Meanwhile things went on placidly enough around the silent and
uninhabited Deerchase. The negroes worked the plantation under the
overseer’s management, and the house was well cared for, as well as the
grounds. Every year there was an alarm that Skelton was coming home,
but he never came. At last, like a thunderclap, came the news that he
was married to an English woman of rank and wealth.
Sylvia Shapleigh was then eighteen, pretty and full of romance. That
one interview with Skelton had been with her the dividing line between
childhood and womanhood. She brooded over it, and as she grew older she
fell in love with an imaginary Skelton, who was to come home and make
her the grandest lady in the county. She began to look upon Deerchase
as her own, and could picture vividly to herself her gay and splendid
life there. She was haughty to the young squires who openly admired
her, and secretly declared herself meat for their masters. She was
proud and spirited to the last degree, and it seemed to her in her
arrogance and inexperience, that Nature had destined her for something
great; and what could be greater than to be Mrs. Richard Skelton?
When the news came of Skelton’s marriage, Mrs. Shapleigh was luckily
away from home on a visit of several days. Sylvia, on hearing of
the marriage, rose and went to her own room, where she gave way to
a passion of disappointment as acute as if the bond between Richard
Skelton and herself were a real one, instead of the mere figment of a
child’s imagination. It made no difference that it was wholly baseless
and fanciful. In that simple and primitive age, romantic young things
like Sylvia had plenty of time and opportunity to cultivate sentiment.
The only really splendid thing she ever saw in her life was Deerchase,
and she saw it whenever she chose to turn her eyes toward it. She knew
nothing of the power of new scenes to make one forget the old ones,
and the extreme prettiness of the story that she made up for Skelton
and herself charmed her. But then came this sudden disillusion. In the
twinkling of an eye her castle in Spain fell, to rise no more.
But Sylvia, in common with most people who possess thinking and
feeling powers of a high order, had also a great fund of sound good
sense, which came to her rescue. She learned to smile at her own
childish folly, but it was rather a sad and bitter smile: the folly
was childish, but the pain was startlingly real. She did not like
to look at Deerchase after that, because it brought home to her how
great a fool she had been. And then, having lost that illusion--sad to
say--she had no other to take its place. Nothing is more intolerable to
a young, imaginative soul than to be turned out of the fairy kingdom
of fancy. It is all theirs--palaces, smiling courtiers, crown jewels,
and all--and they revel in a royal summer time. Then, some fine day,
the pretty dream melts away and leaves a black abyss, and then Common
Sense, the old curmudgeon, shows himself; and when, as in Sylvia’s
case, the palace would be rebuilt, the flattering courtiers recalled,
the recollection of the pain of its destruction is too keen. Driven
by common sense, Sylvia concluded to live in the real world, not in
the imaginary one. This wise resolve was a good deal helped by the
grotesque form the same picture that had been in her mind took in Mrs.
Shapleigh’s. Sylvia could not help laughing any more than Mr. Shapleigh
could when Mrs. Shapleigh was all for his sending a letter to Skelton,
reproaching him for his “shameful treatment of Sylvia.”
The worthy woman had got all the particulars of that odd, childish
visit out of Sylvia, and bewailed herself as follows:
“Was there ever such a poor, unlucky creature as I! Here for eighteen
years I’ve had but one single, solitary idea in my head, and that
was to see Sylvia mistress of Deerchase; and all through your fault,
Mr. Shapleigh, in not throwing them together when you were Richard
Skelton’s guardian, I am a heart-broken and disappointed woman. But now
that I’ve had this awful blow, it’s as little as you can do to improve
the house and put me up a new wing, as I’ve often asked you.”
“Put you up a new swing?” asked Mr. Shapleigh, becoming very deaf.
“Now, Belinda, what on earth do you want with a swing at your time of
life? You’ll be wanting a skipping-rope next.”
Mr. Shapleigh’s deafness was so obstinate regarding the proposed new
wing that Mrs. Shapleigh was unable to make him understand her.
Within six months came another startling piece of information.
Skelton’s wife had died, and had left him a great fortune upon
condition that he did not marry again.
This nearly drove Mrs. Shapleigh crazy, and Mrs. Shapleigh, in turn,
nearly drove Mr. Shapleigh crazy. Between the propriety and excellence
of Mrs. Skelton’s dying and the abominable means she took to prevent
Sylvia from marrying Skelton--for, of course, the whole scheme was
levelled at Sylvia--Mrs. Shapleigh was at a loss whether to consider
the dead woman as her best friend or her greatest enemy. Sylvia by
that time had grown sensible. She had learned in that first ridiculous
yet terrible experience the dangers of her splendid imagination and
intense emotions, and resolved upon learning to govern both--and Sylvia
had a good strong will of her own. She even smiled as she thought
how tremendously she had concerned herself, at the time of Skelton’s
marriage, about what really did not concern her in the least.
Still Skelton did not come home. The old expectations of his coming
intellectual achievements had by no means vanished. He had given
such extraordinary promise! But there was time enough--he was not
yet thirty. He was known to be studying at the German universities.
He still kept up his interest in his Virginia affairs, and, although
on the other side of the water, he even had a fine racing stable
organised under the charge of Miles Lightfoot, who was a cross between
a gentleman and a “leg.” Racing was the sport in those days, and the
Campdown Jockey Club had just been started upon an imposing basis.
