XIX
ThoughBromley, swiftly changing from the up to the down train on the Sunday morning arrival in Leadville, should have won back to Denver at six o’clock Sunday evening, a freight wreck on the Kenosha Mountain grade held him up, and it was between nine and ten when, tired as he was by more than twenty-four hours of mountain railroad travel, he set out in search of Philip, making the rooms of the Alamo Building his starting point.
To his relief, the lighted transom assured him that the sitting-room was occupied; and when there was no answer to his knock, he opened the door noiselessly and entered. At first he thought the hunched figure in the hollowed-out easy chair beside the reading table was in a drunken stupor; but when he drew nearer he saw that the fancied stupor was merely a deep sleep of exhaustion. Silently placing a chair for himself on the other side of the table, he lighted his pipe and waited. After a time the sleeper in the hollowed chair stirred, stretched his arms over his head, and, at the smell of live tobacco smoke, opened his eyes and sat up with a jerk.
“You?” he muttered, blinking across the table at the play-boy.
“It’s nobody else. Had a good nap?”
Philip’s wordless response was to get up and reachfor a half-emptied bottle standing on a bookcase; but Bromley stopped him.
“Let that alone, Phil—for the moment, anyway; long enough to tell me what has hit you. You owe me that much, at least.”
Philip sank back into the sleepy-hollow chair. “How much do you know?” he demanded sullenly.
“What Stephen Drew could tell me, added to what I happened to see at midnight last night when your train on the South Park met mine at the passing point in the mountains.”
“You were going to Leadville to hunt me up?”
“Yes. Drew told me you needed to be knocked down and dragged out.”
Philip’s dull eyes glowed suddenly. “I ought to have had a gun last night!” he broke out savagely. “Those two tinhorns robbed me blind!”
“Of course they did. That is what they were out for. No, wait; I’m not going to preach. I grant you it’s every man’s privilege to go to the devil in his own fashion. Still, I’m a trifle curious.”
Silence for the space of a long minute. Then: “You wouldn’t understand, Harry; I couldn’t make you understand if I should try. Say that the cursed atmosphere of this God-forsaken country got hold of me at last and that I stubbed my toe and fell down. That will cover it as well as anything.”
“A good many of us fall down, but we get up again. Have you got to stay down?”
“It looks that way. I haven’t anything to get up for.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“That question runs you up against a shut door, Harry; a door that I’ll never open for anybody so long as I can keep it shut. Let that be understood, once for all.”
“All right; we’ll let it go at that, if you say so. Just the same——”
“Well?”
“Oh, confound it—you know what I want to say, and can’t Phil! You’ve been more than a brother to me, ever since you picked me up out of the gutter a year ago and stood me on my two feet. Can’t you see where this thing hits me?”
Philip leaned forward, elbows on knees, face propped in his hands, lead-heavy eyes fixed upon the blank wall opposite. When he replied, the harshness had gone out of his voice.
“I can see a great many things now that I have never been able to see in the past, Harry ... one of them is that I’ve been a self-blinded Pharisee all my life. All I needed was a hard enough kick to show me that at bottom I’m no better than other men; not half as good or as strong as some other men who make no profession of their goodness or strength. I got the kick, finally—no matter how, but I got it—and ... well, I guess I have found my level. I’ve been in hell for the last fourteen days and nights, and if I am just beginning to struggle out, it is at the bottom and not at the top.”
Bromley was silent for a little time; then he said huskily: “You’re not going to break with me, Phil? I couldn’t stand for that, you know. You will have to go your own way, I suppose; but wherever you go,or whatever you do, I’m still your partner. Just remember that when the pull comes the hardest, won’t you?”
“I’ll try to. But you can’t do anything for me, Harry; nobody can. I’ve walked deliberately into the devil’s wood and got lost. If there is any way out—as there doesn’t seem to be now—I’ve got to find it for myself. Can you understand that?”
