Part 41

Mr. Campbell looked pained. After having confined the interview so skilfully within the limits of irreproachable good taste, this brutality outraged his ear. He had not been unprepossessed by Adair, and felt sorry for him.--But here was the cloven hoof.--The fellow was just a low, mercenary adventurer after all.

"The figures are ten thousand dollars," he answered coldly.

"Why, I don't call that anything!"

"Cash," added Campbell, with a pursing of his lips.

"Of course, it's cash," cried Adair, "it's going to be that, whatever it is. Only it isn't enough. She's worth more than ten thousand dollars."

Campbell saw that his personal bias had made him err. Adair's vibrating tone had caught the note of his own; suavity and good humor were all-important, and he scurried back to them, like an incautious general flying for the batteries he has left behind. When he spoke again it was in his best lullaby manner.

"My dear fellow," he said, "the real point is that you concede the principle. That is so, is it not?"

"Hell, yes," returned Adair. "I'd concede a lot for fifty thousand dollars."

"But that is a very, very large sum of money."

Adair, with one hand in his trousers pocket, was restlessly turning over the two nickels that were there--all he had.

"I don't think so," he said. "Anyway, she's worth that, and more."

"I was hardly authorized to commit Mr. Ladd to such an amount," objected Mr. Campbell, "though I will not say right off that I might not entertain it. But you understand, Mr. Adair, that it implies you will not resist an action for divorce, and-- Well, you know we'd like to have the matter absolutely settled and done with."

"For fifty thousand dollars?"

The heavy-lidded eyes were obscured by a momentary glaze.

"We will meet you," said Mr. Campbell.

Adair rubbed the nickels together, and asked, with a slight catch of his breath, if he could have something on account.

"Certainly," assented the lawyer, producing his pocket-book. He removed a sheaf of bills, and Adair perceived that they were in denominations of a thousand dollars each. He had never seen a thousand-dollar bill before in his whole life, and here was a thick packet of twenty or more. No wonder that he was overawed. Campbell noticed his fascinated stare, and dilly-dallying with the notes, spread them out with an elaborate carelessness. To Adair, it was all a blur of $1,000, $1,000, $1,000, $1,000, a green mist of money, a crisp, crinkling, dizzying affluence.--Campbell was saying something to him. There was a paper to be signed. It was a temporary memorandum to be replaced later by a more formal document. Buzz, buzz, buzz! The paper was handed to him. Buzz, buzz, buzz, and the room going round and round. He was standing on his feet, shaking with the pent-up passion that he had been so long holding back. The actor in him had been waiting for that, but the actor was lost in the man.

"You're a damned hound!" he cried hoarsely, "And the man who sent you is a damned hound, and here is your damned paper, and may it choke you both! My wife isn't for sale, do you hear that! My wife isn't for sale, whether it's for fifty thousand or fifty million! Is that plain? Do you concede the principle, or shall I boot it into you? I thought I'd lead you on; I thought I'd just see how far you'd go--you with your sable overcoat, and fat pocket-book, and your stinking respectability. I had you sized up all right, and was only giving you rope to hang yourself. Get out of here, and get out quick, or I'll kick you from here to your cab. Get out!"

It was needless to say that John Hampden Campbell did not need to be pressed. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace could have scarcely been in a bigger hurry. Cramming the notes and papers in his pockets, he sped from the visitors' room like a large, imposing projectile which had been fired from some monster cannon. A second later his flying coat-tails were deposited in his cab, and he was speeding away, considerably shaken in spirit and body, for the mountain quiet of his twenty-eight story office.

Lying on Phyllis' table, all ready for mailing, was a long letter to her father. Pride had crumbled and she had determined to seek his help. She had begun it with constraint, attempting, none too effectually, to conceal her sense of injury and injustice; but as page followed page the old tenderness returned with an irresistible force. That gray, handsome head was before her, that mellow voice was in her ears, and the wretchedness and folly of alienation came home to her with a new and piercing significance. The request for money; the cold, exact exposition of her need--was passed and forgotten in the impetuous rush of her pen. She loved her husband, she loved her father, and this estrangement was unbearable. Like many women under the stress of a deep emotion she wrote with a singular eloquence. She wept as she described Cyril--his unceasing goodness, his loyalty, his fortitude, his good humor and devotion. He was everything a woman loved best in a man; and instead of her marriage having been a mistake, a failure, it was more than she thought life could ever give her. Would not her father forget all that had passed, as she, too, would forget? Their love was too deep, too dear, to make reconciliation impossible. She would climb into his lap again, and put her arms about him--his sad, worn, desolate little girl--and they would whisper to each other what fools they had been, and kiss away the last shadow of misunderstanding.

