The Fighting Chance

“You say you are not afraid of him, Leroy.”

“No!” he said with an oath, “I am not. Go ahead!”

She unhooked the receiver. After a second or two her low, even voice sounded. There came a pause. She rested one elbow on the walnut shelf, the receiver tight to her ear. Then:

“Mr. Quarrier, please.... Yes, Mr. Howard Quarrier.... No, no name. Say it is on business of immediate importance.... Very well, then; you may say that Miss Vyse insists on speaking to him.... Yes, I’ll hold the wire.”

She turned, the receiver at her ear, and looked narrowly at Mortimer.

“Won’t he speak to you?” he demanded.

“I’m going to find out. Hush a moment!” and in the same calm, almost childish voice: “Oh, Howard, is that you? Yes, I know I promised not to do this, but that was before things happened!… Well, what am I to do when it is necessary to talk to you?… Yes, it is necessary!… I tell you it is necessary!… I am sorry it is not convenient for you to talk to me, but I really must ask you to listen!… No, I shall not write. I want to talk to you to-night—now! Yes, you may come here, if you care to!… I think you had better come, Howard.... Because I am liable to continue ringing your telephone until you are willing to listen.... No, there is nobody here. I am alone. What time?… Very well; I shall expect you. Good-bye.”

She hung up the receiver and turned to Mortimer:

“He’s coming up at once. Did I say anything to scare him particularly?”

“One thing’s sure as preaching,” said Mortimer; “he’s a coward, and I’m dammed glad of it,” he added naively, relighting his cigar, which had gone out.

“If he comes up in his motor he’ll be here in a few minutes,” she said. “Suppose you take your hat and go out. I don’t want him to think what he will think if he walks into the room and finds you waiting. You have your key, Leroy. Walk down the block; and when you see him come in, give him five minutes.”

Her voice had become a little breathless, and her colour was high. Mortimer, too, seemed apprehensive. Things had suddenly begun to work themselves out too swiftly.

“Do you think that’s best?” he faltered, looking about for his hat. “Tell Merkle that nobody has been here, if Quarrier should ask him. Do you think we’re doing it in the best way, Lydia? By God, it smells of a put-up job to me! But I guess it’s all right. It’s better for me to just happen in, isn’t it? Don’t forget to put Merkle wise.”

He descended the stairs hastily. Merkle, of the invisible eyes, held his hat and gloves and opened the door for him.

Once on the dark street, his impulse was to flee—get out, get away from the whole business. A sullen shame was pumping the hot blood up into his neck and cheeks. He strove to find an inoffensive name for what he was proposing to do, but ugly terms, synonym after synonym, crowded in to characterise the impending procedure, and he walked on angrily, half frightened, looking back from moment to moment at the house he had just left.

On the corner he halted, breathing spasmodically, for he had struck a smarter pace than he had been aware of.

Few people passed him. Once he caught a glimmer of a policeman’s buttons along the park wall, and an unpleasant shiver passed over him. At the same moment an electric hansom flew noiselessly past him. He shrank back into the shadow of a porte-cochere. The hansom halted before the limestone basement house. A tall figure left it, stood a moment in the middle of the sidewalk, then walked quickly to the front door. It opened, and the man vanished.

The hansom still waited at the door. Mortimer, his hands shaking, looked at his watch by the light of the electric bulbs flanking the gateway under which he stood.

There was not much time in which to make up his mind, yet his fright was increasing to a pitch which began to enrage him with that coward’s courage which it is impossible to reckon with.

He had missed Quarrier once to-day when he had been keyed to the encounter. Was he going to miss him again through sheer terror? Besides, was not Quarrier a coward? Besides, was it not his own money? Had he not been vilely swindled by a pretended friend? Urging, lashing himself into a heavy, shuffling motion, he emerged from the porte-cochere and lurched off down the street. No time to think now, no time for second thought, for hesitation, for weakness. He had waited too long already. He had waited ten minutes, instead of five. Was Quarrier going to escape again? Was he going to get out of the house before—

Fumbling with his latch-key, but with sense enough left to make no noise, he let himself in, passed silently through the reception-hall and up to the drawing-room floor, where for a second he stood listening. Then something of the perverted sportsman sent the blood quivering into his veins. He had him! He had run him down! The game was at bay.

An inrush of exhilaration steadied him. He laid his hand on the banister and mounted, gloves and hat-brim crushed in the other hand. When he entered the room he pretended to see only Lydia.

