Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  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.

  “Gad,” said Alderdene, “she’s well rid of him if he’s been choking her this long — the rank, rotten weed that he is, sapping the life from her so when she hung over toward another fellow’s bush we thought she was frail in the stem — God bless us all for a simpering lot of blatherskites!”

  And if, in the corner of the gun-room, there was a man among them who had ever ventured to hold Leila’s smooth little hand, unrebuked, in days gone by, none the less he knew that Alderdene spoke truth; and none the less he knew that what witness he might be called to bear at the end of the end of all must only incriminate himself and not that young matron who now, before their very eyes, was budding again, reverting to the esoteric charm of youth reincarnated.

  “A suit before a referee would settle him,” mused Voucher; “he hasn’t a leg to stand on. Lord! The same cat that tripped up Stephen Siward!”

  Fleetwood’s quick eyes glimmered for an instant in Quarrier’s direction. Quarrier was in the billiard-room, out of earshot, practising balk-line problems with Major Belwether; and Fleetwood said: “The same cat that tripped up Stephen Siward. Yes. But who let her loose?”

  “It was your dinner; you ought to know,” said Voucher bluntly.

  “I do know. He brought her” — nodding toward the billiard-room.

  “Belwether?”

  “No,” yawned Fleetwood.

  Somebody said presently: “Isn’t he one of the Governors? Oh, I say, that was rather rough on Siward though.”

  “Yes, rough. The law of trespass ought to have operated; a man’s liable for the damage done by his own live-stock.”

  “That’s a brutal way of talking,” said somebody. And the subject was closed with the entrance of Agatha in white flannels on her way to the squash court where she had an appointment with Quarrier.

  “A strange girl,” said somebody after she had disappeared with Quarrier.

  “That pallor is stunning,” said a big, ruddy youth, with sunburn on his neck and forehead.

  “It isn’t healthy,” said Fleetwood.

  “It attracts me,” persisted the ruddy young man, voicing naively that curious truth concerning the attraction that disease so often exerts on health — the strange curiosity the normal has for the sub-normal — that fascination of the wholesome for the unhealthy. It is, perhaps, more curiosity than anything, unless, deep hidden under the normal, there lie one single, perverted nerve.

  Sylvia, passing the hall, glanced in through the gun-room door with an absentminded smile at the men and their laughing greeting, as they rose with uplifted glasses to salute her.

  “The sweetest of all,” observed a man, disconsolately emptying his glass. “Oh irony! What a marriage!”

  “Do you know any girl who would not change places with her?” asked another.

  Every man there insisted that he knew one girl at least who would not exchange Sylvia’s future for her own. That was very nice of them; it is to be hoped they believed it. Some of them did — for the moment, anyhow. Then Alderdene, blinking furiously, emitted one of his ear-racking laughs; and everybody, as usual, laughed too.

  “You damned cynic,” observed Voucher affectionately.

  “Somebody,” said Fleetwood, “insists that she doubled up poor Siward.”

  “She never met Siward until she was engaged to Howard,” remarked Voucher.

  “Well?”

  “Oh, don’t you consider that enough to squelch the story?”

  “Engaged girls,” mused Alderdene, “never double up except at Bridge.”

  “Everybody has been or is in love with Sylvia Landis,” said Voucher, “and it’s a man’s own fault if he’s hit. Once she did it, innocently enough, and enjoyed it, never realising that it hurt a man to be doubled up.”

  Fleetwood yawned again and said: “She can have me to-morrow. But she won’t. She’s tired of the sport. Any girl would get enough with the pack at her heels day in and day out. Besides she’s done for — unless she looses Quarrier and starts on a duke-hunt over in Blinky’s country!... Is anybody on for a sail? Is anybody on for anything? No? Oh, very well. Shove that decanter north by west, Billy.”

  This was characteristic of the dog-days at Shotover. The dog-days in town were very different; the city threw open the parks to the poor at night; horses fell dead in the streets; pallid urchins, stripped naked, splashed and rolled and screeched in the basin of the City Hall fountain under the indifferent eyes of the police.

  As for Plank he was too busy to know what the thermometer was about; he had no time for anything outside of his own particular business except to go every day to the big, darkened house in lower Fifth Avenue where the days had been hard on Siward and the nights harder.

  Siward, however, could walk now, using his crutches still, but often stopping to gently test his left foot and see how much weight he was able to bear on it — even taking a tentative step or two without crutch support. He drove when he thought it prudent to use the horses in the heat, usually very early in the morning, though sometimes at night with Plank when the latter had time to run his touring-car through the park and out into the Bronx or Westchester for a breath of air.

