A drawing-room and a reception-room flanked the marble-tiled hall; behind these the dining-room ran the width of the rear. It was a typical gentlefolk’s house of the worst period of Manhattan, and Major Belwether belonged in it as fittingly as a melodeon belongs in a west-side flat. The hall-way was made for such a man as he to patter through; the velvet-covered stairs were as peculiarly fitted for him as a runway is for a rabbit; the suave pink-and-white drawing-room, the discreet, gray reception-room, the soft, fat rugs, the intricacies of banisters and alcoves and curtained cubby-holes—all reflected his personality, all corroborated the ensemble. It was his habitat, his distinctly, from the pronounced but meaningless intricacy of the architecture to the studied but unconvincing tints, like a man who suddenly starts to speak, but checks himself, realising he has nothing in particular to say.
There were half a dozen people there lounging informally between the living-room on the second floor and Sylvia’s apartments in the rear—the residue from a luncheon and Bridge party given that afternoon by Sylvia to a score or so of card-mad women. A few of these she had asked to remain for an informal dinner, and a desperate game later—the sort of people she knew well enough to lose to heavily or win from without remorse—Grace Ferrall, Marion Page, Agatha Caithness. Trusting to the telephone that morning, she had secured the Mortimers and Quarrier, failing three men; and now the party, with Plank as Mortimer’s substitute, was complete, all thorough gamesters—sex mattering nothing in the preparation for such a séance.
In Sylvia’s boudoir Grace Ferrall and Agatha Caithness sat before the fire; Sylvia, at the mirror of her dresser, was correcting the pallor incident to the unbroken dissipation of a brilliant season; Marion, with her inevitable cigarette, wandered between Sylvia’s quarters and the library, where Quarrier and Major Belwether were sitting in low-voiced confab.
Leila, greeted gaily from the boudoir, went in. Plank entered the library, was mauled effusively by the major, returned Quarrier’s firm hand shake, and sat down with an inquiring smile.
“Oh, yes, we’re out for blood to-night,” tittered Major Belwether, grasping Quarrier’s arm humourously and shaking it to emphasise his words—a habit that Quarrier thoroughly disliked. “Sylvia had a lot of women here playing for the season score, so I suggested she keep the pick of them for dinner, and call in a few choice ones to make a night of it.”
“It’s agreeable to me,” said Plank, still looking at Quarrier with the same inquiring expression, which that gentleman presently chose to understand.
“I haven’t had a chance to look into that matter,” he said carelessly. “Some day, when you have time to go over it—”
“I have time now,” said Plank; “there’s nothing to go over; there’s no reason for any secrecy. All I wrote you was that I proposed to control the stock of Amalgamated Electric and that I wished your advice in the matter.”
“I could not give you any advice off-hand on such an extraordinary suggestion,” returned Quarrier coldly. “If you know where the stock is, you’ll understand.”
“Do you mean what it is quoted at, or who owns it?” interrupted Plank.
“Who owns it. Everybody knows where it has dropped to, I suppose. Most people know, too, where it is held.”
“Yes; I do.”
“And who is manipulating it,” added Quarrier indifferently.
“Do you mean Harrington’s people?”
“I don’t mean anybody in particular, Mr. Plank.”
“Oh!” said Plank, staring, “I was sure you couldn’t have meant Harrington; because,” he went on deliberately, “there are other theories floating about that mysterious pool, one of which I’ve proved.”
Quarrier looked at him out of his velvety-lidded eyes:
“What have you proved?”
“I’ll tell you, if you’ll appoint an interview.”
“I’ll come too,” began Belwether, who had been listening, loose-mouthed and intent; “we’re all in it—Howard, Kemp Ferrall, and I—”
“And Stephen Siward,” observed Plank, so quietly that Quarrier never even raised his eyes to read the stolid face opposite.
Presently he said: “Do you know anybody who can deliver you any considerable block of Amalgamated Electric at the market figures?”
“I could deliver you several blocks, if you care to bid,” said Plank bluntly.
