Chapter 11. The Call Of The Rain

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_ CHAPTER XI. THE CALL OF THE RAIN

The park was very misty and damp and still that morning.

There was a scent of sap and new buds in the February haze, a glimmer of green on southern slopes, a distant bird note, tentative, then confident, rippling from the gray tangle of naked thickets. Here and there in hollows the tips of amber-tinted shoots pricked the soil's dark surface; here and there in the sparse woodlands a withered leaf still clinging to oak or beech was forced to let go by the swelling bud at its base and fell rustling stiffly in the silence.

Far away on the wooded bridle-path the dulled double gallop of horses sounded, now muffled in a hollow, now louder, jarring the rising ground, nearer, heavier, then suddenly checked to a trample, as Sylvia drew bridle by the reservoir, and, straightening in her saddle, raised her flushed face to the sky.

"Rain?" she asked, as Quarrier, controlling his beautiful, restive horse, ranged up beside her.

"Probably," he said, scarcely glancing at the sky, where, above the great rectangular lagoons, hundreds of sea-gulls, high in the air, hung flapping, stemming some rushing upper gale unfelt below.

She walked her mount, head lifted, watching the gulls; he followed, uninterested, imperturbable in his finished horsemanship. With horses he always appeared to advantage, whether on the box of break or coach, or silently controlling a spike or tandem, or sitting his saddle in his long-limbed, faultless fashion, maintaining without effort the very essence of form. Here he was at his best, perfectly informal, informally perfect.

They had ridden every day since the weather permitted--even before it permitted--thrashing and slashing through the rotting ice and snow, galloping over the frozen, gravelly loam, amid leafless trees and a winter-smitten perspective--drearier for the distant, eastern glimpse of the avenue's marble and limestone facades and the vast cliffs of masonry and brick looming above the west and south.

On these daily rides together it was her custom to discuss practical matters concerning their future; and it was his custom to listen until pressed for a suggestion, an assent, or a reply.

Sparing words--cautious, chary of self-commitment, and seldom offering to assume the initiative--this was the surface character which she had come to recognise and acquiesce in; this was Quarrier as he had been developed from her hazy, preconceived ideas of the man before she had finally accepted him at Shotover the autumn before. She also knew him as a methodical man, exacting from others the orderly precision which characterised his own dealings; a man of education and little learning, of attainments and little cultivation, conversant with usages, formal, intensely sensitive to ridicule, incapable of humour.

This was Quarrier as she knew him or had known him. Recently she had, little by little, become aware of an indefinable change in the man. For one thing, he had grown more reticent. At times, too, his reserve seemed to have something almost surly about it; under his cold composure a hint of something concealed, watchful, and very quiet.

Confidences she had never looked for in him nor desired. It appalled her at moments to realise how little they had in common, and that only on the surface--a communion of superficial interest incident to the fulfilment of social duties and the pursuit of pleasure. Beyond that she knew nothing of him, required nothing of him. What was there to know? what to require?

Now that the main line of her route through life had been surveyed and carefully laid out, what was there more for her in life than to set out upon her progress? It was her own road. Presumptive leader already, logical leader from the day she married--leader, in fact, when the ukase, her future legacy, so decreed; it was a royal road laid out for her through the gardens and pleasant places; a road for her alone, and over it she had chosen to pass. What more was there to desire?

From the going of Siward, all that he had aroused in her of love, of intelligence, of wholesome desire and sane curiosity--the intellectual restlessness, the capacity for passion, the renaissance of the simpler innocence--had subsided into the laissez faire of dull quiescence. If in her he had sown, imprudently, subtle, impulsive, unworldly ideas, flowering into sudden brilliancy in the quick magic of his companionship, now those flowers were dead under the inexorable winter of her ambition, where all such things lay; her lonely childhood, with its dimmed visions of mother-love ineffable; the strange splendour of the dreams haunting her adolescence--pageants of bravery and the glitter of the cross, altars of self-denial and pure intent, service and sacrifice and the scorn of wrong; and sometimes, seen dimly with enraptured eyes through dissolving mists--the man! glimmering for an instant, then fading, resolved into the starry void which fashioned him.

Riding there, head bent, her pulses timing the slow pacing of her horse, she presently became aware, without looking up, that Quarrier was watching her. Dreams vanished. A perfectly unreasonable sense of being spied upon, of something stealthy about it all, flashed to her mind and was gone, leaving her grave and perplexed. What a strange suspicion! What an infernal inference! What grotesque train of thought could have culminated in such a sinister idea!

She moved slightly in her saddle to look at him, and for an instant fancied that there was something furtive in his eyes; only for an instant, for he quietly picked up the thread of conversation where she had dropped it, saying that it had been raining for the last ten minutes, and that they might as well turn their horses toward shelter.

"I don't mind the rain," she said; "there is a spring-like odour in it. Don't you notice it?"

"Not particularly," he replied.

