The Risk

by Cosmo Hamilton

THE RISK

By Cosmo Hamilton

I

"HAVE you seen the passenger-list? Is there anybody we know on board?"

Tracy's young brother turned round from a close examination of the wardrobe in their stateroom on the boat-deck.

"I vote we don't look at the passenger-list," he said. "It relieves the monotony of liner-life to run unexpectedly against people. Don't you think so, old boy?"

"Righto!" agreed Rowan. He unpacked his razors and arranged them with a touch of neatness on the shelf under the looking-glass.

"There's one angel on board, anyway," said Harry. "She came on only just in time. Blue eyes, golden hair, and oh, my dear chap, such a kissable mouth! She was with her father—at least, I suppose he was her father; and how a coarse-grained, apoplectic brute like that could be responsible for such an absolute darling is the eighth wonder of the world."

The elder Tracy gave one of his quiet chuckles. "Well," he said, "you're not going to have a dull passage at any rate—what?"

Harry showed a line of strong white teeth. "So long as you don't butt in, I may stand half a chance. I really am awfully keen about this girl. She's exactly my idea of how a girl should look."

"Inflammable little devil!" said Tracy.

"Why not? I can be young only once. Look here, old man: just promise me to talk politics with her father, and confine yourself to nothing more personal than a cheery good-morning to her. Will you?"

Rowan Tracy knocked the ash out of his pipe and stretched out his long Legs.

"My dear chap, don't you know that these extraneous young women have no earthly interest for me? One of these days I may, with luck, introduce you suddenly to the one girl of all this earth who is going to be my wife, and then you'll be able to talk about angels with a bit more knowledge than you do at present. There's the bugle. Let's feed."

The brothers, so utterly dissimilar in appearance, so closely and delightfully united in sympathy, went arm in arm down the companionway, past the orchestra, which had begun to play a dull selection of old English airs, and found themselves rubbing shoulders with the usual hungry, heterogeneous crowd at the chief steward's table. The London officials of the steamship company had notified the Lurania that Mr. Rowan Tracy, M. P., was to receive special attention and a seat at the captain's table. The steward had made it so. The two brothers were conducted through a maze of tables to the place of honor. They were alone there.

"The little old captain," said Harry, consulting the elaborate menu with the eye of a specialist, "won't be down to-day. Tricky job getting away from the coast."

Rowan smiled indulgently at his brother's elderly seafaring nonchalance and rose suddenly to his feet. He twisted round the chair next his own, and, to Harry's combined amusement and chagrin, bowed with more than a touch of politeness to a girl who had been shown to the table by a steward.

It was the angel.

Her eyes were bluer and her hair more golden than Harry had been able to convey in his boyish colloquial outburst. From a quick glance, the elder brother saw behind the exquisite youth and the quiet shy dignity of this quite unusual girl something that made him feel queerly and unexplainably interested. It struck him that round the delicate corners of her mouth there was an expression of rather pathetic dependence, something which showed that, young as she was, she had already tasted some of the sadness of life. Among the smartly dressed women in the saloon, her slight, exquisite figure in its simple black frock stood out like a little sigh among loud laughter.

For the first time in his busy life Rowan Tracy felt self-conscious, awkward. He passed her the menu silently, and when she said "Thank you" her voice thrilled him. He caught his brother's reproachful eyes and met them steadily. He seemed to say: "You and your little promise be damned, my friend! By the grace of God, I have met my woman, and I know it. Laugh if you like. You are young, and it is the privilege of the young to forget easily. If ever this girl goes out of my life again, it will not be because I have lacked the courage to claim her!"

II

Young Mrs. Kavanagh was one of those merry little souls with poisonous tongues, who invariably on board ship collect round them most of the young men under twenty-two and several over sixty. Like her numerous sisters of the same breed, she was helpless and required wrapping up and unwrapping, and some one always had to bring her broth at eleven-o'clock and tea or chocolate at four. Also, like her sisters, her ankles were neat, and out of the kindness of her heart she shared the fact with others. On the fifth day out she was lying in her deck-chair on the sunny side of the deck, and to give her atmosphere and the impression of what she euphoniously called "cul-ture"—she had been one of the belles of Chicago—she was carrying a little library composed of Hewlett, Shaw, Ibsen, and Nietzsche, not one of which could she read to save her life.