Belwether grew red, then pale. Quarrier stiffened in his chair, but his eyes were only sceptical. Plank’s under lip had begun to protrude again; he swung his massive head, looking from Belwether back to Quarrier:
“Pool or no pool,” he continued, “you Amalgamated people will want to see the stock climb back into the branches from which somebody shook it out; and I propose to put it there. That is all I had meant to say to you, Mr. Quarrier. I’m not averse to saying it here to you, and I do. There’s no secrecy about it. Figure out for yourself how much stock I control, and who let it go. Settle your family questions and put your house in order; then invite me to call, and I’ll do it. And I have an idea that we are going to stand on our own legs again, and recover our self-respect and our fighting capacity; and I rather think we’ll stop this hold-up business, and that our Inter-County friend will let go the sand-bag and pocket the jimmy, and talk business across the line-fence.”
Quarrier’s characteristic pallor was no index to his feelings, nor was his icy reticence. All hell might be boiling below.
When anybody gave Quarrier a letter to read he took a long time reading it; but if he was slow he was also minute; he went over every word again and again, studying, absorbing each letter, each period, the conformation of every word. And when he ended he had in his brain a photograph of the letter which he would never forget.
And now, slowly, minutely, methodically, he was going over and over Plank’s words, and his manner of saying them, and their surface import, and the hidden one, if any.
If Plank had spoken the truth—and there was no reason to doubt it—Plank had quietly acquired a controlling interest in Amalgamated Electric. That meant treachery in somebody. Who? Probably Siward, perhaps Belwether. He would not look at the latter just yet; not for a minute or two. There was time enough to see through that withered, pink-and-white old fraud. But why had Plank done this? And why did Plank suspect him of any desire to wreck his own property? He did suspect him, that was certain.
After a silence, he spoke quietly and without emotion:
“Everybody concerned will be glad to see Amalgamated Electric declaring dividends. This is a shock to us,” he glanced impassively at the shrunken major, “but a pleasant shock. I think it well to arrange a meeting as soon as possible.”
“To-morrow,” said Plank, with a manner of closing discussion. And in his brusque ending of the matter Quarrier detected the ringing undertone of an authority he never had and never would endure; and though his pale, composed features betrayed not the subtlest shade of emotion, he was aware that a new element had come into his life—a new force was growing out of nothing to confront him, an unfamiliar shape loomed vaguely ahead, throwing its huge distorted shadow across his path. He sensed it with the instinct of kind for kind, not because Plank’s millions meant anything to him as a force; not because this lumbering, red-faced meddler had blundered into a family affair where confidence consisted in joining hands lest a pocket be inadvertently picked; not because Plank had knocked at the door, expecting treachery to open, and had found it, but because of the awful simplicity of the man and his methods.
If Plank suspected him, he must also suspect him of complicity in the Inter-County grab; he must suspect him of the ruthless crushing power that corrupts or annihilates opposition, making a mockery of legislation, a jest of the courts, and an epigram of a people’s indignation.
And yet, in the face of all this, careless, fearless, frank to the outer verge of stupidity—which sometimes means the inability to be afraid—this man Plank was casually telling him things which men regard as secrets and as weapons of defence—was actually averting him of his peril, and telling him almost contemptuously to pull up the drawbridge and prepare for siege, instead of rushing the castle and giving it to the sack.
As Quarrier sat there meditating, his long, white fingers caressing his soft, pointed beard, Sylvia came in, greeting the men collectively with a nod, and offering her hand to Plank.
“Dinner is announced,” she said; “please go in farm fashion. Wait!” as Plank, following the major and Quarrier, stood aside for her to pass. “No, you go ahead, Howard; and you,” to the major.
Left for a moment in the room with Plank, she stood listening to the others descending the stairs; then:
“Have you seen Mr. Siward?”
“Yes,” said Plank.
“Oh! Is he well?”
“Not very.”
“Is he well enough to read a letter, and to answer one?”
“Oh, yes; he’s well enough in that way.”
“I supposed so. That is why I said to you, over the wire, not to trouble him with my request.”
“You mean that I am not to say anything about your offer to buy the hunter?”
