Book: The Fighting Chance

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




“Oh, look out, Leroy! Don’t step on my hat!” cried a girl’s voice; and
he sank back in his chair, gazing stupidly around.

“Hello! you people!” he said, amused; “I guess I’ve been asleep. Oh, is
that you Millbank? Whose hat was that--yours, Lydia?”

He yawned, laughed, turning his heavy eyes from one to another,
recognising a couple of young girls at the window. He didn’t want to get
up; but there is, in the society he now adorned, a stringency of
etiquette known as “re-finement,” and which, to ignore, is to become
unpopular.

So he got onto his massive legs and went over to shake hands with a
gravity becoming the ceremony.

“How d’ye do, Miss Hutchinson? Thought you were at Asbury Park. How de
do, Miss Del Garcia. Have you been out in Millbank’s motor yet?”

“We broke down at McGowan’s Pass,” said Miss Del Garcia, laughing the
laugh that had made her so attractive in “A Word to the Wise.”

“Muddy gasoline,” nodded Millbank tersely--an iron-jawed, over-groomed
man of forty, with a florid face shaved blue.

“We passed Mr. Plank’s big touring-car,” observed Lydia Vyse, shifting
Tinto to the couch and brushing the black and white hairs from her
automobile coat. “How much does a car like that cost, Leroy?”

“About twenty-five thousand,” he said gloomily. Then, looking up, “Hold
on, Millbank, don’t be going! Why can’t you all dine with us? Never mind
your car; ours is all right, and we’ll run out into the country for
dinner. How about it, Miss Del Garcia?”

But both Miss Del Garcia and Miss Hutchinson had accepted another
invitation, in which Millbank was also included.

They stood about, veils floating, leather decorated coats thrown back,
lingering for awhile to talk the garage talk which fascinates people of
their type; then Millbank looked at the clock, made his adieux to Lydia,
nodded significantly to Mortimer, and followed the others down-stairs.

There was something amiss with his motor, for it made a startling racket
in the street, finally plunging forward with a kick.

Lydia laughed as the two young girls in the tonneau turned to nod to her
in mock despair; then she came running back up-stairs, holding her skirt
free from her hurrying little feet.

“Well?” she inquired, as Mortimer turned back from the window to
confront her.

“Nothing doing, little girl,” he said with a sombre smile.

She looked at him, slowly divesting herself of her light leather-trimmed
coat.

“I missed him,” said Mortimer.

She flung the coat over a chair, stood a moment, her fingers busy with
her hair-pegs, then sat down on the couch, taking Tinto into her lap.
She was very pretty, dark, slim, marvellously graceful in her every
movement.

“I missed him,” repeated Mortimer.

“Can’t you see him to-morrow?” she asked.

“I suppose so,” said Mortimer slowly. “Oh, Lord! how I hate this
business!”

“Hasn’t he misused your confidence? Hasn’t he taken your money?” she
asked. “It may be unpleasant for you to make him unbelt, but you’re a
coward if you don’t!”

“Easy! easy, now!” muttered Mortimer; “I’m going to shake it out of him.
I said I would, and I will.”

“I should hope so; it’s yours.”

“Certainly it’s mine. I wish I’d held fast now. I never supposed Plank
would take hold. It was that drivelling old Belwether who scared me
stiff! The minute I saw him scurrying to cover like a singed cat I was
fool enough to climb the first tree. I’ve had my lesson, little girl.”

“I hope you’ll give Howard his. Somebody ought to,” she said quietly.

Then gathering up her hat and coat she went into her own apartments.
Mortimer picked up a cheap magazine, looked over the portraits of the
actresses, then, hunching up into a comfortable position, settled
himself to read the theatrical comment.

Later, Lydia not appearing, and his own valet arriving to turn on the
electricity, bring him his White Rock and Irish and the Evening
Telegraph, he hoisted his legs into another chair and sprawled there
luxuriously over his paper until it was time to dress.