"I was miles away a moment ago," she said; "years away, I mean--a little girl again, with two stiff yellow braids, trying to pretend that a big arm-chair was my mother's lap and that I could hear her whispering to me. And there I sat, on a day like this, listening, pretending, cuddled up tight, and looking out at the first rain of the year falling in the backyard. There was an odour like this about it all. Memory, they say, is largely a matter of nose!" She laughed, fearing that he might have thought her sentimental, already regretting the familiarity of thrusting such trivial and personal incidents upon his notice. He was probably too indifferent to comment on it, merely nodding as she ended.

Then, without reason, through and through her shot a shiver of loneliness--utter loneliness and isolation. Without reason, because from him she expected nothing, required nothing, except what he offered--the emotionless reticence of indifference, the composure of perfect formality. What did she want, then--companions? She had them. Friends? She could scarcely escape from them. Intimates? She had only to choose one or a hundred attuned responsive to her every mood, every caprice. Lonely? With the men of New York crowding, shouldering, crushing their way to her feet? Lonely? With the women of New York struggling already for precedence in her favour?--omen significant of the days to come, of those future years diamond-linked in one unbroken, triumphant glitter.

Lonely!

The rain was falling out of the hanging mist, something more than a drizzle now. Quarrier spoke of it again, but she shook her head, walking her horse slowly onward. The train of thought she followed was slower still, winding on and on, leading her into half light and shadow, and in and out through hidden trails she should have known by this time--always on, skirting the objective, circling it through sudden turns. And now she was becoming conscious of the familiar way; now she recognised the quiet, still by-ways of the maze she seemed doomed to wander in forever. But, for that matter, all paths of thought were alike to her, for, sooner or later, all ultimately led to him; and this she was already aware of as a disturbing phenomenon to consider and account for and to provide against--when she had leisure.

"About that Amalgamated Electric Company," she began without prelude; "would you mind answering a question or two, Howard?"

"You could not understand it," he said, unpleasantly disturbed by her abruptness.

"As you please. It is quite true I can make nothing of what the newspapers are saying about it, except that Mr. Plank seems to be doing a number of things."

"Injunctions, and other matters," observed Quarrier.

"Is anybody going to lose any money in it?"

"Who, for example?"

"Why--you, for example," she said, laughing.

"I don't expect to."

"Then it is going to turn out all right? And Mr. Plank and Kemp Ferrall and the major and--the other people interested, are not going to be almost ruined by the Inter-County people?"

"Do you think a man like Plank is likely to be ruined, as you say, by Amalgamated Electric?"

"No. But Kemp and the major--"

"I think the major is out of danger," replied Quarrier, looking at her with the new, sullen narrowing of his eyes.

"I am glad of that. Is Kemp--and the others?"

"Ferrall could stand it if matters go wrong. What others?"

"Why--the other owners and stockholders--"

"What others? Who do you mean?"

"Mr. Siward, for example," she said in an even voice, leaning over to pat her horse's neck with her gloved hand.

"Mr. Siward must take the chances we all take," observed Quarrier.

"But, Howard, it would really mean ruin for him if matters went badly. Wouldn't it?"

"I am not familiar with the details of Mr. Siward's investments."

"Nor am I," she said slowly.

He made no reply.

Lack of emotion in the man beside her she always expected, and therefore this new, sullen note in his voice perplexed her. Too, at times, in his increasing reticence there seemed to be almost a hint of cold effrontery. She felt it now--an indefinite suggestion of displeasure and the power to retaliate; something evasive, watchful, patiently hostile; and, try as she might, she could not rid herself of the discomfort of it, and the perplexity.

She spoke about other things; he responded in his impassive manner. Presently she turned her horse and Quarrier wheeled his, facing a warm, fine rain, slanting thickly from the south.

His silky, Vandyke beard was all wet with the moisture. She noticed it, and unbidden arose the vision of the gun-room at Shotover: Quarrier's soft beard wet with rain; the phantoms of people passing and repassing; Siward's straight figure swinging past, silhouetted against the glare of light from the billiard-room. And here she made an effort to efface the vision, shutting her eyes as she rode there in the rain. But clearly against the closed lids she saw the phantoms passing--spectres of dead hours, the wraith of an old happiness masked with youth and wearing Siward's features!

She must stop it! What was all this crowding in upon her as she rode forward through the driving rain--all this resurgence of ghosts long laid, long exorcised? Had the odour of the rain stolen her senses, awakening memory of childish solitude? Was it that which was drugging her with remembrance of Siward and the rattle of rain in the bay-window above the glass-roofed swimming-pool?

She opened her eyes wide, staring straight ahead into the thickening rain; but her thoughts were loosened now, tuned to the increasing rhythm of her heart: and she saw him seated there, his head buried in his hands as she stole through the dim corridors to her first tryst; saw him look up; saw herself beside him among the cushions; tasted again the rose-petals that her lips had stripped from the blossoms; saw once more the dawn of something in his steady eyes; felt his arm about her, his breath--

Her horse, suddenly spurred, bounded forward through the rain, and she rode breathless, with lips half parted, as if afraid, turning her head to look behind--as though she could outride the phantom clinging to her stirrup, masked like youth, wearing the shadowy eyes of Love!

In her drenched habit, standing before her dressing-room fire, she heard her maid soliciting entrance, and paid no heed, the door being locked--as though a spectre could be bolted out of rooms and houses! Pacing the floor, restless, annoyed, and dismayed by turns, she flung her wet skirt and coat from her, piece by piece, and stood for awhile, like some slender youth in riding breeches and shirt, facing the fire, her fingers resting on her hips.