“Hello, little girl!” he said, laughing, “are you surprised to—”

At that moment he caught sight of Quarrier, and the start he gave was genuine enough. Never had he seen in a man’s visage such white concentration of anger.

“Quarrier!” he stammered, for his acting was becoming real enough to supplant art.

Quarrier had risen; his narrowing eyes moved from Mortimer to Lydia, then reverted to the man in the combination.

“Rather unexpected, isn’t it?” said Mortimer, staring at Quarrier.

“Is it?” returned Quarrier in a low voice.

“I suppose so,” sneered Mortimer. “Did you expect to find me here?”

“No. Did you expect to find me?” asked the other, with emphasis unmistakable.

“What do you mean?” demanded Mortimer hoarsely. “What the devil do you mean by asking me if I expected to find you here? If I had, I’d not have travelled down to your office to-day to see you; I’d have come here for you. Naturally people suppose that an engaged man is likely to give up this sort of thing.”

Quarrier, motionless, white to the lips, turned his eyes from one to the other.

“It doesn’t look very well, does it?” asked Mortimer; and he stood there, smiling, danger written all over him. “It’s beginning rather early,” he continued, with a sneer. “Most engaged men with a conscience wait until they’re married before they return to the gay and frivolous. But here you are, it seems, handsome, jolly, and irresistible as ever!”

Quarrier looked at Lydia, and his lips moved: “You asked me to come,” he said.

“No; you offered to. I wished to talk to you over the wire, but “—her lip curled, and she shrugged her shoulders—“you seemed to be afraid of something or other.”

“I couldn’t talk to you in my own house, with guests in the room.”

“Why not? Did I say anything your fashionable guests might take exception to? Am I likely to do anything of that kind?—you coward!”

Quarrier stood very still, then noiselessly turned and made one step toward the door.

“One moment,” interposed Mortimer blandly. “As long as I travelled down town to see you, and find you here so unexpectedly, I may as well take advantage of this opportunity to regulate a little matter. You don’t mind our talking shop for a moment, Lydia? Thank you. It’s just a little business matter between Mr. Quarrier and myself—a matter concerning a few shares of stock which I once held in one of his companies, bought at par, and tumbled to ten and—What is the fraction, Quarrier? I forget.”

Quarrier thought deeply for a moment; then he raised his head, looking full at Mortimer, and under his silky beard an edge of teeth glimmered. “Did you wish me to take back those shares at par?” he asked.

“Exactly! I knew you would! I knew you’d see it in that way!” cried Mortimer heartily. “Confound it all, Quarrier, I’ve always said you were that sort of man—that you’d never let a friend in on the top floor, and kick him clear to the cellar! As a matter of fact, I sold out at ten and three-eighths. Wait! Here’s a pencil. Lydia, give me that pad on your desk. Here you are, Quarrier. It’s easy enough to figure out how much you owe me.”

And as Quarrier slowly began tracing figures on the pad, Mortimer rambled on, growing more demonstrative and boisterous every moment. “It’s white of you, Quarrier—I’ll say that! Legally, of course, you could laugh at me; but I’ve always said your business conscience would never let you stand for this sort of thing. ‘You can talk and talk,’ I’ve told people, many a time, ‘but you’ll never convince me that Howard Quarrier hasn’t a heart.’ No, by jinks! they couldn’t make me believe it. And here’s my proof—here’s my vindication! Lydia, would you mind hunting up that cheque-book I left here before dinn—”

He had made a mistake. The girl flushed. He choked up, and cast a startled glance at Quarrier. But Quarrier, if he heard, made no motion of understanding. Perhaps it had not been necessary to convince him of the conspiracy.

When he had finished his figures he reviewed them, tracing each total with his pencil’s point; then quietly handed the pad to Mortimer who went over it, and nodded that it was correct.

Lydia rose. Quarrier said, without looking at her: “I have a blank cheque with me. May I use one of these pens?”

So he had brought a cheque! Had he supposed that a cheque might be necessary when Lydia called him up? Was he prepared to meet any demand of hers, too, even before Mortimer appeared on the scene?

“As long as you have a cheque with you, Howard,” said Lydia quietly, “suppose you simply add to Mr. Mortimer’s amount what you had intended to offer me?”

He stared at her without answering.

“That little remembrance for old time’s sake. Don’t you recollect?”

“No,” said Quarrier.

