“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.”
CHAPTER XIX. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
By the first of January it became plain that there was not very much left of Colonel Mallett’s fortune, less of his business reputation, and even less of his wife’s health. But she was now able to travel, and toward the middle of the month she sailed with Naïda and one maid for Naples, leaving her son to gather up and straighten out what little of value still remained in the wreckage of the house of Mallett. What he cared most about was to straighten out his father’s personal reputation; and this was possible only as far as it concerned Colonel Mallett’s individual honesty. But the rehabilitation was accomplished at the expense of his father’s reputation for business intelligence; and New York never really excuses such things.
Not much remained after the amounts due every creditor had been checked up and provided for; and it took practically all Duane had, almost all Naïda had, and also the sacrifice of the town house and country villa to properly protect those who had suffered. Part of his mother’s estate remained intact, enough to permit her and her daughter to live by practising those inconsequential economies, the necessity for which fills Europe with about the only sort of Americans cultivated foreigners can tolerate, and for which predatory Europeans have no use whatever.
As for Duane, matters were now in such shape that he found it possible to rent a studio with adjoining bath and bedroom — an installation which, at one time, was more than he expected to be able to afford.
The loss of that luxury, which custom had made a necessity, filled his daily life full of trifling annoyances and surprises which were often unpleasant and sometimes humorous; but the new and arid order of things kept him so busy that he had little time for the apathy, bitterness, or self-commiseration which, in linked sequence, usually follow sudden disaster.
Sooner or later it was inevitable that he must feel more keenly the death of a father who, until in the shadow of impending disaster, had never offered him a very close intimacy. Their relations had been merely warm and pleasant — an easy camaraderie between friends — neither questioned the other’s rights to reticence and privacy. Their mutual silence concerning business pursuits was instinctive; neither father nor son understood the other’s affairs, nor were they interested except in the success of a good comrade.
It was inevitable that, in years to come, the realisation of his loss would become keener and deeper; but now, in the reaction from shock, and in the anxiety and stress and dire necessity for activity, only the surface sorrow was understood — the pity of it, the distressing circumstances surrounding the death of a good father, a good friend, and a personally upright man.
The funeral was private; only the immediate family attended. Duane had written to Geraldine, Kathleen, and Scott not to come, and he had also asked if he might not go to them when the chance arrived.
And now the chance had come at last, in the dead of winter; but the prospect of escape to Geraldine brightened the whole world for him and gilded the snowy streets of the city with that magic radiance no flaming planet ever cast.
He had already shipped a crate of canvases to Roya-Neh; his trunk had gone, and now, checking with an amused shrug a natural impulse to hail a cab, he swung his suit-case and himself aboard a car, bound for the Patroons Club, where he meant to lunch before taking the train for Roya-Neh.
He had not been to the club since the catastrophe and his father’s death, and he was very serious and sombre and slightly embarrassed when he entered.
A servant took his coat and suit-case with marked but subdued respect. Men whom he knew and some men whom he scarcely knew at all made it a point to speak to him or bow to him with a cordiality too pointed not to affect him, because in it he recognised the acceptance of what he had fought for — the verdict that publicly exonerated his father from anything worse than a bad but honest mistake.
For a second or two he stood in the great marble rotunda looking around him. In that club familiar figures were lacking — men whose social and financial position only a few months before seemed impregnable, men who had gone down in ruin, one or two who had perished by their own hand, several whose physical and financial stamina had been shattered at the same terrible moment. Some were ill, some dead, some had resigned, others had been forced to write their resignations — such men as Dysart for example, and James Skelton, now in prison, unable to furnish bail.
But the Patroons was a c
lub of men above the average; a number among them even belonged to the Pyramid; and the financial disasters of that summer and winter had spared no club in the five boroughs and no membership list had been immune from the sinister consequences of a crash that had resounded from ocean to ocean and had set humble and great scurrying to cover in every Bourse of the civilised world.
As he entered the dining-room and passed to his usual table, he caught sight of Delancy Grandcourt lunching alone at the table directly behind him.
“Hello, Delancy,” he said; “shall we join forces?”
“I’d be glad to; it’s very kind of you, Duane,” replied Grandcourt, showing his pleasure at the proposal in the direct honesty of his response. Few men considered it worth while to cultivate Grandcourt. To lunch with him was a bore; a tête-à-tête with him assumed the proportions of a visitation; his slowness and stupidity had become proverbial in that club; and yet almost the only foundation for it had been Dysart’s attitude toward him; and men’s estimate of him was the more illogical because few men really cared for Dysart’s opinions. But Dysart had introduced him, elected him, and somehow had contrived to make the public accept his half-sneering measure of Grandcourt as Grandcourt’s true stature. And the man, being shy, reticent, slow to anger, slower still to take his own part, was tolerated and good-humouredly avoided when decently possible. So much for the average man’s judgment of an average man.
Seated opposite to Duane, Grandcourt expressed his pleasure at seeing him with a simplicity that touched the other. Then, in perfectly good taste, but with great diffidence, he spoke of Duane’s bereavement.
For a little while they asked and answered those amiably formal questions convention requires under similar circumstances; then Duane spoke of Dysart gravely, because new rumours were rife concerning him, even a veiled hint of possible indictment and arrest.
“I hope not,” said Grandcourt, his heavy features becoming troubled; “he is a broken man, and no court and jury can punish him more severely than he has been punished. Nor do I know what they could get out of him. He has nothing left; everything he possessed has been turned over. He sits all day in a house that is no longer his, doing nothing, hoping nothing, hearing nothing, except the childish babble of his old father or the voices from the hall below, where his servants are fighting off reporters and cranks and people with grievances. Oh, I tell you, Duane, it’s pitiable, all right!”
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 455