The Danger Mark | Page 3

brother as soon as his own gloves were fastened.
They went about their business like lightning, swinging, blocking,
countering. Twice she gave him inviting openings and then punished
him savagely before he could get away; then he attempted in-fighting,
but her legs were too nimble. And after a while he lost his head and
came at her using sheer weight, which set her beside herself with fury.
Teeth clenched, crimson-cheeked, she side-stepped, feinted, and
whipped in an upper-cut. Then, darting in, she drove home her left with
all her might; and Scott went down with an unmistakable thud.
"One--two--three--four," she counted, "and you did tell a lie, didn't you?
Five--six--Oh, Scott! I've made your nose bleed horridly! Does it hurt,
dear? Seven--eight----"
The boy, still confused, rose and instinctively assumed the classic
attitude of self-defence; but his sister threw down her gloves and
offered him her handkerchief, saying: "You've just got to be fair to me
now, Scott. Tell me that I throw straight and that I did hit Olga!"
He hesitated; wiped his nose:
"I take it back. You can throw straight. Ginger! What a crack you just
gave me!"

She was all compunction and honey now, hovering around him where
he stood stanching honourable wounds. After a while he laughed.
"Thunder!" he exclaimed ruefully; "my nose seems to be growing for
fair. You're all right, Geraldine."
"Here's my last cup-cake, if you like," said his sister, radiant.
Embarrassed a little by defeat, but nursing no bitterness, he sat down on
the leather divan again and permitted his sister to feed him and tell him
that his disaster was only an accident. He tried to think so, too, but
serious doubts persisted in his mind. There had been a clean-cut finish
to that swing and jab which disturbed his boy's conceit.
"We'll try it again," he began. "I'm all right now, if you like----"
"Oh, Scott, I don't want to!"
"Well, we ought to know which of us really can lick the other----"
"Why, of course, you can lick me every time. Besides, I wouldn't want
to be able to lick you--except when I'm very, very angry. And I ought
not to become angry the way I do. Kathleen tries so hard to make me
stop and reflect before I do things, but I can't seem to learn.... Does
your nose hurt?"
"Not in the least," said her brother, reddening and changing the subject.
"I say, it looks as though it were going to stop raining."
He went to the window; the big Seagrave house with its mansard roof,
set in the centre of an entire city block, bounded by Madison and Fifth
Avenues and by Ninety-fifth and Ninety-sixth Streets, looked out from
its four red brick façades onto strips of lawn and shrubbery, now all
green and golden with new grass and early buds.
It was topsy-turvy, March-hare weather, which perhaps accounted for
the early April dementia that possessed the children at recurring
intervals, and which nothing ever checked except the ultimate slumber
of infantile exhaustion.

If anybody in the house possessed authority to punish them, nobody
exercised it. Servants grown gray in the Seagrave service endured much,
partly for the children's sakes, partly in memory of the past; but the
newer and younger domestics had less interest in the past glories and
traditions of an old New York family which, except for two little
children, ten years old, had perished utterly from the face of the land.
The entire domestic régime was a makeshift--had been almost from the
beginning. Mrs. Farren, the housekeeper, understood it; Howker, the
butler, knew it; Lacy knew it--he who had served forty years as
coachman in the Seagrave family.
For in all the world there remained not one living soul who through ties
of kinship was authorised to properly control these children. Nor could
they themselves even remember parental authority; and only a shadowy
recollection of their grandfather's lax discipline survived, becoming
gradually, as time passed, nothing more personal to them than a
pleasant legend kept alive and nourished in the carefully guarded
stories told them by Kathleen Severn and by Anthony Seagrave's old
servants.
Yet, in the land, and in his own city of Manhattan, their grandfather had
been a very grand man, with his large fortune, now doubled and still
increasing; he had been a very distinguished man in the world of
fashion with his cultivated taste in art and wine and letters and horses;
he had been a very important man, too, in the civic, social, and political
construction of New York town, in the quaint days when the sexton of
Old Trinity furnished fashionable hostesses with data concerning the
availability of social aspirants. He had been a courtly and fascinating
man, too. He had died a drunkard.
Now his grandchildren