About half past eight they dined in a white and pink dining-room
furnished in dull gray walnut, and served by a stealthy, white-haired,
pink-skinned butler, chiefly remarkable because it seemed utterly
impossible to get a glimpse of his eyes. Nobody could tell whether there
was anything the matter with them or not--and whether they were only very
deep set or were weak, like an albino’s, or were slightly crossed, the
guests of the house never knew. Lydia herself didn’t know, and had given
up trying to find out.

They had planned to go for a spin in Mortimer’s motor after dinner, but
in view of the Quarrier fiasco neither was in the mood for anything.

Mortimer, as usual, ate and drank heavily. He was a carnivorous man, and
liked plenty of thick, fat, underdone meat. As for Lydia, her appetite
was as erratic as her own impulses. Her table, always wastefully
elaborate, no doubt furnished subsistence for all the relatives of her
household below stairs, and left sufficient for any ambitious butler to
make a decent profit on.

“Do you know, Leroy,” she observed, as they left the table and sauntered
back into the pale blue drawing-room, “do you know that the servants
haven’t been paid for three months?”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” he expostulated, “don’t begin that sort of
thing! I get enough of that at home; I get it every time I show my
nose!”

“I only mentioned it,” she said carelessly.

“I heard you all right. It isn’t any pleasanter for me than for you. In
fact, I’m sick of it; I’m dead tired of being up against it every day of
my life. When a man has anything somebody gets it before he can
sidestep. When a man’s dead broke there’s nobody in sight to touch.”

“You had an opportunity to make Howard pay you back.”

“Didn’t I tell you I missed him?”

“Yes. What are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“Of course. You are going to do something, I suppose.”

They had reached the gold and green room above. Lydia began pacing the
length of a beautiful Kermanshah rug--a pale, delicate marvel of rose and
green on a ground of ivory--lovely, but doomed to fade sooner than the
pretty woman who trod it with restless, silk-shod feet.

Mortimer had not responded to her last question. She said presently:
“You have never told me how you intend to make him pay you back.”

“What?” inquired Mortimer, turning very red.

“I said that you haven’t yet told me how you intend to make Howard
return the money you lost through his juggling with your stock.”

“I don’t exactly know myself,” admitted Mortimer, still overflushed. “I
mean to put it to him squarely, as a debt of honour that he owes. I
asked him whether to invest. Damn him! he never warned me not to. He is
morally responsible. Any man who would sit there and nod monotonously
like a mandarin, knowing all the while what he was doing to wreck the
company, and let a friend put into a rotten concern all the cash he
could scrape together, is a swindler!”

“I think so too,” she said, studying the rose arabesques in the rug.

There was a little click of her teeth when she ended her inspection and
looked across at Mortimer. Something in her expressionless gaze seemed
to reassure him, and give him a confidence he may have lacked.

“I want him to understand that I won’t swallow that sort of contemptible
treatment,” asserted Mortimer, lighting a thick, dark cigar.

“I hope you’ll make him understand,” she said, seating herself and
resting her clasped, brilliantly ringed hands in her lap.

“Oh, I will--never fear! He has abused my confidence abominably; he has
practically swindled me, Lydia. Don’t you think so?”

She nodded.

“I’ll tell him so, too,” blustered Mortimer, shaking himself into an
upright posture, and laying a pudgy, clinched fist on the table. “I’m
not afraid of him! He’ll find that out, too. I know enough to stagger
him. Not that I mean to use it. I’m not going to have him think that my
demands on him for my own property resemble extortion.”

“Extortion?” she repeated.

“Yes. I don’t want him to think I’m trying to intimidate him. I won’t
have him think I’m a grafter; but I’ve half a mind to shake that money
out of him, in one way or another.”

He struck the table and looked at her for further sign of approval.

“I’m not afraid of him,” he repeated. “I wish to God he were here, and
I’d tell him so!”

She said coolly: “I was wishing that too.”

For a while they sat silent, preoccupied, avoiding each other’s direct
gaze. When she rose he started, watching her in a dazed way as she
walked to the telephone.

