“Why, thank you; are you so sure you want that, Gerald?”
“Yes, as long as I live!” he declared, generous emotion in the ascendant. A pretty woman upset him very easily even under normal circumstances. But beauty in distress knocked him flat — as it does every wholesome boy who is worth his salt.
And he said so in his own naïve fashion; and the more eloquent he grew the more excited he grew and the deeper and blacker appeared her wrongs to him.
At first she humoured him, and rather enjoyed his fresh, eager sympathy; after a little his increasing ardour inclined her to laugh; but it was very splendid and chivalrous and genuine ardour, and the inclination to laugh died out, for emotion is contagious, and his earnestness not only flattered her legitimately but stirred the slackened tension of her heart-strings until, tightening again, they responded very faintly.
“I had no idea that you were lonely,” he declared.
“Sometimes I am, a little, Gerald.” She ought to have known better. Perhaps she did.
“Well,” he began, “couldn’t I come and—”
“No, Gerald.”
“I mean just to see you sometimes and have another of these jolly talks—”
“Do you call this a jolly talk?” — with deep reproach.
“Why — not exactly; but I’m awfully interested, Mrs. Ruthven, and we understand each other so well—”
“I don’t understand you”, she was imprudent enough to say.
This was delightful! Certainly he must be a particularly sad and subtle dog if this clever but misunderstood young matron found him what in romance is known as an “enigma.”
So he protested with smiling humility that he was quite transparent; she insisted on doubting him and contrived to look disturbed in her mind concerning the probable darkness of that past so dear to any young man who has had none.
As for Alixe, she also was mildly flattered — a trifle disdainfully perhaps, but still genuinely pleased at the honesty of this crude devotion. She was touched, too; and, besides, she trusted him; for he was clearly as transparent as the spring air. Also most women lugged a boy about with them; she had had several, but none as nice as Gerald. To tie him up and tack his license on was therefore natural to her; and if she hesitated to conclude his subjection in short order it was that, far in a corner of her restless soul, there hid an ever-latent fear of Selwyn; of his opinions concerning her fitness to act mentor to the boy of whom he was fond, and whose devotion to him was unquestioned.
Yet now, in spite of that — perhaps even partly because of it, she decided on the summary taming of Gerald; so she let her hand fall, by accident, close to his on the cushioned seat, to see what he’d do about it.
It took him some time to make up his mind; but when he did he held it so gingerly, so respectfully, that she was obliged to look out of the window. Clearly he was quite the safest and nicest of all the unfledged she had ever possessed.
“Please, don’t,” she said sadly.
And by that token she took him for her own.
She was very light-hearted that evening when she dropped him at the Stuyvesant Club and whizzed away to her own house, for he had promised not to play again on her premises, and she had promised to be nice to him and take him about when she was shy of an escort. She also repeated that he was truly an “enigma” and that she was beginning to be a little afraid of him, which was an economical way of making him very proud and happy. Being his first case of beauty in distress, and his first harmless love-affair with a married woman, he looked about him as he entered the club and felt truly that he had already outgrown the young and callow innocents who haunted it.
On her way home Alixe smilingly reviewed the episode until doubt of Selwyn’s approval crept in again; and her amused smile had faded when she reached her home.
The house of Ruthven was a small but ultra-modern limestone affair, between Madison and Fifth; a pocket-edition of the larger mansions of their friends, but with less excuse for the overelaboration since the dimensions were only twenty by a hundred. As a matter of fact its narrow ornate facade presented not a single quiet space the eyes might rest on after a tiring attempt to follow and codify the arabesques, foliations, and intricate vermiculations of what some disrespectfully dubbed as “near-aissance.”
However, into this limestone bonbon-box tripped Mrs. Ruthven, mounted the miniature stairs with a whirl of her scented skirts, peeped into the drawing-room, but continued mounting until she whipped into her own apartments, separated from those of her lord and master by a locked door.
That is, the door had been locked for a long, long time; but presently, to her intense surprise and annoyance, it slowly opened, and a little man appeared in slippered feet.
He was a little man, and plump, and at first glance his face appeared boyish and round and quite guiltless of hair or of any hope of it.
But, as he came into the electric light, the hardness of his features was apparent; he was no boy; a strange idea that he had never been assailed some people. His face was puffy and pallid and faint blue shadows hinted of closest shaving; and the line from the wing of the nostrils to the nerveless corners of his thin, hard mouth had been deeply bitten by the acid of unrest.
For the remainder he wore pale-rose pajamas under a silk-and-silver kimona, an obi pierced with a jewelled scarf-pin; and he was smoking a cigarette as thin as a straw.
“Well!” said his young wife in astonished displeasure, instinctively tucking her feet — from which her maid had just removed the shoes — under her own chamber-robe.
“Send her out a moment,” he said, with a nod of his head toward the maid. His voice was agreeable and full — a trifle precise and overcultivated, perhaps.
When the maid retired, Alixe sat up on the lounge, drawing her skirts down over her small stockinged feet.
“What on earth is the matter?” she demanded.
“The matter is,” he said, “that Gerald has just telephoned me from the Stuyvesant that he isn’t coming.”
“Well?”
“No, it isn’t well. This is some of your meddling.”
“What if it is?” she retorted; but her breath was coming quicker.
“I’ll tell you; you can get up and ring him up and tell him you expect him to-night.”
She shook her head, eyeing him all the while.
“I won’t do it, Jack. What do you want him for? He can’t play with the people who play here; he doesn’t know the rudiments of play. He’s only a boy; his money is so tied up that he has to borrow if he loses very much. There’s no sport in playing with a boy like that—”
“So you’ve said before, I believe, but I’m better qualified to judge than you are. Are you going to call him up?”
“No, I am not.”
He turned paler. “Get up and go to that telephone!”
“You little whippet,” she said slowly, “I was once a soldier’s wife — the only decent thing I ever have been. This bullying ends now — here, at this instant! If you’ve any dirty work to do, do it yourself. I’ve done my share and I’ve finished.”
He was astonished; that was plain enough. But it was the sudden overwhelming access of fury that weakened him and made him turn, hand outstretched, blindly seeking for a chair. Rage, even real anger, were emotions he seldom had to reckon with, for he was a very tired and bored and burned-out gentleman, and vivid emotion was not good for his arteries, the doctors told him.
He found his chair, stood a moment with his back toward his wife, then very slowly let himself down into the chair and sat facing her. There was moisture on his soft, pallid skin, a nervous twitching of the under lip; he passed one heavily ringed hand across his closely shaven jaw, still staring at her.
“I want to tell you something,” he said. “You’ve got to stop your interference with my affairs, and stop it now.”
“I am not interested in your affairs,” she said unsteadily, still shaken by her own revolt, still under the shock of her own arousing to a
resistance that had been long, long overdue. “If you mean,” she went on, “that the ruin of this boy is your affair, then I’ll make it mine from this moment. I’ve told you that he shall not play; and he shall not. And while I’m about it I’ll admit what you are preparing to accuse me of; I did make Sandon Craig promise to keep away; I did try to make that little fool Scott Innis promise, too; and when he wouldn’t I informed his father. . . . And every time you try your dirty bucket-shop methods on boys like that, I’ll do the same.”
He swore at her quite calmly; she smiled, shrugged, and, imprisoning her knees in her clasped hands, leaned back and looked at him.
“What a ninny I have been,” she said, “to be afraid of you so long!”
A gleam crossed his faded eyes, but he let her remark pass for the moment. Then, when he was quite sure that violent emotion had been exhausted within him:
“Do you want your bills paid?” he asked. “Because, if you do, Fane, Harmon & Co. are not going to pay them.”
“We are living beyond our means?” she inquired disdainfully.
