The Danger Mark Part 76

"You won't go, will you?" he whispered.

"Where, father?"

"Away."

"No, of course not."

"I mean with--Geraldine," he said feebly.

"If I did, father, we'd take you with us," he laughed.

"It is too far, my son.... You and Geraldine are going too far for me to follow.... Wait a little while."

Geraldine, blushing, bent down swiftly, her lips brushing the sick man's wasted face:

"I would not care for him if I could take him from you."

"Your father and I were old friends. Your grandfather was a very fine gentleman.... I am glad.... I am a little tired--a little confused. Is your grandfather here with you? I would like to see him."

She said, after a moment, in a low voice: "He did not come with me to-day."

"Give him my regards and compliments. And say to him that it would be a pleasure to see him. I am not very well; has he heard of my indisposition?"

"I think he--has."

"Then he will come," said Colonel Mallett feebly. "Duane, you are not going, are you? I am a little tired. I think I could sleep if you would lower the shade and ask your mother to sit by me.... But you won't go until I am asleep, will you?"

"No," he said gently, as his mother and Nada entered and Geraldine rose to greet them, shocked at the change in Mrs. Mallett.

She and Nada went away together; later Duane joined them in the library, saying that his father was asleep, holding fast to his wife's hand.

Geraldine, her arm around Nada's waist, had been looking at one of Duane's pictures--the only one of his in the house--merely a stretch of silvery marsh and a gray, wet sky beyond.

"Father liked it," he said; "that's why it's here, Geraldine."

"You never made one brush-stroke that was commonplace in all your life,"

said Geraldine abruptly. "Even I can see that."

"Such praise from a lady!" he exclaimed, laughing. Geraldine smiled, too, and Nada's pallid face lightened for a moment. But grief had set its seal on the house of Mallett; that was plain everywhere; and when Geraldine kissed Nada good-bye and walked to the door beside her lover, a pa.s.sion of tenderness for him and his overwhelmed her, and when he put her into her brougham she leaned from the lowered window, clinging to his hand, careless of who might see them.

"_Can_ I help in any way?" she whispered. "I told you that my fortune is still my own--most of it----"

"Dear, wait!"

There was a strange look in his eyes; she said no more with her lips, but her eyes told him all. Then he stepped back, directing Dunn to drive his mistress to the Commonwealth Club, where she was to lunch with Sylvia Quest, whom she had met that morning in the blockade at Forty-second Street, and who had invited her from her motor across the crupper of a traffic-policeman's horse.

CHAPTER XVIII

BON CHIEN

The chronology of that last dark and bitter week in November might have been written "necrology."

On Monday Colonel Mallett died about sundown; on Wednesday the Hon. John D. Ellis, while examining an automatic revolver in his bath-room, met with one of those unfortunate and fatal accidents which sometimes happen in times of great financial depression.

Thursday Amos Flack carelessly disappeared, leaving no address; and on the last day of the week Emanuel Klawber politely excused himself to a group of very solemn gentlemen who had been a.s.sisting him in the well-known and popular game of "Hunt the Books"; and, stepping outside the door of the director's office, carefully destroyed what little life had not already been scared out of his three-hundred-pound person.

It had been raining all day; Dysart had not felt very well, and Klawber's unpleasant performance made him ill. He stood in the rain watching the ambulance arriving at a gallop, then, sickened, turned away through the dark and dripping crowds, crossed the street, and, lowering his head against the storm, drove both gloved hands deep into the pockets of his fashionably cut rain-coat, and started for home.

It mattered nothing to him that several hard-working newspaper men might desire to secure his version of Mr. Klawber's taking off, or of his explanation for it or his sensations concerning it. It mattered nothing to him that the afternoon papers reported the arrest of James Skelton, or that Max Moebus had inadvertently, and no doubt in a moment of intense abstraction, taken a steamer for Europe and the books of the Shoshone Bank.

