The Firing Line by Robert W. Chambers

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Even while she spoke she remained calmly amazed at the commonness of her
own speech, the astonishing surface streak of unsuspected vulgarity
which she was naively exhibiting to this man.

Vetchen came noisily splashing up to join them, but he found neither of
them very attentive to him as they walked slowly to the beach and up to
the dry, hot sand.

Virginia curled up in the sand; Malcourt extended himself full length at
her feet, clasped fingers supporting his head, smooth, sun-browned legs
crossed behind him; and he looked like a handsome and rather sulky boy
lying there, kicking up his heels insouciantly or stretching luxuriously
in the sun.

Vetchen, who had followed, began an interminable story on the usual
theme of his daughter, Mrs. Tom O'Hara, illustrating her beauty, her
importance, and the incidental importance of himself; and it was with
profound surprise and deep offence that he discovered that neither
Malcourt nor Miss Suydam were listening. Indeed, in brief undertones,
they had been carrying on a guarded conversation of their own all the
while; and presently little Vetchen took his leave with a hauteur quite
lost on those who had so unconsciously affronted him.

"Of course it is very civil of you to say you remember me," Virginia was
saying, "but I am perfectly aware you do not."

Malcourt insisted that he recalled their meeting at Portlaw's Adirondack
camp on Luckless Lake two years before, cudgelling his brains at the
same time to recollect seeing Virginia there and striving to remember
some corroborative incident. But all he could really recall was a young
and unhappily married woman to whom he had made violent love--and it was
even an effort for him to remember her name.

"How desperately you try!" observed Virginia, leisurely constructing a
little rampart of sand between them. "Listen to me, Mr. Malcourt"--she
raised her eyes, and again the hint of provocation in them preoccupied
him--"I remembered you, and I have sometimes hoped we might meet again.
Is that amends for the very bad taste I displayed in speaking of your
engagement before it has been announced?"

"I am not engaged--to be married," he said deliberately.

She looked at him steadily, and he sustained the strain of the gaze in
his own untroubled fashion.

"You are not engaged?"

"No."

She straightened up, resting her weight on one bare arm, then leisurely
laid her length on the burning sands and, face framed between her
fingers, considered him in silence.

In her attitude, in her very conversation with this man there was, for
her, a certain sense of abandonment; a mental renouncing of all that had
hitherto characterised her in her relations with an always formal world;
as though that were necessary to meet him on his own level.

Never before had she encountered the temptation, the opportunity, or the
person where the impulse to discard convention, conviction, training,
had so irresistibly presented itself. Nor could she understand it now;
yet she was aware, instinctively, that she was on the verge of the
temptation and the opportunity; that there existed a subtle something in
this man, in herself, that tempted to conventional relaxation. In all
her repressed, regulated, and self-suppressed career, all that had ever
been in her of latent daring, of feminine audacity, of caprice, of
perverse provocation, stirred in her now, quickening with the slightest
acceleration of her pulses.

Apparently a man of her own caste, yet she had never been so obscurely
stirred by a man of her own caste--had never instinctively divined in
other men the streak which this man, from the first interchange of
words, had brought out in her.

Aware of his attraction, hazily convinced that she had no confidence in
him, the curious temptation persisted and grew; and she felt very young
and very guilty like a small child consenting to parley with another
child whose society has been forbidden. And it seemed to her that
somehow she had already demeaned herself by the tentative toward a
common understanding with an intellect and principles of a grade
inferior to her own.

"That was a very pretty woman you were so devoted to in the
Adirondacks," she said.

He recalled the incident with a pleasant frankness which left her
unconvinced.

Suddenly it came over her that she had had enough of him--more than was
good for her, and she sat up straight, primly retying her neckerchief.

"To-morrow?" he was saying, too civilly; but on her way to the pavilion
she could not remember what she had replied, or how she had rid herself
of him.

Inside the pavilion she saw Hamil and Shiela Cardross, already dressed,
watching the lively occupants of the swimming-pool; and she exchanged a
handshake with the former and a formal nod with the latter.

"Garret, your aunt is worrying because somebody told her that there are
snakes in the district where you are at work. Come in some evening and
reassure her." And to Shiela: "So sorry you cannot come to my luncheon,
Miss Cardross.--You _are_ Miss Cardross, aren't you? I've been told
otherwise."

Hamil looked up, pale and astounded; but Shiela answered, undisturbed:

"My sister Cecile is the younger; yes, I am Miss Cardross."

And Hamil realised there had been two ways of interpreting Virginia's
question, and he reddened, suddenly appalled at his own knowledge and at
his hasty and gross conclusions.