In the dull light of a rainy noon-day the fire reddened the ceiling, throwing her giant shadow across the wall, where it towered, swaying, like a ghost above her. She caught sight of it over her shoulder, and watched it absently; then gazed into the coals again, her chin dropping on her bared chest.

At her maid's repeated knocking she turned, her boots and the single spur sparkling in the firelight, and opened the door.

An hour later, fresh from her bath, luxurious in loose and filmy lace, her small, white feet shod with silk, she lunched alone, cradled among the cushions of her couch.

Twice she strolled through the rooms leisurely, summoned by her maid to the telephone; the first time to chat with Grace Ferrall, who, it appeared, was a victim of dissipation, being still abed, and out of humour with the rainy world; the second time to answer in the negative Marion's suggestion that she motor to Lakewood with her for the week's end before they closed their house.

Sauntering back again, she sipped her milk and vichy, tasted the strawberries, tasted a big black grape, discarded both, and lay back among the cushions, her naked arms clasped behind her head, and dropping one knee over the other, stared at the ceiling.

Restlessness and caprice ruled her. She seldom smoked, but seeing on the table a stray cigarette of the sort she kept for any intimates who might desire them, she stretched out her arm, scratched a match, and lighted it with a dainty grimace.

Lying there, she tried to make rings; but the smoke only got into her delicate uptilted nose and stung her tongue, and she very soon had enough of her cigarette.

Watching the slow fire consume it between her fingers she lay supine, following the spirals of smoke with inattentive eyes. By-and-by the lengthening ash fell, powdering her, and she threw the cigarette into the grate, flicked the ashes from her bare, round arm, and, clasping her hands under her neck, turned over and closed her eyes.

Sleep?--with every pulse awake and throbbing, every heart-beat sending the young blood rushing out through a body the incarnation of youth and life itself! There was a faint flush in the hollow of each upturned palm, where the fingers like relaxed petals curled inward; a deepening tint in the parted lips; and under the lids, through the dusk of the lashes, a glimmer of blue.

Lying there, veiled gaze conscious of the rose-light which glowed and waned on the ceiling, she awaited the flowing tide on which so often she had embarked and drifted out into that golden gloom serene, where, spirit becalmed, Time and Grief faded, and Desire died out upon the unshadowed sea of dreams.

It is long waiting for the tide when the wakeful heart beats loudly, when the pulses quicken at a memory, and the thousand idle little cellules of the brain, long sealed, long unused, and consigned to the archives of What Is Ended, open one by one, releasing each its own forgotten ghost.

And how can the heart rest, the pulse sleep, startled to a flutter, as one by one the tiny cells unclose unbidden, and the dead remembrance, from its cerements freed, brightens to life?

Words he had used, the idle lifting of his head, the forgotten inflection of his voice, the sunlight on his hair and the sea-wind stirring it; his figure as it turned to move away, the half-caught echo of his laugh, faint, faint!--so that her own ears, throbbing, strained to listen; the countless unimportant moments she had thought unmarked, yet carefully stored up, without her knowledge, in the magic cellules of her brain--all, all were coming back to life, more and more distinct, startlingly clear.

And she lay like one afraid to move, lest her stirring waken a vague something that still slept, something she dared not arouse, dared not meet face to face, even in dreams. An interval--perhaps an hour, perhaps a second--passed, leaving her stranded so close to the shoals of slumber that sleep passed only near enough to awaken her.

The room was very still and dim, but the clamour in her brain unnerved her, and she sat up among the cushions, looking vacantly about her with the blue, confused eyes, the direct, unseeing gaze of a child roused by a half-heard call.

The call--low, imperative, sustained--continued softly persistent against her windows--the summons of the young year's rain.

She went to the window and stood among the filmy curtains, looking out into the mist; a springlike aroma penetrated the room. She opened the window a little way, and the sweet, virile odour enveloped her.

A thousand longings rose within her; unnumbered wistful questions stirred her, sighing, unanswered.

Aware that her lips were moving unconsciously, she listened to the words forming automatic repetitions of phrases long forgotten:

"And those that look out of the windows be darkened, And the door shall be shut in the streets."

What was it she was repeating?

"Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fear shall be in the way."

What echo of the past was this?

"And desire shall fail: because--"

Intent, absorbed in retracing the forgotten sequence to its source, she stood, breathing the thickening incense of the rain; and every breath was drawing her backward, nearer, nearer to the source of memory. Ah, the cliff chapel in the rain!--the words of a text mumbled deafly--the yearly service for those who died at sea! And she, seated there in the chapel dusk thinking of him who sat beside her, and how he feared a heavier, stealthier, more secret tide crawling, purring about his feet!

Enfin! Always, always at the end of everything, He! Always, reckoning step by step, backward through time, He! the source, the inception, the meaning of all!

Unmoored at last, her spirit swaying, enveloped in memories of him, she gave herself to the flood--overwhelmed, as tide on tide rose, rushing over her--body, mind, and soul.

