Pierre’s uneasiness returned. “You are drunk,” he said calmly. “But what do you mean?”
The other pointed a wavering finger at Pierre’s hand. “That’s what I mean. You tremble, you glance about, you are afraid. No doubt you have a reason; but look at that!” He held out his own hand, which shook like a leaf in the wind. “Observe my steadiness, my calm! And yet my whole future — my whole future is decided within the hour.”
“Come,” said Pierre, “you talk too much, my friend.”
“You are mistaken,” said the other with some dignity. “I do not talk too much. I never have talked too much.” He laid his cards on the table, picked up his glass and drained it. “Monsieur, I like you. I think I shall tell you a great secret.”
“I advise you to keep it to yourself,” said Pierre, who was beginning to be bored. He glanced again at his watch. It was a quarter to six.
“Right. Unquestionably right,” said the stranger. “The greatest of all virtues is caution.” He extended his arm as though to pluck a measure of that quality from the thick, damp air. “At the present moment I am a glowing example of the value of caution. It is the sine qua non of success. My motto is ‘In words bold, in action prudent.’ Caution! Prudence! I thank you, my friend.”
This, being somewhat at variance with Pierre’s theory of life, slightly aroused him. “But one cannot be an absolute coward,” he protested.
“Eh, bien,” returned the other, raising his brows in scorn at the bare suggestion, “one is expected to be a man. But what would you have? There are times — there is always one’s safety. Preservation is the first law of existence. Now I, for instance” — he leaned forward and finished in a confidential whisper — “would never think of blaming a man for obtaining a substitute to fight a duel for him. A mere matter of caution. Would you?”
Pierre felt a choking lump rise to his throat, and when he tried to speak found himself unable to open his mouth. All was known! He was lost! This drunken fellow — who probably was not drunk at all — who was he? Undoubtedly, Phillips had betrayed him. And then, as he sat stunned by surprise, the other continued:
“The truth is — you see, my friend, I trust you, and I want your opinion — that is exactly what I have done myself. It was to be at six o’clock,” he said. “And he — that fool of a Dumain — proposed for us to mask. That was what gave me the idea.”
A thought darted into Pierre’s brain like a leaping flame, and forced from him an unguarded exclamation: “Aha! Lamon!”
The other glanced up with quick suspicion. “How do you know that?” he demanded thickly.
But Pierre had had a second in which to recover his wits. “A man as famous as you?” he asked in a tone of surprise. “Everyone knows Lamon.”
The uneasiness on the other’s face gave way to a fatuous smile. “Perhaps,” he admitted.
Pierre’s brain, always nimble in an emergency, was working rapidly. He glanced at his watch: there still remained ten minutes before Phillips could be expected to arrive. As for this drunken Lamon, there was nothing to be feared from him. Then a new fear assailed him.
“But what if your substitute is wounded?”
Lamon’s lips, tightly compressed in an effort at control, relaxed in a knowing grin. “Impossible.” He fumbled in his vest pockets and finally drew forth a card, which he tossed on the table in front of Pierre. “You see, he’s an expert.”
Pierre, turning the card over, read it in a single glance:
A Tyrant Abdicates
The fact that Mrs. Coit kept her rooms full could be accounted for only by the Law of Chance. As a matter of free choice, no rational human being would ever have submitted to her sour tutelage. But situated as it was, on East Thirty-seventh Street, her house had inevitably attracted a certain portion of those poor unfortunates who find in that locality everything of home that New York can mean to them; and what Mrs. Coit got she usually kept. Her manner was so very forbidding that it seemed even to forbid their escape.
Perhaps the most unpopular of Mrs. Coit’s activities was the strict supervision of the movements of her men roomers. It came to be generally understood that coming in at eleven o’clock was barely safe, midnight required a thorough explanation, and one o’clock was unpardonable. From this you may judge of the rest.
The two who suffered most from this stern maternalism were the Boy and the Girl. It is unnecessary to give their names, since, being in love, they were undistinguishable from several million other boys and girls that the world has seen or read about. To confirm their title as members of this club, their course of true love did not run smooth. No doubt it is trying enough to be bothered by a particular mother, a strict father, or an inquisitive aunt; but all of these are as nothing to a prying landlady.
Mrs. Coit was fat, forty, and unfair. No one knew the nature of her widowhood, whether simple or complex, voluntary or forced, but all were agreed that Mr. Coit was lucky to escape, through whatever medium. The Bookkeeper had once declared positively that Mrs. Coit was a grass widow, but, being pressed for an explanation, admitted that he had grounded his belief on no better foundation than the too evident presence of dry hay in the mattresses.
The roomers — that is, the seasoned ones — were little disturbed by her. Most of them had come to accept life as a dull and colorless routine, to which the impression of anything unusual came as a relief; and Mrs. Coit served as matter for continual amusement. They laughed at her and submitted to her minute censorship without complaint.
But in each of these dulled and sluggish hearts old Romance crouched, ever watchful for an opportunity to make its presence known. That opportunity arrived on the day that the Boy first met the Girl.
Within a week every roomer in the house was enlisted on the side of Cupid. It is true that Cupid needed no assistance, especially from these dried-up mortals whom he had long ago abandoned; but they thought they helped, and Cupid always was an ungrateful little wretch. The Boy was fair, the Girl was sweet, and it truly seemed that it would take much more than the grim visage of Mrs. Coit to frighten away that ever-welcome though sometimes painful visitor.
Mrs. Coit, however, was doing her best. After ten years of unchallenged tyranny, her subjects openly rebelled and resented her malicious activity. As I have said, for themselves they did not care — what mattered a little extra discomfort in lives long since devoted to the Prosaic? But when it came to the Boy and the Girl, and interference with the divine right of rings, they rallied round the flag and struck hard for the colors of Love.
As time passed and the general interest in the affair deepened, Mrs. Coit redoubled her vigilance and asperity. Her remarks to the Boy on the foolishness of marrying at his age and on his salary were repeated with emphasis, and to the Girl she talked so severely about the selfishness of hampering the Boy’s career that she left her in tears. This was unwise; it merely served as an excuse to the Boy for so many more kisses.
Many were the objections entered by Mrs. Coit, many were the petty trials and inconveniences she managed to inflict on the lovers; all, of course, in vain. The women declared that she was jealous of the Boy, which was manifestly absurd; the men, that she was naturally mean, which was somewhat ungallant. Anyway, they might have spared their abuses, since the Boy and the Girl had finally been steered through the shoals of criticism and the rocks of opposition to the sheltered harbor of a Definite Engagement. Mrs. Coit had settled down to a dull resentment; the roomers, to a calm and pleasurable expectation.