Book: The Fighting Chance

R >> Robert W. Chambers >> The Fighting Chance




If Plank suspected him, he must also suspect him of complicity in the
Inter-County grab; he must suspect him of the ruthless crushing power
that corrupts or annihilates opposition, making a mockery of
legislation, a jest of the courts, and an epigram of a people’s
indignation.

And yet, in the face of all this, careless, fearless, frank to the outer
verge of stupidity--which sometimes means the inability to be afraid--this
man Plank was casually telling him things which men regard as secrets
and as weapons of defence--was actually averting him of his peril, and
telling him almost contemptuously to pull up the drawbridge and prepare
for siege, instead of rushing the castle and giving it to the sack.

As Quarrier sat there meditating, his long, white fingers caressing his
soft, pointed beard, Sylvia came in, greeting the men collectively with
a nod, and offering her hand to Plank.

“Dinner is announced,” she said; “please go in farm fashion. Wait!” as
Plank, following the major and Quarrier, stood aside for her to pass.
“No, you go ahead, Howard; and you,” to the major.

Left for a moment in the room with Plank, she stood listening to the
others descending the stairs; then:

“Have you seen Mr. Siward?”

“Yes,” said Plank.

“Oh! Is he well?”

“Not very.”

“Is he well enough to read a letter, and to answer one?”

“Oh, yes; he’s well enough in that way.”

“I supposed so. That is why I said to you, over the wire, not to trouble
him with my request.”

“You mean that I am not to say anything about your offer to buy the
hunter?”

“No. If I make up my mind that I want the horse I’ll write him--perhaps.”

Lingering still, she let one hand fall on the banisters, turning back
toward Plank, who was following:

“I understood you to mean that--that Mr. Siward’s financial affairs were
anything but satisfactory?”--the sweet, trailing, upward inflection
making it a question.

“When did I say that?” demanded Plank.

“Once--a month ago.”

“I didn’t,” said Plank bluntly.

“Oh, I had inferred it, then, from something you said, or something you
were silent about. Is that it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Am I quite wrong, then?” she asked, looking him in the eyes.

And Plank, who never lied, found no answer. Considering him for a moment
in silence, she turned again and descended the stairs.

The dinner was one of those thoroughly well-chosen dinners of few
courses and faultless service suitable for card-players, who neither
care to stuff themselves as a preliminary to a battle royal, nor to
dawdle through courses, eliminating for themselves what is not good for
them. The men drank a light, sound, aromatic Irish of the major’s; the
women--except Marion, who took what the men took--used claret sparingly.
Coffee was served where they sat; the men smoking, Agatha and Marion
producing their own cigarettes.

“Don’t you smoke any more?” asked Grace Ferrall of Leila Mortimer, and
at the smiling negative, “Oh, that perhaps explains it. You’re growing
positively radiant, you know. You’ll he wearing a braid and a tuck in
your skirt if you go on getting younger.”

Leila laughed, colouring up as Plank turned in his chair to look at her
closer.

“No, it won’t rub off, Mr. Plank,” said Marion coolly, “but mine will.
This,” touching a faint spot of colour under her eyes, “is art.”

“Pooh! I’m all art!” said Grace. “Observe, Mr. Plank, that under this
becoming flush are the same old freckles you saw at Shotover.” And she
laughed that sweet, careless laugh of an adolescent and straightened her
boyish figure, pretty head held high, adding: “Kemp won’t let me
‘improve’ myself, or I’d do it.”

“You are perfect,” said Sylvia, rising from the table, her own lovely,
rounded, youthful figure condoning the exaggeration; “you’re
sufficiently sweet as you are. Good people, if you are ready, we will go
through the ceremony of cutting for partners--unless otherwise you
decide. How say you?”

“I don’t care to enter the scramble for a man,” cried Grace. “If it’s to
choose, I’d as soon choose Marion.”

Plank looked at Leila, who laughed.

“All right; choose, then!” said Sylvia. “Howard, you’re dying, of
course, to play with me, but you’re looking very guiltily at Agatha.”

The major asked Leila at once; so Plank fell to Sylvia, pitted against
Marion and Grace Ferrall.

A few moments later the quiet of the library was broken by the butler
entering with decanters and ice, and glasses that tinkled frostily.

Play began at table Number One on a passed make of no trumps by Sylvia,
and at the other table on a doubled and redoubled heart make, which sent
a delicate flush into Agatha’s face, and drove the last vestige of
lingering thoughtfulness from Quarrier’s, leaving it a tense, pallid,
and expressionless mask, out of which looked the velvet-fringed eyes of
a woman.