“No. If I make up my mind that I want the horse I’ll write him—perhaps.”
Lingering still, she let one hand fall on the banisters, turning back toward Plank, who was following:
“I understood you to mean that—that Mr. Siward’s financial affairs were anything but satisfactory?”—the sweet, trailing, upward inflection making it a question.
“When did I say that?” demanded Plank.
“Once—a month ago.”
“I didn’t,” said Plank bluntly.
“Oh, I had inferred it, then, from something you said, or something you were silent about. Is that it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Am I quite wrong, then?” she asked, looking him in the eyes.
And Plank, who never lied, found no answer. Considering him for a moment in silence, she turned again and descended the stairs.
The dinner was one of those thoroughly well-chosen dinners of few courses and faultless service suitable for card-players, who neither care to stuff themselves as a preliminary to a battle royal, nor to dawdle through courses, eliminating for themselves what is not good for them. The men drank a light, sound, aromatic Irish of the major’s; the women—except Marion, who took what the men took—used claret sparingly. Coffee was served where they sat; the men smoking, Agatha and Marion producing their own cigarettes.
“Don’t you smoke any more?” asked Grace Ferrall of Leila Mortimer, and at the smiling negative, “Oh, that perhaps explains it. You’re growing positively radiant, you know. You’ll he wearing a braid and a tuck in your skirt if you go on getting younger.”
Leila laughed, colouring up as Plank turned in his chair to look at her closer.
“No, it won’t rub off, Mr. Plank,” said Marion coolly, “but mine will. This,” touching a faint spot of colour under her eyes, “is art.”
“Pooh! I’m all art!” said Grace. “Observe, Mr. Plank, that under this becoming flush are the same old freckles you saw at Shotover.” And she laughed that sweet, careless laugh of an adolescent and straightened her boyish figure, pretty head held high, adding: “Kemp won’t let me ‘improve’ myself, or I’d do it.”
“You are perfect,” said Sylvia, rising from the table, her own lovely, rounded, youthful figure condoning the exaggeration; “you’re sufficiently sweet as you are. Good people, if you are ready, we will go through the ceremony of cutting for partners—unless otherwise you decide. How say you?”
“I don’t care to enter the scramble for a man,” cried Grace. “If it’s to choose, I’d as soon choose Marion.”
Plank looked at Leila, who laughed.
“All right; choose, then!” said Sylvia. “Howard, you’re dying, of course, to play with me, but you’re looking very guiltily at Agatha.”
The major asked Leila at once; so Plank fell to Sylvia, pitted against Marion and Grace Ferrall.
A few moments later the quiet of the library was broken by the butler entering with decanters and ice, and glasses that tinkled frostily.
Play began at table Number One on a passed make of no trumps by Sylvia, and at the other table on a doubled and redoubled heart make, which sent a delicate flush into Agatha’s face, and drove the last vestige of lingering thoughtfulness from Quarrier’s, leaving it a tense, pallid, and expressionless mask, out of which looked the velvet-fringed eyes of a woman.
Of all the faces there at the two tables, Sylvia’s alone had not changed, neither assuming the gambler’s mask nor the infatuated glare of the amateur. She was thoughtful, excited, delighted, or dismayed by turns, but always wholesomely so; the game for its own sake, and not the stakes, absorbing her, partly because she had never permitted herself to weigh money and pleasure in the same balance, but kept a mental pair of scales for each.
As usual, the fever of gain was fiercest in those who could afford to lose most. Quarrier, playing to rule with merciless precision, coldly exacted every penalty that a lapse in his opponents permitted. Agatha, her teeth set in her nether lip, her eyes like living jewels, answered Quarrier’s every signal, interpreted every sign, her play fitting in exactly with his, as though she were his subconscious self balancing the perfectly adjusted mechanism of his body and mind.
Now and then lifting her eyes, she sent a long, limpid glance at Quarrier like a pale shaft of light; and under his heavy-fringed lashes, at moments, his level gaze encountered her’s with a slow narrowing of lids—as though there was more than one game in progress, more than one stake being played for under the dull rose glow of the clustered lights.
