The Fighting Chance

“No. I mean could I do anything for him?”

“No woman ever did. That is a sentimental falsehood of the emotional. No woman ever did help a man in that way. Sylvia, if love were the only question, and if you do truly love him, I—well, I suppose I’d be fool enough to advise you to be a fool. Even then you’d be sorry. You know what your future may be; you know what you are fitted for. What can you do without Howard? In this town your rôle would be a very minor one without Howard’s money, and you know it.”

“Yes, I know it.”

“And your sacrifice could not help that doomed boy.”

Sylvia nodded assent.

“Then, is there any choice? Is there any question of what to do?”

Sylvia looked out into the winter sky, through the tops of snowy trees; everywhere the stark, deathly rigidity of winter. Under it, frozen, lay the rain that had scented the air. Under her ambition lay the ghosts of yesterday.

“No,” she said, “there is no question of choice. I know what must be.”

Grace, seated in the firelight, looked up as Sylvia rose from her desk and came across the room; and when she sank down on the rug at her feet, resting her cheek against the elder woman’s knees, nothing was said for a long time—a time of length sufficient to commit a memory to its grave, lay it away decently and in quiet befitting.

Sore doubt assailed Grace Ferrall, guiltily aware that once again she had meddled; and in the calm tenor of her own placid, marital satisfaction, looking backward along the pleasant path she had trodden with its little monuments to love at decent intervals amid the agreeable monotony of content, her heart and conscience misgave her lest she had counselled this young girl wrongly, committing her to the arid lovelessness which she herself had never known.

Leaning there, her fingers lingering in light caress on Sylvia’s bright hair, for every doubt she brought up argument, to every sentimental wavering within her heart she opposed the chilling reason of common sense. Destruction to happiness lay in Sylvia’s yielding to her caprice for Siward. There was other happiness in the world besides the non-essential one of love. That must be Sylvia’s portion. And after all—and after all, love was a matter of degree; and it was well for Sylvia that she had the malady so lightly—well for her that it had advanced so little, lest she suspect what its crowning miracles might be and fall sick of a passion for what she had forever lost.

For a week or more the snow continued; colder, gloomier weather set in, and the impending menace of Ash Wednesday redoubled the social pace, culminating in the Westervelt ball on the eve of the forty days. And Sylvia had not yet seen Siward or spoken to him again across the wilderness of streets and men.

In the first relaxation of Lent she had instinctively welcomed an opportunity for spiritual consolation and a chance to take her spiritual bearings; not because of bodily fatigue—for in the splendour of her youthful vigour she did not know what that meant.

Saint Berold was a pretty good saint, and his church was patronised by Major Belwether’s household. The major liked two things high: his game and his church. Sylvia cared for neither, but had become habituated to both the odours of sanctity and of pheasants; so to Saint Berold’s she went in cure of her soul. Besides, she was fond of Father Curtis, who, if he were every inch a priest, was also every foot of his six feet a man—simple, good, and brave.

However, she found little opportunity, save at her brief confession, for a word with Father Curtis. His days were full days to the overbrimming, and a fashionable pack was ever at his heels, fawning and shoving and importuning. It was fashionable to adore Father Curtis, and for that reason she shrank from venturing any demand upon his time, and nobody else at Saint Berold’s appealed to her. Besides, the music was hard, commonplace, even blatant at times, and, having a delicate ear, she shrank from this also. It is probable then that what comfort she found under Saint Berold’s big, brand-new Episcopal cross she extracted from observing the rites, usages, and laws of a creed that had been accepted for her by that Christian gentleman, Major Belwether. Also, she may have found some solace from the still intervals devoted to an inventory of her sins and the wistful searching of a heart too young for sadness. If she did it was her own affair, not Grace Ferrall’s, who went with her to Saint Berold’s determined always to confess to too much gambling, but letting it go from day to day so that the penance could not interfere with the next séance.

Agatha Caithness was there a great deal, looking like a saint in her subdued plumage; and very devout, dodging nothing—neither confession nor Quarrier’s occasionally lifted eyes, though their gaze, meeting, seemed lost in dreamy devotion or drowned in the contemplation of the spiritual and remote.