Of all the faces there at the two tables, Sylvia’s alone had not
changed, neither assuming the gambler’s mask nor the infatuated glare of
the amateur. She was thoughtful, excited, delighted, or dismayed by
turns, but always wholesomely so; the game for its own sake, and not the
stakes, absorbing her, partly because she had never permitted herself to
weigh money and pleasure in the same balance, but kept a mental pair of
scales for each.

As usual, the fever of gain was fiercest in those who could afford to
lose most. Quarrier, playing to rule with merciless precision, coldly
exacted every penalty that a lapse in his opponents permitted. Agatha,
her teeth set in her nether lip, her eyes like living jewels, answered
Quarrier’s every signal, interpreted every sign, her play fitting in
exactly with his, as though she were his subconscious self balancing the
perfectly adjusted mechanism of his body and mind.

Now and then lifting her eyes, she sent a long, limpid glance at
Quarrier like a pale shaft of light; and under his heavy-fringed lashes,
at moments, his level gaze encountered her’s with a slow narrowing of
lids--as though there was more than one game in progress, more than one
stake being played for under the dull rose glow of the clustered lights.

Sylvia, sitting dummy at the other tables mechanically alert to Plank’s
cards dropping in rapid sequence as he played alternately from his own
hand and the dummy, permitted her thoughtful eyes to wander toward
Agatha from moment to moment. How alluring her subtle beauty, in its own
strange way! How perfect her accord with her partner! How faultless her
intelligence, divining the very source of every hidden motive
controlling him, forestalling his intent--acquiescent, delicate,
marvellous intelligence--the esoteric complement of two parts of a single
mind.

The collar of diamonds and aqua marines shimmered like the reflection of
shadowy lightning across her throat; a single splendid jewel glowed on
her left hand as her fingers flashed among the cards for the make-up.

“A hundred aces,” broke in Plank’s heavy voice as he played the last
trick and picked up the scoring card and pencil.

Sylvia’s blue eyes were laughing as Plank cut the new pack. Marion Page
coolly laid aside her cigarette, dealt, and made it “without” in the
original.

“May I play?” asked Sylvia sweetly.

“Please,” growled Plank.

So Sylvia serenely played from the “top of nothing,” and Grace Ferrall
whisked a wonderful dummy across the green; and Plank’s thick under lip
began to protrude, and he lowered his heavy head like a bull at bay.

Once Marion, over-intent, touched a card in the dummy when she should
have played from her own hand; and Sylvia would have let it pass, had
not Plank calmly noted the penalty.

“Oh, dear! It’s too much like business,” sighed Sylvia. “Can’t we play
for the sake of the sport? I don’t think it good sportsmanship to profit
by a blunder.”

“Rule,” observed Marion laconically. “’Ware barbed wire, if you want the
brush.”

“I myself never was crazy for the brush,” murmured Sylvia.

Grace whispered maliciously: “But you’ve got it, with the mask and
pads,” and her mischievous head barely tipped backward in the direction
of Quarrier.

“Especially the mask,” returned Sylvia, under her breath, and laid on
the table the last card of a Yarborough.

Plank scored without comment. Marion cut, and resumed her cigarette.
Sylvia dealt with that witchery of rounded wrists and slim fingers
fascinating to men and women alike. Then, cards en règle, passed the
make. Plank, cautiously consulting the score, made it spades, which
being doubled, Grace led a “singleton” ace, and Plank slapped down a
strong dummy and folded his great arms.

Toward midnight, Sylvia, absorbed in her dummy, fancied she heard the
electric bell ringing at the front door. Later, having barely made the
odd, she was turning to look at the major, when, beyond him, she saw
Leroy Mortimer enter the room, sullen, pasty-skinned, but perfectly
sober and well groomed.

“You are a trifle late,” observed Sylvia carelessly. Grace Ferrall and
Marion ignored him. Plank bade him good evening in a low voice.

The people at the other table, having completed their rubber, looked
around at Mortimer in disagreeable surprise.

“I’ll cut in, if you want me. If you don’t, say so,” observed Mortimer.

It was plain that they did not; so he settled himself in an arm-chair,
with an ugly glance at his wife and an insolent one at Quarrier; and the
game went on in silence; Leila and the major still losing heavily under
the sneering gaze of Mortimer.

At last, “Who’s carrying you?” he broke out, exasperated; and in the
shocked silence Leila, very white, made a movement to rise, but Quarrier
laid his long fingers across her arm, pressing her backward.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he remarked, looking coldly at
Mortimer.