She closed her eyes, leaning there heavily amid the cloudy curtains; she moved back into the room and stood staring at space through wet lashes. The hard, dry pulse in her throat hurt her till her under lip, freed from the tyranny of her small teeth, slipped free, quivering rebellion.

She had been walking her room to and fro, to and fro, for a long time before she realised that she had moved at all.

And now, impulse held the helm; a blind, unreasoning desire for relief hurried into action on the wings of impulse.

There was a telephone at her elbow. No need to hunt through lists to find a number she had known so long by heart--the three figures which had reiterated themselves so often, monotonously insistent, slyly persuasive; repeating themselves even in her dreams, so that she awoke at times shivering with the vision in which she had listened to temptation, and had called to him across the wilderness of streets and men.

"Is he at home?"

"--!"

"Would you ask him to come to the telephone?"

"--!"

"Please say to him that it is a--a friend. ... Thank you."

In the throbbing quiet of her room she heard the fingers of the prying rain busy at her windows; the ticking of the small French clock, very dull, very far away--or was it her heart? And, faintly ringing in the receiver pressed against her ear, millions of tiny stirrings, sounds like instruments of an elfin orchestra tuning, echoes as of steps passing through the halls of fairy-land, a faint confusion of human-like tones; then:

"Who is it?"

Her voice left her for an instant; her dry lips made no answer.

"Who is it?" he repeated in his steady, pleasant voice.

"It is I."

There was absolute silence--so long that it frightened her. But before she could speak again his voice was sounding in her ears, patient, unconvinced:

"I don't recognise your voice. Who am I speaking to?"

"Sylvia."

There was no response, and she spoke again:

"I only wanted to say good morning. It is afternoon now; is it too late to say good morning?"

"No. I'm badly rattled. Is it you, Sylvia?"

"Indeed it is. I am in my own room. I--I thought--"

"Yes, I am listening."

"I don't know what I did think. Is it necessary for me to telephone you a minute account of the mental processes which ended by my calling you up--out of the vasty deep?"

The old ring in her voice hinting of the laughing undertone, the same trailing sweetness of inflection--could he doubt his senses any longer?

"I know you, now," he said.

"I should think you might. I should very much like to know how you are--if you don't mind saying?"

"Thank you. I seem to be all right. Are you all right, Sylvia?"

"Shamefully and outrageously well. What a season, too! Everybody else is in rags--make-up rags! Isn't that a disagreeable remark? But I'll come to the paint-brush too, of course. ... We all do. Doesn't anybody ever see you any more?"

She heard him laugh to himself unpleasantly; then: "Does anybody want to?"

"Everybody, of course! You know it. You always were spoiled to death."

"Yes--to death."

"Stephen!"

"Yes?"

"Are you becoming cynical?"

"I? Why should I?"

"You are! Stop it! Mercy on us! If that is what is going on in a certain house on lower Fifth Avenue, facing the corner of certain streets, it's time somebody dropped in to--"

"To--what?"

"To the rescue! I've a mind to do it myself. They say you are not well, either."

"Who says that?"

"Oh, the usual little ornithological cockatrice--or, rather, cantatrice. Don't ask me, because I won't tell you. I always tell you too much, anyway. Don't I?"

"Do you?"

"Of course I do. Everybody spoils you and so do I."

"Yes--I am rather in that way, I suppose."

"What way?"

"Oh--spoiled."

"Stephen!"

"Yes?"

And in a lower voice: "Please don't say such things--will you?"

"No."

"Especially to me."

"Especially to you. No, I won't, Sylvia."

And, after a hesitation, she continued sweetly:

"I wonder what you were doing, all alone in that old house of yours, when I called you up?"

"I? Let me see. Oh, I was superintending some packing."

"Are you going off somewhere?"

"I think so."

"Where?"

"I don't know, Sylvia."

"Stephen, how absurd! You must know where you are going! If you mean that you don't care to tell me--"

"I mean--that."

"I decline to be snubbed. I'm shameless, and I wish to be informed. Please tell me."

"I'd rather not tell you."

"Very well. ... Good-bye. ... But don't ring off just yet, Stephen. ... Do you think that, sometime, you would care to see--any people--I mean when you begin to go out again?"

"Who, for example?"

"Why, anybody?"

"No; I don't think I should care to."

"I wish you would care to. It is not well to let go every tie, drop everybody so completely. No man can do that to advantage. It would be so much better for you to go about a bit--see and be seen, you know; just to meet a few people informally; go to see some pretty girl you know well enough to--to--"

"To what? Make love to?"

"That would he very good for you," she said.

"But not for the pretty girl. Besides, I'm rather too busy to go about, even if I were inclined to."

"Are you really busy, Stephen?"

"Yes--waiting. That is the very hardest sort of occupation. And I'm obliged to be on hand every minute."

"But you said that you were going out of town."

"Did I? Well, I did not say it, exactly, but I am going to leave town."

"For very long?" she asked.

"Perhaps. I can't tell yet."

"Stephen, before you go--if you are going for a very, very long while--perhaps you will--you might care to say good-bye?"

"Do you think it best?"

"No," she said innocently; "but if you care--"

"Do you care to have me?"

