The Fighting Chance

R >> Robert W. Chambers >> The Fighting Chance

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"Look here, Agatha, how long is this going to last? Are you trying to
make a fool of me? What is the matter? Is there anything wrong?"

"Wrong? Oh dear no! How could there be anything wrong between you and
me--"

"Agatha, what is the matter! Look here; let's settle this thing now and
settle it one way or the other! I won't stand it; I--I can't!"

"Very well," she said, releasing herself from his tightening arms and
stepping back with another glance at the mirror and another light touch
of her finger-tips on her burnished hair. "Very well," she repeated,
gazing again into the mirror; "what am I to understand, Howard?"

"You know what to understand," he said in a low voice; "you know what we
both understood when--when--"

"When what?"

"When I--when you--"

"Oh what, Howard?" she prompted indolently; and he answered in brutal
exasperation, and for the first time so plainly that a hint of rose
tinted her strange, pale beauty and between her lips the breath came
less regularly as she stood there looking at the dull, silvery rug under
her feet.

"Did you ever misunderstand me?" he demanded hotly. "Did I give you any
chance to? Were you ignorant of what that meant," with a gesture toward
the splendid crescent of flashing gems, scintillating where the low,
lace bodice met the silky lustre of her skin. "Did you misinterpret the
collar? Or the sudden change of fortune in your own family's concerns?
Answer me, Agatha, once for all. But you need not answer after all: I
know you have never misunderstood me!"

"I misunderstood nothing," she said; "you are quite right."

"Then what are you going to do?"

"Do?" she asked in slow surprise. "What am I to do, Howard?"

"You have said that you loved me."

"I said the truth, I think."

"Then--"

"Well?"

"How long are you going to keep me at arm's length?" he asked violently.

"That lies with you," she said, smiling. She looked at him for a moment,
then, resting her hands on her hips, she began to pace the floor, to and
fro, to and fro, and at every turn she raised her head to look at him.
All the strange grace of her became insolent provocation--her pale eyes,
clear, limpid, harbouring no delusions, haunted with the mockery of
wisdom, challenged and checked him. "Howard," she said, "why should I be
the fool you want me to be because I love you? Why should I be even if I
wished to be? You desire an understanding? Voila! You have it. I love
you; I never misunderstood you from the first; I could not afford to.
You know what I am; you know what you arouse in me?"

Slim, pale, depraved in all but body she stood, eyeing him a moment, the
very incarnation of vicious perversity.

"You know what you arouse in me," she repeated. "But don't count on it!"

"You have encouraged--permitted me to count--" His anger choked him--or was
it the haunting wisdom of her eyes that committed him to silence.

"I don't know," she said, musingly, "what it is in you that I am so mad
about--whether it is your brutality, or the utter corruption of you that
holds me, or your wicked eyes of a woman, or the fascination of the mask
you turn on the world, and the secret visage, naked in its vice, that
you reserve for me. But I love you--in my own fashion. Count on that,
Howard; for that is all you can surely count on. And now, at last, you
know."

As he stood there, it came to him slowly that, deep within him he had
always known this; that he had never really counted on anything else
though he had throttled his doubts by covering her throat with diamonds.
Her strangeness, her pallor, her acquiescence, the delicate hint of
depravity in her, the subtle response to all that was worst in him had
attracted him, only to learn, little by little, that the taint of
corruption was only a taint infecting others, not her; that the promise
of evil was only a promise; that he had to deal with a young body but an
old intelligence, and a mind so old that at moments her faded gaze
almost appalled him with its indolent clairvoyance.

Long since he knew, too, that in all the world he could never again find
such a mate for him. This had, unadmitted even to himself, always
remained a hidden secret within this secret man--an unacknowledged,
undrawn-on reserve in case of the failure which he, even in sanguine
moods, knew in his inmost corrupted soul that his quest was doomed to.

And now he had no more need of secrets from himself; now, turning his
gaze inward, he looked upon all with which he had chosen to deceive
himself. And there was nothing left for self-deception.

"If I marry you!" he said calmly "at least I know what I am getting."

"I will marry you, Howard. I've got to marry somebody pretty soon. You
or Captain Voucher."

For an instant a vicious light flashed in his narrowing eyes. She saw it
and shook her head with weary cynicism:

"No, not that. It could not attract me even with you. It is really
vulgar--that arrangement. Noblesse oblige, mon ami. There is a depravity
in marrying you that makes all lesser vices stale as virtues."

