The Fighting Chance

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"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 scrap-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 clustered 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 coarser
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
bum! 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 attitude 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 attitude of a college lower
classman for a man in a class above seemed to typify their relations;
and that feeling is never entirely eradicated between men, no matter how
close their relationship in after-life.

One very bad night Plank came to the house and was admitted by Gumble.
Wands, the second man, stood behind the aged butler; both were
apparently frightened.

That something was amiss appeared plainly enough; and Plank,
instinctively producing a card, dropped it on a table and turned to go.
It may have been that the old butler recognised the innate delicacy of
the motive, or it may have been a sudden confidence born of the
necessities of the case, for he asked Plank to see his young master.

And Plank, looking him in the eyes, considered, until his courage began
to fail. Then he went up-stairs.

It was a bad night outside, and it was a bad night for Siward. The
master-vice had him by the throat. He sat there, clutching the arms of
his chair, his broken leg, in its plaster casing, extended in front of
him; and when be saw Plank enter he glared at him.

Hour after hour the two men sat there, the one white with rage, but
helpless; the other, stolid, inert, deaf to demands for intercession
with the arch-vice, dumb under pleadings for a compromise. He refused to
interfere with the butler, and Siward insulted him. He refused to go and
find the decanters himself, and Siward deliberately cursed him.

Outside the storm raged all night. Inside that house Plank faced a more
awful tempest. There was a sedative on the mantel and he offered it to
Siward, who struck it from his hand.

Once, toward morning, Siward feigned sleep, and Plank, heavy head on his
breast, feigned it, too. Then Siward bent over stealthily and opened a
drawer in his desk; and Plank was on his feet like a flash, jerking the
morphine from Siward's fingers.

The doctor arrived at daylight, responding to Plank's summons by
telephone, and Plank went away with the morphine and Siward's revolver
bulging in the side-pockets of his dinner coat.

He did not come again for a week. A short note from Siward started him
toward lower Fifth Avenue.

There was little said when he came into the room:

"Hello, Plank! Glad to see you."

"Hello! Are you all right?"

"All right. . Much obliged for pulling me through. Wish you'd pull me
through this Amalgamated Electric knot-hole, too--some day!"

"Do--do you mean it?" ventured Plank, turning red with delight.

"Mean it? Indeed I do--if you do. Sit here; ring for whatever you want--or
perhaps you'd better go down to the sideboard. I'm not to be trusted
with the odour in the room just yet."

"I don't care for anything," said Plank.

"Whenever you please, then. You know the house, and you don't mind my
being unceremonious, do you?"

"No," said Plank.

"Good!" rejoined Siward, laughing. "I expect the same friendly lack of
ceremony from you."

But that, for Plank, was impossible. All he could do was to care the
more for Siward without crossing the border line so suddenly made free;
all he could do was to sit there rolling and unrolling his gloves into
wads with his clumsy, highly coloured hands, and gaze consciously at
everything in the room except Siward.

On that day, at Plank's shy suggestion, they talked over Siward's
business affairs for the first time. After that day, and for many days,
the subject became the key-note to their intercourse; and Siward at last
understood that this man desired to do him a service absolutely and
purely from a disinterested liking for him, and as an expression of that
liking. Also he was unexpectedly made aware of Plank's serenely unerring
business sagacity.

That surface cynicism which all must learn, sooner or later, or remain
the victims of naive credulity, was, in Siward, nothing but an outer
skin, as it is in all who acquire wisdom with their cynicism. It was not
long proof against Plank's simple attitude and undisguised pleasure in
doing something for a man he liked. Under that simplicity no motive, no
self-interest could skulk; and Siward knew it.

As for the quid pro quo, Siward had insisted from the first on a
business arrangement. The treachery of Major Belwether through sheer
fright had knocked the key-stone from the syndicate, and the dam which
made the golden pool possible collapsed, showering Plank's brokers who
worked patiently with buckets and mops.

The double treachery of Quarrier was now perfectly apparent to Plank.
Siward, true to his word, held his stock in the face of ruin. Kemp
Ferrall, furious with the major, and beginning to suspect Quarrier, came
to Plank for consultation.

Then the defence formed under Plank. Legal machinery was set in motion,
meeting followed meeting, until Harrington cynically showed his hand and
Quarrier smiled his rare smile; and the fight against Inter-County was
on in the open, preceded by a furious clamour of charge and counter-
charge in the columns of the daily press.

That Quarrier had been guilty of something or other was the vague
impression of that great news-reading public which, stunned by the
reiteration of figures in the millions, turns to the simpler pleasures
of a murder trial. Besides, whatever Quarrier had done was no doubt done
within the chalk-marked courts of the game, though probably his shoes
may have become a little dusty.

But who could hope to bring players like Quarrier before the ordinary
umpire, or to investigate his methods with the everyday investigations
reserved for everyday folk, whose road through business life lay always
between State's prison and the penitentiary and whose guide-posts were
policemen?

Let the great syndicates join in battle; they could only slay each
other. Let the millions bury their millions; the public, though poorer,
could never be the wiser.