"Yes, I do."

There was a silence; and when his voice sounded again it had altered:

"I do not think you would care to see me, Sylvia. I--they say I am--I have--changed--since my--since a slight illness. I am not over it yet, not cured--not very well yet; and a little tired, you see--a little shaken. I am leaving New York to--to try once more to be cured. I expect to be well--one way or another--"

"Stephen, where are you going? Answer me!"

"I can't answer you."

"Is your illness serious?"

"A--it is--it requires some--some care."

Her fingers tightening around the receiver whitened to the delicate nails under the pressure. Mute, struggling with the mounting impulse, voice and lip unsteady, she still spoke with restraint:

"You say you require care? And what care have you? Who is there with you? Answer me!"

"Why--everybody; the servants. I have care enough."

"Oh, the servants! Have you a physician to advise you?"

"Certainly--the best in the world. Sylvia, dea--, Sylvia, I didn't mean to give you an impression--"

"Stephen, I will have you truthful with me! I know perfectly well you are ill. I--if I could only--if there was something, some way--Listen: I am--I am going to do something about it, and I don't care very much what I do!"

"What sweet nonsense!" he laughed, but his voice was no steadier than hers.

"Will you drive with me?" she asked impulsively, "some afternoon--"

"Sylvia, dear, you don't really want me to do it. Wait, listen: I--I've got to tell you that--that I'm not fit for it. I've got to be honest with you; I am not fit, not in physical condition to go out just yet. I've really been ill--for weeks. Plank has been very nice to me. I want to get well; I mean to try very hard. But the man you knew--is--changed."

"Changed?"

"Not in that way!" he said in a slow voice.

"H-how, then?" she stammered, all a-thrill.

"Nerve gone--almost. Going to get it back again, of course. Feel a million times better already for talking with you."

"Do--does it really help?"

"It's the only panacea for me," he said too quickly to consider his words.

"The only one?" she faltered. "Do you mean to say that your trouble--illness--has anything to do with--"

"No, no! I only--"

"Has it, Stephen?"

"No!"

"Because, if I thought--"

"Sylvia, I'm not that sort! You mustn't talk to me that way. There's nothing to be sorry for about me. Any man may lose his nerve, and, if he is a man, go after it and get it back again. Every man has a fighting chance. You said it yourself once--that a man mustn't ask for a fighting chance; he must take it. And I'm going to take it and win out one way or another."

"What do you mean by 'another,' Stephen?"

"I--Nothing. It's a phrase."

"What do you mean? Answer me!"

"It's a phrase," he said again; "no meaning, you know."

"Stephen, Mr. Plank says that you are lame."

"What did he say that for?" demanded Siward wrathfully.

"I asked him. Kemp saw you on crutches at your window. So I asked Mr. Plank, and he said you had discarded your crutches too soon and had fallen and lamed yourself again. Are you able to walk yet?"

"Yes, of course."

"Outdoors?"

"A--no, not just yet."

"In other words, you are practically bedridden."

"No, no! I can get about the room very well."

"You couldn't go down-stairs--for an hour's drive, could you?"

"Can't manage that for awhile," he said hastily.

"Oh, the vanity of you, Stephen Siward! the vanity! Ashamed to let me see you when you are not your complete and magnificently attractive self! Silly, I shall see you! I shall drive down on the first sunny morning and sit outside in my victoria until you can't stand the temptation another instant. I'm going to do it. You cannot stop me; nobody can stop me. I desire to do it, and that is sufficient, I think, for everybody concerned. If the sun is out to-morrow, I shall be out too! ... I am so tired of not seeing you! Let central listen! I don't care. I don't care what I am saying. I've endured it so long--I--There's no use! I am too tired of it, and I want to see you. ... Can't we see each other without--without--thinking about things that are settled once and for all?"

"I can't," he said.

"Then you'd better learn to! Because, if you think I'm going through life without seeing you frequently you are simple! I've stood it too long at a time. I won't go through this sort of thing again! You'd better be amiable; you'd better be civil to me, or--or--nobody on earth can tell what will happen! The idea of you telling me you had lost your nerve! You've got to get it back--and help me find mine! Yes, it's gone, gone, gone! I lost it in the rain, somewhere, to-day. ... Does the scent of the rain come in at your window? ... Do you remember--There! I can't say it. ... Good-bye. Good-bye. You must get well and I must, too. Good-bye."

The fruit of her imprudence was happiness--an excited happiness, which lasted for a day. The rain lasted, too, for another day, then turned to snow, choking the city with such a fall as had not been seen since the great blizzard--blocking avenues, barricading cross-streets, burying squares and circles and parks, and still falling, drifting, whirling like wind-whipped smoke from cornice and roof-top. The electric cars halted; even the great snow-ploughs roared impotent amid the snowy wastes; waggons floundered into cross-streets and stuck until dug out; and everywhere, in the thickening obscurity, battalions of emergency men with pick and shovel struggled with the drifts in Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Then the storm ended at daybreak.