Plank came docilely from his Dutch Reformed church to sit beside Leila. As for Mortimer, once a vestryman, he never came at all—made no pretence or profession of what he elegantly expressed as “caring a damn” for anything “in the church line,” though, he added, there were “some good lookers to be found in a few synagogues.” His misconception of the attractions of the church amused the new set of men among whom he had recently drifted, to the unfeigned disgust of gentlemen like Major Belwether; “club” men, in the commoner and more sinister interpretation of the word; unfit men, who had managed to slip into good clubs; men, once fit, who had deteriorated to the verge of ostracism; heavy, over-fed, idle, insolent men in questionable financial situation, hard card players, hard drinkers, hard riders, negative in their virtues, merciless in their vices, and whose cynical misconduct formed the sources of the stock of stories told where such men foregather.

Mortimer had already furnished his world with sufficient material for jests of that flavour; now they were telling a new one: how, as Leila was standing before Tiffany’s looking for her carriage, a masher accosted her, and, at her haughty stare, said sneeringly: “Oh, you can’t play that game on me; I’ve seen you with Leroy Mortimer!”

The story was repeated frequently enough. Leila heard it with a shrug; but such things mattered to her now, and she cried over it at night, burning that Plank should hear her name used jestingly to emphasise the depth of her husband’s degradation.

Mortimer stayed out at night very frequently now. Also, he appeared to make his money go farther, or was luckier at his “card killings,” because he seldom attempted to bully Leila, being apparently content with his allowance.

Once or twice Plank saw him with an unusually attractive girl belonging to a world very far removed from Leila’s. Somebody said she was an actress when she did anything at all—one Lydia Vyse, somewhat celebrated for an audacity not too delicate. But Plank was no more interested than any man who can’t afford to endanger his prospects by a closer acquaintance with that sort of pretty woman.

Meanwhile Mortimer kept away from home, wife, and church, and Plank frequented them, so the two men did not meet very often; and the less they met the less they found to say to one another.

Now that the forty days had really begun, Major Belwether became restless for the flesh-pots of the south, although Lenten duties sat lightly enough upon the house of Belwether. These decent observances were limited to a lax acknowledgment of fast days, church in moderation, and active participation in the succession of informal affairs calculated to sustain life in those intellectually atrophied and wealthy people entirely dependent upon others for their amusements.

To these people no fear of punishment hereafter can equal the terror of being left to their own devices; and so, though the opera was over, theatres unfashionable, formal functions suspended and dances ended, the pace still continued at a discreet and decorous trot; and those who had not fled to California or Palm Beach, remained to pray and play Bridge with an unction most edifying.

And all this while Sylvia had not seen Siward.

Sylvia was changing. The characteristic amiability, the sensitive reserve, the sweet composure which the world had always counted on in her, had become exceptions and no longer the rules which governed the caprice and impulse always latent. An indifference so pointed as to verge on insolence amazed her intimates at times; a sudden, flushed impatience startled the habitués of her shrine. There was a new, unseeing hardness in her eyes; in her attitude the faintest hint of cynicism. She acquired a habit of doing selfish things coldly, indifferent to the canons of the art; and true selfishness, the most delicate of all the arts, requires an expert.

That which had most charmed—her unfeigned pleasure in pleasure, her unfailing consideration for all, her gentleness with ignorance, her generous unconsciousness of self—all these still remained, it is true, though no longer characteristic, no longer to be counted on.

For the first time a slight sense of fear tinctured the general admiration.

In public her indifference and growing impatience with Quarrier had not reached the verge of bad taste, but in private she was scarcely at pains to conceal her weariness and inattention, showing him less and less of the formal consideration which had been their only medium of coexistence. That he noticed it was evident even to her who carelessly ignored the consequences of her own attitude.

Once, speaking of the alterations in progress at The Sedges, his place near Oyster Bay, he casually asked her opinion, and she as casually observed that if he had an opinion about anything he wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Once, too, she had remarked in Quarrier’s hearing to Ferrall, who was complaining about the loss of his hair, that a hairless head was a visitation from Heaven, but a beard was a man’s own fault.

