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.