All day long squadrons of white gulls wheeled and sailed in the sky above the snowy expanse of park where the great, rectangular sheets of water glimmered black in their white setting. As she sat at her desk she could see them drifting into and out of the gray squares of sky framed by her window-panes. Two days ago she had seen them stemming the sky blasts, heralding the coming of unfelt tempests, flapping steadily through the fragrant rain. Now, the false phantom which had mimicked spring turned on the world the glassy glare of winter, stupefying hope, stunning desire, clogging the life essence in all young, living things. The first vague summons, the restlessness of awakening aspiration, the first delicate, indrawn breath, were stilled to deathly immobility.

Sylvia, at her escritoire, chin cradled in her hollowed hand, sat listlessly inspecting her mail--the usual pile of bills and advertisements, social demands and interested appeals, with here and there a frivolous note from some intimate to punctuate the endless importunities.

Her housekeeper had come and gone; the Belwether establishment could jog through another day. Various specialists, who cared for the health and beauty of her body, had entered and made their unctuous exits. The major had gone to Tuxedo for the week's end; her maid had bronchitis; two horses required the veterinary, and the kitchen range a new water-back.

Cards had come for the Caithness function; cards for young Austin Wadsworth's wedding to a Charleston girl of rumoured beauty; Caragnini was to sing for Mrs. Vendenning; a live llama, two-legged, had consented to undermine Christianity for Mrs. Pyne-Johnson and her guests.

"Would Sylvia be ready for the inspection of imported head-gears to harmonise with the gowns being built by Constantine?

"When--

"Would she receive the courteous agent of 'The Reigning Beauties of Manhattan,' to arrange for her portrait and biographical sketch?

"When--

"Would she realise that Jefferson B. Doty could turn earth into heaven for any young chatelaine by affixing to the laundry his anti-microbe drying machine emitting sixty sterilised hot-air blasts in thirty seconds, at a cost of one-tenth of one mill per blast?

"And when--"

But she turned her head, looking wearily across the room at the brightly burning fire beside which Mrs. Ferrall sat, nibbling mint-paste, very serious over one of those books that "everybody was reading."

"How far have you read?" inquired Sylvia without interest, turning over a new letter to cut with her paper-knife.

Grace ruffled the uncut pages of her book without looking up, then yawned shamelessly: "She's decided to try living with him for awhile, and if they find life agreeable she'll marry him. ... Pleasant situation, isn't it? Nice book, very; and they say that somebody is making a play of it. I"--She yawned again, showing her small, brilliant teeth--"I wonder what sort of people write these immoral romances!"

"Probably immoral people," said Sylvia indifferently. "Drop it on the coals, Grace."

But Mrs. Ferrall reopened the book where she had laid her finger to mark the place. "Do you think so?" she asked.

"Think what?"

"That rotten books and plays come from morally rotten people?"

"I don't think about it at all," observed Sylvia, opening another letter impatiently.

"You're probably not very literary," said Grace mischievously.

"Not in that way, I suppose."

Mrs. Ferrall took another bonbon: "Did you see 'Mrs. Lane's Experiment'?"

"I did," said Sylvia, looking up, the pink creeping into her cheeks.

"You thought it very strong, I suppose?" asked Grace innocently.

"I thought it incredible."

"But, dear, it was sheer realism! Why blink at truth? And when an author has the courage to tell facts why not have the courage to applaud?"

"If that is truth, it doesn't concern me," said Sylvia. "Grace, why will you pose, even if you are married? for you have a clean mind, and you know it!"

"I know it," sighed Mrs. Ferrall, closing her book again, but keeping the place with her finger; "and that's why I'm so curious about all these depraved people. I can't understand why writers have not found out that we women are instinctively innocent, even after we are obliged to make our morality a profession and our innocence an art. They all hang their romances to motives that no woman recognises as feminine; they ascribe to us instincts which we do not possess, passions of which we are ignorant--a ridiculous moral turpitude in the overmastering presence of love. Pooh! If they only knew what a small part love plays with us, after all!"

Sylvia said slowly: "It sometimes plays a small part, after all."

"Always," insisted Grace with emphasis. "No carefully watched girl knows what it is, whatever her suspicions may be. When she marries, if she doesn't marry from family pressure or from her own motives of common-sense ambition, she marries because she likes the man, not because she loves him."

Sylvia was silent.

"Because, even if she wanted to love him," continued Grace, "she would not know how. It's the ingrained innocence which men encounter that they don't allow for or understand in us. Even after we are married, and whether or not we learn to love our husbands, it remains part of us as an educated instinct; and it takes all the scientific, selfish ruthlessness of a man to break it down. That's why I say so few among us ever comprehend the motives attributed to us in romance or in that parody of it called realism. Love is rarer with us than men could ever believe--and I'm glad of it," she said maliciously, with a final snap of her pretty teeth.

"It was on that theory you advised me, I think," said Sylvia, looking into the fire.

"Advised you, child?"

"Yes--about accepting Howard."

"Certainly. Is it not a sound theory? Doesn't it stand inspection? Doesn't it wear?"

"It--wears," said Sylvia indifferently. Grace looked up from her open book. "Is anything amiss?" she asked.

"I don't know."

"Of course you know, child. What is wrong? Has Howard made himself insufferable? He's a master at it. Has he?"

