XV
ExuberantDenverites of the early ’eighties—not the bull-team pioneers of the ’sixties, most of whom looked on with dry humor, but the clamant majority of tenderfoot later comers—lived strenuously in a boosters’ Paradise, acclaiming their city the Queen of the Plains and extolling impartially its Italian skies, health-giving atmosphere and matchless scenic surroundings; its phenomenal growth, wealth and hilarious “wide-openness.”
To this trumpeting mother of mining-camps came the Follansbees, fresh from an America which was slow to concede an America west of the Alleghenies; the judge, a fine, upstanding gentleman of the old school, with silvering hair and beard; his wife, an ample and gracious lady corseted to the moment and expert in the use of fan and lorgnette; their son Thomas, a spectacled young man who had had a post-graduate year at Oxford, returning with a pronounced English accent and as the introducer of the curious English custom of wearing spats; an elder daughter fully bearing out Bromley’s description of her as a “glorious blonde,” and a younger, thin and pale, with wistful eyes looking out upon a world which would always be alien to them.
True to his traditions, Bromley joined Thurlow in meeting the migrants-for-health’s-sake at the UnionDepot, saw them carriaged for their hotel, saw to the transfer of their luggage, and afterward called at the hotel, dutifully and at the proper hour, to pay his respects and to place himself, as a somewhat seasoned Denverite, at the service of the family in helping to find summer quarters in which the invalid Lucy Ann could have the benefits to be derived from the miracle-working climate.
“Their reactions to the ‘wild and woolly’ are delightful to behold,” Bromley told Philip that night at dinner. “The judge and Lucy Ann take things as they are; but Mrs. Aurelia and Tom and Eugie are distinctly disappointed at finding themselves surrounded by all the comforts and most of the luxuries of civilization. I don’t know just what they were expecting to find, but they evidently haven’t found it—yet.”
“They will live at the Windsor?” Philip asked.
“Oh, no; their idea is to take a ‘villa,’ as Tom calls it, somewhere in the suburbs and settle down in a housekeeping way. And, by the by, Tom is a joke—a shout! He used to be a rather decent chap, as harmless as a cockroach; a trifle on his toes, perhaps, because the Follansbees date back to Colonial times, but otherwise quite bearable. But he spent last year in England, at Oxford, and now he does everything but drop his ‘h’s.’ He was out with me this afternoon and he wore a top hat and spats. The grins we met, if put end to end, would reach from here to Leadville. He calls me ‘my deah fellaw.’”
“And the fair Eugenia?” Philip inquired maliciously.
Bromley sighed and shook his head.
“I’m still a ruined community. She is as fair as ever and she hasn’t changed a particle. I was in hopes some really good chap had cut in by this time, but I am afraid she is still taking the parental bargain as a matter of course.”
Philip’s grin was sardonic.
“And as long as she does, you’ll have to. Still, this is a man’s town, and perhaps you won’t bulk so large in the lady’s imagination after she has had time to look the Western collection over.”
Bromley shook his head again. “I shall feel like a cad doing it, but she shan’t lack for introductions, Phil; I’ll promise you that. Want to go around to the Windsor with me after dinner and meet them?”
Philip’s laugh was a bray. “And let you start the introductions with me? Thanks, I wouldn’t be that unkind to you,” he bantered.
“Let’s talk about something pleasant,” Bromley broke in whimsically; “our friends from Mississippi, for example. You remember the little rescue plan we were talking about last week?”
“I remember telling you that it wouldn’t work.”
“But it has worked—like a charm. I bought the West Denver cottage Saturday: you know the neighborhood—respectable and neat, but not gaudy—short walk across the Curtis Street bridge to the University School for the girls—short walk to business for the dear little hat-trimmer. After I’d got the deed safely in my pocket, I called upon Mrs. Dabney and told her what I had ‘found.’ She wept tears of joy.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” said Philip discontentedly.“As many times as I have been with Jean since I took her to dinner that first evening, she has never let me see the inside of their rooms in the Whittle Block.”
The play-boy laughed.
“You know the saying about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. I got my foot in the door the first time I walked home with her—the day you went to Boulder. The younger girls took to me and called me ‘Uncle Harry’; and after that it was easy.”
