The Firing Line

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.

CHAPTER XIX

THE LINE OF BATTLE

Portlaw's camp in the southern foot-hills of the Adirondacks was as much a real camp as the pretentious constructions at Newport are real cottages. A modesty, akin to smugness, designates them all with Heep-like humbleness under a nomenclature now tolerated through usage; and, from the photographs sent him, Hamil was very much disgusted to find a big, handsome two-story house, solidly constructed of timber and native stone, dominating a clearing in the woods, and distantly flanked by the superintendent's pretty cottage, the guides' quarters, stables, kennels, coach-houses, and hothouses with various auxiliary buildings still farther away within the sombre circle of the surrounding pines.

To this aggravation of elaborate structures Portlaw, in a spasm of modesty, had given the name of "Camp Chickadee"; and now he wanted to stultify the remainder of his domain with concrete terraces, bridges, lodges, and Gothic towers in various and pleasing stages of ruin.

So Hamil's problem presented itself as one of those annoyingly simple ones, entirely dependent upon Portlaw and good taste; and Portlaw had none.

He had, however, some thirty thousand acres of woods and streams and lakes fenced in with a twelve-foot barrier of cattle-proof wire—partly a noble virgin wilderness unmarred by man-trails; partly composed of lovely second growth scarcely scarred by that, vile spoor which is the price Nature pays for the white-hided invaders who walk erect, when not too drunk, and who foul and smear and stain and desolate water and earth and air around them.

Why Portlaw desired to cut his wilderness into a mincing replica of some emasculated British royal forest nobody seemed able to explain. While at Palm Beach he had made two sage observations to Hamil concerning the sacredness of trees; one was that there are no trees in a Scotch deer forest, which proved to his satisfaction that trees are unnecessary; the other embodied his memories of seeing a herd of calf-like fallow deer decorating the grass under the handsome oaks and beeches of some British nobleman's park.

Why Portlaw concerned himself at all with his wild, out-world domain was a mystery, too; for he admitted that he spent almost all day playing cards indoors or contriving with his cook some new and succulent experiment in the gastronomical field.

Sometimes he cast a leaden eye outdoors when his dogs were exercised from the kennel; rarely, and always unwillingly, he followed Malcourt to the hatchery to watch the stripping, or to the exotic pheasantry to inspect the breeding of birds entirely out of place in such a climate.