The Danger Mark

"Why do you cough like that, Jack?" he demanded after a paroxysm had shaken the other into an armchair, where he lay sweating and panting:

"It's a cold," Dysart managed to say; "been hanging on for a month."

"Three months," said Grandcourt tersely. "Why don't you take care of it?"

There was a silence; nothing more was said about the cold; and presently Grandcourt drew a letter from his pocket and handed it silently to Dysart. It was in Rosalie's handwriting, dated two months before, and directed to Dysart at Baltimore. The post-office authorities had marked it, "No address," and had returned it a few days since to the sender.

These details Dysart noticed on the envelope and the heading of the first page; he glanced over a line or two, lowered the letter, and looked questioningly over it at Grandcourt:

"What's it about?—if you know," he asked wearily. "I'm not inclined just now to read anything that may be unpleasant."

Grandcourt said quietly:

"I have not read the letter, but your wife has told me something of what it contains. She wrote and mailed it to you weeks ago—before the crash—saying, I believe, that adversity was not the time for the settlement of domestic differences, and that if her private fortune could avert disaster, you were to write immediately to her attorneys."

Dysart gazed at him as though stunned; then his dull gaze fell once more on the envelope. He examined it, went all over it with lack-lustre eyes, laid it aside, and finally began to read his wife's letter—the letter that had never reached him because he had used another name on the hotel register in Baltimore.

Grandcourt watched him with painful interest as he sat, hunched up, coughing at intervals, and poring over his wife's long, angular chirography. There was much between the lines to read, but Dysart could never read it; much to understand, but he could never understand it.

"Delancy tells me," she wrote, "that you are threatened with very serious difficulties. Once or twice you yourself have said as much to me; and my answer was that they no longer concerned me.

"The situation is this: I have, as you know, consulted counsel with a view to begin proceedings for a separation. This has been discontinued—temporarily, at any rate—because I have been led to believe by your friend, Delancy Grandcourt, that the present is no time to add to your perplexities.

"He has, I may add, induced me to believe other things which my better sense rejects; but no woman's logic—which is always half sentiment—could remain unshaken by the simple loyalty to you and to me of this friend of yours and of mine. And this letter would never have been written except, practically, at his dictation. Kindly refrain from showing it to him as my acknowledgment here of his influence in the matter would grieve him very deeply.

"Because he believes that it is still possible for you and me to return to civilised relations; he believes that I care for you, that, in your own leisurely and superficial fashion, you still really honour the vows that bound you—still in your heart care for me. Let him believe it; and if you will, for his sake, let us resume the surface semblance of a common life which, until he persuaded me, I was determined to abandon.

"It is an effort to write this; I do it for his sake, and, in that way, for yours. I don't think you care about me; I don't think you ever did or ever will. Yet you must know how it was with me until I could endure my isolation no longer. And I say to you perfectly frankly that now I care more for this friend of yours, Delancy Grandcourt, than I care for anybody in the world. Which is why I write you to offer what I have offered, and to say that if my private fortune can carry you through the disaster which is so plainly impending, please write to my attorneys at once as they have all power in the matter."

The postscript was dated ten days later, from Dysart's own house:

"Receiving no reply, I telephoned you, but Brandon says you are away from the city on business and have left no address, so I took the liberty of entering your house, selecting this letter from the mass of nine days' old mail awaiting you, and shall direct it to you at the hotel in Baltimore where Bunny Gray says that somebody has seen you several times with a Mr. Skelton."

As Dysart read, he wiped the chilly perspiration from his haggard face at intervals, never taking his eyes from the written pages. And at last he finished his wife's letter, sat very silent, save when the cough shook him, the sheets of the letter lying loosely in his nerveless hand.

It was becoming plain to him, in a confused sort of way, that something beside bad luck and his own miscalculations, was working against him—had been stealthily moving toward his undoing for a year, now; something occult, sinister, inexorable.

He thought of the register at the hotel in Baltimore, of the name he lived under there during that interval in his career for which he had accounted to nobody, and never would account—on earth. And into his memory rose the pale face of Sylvia Quest; and he looked down at the letter trembling in his hand and thought of her and of his wife and of the Algonquin Trust Company, and of the chances of salvation he had missed.

Grandcourt sat looking at him; there was something in his gaze almost doglike:

"Have you read it?" he asked.

Dysart glanced up abstractedly: "Yes."

"Is it what I told you?"

"Yes—substantially." He dried his damp face; "it comes rather late, you know."

"Not too late," said the other, mistaking him; "your wife is still ready to meet you half-way, Jack."

"Oh—that? I meant the Algonquin matter—" He checked himself, seeing for the first time in his life contempt distorting Grandcourt's heavy face.

"Man! Man!" he said thickly, "is there nothing in that letter for you except money offered?"

"What do you mean?"

"I say, is there nothing in that message to you that touches the manhood in you?"

"You don't know what is in it," said Dysart listlessly. Even Grandcourt's contempt no longer produced any sensation; he looked at the letter, tore it into long strips, crumpled them and stood up with a physical effort:

"I'm going to burn this. Have you anything else to say?"

"Yes. Good God, Jack, don't you care for your wife? Can't you?"

"No."

"Why?"

"I don't know." His tone became querulous. "How can a man tell why he becomes indifferent to a woman? I don't know. I never did know. I can't explain it. But he does."

Grandcourt stared at him. And suddenly the latent fear that had been torturing him for the last two weeks died out utterly: this man would never need watching to prevent any attempt at self-destruction; this man before him was not of that caste. His self-centred absorption was of a totally different nature.

He said, very red in the face, but with a voice well modulated and even:

"I think I've made a good deal of an ass of myself. I think I may safely be cast for that rôle in future. Most people, including yourself, think I'm fitted for it; and most people, and yourself, are right. And I'll admit it now by taking the liberty of asking you whom you were with in Baltimore."

"None of your damned business!" said Dysart, wheeling short on him.

"Perhaps not. I did not believe it at the time, but I do now.... And her brother is after you with a gun."

"What do you mean?"

"That you'd better get out of town unless you want an uglier scandal on your hands."

Dysart stood breathing fast and with such effort that his chest moved visibly as the lungs strained under the tension:

"Do you mean to say that drunken whelp suspects anything so—so wildly absurd–"

"Which drunken whelp? There are several in town?"

Dysart glared at him, careless of what he might now believe.

"I take it you mean that little cur, Quest."

"Yes, I happen to mean Quest."

Dysart gave an ugly laugh and turned short on his heel: