His Own People Part 6

she says. 'He's the gamest little Indian ever come down the big road!'

she says. Was she right? What? Maybe she wasn't! We'll double it before very long, my boy; this'll do to start on. There." He distributed some of the small towers of ivory counters and made a memorandum in a notebook. "There's four hundred apiece."

"That all?" inquired Mellin, whereupon Mr. Pedlow uproariously repeated Madame de Vaurigard's alleged tribute.

As the game began, the intelligent-looking maid appeared from the dining-room, bearing bottles of whisky and soda, and these she deposited upon small tables at the convenience of the players, so that at the conclusion of the first encounter in the gentle tournament there was material for a toast to the gallant who had won it.

"Here's to the gamest Indian of us all," proposed the fat man. "Did you notice him call me with a pair of tens? And me queen-high!"

Mellin drained a deep gla.s.s in honor of himself. "On my soul, Chan'

Pedlow, I think you're the bes' fellow in the whole world," he said gratefully. "Only trouble with you--you don't want to play high enough."

He won again and again, adding other towers of counters to his original allotment, so that he had the semblance of a tiny castle. When the cards had been dealt for the fifth time he felt the light contact of a slipper touching his foot under the table.

That slipper, he decided (from the nature of things) could belong to none other than his Helene, and even as he came to this conclusion the slight pressure against his foot was gently but distinctly increased thrice. He pressed the slipper in return with his shoe, at the same time giving Madame de Vaurigard a look of grateful surprise and tenderness, which threw her into a confusion so evidently genuine that for an unworthy moment he had a jealous suspicion she had meant the little caress for some other.

It was a disagreeable thought, and, in the hope of banis.h.i.+ng it, he refilled his gla.s.s; but his mood had begun to change. It seemed to him that Helene was watching Cooley a great deal too devotedly. Why had she consented to sit by Cooley, when she had promised to watch Robert Russ Mellin? He observed the pair stealthily.

Cooley consulted her in laughing whispers upon every discard, upon every bet. Now and then, in their whisperings, Cooley's hair touched hers; sometimes she laid her hand on his the more conveniently to look at his cards. Mellin began to be enraged. Did she think that puling milksop had as much as a shadow of the daring, the devilry, the carelessness of consequences which lay within Robert Russ Mellin? "Consequences?" What were they? There were no such things! She would not look at him--well, he would make her! Thenceforward he raised every bet by another to the extent of the limit agreed upon.

Mr. Cooley was thoroughly happy. He did not resemble Ulysses; he would never have had himself bound to the mast; and there were already sounds of unearthly sweetness in his ears. His conferences with his lovely hostess easily consoled him for his losses. In addition, he was triumphing over the boaster, for Mr. Pedlow, with a very ill grace and swearing (not under his breath), was losing too. The Countess, reiterating for the hundredth time that Cooley was a "wicked one,"

sweetly const.i.tuted herself his cup-bearer; kept his gla.s.s full and brought him fresh cigars.

Mellin dealt her furious glances, and filled his own gla.s.s, for Lady Mount-Rhyswicke plainly had no conception of herself in the role of a Hebe. The hospitable Pedlow, observing this neglect, was moved to chide her.

"Look at them two cooing doves over there," he said reproachfully, a jerk of his bulbous thumb indicating Madame de Vaurigard and her young protege. "Madge, can't you do nothin' fer our friend the Indian? Can't you even help him to sody?"

"Oh, perhaps," she answered with the slightest flash from her tired eyes. Then she nonchalantly lifted Mellin's replenished gla.s.s from the table and drained it. This amused Cooley.

"I like that!" he chuckled. "That's one way of helpin' a feller! Helene, can you do any better than that?"

"Ah, this dear, droll Cooley!"

The tantalizing witch lifted the youth's gla.s.s to his lips and let him drink, as a mother helps a thirsty child. "_Bebe!_" she laughed endearingly.

As the lovely Helene p.r.o.nounced that word, Lady Mount-Rhyswicke was leaning forward to replace Mellin's empty gla.s.s upon the table.

"I don't care whether you're a widow or not!" he shouted furiously. And he resoundingly kissed her ma.s.sive shoulder.

There was a wild shout of laughter; even the imperturbable Sneyd (who had continued to win steadily) wiped tears from his eyes, and Madame de Vaurigard gave way to intermittent hysteria throughout the ensuing half-hour.

