Robert Chambers - The Fighting Chance

“I think not. But it was too much responsibility for me.”

“I see. Any time I wish to break my neck I am to please do it alone in future.”

“Exactly—if you don’t mind,” he said smiling.

They turned, shoulder to shoulder, walking back through the drenched herbage.

“That,” she said impulsively, “is not what I said a few moments ago to a woman.”

“What did you say a few moments ago to a woman?”

“I said, Mr. Siward, that I would not leave a—a certain man to go to the devil alone!”

“Do you know any man who is going to the devil?”

“Do you?” she asked, letting herself go swinging out upon a tide of intimacy she had never dreamed of risking—nor had she the slightest idea whither the current would carry her.

They had stopped on the lawn, ankle deep in wet grass, the stars overhead sparkling magnificently, and in their ears the outcrash of the sea.

“You mean me,” he concluded.

“Do I?”

He looked up into the lovely face; her eyes were very sweet, very clear—clear with excitement—but very friendly.

“Let us sit here on the steps a little while, will you?” she asked.

So he found a place beside her, one step lower, and she leaned forward, elbows on knees, rounded white chin in her palms, the starlight giving her bare arms and shoulders a marble lustre and tinting her eyes a deeper amethyst.

And now, innocently untethered, mission and all, she laid her heart quite bare—one chapter of it. And, like other women-errant who believe in the influence of their sex individually and collectively, she began wrong by telling him of her engagement—perhaps to emphasise her pure disinterestedness in a crusade for principle only. Which naturally dampened in him any nascent enthusiasm for being ministered to, and so preoccupied him that he turned deaf ears to some very sweet platitudes which might otherwise have impressed him as discoveries in philosophy.

Officially her creed was the fashionable one in town; privately she had her own religion, lacking some details truly enough, but shaped upon youthful notions of right and wrong. As she had not read very widely, she supposed that she had discovered this religion for herself; she was not aware that everybody else had passed that way—it being the first immature moult in young people after rejecting dogma.

And the ripened fruit of all this philosophy she helpfully dispensed for Siward’s benefit as bearing directly on his case.

Had he not been immersed in the unexpected proposition of her impending matrimony, he might have been impressed, for the spell of her beauty counted something, and besides, he had recently formulated for himself a code of ethics, tinctured with Omar, and slightly resembling her own discoveries in that dog-eared science.

So it was, when she was most eloquent, most earnestly inspired—nay in the very middle of a plea for sweetness and light and simple living, that his reasonings found voice in the material comment:

“I never imagined you were engaged!”

“Is that what you have been thinking about?” she asked, innocently astonished.

“Yes. Why not? I never for one instant supposed—”

“But, Mr. Siward, why should you have concerned yourself with supposing anything? Why indulge in any speculation of that sort about me?”

“I don’t know, but I didn’t,” he said.

“Of course you didn’t; you’d known me for about three hours—there on the cliff—”

“But—Quarrier—!”

Over his youthful face a sullen shadow had fallen—flickering, not yet settled. He would not for anything on earth have talked freely to the woman destined to be Quarrier’s wife. He had talked too much anyway. Something in her, something about her had loosened his tongue. He had made a plain ass of himself—that was all,—a garrulous ass. And truly it seemed that the girl beside him, even in the starlight, could follow and divine what he had scarcely expressed to himself; or her instincts had taken a shorter cut to forestall his own conclusion.

“Don’t think the things you are thinking!” she said in a fierce little voice, leaning toward him.

“What do you mean?” he asked, taken aback.

“You know! Don’t! It is unfair—it is—is faithless—to me. I am your friend; why not? Does it make any difference to you whom I marry? Cannot two people remain in accord anyway? Their friendship concerns each other and—nobody else!” She was letting herself go now; she was conscious of it, conscious that impulse and emotion were the currents unloosed and hurrying her onward. And with it all came exhilaration, a faint intoxication, a delicate delight in daring to let go all and trust to impulse and emotions.

“Why should you feel hurt because for a moment you let me see—gave me a glimpse of yourself—of life’s battle as you foresee it? What if there is always a reaction from all confidences exchanged? What if that miserable French cynic did say that never was he more alone than after confessing to a friend? He died crazy anyhow. Is not a rare moment of confidence worth the reaction—the subsidence into the armored shell of self? Tell me truly, Mr. Siward, isn’t it?”

Breathless, confused, exhilarated by her own rapid voice she bent her face, brilliant with colour, and very sweet; and he looked up into it, expectant, uncertain.

“If such a friendship as ours is to become worth anything to you—to me, why should it trouble you that I know—and am thinking of things that concern you? Is it because the confidence is one-sided? Is it because you have given and I have listened and given nothing in return to balance the account? I do give—interest, deep interest, sympathy if you ask it; I give confidence in return—if you desire it!”

“What can a girl like you need of sympathy?” he said smiling.

“You don’t know! you don’t know! If heredity is a dark vista, and if you must stare through it all your life, sword in hand, always on your guard, do you think you are the only one?”

“Are you—one?” he said incredulously.

“Yes”—with an involuntary shudder—“not that way. It is easier for me; I think it is—I know it is. But there are things to combat—impulses, a recklessness, perhaps something almost ruthless. What else I do not know, for I have never experienced violent emotions of any sort—never even deep emotion.”

“You are in love!”

“Yes, thoroughly,” she added with conviction, “but not violently. I—” she hesitated, stopped short, leaning forward, peering at him through the dusk; and: “Mr. Siward! are you laughing?” She rose and he stood up instantly.

There was lightning in her darkening eyes now; in his something that glimmered and danced. She watched it, fascinated, then of a sudden the storm broke and they were both laughing convulsively, face to face there under the stars.

“Mr. Siward,” she breathed, “I don’t know what I am laughing at; do you? Is it at you? At myself? At my poor philosophy in shreds and tatters? Is it some infernal mirth that you seem to be able to kindle in me—for I never knew a man like you before?”

“You don’t know what you were laughing at?” he repeated. “It was something about love—”

“No I don’t know why I laughed! I—I don’t wish to, Mr. Siward. I do not desire to laugh at anything you have made me say—anything you may infer—”

“I don’t infer—”

“You do! You made me say something—about my being ignorant of deep, of violent emotion, when I had just informed you that I am thoroughly, thoroughly in love—”

“Did I make you say all that, Miss Landis?”

“You did. Then you laughed and made me laugh too. Then you—”

“What did I do then?” he asked, far too humbly.