“Why, Howard! Didn’t you promise me all sorts of things when I wanted to go to your friend Mr. Siward, and explain that it was not his fault I got into the Patroons Club? Don’t you remember I felt dreadfully that he was expelled—that I was simply wild to write to the governors and tell them how I took Merkle’s clothes and drove to the club and waited until I saw a lot of men go in, and then crowded in with the push?”

Mortimer was staring at Quarrier out of his protruding eyes. The girl leaned forward, deliberate, self-possessed, the red lips edged with growing scorn.

“That was a dirty trick!” said Mortimer heavily. He took the pad, added a figure, passed it to Lydia, and she coolly wrote a total, underscoring it heavily.

“That is the amount,” she said.

Quarrier looked at the pad which she had tossed upon the desk. Then he slowly wetted his pen with ink, and, laying the loose cheque flat, began to fill it in. Afterward he dried it, and, reading it carefully, pushed it aside and rose.

“It wouldn’t be advisable for you to stop payment, you know,” observed Mortimer insolently, lying back in his chair and stretching his legs.

“I know,” said Quarrier, pausing to turn on them a deathly stare. Then he went away. After awhile they heard the door close. But there was no sound from the electric hansom, and Mortimer rose and walked to the window.

“He’s gone,” he said.

Lydia stood at the desk, examining the cheque.

“We ought to afford a decent touring-car now,” she suggested—“like that yellow and black Serin-Chanteur car of Mr. Plank’s.”

CHAPTER XIII THE SELLING PRICE

The heat, which had been severe in June, driving the last fashionable loiterer into the country, continued fiercely throughout July. August was stifling; the chestnut leaves in the parks curled up and grew brittle; the elms were blotched; brown stretches scarred the lawns; the blazing colour of the geranium beds seemed to intensify the heat, like a bed of living coals.

Nobody who was anybody remained in town—except some wealthy business men and their million odd employés; but the million, being nobodies, didn’t count.

Nobody came into town; that is to say that a million odd strangers came as usual, swelling the sweltering, resident population sufficiently to animate the main commercial thoroughfares morning and evening, but they didn’t count; the money they spent was, however, very carefully counted.

The fashionable columns of the newspapers informed the fashionable ex-urbanated that the city was empty—though the East Side reeked like a cattle-pen, and another million or two gasped on the hot, tin roofs under the stars, or buried their dirty faces in the parched park grass.

What the press meant to say was that the wealthy section of the city within the shadow of St. Patrick’s twin white spires and north of Fifty-ninth Street was as empty and silent as an abandoned gold-mine. Which was true. Miles of elaborate, untenanted dwellings glimmered blank under the moon and stood tomb-like in barren magnificence against the blazing blue of noon. Miles of plate-glass windows, boarded, or bearing between lowered shade and dusty pane the significant parti-coloured placard warning the honest thief, stared out at the heated park or, in the cross streets, confronted each other with inert hauteur, awaiting the pleasure of their absent owners.

The humidity increased; the horses’ heads hung heavily under their ridiculously pitiful straw bonnets. When the sun was vertical nobody stirred; when the bluish shadows began to creep out over baked sidewalks, broadening to a strip of superheated shade, a few stirred abroad in the deserted streets; here a policeman, thin blue summer tunic open, helmet in hand, swabbing the sweat from forehead and neck; there a white uniformed street sweeper dragging his rubber-edged mop or a section of wet hose; perhaps a haggard peddler of lemonade making for the Park wall around the Metropolitan Museum where, a little later, the East Side would venture out to sit on the benches, or the great electric tourists’ busses would halt to dump out a living cargo—perhaps only the bent figure of a woman, very shabby, very old, dragging her ancient bones along the silent splendour of Fifth Avenue, and peering about the gutters for something she never finds—always peering, always mumbling the endless, wordless, soundless miserere of the poor.

Quarrier’s huge limestone mansion, looming golden in the sun, was tenantless; its owner, closing even The Sedges, his Long Island house, and driven northward for a breath of air, was expected at Shotover.

The house of Mrs. Mortimer was closed and boarded up; the Caithness mansion was closed; the Ferralls’, the Bonnesdels’, the Pages’, the Shannons’, Mrs. Vendenning’s, all were sealed up like vaults. A caretaker apparently guarded Major Belwether’s house, peeping out at intervals from behind the basement windows. As for Plank’s great pile of masonry, edging the outer Hundreds in the north, several lighted windows were to be seen in it at night, and a big yellow and black touring-car whizzed down town from its bronze gateway every morning with perfect regularity.