Sylvia, sitting dummy at the other tables mechanically alert to Plank’s cards dropping in rapid sequence as he played alternately from his own hand and the dummy, permitted her thoughtful eyes to wander toward Agatha from moment to moment. How alluring her subtle beauty, in its own strange way! How perfect her accord with her partner! How faultless her intelligence, divining the very source of every hidden motive controlling him, forestalling his intent—acquiescent, delicate, marvellous intelligence—the esoteric complement of two parts of a single mind.
The collar of diamonds and aqua marines shimmered like the reflection of shadowy lightning across her throat; a single splendid jewel glowed on her left hand as her fingers flashed among the cards for the make-up.
“A hundred aces,” broke in Plank’s heavy voice as he played the last trick and picked up the scoring card and pencil.
Sylvia’s blue eyes were laughing as Plank cut the new pack. Marion Page coolly laid aside her cigarette, dealt, and made it “without” in the original.
“May I play?” asked Sylvia sweetly.
“Please,” growled Plank.
So Sylvia serenely played from the “top of nothing,” and Grace Ferrall whisked a wonderful dummy across the green; and Plank’s thick under lip began to protrude, and he lowered his heavy head like a bull at bay.
Once Marion, over-intent, touched a card in the dummy when she should have played from her own hand; and Sylvia would have let it pass, had not Plank calmly noted the penalty.
“Oh, dear! It’s too much like business,” sighed Sylvia. “Can’t we play for the sake of the sport? I don’t think it good sportsmanship to profit by a blunder.”
“Rule,” observed Marion laconically. “‘Ware barbed wire, if you want the brush.”
“I myself never was crazy for the brush,” murmured Sylvia.
Grace whispered maliciously: “But you’ve got it, with the mask and pads,” and her mischievous head barely tipped backward in the direction of Quarrier.
“Especially the mask,” returned Sylvia, under her breath, and laid on the table the last card of a Yarborough.
Plank scored without comment. Marion cut, and resumed her cigarette. Sylvia dealt with that witchery of rounded wrists and slim fingers fascinating to men and women alike. Then, cards en règle, passed the make. Plank, cautiously consulting the score, made it spades, which being doubled, Grace led a “singleton” ace, and Plank slapped down a strong dummy and folded his great arms.
Toward midnight, Sylvia, absorbed in her dummy, fancied she heard the electric bell ringing at the front door. Later, having barely made the odd, she was turning to look at the major, when, beyond him, she saw Leroy Mortimer enter the room, sullen, pasty-skinned, but perfectly sober and well groomed.
“You are a trifle late,” observed Sylvia carelessly. Grace Ferrall and Marion ignored him. Plank bade him good evening in a low voice.
The people at the other table, having completed their rubber, looked around at Mortimer in disagreeable surprise.
“I’ll cut in, if you want me. If you don’t, say so,” observed Mortimer.
It was plain that they did not; so he settled himself in an arm-chair, with an ugly glance at his wife and an insolent one at Quarrier; and the game went on in silence; Leila and the major still losing heavily under the sneering gaze of Mortimer.
At last, “Who’s carrying you?” he broke out, exasperated; and in the shocked silence Leila, very white, made a movement to rise, but Quarrier laid his long fingers across her arm, pressing her backward.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he remarked, looking coldly at Mortimer.
Plank laid down his cards, rose, and walked over to Mortimer:
“May I have a word with you?” he asked bluntly.
“You may. And I’ll help myself to a word or two with you,” retorted Mortimer, following Plank out of the room, down the stairs to the lighted reception-room, where they wheeled, confronting one another.
“What is the matter?” demanded Plank. “At the club they told me you were asleep in the card-room. I didn’t tell Leila. What is wrong?”
“I’m—I’m dead broke,” said Mortimer harshly. “Billy Fleetwood took my paper. Can you help me out? It’s due to-morrow.”
Plank looked at him gravely, but made no answer.
