The Fighting Chance Part 67

Her voice had grown unsteady; an unreasoning rush of anger had set her whole body a-thrill, and the white heat of it was driving her to provoke him, as though that might cleanse her of the ignominy of the bargain--as though a bargain did not require two of the same mind to make it.

"What do you want of me?" she said, still stinging under the angry waves of self-contempt. "What are you marrying me for? Because, divided, we are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world? Because, united, we can dominate the brainless? Is there any other reason?"

Showing his teeth in that twitching snicker that contracted the muscles of his upper lip: "Children!" he said, looking at her.

She turned scarlet to her hair; the deliberate grossness stunned her.

Confused, she stood confronting him, dumb under a retort the coa.r.s.eness of which she had never dreamed him capable.

"I mean what I say," he repeated calmly. "A man cares for two things: his fortune, and the heirs to it. If you didn't know that you have learned it now. You hurt me deliberately. I told you a plain truth very bluntly. It is for you to consider the situation."

But she could not speak; anger, humiliation, shame, held her tongue-tied. The instinctive revolt at the vague horror--the monstrous, meaningless threat--nothing could force words from her to repudiate, to deny what he had dared to utter.

Except as the effrontery of brutality, except as a formless menace born of his anger, the reason he flung at her for his marrying her conveyed nothing to her in its grotesque impossibility. Only the intentional coa.r.s.eness of it was to be endured--if she chose to endure it; for the rest was empty of concrete meaning to her.

Lent was half over before she saw him again. Neither he nor she had taken any steps to complete the rupture; and at the Mi-careme dance, given by the Siowa Hunt, Quarrier, who was M. F. H., took up the thread of their suspended intercourse as methodically and calmly as though it had never quivered to the breaking point. He led the cotillon with agreeable precision and impersonal accuracy, favouring her at intervals; and though she wasted no favours on him, she endured his, which was sufficient evidence that matters were still in statu quo.

She returned to town next morning with Grace Ferrall, irritable, sulky, furious with herself at the cowardly relief she felt. For, spite of her burning anger against Quarrier, the suspense at times had been wearing; and she would not make the first move--had not decided even to accept his move if it came--at least, had not admitted to herself that she would accept it. It had come and the tension was over, and now, entering Mrs. Ferrall's brougham which met them at Thirty-fourth Street Ferry, she was furious with herself for her unfeigned feeling of relief.

All hot with self-contempt she lay back in the comfortably upholstered corner of the brougham, staring straight before her, sullen red mouth unresponsive to the occasional inconsequent questions of Grace Ferrall.

"After awhile," observed Grace, "people will begin to talk about the discontented beauty of your face."

Sylvia's eyebrows bent still farther inward.

"A fretful face, but rather pretty," commented Grace maliciously.

"It won't do, dear. Your role is dignified comedy. O dear! O my!" She stifled a yawn behind her faultlessly gloved hand. "I'm feeling these late hours in my aged bones. It wasn't much of a dance, was it? Or am I disillusioned? Certainly that Edgeworth boy fell in love with me--the depraved creature--trying his primitive wiles there in the conservatory!

Little beast! There are no nice boys any more; they're all too young or too sophisticated.

Howard does lead well, I admit that.

You're on the box seat together again I see. Pooh! I wasn't a bit alarmed."

"I was," said Sylvia, curling her lip in biting self-contempt.

"Well, that's a wholesome confession, anyway. O dear, how I do yawn! and Lent only half over.

Sylvia, what are you staring at? Oh, I--see."

They had driven south to Washington Square, where Mrs. Ferrall had desired to leave a note, and were now returning. Sylvia had leaned forward to look up at Siward's house, but with Mrs. Ferrall's first word she sank back, curiously expressionless and white; for she had seen a woman entering the front door and had recognised her as Marion Page.

"Well, of all indiscretions!" breathed Grace, looking helplessly at Sylvia. "Oh, no, that sort of thing is sheer effrontery, you know! It's rotten bad taste; it's no worse, of course--but it's bad taste. I don't care what privileges we concede to Marion, we're not going to concede this--unless she puts on trousers for good. It's all very well for her to talk her plain kennel talk, and call spades by their technical names, and smoke all over people's houses, and walk all over people's prejudices; but there's no sense in her hunting for trouble; and she'll get it, sure as scandal is scandal!"

And still Sylvia remained pale and silent, eyes downcast, shrinking close into her upholstered corner, as though some reflex instinct of self-concealment was still automatically dominating her.

"She ought to be spanked!" said Grace viciously. "If she were my daughter I'd do it, too!"

Sylvia did not stir.

"Little idiot! Going into a man's house in the face of all Fifth Avenue and the teeth of decency!"

"She has courage," said Sylvia, still very white.

"Courage! Do you mean fool-hardiness?"

