What to say? He looked so eager, so pathetically eager, and if the truth were told she was remembering that the game which had once been such a source of pleasure to her had become just another chore, an intellectual puzzle to be solved. To sit opposite to him again would be like revisiting her lost girlhood. On the other hand, if she allowed him to tempt her into giving way on this, was she simply paving the way for yet another piece of treachery on his part?
Why she agreed to play against him Mary never knew.
‘Very well, but it will only be one game, I am not promising anything more than that.’
It was a surrender, though, and they both knew that it was.
‘Allow me to record the state of the current game first,’ she said and, taking his answer for granted, rapidly wrote it down before rearranging the pieces.
‘You may have white,’ he said, once the pieces were rearranged.
‘Indeed, not,’ said Mary haughtily. ‘I want no favours from you.’
Russell laughed. ‘How that takes me back. I remember that you never did. Shall we let chance settle the matter?’ He took a coin from his pocket and saying ‘Heads or tails? I say heads,’ he prepared to toss it up.
‘No,’ said Mary, laughing across at him as she had done so long ago. ‘Allow me to inspect the coin first. I seem to remember that you had two and one of them possessed two heads and the other two tails. You played that trick on me once, but never again.’
‘Oh, ye of little faith,’ Russell grinned back at her and threw the coin to her. ‘It is a good one and you may do the tossing. Am I right to trust you?’
Oh, yes, it was just like the old days when laughter and banter had filled their time together after the hard work of study was over.
Mary said reprovingly, ‘You know that I never cheated you. There,’ and she tossed the coin up, caught it on the palm of one hand and covered it with the palm of her other.
The smile she gave him when she exclaimed, ‘Now, Lord Hadleigh, which is it? Heads or tails?’ nearly destroyed him.
‘Tails,’ he finally achieved.
‘Tails it is,’ she announced, lifting her hand. ‘Why is it that you always win, even when you are not cheating me?’
He could not prevent himself from saying, now suddenly sober, ‘Now Mary, you know as well as I do, that I did not always win.’
Either she did not take his meaning—that she had ended their affair and married another—or she preferred not to. She swung the board around to give him the white pieces and said quite simply, ‘Let the battle begin.’
That, too, was said in memory of the old days and with the same calm amusement which she had used then. It was for her beautiful quiet that he had always loved her. He had been a noisy boy—unlike Ritchie—and he was fascinated by her calm self-control and wished that he possessed it.
Time and the passing years had sobered him, and he was not sure that it had been for the better. Meeting Mary again, though, had revived some of his old exuberance, his zest for life, the sense that anything was possible for him if only he put his mind to it.
‘Prepare to be dealt with as the Romans dealt with Hannibal,’ he announced grandly, ‘particularly as you have no elephants.’
‘But I have knights instead,’ and she moved the Black one—to which Russell countered with his White—and battle was fairly joined.
The afternoon flew by. Early on someone—who?—looked in on them and retreated at the sight of their rapt faces, at the fair head and the dark bent over the board.
Once Russell raised his head to stare into Mary’s eyes. ‘You are bamming me,’ he said accusingly as she moved a minor pawn. ‘What the devil—if I may be so frank—did you do that for?’
‘Since you read my notes you should know exactly why—and the devil had little to do with it.’
Oh, but he had, thought Russell a few moves later. He desperately wanted to win this game. To prove what? That he might have lost to her years ago, but he could not lose now—although it seemed likely that he was just about to do exactly that.
And then he saw a way out of his dilemma when he was on the point of being mated. Mated! There was a double meaning there, was there not? Mate in chess meant death—but in life it meant the possibility of birth. Which one was this? And if he were not to win, for he could not, might he not force a draw and in the doing hold both death and life in balance: the perfect equilibrium! He moved his White knight for the last time.
‘Stalemate!’ he announced triumphantly.
And so it was.
Neither of them had won—or lost.
The perfect ending.
Mary did not think so. ‘That was not supposed to happen,’ she exclaimed, indignant for once. ‘I must have made an error in my calculations.’
‘Ah,’ said Russell, laughter on his face. ‘But then you were playing yourself, not me. I think the ending is perfect, for neither of us have lost face.’
‘Or both of us have,’ countered Mary, beginning to smile herself. ‘I wonder what Father would have said.’
‘That we are well matched, but then, we always were.’
Mary’s smile disappeared. ‘I think that we ought to stop now,’ she said. ‘The others will be returning at any moment.’
‘But you will give me a game again tomorrow, will you not? And allow me to assist you with your calculations?’
His face when he said this was as earnest and serious as he could make it. To be with her again was all and more than he might have expected. It was not simply that she stirred him as no other woman had, but their meeting of minds was something that he had never experienced with anyone other than Ritchie when they had been boys together.
She could not refuse him. Forgetting everything which had earlier passed between them, she remembered only the exhilaration of the last two hours—and gave him the reply which he so dearly wanted.
‘If you promise to behave yourself and not pester me about the past, then yes, we may do as you wish, only providing that you are reasonably discreet.’
‘Bravo!’ was his response to that. ‘As we have already noted, the men of the party are preparing to journey to the boxing mill so we might as well agree to meet here at two of the clock. I see that there is a chess set and board on one of the cupboards which looks as though no one has used it for years. I propose to take it to my room and engage in a little useful practice. You will not find me such an easy mark tomorrow, I hope.’
‘That remains to be seen,’ returned Mary saucily. ‘For the present then, adieu. I shall expect you here on the hour tomorrow,’ and she left him to pick up the spare chessmen and the board, wondering what kind of a fool she was to put him in a position where he could let her down all over again.
Eliza