“Perhaps I can.” Another silence, and then Bromley went on: “What shall I say to Jean?—or will you say it to her yourself?”
“You know very well I won’t say it myself. If you tell her anything you must tell her the plain truth: that the man she has known as Philip Trask was a sorry hypocrite; a whited sepulchre, with the cleanliness all on the outside and full of dead men’s bones within.”
“It isn’t that bad, Philip.”
“Yes it is; just that bad. I got my kick, as I have said, and it was hard enough, God knows. Instead of taking it like a man, I went under. In a single fortnight I have measured all the depths—broken all the moorings. I have shut myself out of the world of decent people, and I’ve only decency enough left in me to know that I shall never be able to look a pure woman in the face again. I have only one comfort now, Harry, and that is that I have never given Jean any reason to believe that I was in love with her.”
“You are sure of that, are you?”
“Yes; quite sure. After the fatuous fashion of the complete Pharisee I have been holding off, telling myself that there was plenty of time, that I would wait until——” he stopped abruptly, and Bromley finishedthe sentence for him, not without an edge in his tone.
“You’d wait until the peach was fully ripe; then you’d reach up and pluck it.”
“No,” was the sober denial, made with no touch of resentment. “You must give the devil his due, Harry. It wasn’t altogether as rotten as that, though maybe it did lean a little that way, at times. Never mind; it’s all over now. You have a free field.”
“I?”
“Yes. I haven’t been blind. Jean is heart-free, and I saw at once that it was going to lie between us two. I’m eliminated.”
The edge had gone out of the play-boy’s voice and there was a faint smile at the bottom of his eyes when he said: “But, according to the way you stack things up, I am just as much of a false alarm as you are. Heaven knows, I’ve waded fully as deep in the mud as you have in the mire.”
“No; there is a difference. I know it now. Whatever you have done, you have contrived somehow, in some way, to keep your soul out of the mud. Flout the idea if you want to, but I know. I’ve lived with you for something better than a year and know what I’m talking about.”
Another interval of silence, and at the end of it Bromley got upon his feet.
“You are off?” said Philip, without looking up.
“Yes, I must go. I’m train-tired and perishing for a bath. You’re not meaning to run away from Denver, are you?”
“Oh, no; I suppose not. There is nowhere to run to.”
At the door Bromley paused with his hand on the knob.
“Just one other word, Phil—and you may throw a chair at me if it bites too hard: you’re no gambler. I mean you can’t hold your own against the crooks and short-card men.”
“You are right. I have learned my lesson out of that book this early in the game. Anything else?”
Bromley pointed to the half-empty bottle on the bookcase.
“That stuff is never much of a friend, and it is always a pretty bad enemy. I wouldn’t trust it too far, if I were you. There is always a morning after to follow the night before.”
“Yes; I have learned that, too. I am learning a good many things these days. I guess I had it coming to me. Are you going? Well, good-night.”
After Bromley had gone, Philip heaved himself wearily out of the deep chair and began to pace the floor with his head down and his hands locked behind him. Two weeks of mad, unbridled rebellion against all the inhibitions had left him weak and shattered in mind and body. Twice in the circling round of the room he reached for the bottle on the bookcase, and once he took it up and started to draw the cork. He knew that a swallow or two of the liquor would steady the twittering nerves, temporarily, at least; and that if he should drink enough of it, he could go to bed and sleep.
But the good fighting strength which had been his up to that fatal Monday evening a fortnight in the past, broken and spent though it was, strove to makeitself felt. Had it already come to this, that he could no longer go to sleep without first drugging himself with whiskey? If two short weeks of indulgence had thus far maimed and crippled him, how long could he hope to delay the descent into the lowest gutter of degradation?
“No, by God!” he exclaimed finally. “No more of it to-night—not if I have to lie awake in hell till daylight!” And, such is the strength derivable from even a partial resistance to temptation, he went to bed and slept the clock around.