These matters, now seemed a great way off--too unreal to be of personal moment. He was feeling sick; that occupied his mind. Also the slush on the sidewalk had wet through his shoes, which probably was not good for his cough.

It was scarcely two in the afternoon, yet there remained so little daylight that the electricity burned in the shops along Fifth Avenue.

Through a s.m.u.tty, grayish gloom, rain drove densely; his hat and waterproof coat were heavy with it, the bottoms of his trousers soaked.

Pa.s.sing the Patroons Club it occurred to him that hot whiskey might extinguish his cough. The liveried servants at the door, in the cloak-room--the page who took his order, the white-headed butler who had always personally served him, and who served him now, all hesitated and gazed curiously at him. He paid no attention at the time but remembered it afterward.

For an hour he sat alone in the vast empty room before a fire of English cannel coal, taking his hot whiskey and lemon in slow, absent-minded gulps. Patches of deep colour lay flat under his cheek-bones, his sunken abstracted eyes never left the coals.

The painted gaze of dead Presidents and Governors looked down at him from their old-time frames ranged in stately ranks along the oaken wainscot. Over the mantel the amazing, Hebraic countenance of a moose leered at him out of little sly, sardonic little eyes, almost bantering in their evil immobility.

He had presented the trophy to the club after a trip somewhere, leaving the impression that he had shot it. He seldom looked at it, never at the silver-engraved inscription on the walnut shield.

Strangely enough, now as he sat there, he thought of the trophy and looked up at it; and for the first time in his life read the inscription.

It made no visible impression upon him except that for a brief moment the small and vivid patches of colour in his wasted cheeks faintly tinted the general pallor. But this died out as soon as it appeared; he drank deliberately, set the hot gla.s.s on a table at his elbow, long, bony fingers still retaining a grip upon it.

And into his unconcentrated thoughts, strangely enough, came the memories of little meannesses which he had committed--trivial things that he supposed he had forgotten long ago; and at first, annoyed, he let memory drift.

But, imperceptibly, from the shallows of these little long-forgotten meannesses, memory drifted uncontrolled into deeper currents; and, disdainful, he made no effort to control it; and later, could not. And for the first time in his life he took the trouble to understand the reason of his unpopularity among men. He had cared nothing for them.

He cared nothing for them now, unless that half tolerant, half disdainful companionship of years with Delancy Grandcourt could be called caring for a man. If their relations ever had been anything more than a habit he did not know; on what their friendship had ever been founded he could not tell. It had been his habit to take from Delancy, accept, or help himself. He had helped himself to Rosalie Dene; and not long ago he had accepted all that Delancy offered, almost convinced at the time that it would disappear in the debacle when the Algonquin crumbled into a rubbish heap of rotten securities.

A curious friendship--and the only friend he ever had had among men--stupid, inertly at hand, as inevitably to be counted on as some battered toy of childhood which escaped the dust heap so long that custom tolerates its occupation of any closet s.p.a.ce convenient: and habit, at intervals, picks it up to see what's left of it.

He had finished his whiskey; the fire seemed to have grown too hot, and he shoved back his chair. But the room, too, was becoming close, even stifling. Perspiration glistened on his forehead; he rose and began to wander from room to room, followed always by the stealthy glances of servants.

The sweat on his face had become unpleasantly cold; he came back to the fire, endured it for a few moments, then, burning and shivering at the same time, and preferring the latter sensation, he went out to his letter-box and unlocked it. There was only one envelope there, a letter from the governing board of the club requesting his resignation.

The possibility of such an event had never occurred to him; he read the letter again, folded and placed it in his pocket, went back to the fire with the idea of burning it, took it out, read it again, folded it absently, and replaced it in his pocket.

At that time, except for the dull surprise, the episode did not seem to affect him particularly. So many things had been acc.u.mulating, so many matters had been menacing him, that one cloud more among the dark, ominous ma.s.ses gathering made no deeper impression than slight surprise.