The Fighting Chance Part 79

"Yes."

"And you ask me if I believe it possible that she can be the medium?"

"Yes."

Plank said deliberately: "Yes, I do think so."

The silence was again broken by Plank: "Siward, you have asked me what I think. Now you must listen to the end. If you believed that through her--her love, marrying her--you stood the best chance in the world to win out, it would be cowardly to ask her to take the risk. As much as I care for you I had rather see you lose the fight than accept such a risk from her. Now you know what I think--but you don't know all. Siward, I say to you that if you are man enough to take her, take her! And I say that of the two risks she is running to-day, the chance she might take with you is infinitely the lesser risk. For with you, if you continue slowly losing your fight, the mental suffering only will be hers. But if she closes this bargain with Quarrier, selling to him her body, the light will go out of her soul for ever."

He leaned heavily toward Siward, stretching out his powerful arm:

"You marry her; and keep open your spiritual communication through her, if that is the way it has been established, and hang on to your G.o.d that way until your body is dead! I tell you, Siward, to marry her. I don't care how you do it; I don't care how you get her. Take her! Yours, of the two, is the stronger character, or she would not be where she is.

Does she want what you cannot give her? Cure that desire--it is more contemptible than the craving that shatters you! I say, let the one-eyed lead the blind. Miracles are worked out by mathematics--if you have faith enough."

He rose, striding the length of the room once or twice, turned, holding out his broad hand:

"Good-bye," he said. "Harrington is about due at my office; Quarrier will probably turn up to-night. I am not vindictive; I shall be just with them--as just as I know how, which is to be as merciful as I dare be. Good-bye, Siward. I--I believe you and she are going to get well."

When he had gone, Siward lay back in his chair, very still, eyes closed.

A faint colour had mounted to his face and remained there.

It was late in the afternoon when he went down-stairs, using his crutches lightly. Gumble handed him a straw hat and opened the door, and Siward cautiously descended the stoop, stood for a few moments on the sidewalk, looking up at the blue sky, then wheeled and slowly made his way toward Washington Square. The avenue was deserted; his own house appeared to be the only remaining house still open in all that old-fashioned but respectable quarter.

He swung leisurely southward, a slim, well-built young fellow, strangely out of place on crutches. The poor always looked at him; beggars never importuned him, yet found him agreeable to watch. Children, who seldom look up into the air far enough to notice grown people, always became conscious of him when he pa.s.sed; often smiled, sometimes spoke. As for stray curs and tramp cats, they were for ever making advances. As long as he could remember, there was scarcely a week in town but some homeless dog attached himself to Siward's heels, sometimes trotting several blocks, sometimes following him home--where the outcast was always cared for, washed, fed, and ultimately shipped out to the farm, where scores of these "fresh-air" dogs resided on his bounty and rolled in luxury on his lawns.

Cats, too, were p.r.o.ne to notice him, rising as he pa.s.sed to hoist an interrogative tail and make tentative observations.

In Washington Square, these, and the ragged children, knew him best of all. The children came from Minetta Lane and the purlieus south and west of it; the cats from the Mews, which Siward always thought most appropriate.

And now, as he pa.s.sed the marble arch and entered the square, glancing behind him he saw the inevitable cat trotting, and, at his left, a very dirty little girl pretending to trundle a hoop, but plainly enough keeping sociable pace with him.

"h.e.l.lo!" said Siward. The cat stopped; the child tossed her cl.u.s.tering curls, gave him a rapid but fearless sidelong glance, laughed, and ran on in the wake of her hoop. When she caught it she sat down on a bench opposite the fountain and looked around at Siward.

"It's pretty warm, isn't it?" said Siward, coming up and seating himself on the same bench.

"Are you lame?" asked the child.

"Oh, a little."

"Is your leg broken?"

"Oh, no, not now."

"Is that your cat?"

Siward looked around; the cat was seated on the bench beside him. But he was accustomed to that sort of thing, and he caressed the creature with his gloved hand.

"Are you rich?" asked the child, shaking her blond curls from her eyes and staring up solemnly at him.

"Not very," he answered, smiling. "Why do you ask?"

"You look rich, somehow," said the child shyly.

"What! With these old and very faded clothes?"

