Durnovo's eyes flashed dangerously, and his tobacco-stained teeth clenched for a moment over his lower lip.
“That is my desire—and intention.”
“Look here, Durnovo!” exclaimed Gordon. “Don't be a fool! Can't you see that it is quite out of the question?”
He attempted weakly to dismiss the matter by leaning forward on his writing-table, taking up his pen, and busying himself with a number of papers.
Victor Durnovo rose from his chair so hastily that in a flash Maurice Gordon's hand was in the top right-hand drawer of his writing-table. The good-natured blue eyes suddenly became fixed and steady. But Durnovo seemed to make an effort over himself, and walked to the window, where he drew aside the woven-grass blind and looked out into the glaring sunlight. Still standing there, he turned and spoke in a low, concentrated voice:
“No,” he said, “I can't see that it is out of the question. On the contrary, it seems only natural that she should marry the man who is her brother's partner in many a little—speculation.”
Maurice Gordon, sitting there, staring hopelessly into the half-breed's yellow face, saw it all. He went back in a flash of recollection to many passing details which had been unnoted at the time—details which now fitted into each other like the links of a chain—and that chain was around him. He leapt forward in a momentary opening of the future, and saw himself ruined, disgraced, held up to the execration of the whole civilised world. He was utterly in this man's power—bound hand and foot. He could not say him no. And least of all could he say no to this demand, which had roused all the latent chivalry, gentlemanliness, brotherly love, that was in him. Maurice Gordon knew that Victor Durnovo possessed knowledge which Jocelyn would consider cheap at the price of her person.
There was one way out of it. His hand was still on the handle of the top right-hand drawer. He was a dead shot. His finger was within two inches of the stock of a revolver. One bullet for Victor Durnovo, another for himself. Then the old training of his school days—the training that makes an upright, honest gentleman—asserted itself, and he saw the cowardice of it. There was time enough for that later, when the crisis came. In the meantime, if the worst came to the worst, he could fight to the end.
“I don't think,” said Durnovo, who seemed to be following Gordon's thoughts, “that the idea would be so repellent to your sister as you seem to think.”
And a sudden ray of hope shot athwart the future into which his listener was staring. It might be so. One can never tell with women. Maurice Gordon had had considerable experience of the world, and, after all, he was only building up hope upon precedent. He knew, as well as you or I, that women will dance and flirt with—even marry—men who are not gentlemen. Not only for the moment, but as a permanency, something seems to kill their perception of a fact which is patent to every educated man in the room; and one never knows what it is. One can only surmise that it is that thirst for admiration which does more harm in the world than the thirst for alcoholic stimulant which we fight with societies and guilds, oaths and little snips of ribbon.