“Not if you will be good enough to mind your business, my friend. I’ve managed this establishment on our winnings for two years. It’s a detail; but you might as well know it. My association with Fane, Harmon & Co. runs the Newport end of it, and nothing more.”
“What did you marry me for?” she asked curiously.
A slight colour came into his face: “Because that damned Rosamund Fane lied about you.”
“Oh! . . . You knew that in Manila? You’d heard about it, hadn’t you — the Western timber-lands? Rosamund didn’t mean to lie — only the titles were all wrong, you know. . . . And so you made a bad break, Jack; is that it?”
“Yes, that is it.”
“And it cost you a fortune, and me a — husband. Is that it, my friend?”
“I can afford you if you will stop your meddling,” he said coolly.
“I see; I am to stop my meddling and you are to continue your downtown gambling in your own house in the evenings.”
“Precisely. It happens that I am sufficiently familiar with the stock-market to make a decent living out of the Exchange; and it also happens that I am sufficiently fortunate with cards to make the pleasure of playing fairly remunerative. Any man who can put up proper margin has a right to my services; any man whom I invite and who can take up his notes, has a right to play under my roof. If his note goes to protest, he forfeits that right. Now will you kindly explain to yourself exactly how this matter can be of any interest to you?”
“I have explained it,” she said wearily. “Will you please go, now?”
He sat a moment, then rose:
“You make a point of excluding Gerald?”
“Yes.”
“Very well; I’ll telephone Draymore. And” — he looked back from the door of his own apartments— “I got Julius Neergard on the wire this afternoon and he’ll dine with us.”
He gathered up his shimmering kimona, hesitated, halted, and again looked back.
“When you’re dressed,” he drawled, “I’ve a word to say to you about the game to-night, and another about Gerald.”
“I shall not play,” she retorted scornfully, “nor will Gerald.”
“Oh, yes, you will — and play your best, too. And I’ll expect him next time.”
“I shall not play!”
He said deliberately: “You will not only play, but play cleverly; and in the interim, while dressing, you will reflect how much more agreeable it is to play cards here than the fool at ten o’clock at night in the bachelor apartments of your late lamented.”
And he entered his room; and his wife, getting blindly to her feet, every atom of colour gone from lip and cheek, stood rigid, both small hands clutching the foot-board of the gilded bed.
CHAPTER VI
THE UNEXPECTED
Differences of opinion between himself and Neergard concerning the ethics of good taste involved in forcing the Siowitha Club matter, Gerald’s decreasing attention to business and increasing intimacy with the Fane-Ruthven coterie, began to make Selwyn very uncomfortable. The boy’s close relations with Neergard worried him most of all; and though Neergard finally agreed to drop the Siowitha matter as a fixed policy in which Selwyn had been expected to participate at some indefinite date, the arrangement seemed only to cement the man’s confidential companionship with Gerald.
This added to Selwyn’s restlessness; and one day in early spring he had a long conference with Gerald — a most unsatisfactory one. Gerald, for the first time, remained reticent; and when Selwyn, presuming on the cordial understanding between them, pressed him a little, the boy turned sullen; and Selwyn let the matter drop very quickly.
But neither tact nor caution seemed to serve now; Gerald, more and more engrossed in occult social affairs of which he made no mention to Selwyn, was still amiable and friendly, even at times cordial and lovable; but he was no longer frank or even communicative; and Selwyn, fearing to arouse him again to sullenness or perhaps even to suspicious defiance, forbore to press him beyond the most tentative advances toward the regaining of his confidence.
This, very naturally, grieved and mortified the elder man; but what troubled him still more was that Gerald and Neergard were becoming so amazingly companionable; for it was easy to see that they had in common a number of personal interests which he did not share, and that their silence concerning these interests amounted to a secrecy almost offensive.
Again and again, coming unexpectedly upon them, he noticed that their confab ceased with his appearance. Often, too, glances of warning intelligence passed between them in his presence, which, no doubt, they supposed were unnoticed by him.
