Chambers Robert William
The Danger Mark
She had looked at the clock four times, and the hands seemed to have moved no more than a minute's space across the dial; and once more she turned to pace the floor.
Her lips had lost almost all their colour now; they moved, muttering tremulous incoherences; the outline of every feature grew finer, sharper, more spiritual, but dreadfully white.
Later she found herself on her knees beside the couch, face buried in the cushions, her small teeth marking her wrist again—heard herself crying out for somebody to help her—yet her lips had uttered no sound; it was only her soul in its agony, while the youthful, curved body and rigid limbs burnt steadily in hell's own flames.
Again she raised her head and lifted her white face toward the clock. Only a minute had crept by, and she turned, twisting her interlocked hands, dry-eyed, dry lips parted, and stared about her. Half stupefied with pain, stunned, dismayed by the million tiny voices of temptation assailing her, dinning in her senses, she reeled where she knelt, fell forward, laid her slender length across the hearth-rug, and set her teeth in her wrist again, choking back the cry of terror and desolation.
And there her senses tricked her—or she may have lost consciousness—for it seemed that the next moment she was on the stairs, moving stealthily—where? God and her tormented body seemed to know, for she caught herself halfway down the stairs, cried out on her Maker for strength, stood swaying, breathless, quivering in the agony of it—and dragged herself back and up the stairs once more, step by step, to the landing.
For a moment she stood there, shaking, ghastly, staring down into the regions below, where relief lay within her reach. And she dared not even stare too long; she turned blindly, arms outstretched, feeling her way back. Every sense within her seemed for the moment deadened; sounds scarcely penetrated, had no meaning; she heard the grille clash, steps on the stair; she was trying to get back to the library, paused to rest at the door, was caught in two strong arms, drawn into them:
"Duane," she whispered.
"Darling!"—and as he saw her face—"My God!"
"Mine, too, Duane. Don't be afraid; I'm holding firm, so far. But I am very, very ill. Could you help me a little?"
"Yes, child!—yes, little Geraldine—my little, little girl–"
"Can you stay near me?"
"Yes! Good God, yes!"
"How long?"
"As long as you want me."
"Then I can get through with this. I think to-night decides.... If you will remain with me—for a while–"
"Yes, dear."
He drew a chair to the fire; she sank into it; he seated himself beside her and she clung to his hand with both of hers.
His eyes fell upon her wrist where the marks of her teeth were imprinted; he felt her body trembling, saw the tragedy in her eyes, rose, lifted her as though she were a child, and seating himself, drew her close against his breast.
The night was a hard one; sometimes in an access of pain she struggled for freedom, and all his strength was needed to keep her where she lay. At times, too, her senses seemed clouded, and she talked incoherently; sometimes she begged for relief, shamelessly craved it; sometimes she used all her force, and, almost beside herself, defied him, threatened him, turned on him infuriated; but his strength held her locked in a vicelike embrace, and, toward morning, she suddenly relaxed—crumpled up like a white flower in his arms. For a while her tears fell hot and fast; then utter prostration left her limp, without movement, even without a tremor, a dead weight in his arms.
And, for the second time in his life, lifting her, he bore her to her room, laid her among the pillows, slipped off her shoes, and, bending above her, listened.
She slept profoundly—but it was not the stupor that had chained her limbs that other time when he had brought her here.
He went into the library and waited for an hour. Then, very quietly, he descended the stairs and let himself out into the bitter darkness of a November morning.
About noon next day the Seagraves' brougham drew up before the Mallett house and Geraldine, in furs, stepped out and crossed the sidewalk with that swift, lithe grace of hers. The servant opened the grille; she entered and stood by the great marble-topped hall-table until Duane came down. Then she gave him her gloved hands, looking him straight in the eyes.
She was still pale but self-possessed, and wonderfully pretty in her fur jacket and toque; and as she stood there, both hands dropped into his, that nameless and winning grace which had always fascinated him held him now—something about her that recalled the child in the garden with clustering hair and slim, straight limbs.
"You look about fifteen," he said, "you beautiful, slender thing! Did you come to see my father?"
"Yes—and your father's son."
"Me?"
"Is there another like you, Duane—in all the world?"
