Once a month Marrineal gave a bachelor dinner of Lucullan repute. The company, though much smaller than the gatherings at The House With Three Eyes, covered a broader and looser social range. Having declined several of his employer's invitations in succession on the well-justified plea of work, Banneker felt it incumbent upon him to attend one of these events, and accordingly found himself in a private dining-room of the choicest of restaurants, tabled with a curiously assorted group of financiers, editors, actors, a small selection of the more raffish members of The Retreat including Delavan Eyre; Ely Ives; an elderly Jewish lawyer of unsavory reputation, enormous income, and real and delicate scholarship; Herbert Cressey, a pair of the season's racing-kings, an eminent art connoisseur, and a smattering of men-about-town. Seated between the lawyer and one of the racing-men, Banneker, as the dinner progressed, found himself watching Delavan Eyre, opposite, who was drinking with sustained intensity, but without apparent effect upon his debonair bearing. Banneker thought to read a haunting fear in his eyes, and was cogitating upon what it might portend, when his attention was distracted by Ely Ives, who had been requested (as he announced) to exhibit his small skill at some minor sleight-of-hand tricks. The skill, far from justifying its possessor's modest estimate, was so unusual as to provoke expressions of admiration from Mr. Stecklin, the lawyer on Banneker's right.
"Oh, yes; hypnotism too," said Ely Ives briskly, after twenty minutes of legerdemain. "Child's play."
"Now, who suggested hypnotism?" murmured Stecklin in his limpid and confidential undertone, close to Banneker's ear. "You? I? No! No one, _I_ think."
So Banneker thought, and was the more interested in Ives's procedure. Though the drinking had been heavy at his end of the table, he seemed quite unaffected, was now tripping from man to man, peering into the eyes of each, "to find an appropriate subject," as he said. Delavan Eyre roused himself out of a semi-torpor as the wiry little prowler stared down at him.
"What's the special idea?" he demanded.
"Just a bit of mesmerism," explained the other. "I'll try you for a subject. If you'll stand up, feet apart, eyes closed, I'll hypnotize you so that you'll fall over at a movement."
"You can't do it," retorted Eyre.
"For a bet," Ives came back.
"A hundred?"
"Double it if you like."
"You're on." Eyre, slowly swallowing the last of a brandy-and-soda, rose, reaching into his pocket.
"Not necessary, between gentlemen," said Ely Ives with a gesture just a little too suave.
"Ah, yes," muttered the lawyer at Banneker's side. "Between gentlemen. Eck-xactly."
Pursuant to instructions, Eyre stood with his feet a few inches apart and his eyes closed. "At the word, you bring your heels together. Click! And you keep your balance. If you can. For the two hundred. Any one else want in?... No?... Ready, Mr. Eyre. Now! _Hep_!"
The heels clicked, but with a stuttering, weak impact. Eyre, bulky and powerful, staggered, toppled to the left.
"Hold up there!" His neighbor propped him, and was clutched in his grasp.
"Hands off!" said Eyre thickly. "Sorry, Banks! Let me try that again. Oh, the bet's yours, Mr. Ives," he added, as that keen gambler began to enter a protest. "Send you a check in the morning--if that'll be all right."
Herbert Cressey, hand in pocket, was at his side instantly. "Pay him now, Del," he said in a tone which did not conceal his contemptuous estimate of Ives. "Here's money, if you haven't it."
"No; no! A check will be _quite_ all right," protested Ives. "At your convenience."
Others gathered about, curious and interested. Banneker, puzzled by a vague suspicion which he sought to formulate, was aware of a low runnel of commentary at his ear.
"Very curious. Shrewd; yes. A clever fellow.... Sad, too."
"Sad?" He turned sharply on the lawyer of unsavory suits. "What is sad about it? A fool and his money! Is that tragedy?"
"Comedy, my friend. Always comedy. This also, perhaps. But grim.... Our friend there who is so clever of hand and eye; he is not perhaps a medical man?"
"Yes; he is. What connection--Good God!" he cried, as a flood of memory suddenly poured light upon a dark spot in some of his forgotten reading.
"Ah? You know? Yes; I have had such a case in my legal practice. Died of an--an error. He made a mistake--in a bottle, which he purchased for that purpose. But this one--he elects to live and face it--"
"Does he know it?"
"Obviously. One can see the dread in his eyes. Some of his friends know it--and his family, I am told. But he does not know this interesting little experiment of our friend. Profitable, too, eh? One wonders how he came to suspect. A medical man, though; a keen eye. Of course."
"Damn him," said Banneker quietly. "General paralysis?"
"Eck-xactly. Twelve, maybe fifteen years ago, a little recklessness. A little overheating of the blood. Perhaps after a dinner like this. The poison lies dormant; a snake asleep. Harms no one. Not himself; not another. Until--something here"--he tapped the thick black curls over the base of his brain. "All that ruddy strength, that lusty good-humor passing on courageously--for he is a brave man, Eyre--to slow torture and--and the end. Grim, eh?"