"No; I don't remember that he has. ... I'm tired, physically. I'm tired of the winter."

"Go to Florida for Lent."

"Horror! It's as stupid as a hothouse. It isn't that, either, dear--only, when it was raining so deliciously the other day I was silly enough to think I scented the spring in the park. I was glad of a change you know--any excuse to stop this eternal carnival I live in."

"What is the matter?" demanded Mrs. Ferrall, withdrawing her finger from the pages and plumping the closed book down on her knee. "You'd better tell me, Sylvia; you might just as well tell me now as later when my persistence has vexed us both. Now, what has happened?"

"I have been--imprudent," said Sylvia, in a low voice.

"You mean,"--Mrs. Ferrall looked at her keenly--"that he has been here?"

"No. I telephoned him; and I asked him to drive with me."

"Oh, Sylvia, what nonsense! Why on earth do you stir yourself up by that sort of silliness at this late date? What use is it? Can't you let him alone?"

"I--No, I can't, it seems. Grace, I was--I felt so--so strangely about it all."

"About what, little idiot?"

"About leaving him--alone."

"Are you Stephen Siward's keeper?" demanded Mrs. Ferrall, exasperated.

"I felt as though I were, for awhile. He is ill."

"With an illness that, thank God, you are not going to nurse through life. Don't look at me that way, dear. I'm obliged to speak harshly; I'm obliged to harden my heart to such a monstrous idea. You know I love you; you know I care deeply for that poor boy--but do you think I could be loyal to either of you and not say what I do say? He is doomed, as sure as you sit there! He has fallen, and no one can help him. Link after link he has broken with his own world; his master-vice holds him faster, closer, more absolutely, than hell ever held a lost soul!"

"Grace, I cannot endure--"

"You must! Are you trying to drug your silly self with romance so you won't recognise truth when you see it? Are you drifting back into old impulses, unreasoning whims of caprice? Have you forgotten what I know of you, and what you know of yourself? Is the taint of your transmitted inheritance beginning to show in you--the one woman of your race who is fashioned to withstand it and stamp it out?"

"I am mistress of my emotions," said Sylvia, flushing.

"Then suppress them," retorted Grace Ferrall hotly, "before they begin to bully you. There was no earthly reason for you to talk to Stephen. No disinterested impulse moved you. It was a sheer perverse, sentimental restlessness--the delicate, meddlesome deviltry of your race. And if that poison is in you, it's well for you to know it."

"It is in me," said Sylvia, staring at the fire.

"Then you know what to do for it."

"No, I don't."

"Well, I do," said Grace decisively; "and the sooner you marry Howard and intrench yourself behind your pride, the better off you'll be. That's where, fortunately enough, you differ from your ancestors; you are unable to understand marital treachery. Otherwise you'd make it lively for us all."

"It is true," said Sylvia deliberately, "that I could not be treacherous to anybody. But I am wondering; I am asking myself just what constitutes treachery to myself."

"Sentimentalising over Stephen might fill the bill," observed Grace tartly.

"But it doesn't seem to," mused Sylvia, her blue gaze on the coals. "That is what I do not understand. I have no conscience concerning what I feel for him."

"What do you feel?"

"I was in love with him. You knew it."

"You liked him," insisted Grace patiently.

"No--loved him. I know. Dear, your theories are sound in a general way, but what is a girl going to do about it when she loves a man? You say a young girl can't love--doesn't know how. But I do love, though it is true that I don't know how to love very wisely. What is the use in denying it? This winter has been a deafening, stupefying fever to me. The sheer noise of it stunned me until I forgot how I did feel about anything. Then--I don't know--somehow, in the rain out there, I began to wake ... Dear, the old instincts, the old desires, the old truths, came back out of chaos; that full feeling here"--she laid her fingers on her throat--"the sense of expectancy, the restless hope growing out of torpid acquiescence--all returned; and, dearest, with them all came memories of him. What am I to do? Could you tell me?"

For a long while Mrs. Ferrall sat in troubled silence, her hand shading her eyes. Sylvia, leaning over her desk, idling with pen and pencil, looked around from time to time, as though awaiting the opinion of some specialist who, in full possession of the facts, now had become responsible for the patient.

"If you marry him," said Mrs. Ferrall quietly, "your life will become a hell."

"Yes. But would it make life any easier for him?" asked Sylvia.

"How--to know that you had been dragged down?"

"No. I mean could I do anything for him?"

"No woman ever did. That is a sentimental falsehood of the emotional. No woman ever did help a man in that way. Sylvia, if love were the only question, and if you do truly love him, I--well, I suppose I'd be fool enough to advise you to be a fool. Even then you'd be sorry. You know what your future may be; you know what you are fitted for. What can you do without Howard? In this town your role would be a very minor one without Howard's money, and you know it."

"Yes, I know it."

"And your sacrifice could not help that doomed boy."

Sylvia nodded assent.

"Then, is there any choice? Is there any question of what to do?"

Sylvia looked out into the winter sky, through the tops of snowy trees; everywhere the stark, deathly rigidity of winter. Under it, frozen, lay the rain that had scented the air. Under her ambition lay the ghosts of yesterday.

"No," she said, "there is no question of choice. I know what must be."