Skelton became a liberal subscriber, and Miles Lightfoot was understood
to have _carte blanche_ in the great affair of making Skelton’s stable
the finest one in the State. Whatever Skelton did he must do better
than anybody else, and, since his large access of fortune, money was
less than ever an object to him. Skelton always heard with pleasure of
his successes on the turf, and Miles Lightfoot found out by some occult
means that his own excellent place and salary, from a professional
point of view, depended upon Skelton’s horses always beating Jack
Blair’s. For Skelton never forgot a friend or an enemy.
At first this rivalry between Skelton’s stable and what Jack Blair
modestly called his “horse or two” was a joke on the courthouse green
and the race track. But when ten years had passed, and Jack Blair
had been steadily losing money all the time on account of matching
his horses against Skelton’s, it had ceased to be a joke. Blair had
more than the average man’s pugnacity, and having early suspected
that Skelton meant to ruin him, it only aroused a more dogged spirit
of opposition in him. Old Tom Shapleigh in the beginning urged Blair
to draw out of the fight, but Blair, with a very natural and human
aggressiveness, refused. Elizabeth at first shared Blair’s confidence
that he could beat Skelton’s horses as easily as he had run away with
Skelton’s sweetheart, but she soon discovered her mistake. Blair was
a superb farmer. He had twelve hundred acres under cultivation, and
every year the bags of wheat marked “Newington” commanded a premium in
the Baltimore market. But no matter how many thousand bushels of wheat
Blair might raise, that “horse or two” ate it all up.
There were two Blair children, Hilary and little Mary. Elizabeth Blair
was full of ambition for her boy. He was to be educated as his father
had been, first at William and Mary, afterwards at the University of
Virginia. But she discovered that there was no money either to send the
boy to school or to employ a tutor at home. Mrs. Blair bore this, to
her, dreadful privation and disappointment with courage, partly born of
patience and partly of a woman’s natural vanity. Blair never ceased to
impress upon her that since Skelton chose to harbour his revenge all
those years, that he--Blair--could not refuse to meet him, particularly
as he had carried off the prize matrimonial in the case. Blair had the
most winning manner in the world. When he would tip his wife’s chin up
with his thumb, and say, “Hang it, Bess, I’ll meet Skelton on the race
track, in the hunting field, anywhere he likes, and take my chances
with him as I did before: I had tremendous odds against me then, but
Fortune favoured me,” Elizabeth would feel an ineffable softness
stealing over her towards her husband. Not many wives could boast of
that sort of gallantry from their husbands. Blair was not disposed to
underrate his triumph over Skelton. Every defeat of his “horse or two”
was met by a debonair laugh, and a reminder, “By Jove, his horses may
leg it faster than mine, but I beat him in a better race and for a
bigger stake than any ever run on a race course!”
This keeping alive of the old rivalry contained in it a subtile
flattery to Elizabeth. But Blair himself was well calculated to
charm. He was fond of a screeching run after the hounds, as Skelton
contemptuously said, but he was a gentleman from the crown of his head
to the sole of his foot. He might not give Hilary a tutor, or Mary a
governess, but his children never heard him utter a rude word to their
mother or any one else, or saw him guilty of the smallest _gaucherie_
in word or deed. His negroes adored him, his horses came at his voice,
his dogs disputed with his children for the touch of his hand. He knew
all the poetry and romance existing, and a great many other things
besides.
It was easy enough to understand why he was the pet and darling of
women--for the sex is discerning. Your true woman’s man is always a
good deal of a man. This was the case with Jack Blair, in spite of
his fatal fondness for a certain ellipse of a mile and a quarter,
upon which he had lost more money than he cared to own up to. But, at
least, there was no deceit about Blair. Elizabeth often implored him
to promise her never to bet at the races, never to bet at cards, and a
great many other things; but he always refused. “No,” he said, “I’ll
make no promise I can’t keep. I may not be the best husband in the
world, but at least I’ve never lied to you, and I don’t propose to put
myself in the way of temptation now.”
It was true that he had never even used a subterfuge towards her. But
Elizabeth was haunted by a fear that Blair thought lightly of money
obligations, and that inability to pay was not, to him, the terrible
and disgraceful thing it was to her. Then, she was tormented by a
perfectly ridiculous and feminine jealousy. For all she was a clever
enough woman, in the matter of jealousy and a few other trifles of
that kind all women are fools alike. This amused Blair hugely, who had
a smile and a soft word and a squeeze of the hand for every woman in
the county, Mrs. Shapleigh included, but who was the soul of loyalty
to Elizabeth. If only he would give up horse racing! for so Elizabeth
came to think to herself when the mortgages multiplied on Newington,
and after every fall and spring meeting of the Jockey Club she was
called upon to sign her name to something or other that Blair paid her
for in the tenderest kisses. But there seemed to be a sort of fatality
about the whole thing. Blair was thought to be the best judge of horses
in the county, yet he rarely had a good horse, and more rarely still
won a race. Something always happened at the last minute to upset his
triumph. Like all men who are the willing victims of chance, Blair
was a firm believer in luck. Everybody knows, he argued, that luck
ebbs and flows. The more he lost on the Campdown course, the more he
was eventually bound to win on that very course. Elizabeth, with her
practical woman’s wit, did not believe at all in luck, but she believed
in Blair, which was the same thing in that case. The county was a great
one for racing, and at Abingdon Church every Sunday, the affairs of the
Jockey Club were so thoroughly discussed by gentlemen sitting around
on the flat tombstones during sermon-time, that the formal meetings
were merely perfunctory. This way of turning church into a club meeting
sincerely distressed the clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Conyers.