Play the Game! Part 20

Honor went away to sit with Mrs. King and the sick man and both boys stared unhappily after her. "If Skipper were only out of this----" Jimsy groaned.

"And whose fault is it that she's in it?" Carter snarled. Two red spots sprang into his white cheeks.

"Why--Cart'!" Jimsy backed away from him, staring.

"Whose fault is it, I say?" Carter followed him. "If she hadn't been terrified over you, if she hadn't the insane idea of duty and loyalty to you, would she have come? Would she?"

Jimsy King sat down and looked at him, aghast. "Good Lord, Cart'--that's the truth! That shows what a mutt I am. It hasn't struck me before. It's all my fault."

"Whatever happens to Honor--_whatever happens to her_--and death wouldn't be the worst thing, would it?--it's your fault. Do you hear what I say? It's all your fault!" In all the years since he had known him Jimsy had never seen Carter Van Meter like this,--cool Carter, with his little elegancies of dress and manner, his studied detachment. This was a different person altogether,--hot-eyed, white-lipped, snarling.

"Your fault if she dies here, dies of thirst; your fault if they get in here and carry her off, those filthy brutes out there."

"They'll never ... get her," said Jimsy King. His face was scarlet and he was breathing hard and clenching and unclenching his hands.

"Yes," Carter sneered, "yes! I know what you mean! You feel very heroic about it. You feel like a hero in a movie, don't you? n.o.ble of you, isn't it? Slay the heroine with your own hands rather than let her----"

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake, Cart'!" Jimsy got up and came toward him. "Cut it out! What's the good of talking like that? We're in it now, all of us, and we've got to stick it out. I know it's harder on you because you're not strong, but----"

"d.a.m.n you! 'Not strong--' Not built like an ox--muscles in my brain instead of my legs! Because I cared for something else besides rolling around in the mud with a leather ball in my arms----"

"Key down, old boy." Jimsy was cool now, unresentful; he understood.

Poor old Cart' ... he couldn't stand much suffering.

"That's how you got Honor, when she was a child, with no sense of values, but you haven't held her! You can't hold her."

"Cart', I'm not going to get sore at you. I know you're about all in.

You don't know what you're saying."

"Don't I? Don't I? You listen to me. Honor Carmody never really loved you; it was a silly boy-and-girl, calf love affair, and when she realized it she stood by, of course,--she's that sort. She kept the letter of her promise, but she couldn't keep the spirit."

"Key down, old top," said Jimsy King again, grinning. "I'm not going to get sore, but I don't want to use up my breath laughing at you.

_Skipper_--going back on me!" He did laugh, ringingly.

"She hasn't gone back on you; except in her heart. Good G.o.d, Jimsy King, what do you think you are to hold a girl like that--with her talent and her success and her future? She's only stuck by you because it was her creed, that's all."

"Look here, Cart', I'm not going to argue with you. It's not on the square to Skipper even to talk about it, but don't be a crazy fool.

Would she have come to me here--from Italy, if she didn't----"

"Yes. Yes, she would! She's pledged to see it through--to stand by you as all the other miserable women have stood by the men of your family,--if you're cad enough to let her."

That caught and stuck. "If I'm--cad enough to let her," said Jimsy in a curiously flat voice. But the mood pa.s.sed in a flash. "It's no use talking like that, Carter. Of course I know I'm not good enough or brainy enough--or _anything_ enough for Skipper, but she thinks I am, and----"

"You poor fool, she doesn't think so. I tell you she's only standing by because she said she would. I tell you she cares for some one else."

"That's a lie," said Jimsy King with emphasis but without pa.s.sion. The statement was too grotesque for any feeling over it.

Carter stopped raving and snarling and became very cool and coherent.

"I think I can prove it to you," he said, quietly.

"You can't," said Jimsy, turning and walking toward the door.

"Are you afraid to listen?" He asked it very quietly.

"No," said Jimsy King, wheeling. "I'm not afraid. Go ahead. Get it off your chest."

"Well, in the first place,--hasn't she kept you at arm's length here?

Hasn't she insisted on being with other people all the time,--on having me with you?"

"Cart', I hate to say it, but that's because she's sorry for you."

"And for herself."

The murky dimness of the _sala_ was pressing in on Jimsy as it had on the girl, that other day. He was worn with vigil and torn with thirst, sick with dread of what might any moment come to them,--with remorse for bringing Honor there, tormented with his helplessness to save her. Even at his best he was no match for the other's cleverness and now he was in the dust, blaming and hating himself. He stood there in silence, listening, and Carter's hoa.r.s.e voice, Carter's plausible words, went on and on. "But I don't believe it," Jimsy would say at intervals. "She doesn't care for you, Cart'. She's all mine, Skipper is. She doesn't care for you."

