The Fighting Chance

“Little idiot! Going into a man’s house in the face of all Fifth Avenue and the teeth of decency!”

“She has courage,” said Sylvia, still very white.

“Courage! Do you mean fool-hardiness?”

“No, courage—the courage I lacked. I knew he was too ill to leave his room and I lacked the courage to go and see him.”

“You mean, alone?”

“Certainly, alone.”

“You dare tell me you ever contemplated—”

“Oh, yes. I think I should have done it yet, but—but Marion—”

Suddenly she bent forward, resting her face in her hands; and between the fingers a bright drop ran, glimmered, and fell.

“O Lord!” breathed Mrs. Ferrall, and sank back, nerveless, into her own corner of the rocking brougham.

CHAPTER XII THE ASKING PRICE

Siward, at his desk, over which the May sunshine streamed, his crutches laid against his chair, sat poring over the piles of papers left there by Beverly Plank some days before with a curt recommendation that he master their contents.

Some of the papers were typewritten, some appeared to be engraved certificates of stock, a few were in Plank’s heavy, squat handwriting. There were several packages tied in pink tape, evidently legal papers of some sort; and also a pile of scrap-books containing newspaper clippings to which Siward referred occasionally, or read them at length, resting his thin, fatigued face between two bony hands.

The curious persistence of youth in his features seemed unaccountable in view of the heavy marks imprinted there; but they were marks, not lines; bluish hollows under eyes still young, marred contours of the cheek-bone; a hardness about the hollow temples above which his short, bright hair clustered with all its soft, youthful allure undimmed; and in every movement, every turn of his head, there still remained much of that indefinable attractiveness which had always characterised his race—much of the unconscious charm usually known as breeding.

In men of Mortimer’s fibre, dissipation produced coarser symptoms—distended veins, and sagging flesh—where in Siward it seemed to bruise and harden, driving the colour of blood out of him and leaving the pallor of marble, and the bluish shadows of it staining the hollows. Only the eyes had begun to change radically; something in them had been quenched.

That he could never hope to become immune he had learned at last when he had returned, physically wholesome, from his long course of training under the famous Irish specialist on the Hudson. He had expected to be immune, spite of the blunt and forcible language of Mulqueen when he turned him out into the world again:

“Ye’ll be afther notin’,” said Mr. Mulqueen, “that a poonch in the plexis putts a man out; but it don’t kill him. That’s you! Whin a man mixes it up wid the booze, l’ave him come here an’ I’ll tache him a thrick. But it’s not murther I tache; it’s the hook on the jaw that shtops, an’ the poonch in the plexis that putts the booze-divil on the bum! L’ave him take the count; he’ll niver rise to the chune o’ the bell av ye l’ave him lie. But he ain’t dead, Misther Sayward; mark that, me son! An’ don’t ye be afther sayin’, ‘Th’ inimy is down an’ out fur good! Pore lad! Sure, I’ll shake hands over a dhrink wid him, for he can do me no hurrt anny more!’ No, sorr! L’ave him lie, an’ l’ave the years av ver life count him out; fur the day you die, he dies, an’ not wan shake o’ the mixer sooner! G’wan, now, fur the rub-down. Ye’ve faught yer lasht round, if ye ain’t a fool!”

He had been a fool. He had imagined that he could control himself, and practise the moderation that other men practised when they chose. The puerile restraint annoyed him; his implied inability to master himself humiliated him, the more so because, secretly, he was horribly afraid in the remote depths of his heart.

Exactly how it happened he did not remember, except that he had gone down town on business and had lunched with several men. There was claret. Later he remembered another café, farther up town, and another, more brilliantly lighted. After that there were vague hours—the fierce fever of debauch wrapping night and day in flame through which he moved, unseeing, unheeding, deafened, drenched soul and body in the living fire; or dreaming, feeling the subsiding fury of desire pulse and ebb and flow, rocking him to unconsciousness.

His father’s old servants had found him again, this time in the area; and this time the same ankle, not yet strong, had been broken.

Through the waning winter days, as he lay brooding in bitterness, realising that it was all to do over again, Plank’s shy visits became gradually part of the routine. But it was many days before Siward perceived in the big, lumbering, pink-fisted man anything to attract him beyond the faintly amused curiosity of one man for another who is in process of establishing himself as the first of a race.

As for reciprocation in other forms except the most superficial, or of permitting a personal note to sound ever so discreetly, Siward tolerated no such idea. Even the tentative advances of Plank hinting on willingness, and perhaps ability, to help Siward in the Amalgamated tangle were pleasantly ignored. Unpaid services rendered by men like Plank were impossible; any obligation to Plank was utterly out of the question. Meanwhile they began to like one another—at least Siward often found himself looking forward with pleasure to a visit from Plank. There had never been any question of the latter’s attitude toward Siward.

