The Fighting Chance

Slim, pale, depraved in all but body she stood, eyeing him a moment, the very incarnation of vicious perversity.

“You know what you arouse in me,” she repeated. “But don’t count on it!”

“You have encouraged—permitted me to count—” His anger choked him—or was it the haunting wisdom of her eyes that committed him to silence.

“I don’t know,” she said, musingly, “what it is in you that I am so mad about—whether it is your brutality, or the utter corruption of you that holds me, or your wicked eyes of a woman, or the fascination of the mask you turn on the world, and the secret visage, naked in its vice, that you reserve for me. But I love you—in my own fashion. Count on that, Howard; for that is all you can surely count on. And now, at last, you know.”

As he stood there, it came to him slowly that, deep within him he had always known this; that he had never really counted on anything else though he had throttled his doubts by covering her throat with diamonds. Her strangeness, her pallor, her acquiescence, the delicate hint of depravity in her, the subtle response to all that was worst in him had attracted him, only to learn, little by little, that the taint of corruption was only a taint infecting others, not her; that the promise of evil was only a promise; that he had to deal with a young body but an old intelligence, and a mind so old that at moments her faded gaze almost appalled him with its indolent clairvoyance.

Long since he knew, too, that in all the world he could never again find such a mate for him. This had, unadmitted even to himself, always remained a hidden secret within this secret man—an unacknowledged, undrawn-on reserve in case of the failure which he, even in sanguine moods, knew in his inmost corrupted soul that his quest was doomed to.

And now he had no more need of secrets from himself; now, turning his gaze inward, he looked upon all with which he had chosen to deceive himself. And there was nothing left for self-deception.

“If I marry you!” he said calmly “at least I know what I am getting.”

“I will marry you, Howard. I’ve got to marry somebody pretty soon. You or Captain Voucher.”

For an instant a vicious light flashed in his narrowing eyes. She saw it and shook her head with weary cynicism:

“No, not that. It could not attract me even with you. It is really vulgar—that arrangement. Noblesse oblige, mon ami. There is a depravity in marrying you that makes all lesser vices stale as virtues.”

He said nothing; she looked at him, lazily amused; then, inattentive, turned and paced the floor again.

“Shall I see you to-morrow?” he demanded.

“If you wish. Captain Voucher came down on the same train with me. I’ll set him adrift if you like.”

“Is he preparing for a declaration?” sneered Quarrier.

“I think so,” she said simply.

“Well if he comes to-night after I’m gone, you wait a final word from me. Do you understand?” he repeated with repressed violence.

“No, Howard. Are you going to propose to me to-morrow?”

“You’ll know to-morrow,” he retorted angrily. “I tell you to wait. I’ve a right to that much consideration anyway.”

“Very well, Howard,” she said, recognising in him the cowardice which she had always suspected to be there.

She bade him good night; he touched her hand but made no offer to kiss her. She laughed a little to herself, watching him striding toward the elevator, then, closing the door, she stood still in the centre of the room, staring at her own reflection, full length, in the gilded pier-glass, her lips edged with a sneer so like Quarrier’s that, the next moment she laughed aloud, imitating Quarrier’s rare laugh from sheer perversity.

“I think,” she said to her reflected figure in the glass, “I think that you are either mentally ill or inherently a kind of devil. And I don’t much care which.”

And she turned leisurely, her slim hands balanced lightly on her narrow hips, and strolled into the second dressing-room, where Mrs. Vendenning sat sullenly indulging in that particular species of solitaire known as “The Idiot’s Delight.”

“Well?” inquired Mrs. Vendenning, looking up at the tall, pale girl she was chaperoning so carefully during their sojourn in town.

“Oh, you know the rhyme to that,” yawned Agatha; “let’s ring up somebody. I’m bored stiff.”

“What did Howard Quarrier want?”

“He knows, I think, but he hasn’t yet informed me.”

“I’ll tell you one thing, Agatha,” said Mrs. Vendenning, gathering up the packs for a new shuffle: “Grace Ferrall doesn’t fancy Howard’s attention to you and she’s beginning to say so. When you go back to Shotover you’d better let him alone.”

“I’m not going back to Shotover,” said Agatha.

“What?”

“No; I don’t think so. However, I’ll let you know to-morrow. It all depends—but I don’t expect to.” She turned as her maid tapped on the door. “Oh, Captain Voucher. Are you at home to him?” flipping the pasteboard onto the table among the scattered cards.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Vendenning aggressively, “unless you expect him to flop down on his knees to-night. Do you?”

“I don’t—to-night. Perhaps to-morrow. I don’t know; I can’t tell yet.” And to her maid she nodded that they were at home to Captain Voucher.

Quarrier had met him, too, just as he was leaving the hotel lobby. They exchanged the careful salutations of men who had no use for one another. On the Englishman’s clean-cut face a deeper hue settled as he passed; on Quarrier’s, not a trace of emotion; but when he entered his motor he sat bolt upright, stiff-backed and stiff-necked, his long gray-gloved fingers moving restlessly over his pointed heard.