So it ran, page after page, in her fine, delicate hand, an appeal that no father could have resisted. A beautiful letter, touched with the quality of tears; full of womanly longing; heart crying to heart, across an aching void. Alas, that it never went. It was torn to pieces, and thrown passionately on the floor. Campbell had intervened, and the news of his offer was thus received in the little flat on East Fifty-eighth Street. "That's the end of it," cried Phyllis, regarding the scraps of paper. "That's the end of everything between Papa and me!"

*CHAPTER XXV*

It is one of the peculiarities of looking for a theatrical engagement that hope is never quite extinguished. There is always some one who wants you to call next week; there is always a company just short of a part they are considering you for; there is always some friendly member of the Thespians who has "mentioned your name," and gives you a scribbled address or a telephone number. This is stated to explain the fact why Adair, instead of surrendering to circumstances, as any other man would have done in any other walk of life, still snatched at straw after straw with egregious determination. His circumstances were becoming absolutely desperate. Suspension from the club was staring him in the face; in eight days his sticks of furniture and his trunks would be dumped out on the street; it was only by the most rigid parsimony that body and soul could be kept together. Phyllis said the dormice were floating on a shingle, and with tearful laughter would expatiate on the pitiful, half-drowned things, so scared and hungry on a bobbing sea. What was to happen when they slid off?--Oh, but Booful wasn't to mind. She'd hold his poor, pretty, dormouse head up, and swim him off to a lovely island where there were peanuts on peanuts, and an alabaster mousery with all modern improvements.

That lovely island seemed a terribly long way off. As the emblem of an engagement it lay so far over the horizon that Adair began to doubt its very existence. His eyes grew lack-luster; he lost his confident bearing; poverty and failure stamped him, as they stamp every man with an unmistakable mark. We instinctively move away from the unsuccessful. We see that mark, and widen our distance. Success likes success. It isn't decent to be very, very poor. Fingers tighten on pocketbooks, and respectable, prosperous legs quicken their steps.--Adair was sinking, though the dismal masquerade still went on--the immaculate cuffs, the once smart tie, the pressed clothes, shiny with constant ironing. There is many such a figure on Broadway--and in some mean room there is usually a woman who believes in him, stinting herself and starving for his sake.

One dark, wintry Sunday afternoon in early spring, as Phyllis was sitting near the frosted window, sewing and thinking and dreaming by the scanty light, she was roused by the tramp of many footsteps on the stair outside, and a confused bumping, scuffling sound, accompanied by a hoarse murmur of voices. With a horrible premonition she ran to the door and opened it, giving a cry as she recognized Adair being supported in by two companions. His face was swollen and discolored; one eye was closed in a rim of crimson; his mouth was dribbling blood; sawdust and filth befouled his clothes, and a stench of vile whisky exhaled from him like a nauseating steam. He was helped over to a sofa, and allowed to collapse, while the men hurried away as though ashamed of their task, and thankful to have done with it.

It was the first time he had ever appeared repugnant to Phyllis; he was drunk, and she knew it, and the fumes of the disgusting stuff stifled her with loathing. But she unloosened his collar, laid a couple of pillows under his head, unlaced his shoes; and bringing a basin, rinsed the oozing blood from his lip. With pity, yes, but with the raging, furious pity that goes with lost illusions, and the falling of one's little world; a pity less for him than for herself that this should be the end of a love that to her had been the very breath of life.

He regarded her stupidly with his one open eye, moaning faintly, and drawing himself laboriously near the basin, spat into it. Then he put out his hand, and tried to touch her, but she shrank from him.

"Phyllis," he said, in a raucous whisper, "Phyllis"; and then, as though overcome by the exertion, closed that single bleary eye, and dozed off. But it was not for very long. He awakened again. "They loaded me up with that cursed whisky," he whispered. "I was all in, and needed it. God, if they didn't pour a bottle of it down my throat!"--For a while he rambled on brokenly, spluttering with laughter as he held up his clenched fist as though he found a strange, childish entertainment in the action.--Little by little he pulled himself together. He was a powerful man, sound to the core, and though he was badly spent, health and nature were rallying to his side.