She shook her head, swinging her plump legs: "You look it, somehow. It isn't the clothes that matter."

"I'll tell you one thing," said Siward, laughing "I'm rich enough to buy all the hokey-pokey you can eat!" and he glanced meaningly at the pedlar of that staple who had taken station between a vender of peaches and a Greek flower-seller.

The child looked, too, but made no comment.

"How about it?" asked Siward.

"I'd rather have something to remember you by," said the girl innocently.

"What?" he said, perplexed.

"A rose. They are five cents, and hokey-pokey costs that much--I mean, for as much as you can eat."

"Do you really want a rose?" he said amused.

But the child fell shy, and he beckoned the Greek and selected a dozen big, perfumed jacks.

Then, as the child sat silent, her ragged arms piled with roses, he asked her jestingly what else she desired.

"Nothing. I like to look at you," she answered simply.

"And I like to look at you. Will you tell me your name?"

"Molly."

But that is all the information he could extract. Presently she said she was going, hesitated, looked a very earnest good-bye, and darted away across the park, her hoop over one arm, the crimson roses bobbing above her shoulders. Something in her flight attracted the errant cat, for she, too, jumped down and bounded after the little flying feet, but, catlike, halted half-way to scratch, and then forgetting what she was about, wandered off toward the Mews again, whence she had been lured by instinctive fascination.

Siward, intensely amused, sat there in the late sunlight which streamed through the park, casting long shadows from the elms and sycamores. It was that time of the day, just before sunset, when the old square looked to him as he remembered it as a child. Even the marble arch, pink in the evening sun, did not disturb the harmony of his memories. He saw his father once more, walking home from down town, tall, slim, laughingly stopping to watch him as he played there with the other children--the nurses, seated in a row, crocheting under the sycamores; he saw the old-fashioned carriage pa.s.s, Mockett on the box, Wands beside him, and his pretty mother leaning forward to wave her hand to him as the long-tailed, long-maned horses wheeled into Fifth Avenue. Little unimportant scenes, trivial episodes, grew in the spectral garden of memory: the first time he ever saw Marion Page, when, aged five, she was attempting to get into the fountain, pursued by a shrieking nurse; and a certain flight across the gra.s.s he had indulged in with Leila Mortimer, then Leila Egerton, aged six, in hot pursuit, because she found that it bored him horribly to be kissed, and she was bound to do it. He had a fight once, over by that gnarled, old, silver poplar-tree, with Kemp Ferrall--he could not remember what about, only that they ended by unanimously a.s.saulting their nurses and were dragged howling homeward.

He turned, looking across to where the gray towers of the University once stood. There had been an old stone church there, too; and, south of that, old, old houses with hip-roofs and dormers where now the high white cliffs of modern architecture rose, riddled with tiny windows, every vane glittering in the sun. South, the old houses still remained, now degraded to sordid uses. North, the square, red-brick mansions, with their white pillars and steps, still faced the sunset--the last practically unbroken rank of the old regime, the last of the old guard, standing fast and still confronting, still resisting the Inevitable looming in limestone and granite, story piled on story, aloft in the kindling, southern sky.

A cab, driven smartly, pa.s.sed through the park, the horses' feet slapping the asphalt till the echoes rattled back from the marble arch.

He followed it idly with his eyes up Fifth Avenue; saw it suddenly halt in the middle of the street; saw a woman spring out, stand for a moment talking to her companion, then turn and look toward the square.

She stood so long, and she was so far away, that he presently grew tired of watching her. A dozen ragged urchins were prowling around the fountain, casting sidelong glances at a distant policeman. But it was not hot enough that evening to permit the children to splash in the water, and the policeman drove them off.

"Poor little devils!" said Siward to himself; and he rose, adjusted his crutches, and started through the park with a vague idea of seeing what could be done.

As he limped onward, the sun level in his eyes, he heard somebody speak behind him, but did not catch the words or apply the hail to himself.

Then, "Mr. Siward!" came the low, breathless voice at his elbow.

His heart stopped as he did. The sun had dazzled his eyes, and when he turned on his crutches he could not see clearly for a second. That past, he looked at Sylvia, looked at her outstretched hand, took it mechanically, still staring at her with only a dazed unbelief in his eyes.