  But Plank wanted him to go away, get out of the city for his convalescence, and Siward flatly declined, demanding that Plank permit him to do his share in the fight against the Inter-County people.

  And Plank, utterly unable to persuade him, and the more hampered because of his anxiety about Siward — though that young man did not know it — wore himself out providing Siward with such employment in the matter as would lightly occupy him without doing any good to the enemy.

  So Siward, stripped to his pajamas, pored over reams of typewritten matter and took his brief walking exercise in the comparative cool of the evening and drove when he dared use his horses; or, sitting beside Plank, whizzed northward through the starry darkness of
the suburbs.

  When it was that he first began to like Plank very much he could not exactly remember. He was not, perhaps, aware of how much he liked him. Plank’s unexpected fits of shyness, of formality, often and often amused him. But there was a subtler feeling under the unexpressed amusement, and, beneath all, a constantly increasing sub-stratum of respect. Too, he found himself curiously at ease with Plank, as with one born to his own caste. And this feeling, unconscious, but more and more apparent, meant more to Plank than anything that had ever happened to him. It was a tonic in hours of doubt, a pleasure in his brief leisure, a pride never to be hinted at, never to be guessed, never to be dreamed of by any living soul save Plank alone.

  Then, one sultry day toward the last week in August, a certain judge of a certain court, known among some as “Harrington’s judge,” sent secretly for Plank. And Plank knew that the crisis was over. But neither Harrington nor Quarrier dreamed of such a thing.

  Fear sat heavy on that judge’s soul — the godless, selfish fear that sends the first coward slinking from the councils of conspiracy to seek immunity from those slowly grinding millstones that grind exceeding fine.

  Quarrier at Shotover, with his private car and his locomotive within an hour’s drive, strolled with Sylvia on the eve of her departure for Lenox with Leila Mortimer; then, when their conference was ended, he returned to Agatha, calmly unconscious of impending events.

  Harrington, at Seabright, paced his veranda, awaiting this same judge, annoyed as two boats came in without the expected guest. And never for one instant did he dream that his creature sat closeted with Plank, tremulous, sallow, nearing the edge of cringing avowal — only held back from utter collapse by the agonising necessity of completing a bargain that might save himself from the degradation of the punishment that had seemed inevitable. All day long he sat with Plank. Nobody except those two knew he was there. And after a very long time Plank consented that nobody else except Siward and Harrington and Quarrier should ever know. So he called up Harrington on the telephone, saying that there was, in the office, somebody who desired to speak to him. And when Harrington caught the judge’s first faint, stammered word he reeled where he stood, ashen, unbelieving, speechless. The shaking but remorseless voice went on, dinning horribly in his ear, then ceased, and Plank’s heavy voice sounded the curt coup de grâce.

  Harrington was an old man, a very old man, mortally hurt; but he steadied himself along the wall of his study to the desk and sank into the chair.

  There he sat, feeling the scars of old wounds throbbing, feeling his age and the tragedy of it, and the new sensation of fear — fear of the wraith of his own youth, wearing the mask of Plank, and menacing him with the menace he had used on others so long ago — so very long ago.

  After a little while he passed a thin hand over his eyes, over his gray head, over the mouth that all men watched with fear, over the shaven jaw now grimly set, but trembling. His hand, too, shook with palsy as he wrote, painfully picking out the words and figures of the cipher from his code-book; but he closed his thin lips and squared his unsteady jaw and wrote his message to Quarrier:

  “It is all up. Plank will take over Inter-County. Come at once.”

  And that was all there was to be done until he could come into Plank’s camp with arms and banners, a conquered man, cynical of the mercy he dared not expect and which, in all his life, he had never, never shown to man, to woman, or to child.

  Plank slept the sleep of utter exhaustion that night; the morning found him haggard but strong, cool in his triumph, serious, stern faced, almost sad that his work was done, the battle won.

  From his own house he telegraphed a curt summons to Harrington and to Quarrier for a conference in his own office; then, finishing whatever business his morning mail required, put on his hat and went to see the one man in the world he was most glad for.

  He found him at breakfast, sipping coffee and wrinkling his brows over the eternal typewritten pages. And Plank’s face cleared at the sight and he sat down, laughing aloud.

  “It’s all over, Siward,” he said. “Harrington knows it; Quarrier knows it by this time. Their judge crawled in yesterday and threw himself on our mercy; and the men whose whip he obeyed will be on their way to surrender by this time.... Well! Haven’t you a word?”

  “Many,” said Siward slowly; “too many to utter, but not enough to express what I feel. If you will take two on account, here they are in one phrase: thank you.”

  “Debt’s cancelled,” said Plank, laughing. “Do you want to hear the details?”

