The Fighting Chance

The story was repeated frequently enough. Leila heard it with a shrug; but such things mattered to her now, and she cried over it at night, burning that Plank should hear her name used jestingly to emphasise the depth of her husband’s degradation.

Mortimer stayed out at night very frequently now. Also, he appeared to make his money go farther, or was luckier at his “card killings,” because he seldom attempted to bully Leila, being apparently content with his allowance.

Once or twice Plank saw him with an unusually attractive girl belonging to a world very far removed from Leila’s. Somebody said she was an actress when she did anything at all—one Lydia Vyse, somewhat celebrated for an audacity not too delicate. But Plank was no more interested than any man who can’t afford to endanger his prospects by a closer acquaintance with that sort of pretty woman.

Meanwhile Mortimer kept away from home, wife, and church, and Plank frequented them, so the two men did not meet very often; and the less they met the less they found to say to one another.

Now that the forty days had really begun, Major Belwether became restless for the flesh-pots of the south, although Lenten duties sat lightly enough upon the house of Belwether. These decent observances were limited to a lax acknowledgment of fast days, church in moderation, and active participation in the succession of informal affairs calculated to sustain life in those intellectually atrophied and wealthy people entirely dependent upon others for their amusements.

To these people no fear of punishment hereafter can equal the terror of being left to their own devices; and so, though the opera was over, theatres unfashionable, formal functions suspended and dances ended, the pace still continued at a discreet and decorous trot; and those who had not fled to California or Palm Beach, remained to pray and play Bridge with an unction most edifying.

And all this while Sylvia had not seen Siward.

Sylvia was changing. The characteristic amiability, the sensitive reserve, the sweet composure which the world had always counted on in her, had become exceptions and no longer the rules which governed the caprice and impulse always latent. An indifference so pointed as to verge on insolence amazed her intimates at times; a sudden, flushed impatience startled the habitués of her shrine. There was a new, unseeing hardness in her eyes; in her attitude the faintest hint of cynicism. She acquired a habit of doing selfish things coldly, indifferent to the canons of the art; and true selfishness, the most delicate of all the arts, requires an expert.

That which had most charmed—her unfeigned pleasure in pleasure, her unfailing consideration for all, her gentleness with ignorance, her generous unconsciousness of self—all these still remained, it is true, though no longer characteristic, no longer to be counted on.

For the first time a slight sense of fear tinctured the general admiration.

In public her indifference and growing impatience with Quarrier had not reached the verge of bad taste, but in private she was scarcely at pains to conceal her weariness and inattention, showing him less and less of the formal consideration which had been their only medium of coexistence. That he noticed it was evident even to her who carelessly ignored the consequences of her own attitude.

Once, speaking of the alterations in progress at The Sedges, his place near Oyster Bay, he casually asked her opinion, and she as casually observed that if he had an opinion about anything he wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Once, too, she had remarked in Quarrier’s hearing to Ferrall, who was complaining about the loss of his hair, that a hairless head was a visitation from Heaven, but a beard was a man’s own fault.

Once they came very close to a definite rupture, close enough to scare her after all the heat had gone out of her and the matter was ended. Quarrier had lingered late after cards, and something was said about the impending kennel show and about Marion Page judging the English setters.

“Agatha tells me that you are going with Marion,” continued Quarrier. “As long as Marion has chosen to make herself conspicuous there is nothing to be said. But do you think it very good taste for you to figure publicly on the sawdust with an eccentric girl like Marion?”

“I see nothing conspicuous about a girl’s judging a few dogs,” said Sylvia, merely from an irritable desire to contradict.

“It’s bad taste and bad form,” remarked Quarrier coldly; “and Agatha thought it a mistake for you to go there with her.”

“Agatha’s opinions do not concern me.”

“Perhaps mine may have some weight.”

“Not the slightest.”

He said patiently: “This is a public show; do you understand? Not one of those private bench exhibitions.”

“I understand. Really, Howard, you are insufferable at times.”

“Do you feel that way?”

“Yes, I do. I am sorry to be rude, but I do feel that way!” Flushed, impatient, she looked him squarely between his narrowing, woman’s eyes: “I do not care for you very much, Howard, and you know it. I am marrying you with a perfectly sordid motive, and you know that, too. Therefore it is more decent—if there is any decency left in either of us—to interfere with one another as little as possible, unless you desire a definite rupture. Do you?”

“I? A—a rupture?”

“Yes,” she said hotly; “do you?”

“Do you, Sylvia?”

“No; I’m too cowardly, too selfish, too treacherous to myself. No, I don’t.”

“Nor do I,” he said, lifting his furtive eyes.