“Still, I don’t see how you got Mrs. Dabney’s consent to fall in with your cottage scheme. I tried to offer Jean a loan, and she froze me so quick——”
“Of course she would. That was what you might call the heavy-hand method. I had to tell a few white lies about the cottage, but that was all in the day’s work. A mining friend of mine was moving his family to the Gunnison country and was willing to let his furnished house cheap to the right kind of tenants. Past that, all that was needed was to make the rent fit the Dabney purse.”
“But you haven’t fooled Jean with any such cock-and-bull story as that.”
“Haven’t I? That remains to be seen. Anyway, they are taking possession to-morrow, and I’m to help them. You are not in it; not in one side of it.”
“Evidently,” was the morose agreement. Then: “As I said before, I’d like to know how you do it, Harry. You can get closer to people in ten minutes than I can in a year. The first evening we were together with Jean I could see that she accepted you that quick,”—with a snap of his finger. “And she knewwhat you are—or rather what you were a year ago. Don’t women, good women, care whether or not a man makes a consummate fool of himself?”
Instead of laughing at this acerbic thrust, his usual reply to Philip’s censorious references to his past, Bromley grew thoughtfully silent. When he spoke, it was to say: “You may analyze women, good, bad and indifferent, until the cows come home, Philip, but you’ll never fully understand them; no man ever does, I think. That remark of yours rubs shoulders with a pretty large truth. There is a good deal of talk nowadays about the double standard. It is the women—the good women—who, unconsciously, perhaps, do the most to maintain it. Why a man who has sown a pretty generous acreage of wild oats should stand a better chance with a good woman than the other sort of man—your sort—is a question that has puzzled better brains than yours or mine. But the fact seems to remain.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Philip doggedly.
“All right; your belief isn’t obligatory, and we won’t quarrel over it. You asked me a question and I gave you the best answer I had in the box. Would you like to amble across Cherry Creek and have a look at my ‘mining friend’s’ cottage on the west side? It is too fine an evening to be wasted indoors. Besides, you’ll want to know the way.”
Together they walked down Larimer and across the bridge, turning south in a street paralleling Cherry Creek. Three short squares brought them to a darkened cottage on a corner; a small box of a place with a pocket-handkerchief lawn and two half-grown cottonwoodsfor shade trees. Bromley found a key and they went in. When the gas was lighted, Philip looked around. There were three bed-rooms, a sitting-room, a small dining-room and a lean-to kitchen, all plainly but comfortably furnished. True, the carpets were worn and the furniture did not match; but there was a home-like air about the place that made it seem as if the former owners had just stepped out.
“Did you buy it all, just as it stands?” Philip asked.
“No, indeed. Just the empty house. I spent a whole day ransacking the second-hand shops for the fittings; didn’t dare buy anything new, naturally—that would have been a dead give-away. Like it?”
“It will do well enough—considering who did it. Of course, it’s understood that you let me in with you on the expense?”
Bromley did not reply at once. When he did, his answer was a conditional refusal.
“No, I think not, Phil. You don’t owe Jean Dabney anything, and I do. If the time ever comes when you are in debt to her as I am, we’ll have an accounting. If you have seen all you want to, let’s go.” And he reached up to turn off the gas.
In their common sitting-room that evening, while Bromley was chuckling over a magazine article which showed how little the writer really knew about the Colorado to which he had evidently made no more than a flying visit, Philip shut theThe Lady of the Aroostookupon a place-keeping finger to say:
“I think I owe it to myself to tell you that I went to Middleton to-day and apologized.”
“Of course; I knew you’d do that, sooner or later,”returned the play-boy, with his best impish grin. “That is what you get for having a conscience. What did he say?”
“He was very decent about it; doesn’t seem to bear malice. Shook hands with me when I got up to go and said he couldn’t blame me so very much for ‘losing my temper.’ Altogether, he made me feel like a fool—or rather like a whited sepulchre.”
“Why the simile?” queried the magazine reader.
“Because I profess better things, and he doesn’t. He is a hopeless pagan, but he shows a better Christian spirit than I did.”
This time Bromley’s grin was good-naturedly cynical.
“Deep down in your heart, Philip, you don’t really believe any such thing as that; you know you don’t,” he said accusingly.
“Why don’t I?”
“Because, at this very moment, the old self-righteous Puritan in you is patting itself on the back for its superior virtue and for the humility in which you kept the letter of the Gospel to your own satisfaction and comfort.”
“Oh, to the devil with you and your hair-splitting philosophy!” said Philip impatiently; and, relighting his pipe, he went on with his reading of the Howells novel.