The Danger Mark Part 46

"But you won't, will you? Simply tell me that you won't."

She looked at him, appalled by her own hesitation. Was it possible, after the words she had just uttered, the exaltation of confession still thrilling her, that she could hesitate? Was it morbid over-conscientiousness in the horror of a broken promise to him that struck her silent?

"Say it, Geraldine."

"Oh, Duane! I've said it so often to Kathleen and myself! Let me promise myself again--and keep my word. Let me try that way, dear, before I--I promise you?"

There was a feverish colour in her face; she spoke rapidly, like one who temporises, trying to convince others and over-ride the inward voice; her slender hands were restless on his shoulders, her eyes lowered, avoiding his.

"Perhaps if you and Kathleen, and I, myself, were not so afraid--perhaps if I were not forbidden--if I had your confidence and my own that I would not abuse my liberty, it might be easier to refrain. Shall we try it that way, Duane?"

"Do you think it best?"

"I think--I might try that way. Dear, I have so much to sustain me now--so much more at stake! Because there is the dread of losing you--for, Duane, until I am mistress of myself, I will never, never marry you--and do you suppose I am going to risk our happiness? Only leave me free, dear; don't attempt to wall me in at first, and I will surely find my way."

She sprang up, trying to smile, hesitated, then slowly came back to where he was standing and put her arms around his neck.

"Good-bye until luncheon," she said. "I must go back to my neglected guests--I am going to run all the way as fast as my legs can carry me!

Kathleen will be dreadfully mortified. Do you love me?... Even after my horrid confessions?... Oh, you darling!... Now that you know the very worst, I begin to feel as clean and fresh as though I had just stepped from the bath.... And I _will_ try to be what you would have me, dear.... Because I am quite crazy about you--oh, completely mad!"

She bent impulsively and kissed his hands, freed herself with a breathless laugh, and turned and fled.

For a long time her lover stood there, motionless, downcast, clenched fists in his pockets, face to face with the past. And that which lay behind him was that which lies behind what is commonly known to the world as the average man.

CHAPTER X

DUSK

The Masked Dance was to begin at ten that evening; for that reason dinner had been served early at scores of small tables on the terrace, a hilarious and topsy-turvy, but somewhat rapid affair, because everybody required time for dressing, and already throughout the house maids and valets were scurrying around, unpacking masks and wigs and dainty costumes for the adorning of the guests at Roya-Neh.

Toward nine o'clock the bustle and confusion became distracting; corridors were haunted by graceful flitting figures in various stages of deshabille, in quest of paraphernalia feminine and maids to adjust the same. A continual chatter filled the halls, punctuated by smothered laughter and subdued but insistent appeals for aid in the devious complications of intimate attire.

On the men's side of the house there was less hubbub and some quiet swearing; much splas.h.i.+ng in tubs, much cigarette smoke. Men entered each other's rooms, half-clad in satin breeches, silk stockings, and ruffled s.h.i.+rts, asking a helping hand in tying queue ribbons or adjusting stocks, and lingered to smoke and jest and gossip, and jeer at one another's finery, or to listen to the town news from those week-enders recently arrived from the city.

The talk was money, summer shows, and club gossip, but financial rumours ruled.

Young Ellis, in pale blue silk and wig, perched airily, on a table, became gloomily prophetic concerning the steady retirement of capital from philanthropic enterprises hatched in Wall Street; Peter Tappan saw in the endlessly sagging market dire disaster for the future digestions of wealthy owners of undistributed securities.

"Marble columns and gold ceilings don't make a trust company," he sneered. "There are a few billionaire gamblers from the West who seem to think Wall Street is Coney Island. There'll be a s.h.i.+ndy, don't make any mistake; we're going to have one h.e.l.l of a time; but when it's over the corpses will all be s.h.i.+pped--ahem!--west."

Several men laughed uneasily; one or two old line trust companies were mentioned; then somebody spoke of the Minnisink, lately taken over by the Algonquin.

Duane lighted a cigarette and, watching the match still burning, said:

"Dysart is a director. You can't ask for any more conservative citizen than Dysart, can you?"

Several men looked around for Dysart, but he had stepped out of the room.