If Shiela noticed the quick changes in his face she did not appear to,
nor the curious glance that Virginia cast at him.

"_So_ sorry," said Miss Suydam again, "for if you are going to be so
much engaged to-day you will no doubt also miss the tea for that pretty
Mrs. Ascott."

"No," said Shiela, "I wouldn't think of missing that." And carelessly to
Hamil: "As you and I have nothing on hand to-day, I'll take you over to
meet Mrs. Ascott if you like."

Which was a notice to Virginia that Miss Cardross had declined her
luncheon from deliberate disinclination.

Hamil, vaguely conscious that all was not as agreeable as the surface of
things indicated, said cordially that he'd be very glad to go anywhere
with Shiela to meet anybody, adding to Virginia that he'd heard of Mrs.
Ascott but could not remember when or where.

"Probably you've heard of her often enough from Louis Malcourt," said
Virginia. "He and I were just recalling his frenzied devotion to her in
the Adirondacks; that," she added smilingly to Shiela, "was before Mrs.
Ascott got her divorce from her miserable little French count and
resumed her own name. She was the most engaging creature when Mr.
Malcourt and I met her two years ago."

Shiela, who had been listening with head partly averted and grave eyes
following the antics of the divers in the pool, turned slowly and
encountered Virginia's smile with a straight, cold gaze of utter
distrust.

Nothing was said for a moment; then Virginia spoke smilingly again to
Hamil concerning his aunt's uneasiness, turned toward Shiela, exchanged
formal adieux with her, and walked on toward her dressing-room and
shower. Hamil and Miss Cardross turned the other way.

When Shiela was seated in her double wheel-chair with Hamil beside her,
she looked up through her veil unsmiling into his serious face.

"Did you notice anything particularly impertinent in Miss Suydam's
question?" she asked quietly.

"What question?"

"When she asked me whether I was Miss Cardross."

The slow colour again burned his bronzed skin. He made no reply, nor did
she await any after a silent consideration of his troubled face.

"Where did you hear about me?" she asked.

She had partly turned in her seat, resting both gloved hands on the
crook of her folded sunshade, and leaning a little toward him.

"Don't ask me," he said; "whatever I heard I heard unwillingly--"

"You _have_ heard?"

He did not answer.

The remainder of the journey was passed in silence. On the road they met
Mrs. Cardross and Jessie Carrick driving to a luncheon; later, Gray
passed in his motor with his father.

"I have an idea that you and I are to lunch alone," said Hamil as they
reached the house; and so it turned out, for Malcourt was going off
with Portlaw somewhere and Cecile was dressing for Virginia's luncheon.

"Did you care to go with me to the Ascott-O'Hara function?" asked
Shiela, pausing on the terrace. Her voice was listless, her face devoid
of animation.

"I don't care where I go if I may go with you," he said, with a new
accent of intention in his voice which did not escape her.

She went slowly up the stairs untying her long veil as she mounted.
Cecile in a bewildering hat and gown emerged upon the terrace before
Shiela reappeared, and found Hamil perched upon the coquina balustrade,
poring over a pocketful of blue-prints; and she said very sweetly:
"Good-bye, my elder brother. Will you promise to take the best of care
of our little sister Shiela while I'm away?"

"The very best," he said, sliding feet foremost to the terrace.
"Heavens, Cecile, you certainly are bewitching in those clothes!"

"It is what they were built for, brother," she said serenely. "Good-bye;
we won't shake hands on account of my gloves.... Do be nice to Shiela.
She isn't very gay these days--I don't know why. I believe she has
rather missed you."

Hamil tucked her into her chair, the darky pedalled off; then the young
man returned to the terrace where presently a table for two was brought
and luncheon announced as Shiela Cardross appeared.

Hamil displayed the healthy and undiscriminating appetite of a man who
is too busy mentally and physically to notice what he eats and drinks;
Shiela touched nothing except fruit. She lighted his cigarette for him
before the coffee, and took one herself, turning it thoughtfully over
and over between her delicately shaped fingers; but at a glance of
inquiry from him:

"No, I don't," she said; "it burns my tongue. Besides I may some day
require it as a novelty to distract me--so I'll wait."

She rose a moment later, and stood, distrait, looking out across the
sunlit world. He at her elbow, head bent, idly watched the smoke curling
upward from his cigarette.

