Part 18

“Cut it out? I can’t--not in my business. I’ll give you a sample. With the Tabor Opera House about to open, theatrical companies are beginning to book the circuit--Denver, the Springs, Pueblo and Leadville--and, of course, I try to get a share of the haul for my railroad. This morning I went up to the Opera House office to see one of the troupe managers, and the first thing he did was to push the wall button for a round of drinks. I’d had three or four already with other pie-eyed patrons of the company, and when the bar-boy came, I ordered a plain seltzer. ‘Whatzzat?’ shouts the man from New York. ‘You’ll drink with me, or you don’t carry us a mile over your damn’ railroad, see?’ It made me so hot that I told him to go to hell, and walked out--and I lose the business.”

“It is demoralizing, I grant you,” said Bromley. “But Denver--all Colorado, for that matter--is merely in the effervescent stage; it will settle down, after a while.”

“Not until after it has beautifully spoiled a lot of us fellows who would have been at least half-way decent, normally. Just in my limited little circle I can point you to dozens of young fellows who never had any leanings toward the toboggan till they came West, but they are on it now. I’m one of ’em, and your partner’s another; only, as I told him last night, he can still be a pretty good sort of devil when the fit strikes him.”

“Last night?” echoed the play-boy. “What, in particular, happened last night?”

Briefly but succinctly Reddick told the story of the assault upon the Goguette stronghold and its outcome.

“Ah!” said Bromley at the finish; “I’m mighty glad you told me that, Reddick. I saw him putting the girl on the train and was by way of doing him a rank injustice. Afterward, I offered him his chance to tell me about it, but of course he wouldn’t take it; he isn’t built that way.”

“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Harry. In some ways, Phil is as queer as they make ’em. He has developed into an all-night rounder, all right; don’t make any mistake about that; but in spots he is as soft nowadays as he used to be high-headed and flinty when I first knew him a year ago. They tell me he has his hand in his pocket for the down-and-out every minute of the day. I’d like to know what hit him. It must have been something pretty solid to give him the jolt he’s had.”

“It was,” Bromley confirmed; but he added nothing to the bare admission.

“Some girl go back on him?”

“No; for a man of his make-up it was something even worse than that. I can’t tell you what it was, because, thus far, it is his own secret--or he believes it is.”

“I’ve quit,” said the passenger agent; and so the subject died.

After this explanation of the girl-at-the-train incident, Bromley breathed freer; and though he saw less and less of Philip as time passed, he continued to hope for the best, the hope founding itself upon nothing better, however, than an illogical theory of reactions good, bad and indifferent--swings of the pendulum, he called them. When Philip should see the ghastly emptiness of the life he was living--and he was too intelligent not to see it, in time--he would pick himself up out of the mire into which the blow to his pride had buffeted him and be the better and broader man for the humbling experience.

Something of this confidence the play-boy tried to pass on to Jean; and he could see that while she caught at it eagerly there was always a shadow in the dark eyes when Philip was mentioned. Bromley knew what was behind the shadow: it was the fear that she had once put into words--that the prisoner of reproach would end by taking some step which could never be retraced--that would put him once for all beyond the hope of redemption and reinstatement. Wise in his generation, the play-boy knew that there might be such a step; knew, also, that a man of Philip’s temper and resolution would be precisely the one to take it if the expiatory urge should drive him far enough and hard enough.

In these talks with Jean his heart went soft with pity for her. It was plain enough now that she had let herself go as far on the road to love for Philip as Philip’s prideful self-repression had permitted her to go; and at such times he would have given anything he possessed to be able to comfort her. So far as he might, with the Eugenia Follansbee entanglement still tacitly binding him, he did what he could. On the opening night at the new opera house, upon the building and furnishing of which a princely fortune had been lavished, he had all the Dabneys as his guests; and thereafter, whenever he could persuade Jean to go out, he took her and Mysie.