He said nothing; she looked at him, lazily amused; then, inattentive,
turned and paced the floor again.

"Shall I see you to-morrow?" he demanded.

"If you wish. Captain Voucher came down on the same train with me. I'll
set him adrift if you like."

"Is he preparing for a declaration?" sneered Quarrier.

"I think so," she said simply.

"Well if he comes to-night after I'm gone, you wait a final word from
me. Do you understand?" he repeated with repressed violence.

"No, Howard. Are you going to propose to me to-morrow?"

"You'll know to-morrow," he retorted angrily. "I tell you to wait. I've
a right to that much consideration anyway."

"Very well, Howard," she said, recognising in him the cowardice which
she had always suspected to be there.

She bade him good night; he touched her hand but made no offer to kiss
her. She laughed a little to herself, watching him striding toward the
elevator, then, closing the door, she stood still in the centre of the
room, staring at her own reflection, full length, in the gilded pier-
glass, her lips edged with a sneer so like Quarrier's that, the next
moment she laughed aloud, imitating Quarrier's rare laugh from sheer
perversity.

"I think," she said to her reflected figure in the glass, "I think that
you are either mentally ill or inherently a kind of devil. And I don't
much care which."

And she turned leisurely, her slim hands balanced lightly on her narrow
hips, and strolled into the second dressing-room, where Mrs. Vendenning
sat sullenly indulging in that particular species of solitaire known as
"The Idiot's Delight."

"Well?" inquired Mrs. Vendenning, looking up at the tall, pale girl she
was chaperoning so carefully during their sojourn in town.

"Oh, you know the rhyme to that," yawned Agatha; "let's ring up
somebody. I'm bored stiff."

"What did Howard Quarrier want?"

"He knows, I think, but he hasn't yet informed me."

"I'll tell you one thing, Agatha," said Mrs. Vendenning, gathering up
the packs for a new shuffle: "Grace Ferrall doesn't fancy Howard's
attention to you and she's beginning to say so. When you go back to
Shotover you'd better let him alone."

"I'm not going back to Shotover," said Agatha.

"What?"

"No; I don't think so. However, I'll let you know to-morrow. It all
depends--but I don't expect to." She turned as her maid tapped on the
door. "Oh, Captain Voucher. Are you at home to him?" flipping the
pasteboard onto the table among the scattered cards.

"Yes," said Mrs. Vendenning aggressively, "unless you expect him to flop
down on his knees to-night. Do you?"

"I don't--to-night. Perhaps to-morrow. I don't know; I can't tell yet."
And to her maid she nodded that they were at home to Captain Voucher.

Quarrier had met him, too, just as he was leaving the hotel lobby. They
exchanged the careful salutations of men who had no use for one another.
On the Englishman's clean-cut face a deeper hue settled as he passed; on
Quarrier's, not a trace of emotion; but when he entered his motor he sat
bolt upright, stiff-backed and stiff-necked, his long gray-gloved
fingers moving restlessly over his pointed heard.

The night was magnificent; myriads of summer stars spangled the heavens.
Even in the reeking city itself a slight freshness grew in the air,
although there was no wind to stir the parched leaves of the park trees,
among which fire-flies floated--their intermittent phosphorescence
breaking out with a silvery, star-like brilliancy.

Plank, driving his big motor northward through the night, Leila Mortimer
beside him, twice mistook the low glimmer of a fire-fly for the distant
lamp of a motor, which amused Leila, and her clear, young laughter
floated back to the ears of Sylvia and Siward, curled up in their
corners of the huge tonneau. But they were too profoundly occupied with
each other to heed the sudden care-free laughter of the young matron,
though in these days her laughter was infrequent enough to set the more
merciless tongues wagging when it did sound.

Plank had never seen fit to speak to her of her husband's scarcely
veiled menace that day he had encountered him in the rotunda of the
Algonquin Trust Company. His first thought was to do so--to talk it over
with her, consider the threat and the possibility of its seriousness,
and then come to some logical and definite decision as to what their
future relations should be. Again and again he had been on the point of
doing this when alone with Leila--uncomfortable, even apprehensive,
because of their frank intimacy; but he had never had the opportunity to
do so without deliberately dragging in the subject by the ears in all
its ugliness and implied reproach for her imprudence, and seeing that
dreadful, vacant change in Leila's face, which the mere mention of her
husband's name was sure to bring, turn into horror unspeakable.