For there was a fight on that had steadily grown hotter with the weather, and Plank had little time to concern himself with the temperature or to mop his red features over the weather bureau report. Harrington and Quarrier were after him, horse, foot, and dragoons; Harrington had even taken a house at Seabright in order to be near in person; and Quarrier’s move from Long Island to Shotover House was not as flippant as it might appear, for he had his private car there and a locomotive at Black Fells Crossing station, and he was within striking distance of Rochester, Utica, Syracuse, and Albany. Which was what Harrington thought necessary.

The vast unseen machinery set in motion by Harrington and Quarrier had begun to grind in May; and, at the first audible rumble, the aspect of things financial in the country changed. A few industrials began to rocket, nobody knew why; but the market’s first tremor left it baggy and spineless, and the reaction, already overdue, became a sodden and soggy slump. Nobody knew why.

The noise of the fray in the papers, which had first excited then stunned the outside public, continued in a delirium of rumour, report, forecast, and summing up at the week’s end.

Scare heads, involving everybody and everything, from the District-Attorney to Plank’s office boy, succeeded one another. Plank’s name headed column after column. Already becoming familiar in the society and financial sections, it began to appear in neighbouring paragraphs. Who was Plank? And the papers told people with more or less inaccuracy, humour, or sarcasm. What was he trying to do? The papers tried to tell that, too, making a pretty close guess, with comments good-natured or ill-natured according to circumstances over which somebody ought to have some control. What was Harrington trying to do to Plank—if he was trying to do anything? They told that pretty clearly. What was Quarrier going to do to Plank? That, also, they explained in lively detail. A few clergymen who stuck to their churches began to volunteer pulpit opinions concerning the ethics of the battle. A minister who was generally supposed to make an unmitigated nuisance of himself in politics dealt Plank an unexpected blow by saying that he was a “hero.” Some papers called him “Hero” Plank for awhile, but soon tired of it or forgot it under the stress of the increasing heat.

Besides Plank scarcely noticed what the press said of him. He was too busy; his days were full days, brimming over deep into the night. Brokers, lawyers, sycophants, tipsters, treacherous ex-employés of Quarrier, detectives, up-State petty officials, lobbyists from Albany, newspaper men, men from Wall Street, Broad Street, Mulberry Street, Forty-second Street—all these he saw in units, relays, regiments—either at his offices or after dinner—and sometimes after midnight in his own house. And these were only a few, picked from the interested or disinterested thousands who besieged him with advice, importunity, threats, and attempted blackmail. And he handled them all in turn, stolidly but with decision. His obstinate under lip protruded further and further with rare recessions; his heavy head was like the lowered head of a bull. Undaunted, inexorable, slow to the verge of stupidity at times, at times swift as a startled tiger, this new, amazing personality steadily developing, looming higher, heavier, athwart the financial horizon—in stature holding his own among giants, then growing, gradually, inch by inch, dominated his surrounding level sky line.

The youth in him was the tragedy to the old; the sudden silence of the man the danger to the secretive. Harrington was already an old man; Quarrier’s own weapon had always been secrecy; but the silence of Plank confused him, for he had never learned to parry well another’s use of his own weapon. The left-handed swordsman dreads to cross with a man who fights with the left hand. And Harrington, hoary, seamed, scarred, maimed in onslaughts of long forgotten battles, looked long and hard upon this weird of his own dead youth which now rose towering to confront him, menacing him with the armed point of the same shield behind which he himself had so long found shelter—the Law!

The closing of the courts enforced armed truces along certain lines of Plank’s battle front; the adjournment of the legislature emptied Albany. Once it was rumoured that Plank had passed an entire morning with the Governor of the greatest State in the Union and that the conference was to be repeated. A swarm of newspaper men settled about the Governor’s summer cottage at Saratoga, but they learned nothing, nor could they find a trace of Plank’s tracks in the trodden trails of the great Spa.

Besides, the racing had begun; Desmond, Burbank, Sneed, and others of the gilded guild had opened new club-houses; the wretched, half-starved natives in the surrounding hills were violating the game-laws to distend the paunches of the overfed with five-inch troutlings and grouse and woodcock slaughtered out of season; so there was plenty of copy for newspaper men without the daily speculative paragraph devoted to the doings of Beverly Plank. Some scandal, too—but newspapers never touch that; and after all it was nobody’s affair that Leroy Mortimer drove a large yellow and black Serin-Chanteur touring-car, new model, all over Saratoga county. Perhaps the similarity of machines gave rise to the rumour of Plank’s presence; perhaps not, because the car was often driven by a tall, slender girl with dark eyes and hair; and nobody ever saw that sort of pretty woman in Plank’s Serin, or saw Leroy Mortimer for many days without a companion of that species.