They left the office together frequently, now; they often lunched uptown. Whether they were in each other’s company evenings, Selwyn did not know, for Gerald no longer volunteered information as to his whereabouts or doings. And all this hurt Selwyn, and alarmed him, too, for he was slowly coming to the conclusion that he did not like Neergard, that he would never sign articles of partnership with him, and that even his formal associateship with the company was too close a relation for his own peace of mind. But on Gerald’s account he stayed on; he did not like to leave the boy alone for his sister’s sake as well as for his own.
Matters drifted that way through early spring. He actually grew to dislike both Neergard and the business of Neergard & Co. — for no one particular reason, perhaps, but in general; though he did not yet care to ask himself to be more precise in his unuttered criticisms.
However, detail and routine, the simpler alphabet of the business, continued to occupy him. He consulted both Neergard and Gerald as usual; they often consulted him or pretended to do so. Land was bought and sold and resold, new projects discussed, new properties appraised, new mortgage loans negotiated; and solely because of his desire to remain near Gerald, this sort of thing might have continued indefinitely. But Neergard broke his word to him.
And one morning, before he left his rooms at Mrs. Greeve’s lodgings to go downtown, Percy Draymore called him up on the telephone; and as that overfed young man’s usual rising hour was notoriously nearer noon than eight o’clock, it surprised Selwyn to be asked to remain in his rooms for a little while until Draymore and one or two friends could call on him personally concerning a matter of importance.
He therefore breakfasted leisurely; and he was still scanning the real estate columns of a morning paper when Mrs. Greeve came panting to his door and ushered in a file of rather sleepy but important looking gentlemen, evidently unaccustomed to being abroad so early, and bored to death with their experience.
They were men he knew only formally, or, at best, merely as fellow club members; men whom he met when a dance or dinner took him out of the less pretentious sets he personally affected; men whom the newspapers and the public knew too well to speak of as “well known.”
First there was Percy Draymore, overgroomed for a gentleman, fat, good-humoured, and fashionable —
one of the famous Draymore family noted solely for their money and their tight grip on it; then came Sanxon Orchil, the famous banker and promoter, small, urbane, dark, with that rich almost oriental coloring which he may have inherited from his Cordova ancestors who found it necessary to dehumanise their names when Rome offered them the choice with immediate eternity as alternative.
Then came a fox-faced young man, Phoenix Mottly, elegant arbiter of all pertaining to polo and the hunt — slim-legged, hatchet-faced — and more presentable in the saddle than out of it. He was followed by Bradley Harmon, with his washed-out colouring of a consumptive Swede and his corn-coloured beard; and, looming in the rear like an amiable brontasaurus, George Fane, whose swaying neck carried his head as a camel carries his, nodding as he walks.
“Well!” said Selwyn, perplexed but cordial as he exchanged amenities with each gentleman who entered, “this is a killing combination of pleasure and mortification — because I haven’t any more breakfast to offer you unless you’ll wait until I ring for the Sultana—”
“Breakfast! Oh, damn! I’ve breakfasted on a pill and a glass of vichy for ten years,” protested Draymore, “and the others either have swallowed their cocktails, or won’t do it until luncheon. I say, Selwyn, you must think this a devilishly unusual proceeding.”
“Pleasantly unusual, Draymore. Is this a delegation to tend me the nomination for the down-and-out club, perhaps?”
Fane spoke up languidly: “It rather looks as though we were the down-and-out delegation at present; doesn’t it, Orchil?”
“I don’t know,” said Orchil; “it seems a trifle more promising to me since I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Captain Selwyn face to face. Go on, Percy; let the horrid facts be known.”
“Well — er — oh, hang it all!” blurted out Draymore, “we heard last night how that fellow — how Neergard has been tampering with our farmers — what underhand tricks he has been playing us; and I frankly admit to you that we’re a worried lot of near-sports. That’s what this dismal matinee signifies; and we’ve come to ask you what it all really means.”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 338