The Firing Line by Robert W. Chambers

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"And I?" she faltered, deadly pale.

"You don't know what you're saying!" he said violently.

"I--I begin to think I do.... Garry--Garry--I am learning very fast!...
How can I let you go!"

"The idea is," he said grimly, "for me to go before I go insane.... And
never again to touch you--"

"Why?"

"Peril!" he said. "I'm just a plain blackguard, Shiela."

"Would it change you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Not to touch me, not to kiss me. Could you go on always just loving
me?... Because if you could not--through the years that are coming--I--I
had rather take the risk--with you--than lose you."

He stood, head bent, not trusting himself to speak or look at her.

"Good-night," she said timidly.

He straightened up, stared at her, and turned on his heel, saying good
night in a low voice.

"Garry!"

"Good-night," he muttered, passing on.

Her heart was beating so violently that she pressed her hand to it,
leaning against the door sill.

"Garry!" she faltered, stretching out the other hand to him in the
darkness, "I--I do not care about the--risk--if you care to--kiss me--"

He swung round from the shadows to the dimly lighted sill; crossed it.
For a moment they looked into one another's eyes; then, blinded, she
swayed imperceptibly toward him, sighing as his arms tightened and her
own crept up around his neck.

She yielded, resigning lips, and lids, and throat, and fragrant hair,
and each slim finger in caress unending.

Conscious of nothing save that body and soul were safe in his beloved
keeping, she turned to him in all the passion of a guiltless love,
whispering her adoration, her faith, her trust, her worship of the man
who held her; then, adrift once more, the breathless magic overwhelmed
her; and she drew him to her, closer, desperately, hiding her head on
his breast.

"Take me away, Garry," she stammered--"take me with you. There is no
use--no use fighting it back. I shall die if you leave me.... Will you
take me? I--will be--everything that--that you would have me--that you
might wish for--in--in a--wife--"

She was crying now, crying her heart out, her face crushed against his
shoulder, clinging to him convulsively.

"Will you take me, Garry? What am I without you? I cannot give you up! I
will not.... Nobody can ask that of me--How can they ask that of me?--to
give you up--to let you go out of my little world for ever--to turn from
you, refuse you!... What a punishment for one instant's folly! If they
knew they would not let me suffer this way!--They would want me to tell
them--"

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.

[Illustration: "Then fell prone, head buried in her tumbled hair."]

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.

He did like to see a fat deer; the fatter the better; he was accustomed,
too, to poke his thumb into the dead plumage of a plump grouse when
Malcourt's men laid out the braces, on which he himself never drew
trigger; and which interested him only when on the table.

He wanted plenty of game and fish on the place for that reason; he
wanted his guests to shoot and fish for that reason, too. Otherwise he
cared nothing for his deer, his grouse, and his trout. And why he
suddenly had been bitten with a mania for "improving" the flawless
wilderness about him, even Malcourt did not know.

Hamil, therefore, was prepared for a simple yet difficult problem--to do
as little harm to the place as possible, and to appease Portlaw at the
same time, and curb his meddlesome and iconoclastic proclivities.

Spring had begun early in the North; shallow snows were fading from the
black forest soil along the streams' edges, and from the pebbled shores
of every little lake; already the soft ice was afloat on pool and pond;
muskrats swam; the eggs of the woodcock were beginning their chilly
incubation; and in one sheltered spring-hole behind the greenhouse
Malcourt discovered a solemn frog afloat. It takes only a single frog to
make the spring-time.

That week the trailing fragrance of arbutus hung over wet hollows along
the hills; and at night, high in the starlight, the thrilling clangour
of wild geese rang out--the truest sky-music of the North among all the
magic folk-songs of the wild.

The anchor-ice let go and went out early, and a few pioneer trout jumped
that week; the cock-grouse, magnificent in his exquisite puffed ruff,
paced the black-wet drumming log, and the hollow woodlands throbbed all
day with his fairy drumming.

On hard-wood ridges every sugar-bush ran sap; the aroma from fire and
kettle sweetened the air; a few battered, hibernating butterflies
crawled out of cracks and crannies and sat on the sap-pans sunning
their scarlet-banded wings.

And out of the hot South into the fading silver of this chill Northern
forest-world came Hamil, sunburned, sombre-eyed, silent.

Malcourt met him at Pride's Fall with a buckboard and a pair of
half-broken little Morgans; and away they tore into the woods,
scrambling uphill, plunging downhill, running away most of the time to
the secret satisfaction of Malcourt, who cared particularly for what was
unsafe in life.

He looked sideways at Hamil once or twice, and, a trifle disappointed
that the pace seemed to suit him, let the little horses out.

"Bad thing to meet a logging team," he observed.