Rowan Tracy walked by. His hand was holding the arm of Leila Brandon—the angel. If any of his fellow-members of the House of Parliament had seen him at that moment, they would have been obliged to stare into his face to recognize their rather stern friend. He looked ten years younger and like a man who had found the Eldorado of his dreams.

The man in the striped white flannel trousers, who characteristically forgot, to hold his stomach in his chest, looked after them with what is called, and hideously called, the knowing smile.

"Quick work," he said. "I wonder what effect an American wife will have upon English politics?"

The pear-shaped man, whose chin broke like waves into his collar, guffawed.

"If a man married every girl whose arm he held on board ship," he said, "most of us would have harems. I've crossed fifty-nine times. Ha! ha!"

Then Mrs. Kavanagh with the sweetest of smiles: "Marry? Do English members of Parliament marry those things?"

"Those things?" The boy who was sitting at her feet looked up. The words had brought a flush to his face. "I've asked Miss Brandon to meet my sister. I think she's a ripping girl," he said deliberately.

The little woman from Chicago shrugged her shoulders.

"The longer I live," she said, "the more painfully obvious it becomes that if a woman wishes to be interesting to men, she must not be good. This Miss Brandon of yours, boy dear, is not only looked upon as a Madonna by most of you men, but she has absolutely captured our Mr. Tracy, the 'star turn.' Do any of you happen to know—please bear In mind that I'm no scandalmonger—that the fair Leila Brandon is at this moment keeping house for a neighbor of mine the notoriously unfastidious Mr. Maxwell McDonough?"

"Oh, no!" cried the boy.

"Oh, yes." said the little woman, reveling in the effects of her bomb; "and if you don't believe me go and look in the stateroom next to hers. Everybody in Chicago has been talking about their liaison for months. They say that McDonough, who is a patron of the drama, found her in a stock company and made her, for the moment, the leading lady of his heart and home."

Disentangling herself from the close folds of her steamer-rug so expertly as to display an expensively embroidered pair of stockings, Mrs. Kavanagh looked round at the faces of her audience and gave a hard little laugh.

"Of course, I've scandalized you good people," she said, "and doubtless you are calling me a cat, but I consider it to be the duty of a good woman to warn her friends against the vultures of society."

Some one who had apparently been sleeping in a deck-chair within range of the woman's staccato voice rose abruptly and cast at her a look so full of disgust and nausea that a rush of blood dulled for a moment the rouge upon her cheeks. As he strode off with square, uncompromising shoulders, the boy who still sat, though uncomfortably, at Mrs. Kavanagh's fet, recognized Harry Tracy and gave a little whistle through his lips.

 

Rowan Tracy still held her arm. They were leaning on the rail above the steerage-deck. Beneath them sprawled the ungainly, untidy flotsam and jetsam of European civilization who expected to find the streets of America paved with gold.

Tracy's usually sympathetic eyes were concentrated upon the wistful flower-face of the girl who unconsciously nestled against his shoulder. The poor devils beneath him, whose disillusionment hourly was growing nearer, might have been miles away.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Canada," he said. "Will you come?"

A startled, disappointed look came into the girl's eyes.

"What do you mean?" she said. Was he too, then, like all the others?

"I've been looking for you always, looking and looking. And all the while I've been saving up for you, saving everything for you—soul and body and heart. Do you think you could find enough in me to give me all I need in return? By all, I mean your soul and body and heart. Will you marry me, and walk through the rest of my life so closely by my side that we shall be able to hear each other's heart beat?"

A sort of trembling seized the girl. She stood inarticulate, but her eyes were filled with a rush of things—thankfulness, gratitude, joy, and, oddly enough, surprise.

And then he said: "Can't you find anything to say?"

She put up her face. It was the action of a child. She seemed to be alone with this man in a world which up to that moment had been peopled with enemies and ugly with sin.

With a sort of inward cry, he took her lips and so opened the floodgates of her heart.

"Thank God for you!" she said. "Thank God! I'd given you up ages ago. And when I came on board this ship I prayed that I might have the strength to choose a dark night and a quiet hour and slip down into a deep, peaceful grave. Life has been almost too much for me. I was at the end of my tether. Your great, strong arm held me back. I have belonged to you, soul and body and heart, not for five days—these blessed five days—but always, so that I seem to have forgotten everything that has gone before."