"Plenty–"
"Hush!… When did you go last night?"
"When you left me for the land of dreams, little lady."
"So you—carried me."
He smiled, and a bright flush covered her cheeks.
"That makes twice," she said steadily.
"Yes, dear."
"There will be no third time."
"Not unless I have a sleepy wife who nods before the fire like a drowsy child."
"Do you want that kind?"
"I want the kind that lay close in my arms before the fire last night."
"Do you? I think I should like the sort of husband who is strong enough to cradle that sort of a child.... Could your mother and Naïda receive me? Could I see your father?"
"Yes. When are you going back to Roya-Neh?"
"To-night."
He said quietly: "Is it safe?"
"For me to go? Yes—yes, my darling"—her hands tightened over his—"yes, it is safe—because you made it so. If you knew—if you knew what is in my heart to—to give you!—what I will be to you some day, dearest of men–"
He said unsteadily: "Come upstairs.... My father is very feeble, but quite cheerful. Do you understand that—that his mind—his memory, rather, is a little impaired?"
She lifted his hands and laid her soft lips against them:
"Will you take me to him, Duane?"
Colonel Mallett lay in the pale November sunlight, very still, his hands folded on his breast. And at first she did not know him in this ghost of the tall, well-built, gray-haired man with ruddy colour and firm, clear skin.
As she bent over, he opened his eyes, smiled, pronounced her name, still smiling and keeping his sunken eyes on her. They were filmy and bluish, like the eyes of the very old; and the hand she lifted and held was the stricken hand of age—inert, lifeless, without weight.
She said that she was so happy to know he was recovering; she told him how proud everybody was of Duane, what exceptional talent he possessed, how wonderfully he had painted Miller's children. She spoke to him of Roya-Neh, and how interesting it had become to them all, told him about the wild boar and her own mishaps with the guileful pig.
He smiled, watching her at times; but his wistful gaze always reverted to his son, who sat at the foot of the couch, chin balanced between his long, lean hands.
"You won't go, will you?" he whispered.
"Where, father?"
"Away."
"No, of course not."
"I mean with—Geraldine," he said feebly.
"If I did, father, we'd take you with us," he laughed.
"It is too far, my son.... You and Geraldine are going too far for me to follow.... Wait a little while."
Geraldine, blushing, bent down swiftly, her lips brushing the sick man's wasted face:
"I would not care for him if I could take him from you."
"Your father and I were old friends. Your grandfather was a very fine gentleman.... I am glad.... I am a little tired—a little confused. Is your grandfather here with you? I would like to see him."
She said, after a moment, in a low voice: "He did not come with me to-day."
"Give him my regards and compliments. And say to him that it would be a pleasure to see him. I am not very well; has he heard of my indisposition?"
"I think he—has."
"Then he will come," said Colonel Mallett feebly. "Duane, you are not going, are you? I am a little tired. I think I could sleep if you would lower the shade and ask your mother to sit by me.... But you won't go until I am asleep, will you?"
"No," he said gently, as his mother and Naïda entered and Geraldine rose to greet them, shocked at the change in Mrs. Mallett.
She and Naïda went away together; later Duane joined them in the library, saying that his father was asleep, holding fast to his wife's hand.
Geraldine, her arm around Naïda's waist, had been looking at one of Duane's pictures—the only one of his in the house—merely a stretch of silvery marsh and a gray, wet sky beyond.
"Father liked it," he said; "that's why it's here, Geraldine."
"You never made one brush-stroke that was commonplace in all your life," said Geraldine abruptly. "Even I can see that."
"Such praise from a lady!" he exclaimed, laughing. Geraldine smiled, too, and Naïda's pallid face lightened for a moment. But grief had set its seal on the house of Mallett; that was plain everywhere; and when Geraldine kissed Naïda good-bye and walked to the door beside her lover, a passion of tenderness for him and his overwhelmed her, and when he put her into her brougham she leaned from the lowered window, clinging to his hand, careless of who might see them.
"Can I help in any way?" she whispered. "I told you that my fortune is still my own—most of it–"
"Dear, wait!"
