Part 17 (1/2)
CHAPTER XIII
I
Aileen had shrieked and fled. Ruyler stood in the room with the ruby in his open hand. He saw that Helene was standing quite erect before him.
She had made no attempt to leave the room, nor did she appear to be threatened with hysterics.
He groped until he found the electric b.u.t.ton. The room, as Ruyler had inferred, was Mrs. Thornton's winter boudoir, a gorgeous room of yellow brocade and oriental stuffs.
”Will you sit down?” he asked.
Helene shook her head. She was very white and she looked as old as a young actress who has been doing one night stands for three months.
Behind the drawn mask of her face there was her indestructible youth, but so faint that it thought itself dead.
She looked at her hands, which she twisted together as if they were cold.
”Will you tell me the truth now?” asked Price.
”Don't you guess it?”
”When I came here to-night I believed that you were the victim of blackmail. I was not watching you--I hope you will take my word for that.
We--I had a detective on the case--Spaulding merely wanted to nab the man who was blackmailing you--”
”Do you still believe that?”
”I overheard your conversation with Aileen Lawton. I don't know what to believe.”
”I am a gambler. My father was a gambler. He kept a notorious place in San Francisco. His name out here was James Garnett. My grandfather was a gambler. He was even more spectacular--”
”I know all that. Don't mind.”
”You knew it?” For the first time she looked at him, but she turned her eyes away at once and stared at the oblong of dark framed by the window. ”Why--”
”Spaulding told me to-night only.”
”Mother told me a week or so ago. She'd been recognized. Shortly after I married, when she found out how the women played bridge and poker here, she made me promise I'd never touch a card, never play any sort of gambling game. I promised readily enough, and I thought nothing of her insistence. Maman was old-fas.h.i.+oned in many ways--I mean the life we lived in. Rouen was so different from this that I could understand how many things would shock her. I never thought about it--but--it was about six months ago--you were away for a week and I stayed with Polly Roberts at the Fairmont. I knew of course that she played and that Aileen and a lot of the others did, but I hadn't given the matter a thought. One heard nothing but bridge, bridge, bridge. I was sick of the word.
”But I found they played poker. Polly and Aileen, Alice Thornd.y.k.e, Janet Maynard, Mary Kimball, Nick Doremus, Rex and one or two other men who could get off in the afternoons.
”I never had dreamed any one in society played for such high stakes.
Janet Maynard and Mary Kimball could afford it, but Polly and Alice and Aileen couldn't. Still they often won--enough, anyhow, to clean up and go on. Doremus is a wonderful player. That is how I got interested, watching him after he had explained the game to me.
”It was a long time before I was persuaded to take a hand. It was so interesting just to watch. And not only the game, but their faces. Some would have a regular 'poker face,' others would give themselves away.
Once Aileen had the most awful hysterics. We were afraid some one outside would hear her; the deadening was burnt out of the walls of the Fairmont at the time of the fire. But we were in the middle room of the suite.
”Nick told her in his dreadful cold expressionless voice that if she ever did that again he'd never play another game with her. That meant that they'd all drop her, and she came to and promised, and she kept her word.
Poker is the breath of life to her. I think she'd become a drug fiend if she couldn't have it.
”At last they persuaded me to play. We were playing at Nick's, and after a light dinner served by his j.a.p, we went right on playing until midnight. I never thought of you or anything. I seemed to respond with every nerve in my body and brain. I won and won and won, and even when I lost I didn't mind. The sensation, the tearing excitement just under a perfectly cool brain was wonderful.