“Can you?” repeated Mortimer violently. “Haven’t I done enough for you? Haven’t I done enough for everybody? Is anybody going to show me any consideration? Look at Quarrier’s manner to me just now! And this very day I did him a service that all his millions can’t repay. And there you stand, too, staring at me as though I were some damned importuning shabby-genteel, hinting around for an opening to touch you. Yes, you do! And this very day I have done for you the—the most vital thing—the most sacred favour one man can do for another—”
He halted, stammered something incoherent, his battered eyes wet with tears. The man was a wreck—nerves, stamina, mind on the very verge of collapse.
“I’ll help you, of course,” said Plank, eyeing him. “Go home, now, and sleep. I tell you I’ll help you in the morning.... Don’t give way! Have you no grit? Pull up sharp, I tell you!”
But Mortimer had fallen into a chair, his ravaged face cradled in his hands. “I’ve got all that’s c-coming to me,” he said hoarsely; “I’m all in—all in! God! but I’ve got the jumps this trip.... You’ll stand for this, won’t you, Plank? I was batty, but I woke up in time to grasp the live wire Billy Fleetwood held—three shocks in succession—and his were queens full to my jacks—aces to kings twice!—Alderdene and Voucher sitting in until they’d started me off hiking hellward!”
He began to ramble, and even to laugh weakly, passing his puffy, shaking hands across his eyes.
“It’s good of you, Beverly; I appreciate it. But I’ve been good to you. You’re all to the good, my boy! Understand? All to the good. I fixed it; I did it for you. You can have your innings now. You can have her when you want her, I tell you.”
“What do you mean?” said Plank menacingly.
“Mean! I mean what I told you that day at Black Fells, when we were riding. I told you you had a chance to win out. Now the chance has come—same’s I told you. Start in, and by the time you’re ready to say ‘When?’ she’ll be there with the bottle!”
“I don’t think you are perfectly sane yet,” said Plank slowly.
“Let it go at that, then,” sniggered Mortimer, struggling to his feet. “Bring Leila back; I’m all in; I’m going home. You’ll be around in the morning, won’t you?”
“Yes,” said Plank. “Have you got a cab?”
Mortimer had one. The glass and iron doors clanged behind him, and Plank, waiting a moment, sighed, raised his head, and, encountering the curious gaze of a servant, trudged off up-stairs again.
The game had ended at both tables. Quarrier and Agatha stood by the window together, conversing in low voices. Belwether, at a desk, sat muttering and fussing with a cheque-book. The others were in Sylvia’s apartments.
A few moments later Kemp Ferrall arrived, in the best of spirits, very much inclined to consider the night as still young; but his enthusiasm met with no response, and presently he departed with his wife and Marion in their big Mercedes, wheeling into the avenue at a reckless pace, and streaming away through the night like a meteor run mad.
Leila, in her wraps, emerged in a few moments, looking at Plank out of serious eyes; and they made their brief adieux and went away in Plank’s brougham.
When Agatha’s maid arrived, Quarrier also started to take his leave; but Sylvia, seated at a card-table, idly arranging the cards in geometrical designs and fanciful arabesques, looked up at him, saying:
“I wanted to say something to you, Howard.”
Agatha passed them, going into Sylvia’s room for her wraps; and Quarrier turned to Sylvia:
“Well?” he said, with the slightest hint of impatience.
“Can’t you stay a minute?” asked Sylvia, surprised.
“Agatha is going in the motor with me. Is it anything important?”
She considered him without replying. She had never before detected that manner, that hardness in a voice always so even in quality.
“What is it?” he repeated.
She thought a moment, putting aside for the time his manner, which she could not comprehend; then:
“I wanted to ask you a question—a rather ignorant one, perhaps. It’s about your Amalgamated Electric Company. May I ask it, Howard?”
After a second’s stare, “Certainly,” he said.
“It’s only this: If the other people—the Inter-County, I mean—are slowly ruining Amalgamated, why don’t you stop it?”
Quarrier’s eyes narrowed. “Oh! And who have you been discussing the matter with?”
“Mr. Plank,” she said simply. “I asked him. He shook his head, and said I’d better ask you. And I do ask you.”