It was on one of these theater nights, when Mysie, now in her final year in the University preparatory school, and with lessons to prepare for the next day, had failed him, that he discovered that his and Jean’s seats were in the same row with those of Stephen Drew, the judge and his wife and Eugenia. Since a guilty conscience needs no accuser, he was not slow to interpret Eugenia’s appraisive scrutiny of his companion during the _entr’actes_; and when, in the dispersal after the play, despite his best efforts to dodge the Follansbee party in the outgoing crush, he found himself and Jean jammed with Drew and Eugenia in the aisle, he was not wholly unprepared for what followed.

“Introduce me,” was the whispered command from the statuesque beauty upon Drew’s arm; and he obeyed, with such formality as the informal conditions would sanction. Then: “Harry has been neglecting us shamefully of late, Miss Dabney. Can’t you persuade him to be a little more neighborly with his old friends?”

Bromley scarcely heard Jean’s murmured reply. He made sure that the beauty’s conventional protest and query were merely another command, and one which he dare not ignore. Eugenia meant to have it out with him. There was to be no more dallying and delaying.

With this discomforting thought in his mind the short walk over to West Denver was begun in silence; and it might have so continued and ended if Jean had not opened the floodgates by asking a simple and most natural question.

“Who is Miss Follansbee, Harry?”

It struck him as a piece of disloyalty of a sort that he had never mentioned the Follansbees by name to her, though he had often spoken of his friends from Philadelphia.

“What did you think of her?” he evaded.

“I think she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

“Wouldn’t you think there was something lacking in a man who couldn’t fall in love with her at sight?”

“Oh, that doesn’t necessarily follow,” was the cool-voiced rejoinder. “Love won’t always go where it is sent--or come when it is called.”

It all came out then; the story of the family alliance and agreement, planned while he and Eugenia were mere babes in arms; its tacit acceptance by both as they grew up; his own abnormal and inexcusable distaste for it and rebellion against it--an attitude which, he had every reason to believe, was not shared by Eugenia.

“You know something about my ratty life in the past, Jean,” he went on. “While I was doing my best to break all of the Ten Commandments, the thing fell down of its own weight, naturally. I wasn’t an ‘eligible,’ even in society’s rather loose interpretation of the word. But now----”

“But now you are no longer living that kind of a life, and you are a rich man,” she finished for him. “You are going to marry her?”

“It is up to me, isn’t it?”

“No. I should say a thousand times, no.”

“Why isn’t it?”

“Because you couldn’t do her a greater wrong than by marrying her when you don’t love her.”

“Don’t you think I could make her happy?”

“I think you could make any woman happy, in a way, if you tried. But that isn’t the question. No doubt there are many marriages made without love, of the kind we are talking about, on either side; and they are happy, after a fashion. But where there is love on one side and only consent on the other ... I can’t conceive of anything more dreadful for the loving one.”

“Perhaps you are right. Just the same, I don’t see where you get all this wisdom of the ages, Jean. I’ve often wondered if there were ever a wall of sophistry built so thick that you couldn’t see through it at a glance.”

“I have lived a long time in the past year, Harry; you know that,” she answered, with a little catch in her voice; and then she began to talk about the play they had just sat through, and there were no more confidences.

Dutifully obeying the command concealed under the conventional protest and query, Bromley made a telephone appointment with Eugenia, and at the proper calling hour the following afternoon presented himself at the furnished house in Champa Street taken for the season by the Follansbees. It was the statuesque beauty herself who admitted him and led the way to the darkened drawing-room, and her first question, when they were alone together, was disconcertingly direct.

“This Miss Dabney I met last night, Harry: is she the daughter of the widow you are boarding with in West Denver?”

“One of three daughters; the others are schoolgirls. Jean is the man of the family; she is a hat-trimmer in Madame Marchande’s.” It took a good deal to shake the play-boy’s easy confidence in himself, but he had a feeling that if he gave the grim demon of consternation the merest shadow of an opening, he would be lost.

“She is a very pretty girl; much too pretty to be wearing out her life in a millinery shop, don’t you think?”

“I do,” he asserted frankly. “But there seems to be no present help for it.”

“Isn’t there? When I saw her with you last night, I was--I was----”

Coming in out of the bright sunlight, Bromley had been half blind in the cool, darkened room. But now that his eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom he saw that his lovely questioner had stopped in curious embarrassment. Her eyes were downcast and she was folding and refolding the filmy handkerchief in her lap. Suddenly she left her chair and came to sit beside him on the old-fashioned, rep-covered sofa.