“Shall I?” she asked quietly, turning to him, her hand on the receiver.

“Wait. W-what are you going to do?” he stammered.

“Call him up. Shall I?”

A dull throb of fright pulsed through him.

“You say you are not afraid of him, Leroy.”

“No!” he said with an oath, “I am not. Go ahead!”

She unhooked the receiver. After a second or two her low, even voice
sounded. There came a pause. She rested one elbow on the walnut shelf,
the receiver tight to her ear. Then:

“Mr. Quarrier, please. … Yes, Mr. Howard Quarrier. … No, no name. Say it
is on business of immediate importance. … Very well, then; you may say
that Miss Vyse insists on speaking to him. … Yes, I’ll hold the wire.”

She turned, the receiver at her ear, and looked narrowly at Mortimer.

“Won’t he speak to you?” he demanded.

“I’m going to find out. Hush a moment!” and in the same calm, almost
childish voice: “Oh, Howard, is that you? Yes, I know I promised not to
do this, but that was before things happened! … Well, what am I to do
when it is necessary to talk to you? … Yes, it is necessary! … I tell
you it is necessary! … I am sorry it is not convenient for you to talk
to me, but I really must ask you to listen! … No, I shall not write. I
want to talk to you to-night--now! Yes, you may come here, if you care
to! … I think you had better come, Howard. … Because I am liable to
continue ringing your telephone until you are willing to listen. … No,
there is nobody here. I am alone. What time? … Very well; I shall expect
you. Good-bye.”

She hung up the receiver and turned to Mortimer:

“He’s coming up at once. Did I say anything to scare him particularly?”

“One thing’s sure as preaching,” said Mortimer; “he’s a coward, and I’m
dammed glad of it,” he added naively, relighting his cigar, which had
gone out.

“If he comes up in his motor he’ll be here in a few minutes,” she said.
“Suppose you take your hat and go out. I don’t want him to think what he
will think if he walks into the room and finds you waiting. You have
your key, Leroy. Walk down the block; and when you see him come in, give
him five minutes.”

Her voice had become a little breathless, and her colour was high.
Mortimer, too, seemed apprehensive. Things had suddenly begun to work
themselves out too swiftly.

“Do you think that’s best?” he faltered, looking about for his hat.
“Tell Merkle that nobody has been here, if Quarrier should ask him. Do
you think we’re doing it in the best way, Lydia? By God, it smells of a
put-up job to me! But I guess it’s all right. It’s better for me to just
happen in, isn’t it? Don’t forget to put Merkle wise.”

He descended the stairs hastily. Merkle, of the invisible eyes, held his
hat and gloves and opened the door for him.

Once on the dark street, his impulse was to flee--get out, get away from
the whole business. A sullen shame was pumping the hot blood up into his
neck and cheeks. He strove to find an inoffensive name for what he was
proposing to do, but ugly terms, synonym after synonym, crowded in to
characterise the impending procedure, and he walked on angrily, half
frightened, looking back from moment to moment at the house he had just
left.

On the corner he halted, breathing spasmodically, for he had struck a
smarter pace than he had been aware of.

Few people passed him. Once he caught a glimmer of a policeman’s buttons
along the park wall, and an unpleasant shiver passed over him. At the
same moment an electric hansom flew noiselessly past him. He shrank back
into the shadow of a porte-cochere. The hansom halted before the
limestone basement house. A tall figure left it, stood a moment in the
middle of the sidewalk, then walked quickly to the front door. It
opened, and the man vanished.

The hansom still waited at the door. Mortimer, his hands shaking, looked
at his watch by the light of the electric bulbs flanking the gateway
under which he stood.

There was not much time in which to make up his mind, yet his fright was
increasing to a pitch which began to enrage him with that coward’s
courage which it is impossible to reckon with.