"Yes," said Hamil absently. So Malcourt let the horses run away when
they cared to; they needed it and he enjoyed it. Besides there were
never any logging teams on that road.

Malcourt inquired politely concerning the Villa Cardross and its
occupants; Hamil answered in generalities.

"You've finished there, then!"

"Practically. I may go down in the autumn to look it over once more."

"Is Cardross going to put in the Schwarzwald pigs?"

"Yes; they're ordered."

"Portlaw wants some here. I'd give ten dollars, poor as I am, if I could
get Portlaw out in the snow and fully occupied with an irritated boar."

"Under such circumstances one goes up a tree?" inquired Hamil, smiling.

"One does if one is not too fat and can shed snowshoes fast enough.
Otherwise one keeps on shooting one's 45-70. By the way, you were in New
York for a day or two. How's the market?"

"Sagging."

"Money?"

"Scarce. I saw Mr. Cardross and Acton Carrick. Nobody seems enthusiastic
over the prospect. While there are no loans being called there are few
being made. I heard rumours of course; a number of banks and trust
companies are getting themselves whispered about. Outside of that I
don't know, Malcourt, because I haven't much money and what I have is on
deposit with the Shoshone Securities Company pending a chance for some
safe and attractive investment."

"That's Cardross, Carrick & Co."

"Yes." And as they whirled into the clearing and the big, handsome house
came into view he smiled: "Is this Camp Chickadee?"

"Yes, and yonder's my cottage on Luckless Lake--a nice name," added
Malcourt, "but Portlaw says it's safer to leave the name as it stands
than to provoke the gods with boastful optimism by changing it to Lucky
Lake. Oh, it's a gay region; Lake Desolation lies just beyond that spur;
Lake Eternity east of us; Little Scalp Lake west--a fine bunch of names
for a landscape in hell; but Portlaw won't change them. West and south
the wet bones of the Sacandaga lie; and south-east you're up against the
Great Vlaie and Frenchman's Creek and Sir William's remains from Guy
Park on the Mohawk to the Fish House and all that bally Revolutionary
tommy-rot." And as he blandly drew in his horses beside the porch: "Look
who's here! Who but our rotund friend and lover of all things fat, lord
of the manor of Chickadee-dee-dee which he has taught the neighbouring
dicky-birds, who sit around the house, to repeat aloud in honour of--"

"For Heaven's sake, Louis! How are you, Hamil?" grunted Portlaw,
extending a heavily cushioned, highly coloured hand of welcome.

Hamil and Malcourt descended; a groom blanketed the horses and took them
to the stables; and Portlaw, with a large gesture of impatient
hospitality, led the way into a great, warm living-room, snug, deeply
and softly padded, and in which the fragrance of burning birch-logs and
simmering toddy blended agreeably in the sunshine.

"For luncheon," began Portlaw with animation, "we're going to try a new
sauce on that pair of black ducks they brought in--"

"In violation of the laws of game and decency," observed Malcourt,
shedding his fur coat and unstrapping the mail-satchel from Pride's
Fall.

"_Shut_ up, Louis! Can't a man eat the things that come into his own
property?" And he continued unfolding to Hamil his luncheon programme
while, with a silver toddy-stick, heirloom from bibulous generations of
Portlaws, he stirred the steaming concoction which, he explained, had
been constructed after the great Sir William's own receipt.

"You've never tried a Molly Brant toddy? Man alive, you've wasted your
youth," he insisted, genuinely grieved. "Well, wise men, chiefs, and
sachems, here's more hair on your scalp-locks, and a fat buck to every
bow!"

Malcourt picked up his glass. "_Choh_" he said maliciously; but Portlaw
did not understand the irony in the Seminole salutation of The Black
Drink; and the impudent toast was swallowed without suspicion.

Then Hamil's luggage arrived, and he went away to inspect his quarters,
prepare for luncheon, and exchange his attire for forest dress. For he
meant to lose no time in the waste corners of the earth when Gotham town
might any day suddenly bloom like Eden with the one young blossom that
he loved.

There was not much for him in Eden now--little enough except to be in
her vicinity, near her at times, at intervals with her long enough to
exchange a word or two under the smooth mask of convention which leaves
even the eyes brightly expressionless.

Never again to touch her hand save under the formal laws sanctioned by
usage; never again to wake with the intimate fragrance of her memory on
his lips; never again to wait for the scented dusk to give them to each
other--to hear her frail gown's rustle on the terrace, her footfall in
the midnight corridor, her far, sweet hail to him from the surf, her
soft laughter under the roses on the moon-lit balcony.

That--all of it--was forever ended. But he believed that the pallid
northern phantom of the past was still left to him; supposed that now,
at least, they might miserably consider themselves beyond peril.