Presently, as though moved by a common impulse, they turned together,
slowly traversed the terrace and the long pergola all crimson and white
with bougainvillia and jasmine, and entered the jungle road beyond the
courts where carved seats of coquina glimmered at intervals along the
avenue of oaks and palmettos and where stone-edged pools reflected the
golden green dusk of the semi-tropical foliage above.

On the edge of one of these basins the girl seated herself; without her
hat and gloves and in a gown which exposed throat and neck she always
looked younger and more slender to him, the delicate modelling of the
neck and its whiteness was accentuated by the silky growth of the brown
hair which close to the nape and brow was softly blond like a child's.

The frail, amber-tinted little dragon-flies of the South came hovering
over the lotus bloom that edged the basin; long, narrow-shaped
butterflies whose velvet-black wings were barred with brilliant stripes
of canary yellow fluttered across the forest aisle; now and then a giant
papilio sailed high under the arched foliage on tiger-striped wings of
chrome and black, or a superb butterfly in pearl white and malachite
green came flitting about the sparkle-berry bloom.

The girl nodded toward it. "That is a scarce butterfly here," she said.
"Gray would be excited. I wish we had his net here."

"It is the _Victorina_, isn't it?" he asked, watching the handsome,
nervous-winged creature which did not seem inclined to settle on the
white flowers.

"Yes, the _Victorina steneles_. Are you interested?"

"The generation I grew up with collected," he said. "I remember my
cabinet, and some of the names. But I never saw any fellows of this sort
in the North."

"Your memory is good?"

"Yes," he said, "for what I care about"--he looked up at her--"for those
I care about my memory is good, I never forget kindness--nor confidence
given--nor a fault forgiven."

She bent forward, elbows on knees, chin propped on both linked hands.

"Do you understand now," she said, "why I could not afford the
informality of our first meeting? What you have heard about me explains
why I can scarcely afford to discard convention, does it not, Mr.
Hamil?"

She went on, her white fingers now framing her face and softly indenting
the flushed skin:

"I don't know who has talked to you, or what you have heard; but I knew
by your expression--there at the swimming-pool--that you had heard
enough to embarrass you and--and hurt me very, very keenly."

"Calypso!" he broke out impulsively; but she shook her head. "Let _me_
tell you if it must be told, Mr. Hamil.... Father and mother are
dreadfully sensitive; I have only known about it for two years; two
years ago they told me--had to tell me.... Well--it still seems hazy and
incredible.... I was educated in a French convent--if you know what that
means. All my life I have been guarded--sheltered from knowledge of
evil; I am still unprepared to comprehend--... And I am still very
ignorant; I know that.... So you see how it was with me; a girl awakened
to such self-knowledge cannot grasp it entirely--cannot wholly convince
herself except at moments--at night. Sometimes--when a crisis
threatens--and one has lain awake long in the dark--"

She gathered her knees in her arms and stared at the patch of sunlight
that lay across the hem of her gown, leaving her feet shod in gold.

"I don't know how much difference it really makes to the world. I
suppose I shall learn--if people are to discuss me. How much difference
does it make, Mr. Hamil?"

"It makes none to me--"

"The world extends beyond your pleasant comradeship," she said. "How
does the world regard a woman of no origin--whose very name is a
charity--"

"Shiela!"

"W-what?" she said, trying to smile; and then slowly laid her head in
her hands, covering her face.

She had given way, very silently, for as he bent close to her he felt
the tearful aroma of her uneven breath--the feverish flush on cheek and
hand, the almost imperceptible tremor of her slender body--rather close
to him now.

When she had regained her composure, and her voice was under command,
she straightened up, face averted.

"You are quite perfect, Mr. Hamil; you have not hurt me with one
misguided and well-intended word. That is exactly as it should be
between us--must always be."

"Of course," he said slowly.

She nodded, still looking away from him. "Let us each enjoy our own
griefs unmolested. You have yours?"

"No, Shiela, I haven't any griefs."

"Come to me when you have; I shall not humiliate you with words to shame
your intelligence and my own. If you suffer you suffer; but it is well
to be near a friend--not _too_ near, Mr. Hamil."

"Not too near," he repeated.

"No; that is unendurable. The counter-irritant to grief is sanity, not
emotion. When a woman is a little frightened the presence of the
unafraid is what steadies her."

She looked over her shoulder into the water, reached down, broke off a
blossom of wild hyacinth, and, turning, drew it through the button-hole
of his coat.

"You certainly are very sweet to me," she said quietly. And, laughing a
little: "The entire family adores you with pills--and I've now decorated
you with the lovely curse of our Southern rivers. But--there are no such
things as weeds; a weed is only a miracle in the wrong place....
Well--shall we walk and moralise or remain here and make cat-cradle
conversation?... You are looking at me very solemnly."