Plank laid down his cards, rose, and walked over to Mortimer:

“May I have a word with you?” he asked bluntly.

“You may. And I’ll help myself to a word or two with you,” retorted
Mortimer, following Plank out of the room, down the stairs to the
lighted reception-room, where they wheeled, confronting one another.

“What is the matter?” demanded Plank. “At the club they told me you were
asleep in the card-room. I didn’t tell Leila. What is wrong?”

“I’m--I’m dead broke,” said Mortimer harshly. “Billy Fleetwood took my
paper. Can you help me out? It’s due to-morrow.”

Plank looked at him gravely, but made no answer.

“Can you? “repeated Mortimer violently. “Haven’t I done enough for you?
Haven’t I done enough for everybody? Is anybody going to show me any
consideration? Look at Quarrier’s manner to me just now! And this very
day I did him a service that all his millions can’t repay. And there you
stand, too, staring at me as though I were some damned importuning
shabby-genteel, hinting around for an opening to touch you. Yes, you do!
And this very day I have done for you the--the most vital thing--the most
sacred favour one man can do for another--”

He halted, stammered something incoherent, his battered eyes wet with
tears. The man was a wreck--nerves, stamina, mind on the very verge of
collapse.

“I’ll help you, of course,” said Plank, eyeing him. “Go home, now, and
sleep. I tell you I’ll help you in the morning. … Don’t give way! Have
you no grit? Pull up sharp, I tell you!”

But Mortimer had fallen into a chair, his ravaged face cradled in his
hands. “I’ve got all that’s c-coming to me,” he said hoarsely; “I’m all
in--all in! God! but I’ve got the jumps this trip. … You’ll stand for
this, won’t you, Plank? I was batty, but I woke up in time to grasp the
live wire Billy Fleetwood held--three shocks in succession--and his were
queens full to my jacks--aces to kings twice!--Alderdene and Voucher
sitting in until they’d started me off hiking hellward!”

He began to ramble, and even to laugh weakly, passing his puffy, shaking
hands across his eyes.

“It’s good of you, Beverly; I appreciate it. But I’ve been good to you.
You’re all to the good, my boy! Understand? All to the good. I fixed it;
I did it for you. You can have your innings now. You can have her when
you want her, I tell you.”

“What do you mean?” said Plank menacingly.

“Mean! I mean what I told you that day at Black Fells, when we were
riding. I told you you had a chance to win out. Now the chance has
come--same’s I told you. Start in, and by the time you’re ready to say
‘When?’ she’ll be there with the bottle!”

“I don’t think you are perfectly sane yet,” said Plank slowly.

“Let it go at that, then,” sniggered Mortimer, struggling to his feet.
“Bring Leila back; I’m all in; I’m going home. You’ll be around in the
morning, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said Plank. “Have you got a cab?”

Mortimer had one. The glass and iron doors clanged behind him, and
Plank, waiting a moment, sighed, raised his head, and, encountering the
curious gaze of a servant, trudged off up-stairs again.

The game had ended at both tables. Quarrier and Agatha stood by the
window together, conversing in low voices. Belwether, at a desk, sat
muttering and fussing with a cheque-book. The others were in Sylvia’s
apartments.

A few moments later Kemp Ferrall arrived, in the best of spirits, very
much inclined to consider the night as still young; but his enthusiasm
met with no response, and presently he departed with his wife and Marion
in their big Mercedes, wheeling into the avenue at a reckless pace, and
streaming away through the night like a meteor run mad.

Leila, in her wraps, emerged in a few moments, looking at Plank out of
serious eyes; and they made their brief adieux and went away in Plank’s
brougham.

When Agatha’s maid arrived, Quarrier also started to take his leave; but
Sylvia, seated at a card-table, idly arranging the cards in geometrical
designs and fanciful arabesques, looked up at him, saying:

“I wanted to say something to you, Howard.”

Agatha passed them, going into Sylvia’s room for her wraps; and Quarrier
turned to Sylvia:

“Well?” he said, with the slightest hint of impatience.

“Can’t you stay a minute?” asked Sylvia, surprised.

“Agatha is going in the motor with me. Is it anything important?”

She considered him without replying. She had never before detected that
manner, that hardness in a voice always so even in quality.

“What is it?” he repeated.

She thought a moment, putting aside for the time his manner, which she
could not comprehend; then:

“I wanted to ask you a question--a rather ignorant one, perhaps. It’s
about your Amalgamated Electric Company. May I ask it, Howard?”

After a second’s stare, “Certainly,” he said.

“It’s only this: If the other people--the Inter-County, I mean--are slowly
ruining Amalgamated, why don’t you stop it?”