“Harry, dear,” she began, “I have something terrible to confess; but first let me ask you.... Last night, you know, when I saw you with Miss Dabney, and saw how pretty and sweet she is ... Harry, aren’t you the least bit in love with her?”

He tried to turn the question aside with a laugh.

“You wouldn’t ask that if you could see her sister next younger. Mysie is the raving beauty of the family.”

“No, but, really, Harry; I’m dreadfully in earnest. Wouldn’t you marry Jean Dabney if you were--if you were free?”

Again he evaded, rather clumsily--for him--this time.

“It wouldn’t rest with me, Eugie. Jean hasn’t the remotest idea of marrying anybody.”

The beauty beside him, statuesque no longer, but almost girlish in her confusion, sighed deeply.

“You are making it terribly hard for me, Harry, but I suppose I deserve every bit of it. I--I’ve been untrue to you and to our--to our engagement.”

It took every atom of his self-control to keep him from bounding to his feet. “Wha--what’s that?” he gasped.

“It’s your fault, in a way,” she pleaded defensively. “We might never have known anything about Mr. Drew if you hadn’t told him we were here in Denver.”

“Stephen Drew!” He almost shouted the name.

“Yes. He asked me last night, you know--after we came home from the theater. I tried to stop him; I knew I ought to; but--but he wouldn’t stop.”

He turned and put his hands on her shoulders. “Tell me just one thing, Eugie: do you love Steve Drew? Is that it?”

She lifted swimming eyes to his for a flitting instant and then dropped them quickly.

“You can say anything you please to me, Harry, dear; I know I deserve it: but--but I love him so hard that it hurts--actually _hurts_!”

“God bless you, Eugie, dear,” he broke out, taking her in his arms and kissing the tears away. “Don’t you cry for a single minute. Your happiness is all I care for--all I’ve ever cared for. And you have picked a man in all his inches. Don’t you fret the least little bit about a thing that was handed out to us, wrapped up in the original package years and years ago, by the old folks!”

“You--you’re not sorry--not even a little?” she faltered.

“How could I be sorry when you have found your true happiness, my dear? That is the biggest thing in the world. And Steve will make you happy. He is one of the finest!--head and shoulders above any other man I’ve met in Colorado. I wouldn’t give you up to a rotter: but to Stephen Drew.... But see here, I’ve got an appointment at the bank, and it’s nearly closing time, right now. Will you forgive me if I run?”

She got up and went with him to the door. At the moment of leave-taking she said shyly: “You’ll marry Miss Dabney some day, won’t you, Harry? I want you to be happy, too.”

“I don’t have to marry anybody to be happy; I’m perfectly happy this minute, because you are. As for Jean ... as I’ve said, I’m sure she isn’t thinking about marrying. There was--er--another man, you know, and he has put himself out of the running. That is why I’ve been taking her out a bit and trying to make it easier for her. She is a dear girl, and I wish you knew her better. They are good people--good old Southern stock left poor by the war. Isn’t that your telephone ringing? I’ll bet that is Drew, wanting to tell you he is coming out. I’m escaping just in time. Good-by, you happy girl!” And, kissing her again, and even more exuberantly than before, he fled to keep the mythical appointment.

XXIV

IT was on one of these matchless September nights, when the stars were blazing in the black bowl of the heavens with a lustrous brilliancy that shamed the flaring gas street-lamps of the city of the plain, that the younger son of an English lord, who was supposed to be learning cattle ranching at first-hand on a range in Middle Park, wound up a day of gaudy dissipation in Denver by galloping his bronco down Holladay Street, yelling like a madman and firing his pistols right and left in true Wild West fashion.

To escape the flying bullets, the few late-hour pedestrians dodged for shelter as best they might, darting into alleyways or disappearing through doors that were always open after candle-lighting. As on a certain other epoch-marking night, Philip found his door of refuge opening for him apparently of its own accord, and when it was quickly closed behind him a pair of silken-soft arms went about his neck, and a voice that he had recalled many times in the past few weeks said, “Gee, Mr. Prince-man! It took you a fine long time to remember where I lived, didn’t it? But I knew you’d come, some time. That shooting fool didn’t hit you, did he?”