"I was thinking--"

"What?"

"That, perhaps, I never before knew a girl as well as I know you."

"Not even Miss Suydam?"

"Lord, no! I never dreamed of knowing her--I mean her real self. You
understand, she and I have always taken each other for granted--never
with any genuine intimacy."

"Oh! And--this--ours--is genuine intimacy?"

"Is it not?"

For a moment her teeth worried the bright velvet of her lip, then
meeting his gaze:

"I mean to be--honest--with you," she said with a tremor in her voice;
but her regard wavered under his. "I mean to be," she repeated so low he
scarcely heard her. Then with a sudden animation a little strained:
"When this winter has become a memory let it be a happy one for you and
me. And by the same token you and I had better think about dressing. You
don't mind, do you, if I take you to meet Mrs. Ascott?--she was Countess
de Caldelis; it's taken her years to secure her divorce."

Hamil remembered the little dough-faced, shrimp-limbed count when he
first came over with the object of permitting somebody to support him
indefinitely so that later, in France, he could in turn support his
mistresses in the style to which they earnestly desired to become
accustomed.

And now the American girl who had been a countess was back, a little
wiser, a little harder, and more cynical, with some of the bloom rubbed
off, yet much of her superficial beauty remaining.

"Alida Ascott," murmured Shiela. "Jessie was a bridesmaid. Poor little
girl!--I'm glad she's free. There were no children," she said, looking
up at Hamil; "in that case a decent girl is justified! Don't you think
so?"

"Yes, I do," he said, smiling; "I'm not one of those who believe that
such separations threaten us with social disintegration."

"Nor I. Almost every normal woman desires to live decently. She has a
right to. All young girls are ignorant. If they begin with a dreadful
but innocent mistake does the safety of society require of them the
horror of lifelong degradation? Then the safety of such a society is not
worth the sacrifice. That is my opinion."

"That settles a long-vexed problem," he said, laughing at her
earnestness.

But she looked at him, unsmiling, while he spoke, hands clasped in her
lap, the fingers twisting and tightening till the rose-tinted nails
whitened.

* * * * *

Men have only a vague idea of women's ignorance; how naturally they are
inclined to respond to a man; how the dominating egotism of a man and
his confident professions and his demands confuse them; how deeply his
appeals for his own happiness stir them to pity.... They have heard of
love--and they do not know. If they ever dream of it it is not what they
have imagined when a man suddenly comes crashing through the barriers of
friendship and stuns them with an incoherent recital of his own desires.
And yet, in spite of the shock, it is with them instinctive to be kind.
No woman can endure an appeal unmoved; except for them there would be no
beggars; their charity is not a creed: it is the essence of them, the
beginning of all things for them--and the end.

* * * * *

The bantering smile had died out in Hamil's face; he sat very still,
interested, disturbed, and then wondering when his eyes caught the
restless manoeuvres of the little hands, constantly in motion,
interlacing, eloquent of the tension of self-suppression.

* * * * *

He thought: "It is a cowardly thing for an egotist with an egotist's
early and lively knowledge of the world and of himself to come
clamouring to a girl for charity. It _is_ true that almost any man can
make a young girl think she loves him if he is selfish enough to do it.
Is her ignorance a fault? All her training deprecates any acquisition of
worldly knowledge: it is not for her: her value is in her ignorance.
Then when she naturally makes some revolting mistake and attempts to
escape to decency and freedom once more there is a hue and a cry from
good folk and clergy. Divorce? It is a good thing--as the last resort.
And a woman need feel no responsibility for the sort of society that
would deprive a woman of the last refuge she has!"

He raised his eyes, curiously, in time to intercept hers.

"So--you did not know me after all, it seems," she said with a faint
smile. "You never suspected in me a _Vierge Rouge_, militant, champion
of her downtrodden sex, haranguing whomsoever would pay her the fee of
his attention. Did you?"

And as he made no reply: "Your inference is that I have had some unhappy
love affair--some perilously close escape from--unhappy matrimony." She
shrugged. "As though a girl could plead only a cause which concerned
herself.... Tell me what you are thinking?"

She had risen, and he stood up before her, fascinated.

"Tell me!" she insisted; "I shall not let you go until you do!"

"I was thinking about you."

"Please don't!... Are you doing it yet?" closely confronting him, hands
behind her.

"Yes, I am," he said, unable to keep his eyes from her, all her beauty
and youth and freshness troubling him, closing in upon him like subtle
fragrance in the golden forest dusk.