For a time Mellin sat grimly observing this inexplicable merriment with a cold smile.

"Laugh on!" he commanded with bitter satire, some ten minutes after play had been resumed--and was instantly obeyed.

Whereupon his mood underwent another change, and he became convinced that the world was a warm and kindly place, where it was good to live.

He forgot that he was jealous of Cooley and angry with the Countess; he liked everybody again, especially Lady Mount-Rhyswicke. "Won't you sit farther forward?" he begged her earnestly; "so that I can see your beautiful golden hair?"

He heard but dimly the spasmodic uproar that followed. "Laugh on!" he repeated with a swoop of his arm. "I don't care! Don't you care either, Mrs. Mount-Rhyswicke. Please sit where I can see your beautiful golden hair. Don't be afraid I'll kiss you again. I wouldn't do it for the whole world. You're one of the n.o.blest women I ever knew. I feel that's true. I don't know how I know it, but I know it. Let 'em laugh!"

After this everything grew more and more hazy to him. For a time there was, in the centre of the haze, a nimbus of light which revealed his cards to him and the towers of chips which he constantly called for and which as constantly disappeared--like the towers of a castle in Spain.

Then the haze thickened, and the one thing clear to him was a phrase from an old-time novel he had read long ago:

"Debt of honor."

The three words appeared to be written in flames against a background of dense fog. A debt of honor was as promissory note which had to be paid on Monday, and the appeal to the obdurate grandfather--a peer of England, the Earl of Mount-Rhyswicke, in fact--was made at midnight, Sunday. The fog grew still denser, lifted for a moment while he wrote his name many times on slips of blue paper; closed down once more, and again lifted--out-of-doors this time--to show him a lunatic ballet of moons dancing streakily upon the horizon.

He heard himself say quite clearly, "All right, old man, thank you; but don't bother about me," to a pallid but humorous Cooley in evening clothes; the fog thickened; oblivion closed upon him for a seeming second....

VII. The Next Morning

Suddenly he sat up in bed in his room at the Magnifique, gazing upon a disconsolate Cooley in gray tweeds who sat heaped in a chair at the foot of the bed with his head in his hands.

Mellin's first sensation was of utter mystification; his second was more corporeal: the consciousness of physical misery, of consuming fever, of aches that ran over his whole body, converging to a dreadful climax in his head, of a throat so immoderately partched it seemed to crackle, and a thirst so avid it was a pa.s.sion. His eye fell upon a carafe of water on a chair at his bedside; he seized upon it with a shaking hand and drank half its contents before he set it down. The action attracted his companion's attention and he looked up, showing a pale and haggard countenance.

"How do you feel?" inquired Cooley with a wan smile.

Mellin's head dropped back upon the pillow and he made one or two painful efforts to speak before he succeeded in finding a ghastly semblance of his voice.

"I thought I was at Madame de Vaurigard's."

"You were," said the other, adding grimly: "We both were."

"But that was only a minute ago."

"It was six hours ago. It's goin' on ten o'clock in the morning."

"I don't understand how that can be. How did I get here?"

"I brought you. I was pretty bad, but you--I never saw anything like you! From the time you kissed Lady Mount-Rhyswicke--"

Mellin sat bolt upright in bed, staring wildly. He began to tremble violently.

"Don't you remember that?" asked Cooley.

Suddenly he did. The memory of it came with inexorable clarity, he crossed forearms over his horror-stricken face and fell back upon his pillow.

"Oh," he gasped. "Un-speakable! Un-speakable!"

"Lord! Don't worry about that! I don't think she minded."

"It's the thought of Madame de Vaurigard--it kills me! The horror of it--that I should do such a thing in her house! She'll never speak to me again, she oughtn't to; she ought to send her groom to beat me! You can't think what I've lost--"

"Can't I!" Mr. Cooley rose from his chair and began to pace up and down the chamber. "I can guess to within a thousand francs of what _I_'ve lost! I had to get the hotel to cash a check on New York for me this morning. I've a habit of carrying all my money in bills, and a fool trick, too. Well, I'm cured of it!"

"Oh, if it were only a little _money_ and nothing else that I'd lost!

The money means nothing." Mellin choked.