He had missed Quarrier once to-day when he had been keyed to the
encounter. Was he going to miss him again through sheer terror? Besides,
was not Quarrier a coward? Besides, was it not his own money? Had he not
been vilely swindled by a pretended friend? Urging, lashing himself into
a heavy, shuffling motion, he emerged from the porte-cochere and lurched
off down the street. No time to think now, no time for second thought,
for hesitation, for weakness. He had waited too long already. He had
waited ten minutes, instead of five. Was Quarrier going to escape again?
Was he going to get out of the house before--”

Fumbling with his latch-key, but with sense enough left to make no
noise, he let himself in, passed silently through the reception-hall and
up to the drawing-room floor, where for a second he stood listening.
Then something of the perverted sportsman sent the blood quivering into
his veins. He had him! He had run him down! The game was at bay.

An inrush of exhilaration steadied him. He laid his hand on the banister
and mounted, gloves and hat-brim crushed in the other hand. When he
entered the room he pretended to see only Lydia.

“Hello, little girl!” he said, laughing, “are you surprised to--”

At that moment he caught sight of Quarrier, and the start he gave was
genuine enough. Never had he seen in a man’s visage such white
concentration of anger.

“Quarrier!” he stammered, for his acting was becoming real enough to
supplant art.

Quarrier had risen; his narrowing eyes moved from Mortimer to Lydia,
then reverted to the man in the combination.

“Rather unexpected, isn’t it?” said Mortimer, staring at Quarrier.

“Is it?” returned Quarrier in a low voice.

“I suppose so,” sneered Mortimer. “Did you expect to find me here?”

“No. Did you expect to find me?” asked the other, with emphasis
unmistakable.

“What do you mean?” demanded Mortimer hoarsely. “What the devil do you
mean by asking me if I expected to find you here? If I had, I’d not have
travelled down to your office to-day to see you; I’d have come here for
you. Naturally people suppose that an engaged man is likely to give up
this sort of thing.”

Quarrier, motionless, white to the lips, turned his eyes from one to the
other.

“It doesn’t look very well, does it?” asked Mortimer; and he stood
there, smiling, danger written all over him. “It’s beginning rather
early,” he continued, with a sneer. “Most engaged men with a conscience
wait until they’re married before they return to the gay and frivolous.
But here you are, it seems, handsome, jolly, and irresistible as ever!”

Quarrier looked at Lydia, and his lips moved: “You asked me to come,” he
said.

“No; you offered to. I wished to talk to you over the wire, but ”--her
lip curled, and she shrugged her shoulders--“you seemed to be afraid of
something or other.”

“I couldn’t talk to you in my own house, with guests in the room.”

“Why not? Did I say anything your fashionable guests might take
exception to? Am I likely to do anything of that kind?--you coward!”

Quarrier stood very still, then noiselessly turned and made one step
toward the door.

“One moment,” interposed Mortimer blandly. “As long as I travelled down
town to see you, and find you here so unexpectedly, I may as well take
advantage of this opportunity to regulate a little matter. You don’t
mind our talking shop for a moment, Lydia? Thank you. It’s just a little
business matter between Mr. Quarrier and myself--a matter concerning a
few shares of stock which I once held in one of his companies, bought at
par, and tumbled to ten and--What is the fraction, Quarrier? I forget.”

Quarrier thought deeply for a moment; then he raised his head, looking
full at Mortimer, and under his silky beard an edge of teeth glimmered.
“Did you wish me to take back those shares at par?” he asked.

“Exactly! I knew you would! I knew you’d see it in that way!” cried
Mortimer heartily. “Confound it all, Quarrier, I’ve always said you were
that sort of man--that you’d never let a friend in on the top floor, and
kick him clear to the cellar! As a matter of fact, I sold out at ten and
three-eighths. Wait! Here’s a pencil. Lydia, give me that pad on your
desk. Here you are, Quarrier. It’s easy enough to figure out how much
you owe me.”

