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 passion 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 dogging 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 circumstances." 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 buttoned 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 God I could!"
The exclamation was involuntary, automatic, the cumulative 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 God 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-abasement. 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 snatched 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 hoarsely. 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 superstitious. 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
mass 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.
"I swear I will!" he said. "I'll stand by the cards, Harry, and for
every day you win, I'll walk a chalk line--so help me God!"
Harry Sanderson sat down. He emptied one of the bags at his elbow, and
pushed the box of wafers across the table. He shuffled the cards swiftly
and cut.
"Your deal!" he said.