Part 11 (1/2)
”Come up-stairs,” said Zeal. ”We are liable to interruption here.”
”Have they put you up decently?” asked Gwynne, with his mind's surface.
”The house is rather full.”
”I shall leave by the seven-o'clock train, and it must be three now. I have no intention of going to bed.”
”Is that wise? You look pretty seedy, old man. You haven't had a hemorrhage?” He almost choked as he brought the word out, and yet he was not in the least surprised when Zeal replied, tonelessly, ”I had forgotten I ever had a chest;” for his mind was vibrating with a telepathic message which his wits attacked fiercely and without avail.
As they entered his room he pushed his cousin into an easy-chair and turned up the lamp on the writing-table. Then he planted his feet on the hearth-rug with a blind instinct to die standing.
”Fire away, for G.o.d's sake,” he said. ”Something has happened. You know you can count on me, whatever it is.”
Zeal, who was sitting stiffly forward, his hands gripping the arms of his chair, laughed dryly. ”You will be the chief sufferer. The others don't count.”
”Has my grandfather speculated once too often? Are we gone completely smash?” Gwynne was rapidly a.s.suring himself that he was now prepared for the worst, that nothing should knock the props from under him again, that it was the sight of Zeal's face that had upset him; he was not one to collapse before the stiff blows of life.
”It is likely. Anyhow, if he lives long enough he'll make a mess of what is left.” He raised his head slowly, and once more Gwynne, as he met those terrible haunted eyes, felt as Adam may have felt when he was being bundled towards the exit of Eden. He braced himself unconsciously, and after Zeal's next words did not relax his body, although his lips turned white and stiff.
”I am going to kill myself some time to-day,” said Zeal, in a voice so emotionless that Gwynne wondered idly if all his capacity for expression had gone to his eyes. ”I should have done it several hours earlier, but I felt that I owed you an explanation. You can pa.s.s it on to my grandfather when the time comes.”
He paused a moment, and then he too seemed to brace himself.
”I killed Brathland,” he said.
Gwynne moistened his lips. ”Poor old Zeal,” he muttered. ”It must be a horrid sensation--”
”To be a murderer? I can a.s.sure you it is.”
Gwynne's mind seemed to darken until only one luminous point confronted it, the visible tormented soul of his kinsman. He walked over to the table and mixed two tumblers of whiskey-and-soda, wondering why he had not thought of it before. They drank without haste, and then Gwynne took the chair opposite Zeal's.
”Tell me all about it,” he said.
”Brathland and I had not been friends for some years. He was a bounder, and an a.s.s in the bargain. I never, even when we were on speaking terms, made any particular effort to hide what I thought of him--it wasn't worth while. Of course, with every mother firing her girls at his head, and the flatterers and toadies from whom a prospective duke cannot escape if he would, he had an opinion of himself that would have made me the object of his particular rancor, even if I hadn't cut him out with three different women that couldn't marry either of us. When I got the verdict that I must pull up or go under, he chose that particular moment to take up with Stella Starr, the only woman I ever cared a pin for.
Somehow, he got wind of my condition, and knowing that I would prefer to retire as gracefully as possible, it struck him as the refinement of vengeance to make a laughing-stock of me when I was no longer in a condition to play the game out; to advertise me as a worn-out rake for whom the world of Stella Starrs had no further use. We never spoke again until Friday night.”
He paused, then mixed and drank another whiskey-and-soda, lit a cigarette, and resumed.
”I had objected to his being let into the mine, which Vanneck's agent and private letters had persuaded the rest of us would make our fortunes; but I was helpless, for he was not only Vanneck's cousin, but his brother is out in Africa and also interested in the mine. I therefore consented to attend the dinner at which the whole business was to be discussed, fully intending to treat him as I should any stranger to whom I had just been introduced.
”At first all went well enough. We had the private dining-room and smoking-room on the second floor at the Club, the dinner was excellent, and Brathland, although nearly opposite me, behaved as decently as he always did when sober. It was champagne that let loose the bounder in him, and that was one reason I always so thoroughly despised him: the man that is not a gentleman when he is drunk has no right to be alive at all.
”We were not long discussing the mine threadbare, for we did not know enough about it to enlarge into any picturesque details, and the agent, who had seen each of us separately, was not present. Raglin read a personal letter from Vanneck, and Brathland another from d.i.c.k. Then, the subject being exhausted long before we reached the end of dinner, we drifted off to other topics; and went into the smoking-room with the coffee.
”It was at least six years since I had tasted anything stronger than whiskey-and-water, and what devil entered into me that night to drink a quart of champagne, and liqueurs, and pour port and brandy on top, the devil himself only knows. Perhaps the old familiar sight of a lot of good fellows; most likely the vanity of forcing Brathland to believe that he beheld a rival as vigorous and dangerous as of old--I had gained ten pounds and was looking and feeling particularly fit. At all events the mess affected me as alcohol never had done in even my salet days, and although my thoughts seemed to be moving in a crystal procession, I became slowly obsessed with the desire to kill Brathland; whose face, chalky white, as it always was when he was drunk--and he always got drunk on less than any one else--filled me with a fury of disgust and hatred. My mind kept a.s.suring this thing that straddled it that I had not the least intention of making an a.s.s of myself; and that procession of thought, in order to support its confidence, entered into an argument with my conscience, which was in a corner and looked like a codfish standing on its tail and grinning impotently. A jig of words escaped from the mouth of the codfish: copy-book maxims, Bible admonitions, the commandments, legal statutes; all in one hideous mess that annoyed me so I slipped out, went up to my room, and pocketed a pistol. That logical procession of thought in my mind a.s.sured me that this unusual move at a friendly business dinner was merely in the way of self-protection, for Brathland had once been heard to say that he wished we were both cow-boys on an American ranch so that he could put a bullet into me without taking the consequences--he never had a brain above s.h.i.+lling shockers. My thoughts, as they visibly combined and recombined in the crystal vault of my skull, a.s.serted confidently that he had been reading such stuff lately, and that, ten to one, he had a pistol in his pocket.
”When I returned Brathland was standing by the hearth, supporting himself by the chimney-piece. The rest were lying about in long chairs, smoking, and drinking whiskey-and-sodas. They were all sober enough, and Brathland looked the more of a beast by contrast.
”I took a chair opposite him and ordered my thoughts to arrange themselves in phrases that should pierce his mental hide and wither the very roots of his self-esteem--his vanity was the one big thing about him. But he took his doom into his own hands and built it up like a house of cards.