There was a strange look in his eyes; she said no more with her lips, but her eyes told him all. Then he stepped back, directing Dunn to drive his mistress to the Commonwealth Club, where she was to lunch with Sylvia Quest, whom she had met that morning in the blockade at Forty-second Street, and who had invited her from her motor across the crupper of a traffic-policeman's horse.
CHAPTER XVIII
BON CHIEN
The chronology of that last dark and bitter week in November might have been written "necrology."
On Monday Colonel Mallett died about sundown; on Wednesday the Hon. John D. Ellis, while examining an automatic revolver in his bath-room, met with one of those unfortunate and fatal accidents which sometimes happen in times of great financial depression.
Thursday Amos Flack carelessly disappeared, leaving no address; and on the last day of the week Emanuel Klawber politely excused himself to a group of very solemn gentlemen who had been assisting him in the well-known and popular game of "Hunt the Books"; and, stepping outside the door of the director's office, carefully destroyed what little life had not already been scared out of his three-hundred-pound person.
It had been raining all day; Dysart had not felt very well, and Klawber's unpleasant performance made him ill. He stood in the rain watching the ambulance arriving at a gallop, then, sickened, turned away through the dark and dripping crowds, crossed the street, and, lowering his head against the storm, drove both gloved hands deep into the pockets of his fashionably cut rain-coat, and started for home.
It mattered nothing to him that several hard-working newspaper men might desire to secure his version of Mr. Klawber's taking off, or of his explanation for it or his sensations concerning it. It mattered nothing to him that the afternoon papers reported the arrest of James Skelton, or that Max Moebus had inadvertently, and no doubt in a moment of intense abstraction, taken a steamer for Europe and the books of the Shoshone Bank.
These matters, now seemed a great way off—too unreal to be of personal moment. He was feeling sick; that occupied his mind. Also the slush on the sidewalk had wet through his shoes, which probably was not good for his cough.
It was scarcely two in the afternoon, yet there remained so little daylight that the electricity burned in the shops along Fifth Avenue. Through a smutty, grayish gloom, rain drove densely; his hat and waterproof coat were heavy with it, the bottoms of his trousers soaked.
Passing the Patroons Club it occurred to him that hot whiskey might extinguish his cough. The liveried servants at the door, in the cloak-room—the page who took his order, the white-headed butler who had always personally served him, and who served him now, all hesitated and gazed curiously at him. He paid no attention at the time but remembered it afterward.
For an hour he sat alone in the vast empty room before a fire of English cannel coal, taking his hot whiskey and lemon in slow, absent-minded gulps. Patches of deep colour lay flat under his cheek-bones, his sunken abstracted eyes never left the coals.
The painted gaze of dead Presidents and Governors looked down at him from their old-time frames ranged in stately ranks along the oaken wainscot. Over the mantel the amazing, Hebraic countenance of a moose leered at him out of little sly, sardonic little eyes, almost bantering in their evil immobility.
He had presented the trophy to the club after a trip somewhere, leaving the impression that he had shot it. He seldom looked at it, never at the silver-engraved inscription on the walnut shield.
Strangely enough, now as he sat there, he thought of the trophy and looked up at it; and for the first time in his life read the inscription.
It made no visible impression upon him except that for a brief moment the small and vivid patches of colour in his wasted cheeks faintly tinted the general pallor. But this died out as soon as it appeared; he drank deliberately, set the hot glass on a table at his elbow, long, bony fingers still retaining a grip upon it.
And into his unconcentrated thoughts, strangely enough, came the memories of little meannesses which he had committed—trivial things that he supposed he had forgotten long ago; and at first, annoyed, he let memory drift.
But, imperceptibly, from the shallows of these little long-forgotten meannesses, memory drifted uncontrolled into deeper currents; and, disdainful, he made no effort to control it; and later, could not. And for the first time in his life he took the trouble to understand the reason of his unpopularity among men. He had cared nothing for them.
He cared nothing for them now, unless that half tolerant, half disdainful companionship of years with Delancy Grandcourt could be called caring for a man. If their relations ever had been anything more than a habit he did not know; on what their friendship had ever been founded he could not tell. It had been his habit to take from Delancy, accept, or help himself. He had helped himself to Rosalie Dene; and not long ago he had accepted all that Delancy offered, almost convinced at the time that it would disappear in the debacle when the Algonquin crumbled into a rubbish heap of rotten securities.
