Robert Chambers - The Fighting Chance

“I’m probably a poor shot?” she said, looking smilingly, straight into Siward’s eyes. “But if you’ll take me—”

“I will with pleasure,” he said; “Dawson, do we draw for position? Very well then”; and he drew a slip of paper from the box offered by the head keeper.

“Number seven!” said Sylvia, looking over his shoulder. “Come out to the starting line, Mr. Siward. All the positions are marked with golf-discs. What sort of ground have we ahead, Dawson?”

“Kind o’ stiff, Miss,” grinned the keeper. “Pity your gentleman ain’t drawed the meadows an’ Sachem Hill line. Will you choose your dog, Sir?”

“You have your dog, you know,” observed Sylvia demurely. And Siward, glancing among the impatient setters, saw one white, heavily feathered dog, straining at his leash, and wagging frantically, brown eyes fixed on him.

The next moment Sagamore was free, devouring his master with caresses, the girl looking on in smiling silence; and presently, side by side, the man, the girl, and the dog were strolling off to the starting line where already people were gathering in groups, selecting dogs, fowling-pieces, comparing numbers, and discussing the merits of their respective lines of advance.

Ferrall, busily energetic, and in high spirits, greeted them gaily, pointing out the red disc bearing their number, seven, where it stood out distinctly above the distant scrub of the foreland.

“You two are certainly up against it!” he said, grinning. “There’s only one rougher line, and you’re in for thorns and water and a scramble across the back-bone of the divide!”

“Is it any good?” asked Siward.

“Good—if you’ve got the legs and Sylvia doesn’t play baby—”

“I?” she said indignantly. “Kemp, you annoy me. And I will bet you now,” she added, flushing, “that your old cup is ours.”

“Wait,” said Siward, laughing, “we may not shoot straight.”

“You will! Kemp, I’ll wager whatever you dare!”

“Gloves? Stockings?—against a cigarette case?” he suggested.

“Done,” she said disdainfully, moving forward along the skirmish line with a nod and smile for the groups now disintegrating into couples, the Page boys with Eileen Shannon and Rena Bonnesdel, Marion Page followed by Alderdene, Mrs. Vendenning and Major Belwether and the Tassel girl convoyed by Leroy Mortimer. Farther along the line, taking post, she saw Quarrier and Miss Caithness, Captain Voucher with Mrs. Mortimer, and others too distant to recognise, moving across country with glitter and glint of sunlight on slanting gun barrels.

And now Ferrall was climbing into his saddle beside his pretty wife, who sat her horse like a boy, the white flag lifted high in the sunshine, watching the firing line until the last laggard was in position.

“All right, Grace!” said Ferrall briskly. Down went the white flag; the far-ranged line started into motion straight across country, dogs at heel.

From her saddle Mrs. Ferrall could see the advance, strung out far afield from the dark spots moving along the Fells boundary, to the two couples traversing the salt meadows to north. Crack! A distant report came faintly over the uplands against the wind.

“Voucher,” observed Ferrall; “probably a snipe. Hark! he’s struck them again, Grace.”

Mrs. Ferrall, watching curiously, saw Siward’s gun fly up as two big dark spots floated up from the marsh and went swinging over his head. Crack! Crack! Down sheered the black spots, tumbling earthward out of the sky.

“Duck,” said Ferrall; “a double for Stephen. Lord Harry! how that man can shoot! Isn’t it a pity that—”

He said no more; his pretty wife astride her thoroughbred sat silent, grey eyes fixed on the distant figures of Sylvia Landis and Siward, now shoulder deep in the reeds.

“Was it—very bad last night?” she asked in a low voice.

Ferrall shrugged. “He was not offensive; he walked steadily enough up-stairs. When I went into his room he lay on the bed as if he’d been struck by lightning. And yet—you see how he is this morning?”

“After a while,” his wife said, “it is going to alter him some day—dreadfully—isn’t it, Kemp?”

“You mean—like Mortimer?”

“Yes—only Leroy was always a pig.”

As they turned their horses toward the high-road Mrs. Ferrall said: “Do you know why Sylvia isn’t shooting with Howard?”

“No,” replied her husband indifferently; “do you?”

“No.” She looked out across the sunlit ocean, grave grey eyes brightening with suppressed mischief. “But I half suspect.”

“What?”

“Oh, all sorts of things, Kemp.”

“What’s one of ‘em?” asked Ferrall, looking around at her; but his wife only laughed.

“You don’t mean she’s throwing her flies at Siward—now that you’ve hooked Quarrier for her! I thought she’d played him to the gaff—”

“Please don’t be coarse, Kemp,” said Mrs. Ferrall, sending her horse forward. Her husband spurred to her side, and without turning her head she continued: “Of course Sylvia won’t be foolish. If they were only safely married; but Howard is such a pill—”

“What does Sylvia expect with Howard’s millions? A man?”

Grace Ferrall drew bridle. “The curious thing is, Kemp, that she liked him.”

“Likes him?”

“No, liked him. I saw how it was; she took his silences for intellectual meditation, his gallery, his library, his smatterings for expressions of a cultivated personality. Then she remembered how close she came to running off with that cashiered Englishman, and that scared her into clutching the substantial in the shape of Howard.... Still, I wish I hadn’t meddled.”

“Meddled how?”

“Oh, I told her to do it. We had talks until daylight.... She may marry him—I don’t know—but if you think any live woman could be contented with a muff like that!”

“That’s immoral.”

“Kemp, I’m not. She’d be mad not to marry him; but I don’t know what I’d do to a man like that, if I were his wife. And you know what a terrific capacity for mischief there is in Sylvia. Some day she’s going to love somebody. And it isn’t likely to be Howard. And, oh, Kemp! I do grow so tired of that sort of thing. Do you suppose anybody will ever make decency a fashion?”

“You’re doing your best,” said Ferrall, laughing at his wife’s pretty, boyish face turned back toward him over her shoulder; “you’re presenting your cousin and his millions to a girl who can dress the part—”

“Don’t, Kemp! I don’t know why I meddled!… I wish I hadn’t—”

“I do. You can’t let Howard alone! You’re perfectly possessed to plague him when he’s with you, and now you’ve arranged for another woman to keep it up for the rest of his lifetime. What does Sylvia want with a man who possesses the instincts and intellect of a coachman? She is asked everywhere, she has her own money. Why not let her alone? Or is it too late?”

“You mean let her make a fool of herself with Stephen Siward? That is where she is drifting.”

“Do you think—”

“Yes, I do. She has a perfect genius for selecting the wrong man; and she’s already sorry for this one. I’m sorry for Stephen, too; but it’s safe for me to be.”

“She might make something of him.”

“You know perfectly well no woman ever did make anything of a doomed man. He’d kill her—I mean it, Kemp! He would literally kill her with grief. She isn’t like Leila Mortimer; she isn’t like most girls of her sort. You men think her a rather stunning, highly tempered, unreasonable young girl, with a reserve of sufficiently trained intelligence to marry the best our market offers—and close her eyes;—a thoroughbred with the caprices of one, but also with the grafted instinct for proper mating.”