Philip unwound the clinging arms from his neck, but he did it gently.

“No, I’m not hurt,” he answered. “I was on my way here, and all he did was to hurry me a little. Were you expecting anybody else?”

“Not me. I’d just come down when I heard the racket in the street and was opening the door to see what had broke loose. Want to go in the parlor with the bunch for a while?”

“No; we’ll go up to your room. I want to talk to you.”

She slipped an arm around him as they went up the stairs together, saying: “This is like old times, only the other time you was too parboiled to know where you was going. You ain’t been drinking to-night, have you?”

“Not enough to amount to anything. I am as nearly sober as I ever get to be, nowadays.”

In the room above a gas jet was burning low, and the girl turned it on full. Philip took off his hat and coat and threw them on the bed.

“I don’t want to drink any more to-night, and I don’t want you to drink,” he said. “But I’ll pay my way, just the same.” He handed her a twenty-dollar gold piece: “Take this down to Madam Blanche and tell her your friend is buying her best for the house, and that it is the price he is paying to be let alone.”

While she was gone, he made a slow circuit of the room, alert to all the small details of his surroundings. By this time he knew the household routine of such places--that each woman took care of her own room. There were little hints of personality that were not lost upon him: a single late-blooming rose in a tiny vase on the dresser, placed exactly in the middle of the freshly laundered linen cover; the girl’s comb and brush and toilet appliances as clean and shining as if they had just come from the shop; spotless cleanliness everywhere. He pulled the dresser drawers open, one by one; here, too, there were decent orderliness and the smell of fresh laundering.

She came in just as he was closing the drawers and laughed good-naturedly.

“Didn’t find anything to bite you, did you?” she asked. Then: “Blanche says the house is yours. She’ll turn everybody else out in the street, if you say so.”

“I don’t want any part of the house but this,” he returned. Then he reminded her of an omission: “When I was here before, you didn’t tell me your name.”

“A name’s nothing. They call me ‘Little Irish’ here, and I’ve never told ’em the name my mother gave me.”

“But you will tell me, won’t you?”

“If you care enough for me to want to know. It’s Mona--Mona Connaghey is the whole of it.”

Philip sat down, and immediately she came and perched on his knee. Almost roughly he caught her up and planted her in a chair.

“I want to talk sense to you, Mona, and I can’t do it if you stir up the devil in me,” he told her soberly.

“Is it the devil you’re calling it?” she laughed.

“Yes; and you know well enough that is the right name for it. But never mind; let me ask you this: I know it is a part of your business to tell lies and nothing but lies to any man who comes here. Can you tell the truth for once in a way, if you try?”

“I guess so, maybe--to you.”

He fixed her with a half-absent gaze. “How old are you, Mona?”

“If I live till Christmas, I’ll be twenty.”

“Twenty years old and well on the road to hell,” he said musingly; adding: “Or perhaps you are not calling it hell?”

“Am I not?” she flashed back. “But what’s the use? You didn’t come here to put the whip to me, did you? God knows, I can do that well enough for myself!”

“No,” he answered, “I came to ask you a few questions. What is there for a woman in your condition to look forward to?--or is there anything?”

Her lips twisted in a wry smile.

“A few years of this, maybe, and then a little bigger dose of the chloral than it takes to put you to sleep. That is, for them that have got the nerve.”

“Nothing else?”

“Oh, yes; in a way of speaking. Once in a while a bit of heaven comes now and then to one or another of us--when some man lets a girl go and live with him till he gets tired of her.”

“And you call that heaven?”

“Some does: for me, I’d say it depends on who the man is.”

He lighted a cigar and puffed at it in silence. And when he spoke again: “Do you care to tell me what brought you to this, Mona?”

“You wouldn’t want to know.” Then, in lower tones and with her face averted: “I ain’t got no hard-luck story to tell. I just went bad because I was ... but what’s the use of trying to make you see? It’s just in the blood, or it ain’t; and I’m thinking it ain’t in your blood at all.”