"Wait!" Carter took out his wallet of limp leather with his initials on it in delicately wrought gold letters and opened it. "I didn't mean to show you this, but I see that I must. It was last summer. I--I lost my head the night before we sailed, and let Honor see.... Then I asked her.... I didn't say, 'Will you marry me?' because I knew there was no hope of that so long as she thought there was a chance of saving you by standing by you. I asked her--something else. And she sent me this wire to the boat at Naples."

Jimsy did not put out his hand to take the slip of paper which Carter unfolded and smoothed and held toward him. It was utterly still in the _sala_ but from an upper room came the sound of Richard King's voice, faint, thick, begging for water, and from somewhere in the distance a m.u.f.fled shot ... three shots.

Carter held the message up before Jimsy's eyes:

Carter Van Meter care Purser S. S. _Canopic Naples_ Yes.

HONOR.

CHAPTER XIV

If Stephen Lorimer, far to the north in the safe serenity of the old house of South Figueroa Street, could have envisaged the three of them that day his chief concern would not have been for their bodily danger.

It would have seemed to him that the intangible cloud settling down over them was a more tragic and sinister thing than the _insurrectos_ besieging them, than the thirst which was cracking their lips and swelling and blackening their tongues.

He was to remember and marvel, long afterward, that his thought on that date had tugged uneasily toward them all day and evening. Conditions, so far as he knew, were favorable; the escort for the personage would be a stout one and under his wing the boy and girl would be safe, and James King was waiting for them, spinning out his thread of life until they should come to him. Nevertheless, he found himself acutely unhappy regarding them, aware of an urgent and instant need of being with them.

They had never, in all their blithe young lives, needed him so cruelly.

He could not have driven back the bandits, but he could have driven back the clouds of doubt and misery and misunderstanding; he could not have given them water for their parched throats but he could have given them to drink of the waters of understanding; he could have relieved the drought in their wrung young hearts. He would have seen, as only a looker-on could see, what was happening to them. He would have yearned over Honor, fronting the bright face of danger so gallantly but stunned and crushed by the change in Jimsy, over Jimsy himself, setting out to do an incredibly stupid, incredibly n.o.ble deed, absolutely convinced by the sight of her one-word telegram that she loved Carter (and humbly realizing that she might well love Carter, the brilliant Carter, better than his unilluminated self), seeing the thing simply and objectively as he would be sure to do, deciding on his course and pursuing it as definitely as he would take a football over the line for a touchdown. He would even have yearned over Carter, at the very moment when the youth fulfilled his ancient distrust of him. He would have understood as even Carter himself did not, by what gradual and destructive processes he had arrived at the point of his outbreak to Jimsy; would have realized in how far his physical suffering--infinitely harder for him than for the others--had broken down his moral fiber; how utterly his very real love for Honor had engulfed every other thought and feeling. And he would have seen, in the last a.n.a.lysis, that Carter was sincere; he had come at last to believe his own fabrications; he honestly believed that Honor's betrothed would go the way of all the "Wild Kings"; that Honor would be ruining her life in marrying him.

But Stephen Lorimer was hundreds and thousands of miles away from them that day of their bitter need, making tentative notes for a chapter on young love for his unborn book, listening to the inevitable mocking-bird in the j.a.panese garden, waiting for Mildred Lorimer to give him his tea ... wearing the latest of his favorites among her gowns....

Madeline King was spent with her vigil and Honor had coaxed her to lie down for an hour and let her take the chair beside Richard King's bed.

"Very well, my dear. I'll rest for an hour. I'll do it because I know I may want my strength more, later on." She seemed to have aged ten years since the day Honor had come to _El Pozo_, but she came of fighting blood, this English wife of Jimsy's uncle. "I'm frightfully sorry you're let in for this, Honor, but it's no end of a comfort, having you. Call me if he rouses. I daresay I shan't really sleep."

Honor sat on beside him, fanning him until her arm ached, resting it until he stirred again, trying to wet her dry lips with her thickened tongue. She wasn't thinking; she was merely waiting, standing it. It was a relief not to talk, but she must talk when she was with the boys again; it helped to keep them up, to keep an air of normality about things.

Jimsy King had read the message Carter held up to him and gone away without comment, and Carter had stayed on in the _sala_. It was almost an hour before Jimsy came back. Honor's stepfather would have marked and marveled at the change so brief a little s.p.a.ce of time had been able to register in the bonny boy's face. The flesh seemed to have paled and receded and the bones seemed more sharply modeled; more insistent; and the eyes looked very old and at the same time pitifully young. He was very quiet and sure of himself.

"Jimsy," said Carter, "I shouldn't have told you, _now_, but I went off my head."