Grace, seated in the firelight, looked up as Sylvia rose from her desk and came across the room; and when she sank down on the rug at her feet, resting her cheek against the elder woman's knees, nothing was said for a long time--a time of length sufficient to commit a memory to its grave, lay it away decently and in quiet befitting.

Sore doubt assailed Grace Ferrall, guiltily aware that once again she had meddled; and in the calm tenor of her own placid, marital satisfaction, looking backward along the pleasant path she had trodden with its little monuments to love at decent intervals amid the agreeable monotony of content, her heart and conscience misgave her lest she had counselled this young girl wrongly, committing her to the arid lovelessness which she herself had never known.

Leaning there, her fingers lingering in light caress on Sylvia's bright hair, for every doubt she brought up argument, to every sentimental wavering within her heart she opposed the chilling reason of common sense. Destruction to happiness lay in Sylvia's yielding to her caprice for Siward. There was other happiness in the world besides the non-essential one of love. That must be Sylvia's portion. And after all--and after all, love was a matter of degree; and it was well for Sylvia that she had the malady so lightly--well for her that it had advanced so little, lest she suspect what its crowning miracles might be and fall sick of a passion for what she had forever lost.

For a week or more the snow continued; colder, gloomier weather set in, and the impending menace of Ash Wednesday redoubled the social pace, culminating in the Westervelt ball on the eve of the forty days. And Sylvia had not yet seen Siward or spoken to him again across the wilderness of streets and men.

In the first relaxation of Lent she had instinctively welcomed an opportunity for spiritual consolation and a chance to take her spiritual bearings; not because of bodily fatigue--for in the splendour of her youthful vigour she did not know what that meant.

Saint Berold was a pretty good saint, and his church was patronised by Major Belwether's household. The major liked two things high: his game and his church. Sylvia cared for neither, but had become habituated to both the odours of sanctity and of pheasants; so to Saint Berold's she went in cure of her soul. Besides, she was fond of Father Curtis, who, if he were every inch a priest, was also every foot of his six feet a man--simple, good, and brave.

However, she found little opportunity, save at her brief confession, for a word with Father Curtis. His days were full days to the overbrimming, and a fashionable pack was ever at his heels, fawning and shoving and importuning. It was fashionable to adore Father Curtis, and for that reason she shrank from venturing any demand upon his time, and nobody else at Saint Berold's appealed to her. Besides, the music was hard, commonplace, even blatant at times, and, having a delicate ear, she shrank from this also. It is probable then that what comfort she found under Saint Berold's big, brand-new Episcopal cross she extracted from observing the rites, usages, and laws of a creed that had been accepted for her by that Christian gentleman, Major Belwether. Also, she may have found some solace from the still intervals devoted to an inventory of her sins and the wistful searching of a heart too young for sadness. If she did it was her own affair, not Grace Ferrall's, who went with her to Saint Berold's determined always to confess to too much gambling, but letting it go from day to day so that the penance could not interfere with the next seance.

Agatha Caithness was there a great deal, looking like a saint in her subdued plumage; and very devout, dodging nothing--neither confession nor Quarrier's occasionally lifted eyes, though their gaze, meeting, seemed lost in dreamy devotion or drowned in the contemplation of the spiritual and remote.

Plank came docilely from his Dutch Reformed church to sit beside Leila. As for Mortimer, once a vestryman, he never came at all--made no pretence or profession of what he elegantly expressed as "caring a damn" for anything "in the church line," though, he added, there were "some good lookers to be found in a few synagogues." His misconception of the attractions of the church amused the new set of men among whom he had recently drifted, to the unfeigned disgust of gentlemen like Major Belwether; "club" men, in the commoner and more sinister interpretation of the word; unfit men, who had managed to slip into good clubs; men, once fit, who had deteriorated to the verge of ostracism; heavy, over-fed, idle, insolent men in questionable financial situation, hard card players, hard drinkers, hard riders, negative in their virtues, merciless in their vices, and whose cynical misconduct formed the sources of the stock of stories told where such men foregather.

Mortimer had already furnished his world with sufficient material for jests of that flavour; now they were telling a new one: how, as Leila was standing before Tiffany's looking for her carriage, a masher accosted her, and, at her haughty stare, said sneeringly: "Oh, you can't play that game on me; I've seen you with Leroy Mortimer!"

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 habitues 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-careme 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 role 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.

"Little idiot! Going into a man's house in the face of all Fifth Avenue and the teeth of decency!"

"She has courage," said Sylvia, still very white.

"Courage! Do you mean fool-hardiness?"

"No, courage--the courage I lacked. I knew he was too ill to leave his room and I lacked the courage to go and see him."

"You mean, alone?"

"Certainly, alone."

"You dare tell me you ever contemplated--"

"Oh, yes. I think I should have done it yet, but--but Marion--"

Suddenly she bent forward, resting her face in her hands; and between the fingers a bright drop ran, glimmered, and fell.

"O Lord!" breathed Mrs. Ferrall, and sank back, nerveless, into her own corner of the rocking brougham. _

Read next: Chapter 12. The Asking Price

Read previous: Chapter 10. The Seamy Side

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