But what man supposes of woman is vain imagining; and in that shadowy
neutral ground which lies between martyrdom and sin no maid dwells for
very long before she crosses one frontier or the other.

When he descended the stairs once more he found Portlaw, surrounded by
the contents of the mail-sack, and in a very bad temper, while Malcourt
stood warming his back at the blazing birch-logs, and gazing rather
stupidly at a folded telegram in his hands.

"Well, Hamil--damn it all! What do you think of that!" demanded Portlaw,
turning to Hamil as he entered the room; and unheeding Malcourt's
instinctive gesture of caution which he gave, not comprehending why he
gave it, Portlaw went on, fairly pouting out his irritation:

"In that bally mail-sack which Louis brought in from Pride's Fall
there's a telegram from your friend, Neville Cardross; and why the devil
he wants Louis to come to New York on the jump--"

"I have a small balance at the Shoshone Trust," said Malcourt. "Do you
suppose there's anything queer about the company?"

Hamil shook his head, looking curiously at Malcourt.

"Well, what on earth do you think Cardross wants with you?" demanded
Portlaw. "Read that telegram again."

Again Malcourt's instinct seemed to warn him to silence. All the same,
with a glance at Hamil, he unfolded the bit of yellow paper and read:

"LOUIS MALCOURT,
"Superintendent Luckless Lake,
"Adirondacks.

"Your presence is required at my office in the Shoshone
Securities Building on a matter of most serious and instant
importance. Telegraph what train you can catch. Mr. Carrick will
meet you on the train at Albany.

"NEVILLE CARDROSS.
"Answer Paid."

"Well, what the devil does it mean?" demanded Portlaw peevishly. "I
can't spare you now. How can I? Here's Hamil all ready for you to take
him about and show him what I want to have done--"

"I wonder what it means," mused Malcourt. "Maybe there's something wrong
with the Tressilvain end of the family. The Shoshone Securities people
manage her investments here--"

"The way to do is to wire and find out," grumbled Portlaw, leading the
way to the luncheon table as a servant announced that function.

For it was certainly a function with Portlaw; all eating was more or
less of a ceremony, and dinner rose to the dignity of a rite.

"I can't imagine what that telegram--"

"Forget it!" snapped Portlaw; "do you want to infect my luncheon? When a
man lunches he ought to give his entire mind to it. Talk about your lost
arts!--the art of eating scarcely survives at all. Find it again and you
revive that other lost art of prandial conversation. Digestion's not
possible without conversation. Hamil, you look at your claret in a funny
way."

"I was admiring the colour where the sun strikes through," said the
latter, amused.

"Oh! I thought you were remembering that claret is temporarily
unfashionable. That's part of the degeneracy of the times. There never
was and never will be any wine to equal it when it has the body of a
Burgundy and the bouquet of wild-grape blossoms. Louis," cocking his
heavy red face and considering a morsel of duck, "what is your opinion
concerning the proper melange for that plumcot salad dressing?"

"They say," said Malcourt gravely, "that when it's mixed, a current of
electricity passed through it gives it a most astonishing flavour--"

"What!"

"So they say at the Stuyvesant Club."

Portlaw's eyes bulged; Hamil had to bend his head low over his plate,
but Malcourt's bland impudence remained unperturbed.

"Good God!" muttered Portlaw; "Hamil, did you ever hear of passing
electricity through a salad dressing composed of olive oil, astragon,
Arequipa pepper, salt, Samara mustard, essence of anchovy, chives,
distilled fresh mushrooms, truffles pickled in 1840 port--_did_ you?"

"No," said Hamil, "I never did."

For a while silence settled upon the table while Portlaw struggled to
digest mentally the gastronomic suggestion offered by Malcourt.

"I could send to town for a battery," he said hesitatingly; "or--there's
my own electric plant--"

Malcourt yawned. There was not much fun in exploiting such a man.
Besides, Hamil had turned uncomfortable, evidently considering it the
worst of taste on Malcourt's part.

"What am I to do about that telegram?" he asked, lighting a cigarette.

Portlaw, immersed in sauce and the electrical problem, adjusted his mind
with an effort to this other and less amusing question.

"Wire for particulars and sit tight," advised Portlaw. "We've just three
now for 'Preference,' and if you go kiting off to town Hamil and I will
be forced into double dummy, and that's a horrible mental strain on a
man--isn't it, Hamil?"

"I _could_ use the long-distance telephone," said Malcourt pensively.

"Well, for the love of Mike go and do it!" shouted Portlaw, "and let me
try to enjoy this Andelys cheese."

So Malcourt sauntered out through the billiard-room, leaving an aromatic
trail of cigarette smoke in his wake; and he closed all the intervening
doors--why, he himself could not have explained.

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