The Fighting Chance

Side by side they went up the great, broad stoop and entered the lobby.

“If you’ll speak to Leila, I’ll get Plank on the wire. Say that we’ll stop for you at seven.”

She gave her number; then, at the nod of the operator, entered a small booth. Siward was given another booth in a few moments.

Plank answered from his office; his voice sounded grave and tired but it quickened, tinged with surprise, when Siward made known his plan for the evening.

“Is Mrs. Mortimer in town?” he demanded. “I had a wire from her that she expected to be here and I hoped to see her at the station to-morrow on her way to Lenox.”

“She’s stopping with Miss Landis. Can’t you manage to come?” asked Siward anxiously.

“I don’t know. Do you wish it particularly? I have just seen Quarrier and Harrington. I can’t quite understand Quarrier’s attitude. There’s a certain hint of defiance about it. Harrington is all caved in. He is ready to thank us for any mercies. But Quarrier—there’s something I don’t fancy, don’t exactly understand about his attitude. He’s like a dangerous man whom you’ve searched for concealed weapons, and who knows you’ve overlooked the knife up his sleeve. That’s why I’ve expected to spend a quiet evening, studying up the matter and examining every loophole.”

“You’ve got to dine somewhere,” said Siward. “If you could fix it to dine with us—But I won’t urge you.”

“All right. I don’t know why I shouldn’t. I don’t know why I feel this way about things. I—I rather felt—you’ll laugh, Siward!—that somehow I’d better not go out of my own house to-night; that I was safer, better off in my own house, studying this Quarrier matter out. I’m tired, I suppose; and this man Quarrier has come close to worrying me. But it’s all right, of course, if you wish it. You know I haven’t any nerves.”

“If you are tired—” began Siward.

“No, no, I’m not. I’ll go. Will you say that we’ll stop for them at seven? Really, it’s all right, Siward.”

“I don’t want to urge you,” repeated Siward.

“You’re not. I’ll go. But—wait one moment tell me, did Quarrier know that Mrs. Mortimer was to stop with Miss Landis?”

“Wait a moment. Hold the wire.”

He opened the door of the booth and saw Sylvia waiting for him, seated by the operator’s desk. She rose at once when she saw he wished to speak with her.

“Tell me something,” he said in a low voice; “did Mr. Quarrier know that Leila was to stay overnight with you?”

“Yes,” she answered quietly, surprised. “Why?”

Siward nodded vaguely, closed the door again, and said to Plank:

“Yes, Quarrier knows it. Do you think he’ll be there to-night? I don’t suppose Miss Landis and Mrs. Mortimer know he is in town.”

Plank’s troubled voice came back over the wire: “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. I suppose I’m a little, just a trifle, overworked. Somebody once said that I had one nerve in me somewhere, and Quarrier’s probably found it; that’s all.”

“If you think it better not to come—”

“I’ll come. I’ll stop for you in the motor. Don’t worry, old fellow! And—take your fighting chance! Good-bye!”

Siward, absorbed in his own thoughts, rose and walked slowly out of the booth, utterly unconscious that he had left his crutches leaning upright in the corner. It was only the surprise dawning into tremulous delight on Sylvia’s face that at last arrested him.

“See what you have done!” he said, laughing through his own surprise. “I’ve a mind to leave them there now, and trust to your new cure.”

But she was instantly concerned and anxious, and entering the booth brought out the crutches and forced him to take them.

“No risks now!” she said decisively. “We have too much at stake this evening. Leila is coming. Isn’t it perfectly delightful?”

“Perfectly,” he said, his eyes full of the old laughing confidence again; “and the most delightful part of it all is that you don’t know how delightful it is going to be.”

“Don’t I? Very well. Only I inform you that I mean to be perfectly happy! And that means that I’m going to do as I please! And that means—oh, it may mean anything! What are you laughing at, Stephen? I know I’m excited. I don’t care! What girl wouldn’t be? And I don’t know what’s ahead of me at all; and I don’t want to know—I don’t care!”

Her reckless, little laugh rang sweetly in the old-fashioned, deserted hall; her lovely, daring eyes met his undaunted.

“You won’t make love to me, will you, Stephen?”

“Will you promise me the same?”

“I don’t know, silly! How do I know what I might say to you, you big, blundering boy, who can’t take care of himself? I don’t know at all; I won’t promise. I’m likely to do anything to-night—even before Leila and Mr. Plank—when you are with me. Shame on you for the shameless girl you’ve educated!” Her voice fell, tremulously, and for an instant standing there she remembered her education and his part in it.

The slow colour in his face reflected the pink confusion in hers.