“Very well. You are more contemptible than I am, that is all.”

Her voice had grown unsteady; an unreasoning rush of anger had set her whole body a-thrill, and the white heat of it was driving her to provoke him, as though that might cleanse her of the ignominy of the bargain—as though a bargain did not require two of the same mind to make it.

“What do you want of me?” she said, still stinging under the angry waves of self-contempt. “What are you marrying me for? Because, divided, we are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world? Because, united, we can dominate the brainless? Is there any other reason?”

Showing his teeth in that twitching snicker that contracted the muscles of his upper lip: “Children!” he said, looking at her.

She turned scarlet to her hair; the deliberate grossness stunned her. Confused, she stood confronting him, dumb under a retort the coarseness of which she had never dreamed him capable.

“I mean what I say,” he repeated calmly. “A man cares for two things: his fortune, and the heirs to it. If you didn’t know that you have learned it now. You hurt me deliberately. I told you a plain truth very bluntly. It is for you to consider the situation.”

But she could not speak; anger, humiliation, shame, held her tongue-tied. The instinctive revolt at the vague horror—the monstrous, meaningless threat—nothing could force words from her to repudiate, to deny what he had dared to utter.

Except as the effrontery of brutality, except as a formless menace born of his anger, the reason he flung at her for his marrying her conveyed nothing to her in its grotesque impossibility. Only the intentional coarseness of it was to be endured—if she chose to endure it; for the rest was empty of concrete meaning to her.

Lent was half over before she saw him again. Neither he nor she had taken any steps to complete the rupture; and at the Mi-carême dance, given by the Siowa Hunt, Quarrier, who was M. F. H., took up the thread of their suspended intercourse as methodically and calmly as though it had never quivered to the breaking point. He led the cotillon with agreeable precision and impersonal accuracy, favouring her at intervals; and though she wasted no favours on him, she endured his, which was sufficient evidence that matters were still in statu quo.

She returned to town next morning with Grace Ferrall, irritable, sulky, furious with herself at the cowardly relief she felt. For, spite of her burning anger against Quarrier, the suspense at times had been wearing; and she would not make the first move—had not decided even to accept his move if it came—at least, had not admitted to herself that she would accept it. It had come and the tension was over, and now, entering Mrs. Ferrall’s brougham which met them at Thirty-fourth Street Ferry, she was furious with herself for her unfeigned feeling of relief.

All hot with self-contempt she lay back in the comfortably upholstered corner of the brougham, staring straight before her, sullen red mouth unresponsive to the occasional inconsequent questions of Grace Ferrall.

“After awhile,” observed Grace, “people will begin to talk about the discontented beauty of your face.”

Sylvia’s eyebrows bent still farther inward.

“A fretful face, but rather pretty,” commented Grace maliciously. “It won’t do, dear. Your rôle is dignified comedy. O dear! O my!” She stifled a yawn behind her faultlessly gloved hand. “I’m feeling these late hours in my aged bones. It wasn’t much of a dance, was it? Or am I disillusioned? Certainly that Edgeworth boy fell in love with me—the depraved creature—trying his primitive wiles there in the conservatory! Little beast! There are no nice boys any more; they’re all too young or too sophisticated.... Howard does lead well, I admit that.... You’re on the box seat together again I see. Pooh! I wasn’t a bit alarmed.”

“I was,” said Sylvia, curling her lip in biting self-contempt.

“Well, that’s a wholesome confession, anyway. O dear, how I do yawn! and Lent only half over.... Sylvia, what are you staring at? Oh, I—see.”

They had driven south to Washington Square, where Mrs. Ferrall had desired to leave a note, and were now returning. Sylvia had leaned forward to look up at Siward’s house, but with Mrs. Ferrall’s first word she sank back, curiously expressionless and white; for she had seen a woman entering the front door and had recognised her as Marion Page.

“Well, of all indiscretions!” breathed Grace, looking helplessly at Sylvia. “Oh, no, that sort of thing is sheer effrontery, you know! It’s rotten bad taste; it’s no worse, of course—but it’s bad taste. I don’t care what privileges we concede to Marion, we’re not going to concede this—unless she puts on trousers for good. It’s all very well for her to talk her plain kennel talk, and call spades by their technical names, and smoke all over people’s houses, and walk all over people’s prejudices; but there’s no sense in her hunting for trouble; and she’ll get it, sure as scandal is scandal!”

And still Sylvia remained pale and silent, eyes downcast, shrinking close into her upholstered corner, as though some reflex instinct of self-concealment was still automatically dominating her.

“She ought to be spanked!” said Grace viciously. “If she were my daughter I’d do it, too!”

Sylvia did not stir.