"Darling, darling," he said, "forget everything except that I love you. When can you marry me?"

She clutched his arm desperately.

"Soon, oh, soon!" she cried. "If you love me well enough never to remember—never to think of me except as you have known me—marry me at once. Take me from this ship, and never let me out of your sight again. I love you! I love you! You shall never regret it. I swear that. I will serve you and walk at your side. You shall shape me—make me anything you like. Tell me you're not afraid of the risk!"

The girl spoke as though she were pleading for her life.

Tracy took her in his arms and kissed her mouth. What did he care who saw? He had found his mate.

"Risk? There is no risk? I love you. You as I know you. You as you are."

Tracy turned as he felt a sharp, warning hand upon his arm, and met the eyes of his brother. In them was a look that he had never seen before.

"What are you doing!" Harry's voice was harsh.

"Beginning to live," said Tracy triumphantly. "Leila is going to marry me."

III

Leila held out her hand to Harry. She liked this boy. His frank, clean admiration was very refreshing, very good. It was also very different from the sort of admiration to which she had been subjected. To her astonishment and consternation, her hand was ignored. What poison had this boy been injected with, or, worse still, had he heard the truth, in her case the deadliest of all poisons? Happiness is like the statue of Isis, whose veil no mortal ever raised.

"Can I speak to you alone, Rowan?" said Harry. "It's very urgent."

"Of course, my dear fellow. What's your trouble?"

He took Leila, put her into her deck-chair, made her comfortable, kissed her lips, whispered an excuse, and ran his arm through his brother's.

"Your cabin," said the boy grimly.

Neither of them was aware that they were followed by Leila Brandon, who, with a fatalistic dread of impending evil, stood outside the window of the stateroom, listening.

Rowan loaded his pipe, and as he did so he hummed the finale of the last act of "Faust."

Harry had never been known to beat about the bush. Now, facing his brother he came to the point at once.

"I wish to God, Ro, something had happened to prevent your sailing!" he began abruptly, and paused at the stare with which his exclamation was received.

"Do you? I don't. What do you mean?" Rowan put the question quickly. Already a nameless dread was forming in his mind.

"What I say, I'm awfully sorry, old man. You and I are pals as well as brothers. I'd rather break my arm than hurt you. But it's got to be done, and it's up to me to do it."

The unusual emotion in the boy's voice made Rowan look sharply at him.

"Hurt me?" he said. "How? I don't know anything that could hurt me now."

"Well, old man. it's about the girl—Miss Brandon. I heard things, and refused to believe them. When I saw that you were really hard hit, I watched and listened. To-day I went a step further. I made inquiries. You must chuck her at once, without any bones at all."

"I'll see you damned first! And, further than that, I'll trouble you to leave Miss Brandon's name out of this discussion."

Harry stiffened. He had never been spoken to in this way by his brother. But for the great love that existed between them and his desire to prevent Rowan's life from being, as he thought, utterly ruined, he would have let things slide. As it was, he persisted with all the pluck for which he was famous at his college.

"The worst of it is," he said, "Miss Brandon's name isn't the only one that must come into this discussion. It's bracketed with that of a low brute called Maxwell McDonough, a notorious woman-hunter—the blatant cad whom I have heard bragging in the smoking-room about his successes. In fact, the man we thought at first was Leila Brandon's father, and who has kept to his cabin half drunk all the trip, is the man who is keeping her."

Rowan got up slowly. His fist was clenched, and his lips were set.

"No," cried Harry; "before you hit me you've got to listen. I'm not telling you the gossip of the ship. I'm talking facts. I've had the whole story verified by the purser. If you don't believe me, go and find out for yourself. Good God, man, think of you, you with all you mean to the country and all you have to do for the country, taking back a wife who has been the plaything of any man who could pay enough! It's unthinkable."

Rowan's arm was held back by a slim white hand, and Leila Brandon stood between the two brothers.

"Don't strike him," she said quietly. "What he says is true."

"I don't believe it. I'll never believe it." Tracy's voice shook.

"You must believe it. You said you loved me, and you asked me to be your wife. I love you. I have never loved any one else. Never, I swear it! I was afraid to run the risk of losing you by telling you what every one else seems to know. Now you shall have the truth, and then do anything you like with me. Make me your mistress or throw me aside."

