The curious persistence of youth in his features seemed unaccountable in view of the heavy marks imprinted there; but they were marks, not lines; bluish hollows under eyes still young, marred contours of the cheek-bone; a hardness about the hollow temples above which his short, bright hair clustered with all its soft, youthful allure undimmed; and in every movement, every turn of his head, there still remained much of that indefinable attractiveness which had always characterised his race—much of the unconscious charm usually known as breeding.
In men of Mortimer's fibre, dissipation produced coarser symptoms—distended veins, and sagging flesh—where in Siward it seemed to bruise and harden, driving the colour of blood out of him and leaving the pallor of marble, and the bluish shadows of it staining the hollows. Only the eyes had begun to change radically; something in them had been quenched.
That he could never hope to become immune he had learned at last when he had returned, physically wholesome, from his long course of training under the famous Irish specialist on the Hudson. He had expected to be immune, spite of the blunt and forcible language of Mulqueen when he turned him out into the world again:
“Ye'll be afther notin',” said Mr. Mulqueen, “that a poonch in the plexis putts a man out; but it don't kill him. That's you! Whin a man mixes it up wid the booze, l'ave him come here an' I'll tache him a thrick. But it's not murther I tache; it's the hook on the jaw that shtops, an' the poonch in the plexis that putts the booze-divil on the bum! L'ave him take the count; he'll niver rise to the chune o' the bell av ye l'ave him lie. But he ain't dead, Misther Sayward; mark that, me son! An' don't ye be afther sayin', 'Th' inimy is down an' out fur good! Pore lad! Sure, I'll shake hands over a dhrink wid him, for he can do me no hurrt anny more!' No, sorr! L'ave him lie, an' l'ave the years av ver life count him out; fur the day you die, he dies, an' not wan shake o' the mixer sooner! G'wan, now, fur the rub-down. Ye've faught yer lasht round, if ye ain't a fool!”
He had been a fool. He had imagined that he could control himself, and practise the moderation that other men practised when they chose. The puerile restraint annoyed him; his implied inability to master himself humiliated him, the more so because, secretly, he was horribly afraid in the remote depths of his heart.
Exactly how it happened he did not remember, except that he had gone down town on business and had lunched with several men. There was claret. Later he remembered another café, farther up town, and another, more brilliantly lighted. After that there were vague hours—the fierce fever of debauch wrapping night and day in flame through which he moved, unseeing, unheeding, deafened, drenched soul and body in the living fire; or dreaming, feeling the subsiding fury of desire pulse and ebb and flow, rocking him to unconsciousness.
His father's old servants had found him again, this time in the area; and this time the same ankle, not yet strong, had been broken.
Through the waning winter days, as he lay brooding in bitterness, realising that it was all to do over again, Plank's shy visits became gradually part of the routine. But it was many days before Siward perceived in the big, lumbering, pink-fisted man anything to attract him beyond the faintly amused curiosity of one man for another who is in process of establishing himself as the first of a race.
As for reciprocation in other forms except the most superficial, or of permitting a personal note to sound ever so discreetly, Siward tolerated no such idea. Even the tentative advances of Plank hinting on willingness, and perhaps ability, to help Siward in the Amalgamated tangle were pleasantly ignored. Unpaid services rendered by men like Plank were impossible; any obligation to Plank was utterly out of the question. Meanwhile they began to like one another—at least Siward often found himself looking forward with pleasure to a visit from Plank. There had never been any question of the latter's attitude toward Siward.
Plank began to frequent the house, but never informally. It is doubtful whether he could have practised informality in that house even at Siward's invitation. Something of the attitude of a college lower classman for a man in a class above seemed to typify their relations; and that feeling is never entirely eradicated between men, no matter how close their relationship in after-life.