For a moment he stood mute; then his lips began to shrink back over his beautiful teeth in one of his rare laughs.
“I’ll be very glad to explain it some day,” he said; but there was no mirth in his voice or eyes, only the snickering lip wrinkling the pallor.
“Will you not answer now?” she asked.
“No, not now. But I desire you to understand it some day—some day before November. And one or two other matters that it is necessary for you to understand. I want to explain them, Sylvia, in such a manner that you will never be likely to forget them. And I mean to; for they are never out of my mind, and I wish them to be as ineffaceably impressed on yours.... Good night.”
He took her limp hand almost briskly, released it, and stepped down the stairs as Agatha entered, cloaked, to say good night.
They kissed at parting—“life embracing death”—as Mortimer had sneered on a similar occasion; then Sylvia, alone, stood in her bedroom, hands linked behind her, her lovely head bent, groping with the very ghosts of thought which eluded her, fleeing, vanishing, reappearing, to peep out at her only to fade into nothing ere she could follow where they flitted through the dark labyrinths of memory.
The major, craning his neck in the bay-window, saw Agatha and Quarrier enter the big, yellow motor, and disappear behind the limousine. And it worried him horribly, because he knew perfectly well that Quarrier had lied to him about a jewelled collar precisely like the collar worn by Agatha Caithness; and what to do or what to say to anybody on the subject was, for the first time in his life, utterly beyond his garrulous ability. So, for the first time also in his chattering career, he held his tongue, reassured at moments, at other moments panic-stricken lest this marriage he had engineered should go amiss, and his ambitions be nipped at the very instant of triumphant maturity.
“This sort of thing—in your own caste—among your own kind,” his panicky thoughts ran on, “is b-bad form—rotten bad taste on both sides. If they were married—one of them, anyway! But this isn’t right; no, by gad! it’s bad taste, and no gentleman could countenance it!”
It was plain that he could, however, his only fear being that somebody might whisper something to turn Sylvia’s innocence into a terrible wisdom which would ruin everything, and knock the underpinning from the new tower which his inflated fancy beheld slowly growing heavenward, surmounting the house of Belwether.
Another matter: he had violated his word, and had been caught at it by his prospective nephew-in-law—broken his pledged word not to sell his Amalgamated Electric holdings, and had done it. Yet, how could Plank dominate, unless another also had done what he had done? And it made him a little more comfortable to know he was sharing the fault with somebody—probably with Siward, whom he now had the luxury of despising for the very thing he himself had done.
“Drunkard!” he muttered to himself; “he’s in the gutter at last!”
And he repeated it unctuously, almost reconciled to his own shortcoming, because it was the first time, as far as he knew, that a Belwether might legitimately enjoy the pleasures of holding the word of a Siward in contempt.
Sylvia had dismissed her maid, the old feeling of distaste for the touch of another had returned since the last mad, crushed embrace in Siward’s arms had become a memory. More and more she was returning to old instincts, old habits of thought, reverting to type once more, virgin of lip and thought and desire, save when the old memory stopped her heart suddenly, then sent it racing, touching her face with quick, crimson imprint.
Now, blue eyes dreaming under the bright masses of her loosened hair, she sat watching the last glimmer amid the ashes whitening on the hearth, thinking of Siward and of what had been between them, and of what could never be—never, never be.
One red spark among the ashes—her ambition, deathless amid the ashes of life! When that, too, went out, life must be extinct.
What he had roused in her had died when he went away. It could never awake again, unless he returned to awaken it. And he never would; he would never come again.
One brief interlude of love, of passion, in her life could neither tint nor taint the cool, normal sequence of her days. All that life held for a woman of her caste—all save that—was hers when she stretched out her hand for it—hers by right of succession, of descent; hers by warrant unquestioned, by the unuttered text of the ukase to be launched, if necessary, by that very, very old lady, drowsing, enthroned, as the endless pageant wound like a jewelled river at her feet.
So Siward could never come again, sauntering toward her through the sunlight, smiling his absent smile. She caught her breath painfully, straightening up; a single ash fell in the fire; the last spark went out.