The two brothers watched the pale girl as she stood up before them to be judged. There was a terrible simplicity, ghastly dignity, in every line of her slight young figure. She stood with her hands clasped, like a little girl who had to confess some misdemeanor to her guardians. The elder brother's face was drawn and white, and there was nothing of triumph on the face of the younger one. The regular pulse of the ship went on steadily, and the sun flooded the little stateroom and made it seem sarcastically cheerful. The steady pendulum swing of the clean towels on the rack emphasized the rigid self-control of the three people whose nerves were at breaking-point.

"When I was sixteen my father died." The girl's voice came in a sort of recitative. "His love was the only thing that made my childhood happy. For years after he died my home was unbearable, and I longed to get away. My mother was a cold, unresponsive woman, and all the love she had was given to my sister, who loathed the sight of me because I was pretty and she wasn't. I was superfluous, unneeded. I was a constant source of irritation to them both. Nothing that I did was right. Every little action was criticised.

"I was watched and suspected because I was young and full of the joy of life. There wasn't much joy in life in our little, hide-bound town. I was horribly dissatisfied and lonely. The four walls of what wasn't a home to me became every day more and more like the bars of a cage. The only time I was happy was when I was reading stories of love and excitement by the light of one flickering candle at night in my bedroom, and even this, harmless as it now seems, was stopped by Hetty, who said I was steeping my mind in false and harmful things. I can't begin to tell you how this sister hurt me and warped my nature, and drove me to make plans for an escape. Anything, even work in a store, seemed better, more full of promise, than the same deadly monotonous round of small duties and hideous quarrels that seemed to chip little pieces off ny soul. … One dull, wet morning I put my few small treasures in a cheap suit-case and sneaked away like a whipped dog. With a draggled feather in my hat, and the mud of the town I hoped I should never see again on my skirt, I bought a ticket for Boston. Tucked away in my purse I had a small advertisement of a well-known clothing-house requiring young girls as cloak-models. I checked my suit-case at the big, strange station and asked my way eagerly to the store which was to make me rock pendent of my sister's tyranny. I waited timidly among almost a hundred other girls until my turn came for examination. Examination!—think of it, by a little, dirty man with trespassing fingers. Uh! I turned out to be a 'perfect thirty-six,' but that was not enough to get me the job. There was something else required, but even the thought of going back to Laneville was not enough to drive me to that. I hurried out of the store into the air. I suppose I was crying—disillusionment had come so soon. I was just going back to the station when one of my would-be fellow-models touched me on the arm. She was not a 'perfect thirty-six, and as a last resource was going to apply to the manager of a No. 2 Musical Comedy Company for chorus work. … We toured three-flight stands and 'smalls' until the company was stranded near Chicago. With the few dollars we had saved, we went to that bleak city, and there we remained hungry and idle until a fairy-prince—that's what my little friend Daisy called him—put us both into a stock company which he had organized. He did not want gratitude. He wanted me. I refused to give him what he wanted even after I was told that my services were no longer required. But hunger and loneliness have been responsible for many of the poor women who come out after dark with the bats. … He has been very kind to me in his own coarse way, but he took good care that I should never escape. He heaped flashy things upon me, but he never gave me money. In the few hours that he left me alone, how often I wished that I might have been contented with dull monotony and daily duty and an honest bed! I dared not look forward. I was even afraid of looking beyond my waking hours. But do you suppose, either of you, that in the prayers I cried out at night I didn't beg that some day soon—and it would have to be soon—I might meet a man who would understand, and forgive–because he understood, and would lift me up again out of this gutter? … You came, and I thought that you were the man. Was I wrong? Have I expected the impossible? Tell me, is the risk too great?"

Her voice broke, but she maintained a curious dignity that is only acquired by those who have served a hard apprenticeship to life.

Without any hesitation. Rowan Tracy took her in his arms.

"I have been working theoretically for many years," he said. "Give me the chance of doing something practical. Make a man of me. Let me wipe out the memory of all these hideous things. You and I began our lives on the Lurania. Nothing but death shall separate us now. I love you."

With a look of awe and complete sympathy, Harry slipped quietly out. As he closed the door softly behind him, a little, glad cry rang through the cabin, went up like a dove to Heaven, and settled on the soft shoulder of the Madonna, Mother of Women.