AN INDOOR TEMPEST
"If you're broke," said Starrett, leering, "why don't you marry your
cousin?"
Carl Granberry stared insolently across the table.
"Pass the buck," he reminded coolly. "And pour yourself some more
whiskey. You're only a gentleman when you're drunk, Starrett. You're
sober now."
Payson and Wherry laughed. Starrett, not yet in the wine-flush of his
heavy courtesy, passed the buck with a frown of annoyance.
A log blazed in the library fireplace, staining with warm, rich shadows
the square-paneled ceiling of oak and the huge war-beaten slab of
table-wood about which the men were gathered, both feudal relics
brought to the New York home of Carl Granberry's uncle from a ruined
castle in Spain.
"If you've gone through all your money," resumed Starrett offensively,
"I'd marry Diane."
"_Miss_ Westfall!" purred Carl correctively. "You've forgotten,
Starrett, my cousin's name is Westfall, _Miss_ Westfall."
"Diane!" persisted Starrett.
With one of his incomprehensible whims, Carl swept the cards into a
disorderly heap and shrugged.
"I'm through," he said curtly. "Wherry, take the pot. You need it."
"Damned irregular!" snapped Starrett sourly.
"So?" said Carl, and stared the recalcitrant into sullen silence.
Rising, he crossed to the fire, his dark, impudent eyes lingering
reflectively upon Starrett's moody face.
"Starrett," he mused, "I wonder what I ever saw in you anyway. You're
infernally shallow and alcoholic and your notions of poker are as
distorted as your morals. I'm not sure but I think you'd cheat." He
shrugged wearily. "Get out," he said collectively. "I'm tired."
Starrett rose, sneering. There had been a subtle change to-night in
his customary attitude of parasitic good-fellowship.
"I'm tired, too!" he exclaimed viciously. "Tired of your infernal
whims and insults. You're as full of inconsistencies as a lunatic.
When you ought to be insulted, you laugh, and when a fellow least
expects it, you blaze and rave and stare him out of countenance. And
I'm tired of drifting in here nights at your beck and call, to be sent
home like a kid when your mood changes. Mighty amusing for us! If
you're not vivisecting our lives and characters for us in that
impudent, philosophical way you have, you're preaching a sermon that
you couldn't--and wouldn't--follow yourself. And then you end by
messing everybody's cards in a heap and sending us home with the last
pot in Dick Wherry's pocket whether it belongs there or not. I tell
you, I'm tired of it."
Carl laughed, a singularly musical laugh with a note of mockery in it.
"Who," he demanded elaborately, "who ever heard of a treasonous
barnacle before? A barnacle, Starrett, adheres and adheres, parasite
to the end as long as there's liquid, even as you adhered while the
ship was keeled in gold. Nevertheless, you're right. I'm all of what
you say and more that you haven't brains enough to fathom. And some
that you can't fathom is to my credit--and some of it isn't. As, for
instance, my inexplicable poker _penchant_ for you."
To Starrett, hot of temper and impulse, his graceful mockery was
maddening. Cursing under his breath, he seized a glass and flung it
furiously at his host, who laughed and moved aside with the litheness
of a panther. The glass crashed into fragments upon the wall of the
marble fireplace. Payson and Wherry hurriedly pushed back their
chairs. Then, suddenly conscious of a rustle in the doorway, they all
turned.
Wide dark eyes flashing with contempt, Diane Westfall stood motionless
upon the threshold. The aesthete in Carl thrilled irresistibly to her
vivid beauty, intensified to-night by the angry flame in her cheeks and
the curling scarlet of her lips. There were no semi-tones in Diane's
dark beauty, Carl reflected. It was a thing of sable and scarlet, and
the gold-brown satin of her gypsy skin was warm with the tints of an
autumn forest. Carelessly at his ease, Carl noted how the bold eyes of
the painted Spanish grandee above the mantel, the mild eyes of the
saint in the Tintoretto panel across the room and the flashing eyes of
Diane seemed oddly to converge to a common center which was Starrett,
white and ill at ease. And of these the eyes of Diane were loveliest.
With the swift grace which to Carl's eyes always bore in it something
of the primitive, Diane swept away, and the staring tableau dissolved
into a trio of discomfited men of whom Carl seemed But an indifferent
onlooker.
"Well," fumed Starrett irritably, "why in thunder don't you say
something?"
"Permit me," drawled Carl impudently, with a lazy flicker of his
lashes, "to apologize for my cousin's untimely intrusion. I really
fancied she was safe at the farm. Unfortunately, the house belongs to
her. Besides, your crystal gymnastics, Starrett, were as unscheduled
as her arrival. As it is, you've nobly demonstrated an unalterable
scientific fact. The collision of marble and glass is unvaryingly
eventful."
Bellowing indignantly, Starrett charged into the hallway, followed by
Payson. Presently the outer door slammed violently behind them.
Wherry lingered.
Carl glanced curiously at his flushed and boyish face.
"Well?" he queried lightly.
Wherry colored.
"Carl," he stammered, "you've been talking a lot about parasites
to-night and I'd like you to know that--money hasn't made a jot of
difference to me." He met Carl's laughing glance with dogged
directness and for a second something flamed boyishly in his face from
which Carl, frowning, turned away.
"Why don't you break away from this sort of thing, Dick?" he demanded
irritably. "Starrett and myself and all the rest of it. You're
sapping the splendid fires of your youth and inherent decency in unholy
furnaces. Yes, I know Starrett drags you about with him and you
daren't offend him because he's your chief, but you're clever and you
can get another job. In ten years, as you're going now, you'll be an
alcoholic ash-heap of jaded passions. What's more, you have infernal
luck at cards and you haven't money enough to keep on losing so
heavily. Half of the poker sermons Starrett's been growling about were
preached for you."
Now there were mad, irreverent moments when Carl Granberry delivered
his poker sermons with the eloquent mannerisms of the pulpit, save, as
Payson held, they were infinitely more logical and eloquent, but
to-night, husking his logic of these externals, he fell flatly to
preaching an unadorned philosophy of continence acutely at variance
with his own habits.
Wherry stared wonderingly at the tall, lithe figure by the fire.
"Carl," he said at last, "tell me, are you honestly in earnest when you
rag the fellows so about work and decency and all that sort of thing?"
Carl yawned and lighted a cigar.
"I believe," said he, "in the eternal efficacy of good. I believe in
the telepathic potency of moral force. I believe in physical
conservation for the eugenic good of the race and mental dominance over
matter. But I'm infernally lazy myself, and it's easy to preach. It's
even easier to create a counter-philosophy of condonance and
individualism, and I'm alternately an ethical egoist, a Fabian
socialist and a cynic. Moreover, I'm a creature of whims and
inconsistencies and there are black nights in my temperament when John
Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights when he
treacherously deepens it--but I'm peculiarly balanced and subject to
irresistible fits of moral atrophy. All of which has nothing at all to
do with the soundness of my impersonal philosophy. Wherefore," with a
flash of his easy impudence, "when I preach, I mean it--for the other
fellow."
Wherry glanced at the handsome face of his erratic friend with frank
allegiance in his eyes.
Carl flung his cigar into the fire, poured himself some whiskey and
pushed the decanter across the table.
"Have a drink," he said whimsically.
Dick obeyed. It was an inconsistent supplement to the sermon but
characteristic.
"Carl," he said, flushing under the ironical battery of the other's
eyes, "I don't think I understand you--"
Carl laughed.
"Nobody does," he said. "I don't myself."