A man not prone to fear his fellows, he now feared Mortimer, but that
fear struck him only through Leila--or had so reached him until the days
of his closing struggle with Quarrier. Whether the long strain had
unnerved him, whether minutely providing against every possible danger
he had been over-scrupulous, over-anxious, morbidly exact--or whether a
foresight almost abnormal had evoked a sinister possibility--he did not
know; but that threat of Mortimer's to involve Plank with Leila in one
common ruin, that boast that he was able to do so could not be ignored
as a possible weapon if Quarrier should by any chance learn of it.

In all his life he had taken Leila into his arms but once; had kissed
her but once--but that once had been enough to arm Mortimer with danger
from head to foot. Some prying servant had either listened or seen
--perhaps a glimmer of a mirror had betrayed them. At all events, whoever
had seen or heard had informed Mortimer, and now the man was equipped;
the one and only man in all the world who could with truth accuse Plank;
the only man of whom he stood in honest fear.

And it was characteristic of Plank that never for one moment had it
occurred to him that the sheer fault of it all lay with Leila; that it
was her imprudence alone that now threatened herself and the man she
loved--that threatened his very success in life as long as Mortimer
should live.

All this, Plank, in his thorough, painstaking review of the subject, had
taken into account; and he could not see how it could possibly bear upon
the matters now finally to be adjusted between Quarrier and himself,
because Quarrier was in New York and Mortimer in Saratoga, and unless
the latter had already sold his information the former could not strike
at him through knowledge of it.

And yet a curious reluctancy, a hesitation inexplicable--unless overwork
explained it--had come over him when Siward had proposed their dining
together on the very eve of his completed victory over Quarrier.

It seemed absurd, and Plank was too stolid to entertain superstitions,
but he could not, even with Leila laughing there beside him, shake off
the dull instinct that all was not well--that Quarrier's attitude was
still the attitude of a dangerous man; that he, Plank, should have had
this evening in his room alone to study out the matters he had so
patiently plodded through in the long hours while Siward slept.

Yet not for one instant did he dream of shifting the responsibility--if
responsibility entailed blame--on Siward, who, against Plank's judgment
and desire, had on the very eve of consummation drawn him away from that
sleepless vigilance which must for ever be the price of a business man's
safety.

Leila, gay and excited as a schoolgirl, chattered on ceaselessly to
Plank; all the silence, all the secrecy of the arid years turning to
laughter on her red lips, pouring out, in broken phrases of delight,
words strung together for the sheer pleasure of speech and the happiness
of her lot to be with him unrestrained.

He remembered once listening to the song of a wild bird on the edge of a
clearing at night, and how, standing entranced, the low, distant jar of
thunder sounded at moments, scarcely audible--like his heart now, at
intervals, dully persistent amid the gaiety of her voice.

"And would you believe it, Beverly," she said, "I formed the habit at
Shotover of walking across the boundary and strolling into your
greenhouses and deliberately helping myself. And every time I did it I
was certain one of your men would march me out!"

He laughed, but did not tell her that his men had reported the first
episode and that he had instructed them that Mrs. Mortimer and her
friends were to do exactly as they pleased at the Fells. However she
knew it, because a garrulous gardener, proud of his service with Plank,
had informed her.

"Beverly," she said, "you are a dear. If people only knew what I know!"

He began to turn red; she could see it even in the flickering, lamp-shot
darkness. And she teased him for a while, very gently, even tenderly;
and their voices grew lower in a half-serious badinage that ended with a
quiet, indrawn breath, a sigh, and silence.

And now the river swept into view, a darkly luminous sheet set with
reflected stars. Mirrored lights gleamed in it; sudden bright, yellow
flashes zigzagged into its sombre depths; the foliage edged it with a
deeper gloom over which, on the heights, twinkled the multicoloured
lights of Riverside Inn.

Up the broad, gentle grade they sped, curving in and out among the
clumps of trees and shrubbery, then on a level, sweeping in a great
circle up to the steps of the inn.

Now all about them from the brilliantly lighted verandas the gay tumult
broke out like an uproarious welcome after the swift silence of their
journey; the stir of jolly people keen for pleasure; the clatter of
crockery; the coming and going of waiters, of guests, of hansoms,
coupes, victorias, and scores of motor-cars wheeling and turning through
the blinding glare of their own headlights.

Somewhere a gipsy orchestra, full of fitful crescendoes and throbbing
suspensions of caprice, furnished resonant accompaniment to the joyous
clamour; the scent of fountain spray and flowers was in the air.