Plank began to frequent the house, but never informally. It is doubtful whether he could have practised informality in that house even at Siward’s invitation. Something of the attitude of a college lower classman for a man in a class above seemed to typify their relations; and that feeling is never entirely eradicated between men, no matter how close their relationship in after-life.

One very bad night Plank came to the house and was admitted by Gumble. Wands, the second man, stood behind the aged butler; both were apparently frightened.

That something was amiss appeared plainly enough; and Plank, instinctively producing a card, dropped it on a table and turned to go. It may have been that the old butler recognised the innate delicacy of the motive, or it may have been a sudden confidence born of the necessities of the case, for he asked Plank to see his young master.

And Plank, looking him in the eyes, considered, until his courage began to fail. Then he went up-stairs.

It was a bad night outside, and it was a bad night for Siward. The master-vice had him by the throat. He sat there, clutching the arms of his chair, his broken leg, in its plaster casing, extended in front of him; and when he saw Plank enter he glared at him.

Hour after hour the two men sat there, the one white with rage, but helpless; the other, stolid, inert, deaf to demands for intercession with the arch-vice, dumb under pleadings for a compromise. He refused to interfere with the butler, and Siward insulted him. He refused to go and find the decanters himself, and Siward deliberately cursed him.

Outside the storm raged all night. Inside that house Plank faced a more awful tempest. There was a sedative on the mantel and he offered it to Siward, who struck it from his hand.

Once, toward morning, Siward feigned sleep, and Plank, heavy head on his breast, feigned it, too. Then Siward bent over stealthily and opened a drawer in his desk; and Plank was on his feet like a flash, jerking the morphine from Siward’s fingers.

The doctor arrived at daylight, responding to Plank’s summons by telephone, and Plank went away with the morphine and Siward’s revolver bulging in the side-pockets of his dinner coat.

He did not come again for a week. A short note from Siward started him toward lower Fifth Avenue.

There was little said when he came into the room:

“Hello, Plank! Glad to see you.”

“Hello! Are you all right?”

“All right.... Much obliged for pulling me through. Wish you’d pull me through this Amalgamated Electric knot-hole, too—some day!”

“Do—do you mean it?” ventured Plank, turning red with delight.

“Mean it? Indeed I do—if you do. Sit here; ring for whatever you want—or perhaps you’d better go down to the sideboard. I’m not to be trusted with the odour in the room just yet.”

“I don’t care for anything,” said Plank.

“Whenever you please, then. You know the house, and you don’t mind my being unceremonious, do you?”

“No,” said Plank.

“Good!” rejoined Siward, laughing. “I expect the same friendly lack of ceremony from you.”

But that, for Plank, was impossible. All he could do was to care the more for Siward without crossing the border line so suddenly made free; all he could do was to sit there rolling and unrolling his gloves into wads with his clumsy, highly coloured hands, and gaze consciously at everything in the room except Siward.

On that day, at Plank’s shy suggestion, they talked over Siward’s business affairs for the first time. After that day, and for many days, the subject became the key-note to their intercourse; and Siward at last understood that this man desired to do him a service absolutely and purely from a disinterested liking for him, and as an expression of that liking. Also he was unexpectedly made aware of Plank’s serenely unerring business sagacity.

That surface cynicism which all must learn, sooner or later, or remain the victims of naive credulity, was, in Siward, nothing but an outer skin, as it is in all who acquire wisdom with their cynicism. It was not long proof against Plank’s simple attitude and undisguised pleasure in doing something for a man he liked. Under that simplicity no motive, no self-interest could skulk; and Siward knew it.

As for the quid pro quo, Siward had insisted from the first on a business arrangement. The treachery of Major Belwether through sheer fright had knocked the key-stone from the syndicate, and the dam which made the golden pool possible collapsed, showering Plank’s brokers who worked patiently with buckets and mops.

The double treachery of Quarrier was now perfectly apparent to Plank. Siward, true to his word, held his stock in the face of ruin. Kemp Ferrall, furious with the major, and beginning to suspect Quarrier, came to Plank for consultation.

Then the defence formed under Plank. Legal machinery was set in motion, meeting followed meeting, until Harrington cynically showed his hand and Quarrier smiled his rare smile; and the fight against Inter-County was on in the open, preceded by a furious clamour of charge and counter-charge in the columns of the daily press.

That Quarrier had been guilty of something or other was the vague impression of that great news-reading public which, stunned by the reiteration of figures in the millions, turns to the simpler pleasures of a murder trial. Besides, whatever Quarrier had done was no doubt done within the chalk-marked courts of the game, though probably his shoes may have become a little dusty.

But who could hope to bring players like Quarrier before the ordinary umpire, or to investigate his methods with the everyday investigations reserved for everyday folk, whose road through business life lay always between State’s prison and the penitentiary and whose guide-posts were policemen?