Quarrier’s eyes narrowed. “Oh! And who have you been discussing the
matter with?”

“Mr. Plank,” she said simply. “I asked him. He shook his head, and said
I’d better ask you. And I do ask you.”

For a moment he stood mute; then his lips began to shrink back over his
beautiful teeth in one of his rare laughs.

“I’ll be very glad to explain it some day,” he said; but there was no
mirth in his voice or eyes, only the snickering lip wrinkling the
pallor.

“Will you not answer now?” she asked.

“No, not now. But I desire you to understand it some day--some day before
November. And one or two other matters that it is necessary for you to
understand. I want to explain them, Sylvia, in such a manner that you
will never be likely to forget them. And I mean to; for they are never
out of my mind, and I wish them to be as ineffaceably impressed on
yours. … Good night.”

He took her limp hand almost briskly, released it, and stepped down the
stairs as Agatha entered, cloaked, to say good night.

They kissed at parting--“life embracing death”--as Mortimer had sneered
on a similar occasion; then Sylvia, alone, stood in her bedroom, hands
linked behind her, her lovely head bent, groping with the very ghosts of
thought which eluded her, fleeing, vanishing, reappearing, to peep out
at her only to fade into nothing ere she could follow where they flitted
through the dark labyrinths of memory.

The major, craning his neck in the bay-window, saw Agatha and Quarrier
enter the big, yellow motor, and disappear behind the limousine. And it
worried him horribly, because he knew perfectly well that Quarrier had
lied to him about a jewelled collar precisely like the collar worn by
Agatha Caithness; and what to do or what to say to anybody on the
subject was, for the first time in his life, utterly beyond his
garrulous ability. So, for the first time also in his chattering career,
he held his tongue, reassured at moments, at other moments panic-
stricken lest this marriage he had engineered should go amiss, and his
ambitions be nipped at the very instant of triumphant maturity.

“This sort of thing--in your own caste--among your own kind,” his panicky
thoughts ran on, “is b-bad form--rotten bad taste on both sides. If they
were married--one of them, anyway! But this isn’t right; no, by gad! it’s
bad taste, and no gentleman could countenance it!”

It was plain that he could, however, his only fear being that somebody
might whisper something to turn Sylvia’s innocence into a terrible
wisdom which would ruin everything, and knock the underpinning from the
new tower which his inflated fancy beheld slowly growing heavenward,
surmounting the house of Belwether.

Another matter: he had violated his word, and had been caught at it by
his prospective nephew-in-law--broken his pledged word not to sell his
Amalgamated Electric holdings, and had done it. Yet, how could Plank
dominate, unless another also had done what he had done? And it made him
a little more comfortable to know he was sharing the fault with
somebody--probably with Siward, whom he now had the luxury of despising
for the very thing he himself had done.

“Drunkard!” he muttered to himself; “he’s in the gutter at last!”

And he repeated it unctuously, almost reconciled to his own shortcoming,
because it was the first time, as far as he knew, that a Belwether might
legitimately enjoy the pleasures of holding the word of a Siward in
contempt.

Sylvia had dismissed her maid, the old feeling of distaste for the touch
of another had returned since the last mad, crushed embrace in Siward’s
arms had become a memory. More and more she was returning to old
instincts, old habits of thought, reverting to type once more, virgin of
lip and thought and desire, save when the old memory stopped her heart
suddenly, then sent it racing, touching her face with quick, crimson
imprint.

Now, blue eyes dreaming under the bright masses of her loosened hair,
she sat watching the last glimmer amid the ashes whitening on the
hearth, thinking of Siward and of what had been between them, and of
what could never be--never, never be.

One red spark among the ashes--her ambition, deathless amid the ashes of
life! When that, too, went out, life must be extinct.

What he had roused in her had died when he went away. It could never
awake again, unless he returned to awaken it. And he never would; he
would never come again.

One brief interlude of love, of passion, in her life could neither tint
nor taint the cool, normal sequence of her days. All that life held for
a woman of her caste--all save that--was hers when she stretched out her
hand for it--hers by right of succession, of descent; hers by warrant
unquestioned, by the unuttered text of the ukase to be launched, if
necessary, by that very, very old lady, drowsing, enthroned, as the
endless pageant wound like a jewelled river at her feet.

So Siward could never come again, sauntering toward her through the
sunlight, smiling his absent smile. She caught her breath painfully,
straightening up; a single ash fell in the fire; the last spark went
out.



CHAPTER XI THE CALL OF THE RAIN

The park was very misty and damp and still that morning.