"I didn't know you had telephoned for a table," said Siward, as a head-
waiter came up smiling and bowing to Plank. "I confess, in the new
excitement of things, I clean forgot it! What a man you are to think of
other people!"

Plank reddened again, muttering something evasive, and went forward with
Leila.

Sylvia, moving leisurely beside Siward who was walking slowly but
confidently without crutches, whispered to him: "I never really liked
Mr. Plank before I understood his attitude toward you."

"He is a man, every inch," said Siward simply.

"I think that generally includes what men of your sort demand, doesn't
it?" she asked.

"Men of my sort sometimes demand in others what they themselves are
lacking in," said Siward, laughing. "Sylvia, look at this jolly crowd!
Look at all those tables! It seems an age since I have done anything of
this sort. I feel like a boy of eighteen--the same funny, quickening
fascination in me toward everything gay and bright and alive!" He looked
around at her, laughingly. "As for you," he said, "you look about
sixteen. You certainly are the most beautiful thing this beautiful world
ever saw!"

"Schoolboy courtship!" she mocked him, lingering as he made his slow way
through the crowded place. The tint of excitement was in her eyes and
cheeks; the echo of it in her low, happy voice. "Where on earth is Mr.
Plank? Oh, I see them! They have a table by the balcony rail, in the
corner; and it seems to be rather secluded, Stephen, so I shall, of
course, expect you to say nothing further about beauty of any species. .
Are you a trifle tired? No? . Well, you need not be indignant. I don't
care whether you tumble. Indeed, I don't believe there is really
anything the matter with you--you are walking with the same old careless
saunter. Mr. Plank," as they arrived and seated themselves, "Mr. Siward
has just admitted that he uses crutches only because they are
ornamental. Leila, isn't this air delicious? All sorts of people, too,
aren't there, Mr. Plank? Such curious-looking women, some of them--quite
pretty, too, in a certain way. Are you hungry, St--Mr. Siward?"

"Are you, St--Mr. Siward?" mimicked Leila promptly.

"I am," said Siward, laughing at Sylvia's significant colour and noting
Plank's direct gaze as the waiter filled Leila's slender-stemmed glass.
And "nothing but Apollinaris," he said coolly, as the waiter approached
him; but though his voice was easy enough, a dull patch of colour came
out under the cheek-bones.

"That is all I care for, either," said Sylvia with elaborate
carelessness.

Plank and Leila immediately began to make conversation. Siward, his eyes
bent on the glass of mineral water at his elbow, looked up in silence at
Sylvia questioningly.

There was something in her face he did not quite comprehend. She made as
though to speak, looked at him, hesitated, her lovely face eloquent
under the impulse. Then, leaning toward him, she said:

"'And thy ways shall be my ways.'"

"Sylvia, you must not deny yourself, just because I--"

"Let me. It is the happiest thing I have ever done for myself."

"But I don't wish it."

"Ah, but I do," she said, the low excited laughter scarcely fluttering
her lips. "Listen: I never before, in all my life, gave up anything for
your sake, only this one little pitiful thing."

"I won't let you!" he breathed; "it is nonsense to--"

"You must let me! Am I to be on friendly terms with--with your mortal
enemy?" She was still smiling, but now her sensitive mouth quivered
suddenly.

He sat silent, considering her, his restless fingers playing with his
glass in which the harmless bubbles were breaking.

"I drink to your health, Stephen," she said under her breath. "I drink
to your happiness, too; and--and to your fortune, and to all that you
desire from fortune." And she raised her glass in the star-light,
looking over it into his eyes.

"All I desire from fortune?" he repeated significantly.

"All--almost all--"

"No, all," he demanded.

But she only raised the glass to her lips, still looking at him as she
drank.

They became unreasonably gay almost immediately, though the beverage
scarcely accounted for the delicate intoxication that seemed to creep
into their veins. Yet it was sufficient for Siward to say an amusing
thing wittily, for Sylvia to return his lead with all the delightful,
unconscious brilliancy that he seemed to inspire in her--as though
awaking into real life once more. All that had slumbered in her through
the winter and spring, and the long, arid summer now crumbling to the
edge of autumn, broke out into a delicate riot of exquisite florescence;
the very sounds of her voice, every intonation, every accent, every
pause, were charming surprises; her laughter was a miracle, her beauty a
revelation.