"Are you still thinking about me?"

"Yes."

The rare sweet laughter edged her lips, for an instant; then something
in his eyes checked her. Colour and laughter died out, leaving a pale
confused smile; and the straight gaze wavered, grew less direct, yet
lost not a shade of his expression which also had changed.

Neither spoke; and after a moment they turned away, walking not very
near together toward the house.

The sunshine and the open somehow brought relief and the delicate
constraint between them relaxed as they sauntered slowly into the house
where Shiela presently went away to dress for the Ascott function, and
Hamil sat down on the veranda for a while, then retired to undertake the
embellishment of his own person.

CHAPTER IX

THE INVASION

They went together in a double chair, spinning noiselessly over the
shell road which wound through oleander and hibiscus hedges. Great
orange and sulphur-tinted butterflies kept pace with them as they
travelled swiftly southward; the long, slim shadows of palms gridironed
the sunny road, for the sun was in the west, and already a bird here and
there had ventured on a note or two as prelude to the evening song, and
over the ocean wild ducks were rising in clouds, swinging and drifting
and settling again as though in short rehearsal for their sunset flight.

"Your hostess is Mrs. Tom O'Hara," said the girl; "when you have enough
of it look at me and I'll understand. And if you try to hide in a corner
with some soulful girl I'll look at you--if it bores me too much. So
don't sit still with an infatuated smile, as Cecile does, when she sees
that I wish to make my adieux."

"I'm so likely to," he said, "when escape means that I'll have you to
myself again."

There was a trifle more significance in the unconsidered speech than he
had intended. The girl looked absently straight in front of her; he sat
motionless, uncomfortable at his own words, but too wise to attempt to
modify them by more words.

Other chairs passed them now along the road--there were nods of
recognition, gay salutes, an intimate word or two as the light-wheeled
vehicles flashed past; and in a moment more the tall coquina gate posts
and iron grille of Mrs. Tom O'Hara's villa, Tsana Lahni, glimmered under
an avenue of superb royal palms.

The avenue was crowded with the slender-wheeled basket-bodied chairs gay
with the plumage of pretty women; the scene on the lawns beyond was
charming where an orange and white pavilion was pitched against the
intense green of the foliage, and the pelouse was all dotted and
streaked with vivid colours of sunshades and gowns.

"Ulysses among the sirens," she whispered as they made their way toward
their hostess, exchanging recognition with people everywhere in the
throngs. "Here they are--all of them--and there's Miss Suydam,--too
unconscious of us. How hath the House of Hamil fallen!--"

"If you talk that way I won't leave you for one second while we're
here!" he said under his breath.

"Nonsense; it only hurts me, not my pride. And half a cup of unforbidden
tea will drown the memory of that insolence--"

She bent forward with smiling composure to shake hands with Mrs. Tom
O'Hara, a tall, olive-tinted, black-haired beauty; presented Hamil to
his hostess, and left him planted, to exchange impulsive amenities with
little Mrs. Ascott.

Mrs. Tom O'Hara, a delicate living Gainsborough in black and white, was
probably the handsomest woman in the South. She dressed with that
perfection of simplicity which only a few can afford; she wore only a
single jewel at a time, but the gem was always matchless.

Warm-hearted, generous, and restless, she loved the character of Lady
Bountiful; and, naively convinced of her own unassailable supremacy,
played very picturesquely the role of graciousness and patronage to the
tenants of her great estates and of her social and intellectual world
alike. Hence, although she went where many of her less fashionable
guests might not have been asked to go, she herself paid self-confident
homage to intellect as she understood it, and in her own house her
entourage was as mixed as her notions of a "salon" permitted.

She was gracious to Hamil on account of his aunt, his profession, and
himself. Also her instinct was to be nice to everybody. As hostess she
had but a moment to accord him, but during that moment she contrived to
speak reassuringly of the Suydam genealogy, the art of landscape
architecture, and impart a little special knowledge from her
inexhaustible reserve, informing him that the name of her villa, Tsa-na
Lah-ni, was Seminole, and meant "Yellow Butterfly." And then she passed
him sweetly along into a crush of bright-eyed young things who attempted
to pour tea into him and be agreeable in various artless ways; and
presently he found himself in a back-water where fashion and intellect
were conscientiously doing their best to mix. But the mixture was a thin
solution--thinner than Swizzles and Caravan, and the experience of the
very young girl beside him who talked herself out in thirty seconds from
pure nervousness and remained eternally grateful to him for giving her a
kindly opportunity to escape to cover among the feather-brained and
frivolous.

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