Mortimer’s health was excellent. The races had not proved remunerative however, and his new motor-car was horribly expensive. So was Lydia. And he began to be seriously afraid that by the end of August he would be obliged to apply to Quarrier once more for some slight temporary token of that gentleman’s goodwill. He told Lydia this, and she seemed to agree with him. This pleased him. She had not pleased him very much recently. For one thing she was becoming too friendly with some of his friends—Desmond in particular.

Plank, it was known, had opened his great house at Black Fells. His servants, gamekeepers, were there; his stables, kennels, greenhouses, model stock-farm—all had been put in immaculate condition pending the advent of the master. But Plank had not appeared; his new sea-going steam yacht still lay in the East River, and, at rare intervals, a significant glimmer of bunting disclosed the owner’s presence aboard for an hour or two. That was all, however; and the cliff-watchers at Shotover House and the Fells looked seaward in vain for the big Siwanoa, as yacht after yacht, heralded by the smudge on the horizon, turned from a gray speck to a white one, and crept in from the sea to anchor.

The Ferralls were at Shotover with their first instalment of guests. Sylvia was there, Quarrier expected—because Kemp Ferrall’s break with him was not a social one, and Grace’s real affection for Sylvia blinded neither her nor her husband to the material and social importance of the intimacy. Siward was not invited; neither had an invitation to him been even discussed in view of what Grace was aware of, and what everybody knew concerning the implacable relations existing between him, personally, and Howard Quarrier.

Bridge, yachting, and motoring were the August sports; the shooting set had not yet arrived, of course; in fact there was still another relay expected before the season opened and brought the shooting coterie for the first two weeks. But Sylvia was expected to last through and hold over with a brief interlude for a week’s end at Lenox. So was Quarrier; and Grace, always animated by a lively but harmless malice, hoped to Heaven that Plank might arrive before Quarrier left, because she adored the tension of situations and was delightedly persuaded that Plank was more than able to hold his own with her irritating cousin.

“Oh, to see them together in a small room,” she sighed ecstatically in Sylvia’s ear; “I’d certainly poke them up if they only turned around sulkily in the corners of the cage and evinced a desire to lie down.”

“What a mischief-maker you are,” said Sylvia listlessly; and though Grace became very vivacious in describing her plans to extract amusement out of Plank’s hoped-for presence Sylvia remained uninterested.

There seemed, in fact, little to interest her that summer at Shotover House; and, though she never refused any plans made for her, and her attitude was one of quiet acquiescence always—she never expressed a preference for anything, a desire to do anything; and, if let alone, was prone to pace the cliffs or stretch her slim, rounded body on the sand of some little, sheltered, crescent beach, apparently content with the thunderous calm of sea and sky.

Her interest, too, in people had seemingly been extinguished. Once or twice she did inquire as to Marion’s whereabouts, and learned that Miss Page was fishing in Minnesota somewhere but would return to Shotover when the shooting opened. Somebody, Captain Voucher, perhaps, mentioned to somebody in her hearing that Siward was still in New York. If she heard she made no sign, no inquiry. The next morning she remained abed with a headache, and Grace motored to Wendover without her; but Sylvia spent the balance of the day on the cliffs, and played Bridge with the devil’s own luck till dawn, piling up a score that staggered Mr. Fleetwood, who had been instructing her in adversary play a day or two before.

The hot month dragged on; Quarrier came; Agatha Caithness arrived a few days later—scheme of the Ferralls involving Alderdene!—but the Siwanoa did not come, and Plank remained invisible. Leila Mortimer arrived from Swan’s Harbour toward the middle of the month, offering no information as to the whereabouts of what Major Belwether delicately designated as her “legitimate.” But everybody knew he was at last to be crossed off and struck clean out, and the ugly history of the winter, now so impudently corroborated at Saratoga, gave many a hostess the opportunity long desired. Mortimer, as far as his own particular circle was concerned, was down and out; Leila, accepted as a matter of course without him, remained quietly uncommunicative. If the outward physical change in her was due to her marital rupture people thought it was well that it had come in time, for she bloomed like a lovely exotic; and her silences and enthusiasms, and the fragrant freshness of her developing attitude toward the world first disconcerted, then amused, then touched those who had supposed themselves to be so long a buckler for her foibles and a shield for her caprice.