Once they came very close to a definite rupture, close enough to scare her after all the heat had gone out of her and the matter was ended. Quarrier had lingered late after cards, and something was said about the impending kennel show and about Marion Page judging the English setters.

“Agatha tells me that you are going with Marion,” continued Quarrier. “As long as Marion has chosen to make herself conspicuous there is nothing to be said. But do you think it very good taste for you to figure publicly on the sawdust with an eccentric girl like Marion?”

“I see nothing conspicuous about a girl’s judging a few dogs,” said Sylvia, merely from an irritable desire to contradict.

“It’s bad taste and bad form,” remarked Quarrier coldly; “and Agatha thought it a mistake for you to go there with her.”

“Agatha’s opinions do not concern me.”

“Perhaps mine may have some weight.”

“Not the slightest.”

He said patiently: “This is a public show; do you understand? Not one of those private bench exhibitions.”

“I understand. Really, Howard, you are insufferable at times.”

“Do you feel that way?”

“Yes, I do. I am sorry to be rude, but I do feel that way!” Flushed, impatient, she looked him squarely between his narrowing, woman’s eyes: “I do not care for you very much, Howard, and you know it. I am marrying you with a perfectly sordid motive, and you know that, too. Therefore it is more decent—if there is any decency left in either of us—to interfere with one another as little as possible, unless you desire a definite rupture. Do you?”

“I? A—a rupture?”

“Yes,” she said hotly; “do you?”

“Do you, Sylvia?”

“No; I’m too cowardly, too selfish, too treacherous to myself. No, I don’t.”

“Nor do I,” he said, lifting his furtive eyes.

“Very well. You are more contemptible than I am, that is all.”

Her voice had grown unsteady; an unreasoning rush of anger had set her whole body a-thrill, and the white heat of it was driving her to provoke him, as though that might cleanse her of the ignominy of the bargain—as though a bargain did not require two of the same mind to make it.

“What do you want of me?” she said, still stinging under the angry waves of self-contempt. “What are you marrying me for? Because, divided, we are likely to cut small figures in our tin-trumpet world? Because, united, we can dominate the brainless? Is there any other reason?”

Showing his teeth in that twitching snicker that contracted the muscles of his upper lip: “Children!” he said, looking at her.

She turned scarlet to her hair; the deliberate grossness stunned her. Confused, she stood confronting him, dumb under a retort the coarseness of which she had never dreamed him capable.

“I mean what I say,” he repeated calmly. “A man cares for two things: his fortune, and the heirs to it. If you didn’t know that you have learned it now. You hurt me deliberately. I told you a plain truth very bluntly. It is for you to consider the situation.”

But she could not speak; anger, humiliation, shame, held her tongue-tied. The instinctive revolt at the vague horror—the monstrous, meaningless threat—nothing could force words from her to repudiate, to deny what he had dared to utter.

Except as the effrontery of brutality, except as a formless menace born of his anger, the reason he flung at her for his marrying her conveyed nothing to her in its grotesque impossibility. Only the intentional coarseness of it was to be endured—if she chose to endure it; for the rest was empty of concrete meaning to her.

Lent was half over before she saw him again. Neither he nor she had taken any steps to complete the rupture; and at the Mi-carême dance, given by the Siowa Hunt, Quarrier, who was M. F. H., took up the thread of their suspended intercourse as methodically and calmly as though it had never quivered to the breaking point. He led the cotillon with agreeable precision and impersonal accuracy, favouring her at intervals; and though she wasted no favours on him, she endured his, which was sufficient evidence that matters were still in statu quo.

She returned to town next morning with Grace Ferrall, irritable, sulky, furious with herself at the cowardly relief she felt. For, spite of her burning anger against Quarrier, the suspense at times had been wearing; and she would not make the first move—had not decided even to accept his move if it came—at least, had not admitted to herself that she would accept it. It had come and the tension was over, and now, entering Mrs. Ferrall’s brougham which met them at Thirty-fourth Street Ferry, she was furious with herself for her unfeigned feeling of relief.

All hot with self-contempt she lay back in the comfortably upholstered corner of the brougham, staring straight before her, sullen red mouth unresponsive to the occasional inconsequent questions of Grace Ferrall.

“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 rôle 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 café, 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 he 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.