“O tongue! tongue!” she stammered, “I can’t hold you in! I can’t curb you, and I can’t make you say what you ought to be saying to that boy. There’s trouble coming for somebody; there’s trouble here already! Call me a cab, Stephen, or I’ll be dragging you into that big, old-fashioned parlour and planting you on a chair and placing myself opposite, to moon over you until somebody puts us out! There! Now will you call me a hansom?… And I will be all ready at seven.... And don’t dare to keep me waiting one second!… Come before seven. You don’t want to frighten me, do you? Very well then, at a quarter to seven—so I shall not be frightened. And, Stephen, Stephen, we’re doing exactly what we ought not to do. You know it, don’t you? So do I. Nothing can stop us, can it? Good-bye!”

CHAPTER XIV THE BARGAIN

If a man’s grief does not awaken his dignity, then he has none. In that event, grief is not even respectable. And so it was with Leroy Mortimer when Lydia at last turned on him. If you caress an Angora too long and too persistently it runs away. And before it goes it scratches.

Under all the physical degeneration of mind and flesh there had still remained in Mortimer the capacity for animal affection; and that does not mean sensuality alone, but generosity and a sort of routine devotion as characteristic components of a character which had now disintegrated into the simplest and most primitive elements.

Lydia Vyse left Saratoga when the financial stringency began to make it unpleasant for her to remain. She told Mortimer without the slightest compunction that she was going.

He did not believe her and he gave her the new car—the big yellow-and-black Serin-Chanteur. She sold it the same day to a bookmaker—an old friend of hers; withdrew several jewels from limbo—gems which Mortimer had given her—and gathered together everything for which, if he turned ugly, she might not be criminally liable.

She had never liked him—she had long disliked him. Such women have an instinct for their own kind, and no matter how low in the scale a man of the other kind sinks he can never entirely supply the type of running mate that such women require, understand, and usually conceive a passion for.

Not liking him she had no hesitation in the matter; disliking him, whatever unpleasant had occurred during their companionship remained as an irritant to poison memory. She resented a thousand little incidents that he scarcely knew had ever existed, but which she treasured without wasting emotion until the sum total and the time coincided to retaliate. Not that she would have cared to harm him seriously; she was willing enough to disoblige him, however—decorate him, before she left him, with one extra scratch for the sake of auld lang syne. So she wrote a note to the governors of the Patroons Club, saying that both Quarrier and Mortimer were aware that the guilt of her escapade could not be attached to Siward; that she knew nothing of Siward, had accepted his wager without meaning to attempt to win it, had never again seen him, and had, on the impulse of the moment, made her entry in the wake of several men. She added that when Quarrier, as governor, had concurred in Siward’s expulsion he knew perfectly well that Siward was not guilty, because she herself had so informed Quarrier. Since then she had also told Mortimer, but he had taken no steps to do justice to Siward, although he, Mortimer, was still a governor of the Patroons Club.

This being about all she could think of to make mischief for two men whose recent companionship had nourished and irritated her, she shipped her trunks by express, packed her jewel-case and valise, and met Desmond at the station.

Desmond had business in Europe; Lydia had as much business there as anywhere; and, although she had been faithless to Mortimer for a comparatively short time, within that time Desmond already had sworn at her and struck her. So she was quite ready to follow Desmond anywhere in this world or the next. And that, too, had not made her the more considerate toward Mortimer.

When the latter returned from the races to find her gone the last riddled props to what passed for his manhood gave way and the rotten fabric came crashing into the mud.

He had loved her as far as he had been capable of imitating that passion on the transposed plane to which he had fallen; he was stupefied at first, then grew violent with the furniture, then hysterically profane, then pitiable in the abandoned degradation of his grief. And, suspecting Desmond, he started to find him. They put him out of Desmond’s club-house when he became noisy; they refused him admittance to several similar resorts where his noise threatened to continue; his landlord lost no time in interviewing him upon the subject of damage to furniture from kicks and to the walls and carpets from the contents of smashed bottles.

Creditors with sharp noses scented the whirlwind afar off and hemmed him in with unsettled accounts, mostly hers. Somebody placed a lien on his horses; a deputy sheriff began to follow him about; all credit ceased as by magic, and men crossed the street to avoid meeting with an old companion in direst need.

Still, alternately stupefied by his own grief and maddened into the necessity for action, he packed a suitcase, crawled out of the rear door, toiled across country and found a farmer to drive him twenty miles over a sandy road to a local railroad crossing, where he managed to board a train for Albany.

At Albany, as he stood panting and sweating on the long, concrete platform which paralleled track No. 1, he saw a private car, switched from a Boston and Albany train, shunted to the rear of the Merchants’ Express.

The private car was lettered in gold on the central panel, “Algonquin.” He boarded the Pullman coupled to it forward, pushed through the vestibule, shoved aside the Japanese steward and darky cook, forcing his way straight into the private car. Quarrier, reading a magazine, looked up at him in astonishment. For a full moment neither spoke. Then Mortimer dropped his suit-case, sat down in an armchair opposite Quarrier, and leisurely mopped his reeking face and neck.

“Scotch and lithia!” he said hoarsely; the Japanese steward looked at Quarrier; then, at that gentleman’s almost imperceptible nod, went away to execute the commission.