A curious friendship—and the only friend he ever had had among men—stupid, inertly at hand, as inevitably to be counted on as some battered toy of childhood which escaped the dust heap so long that custom tolerates its occupation of any closet space convenient: and habit, at intervals, picks it up to see what's left of it.
He had finished his whiskey; the fire seemed to have grown too hot, and he shoved back his chair. But the room, too, was becoming close, even stifling. Perspiration glistened on his forehead; he rose and began to wander from room to room, followed always by the stealthy glances of servants.
The sweat on his face had become unpleasantly cold; he came back to the fire, endured it for a few moments, then, burning and shivering at the same time, and preferring the latter sensation, he went out to his letter-box and unlocked it. There was only one envelope there, a letter from the governing board of the club requesting his resignation.
The possibility of such an event had never occurred to him; he read the letter again, folded and placed it in his pocket, went back to the fire with the idea of burning it, took it out, read it again, folded it absently, and replaced it in his pocket.
At that time, except for the dull surprise, the episode did not seem to affect him particularly. So many things had been accumulating, so many matters had been menacing him, that one cloud more among the dark, ominous masses gathering made no deeper impression than slight surprise.
For a while he stood motionless, hands in his trousers' pockets, head lowered; then, as somebody entered the farther door, he turned instinctively and stepped into a private card room, closing the polished mahogany door. The door opened a moment later and Delancy Grandcourt walked in.
"Hello," he said briefly. Dysart, by the window, looked around at him without any expression whatever.
"Have you heard about Klawber?" asked Delancy. "They're calling the extra."
Dysart looked out of the window. "That's fast work," he said.
Grandcourt stood for a while in silence, then seated himself, saying:
"He ought to have lived and tried to make good."
"He couldn't."
"He ought to have tried. What's the good of lying down that way?"
"I don't know. I guess he was tired."
"That doesn't relieve his creditors."
"No, but it relieves Klawber."
Grandcourt said: "You always view things from that side, don't you?"
"What side?"
"That of personal convenience."
"Yes. Why not?"
"I don't know. Where is it landing you?"
"I haven't gone into that very thoroughly." There was a trace of irritation in Dysart's voice; he passed one hand over his forehead; it was icy, and the hair on it damp. "What the devil do you want of me, anyway?" he asked.
"Nothing.... I have never wanted anything of you, have I?"
Dysart walked the width of the room, then the length of it, then came and stood by the table, resting on it with one thin hand, in which his damp handkerchief was crushed to a wad.
"What is it you've got to say, Delancy? Is it about that loan?"
"No. Have you heard a word out of me about it?"
"You've been devilish glum. Good God, I don't blame you; I ought not to have touched it; I must have been crazy to let you try to help me–"
"It was my affair. What I choose to do concerns myself," said Grandcourt, his heavy, troubled face turning redder. "And, Jack, I understand that my father is making things disagreeable for you. I've told him not to; and you mustn't let it worry you, because what I had was my own and what I did with it my own business."
"Anyway," observed Dysart, after a moment's reflection, "your family is wealthy."
A darker flush stained Grandcourt's face; and Dysart's misinterpretation of his philosophy almost stung him into fierce retort; but as his heavy lips unclosed in anger, his eyes fell on Dysart's ravaged face, and he sat silent, his personal feelings merged in an evergrowing anxiety.
"Why do you cough like that, Jack?" he demanded after a paroxysm had shaken the other into an armchair, where he lay sweating and panting:
"It's a cold," Dysart managed to say; "been hanging on for a month."
"Three months," said Grandcourt tersely. "Why don't you take care of it?"
There was a silence; nothing more was said about the cold; and presently Grandcourt drew a letter from his pocket and handed it silently to Dysart. It was in Rosalie's handwriting, dated two months before, and directed to Dysart at Baltimore. The post-office authorities had marked it, "No address," and had returned it a few days since to the sender.
These details Dysart noticed on the envelope and the heading of the first page; he glanced over a line or two, lowered the letter, and looked questioningly over it at Grandcourt:
"What's it about?—if you know," he asked wearily. "I'm not inclined just now to read anything that may be unpleasant."