Banneker reached for a drink. "How long?" he asked.
"As for that, he is very strong. It might be slow. One prays not."
"At any rate, that little reptile, Ives, shan't have his profit of it." Banneker rose and, disdaining even the diplomacy of an excuse, drew Ely Ives aside.
"That bet of yours was a joke, Ives," he prescribed.
Ives studied him in silence, wishing that he had watched, through the dinner, how much drink he took.
"A joke?" he asked coolly. "I don't understand you."
"Try," advised Banneker with earnestness. "I happen to have read that luetic diagnosis, myself. A joke, Ives, so far as the two hundred goes."
"What do you expect me to do?" asked the other.
"Tear up the check, when it comes. Make what explanation your ingenuity can devise. That's your affair. But don't cash that check, Ives. For if you do--I dislike to threaten--"
"You don't need to threaten me, Mr. Banneker," interrupted Ives eagerly. "If you think it wasn't a fair bet, your word is enough for me. That goes. It's off. I think just that of you. I'm a friend of yours, as I hope to prove to you some day. I don't lay this up against you; not for a minute."
Not trusting himself to make answer to this proffer, Banneker turned away to find his host and make his adieus. As he left, he saw Delavan Eyre, flushed but composed, sipping a liqueur and listening with courteous appearance of appreciation to a vapid and slobbering story of one of the racing magnates. A debauchee, a cumberer of the earth, useless, selfish, scandalous of life--and Banneker, looking at him with pitiful eyes, paid his unstinted tribute to the calm and high courage of the man.
Walking slowly home in the cool air, Banneker gave thanks for a drink-proof head. He had need of it; he wanted to think and think clearly. How did this shocking revelation about Eyre affect his own hopes of Io? That she would stand by her husband through his ordeal Banneker never doubted for an instant. Her pride of fair play would compel her to that. It came to his mind that this was her other and secret reason for not divorcing Eyre; for maintaining still the outward form of a marriage which had ceased to exist long before. For a lesser woman, he realized with a thrill, it would have been a reason for divorcing him.... Well, here was a barrier, indeed, against which he was helpless. Opposed by a loyalty such as Io's he could only be silent and wait.
In the next few weeks she was very good to him. Not only did she lunch with him several times, but she came to the Saturday nights of The House With Three Eyes, sometimes with Archie Densmore alone, more often with a group of her own set, after a dinner or a theater party. Always she made opportunity for a little talk apart with her host; talks which any one might have heard, for they were concerned almost exclusively with the affairs of The Patriot, especially in its relation to the mayoralty campaign now coming to a close. Yet, impersonal though the discussions might be, Banneker took from them a sense of ever-increasing intimacy and communion, if it were only from a sudden, betraying quiver in her voice, an involuntary, unconscious look from the shadowed eyes. Whatever of resentment he had cherished for her earlier desertion was now dissipated; he was wholly hers, content, despite all his passionate longing for her, with what she chose to give. In her own time she would be generous, as she was brave and honorable....
She was warmly interested in the election of Robert Laird to the mayoralty, partly because she knew him personally, partly because the younger element of society had rather "gone in for politics" that year, on the reform side. Banneker had to admit to her, as the day drew close, that the issue was doubtful. Though The Patriot's fervid support had been a great asset to the cause, it was now, for the moment, a liability to the extent that it was being fiercely denounced in the Socialist organ, The Summons, as treasonable to the interests of the working-classes. The Summons charged hypocrisy, citing the case of the Veridian strike.
"That is McClintick?" asked Io.
"He's back of it, naturally. But The Summons has been waiting its chance. Jealous of our influence in the field it's trying to cultivate."
"McClintick is right," remarked Io thoughtfully.
Banneker laughed. "Oh, Io! It's such a relief to get a clear view and an honest one from some one else. There's no one in the office except Russell Edmonds, and he's away now.... You think McClintick is right? So do I."
"But so are you. You had to do as you did about the story. If any one is to blame, it is Mr. Marrineal. Yet how can one blame him? He had to protect his mother. It's a fearfully complicated phenomenon, a newspaper, isn't it, Ban?"
"Io, the soul of man is simple and clear compared with the soul of a newspaper."
"If it has a soul."
"Of course it has. It's got to have. Otherwise what is it but a machine?"
"Which is The Patriot's; yours or Mr. Marrineal's? I can't," said Io quaintly, "quite see them coalescing."
"I wonder if Marrineal has a soul," mused Banneker.
"If he hasn't one of his own, let him keep his hands off yours!" said Io in a flash of feminine jealousy. "He's done enough already with his wretched mills. What shall you do about the attack in The Summons?"
"Ignore it. It would be difficult to answer. Besides, people easily forget."
"A dangerous creed, Ban. And a cynical one. I don't want you to be cynical."