The night was magnificent; myriads of summer stars spangled the heavens. Even in the reeking city itself a slight freshness grew in the air, although there was no wind to stir the parched leaves of the park trees, among which fire-flies floated—their intermittent phosphorescence breaking out with a silvery, star-like brilliancy.

Plank, driving his big motor northward through the night, Leila Mortimer beside him, twice mistook the low glimmer of a fire-fly for the distant lamp of a motor, which amused Leila, and her clear, young laughter floated back to the ears of Sylvia and Siward, curled up in their corners of the huge tonneau. But they were too profoundly occupied with each other to heed the sudden care-free laughter of the young matron, though in these days her laughter was infrequent enough to set the more merciless tongues wagging when it did sound.

Plank had never seen fit to speak to her of her husband’s scarcely veiled menace that day he had encountered him in the rotunda of the Algonquin Trust Company. His first thought was to do so—to talk it over with her, consider the threat and the possibility of its seriousness, and then come to some logical and definite decision as to what their future relations should be. Again and again he had been on the point of doing this when alone with Leila—uncomfortable, even apprehensive, because of their frank intimacy; but he had never had the opportunity to do so without deliberately dragging in the subject by the ears in all its ugliness and implied reproach for her imprudence, and seeing that dreadful, vacant change in Leila’s face, which the mere mention of her husband’s name was sure to bring, turn into horror unspeakable.

A man not prone to fear his fellows, he now feared Mortimer, but that fear struck him only through Leila—or had so reached him until the days of his closing struggle with Quarrier. Whether the long strain had unnerved him, whether minutely providing against every possible danger he had been over-scrupulous, over-anxious, morbidly exact—or whether a foresight almost abnormal had evoked a sinister possibility—he did not know; but that threat of Mortimer’s to involve Plank with Leila in one common ruin, that boast that he was able to do so could not be ignored as a possible weapon if Quarrier should by any chance learn of it.

In all his life he had taken Leila into his arms but once; had kissed her but once—but that once had been enough to arm Mortimer with danger from head to foot. Some prying servant had either listened or seen—perhaps a glimmer of a mirror had betrayed them. At all events, whoever had seen or heard had informed Mortimer, and now the man was equipped; the one and only man in all the world who could with truth accuse Plank; the only man of whom he stood in honest fear.

And it was characteristic of Plank that never for one moment had it occurred to him that the sheer fault of it all lay with Leila; that it was her imprudence alone that now threatened herself and the man she loved—that threatened his very success in life as long as Mortimer should live.

All this, Plank, in his thorough, painstaking review of the subject, had taken into account; and he could not see how it could possibly bear upon the matters now finally to be adjusted between Quarrier and himself, because Quarrier was in New York and Mortimer in Saratoga, and unless the latter had already sold his information the former could not strike at him through knowledge of it.

And yet a curious reluctancy, a hesitation inexplicable—unless overwork explained it—had come over him when Siward had proposed their dining together on the very eve of his completed victory over Quarrier.

It seemed absurd, and Plank was too stolid to entertain superstitions, but he could not, even with Leila laughing there beside him, shake off the dull instinct that all was not well—that Quarrier’s attitude was still the attitude of a dangerous man; that he, Plank, should have had this evening in his room alone to study out the matters he had so patiently plodded through in the long hours while Siward slept.

Yet not for one instant did he dream of shifting the responsibility—if responsibility entailed blame—on Siward, who, against Plank’s judgment and desire, had on the very eve of consummation drawn him away from that sleepless vigilance which must for ever be the price of a business man’s safety.

Leila, gay and excited as a schoolgirl, chattered on ceaselessly to Plank; all the silence, all the secrecy of the arid years turning to laughter on her red lips, pouring out, in broken phrases of delight, words strung together for the sheer pleasure of speech and the happiness of her lot to be with him unrestrained.

He remembered once listening to the song of a wild bird on the edge of a clearing at night, and how, standing entranced, the low, distant jar of thunder sounded at moments, scarcely audible—like his heart now, at intervals, dully persistent amid the gaiety of her voice.

“And would you believe it, Beverly,” she said, “I formed the habit at Shotover of walking across the boundary and strolling into your greenhouses and deliberately helping myself. And every time I did it I was certain one of your men would march me out!”

He laughed, but did not tell her that his men had reported the first episode and that he had instructed them that Mrs. Mortimer and her friends were to do exactly as they pleased at the Fells. However she knew it, because a garrulous gardener, proud of his service with Plank, had informed her.

“Beverly,” she said, “you are a dear. If people only knew what I know!”

He began to turn red; she could see it even in the flickering, lamp-shot darkness. And she teased him for a while, very gently, even tenderly; and their voices grew lower in a half-serious badinage that ended with a quiet, indrawn breath, a sigh, and silence.