And as Quarrier slowly began tracing figures on the pad, Mortimer
rambled on, growing more demonstrative and boisterous every moment.
“It’s white of you, Quarrier--I’ll say that! Legally, of course, you
could laugh at me; but I’ve always said your business conscience would
never let you stand for this sort of thing. ‘You can talk and talk,’
I’ve told people, many a time, ‘but you’ll never convince me that Howard
Quarrier hasn’t a heart.’ No, by jinks! they couldn’t make me believe
it. And here’s my proof--here’s my vindication! Lydia, would you mind
hunting up that cheque-book I left here before dinn--”

He had made a mistake. The girl flushed. He choked up, and cast a
startled glance at Quarrier. But Quarrier, if he heard, made no motion
of understanding. Perhaps it had not been necessary to convince him of
the conspiracy.

When he had finished his figures he reviewed them, tracing each total
with his pencil’s point; then quietly handed the pad to Mortimer who
went over it, and nodded that it was correct.

Lydia rose. Quarrier said, without looking at her: “I have a blank
cheque with me. May I use one of these pens?”

So he had brought a cheque! Had he supposed that a cheque might be
necessary when Lydia called him up? Was he prepared to meet any demand
of hers, too, even before Mortimer appeared on the scene?

“As long as you have a cheque with you, Howard,” said Lydia quietly,
“suppose you simply add to Mr. Mortimer’s amount what you had intended
to offer me?”

He stared at her without answering.

“That little remembrance for old time’s sake. Don’t you recollect?”

“No,” said Quarrier.

“Why, Howard! Didn’t you promise me all sorts of things when I wanted to
go to your friend Mr. Siward, and explain that it was not his fault I
got into the Patroons Club? Don’t you remember I felt dreadfully that he
was expelled--that I was simply wild to write to the governors and tell
them how I took Merkle’s clothes and drove to the club and waited until
I saw a lot of men go in, and then crowded in with the push?”

Mortimer was staring at Quarrier out of his protruding eyes. The girl
leaned forward, deliberate, self-possessed, the red lips edged with
growing scorn.

“That was a dirty trick!” said Mortimer heavily. He took the pad, added
a figure, passed it to Lydia, and she coolly wrote a total, underscoring
it heavily.

“That is the amount,” she said.

Quarrier looked at the pad which she had tossed upon the desk. Then he
slowly wetted his pen with ink, and, laying the loose cheque flat, began
to fill it in. Afterward he dried it, and, reading it carefully, pushed
it aside and rose.

“It wouldn’t be advisable for you to stop payment, you know,” observed
Mortimer insolently, lying back in his chair and stretching his legs.

“I know,” said Quarrier, pausing to turn on them a deathly stare. Then
he went away. After awhile they heard the door close. But there was no
sound from the electric hansom, and Mortimer rose and walked to the
window.

“He’s gone,” he said.

Lydia stood at the desk, examining the cheque.

“We ought to afford a decent touring-car now,” she suggested--“like that
yellow and black Serin-Chanteur car of Mr. Plank’s.”



CHAPTER XIII THE SELLING PRICE

The heat, which had been severe in June, driving the last fashionable
loiterer into the country, continued fiercely throughout July. August
was stifling; the chestnut leaves in the parks curled up and grew
brittle; the elms were blotched; brown stretches scarred the lawns; the
blazing colour of the geranium beds seemed to intensify the heat, like a
bed of living coals.

Nobody who was anybody remained in town--except some wealthy business
men and their million odd employés; but the million, being nobodies,
didn’t count.

Nobody came into town; that is to say that a million odd strangers came
as usual, swelling the sweltering, resident population sufficiently to
animate the main commercial thoroughfares morning and evening, but they
didn’t count; the money they spent was, however, very carefully counted.

The fashionable columns of the newspapers informed the fashionable
ex-urbanated that the city was empty--though the East Side reeked like
a cattle-pen, and another million or two gasped on the hot, tin roofs
under the stars, or buried their dirty faces in the parched park grass.

