CHAPTER X
THE GAME
Harry Sanderson stared at the apparition with a strange feeling, like rising from the dead. There flashed into his mind the reflection he had seen once in the mirror above the mantel--the face on which fell the amber ray from the chapel window, shining through the figure of the unrepentant thief--the face that had seemed so like his own!
The likeness, however, was not so startling now. The aristocratic features were ravaged like a nicked blade. Dissipation, exposure, shame and unbridled pa.s.sion had each set its separate seal upon the handsome countenance. Hugh"s clothes were shabby-genteel and the old slinking grace of wearing them was gone. A thin beard covered his chin, and his shifty look, as he turned it first on Harry and then nervously over his shoulder, had in it a hunted dread, a d.o.g.g.i.ng terror, constant and indefinable. From bad to worse had been a swift descent for Hugh Stires.
The wave of feeling ebbed. Harry drew the window-curtains, swung a shade before the light, and motioned to the chair.
"Sit down," he said.
Hugh looked his old friend in the face a moment, then his unsteady glance fell to the white carnation in his lapel as he said: "I suppose you wonder why I have come here."
Harry did not answer the implied question. His scrutiny was deliberate, critical and inquiring. "What have you been doing the last year?" he asked.
"A little of everything," replied Hugh. "I ran a bucket-shop with Moreau in Sacramento for a while. Then I went over in the mining country. I took up a claim at Smoky Mountain--that"s worth something, or may be sometime."
"Why did you leave it?"
Hugh touched his parched lips with his tongue--again that nervous, sidelong look, that fearful glance over his shoulder.
"I had no money to work it. I had to live. Besides, I"m tired of the whole thing."
The backward glance, the look of dread, were tangible tokens. Harry translated them:
"You are not telling the truth," he said shortly. "What have you _done_?"
Hugh flinched, but he made sullen answer: "Nothing. What should I have done?"
"That is what I am now inquiring of myself," said Harry. "Your face is a book for any one to read. I see things written on it, Hugh--things that tell a story of wrong-doing. You are afraid."
Hugh shivered under the regard. Did his face really tell so much?
"I don"t care to be seen in town," he said. "You wouldn"t either, probably, under the circ.u.mstances." His gaze dropped to his frayed coat-sleeve. In his craven fear of something that he dared not name even to himself, and in his wretched need, he remembered a night once before, when he had sidled into town drunken and soiled--to a luxurious room, a refreshing bath, clean linen and a welcome. Abject drops of self-pity started in his eyes.
"You"re the only one in the world I dared come to," he said miserably.
"I"ve walked ten miles to-day, for I haven"t a red cent in my pocket.
Nor even decent clothes," he ended.
"That can be partly remedied," said Harry after a pause. He took a dark coat from its hook and tossed it to him. "Put that on," he said. "You needn"t return it."
Hugh caught the garment. In another moment he had exchanged it for the one he wore, and was emptying the old coat"s pockets.
"Don"t sneak!" said Harry with sudden contempt. "Don"t you suppose I know a deck of cards when I see it?"
The thin scar on Hugh"s brow reddened. He thrust into his pocket the pasteboards he had made an instinctive move to conceal and b.u.t.toned the coat around him. It fitted sufficiently. His eyes avoided the well-set figure standing in white negligee shirt, norfolk jacket and leather belt. As they had been wont to do in the comfortable past, they fixed themselves on the little safe.
"Look here, Harry," he began, "you were a good fellow in the old days.
I"m sorry I never paid you the money I borrowed. I would have, but for--what happened. But you won"t go back on me now, will you? I want to get out of the country and begin over again somewhere. Will you loan me the money to do it?"
Hugh was eager and voluble now. The man to whom he appealed was his forlorn hope. He had come with no intention of throwing himself upon his father"s mercy. He had wished to see anybody in the world but him. In his urgent need, he had had a wild thought of appealing to Jessica, or at worst to get speech with Blake, the old butler who many a time of old had hidden his backslidings from the parental eye. But he had found the white house in the aspens closed and desolate, the servants gone. Harry Sanderson was his last resort.
"If you will, I"ll never forget it, Harry!" he cried. "Never, the longest day I live! I"ll use every dollar of it just as I say! I will, on my honor!"
But the sight of the poker deck had been steel to Harry"s soul. It had touched an excoriated spot that in the past months had grown as sensitive as an exposed nerve. The pictured squares were the ironic badge of Hugh"s incorrigibility. They had ruined him, and the ruin had broken his father"s heart, and wrecked the life of Jessica Holme. And out of this havoc a popular rector named Harry Sanderson had emerged pitifully the worse.
