate hint of resentment, which it amused him to excite. Pacing the dunes with her waist enlaced, he said, to incite retort:

"The old families are done for. Decadent in morals, in physique, mean mentally and spiritually, they are even worse off than respectfully cherished ruins, because they are out of fashion; they and their dingy dwellings. Our house is on the market; I'd be glad to see it sold only Tressilvain will get half."

"In you," she said, "there seems to be other things, besides reverence, which are out of fashion."

He continued, smilingly: "As the old mansions disappear, Virginia, so disintegrate those families whose ancestors gave names to the old lanes of New Amsterdam. I reverence neither the one nor the other. Good riddance! The fit alone survive."

"I still survive, if you please."

"Proving the rule, dear. But, yourself excepted, look at the few of us who chance to be here in the South. Look at Courtlandt Classon, intellectually destitute! Cuyp, a mental brother to the ox; and Vetchen to the ass; and Mrs. Van Dieman to somebody's maidservant—that old harridan with all the patrician distinction of a Dame des Halles—"

"Please, Louis!"

"Dear, I am right. Even Constance Palliser, still physically superb, but mentally morbid—in love with what once was Wayward—with the ghost she raised in her dead girlhood, there on the edge of yesterday—"

"Louis! Louis! And you! What were you yesterday? What are you to-day?"

"What do I care what I was and am?—Dutch, British, burgher, or cavalier?—What the deuce do I care, my dear? The Malcourts are rotten; everybody knows it. Tressilvain is worse; my sister says so. As I told you, the old families are done for—all except yours—"

"I am the last of mine, Louis."

"The last and best—"

"Are you laughing?"

"No; you are the only human one I've ever heard of among your race—the sweetest, soundest, best—"

"I?… What you say is too terrible to laugh at. I—guilty in mind—unsound—contaminated—"

"Temporarily. I'm going to-night. Time and absence are the great antiseptics. When the corrupt cause disappears the effect follows. Cheer up, dear; I take the night train."

But she only pressed her pale face closer to his shoulder. Their interlocked shadows, huge, fantastic, streamed across the eastern dunes as they moved slowly on together.

"Louis!"

"Yes?"

She could not say it. Close to the breaking point, she was ready now to give up to him more than he might care for—the only shred left which she had shrunk from letting him think was within his reach for the asking—her name.

Pride, prejudice, had died out in the fierce outbreak of a heart amazingly out of place in the body of one who bore her name.

Generations of her kinsmen, close and remote, had lived in the close confines of narrow circles—narrow, bloodless, dull folk, almost all distantly related—and they had lived and mated among themselves, coldly defiant of that great law which dooms the over-cultivated and inbred to folly and extinction.