There was a scent of sap and new buds in the February haze, a glimmer of
green on southern slopes, a distant bird note, tentative, then
confident, rippling from the gray tangle of naked thickets. Here and
there in hollows the tips of amber-tinted shoots pricked the soil’s dark
surface; here and there in the sparse woodlands a withered leaf still
clinging to oak or beech was forced to let go by the swelling bud at its
base and fell rustling stiffly in the silence.

Far away on the wooded bridle-path the dulled double gallop of horses
sounded, now muffled in a hollow, now louder, jarring the rising ground,
nearer, heavier, then suddenly checked to a trample, as Sylvia drew
bridle by the reservoir, and, straightening in her saddle, raised her
flushed face to the sky.

“Rain?” she asked, as Quarrier, controlling his beautiful, restive
horse, ranged up beside her.

“Probably,” he said, scarcely glancing at the sky, where, above the
great rectangular lagoons, hundreds of sea-gulls, high in the air, hung
flapping, stemming some rushing upper gale unfelt below.

She walked her mount, head lifted, watching the gulls; he followed,
uninterested, imperturbable in his finished horsemanship. With horses he
always appeared to advantage, whether on the box of break or coach, or
silently controlling a spike or tandem, or sitting his saddle in his
long-limbed, faultless fashion, maintaining without effort the very
essence of form. Here he was at his best, perfectly informal, informally
perfect.

They had ridden every day since the weather permitted--even before it
permitted--thrashing and slashing through the rotting ice and snow,
galloping over the frozen, gravelly loam, amid leafless trees and a
winter-smitten perspective--drearier for the distant, eastern glimpse of
the avenue’s marble and limestone façades and the vast cliffs of masonry
and brick looming above the west and south.

On these daily rides together it was her custom to discuss practical
matters concerning their future; and it was his custom to listen until
pressed for a suggestion, an assent, or a reply.

Sparing words--cautious, chary of self-commitment, and seldom offering to
assume the initiative--this was the surface character which she had come
to recognise and acquiesce in; this was Quarrier as he had been
developed from her hazy, preconceived ideas of the man before she had
finally accepted him at Shotover the autumn before. She also knew him as
a methodical man, exacting from others the orderly precision which
characterised his own dealings; a man of education and little learning,
of attainments and little cultivation, conversant with usages, formal,
intensely sensitive to ridicule, incapable of humour.

This was Quarrier as she knew him or had known him. Recently she had,
little by little, become aware of an indefinable change in the man. For
one thing, he had grown more reticent. At times, too, his reserve seemed
to have something almost surly about it; under his cold composure a hint
of something concealed, watchful, and very quiet.

Confidences she had never looked for in him nor desired. It appalled her
at moments to realise how little they had in common, and that only on
the surface--a communion of superficial interest incident to the
fulfilment of social duties and the pursuit of pleasure. Beyond that she
knew nothing of him, required nothing of him. What was there to know?
what to require?

Now that the main line of her route through life had been surveyed and
carefully laid out, what was there more for her in life than to set out
upon her progress? It was her own road. Presumptive leader already,
logical leader from the day she married--leader, in fact, when the ukase,
her future legacy, so decreed; it was a royal road laid out for her
through the gardens and pleasant places; a road for her alone, and over
it she had chosen to pass. What more was there to desire?

From the going of Siward, all that he had aroused in her of love, of
intelligence, of wholesome desire and sane curiosity--the intellectual
restlessness, the capacity for passion, the renaissance of the simpler
innocence--had subsided into the laissez faire of dull quiescence. If in
her he had sown, imprudently, subtle, impulsive, unworldly ideas,
flowering into sudden brilliancy in the quick magic of his
companionship, now those flowers were dead under the inexorable winter
of her ambition, where all such things lay; her lonely childhood, with
its dimmed visions of mother-love ineffable; the strange splendour of
the dreams haunting her adolescence--pageants of bravery and the glitter
of the cross, altars of self-denial and pure intent, service and
sacrifice and the scorn of wrong; and sometimes, seen dimly with
enraptured eyes through dissolving mists--the man! glimmering for an
instant, then fading, resolved into the starry void which fashioned him.


Riding there, head bent, her pulses timing the slow pacing of her horse,
she presently became aware, without looking up, that Quarrier was
watching her. Dreams vanished. A perfectly unreasonable sense of being
spied upon, of something stealthy about it all, flashed to her mind and
was gone, leaving her grave and perplexed. What a strange suspicion!
What an infernal inference! What grotesque train of thought could have
culminated in such a sinister idea!

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.