Siward, at his desk, the May sunshine pouring over him, sat conning the
heaps of typewritten sheets, striving to see between the lines some sign
of fortune for his investments, some promise of release from the
increasing financial stringency, some chance of justice being done on
those high priests who had been performing marvellous tricks upon their
altar so that by miracle, mine and thine spelled "ours," and all the
tablets of the law were lettered upside down and hind-side before, like
the Black Mass.

Gumble knocked presently. Siward raised his perplexed eyes.

"Miss Page, sir."

"Oh," said Siward doubtfully; then, "Ask Miss Page to come up."

Marion strolled in a moment later, exchanged a vigorous hand shake with
Siward, pulled up a chair and dropped into it. She was in riding-habit
and boots, faultlessly groomed as usual, her smooth, pale hair sleek in
its thick knot, collar and tie immaculate as her gloves.

"Well," she said, "any news of your ankle, Stephen?"

"I inquired about my ankle," said Siward, amused, "and they tell me it
is better, thank you."

"Sit a horse pretty soon?" she asked, dropping one leg over the other
and balancing the riding-crop across her knee.

"Not for awhile. You have a fine day for a gallop, Marion," looking
askance at the sunshine filtering through the first green leaves of the
tree outside his window.

"It's all right--the day. I'm trying Tom O'Hara's new mare. They say
she's a little devil. I never saw a devil of a horse--did you? There may
be some out West."

"Don't break that pretty neck of yours, Marion," he said.

She lifted her eyes; then, briefly, "No fear."

"Yes, there is," he said. "There's no use looking for trouble in a
horse. Women who hunt as you hunt take all that's legitimately coming to
them. Why doesn't Tom ride his own mare?"

"She rolled on him," said Marion simply.

"Oh. Is he hurt?"

"Ribs."

"Well, he's lucky."

"Isn't he! He'll miss a few drills with his precious squadron, that's
all."

She was looking about her, preoccupied. "Where are your cigarettes,
Stephen? Oh, I see. Don't try to move--don't be silly."

She leaned over the desk, her fresh young face close to his, and reached
for the cigarettes. The clean-cut head, the sweetness of her youth and
femininity, boyish in its allure, were very attractive to him--more so,
perhaps, because of his isolation from the atmosphere of women.

"It's all very well, Marion, your coming here--and it's very sweet of
you, and I enjoy it immensely," he said: "but it's a deuced imprudent
thing for you to do, and I feel bound to say so for your sake every time
you come."

She leaned back in her chair and coolly blew a wreath of smoke at him.

"All right," he said, unconvinced.

"Certainly it's all right. I've done what suited me all my life. This
suits me."

"It suits me, too," he said, "only I wish you'd tell your mother before
somebody around this neighbourhood informs her first."

"Let 'em. You'll be out by that time. Do you think I'm going to tell my
mother now and have her stop it?"

"Oh, Marion, you know perfectly well that it won't do for a girl to
ignore first principles. I'm horribly afraid somebody will talk about
you."

"What would you do, then?"

"I?" he asked, disturbed. "What could I do?"

"Why, I suppose," she said slowly, "you'd have to marry me."

"Then," he rejoined with a laugh, "I should think you'd be scared into
prudence by the prospect."

"I am not easily--scared," she said, looking down.

"Not at that prospect?" he said jestingly.

She looked up at him; and he remembered afterward the poise of her small
head, and the slow, clear colour mounting; remembered that it conveyed
to him, somehow, a hint of courage and sincerity.

"I am not frightened," she said gravely.

Gravity fell upon him, too. In this young girl's eyes there was no
evasion. For a long while he had felt vaguely that matters were not
perfectly balanced between them. At moments, even, he had felt an
indefinable uneasiness in her presence. The situation troubled him, too;
and though he had known her from childhood and had long ago learned to
discount her vagaries of informality, her manners sans facon, her
careless ignoring of convention, and the unembarrassed terms of her
speech, his common-sense could not countenance this defiance of social
usage, sure to involve even such a privileged girl as she in some
unpleasantness.

This troubled him; and now, partly sceptical, yet partly conscious, too,
of her very frank liking for himself, he looked at her, perplexed,
apprehensive, unwilling to credit her with any deeper meaning than her
words expressed.

She had grown pink and restless under his gaze, using her cigarette
frequently, and continually flicking the ashes to the floor, until the
little finger of her glove was blackened.

But courage characterised her race. It had required more than he knew
for her to come into his house; and now that she was there loyalty to
her professed principles--that a man and a woman were by right endowed
with equal privileges--forced her to face the consequences of her theory
in the practise.

She had, with calm face and quivering heart, given him an opening. That
was a concession to her essential womanhood and a cowardice on her part;
and, lest she turn utterly traitor to herself, she faced him again,
cool, quiet, and terror in her heart:

"I'd be very glad to marry you--if you c-cared to," she said.

"Marion!"

"Yes?"

"Oh--I--it is--of course it's a joke."

"No; I'm serious."

"Serious! Nonsense!"

"Please don't say that."

He looked at her, appalled.

"But I--but you don't love--can't be in love with me!" he stammered.

"I am."

Gloved hands tightening on either end of her riding-crop, she bent her
knee against it, balancing there, looking straight at him.