"No, courage--the courage I lacked. I knew he was too ill to leave his room and I lacked the courage to go and see him."

"You mean, alone?"

"Certainly, alone."

"You dare tell me you ever contemplated--"

"Oh, yes. I think I should have done it yet, but--but Marion--"

Suddenly she bent forward, resting her face in her hands; and between the fingers a bright drop ran, glimmered, and fell.

"O Lord!" breathed Mrs. Ferrall, and sank back, nerveless, into her own corner of the rocking brougham.

CHAPTER XII THE ASKING PRICE

Siward, at his desk, over which the May sunshine streamed, his crutches laid against his chair, sat poring over the piles of papers left there by Beverly Plank some days before with a curt recommendation that he master their contents.

Some of the papers were typewritten, some appeared to be engraved certificates of stock, a few were in Plank's heavy, squat handwriting.

There were several packages tied in pink tape, evidently legal papers of some sort; and also a pile of sc.r.a.p-books containing newspaper clippings to which Siward referred occasionally, or read them at length, resting his thin, fatigued face between two bony hands.

The curious persistence of youth in his features seemed unaccountable in view of the heavy marks imprinted there; but they were marks, not lines; bluish hollows under eyes still young, marred contours of the cheek-bone; a hardness about the hollow temples above which his short, bright hair cl.u.s.tered with all its soft, youthful allure undimmed; and in every movement, every turn of his head, there still remained much of that indefinable attractiveness which had always characterised his race--much of the unconscious charm usually known as breeding.

In men of Mortimer's fibre, dissipation produced coa.r.s.er symptoms--distended veins, and sagging flesh--where in Siward it seemed to bruise and harden, driving the colour of blood out of him and leaving the pallor of marble, and the bluish shadows of it staining the hollows.

Only the eyes had begun to change radically; something in them had been quenched.

That he could never hope to become immune he had learned at last when he had returned, physically wholesome, from his long course of training under the famous Irish specialist on the Hudson. He had expected to be immune, spite of the blunt and forcible language of Mulqueen when he turned him out into the world again:

"Ye'll be afther notin'," said Mr. Mulqueen, "that a poonch in the plexis putts a man out; but it don't kill him. That's you! Whin a man mixes it up wid the booze, l'ave him come here an' I'll tache him a thrick. But it's not murther I tache; it's the hook on the jaw that shtops, an' the poonch in the plexis that putts the booze-divil on the b.u.m! L'ave him take the count; he'll niver rise to the chune o' the bell av ye l'ave him lie. But he ain't dead, Misther Sayward; mark that, me son! An' don't ye be afther sayin', 'Th' inimy is down an' out fur good!

Pore lad! Sure, I'll shake hands over a dhrink wid him, for he can do me no hurrt anny more!' No, sorr! L'ave him lie, an' l'ave the years av ver life count him out; fur the day you die, he dies, an' not wan shake o'

the mixer sooner! G'wan, now, fur the rub-down. Ye've faught yer lasht round, if ye ain't a fool!"

He had been a fool. He had imagined that he could control himself, and practise the moderation that other men practised when they chose. The puerile restraint annoyed him; his implied inability to master himself humiliated him, the more so because, secretly, he was horribly afraid in the remote depths of his heart.

Exactly how it happened he did not remember, except that he had gone down town on business and had lunched with several men. There was claret. Later he remembered another cafe, farther up town, and another, more brilliantly lighted. After that there were vague hours--the fierce fever of debauch wrapping night and day in flame through which he moved, unseeing, unheeding, deafened, drenched soul and body in the living fire; or dreaming, feeling the subsiding fury of desire pulse and ebb and flow, rocking him to unconsciousness.

His father's old servants had found him again, this time in the area; and this time the same ankle, not yet strong, had been broken.

Through the waning winter days, as he lay brooding in bitterness, realising that it was all to do over again, Plank's shy visits became gradually part of the routine. But it was many days before Siward perceived in the big, lumbering, pink-fisted man anything to attract him beyond the faintly amused curiosity of one man for another who is in process of establishing himself as the first of a race.

As for reciprocation in other forms except the most superficial, or of permitting a personal note to sound ever so discreetly, Siward tolerated no such idea. Even the tentative advances of Plank hinting on willingness, and perhaps ability, to help Siward in the Amalgamated tangle were pleasantly ignored. Unpaid services rendered by men like Plank were impossible; any obligation to Plank was utterly out of the question. Meanwhile they began to like one another--at least Siward often found himself looking forward with pleasure to a visit from Plank. There had never been any question of the latter's att.i.tude toward Siward.

Plank began to frequent the house, but never informally. It is doubtful whether he could have practised informality in that house even at Siward's invitation. Something of the att.i.tude of a college lower cla.s.sman for a man in a cla.s.s above seemed to typify their relations; and that feeling is never entirely eradicated between men, no matter how close their relationship in after-life.