Grandcourt said quietly:
"I have not read the letter, but your wife has told me something of what it contains. She wrote and mailed it to you weeks ago—before the crash—saying, I believe, that adversity was not the time for the settlement of domestic differences, and that if her private fortune could avert disaster, you were to write immediately to her attorneys."
Dysart gazed at him as though stunned; then his dull gaze fell once more on the envelope. He examined it, went all over it with lack-lustre eyes, laid it aside, and finally began to read his wife's letter—the letter that had never reached him because he had used another name on the hotel register in Baltimore.
Grandcourt watched him with painful interest as he sat, hunched up, coughing at intervals, and poring over his wife's long, angular chirography. There was much between the lines to read, but Dysart could never read it; much to understand, but he could never understand it.
"Delancy tells me," she wrote, "that you are threatened with very serious difficulties. Once or twice you yourself have said as much to me; and my answer was that they no longer concerned me.
"The situation is this: I have, as you know, consulted counsel with a view to begin proceedings for a separation. This has been discontinued—temporarily, at any rate—because I have been led to believe by your friend, Delancy Grandcourt, that the present is no time to add to your perplexities.
"He has, I may add, induced me to believe other things which my better sense rejects; but no woman's logic—which is always half sentiment—could remain unshaken by the simple loyalty to you and to me of this friend of yours and of mine. And this letter would never have been written except, practically, at his dictation. Kindly refrain from showing it to him as my acknowledgment here of his influence in the matter would grieve him very deeply.
"Because he believes that it is still possible for you and me to return to civilised relations; he believes that I care for you, that, in your own leisurely and superficial fashion, you still really honour the vows that bound you—still in your heart care for me. Let him believe it; and if you will, for his sake, let us resume the surface semblance of a common life which, until he persuaded me, I was determined to abandon.
"It is an effort to write this; I do it for his sake, and, in that way, for yours. I don't think you care about me; I don't think you ever did or ever will. Yet you must know how it was with me until I could endure my isolation no longer. And I say to you perfectly frankly that now I care more for this friend of yours, Delancy Grandcourt, than I care for anybody in the world. Which is why I write you to offer what I have offered, and to say that if my private fortune can carry you through the disaster which is so plainly impending, please write to my attorneys at once as they have all power in the matter."
The postscript was dated ten days later, from Dysart's own house:
"Receiving no reply, I telephoned you, but Brandon says you are away from the city on business and have left no address, so I took the liberty of entering your house, selecting this letter from the mass of nine days' old mail awaiting you, and shall direct it to you at the hotel in Baltimore where Bunny Gray says that somebody has seen you several times with a Mr. Skelton."
As Dysart read, he wiped the chilly perspiration from his haggard face at intervals, never taking his eyes from the written pages. And at last he finished his wife's letter, sat very silent, save when the cough shook him, the sheets of the letter lying loosely in his nerveless hand.
It was becoming plain to him, in a confused sort of way, that something beside bad luck and his own miscalculations, was working against him—had been stealthily moving toward his undoing for a year, now; something occult, sinister, inexorable.
He thought of the register at the hotel in Baltimore, of the name he lived under there during that interval in his career for which he had accounted to nobody, and never would account—on earth. And into his memory rose the pale face of Sylvia Quest; and he looked down at the letter trembling in his hand and thought of her and of his wife and of the Algonquin Trust Company, and of the chances of salvation he had missed.
Grandcourt sat looking at him; there was something in his gaze almost doglike:
"Have you read it?" he asked.
Dysart glanced up abstractedly: "Yes."
"Is it what I told you?"
"Yes—substantially." He dried his damp face; "it comes rather late, you know."
"Not too late," said the other, mistaking him; "your wife is still ready to meet you half-way, Jack."
"Oh—that? I meant the Algonquin matter—" He checked himself, seeing for the first time in his life contempt distorting Grandcourt's heavy face.
"Man! Man!" he said thickly, "is there nothing in that letter for you except money offered?"
"What do you mean?"
"I say, is there nothing in that message to you that touches the manhood in you?"