"I meant to tell you so," she said, "if you didn't tell me first. So--I
was rather--tired waiting. So I've told you."

"It is only a fancy," he said, scarcely knowing what he was saying.

"I don't think so, Stephen."

But he could not meet her candour, and he sat, silent, miserable,
staring at the papers on his desk.

After a while she drew a deep, even breath, and rose to her feet.

"I'm sorry," she said simply.

"Marion--I never dreamed that--"

"You should dream truer," she said. There was a suspicion of mist in her
clear eyes; she turned abruptly to the window and stood there for a few
moments, looking down at her brougham waiting in front of the house. "It
can't be helped, can it!" she said, turning suddenly.

He found no answer to her question.

"Good-bye," she said, walking to him with outstretched hand; "it's all
in a lifetime, Steve, and that's too short for a good, clean friendship
like ours to die in. I don't think I'd better come again. Look me up for
a gallop when you're fit. And you might drop me a line to say how you're
getting on. Is it all right, Stephen?"

"All right," he said hoarsely.

Their hands tightened in a crushing clasp; then she swung on her spurred
heel and walked out, leaving him haggard, motionless. He heard the front
door close, and he swayed forward, dropping his face in his hands, arms
half buried among the papers on his desk.

Plank found him there, an hour later, fumbling among the papers, and at
first feared that he read in Siward's drawn and sullen face a
premonition of the ever-dreaded symptoms.

"Quarrier has telephoned asking for a conference at last," he said
abruptly, sitting down beside Siward.

"Well," inquired Siward, "how do you interpret that--favourably?"

"I am inclined to think he is a bit uneasy," said Plank cautiously.
"Harrington made a secret trip to Albany last week. You didn't know
that."

"No."

"Well, he did. It looks to me as though there were going to be a ghost
of a chance for an investigation. That is how I am inclined to consider
Harrington's trip and Quarrier's flag of truce. But--I don't know.
There's nothing definite, of course. You are as conversant with the
situation as I am."

"No, I am not. That is like you, Plank, to ascribe to me the same
business sense that you possess, but I haven't got it. It's very nice
and considerate of you, but I haven't it, and you know it."

"I think you have."

"You think so because you think generously. That doesn't alter the
facts. Now tell me what you have concluded that we ought to do and I'll
say 'Amen,' as usual."

Plank laughed, and looked over several sheets of the typewritten matter
on the desk beside him.

"Suppose I meet Quarrier?" he said.

"All right. Did he suggest a date?"

"At four, this afternoon."

"Do you think you had better go?"

"I think it might do no harm," said Plank.

"Amen!" observed Siward, laughing, and touched the electric button for
the early tea, which Plank adored at any hour.

For a while they dropped business and discussed their tea, chatting very
comfortably together. Long ago Siward had found out something of the
mental breadth of the man beside him, and that he was worth listening to
as well as talking to. For Plank had formed opinions upon a great many
subjects; and whatever culture he possessed was from sheer desire for
self-cultivation.

"You know, Siward," he was accustomed to say with a smile, "you inherit
what I am qualifying myself to transmit."

"It will be all one in a thousand years," was Siward's usual rejoinder.

"That is not going to prevent my efforts to become a good ancestor to my
descendants," Plank would say laughingly. "They shall have a chance,
every one of them. And it will be up to them if they don't make good."

Sipping their tea in the pleasant, sunny room, they discussed matters of
common interest--Plank's recent fishing trip on Long Island and the
degeneracy of liver-fed trout; the North Side Club's Experiments with
European partridges; Billy Fleetwood's new stables; forestry, and the
chance of national legislation concerning it--a subject of which Plank
was very fond, and on which he had exceedingly sound ideas.

Drifting from one topic to another through the haze of their cigars,
silent when it pleased them to be so, there could be no doubt of their
liking for each other upon a basis at least superficially informal; and
if Plank's manner retained at times a shade of quaint reserve, Siward's
was perhaps the more frankly direct for that reason.

"I think," observed Plank, laying his half-consumed cigar on the silver
tray, "that I'd better go down town and see what our pre-glacial friend
Quarrier wants. I may be able to furnish him with a new sensation."

"I wonder if Quarrier ever experienced a genuine sensation," mused
Siward, arranging the papers before him into divisional piles.

"Plenty," said Plank drily.

"I don't think so."

"Plenty," repeated Plank. "It's your thin-lipped, thin-nosed, pasty-
pale, symmetrical brother who is closer to the animal under his mask
than any of us imagine. I--" He hesitated. "Do you want to know my
opinion of Quarrier? I've never told you. I don't usually talk about
my--dislikes. Do you want to know?"

"Certainly," said Siward curiously.

"Then, first of all, he is a sentimentalist."

"Oh! oh!" jeered Siward.

"A sentimentalist of the weakest type," continued Plank obstinately;
"because he sentimentalises over himself. Siward, look out for the man
with elaborate whiskers! Look out for a pallid man with eccentric hair
and a silky beard! He's a sentimentalist of the sort I told you, and is
usually utterly remorseless in his dealings with women. I suppose you
think me a fool."

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