The Fighting Chance

“Oh, please! Why do you use back-stairs words? Nobody talks about compromising now; all that went out with New Year’s calls and brown-stone stoops.”

“What do they call it, then?” asked Plank seriously.

“Call what? you great boy!”

“What you say I’m doing?”

“I don’t say it.”

“Who does?”

Leila laughed, leaned back in her big, padded chair, dropping one knee over the other. Her dark eyes with the Japanese slant to them rested mockingly on Plank, who had now turned completely around in his chair, leaving his half-written cheque on her escritoire behind him.

“You’re simply credited with an affair with a pretty woman,” she said, watching the dull colour mounting to his temples, “and that is certain to be useful to you, and it doesn’t affect me. What on earth are you blushing about?” And as he said nothing, she added, with a daring little laugh: “You are credited with being very agreeable, you see.”

“If—if that’s the way you take it—” he began.

“Of course! What do you expect me to do—call for help before I’m hurt?”

“You mean that this talk—gossip—doesn’t hurt?”

“How silly!” She looked at him, smiling. “You know how likely I am to require protection from your importunities.” She dropped her pretty head, and began plaiting with her fingers the silken gown over her knee. “Or how likely I would be to shriek for it even if”—she looked up with childlike directness—“even if I needed it.”

“Of course you can take care of yourself,” said Plank, wincing.

“I could, if I wanted to.”

“Everybody knows that. I know it, Leroy knows it; only I don’t care to figure as that kind of man.”

Already he had lost sight of her position in the matter; and she drew a long, quiet breath, almost like a sigh.

“Time enough after you marry,” she said deliberately, and lighted a cigarette from a candle, recreating her knees the other way.

He considered her, started to speak, checked himself, and swung around to the desk again. His pen hovered over the space to be filled in. He tried to recollect the amount, hesitated, dated the cheque and affixed his signature, still trying to remember; then he looked at her over his shoulder.

“I forget the exact amount.”

She surveyed him through the haze of her cigarette, but made no answer.

“I forget the amount,” he repeated.

“So do I,” she nodded indolently.

“But I—”

“Let it go. Besides, I shall not accept it.”

He flushed up, astonished. “You can’t refuse to take a gambling debt.”

“I do,” she retorted coolly. “I’m tired of taking your money.”

“But you won it.”

“I’m tired of winning it. It is all I ever do win… from you.”

Her pretty head was wreathed in smoke. She tipped the ashes from the cigarette’s end, watching them fall to powder on the rug.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he persisted doggedly.

“Don’t you? I don’t believe I do, either. There are intervals in my career which might prove eloquent if I opened my lips. But I don’t, except to make floating rings and cabalistic signs out of cigarette smoke. Can you read their meaning? Look! There goes one, and there’s another, and another—all twisting and uncurling into hieroglyphics. They are very significant; they might tell you a lot of things, if you would only translate them. But you haven’t the key—have you?”

There was a heavy, jarring step in the main living-room, and Mortimer’s bulk darkened the doorway.

“Entrez, mon ami,” nodded Leila, glancing up. “Where is Agatha?”

“I’m going to Desmond’s,” he grunted, ignoring his wife’s question; “do you want to try it again, Beverly?”

“I can’t make Leila take her own winnings,” said Plank, holding out the signed but unfilled cheque to Mortimer, who took it and scrutinised it for a moment, rubbing his heavy, inflamed eyes; then, gesticulating, the cheque fluttering in his puffy fingers:

“Come on,” he insisted. “I’ve a notion that I can give Desmond a whirl that he won’t forget in a hurry. Agatha’s asleep; she’s going to that ball—where is it?” he demanded, turning on his wife. “Yes, yes; the Page blow-out. You’re going, I suppose?”

Leila nodded, and lighted another cigarette.

“All right,” continued Mortimer impatiently; “you and Agatha won’t start before one. And if you think Plank had better go, why, we’ll be back here in time.”

“That means you won’t be back at all,” observed his wife coolly; “and it’s good policy for Beverly to go where he’s asked. Can’t you turn in and sleep, now, and amuse your friend Desmond to-morrow night?”

“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 principal reason for declining; he had too often “temporarily” assisted 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, passing Plank, traversed the passage 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.”