He smiled soberly.

“Maybe there are worse things in my blood than anything you will ever have to plead guilty to. But that is neither here nor there. Tell me this, Mona: if you could have one wish, and could be sure it would be granted, what would it be?”

“My God! Can you ask me that?--after what I’ve been telling you?”

“I can and I do. I have been thinking a good deal about you since--since that morning when you sat here on the bed and told me how I came to be here in this room. You were honest with me then. I’ve been wondering if you could go on being honest with me.”

“You mean that you’d take me out of this--for a little while--and let me--let me----”

“No,” he denied gravely; “I didn’t mean that. But if I should do that--what then?”

A soft light leaped into the blue Irish eyes and for a moment the reckless look vanished and the girl’s face became almost beautiful.

“I’d--I’d work my fingers to the bone to make it last as long as I could--with you!”

“Why with me, rather than with another man?”

“I can tell,” she said. “You’re not like other men. Even when you’re drunk, you don’t forget. I know!”

Another little silence, and at the end of it: “You must know the truth about me, Mona. I have been to the bottom--I’m on the bottom, now; just as much out of the decent running as you are. And I have fallen so hard that it makes me feel for other people who are caught and can’t get loose. Can you understand that?”

“It’s terribly dumb I’d be if I couldn’t--the way I’m living.”

“All right; then we’ll go on. When I was here before it seemed to me that you hadn’t gone quite stony hard--as some of them do; that if you had a chance, you might climb back. Would you?”

She shook her head.

“There’s no chance for the woman; you’d know that very well.”

“There is one chance; just one, I suppose. Do you want to get out of this badly enough to marry me, Mona?”

“_Marry you?_ My God, man, what are you talking about! Do you think I’d----”

“Wait,” he commanded; “let me finish. We won’t say anything about love; we’ll leave that out of it. I have money, and I can take you away from Denver, where you are known, and give you your chance to straighten up. No, I am neither drunk nor crazy, and this is no sudden thing with me. I know what I am proposing, and I want to do it. I have talked with a man who knows you, and he tells me you have no home to go to; no people of your own who would take you in. That is why I am offering you a chance with me.”

To his astonishment the girl sprang up and flung herself upon the bed, burying her face in his overcoat and sobbing as if her heart would break. He let her alone; let the fit of weeping exhaust itself. It was a good sign, he decided; it showed that there were still depths that could be touched--deeply touched. But he was wholly unprepared for what followed when she sat up, wiping her eyes and smiling at him through her tears. For this is what she said:

“You dear, dear man! Do you know, I’d rather die, right here in this room to-night, than marry you?”

“But why?” he demanded. “Don’t you want to get out of this life?”

“Not at the price--the price you’d have to pay. Oh, don’t I know? There’s not a corner on God’s green earth you could take me to where there wouldn’t be some man to turn up and say, ‘Hell’s chickens! there’s “Little Irish”--the girl that used to be in Madam Blanche’s in Denver!’ And that isn’t all, either, nor the worst of it. Some day you’ll brace up and go back to the other world--the one you come from. A man can do that whenever he likes, and you’ll do it. And then you’d be tied to a----”

“Don’t say it,” he interrupted quickly. “What you are saying only makes me more determined. I shall get a license in the morning, and to-morrow afternoon I shall expect you to be ready to go with me.” He threw a handful of gold coins on the bed. “There is money to square you with Madam Blanche, and to pay for whatever you want to buy. Let me have my coat.”

For a moment, while he was struggling into his coat, he thought she had acquiesced. She sat on the bed with her hands tightly clasped and would not look up at him. Dimly he sensed that there was a struggle of some sort making the tapering shapely fingers grip until they were bloodless. Then....

When he won out to the open air of the street his brow was wet and his hands were trembling. There had been a fierce battle in the upper room, and he had come out of it a victor, though only in the strength of a glimpse into the heart of a woman--a glimpse vouchsafed to him in the thick of the struggle. With every wile and weapon she possessed she had fought to make him stay; and but for the saving glimpse which had shown him what her real object was, he might have yielded.