What the press meant to say was that the wealthy section of the city
within the shadow of St. Patrick’s twin white spires and north of Fifty-
ninth Street was as empty and silent as an abandoned gold-mine. Which
was true. Miles of elaborate, untenanted dwellings glimmered blank under
the moon and stood tomb-like in barren magnificence against the blazing
blue of noon. Miles of plate-glass windows, boarded, or bearing between
lowered shade and dusty pane the significant parti-coloured placard
warning the honest thief, stared out at the heated park or, in the cross
streets, confronted each other with inert hauteur, awaiting the pleasure
of their absent owners.

The humidity increased; the horses’ heads hung heavily under their
ridiculously pitiful straw bonnets. When the sun was vertical nobody
stirred; when the bluish shadows began to creep out over baked
sidewalks, broadening to a strip of superheated shade, a few stirred
abroad in the deserted streets; here a policeman, thin blue summer tunic
open, helmet in hand, swabbing the sweat from forehead and neck; there a
white uniformed street sweeper dragging his rubber-edged mop or a
section of wet hose; perhaps a haggard peddler of lemonade making for
the Park wall around the Metropolitan Museum where, a little later, the
East Side would venture out to sit on the benches, or the great electric
tourists’ busses would halt to dump out a living cargo--perhaps only the
bent figure of a woman, very shabby, very old, dragging her ancient
bones along the silent splendour of Fifth Avenue, and peering about the
gutters for something she never finds--always peering, always mumbling
the endless, wordless, soundless miserere of the poor.

Quarrier’s huge limestone mansion, looming golden in the sun, was
tenantless; its owner, closing even The Sedges, his Long Island house,
and driven northward for a breath of air, was expected at Shotover.

The house of Mrs. Mortimer was closed and boarded up; the Caithness
mansion was closed; the Ferralls’, the Bonnesdels’, the Pages’, the
Shannons’, Mrs. Vendenning’s, all were sealed up like vaults. A
caretaker apparently guarded Major Belwether’s house, peeping out at
intervals from behind the basement windows. As for Plank’s great pile of
masonry, edging the outer Hundreds in the north, several lighted windows
were to be seen in it at night, and a big yellow and black touring-car
whizzed down town from its bronze gateway every morning with perfect
regularity.

For there was a fight on that had steadily grown hotter with the
weather, and Plank had little time to concern himself with the
temperature or to mop his red features over the weather bureau report.
Harrington and Quarrier were after him, horse, foot, and dragoons;
Harrington had even taken a house at Seabright in order to be near in
person; and Quarrier’s move from Long Island to Shotover House was not
as flippant as it might appear, for he had his private car there and a
locomotive at Black Fells Crossing station, and he was within striking
distance of Rochester, Utica, Syracuse, and Albany. Which was what
Harrington thought necessary.

The vast unseen machinery set in motion by Harrington and Quarrier had
begun to grind in May; and, at the first audible rumble, the aspect of
things financial in the country changed. A few industrials began to
rocket, nobody knew why; but the market’s first tremor left it baggy and
spineless, and the reaction, already overdue, became a sodden and soggy
slump. Nobody knew why.

The noise of the fray in the papers, which had first excited then
stunned the outside public, continued in a delirium of rumour, report,
forecast, and summing up at the week’s end.

Scare heads, involving everybody and everything, from the District-
Attorney to Plank’s office boy, succeeded one another. Plank’s name
headed column after column. Already becoming familiar in the society and
financial sections, it began to appear in neighbouring paragraphs. Who
was Plank? And the papers told people with more or less inaccuracy,
humour, or sarcasm. What was he trying to do? The papers tried to tell
that, too, making a pretty close guess, with comments good-natured or
ill-natured according to circumstances over which somebody ought to have
some control. What was Harrington trying to do to Plank--if he was trying
to do anything? They told that pretty clearly. What was Quarrier going
to do to Plank? That, also, they explained in lively detail. A few
clergymen who stuck to their churches began to volunteer pulpit opinions
concerning the ethics of the battle. A minister who was generally
supposed to make an unmitigated nuisance of himself in politics dealt
Plank an unexpected blow by saying that he was a “hero.” Some papers
called him “Hero” Plank for awhile, but soon tired of it or forgot it
under the stress of the increasing heat.

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