  They talked for an hour, and, in the telling, even Plank’s stolidity gave way sufficient to make his heavy voice ring at moments, and the glimmer of excitement edge his eyes. Yet, in the telling, he scarcely mentioned himself, never hinted of the personal part — the inspiration which was his alone; the brunt of the battle which centred in him; the tireless vigilance; the loneliness of the nights when he lay awake, perplexed with doubt and nobody to counsel him — because men who wage such wars are lonely men and must work out their own salvation. No, nobody but his peers could advise him; and he had thought that his enemy was his peer, until that enemy surrendered.

  The narrative exchanged by Plank in return for Siward’s intensely interested questions was a simple, limpid review of a short but terrific campaign that only yesterday had threatened to rage through court after court, year after year. In the sudden shock of the cessation from battle, Plank himself was a little dazed. Yet he himself had expected the treason that ended all; he himself had foreseen it. He had counted on it as a good general counts on such things, confidently, but with a dozen plans as substitutes in case that plan failed — each plan as elaborately worked out to the last detail as though it alone existed as the only hope of victory. But if Siward suspected something of this it was not from Plank that he learned it.

  “Plank,” he said at last, “there is nothing in the world that men admire more than a man. It is a good deal of a privilege for me to tell you so.”

  Plank turned red with surprise and embarrassment, stammering out something incoherent.

  That was all that was said about the victory. Siward, unusually gay for awhile, presently turned sombre; and it was Plank’s turn to lift him out of it by careless remarks about his rapid convalescence, and the chance for vacation he so much needed.

  Once Siward looked up vacantly: “Where am I to go?” he asked. “I’d as soon stay here.”

  “But I’m going,” insisted Plank. “The Fells is all ready for us.”

  “The Fells! I can’t go there!”

  “W-what?” faltered Plank, looking at Siward with hurt eyes.

  “Can’t you — don’t you understand?” said Siward in a low voice.

  “No. You once promised—”

  “Plank, I’ll go anywhere except there with you. I’d rather be with you than with anybody. Can I say more than that?”

  “I think you ought to, Siward. A — a fellow feels the refusal of his offered roof-tree.”

  “Man! man! it isn’t your roof I am refusing. I want to go; I’d give anything to go. If it were anywhere except where it is, I’d go fast enough. Now do you understand? If — if Shotover House and Shotover people were not next door to the Fells, I’d go. Now do you understand?”

  Plank said: “I don’t know whether I understand. If you mean Quarrier, he’s on his way here, and he’ll have business to keep him here for the next few months, I assure you. But” — he looked very gravely across at Siward— “if you don’t mean Quarrier—” He hesitated, ill at ease under the expressionless scrutiny of the other.

  “Do you know what’s the matter with me, Plank?” he asked at length.

  “I think so.”

  “I have wondered. I wonder now how much you know.”

  “Very little, Siward.”

  “How much?”

  Plank looked up, hesitated, and shook his head: “One infers from what one hears.”

  “Infers what?”

>   “The truth, I suppose,” replied Plank simply.

  “And what,” insisted Siward, “have you inferred that you believe to be the truth? Don’t parry, Plank; it isn’t easy for me, and I — I never before spoke this way to any man.... It is likely I should have spoken to my mother about it.... I had expected to. It may be weakness — I don’t know; but I’d like to talk a little about it to somebody. And there’s nobody fit to listen, except you.”

  “If you feel that way,” said Plank slowly, “I will be very glad to listen.”

  “I feel that way. I’ve been through — some things; I’ve been pretty sick, Plank. It tires a man out; a man’s head and shoulders get tired. Oh, I don’t mean the usual reaction from self-contempt, disgust — the dreadful, aching sadness of it all which lasts even while desire, stunned for the moment, wakens into craving. I don’t mean that. It is something else — a deathly, mental solitude that terrifies. I tell you, no man except a man smitten by my malady knows what solitude can be!... There! I didn’t mean to be theatrical; I had no intention of—”

  “Go on,” cut in Plank heavily.

  “Go on!... Yes, I want to. You know what a pillow is to a tired man’s shoulders. I want to use your sane intelligence to rest on a moment. It’s my brain that’s tired, Plank.”

  Although everybody had cynically used Plank, nobody had ever before found him a necessity.

  “Go on,” he said unsteadily. “If I can be of use to you, Siward, in God’s name let me be, for I have never been necessary to anybody in all my life.”

  Siward rested his head on one clinched hand: “How much chance do you think I have?” he asked wearily.

  “Chance to get well?”

  “Yes.”

  Plank considered for a moment, then: “You are not trying, Siward.”

  “I have been trying since — since March.”

  “Since March?”

  “Yes.”

  Plank looked at him curiously: “What happened in March?”