Leila, aware of it, exchanged glance after glance with Plank. Siward,
alternately the leader in it all, then the enchanted listener,
bewitched, enthralled, felt care slipping from his shoulders like a
mantle, and sadness exhaling from a heart that was beating strongly,
steadily, fearlessly--as a heart should beat in the breast of him who has
taken at last his fighting chance. He took it now, under her eyes, for
honour, for manhood, and for the ideal which had made manhood no longer
an empty term muttered in desperation by a sick body, and a mind too
sick to control it.

Yes, at last the lifelong battle was on. He knew it. He knew, too,
whatever his fate with her or without her, he must always go on with the
battle for the safe-guarding of that manhood the consciousness of which
she had aroused.

All he knew was that, through the medium of his love for her, whatever
in him of the spiritual remained, or had been generated, was now awake,
alive, strong, vital, indestructible--an impalpable current flowing from
a sane intelligence, through medium of her, back to the eternal truth,
returning always, always, to the deathless source from whence it came.

Lingering over the fruit, the champagne breaking in the glasses standing
on the table between them, rim to rim, Leila and Plank had fallen into a
low, desultory, yet guarded exchange of words and silences.

Sylvia sprang up and pushed her chair into the farther corner against
the balcony rail, where no light fell except the radiance of the stars.
Here Siward joined her, dragging his chair around so that it faced her
as she leaned back, tilted against a shadowy column.

"Is this Bohemianism, Stephen? If it is, I rather like it. Don't you?
You are going to smoke now, aren't you? Ah, that is delightful!"
daintily sniffing the aroma from his cigarette. "It always reminds me of
you--there on the cliffs, that first day. Do you remember?--the smoke
from your cigarette whirling up in my face? . You say you remember. .
Oh, of course there's nothing else to say when a girl asks you . is
there? Oh, I won't argue with you, if you insist that you do remember.
You will not be like any other man if you do, that's all. . The little
things that women remember! . And believe that men remember! It is
pitiful in a way. There! I am not going to spill over, and I don't care
a copper penny whether you really do remember or not! . Yes, I do care!
. Oh, all women care. It is their first disappointment to learn how much
a man can forget and still remember to care for them--a little! .
Stephen, I said a little; and that is all that you are permitted to care
for me; isn't it? . Please, don't. You are deliberately beginning to say
things! . Stephen, you silly! you are making love to me!"

In the darkness his hand encountered hers on the wooden rail, and the
tremor of the contact silenced her. She freed one finger, then let it
rest with its slender fellow-prisoners. There was no use in trying to
speak just then--utterly useless her voice in the soft, rounded throat
imprisoned by the swelling pulses that tightened and hammered and
tightened.

Years seemed to fall away from her, slipping back, back into girlhood,
into childhood, drawing not her alone on the gliding tide, but carrying
him with her. An exquisite languor held her. Through it vague hints of
those splendid visions of her lonely childhood rose, shaping themselves
in the starry darkness--the old mystery of dreams, the old, innocent
desires, the old simplicity of clairvoyance wherein right was right and
wrong, wrong--in all the conventional significance of right and wrong, in
all the old-fashioned, undisturbed faith of childhood.

Drifting deliciously, her eyes sometimes meeting his, sometimes lost in
the magic of her reverie, she lay there in her chair, her unresisting
fingers locked in his.

Odd little thoughts came hovering into her reverie--thoughts that seemed
distantly familiar, the direct, unconscious impulses of a child. To feel
was once more the only motive for expression; to think fearlessly was
once more inherent; to desire was to demand--unlock her lips, naively,
and ask for what she wished.

Under the spell, she turned her blue gaze on him, and her lips parted
without a tremor:

"What do you offer for what you ask? And do you still ask it? Is it me
you are asking me for? Because you love me? And what do you give--love?"

"Weigh it with the--other," he said.

"I have--often--every moment since I have known you. And what a winter!"
Her voice was almost inaudible. "What a winter--without you!"

"That hell is ended for me, too. Sylvia, I know what I ask. And I ask. I
know what I offer. Will you take it?"

"Yes," she said.

He rose, blindly. She stood up, pale, wide-eyed, confronting him,
stammering out the bargain:

"I take all--all! every virtue, every vice of you. I give all--all! all I
have been, all I am, all I shall be! Is that enough? Oh, if there were
only more to give! Stephen, if there were only more!"

Her hands had fallen into his, and they looked each other in the eyes.

Suddenly, through the hush of the enchanted moment, a sullen sound
broke--the sound of a voice they knew, threateningly raised, louder and
louder, growling, profanely menacing.

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