"You don't know what is in it," said Dysart listlessly. Even Grandcourt's contempt no longer produced any sensation; he looked at the letter, tore it into long strips, crumpled them and stood up with a physical effort:
"I'm going to burn this. Have you anything else to say?"
"Yes. Good God, Jack, don't you care for your wife? Can't you?"
"No."
"Why?"
"I don't know." His tone became querulous. "How can a man tell why he becomes indifferent to a woman? I don't know. I never did know. I can't explain it. But he does."
Grandcourt stared at him. And suddenly the latent fear that had been torturing him for the last two weeks died out utterly: this man would never need watching to prevent any attempt at self-destruction; this man before him was not of that caste. His self-centred absorption was of a totally different nature.
He said, very red in the face, but with a voice well modulated and even:
"I think I've made a good deal of an ass of myself. I think I may safely be cast for that rôle in future. Most people, including yourself, think I'm fitted for it; and most people, and yourself, are right. And I'll admit it now by taking the liberty of asking you whom you were with in Baltimore."
"None of your damned business!" said Dysart, wheeling short on him.
"Perhaps not. I did not believe it at the time, but I do now.... And her brother is after you with a gun."
"What do you mean?"
"That you'd better get out of town unless you want an uglier scandal on your hands."
Dysart stood breathing fast and with such effort that his chest moved visibly as the lungs strained under the tension:
"Do you mean to say that drunken whelp suspects anything so—so wildly absurd–"
"Which drunken whelp? There are several in town?"
Dysart glared at him, careless of what he might now believe.
"I take it you mean that little cur, Quest."
"Yes, I happen to mean Quest."
Dysart gave an ugly laugh and turned short on his heel:
"The whole damn lot of you make me sick," he said. "So does this club."
A servant held his rain-coat and handed him his hat; he shook his bent shoulders, stifled a cough, and went out into the rain.
In his own home his little old father, carefully be-wigged, painted, cleaned and dressed, came trotting into the lamp-lit living-room fresh from the ministrations of his valet.
"There you are, Jack!—te-he! Oh, yes, there you are, you young dog!—all a-drip with rain for the love o' the ladies, eh, Jack? Te-he—one's been here to see you—a little white doll in chinchillas, and scared to death at my civilities—as though she knew the Dysarts—te-he! Oh, yes, the Dysarts, Jack. But it was monstrous imprudent, my son—and a good thing that your wife remains at Lenox so late this season—te-he! A lucky thing, you young dog! And what the devil do you mean by it—eh? What d'ye mean, I say!"
Leering, peering, his painted lips pursed up, the little old man seated himself, gazing with dim, restless eyes at the shadowy blur which represented to him his handsome son—a Dysart all through, elegant, debonair, resistless, and, married or single, fatal to feminine peace of mind. Generations ago Dysarts had been shot very conventionally at ten paces owing to this same debonair resistlessness; Dysarts had slipped into and out of all sorts of unsavoury messes on account of this fatal family failing; some had been neatly winged, some thrust through; some, in a more sordid age, permitted counsel of ability to explain to a jury how guiltless a careless gentleman could be under the most unfortunate and extenuating appearances.
The son stood in his wet clothes, haggard, lined, ghastly in contrast to the startling red of his lips, looking at his smirking father: then he leaned over and touched a bell.
"Who was it who called on Mrs. Dysart?" he asked, as a servant appeared.
"Miss Quest, sir," said the man, accepting the cue with stolid philosophy.
"Did Miss Quest leave any message?"
"Yes, sir: Miss Quest desired Mrs. Dysart to telephone her on Mrs. Dysart's return from—the country, sir—it being a matter of very great importance."
"Thank you."
"Thank you, sir."
The servant withdrew; the son stood gazing into the hallway. Behind him his father mumbled and muttered and chuckled to himself in his easy-chair by the fire!
"Te-he! They are all alike, the Dysarts—oh, yes, all alike! And now it's that young dog—Jack!—te-he!—yes, it's Jack, now! But he's a good son, my boy Jack; he's a good son to me and he's all Dysart, all Dysart; bon chien chasse de race!—te-he! Oui, ma fois!—bon chien chasse de race."
