The Fighting Chance Part 49

"No, I can't. What a fool I'd be to let a chance slip when I feel like a winner!"

"You never feel otherwise when you gamble," said Leila.

"Yes, I do," he retorted peevishly. "I can tell almost every time what the cards are going to do to me. Leila, go to sleep. We'll be back here for you by one, or half past."

"Look here, Leroy," began Plank, "there's one thing I can't stand for, and that's this continual loss of sleep. If I go with you I'll not be fit to go to the Pages."

"What a farmer you are!" sneered Mortimer. "I believe you roost on the foot-board of your bed, like a confounded turkey. Come on! You'd better begin training, you know. People in this town are not going to stand for the merry ploughboy game, you see!"

But Plank was shrewdly covering his princ.i.p.al reason for declining; he had too often "temporarily" a.s.sisted Mortimer at Desmond's and Burbank's, when Mortimer, cleaned out and unable to draw against a balance non-existent, had plucked him by the sleeve from the faro table with the breathless request for a loan.

"I tell you I can wring Desmond dry to-night," repeated Mortimer sullenly. "It isn't a case of 'want to,' either; it's a case of 'got to.' That old pink-and-white rabbit, Belwether, got me into a game this afternoon, and between him and Voucher and Alderdine I'm stripped clean as a kennel bone."

But Plank shook his head, pretending to yawn; and Mortimer, glowering and lingering, presently went off, his swollen hands thrust into his trousers' pockets, his gross features dark with disgust; and presently they heard the front door slam, and a rattling tattoo of horses' feet on the asphalt; and Leila sprang up impatiently, and, pa.s.sing Plank, traversed the pa.s.sage to the windows of the front room.

"He's taken the horses--the beast!" she said calmly, as Plank joined her at the great windows and looked out into the night, where the round, drooping, flower-like globes of the electric lamps spread a lake of silver before the house.

It was rather rough on Leila. The Mortimers maintained one pair of horses only; and the use given them at all hours resulted in endless scenes, and an utter impossibility for Leila to retain the same coachman and footman for more than a few weeks at a time.

"He won't come back; he'll keep Martin and the horses standing in front of Delmonico's all night. You'd better call up the stables, Beverly."

So Plank called up a livery and arranged for transportation at one; and Leila seated herself at a card-table and began to deal herself cold decks, thoughtfully.

"That bit in 'Carmen,'" she said, "it always brings the shudder; it never palls on me, never grows stale." She whipped the ominous spade from the pack and held it out. "La Mort!" she exclaimed in mock tragedy, yet there was another undertone ringing through it, sounding, too, in her following laugh. "Draw!" she commanded, holding out the pack; and Plank drew a diamond.

"Naturally," she nodded, shuffling the pack with her smooth, savant fingers and laying them out as she repeated the formula: "Qui frappe?

Qui entre? Qui prend chaise? Qui parle? Oh, the deuce! it's always the same! Tiens! je m'ennui!" There was a flash of her bare arm, a flutter, and the cards fell in a shower over them both.

Plank flipped a card from his knee, laughing uncertainly, aware of symptoms in his pretty vis-a-vis which always made him uncomfortable.

For months, now, at certain intervals, these recurrent symptoms had made him wary; but what they might portend he did not know, only that, alone with her, moments occurred when he was heavily aware of a tension which, after a while, affected even his few thick nerves. One of those intervals was threatening now: her flushed cheeks, her feverish activity with her hands, the unconscious reflex movement of her silken knees and restless slippers, all foreboded it. Next would come the nervous laughter, the swift epigram which bored and puzzled him, the veiled badinage he was unequal to; and then the hint of weariness, the curious pathos of long silences, the burnt-out beauty of her eyes from which the fire had gone as though quenched by invisible tears within.

He ascribed it--desired to ascribe it--to her relations with her husband. He had naturally learned and divined how matters stood with them; he had learned considerable in the last month or two--something of Mortimer's record as a burly brother to the rich; something of his position among those who made no question of his presence anywhere.

Something of Leila, too, he had heard, or rather deduced from hinted word or shrug or smiling silence, not meant for him, but indifferent to what he might hear and what he might think of what he heard.

He did listen; he did patiently add two and two in the long solitudes of his Louis XV chamber; and if the results were not always four, at least they came within a fraction of the proper answer. And this did not alter his policy or weaken his faith in his mentors; nor did it impair his real grat.i.tude to them, and his real and simple friendship for them both. He was faithful in friendship once formed, obstinately so, for better or for worse; but he was shrewd enough to ignore opportunities for friendships which he foresaw could do him no good on his plodding pilgrimage toward the temple of his inexorable desire.

Lifting, now, his Delft-coloured eyes furtively, he studied the silk-and-lace swathed figure of the young matron opposite, flung back into the depths of her great chair, profile turned from him, her chin imprisoned in her ringed fingers. The brooding abandon of the att.i.tude contrasted sharply with the grooming of the woman, making both the more effective.

"Turn in, if you want to," she said, her voice indistinct, smothered by her pink palm. "You're to dress in Leroy's quarters."

"I don't want to turn in just yet."

"You said you needed sleep."

"I do. But it's not eleven yet."

She slipped into another posture, reaching for a cigarette, and, setting it afire from the match he offered, exhaled a cloud of smoke and looked dreamily through it at him.

"Who is she?" she asked in a colourless voice. "Tell me, for I don't know. Agatha? Marion Page? Mrs. Vendenning? or the Ta.s.sel girl?"

"n.o.body--yet," he admitted cheerfully.

"n.o.body--yet," she repeated, musing over her cigarette. "That's good politics, if it's true."

"Am I untruthful?" he asked simply.

"I don't know. Are you? You're a man."

"Don't talk that way, Leila."

"No, I won't. What is it that you and Sylvia Landis have to talk about so continuously every time you meet?"

"She's merely civil to me," he explained.

"That's more than she is to a lot of people. What do you talk about?"

"I don't know--nothing in particular; mostly about Shotover, and the people there last summer."

"Doesn't she ever mention Stephen Siward?"

"Usually. She knows I like him."

"She likes him, too," said Leila, looking at him steadily.

"I know it. Everybody likes him--or did. I do, yet."

"I do, too," observed Mrs. Mortimer coolly. "I was in love with him. He was only a boy then."

Plank nodded in silence.

"Where is he now--do, you know?" she asked. "Everybody says he's gone to the devil."

"He's in the country somewhere," replied Plank cautiously. "I stopped in to see him the other day, but n.o.body seemed to know when he would return."

Mrs. Mortimer tossed her cigarette onto the hearth. For a long interval of silence she lay there in her chair, changing her position restlessly from moment to moment; and at length she lay quite still, so long that Plank began to think she had fallen asleep in her chair.

He rose. She did not stir, and, pa.s.sing her, he instinctively glanced down. Her cheeks, half buried against the back of the chair, were overflushed; under the closed lids the lashes glistened wet in the lamplight.

Surprised, embarra.s.sed, he halted, as though afraid to move; and she sat up with a nervous shake of her shoulders.

"What a life!" she said, under her breath; "what a life for a woman to lead!"

"Wh-whose?" he blurted out.

"Mine!"

He stared at her uneasily, finding nothing to say. He had never before heard anything like this from her.