Ellis said, after a silence:

"That gambling outfit from the West has bedevilled one or two good citizens in Gotham town."

Dr. Bailey shrugged his big, fat shoulders.

"It's no secret, I suppose, that the Minnisink crowd is being talked about," he grunted.

Ellis said in a low but perfectly distinct voice:

"Neither is it any secret that Jack Dysart has been hit hard in National Ice."

Peter Tappan slipped from his seat on the table and threw away his cigarette:

"One thing is sure as soubrettes," he observed; "the Clearing House means to get rid of certain false prophets. The game law is off prophets--in the fall. There'll be some good gunning--under the laws of New Jersey."

"I hope they'll be careful not to injure any marble columns or ruin the gold-leaf on the ceilings," sneered Ellis. "Come on, some of you fellows, and fix the buckle in this cursed stock of mine."

"I thought fixing stocks was rather in your own line," said Duane to the foxy-visaged and celebrated manipulator, who joined very heartily in the general and unscrupulous laugh.

A moment later, Dysart, who had heard every word from the doorway, walked silently back to his own room and sat down, resting his temples between his closed fists.

The well-cut head was already silvery gray at the temples; one month had done it. When animated, his features still appeared firm and of good colour; relaxed, they were loose and pallid, and around the mouth fine lines appeared. Often a man's hands indicate his age, and his betrayed him, giving the lie to his lithe, straight, graceful figure. The man had aged amazingly in a month or two.

Matters were not going very well with him. For one thing, the Half-Moon Trust Company had finally terminated all dealings with the gorgeous marble-pillared temple of high finance of which he was a director. For another, he had met the men of the West, and for them he had done things which he did not always care to think about. For another, money was becoming disturbingly scarce, and the time was already past for selling securities.

During the last year he had been vaguely aware of some occult hostility to himself and his enterprises--not the normal hostility of business aggression--but something indefinable--merely negative at first, then more disturbing, sinister, foreboding; something in the very air to which he was growing more sensitive every day.

By all laws of finance, by all signs and omens, a serious reaction from the saturnalia of the last few years was already over-due. He had felt it, without alarm at first, for the men of the West laughed him to scorn and refused to shorten sail. They still refused. Perhaps they could not.

One thing was certain: he could scarcely manage to take in a single reef on his own account. He was beginning to realise that the men with whom rumour was busy were men marked down by their letters; and they either would not or could not aid him in shortening sail.

For a month, now, under his bland and graceful learning among the intimates of his set, Dysart had been slowly but steadily going to pieces. At such moments as this it showed on the surface. It showed now in his loose jaw and flaccid cheeks; in the stare of the quenched eyes.

He was going to pieces, and he was aware of it. For one thing, he recognised the physical change setting in; for another, his cool, selfish, self-centred equanimity was being broken down; the rigorous bodily regime from which he had never heretofore swerved and which alone enabled him to perform the exacting social duties expected of him, he had recently neglected. He felt the impending bodily demoralisation, the threatened mental disintegration; he suspected its symptoms in a new nervous irritability, in lapses of self-command, in unaccountable excesses utterly foreign to his habitual self-control.

Dissolute heretofore only in the negative form, whatever it was that impended threatening him, seemed also to be driving him into an utter and monstrous lack of caution, and--G.o.d alone knew how--he had at last done the one thing that he never dreamed of doing. And the knowledge of it, and the fear of it, bit deeper into his shallow soul every hour of the day and night. And over all, vague, indefinite, hung something that menaced all that he cared for most on earth, held most sacred--his social position in the Borough of Manhattan and his father's pride in him and it.

After a while he stood up in his pale blue silken costume of that mincing, smirking century which valued a straight back and a well-turned leg, and very slowly, as though tired, he walked to the door separating his wife's dressing-room from his own.

"May I come in?" he asked.

A maid opened the door, saying that Mrs. Dysart had gone to Miss Quest's room to have her hair powdered. He seated himself; the maid retired.

For a while he sat there, absently playing with his gilt-hilted sword, sombre-eyed, preoccupied, listening to the distant joyous tumult in the house, until quick, light steps and a breezy flurry of satin at the door announced his wife's return.