The Game and the Candle Part 1

The Game and the Candle.

by Eleanor M. Ingram.

CHAPTER I

THE DECISION

"It will last about six months," stated John Allard. "Afterward--"

His brother looked up at him helplessly.

"Afterward?" he echoed drearily.

"Afterward there must be more. It is not possible, simply is _not_, for poverty to approach Theodora and Aunt Rose. Look around you, Robert."

Under the clear California moonlight the jade-green lawns and terraces dropped one below the other to the distant road. Through them writhed the long serpentine drive and paths; dotted over them stood dark ma.s.ses of flowering bushes or trees, with here and there the snowy gleam of a statue; over all floated the rhythmic tinkle of the central fountain.

Untroubled calm was the spirit of the place, hereditary comfort.

"I have looked so often, John. Yet, I find nothing."

"We must find not a little money, but a fortune, and we must find it in six months," John answered, his low voice just reaching his listener.

"There is no way to earn it, we know. Inside the law there are ways to acquire it. Wall Street, for instance; a new popular song or two, an inexplicable conjuring trick, or a fresh breakfast food. But we have no such talents, you and I; we are just the ordinary gentlemen of leisure,--dilettanti. We are useless, within the limits set for us.

Outside the limits, outside the law--"

The suggestion was left unfinished, the two men falling silent before it. They were young; so young that the morning mists of romance still blurred the sharp landscape of reality, and for the moment, daring appealed more than endurance.

"We could not do anything low," Robert demurred hesitatingly. "Not about the mortgages or business tangles, John."

"No, no," John agreed, flushing. "Of course not that. I suppose there is an honor even in crime, a cla.s.s distinction. Sir Henry Morgan probably despised a common thief, and Paul Clifford would not pick his neighbor's pocket at dinner. No; we will pay our inherited debts, if we have to steal for it. What a _comedie-heroque_!"

Robert regarded him seriously.

"You are just playing?" he doubted.

"I am not playing at all; only looking at things. For the time left us is not long. If we do nothing, this place will go, and with it all that Theodora and Aunt Rose call life. We must then take these women, Aunt Rose an invalid, Theo a spoiled and petted patrician, to some cheap city lodging, and there strive to support them. How, I haven't any idea. Some one might employ us as clerks, possibly. I have traveled all over Europe and speak French and Italian; that is all my stock in trade, except an education."

"Mine is less."

"We have wasted our time thoroughly, if innocently. Now we pay. Do you wonder that I look at the outlaw's path that offers itself?"

His brother moved, startled.

"Offers itself, John?"

"Yes; I did not think of this without the prompting of circ.u.mstance. Are you dismayed, or shocked?"

"I can not see very clearly," Robert answered simply. "Or, rather, I keep seeing the wrong things. Nothing dismays me to-night except the idea of pain coming to Theo and her mother. I do not say it should be so; merely that it is. We are more ornamental than useful, we Allards, as you point out, but we have the art of loving. I think most people have a less capacity for it; I believe it is a certain intensity born with one--a gift, a talent. And we have it. Tell me more."

"I shall not tell you very much, because the work is only for one of us," John said. "One of us must go, the other stay here and live as always. One must still be master of Sun-Kist, still the head of this household of ours and an irreproachable citizen. He had better not know too accurately what the one who goes is doing."

"John!"

John Allard slipped impulsively from the veranda rail and came to sit on the arm of Robert's chair, drawing him into a caressing embrace.

"I know; we've always played together, dear old fellow. School and college, and the short time since,--the two years' difference between us got lost pretty early. But we must learn to go alone at last. And if we undertake this insanity--for it is little better--we must stand without flinching all it brings. Is it worth while? I do not know, but I know many a man has gone into the underworld to protect a woman. How many cashiers have misused funds entrusted to them, how many business men have stooped to illegal methods, in order to give their wives--not necessities, but luxuries? We see it every day, this cowardice for some one loved. Only they do it by degrees, and we do it all at once."

Robert laid his hand over the one on his shoulder.

"It does not sound very pretty," he acknowledged wistfully. "It is the old legend of selling your ego to Mephistopheles. Only, I wouldn't so much mind going to Hades afterward; it is the clasping Mephisto's smudgy fingers that hurts."

"I am not asking you to do it, Bertie. We will just forget this half-hour, if you like. You know it was a suggestion, not a conviction, I voiced. You are right, of course. But I was ready for rebellion against all laws to-day; and then Desmond came to me--"

"Desmond! He is out of prison?"

"A week ago. He came to me for money to go East. 'Do you mind how you and Master Robert used to sneak away from your nurse to play with Tommy, the coachman's boy?' he said to me. 'And now Tommy Desmond is nursed by the police far and near. I am a master at my trade, I am.' He has not changed much since we recognized him at his trial, five years ago, and tried to help him."

Robert turned to see the face above him in the moonlight.

"He said more than that."

"He was very frank," John answered laconically.

"Then, go on, please. I never meant that we should give up the last chance because it was unpleasant, or unsafe. Theo--she has just tasted her girlhood, just commenced to live; how can we let her lose it all? I would rather smudge my fingers in saving her than wear the bar sinister of cowardice. There are laws I know you will not break, because, being yourself, you can not. Go on, and tell me what Desmond said."

A white moth, hunting some star across the dark, dashed itself against Allard's coat and hung quivering there. He paused to disentangle the delicate wings before replying, the careful seriousness of the little action in itself a characterization.

"There has been shown to me a way to make enough money to thrust poverty out of sight for the present and find comfort for the future. A way to save Sun-Kist in the short time left us to command. But it is by a crime, a crime which the world calls as ugly as forgery. You know for what Desmond was punished. Yet it is in a certain sense the crime magnificent, in that one wrongs a government instead of an individual, and dashes the gauntlet into the face of the state itself. It is the crime that to the least degree smudges, because, after all, it offers a fair equivalent for value received."

"What do you mean?"

"The old mine is no longer worth operating; but there is silver in small quant.i.ties," Allard replied quietly. "Enough for Desmond's use.

Naturally, he never dreamed of making such a proposition to me. He simply told me how the affair could be carried out, as he told me a dozen other amazing possibilities and reminiscences. I encouraged him to talk, at first merely to dull the clamor of thought at my inner ear. In the end, I kept him near here."

"It's so real, John?"

"It's so real and so possible. I have satisfied myself of that. Either of us could carry the plan through, with Desmond; but we must realize that the one who undertakes it steps out of this life. For, facing the fact, disaster in the end is almost certain. The government machinery is very perfect; he who breaks the law can scarcely hope to escape arrest sooner or later. And if that happens, our world must never guess.

Whoever accepts the work must leave here for an indefinite journey abroad, ostensibly; and in reality lose his ident.i.ty absolutely somewhere. The one who goes must endure in silence whatever happens; the one who stays--"

"Go on."

"The one who stays," John finished gently, "must not interfere or try to save."

Robert shuddered slightly and sat still for an instant.

"It is for the women," he said, his boyish voice quite steady. "Shall we draw lots, or will you let me go?"