"Honor!" he said. "Have you enough to swear by? You are what you are because you are a bad egg! You were born a gentleman, but you choose to be a rogue. Do you know the meaning of the word honor, or right, or justice? Have you a single purpose of mind which isn"t crooked?"
"You"re just like the rest, then," Hugh retorted. "Just because I did that one thing, you"ll give me no more chance. Yet the first thing I did with that money was to square myself. I paid every debt of honor I had.
That"s why I"m in the hole now. But I get no credit for it, even from you. I wish you could put yourself in my place!"
Harry had been looking steadily at the sallow face with its hoof-print of the satyr, not seeing it, but hearing his own voice say to Jessica: "I was my brother"s keeper! I see it now." And out of the distance, it seemed, his voice answered:
"Put myself in your place! I wish I could! I wish to G.o.d I could!"
The exclamation was involuntary, automatic, the c.u.mulative expression of every throe of conscience Harry had endured since then, the voice of that remorse that had cried insistently for reparation, dinning in his ears the fateful question that G.o.d asked of Cain! Suddenly a whirl of rage seized him, unmeasured, savage, malicious. He had despised Hugh, now he hated him; hated him because he was Jessica"s husband, and more than all, because he was the symbol of his own self-abas.e.m.e.nt. A dare-devil side of the old Satan Sanderson that he had chained and barred, rose up and took him by the throat. He struck the oak wainscoting with his fist, feeling a red mist grow before his eyes.
"So you paid every "debt of honor" you had, eh? You acknowledge a gamester"s honor, but not the obligation of right action between man and man! Very well! Give me that pack of cards. You want money--here it is!"
He swiftly turned the clicking combination of the safe, wrenched open the door and took out two heavy canvas bags. He snapped the cord from the neck of one of these and a ringing stream of double-eagles swept jingling on the table. He dipped his hand in the yellow pile. A thought mad as the hoofs of runaway horses was careening through his brain. He felt an odd lightness of mind, a tense tingling of every nerve and muscle.
"Here is two thousand dollars!--yours, if you win it! For you shall play for it, you gambler who pays his debts of "honor" and no other! You shall play fair and straight, if you never play again!"
Hugh gazed at Harry in a startled way. This was not the ministerial Harry Sanderson he had known--this _gauche_ figure, with the white infuriate face, the sparkling eyes and the strange, veiled look. This reminded him of the reckless spirit of his college days, that he had patterned after and had stood in awe of. Only he had never seen him look so then. Could Harry be in earnest? Hugh glanced from him to the pile of coin and back again. His fingers itched.
"How can I play," he said, "when you know very well I haven"t a _sou markee_?"
Harry stuffed the gold back into the bag. He s.n.a.t.c.hed the cards from Hugh"s hand and a box of waxen envelope wafers from his desk. There was a strange light in his eye, a tremor in his fingers.
"It is I who play with money!" he said. "My gold against your counters!
Each of those hundred red disks represents a day of your life--a day, do you understand?--a red day of your sin! A day of yours against a double-eagle! What you win you keep. But for every counter I win, you shall pay me one straight, white day, a clean day, lived for decency and for the right!"
He was the old Satan Sanderson now, with the blood bubbling in his veins--the Satan Sanderson who could "talk like Bob Ingersoll or an angel," as the college saying was--the cool, daring, enigmatical Abbot of The Saints, primed for any audacity. It was the old character again, but curiously changed. The new overlaid it. Under the spur of some driving impulse the will was travelling along a disused and preposterous channel to a paramount end.
Hugh"s eyes were fastened on the gold in Harry"s fingers. Two thousand dollars! If luck came his way he could go far on that--far enough to escape the nameless terror that pursued him in every shadow. Money against red wafers? Why, it was plenty if he won, and if he lost he had staked nothing. What a fool Harry was!
Harry saw the shrewd, calculating look that came to his eyes. He caught his wrist.
"Not here!" he said hoa.r.s.ely. He flung open the chapel door and pushed him inside. He seized one of the altar candles, lit it with a match and stuck it upright in its own wax on the small communion table that stood just inside the altar-rail, with the cards, the red wafers and the bags of coin. He dragged two chairs forward.
"Now," he said in a strained voice, "put up your hand--your right hand--and swear before this altar, on the gambler"s honor you boast of, win or lose, to abide by this game!"
Hugh shrank. He was superst.i.tious. The calculating look had fled. He glanced half fearfully about him--at Harry"s white face--at the high altar with its vases of August lilies--at the great rose-window, now a ma.s.s of white, opaque blotches on which the three black crosses stood out with weird distinctness--at the lurking, unlighted shadows in the corners. He looked longingly at the gold, shining yellow in the candle-light. It fascinated him.
He lifted his hand. It was trembling.