XVI
Thespring of 1881, memorable for the jangling aftermath of the bitter factional political struggle of the previous year which had resulted in the nomination and election of President Garfield, waned to its close, and on the second of July the nation was shocked by the news flashed over the wires of the shooting of the President in a Washington railway station by Charles J. Guiteau.
Isolated by distance from the populous East and Middle West, the new Colorado yet felt the shock and responded to it. Partisanship and the harsh pre-election epithets of “329” and the anti-Chinese cry of “Remember the Morey letter” were forgotten, and the city of the plain marked its sorrow and indignation, as it did everything else, with a magnificent Western gesture.
Philip, now following out his plan of a blind search for his father in the various mountain mining-camps, returned to Denver early in the week following the national tragedy with other failures to add to those which had gone before.
“You mustn’t let it dig too deep into you,” Bromley urged sympathetically, after the story of the added failures had been told. “You know you admitted in the beginning that there was only the slenderest chancethat you might turn him up here in Colorado. You haven’t had any later clues, have you?”
“It is all groping in the dark,” was the discouraged answer. “All I am sure of is that he would bury himself out of sight. To be the first of his name to have the finger of suspicion pointed at him, however unjustly ... you’d have to be New England born yourself to know how these things cut to the bone, Harry.”
Something of the same nature he said to Jean Dabney that evening as he was walking home with her from Madame Marchande’s. He had long since told her about the cloud on the Trask name, and of his determination to dispel it; as he made no doubt it could be dispelled if he could trace his father and persuade him to return to New Hampshire, there to fight the good fight of reinstatement with half the wealth of a Colorado gold mine to back him.
“I do hope you will succeed,” said the one who was to the full as sympathetic as Bromley. “You owe it to him to do your very best to find him.”
“To him, and quite as much to myself,” Philip amended decisively. “While the cloud remains, it rests upon all of us who bear the Trask name. Until it is cleared away I can’t ask any right-minded woman to marry me.”
They had reached the bridge over Cherry Creek and had paused to look down upon the damp sands lying dark in the starlight The young woman’s tone was merely argumentative when she said: “Don’t you think that is carrying it rather far?”
“Not as I see it. The name a man gives to his wifeought not to have even a shadow of disgrace upon it. Don’t you believe that?”
“Y-yes, I suppose I do,” was the half-hesitant reply. “Yet that seems frightfully sweeping, when you come to think of it. It seems to shut out all idea of repentance and forgiveness.”
“Take it home,” said Philip shortly. “Would you marry a man who had a bad record, or whose father had been accused of a crime and was still lying under that accusation?”
She was still staring down at the dark sands in the creek channel.
“Since the beginning of time both men and women have been forgiving worse things.”
Never before in their renewed acquaintance had he felt so strongly the difference that a year’s burden of heavy responsibilities courageously taken up and carried had made in the dark-eyed young woman standing beside him. It was only at rare intervals that a flash of the old-time, teasing mockery came to the surface. He told himself that her burden had not only sobered her; it had brought her too crudely in contact with a world of compromises—ethical compromises. He remembered what Bromley had said about the double standard of morals, and the part good women played in maintaining or condoning it, and the recollection brought a bitter taste in his mouth.
“If women like you take that attitude, what is the use of a man’s trying to keep his record clean?” he demanded.
“Dear me! How savagely righteous you can be!” she exclaimed with a little laugh. Then she cleared theair with a plain-spoken declaration that served to increase the aloes taste in his mouth: “I suppose I am like other women. When the time comes—if it ever does come—that I think enough of a man to marry him, I shan’t ask what he has been; only what he is and means to be.”
“That is heroic—but entirely wrong,” he decided magisterially. “My code is stricter than that, and it applies to men and women alike. I mean to be able to give as much as I ask. If I can’t give, I shan’t ask.”
“What terrible spiritual pride!” she commented, laughing again. Then, soberly: “Don’t you know, I shall be truly sorry for the woman you marry.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you don’t know women at all—or yourself. And, besides, you don’t know the meaning of love; the unselfish kind that takes for better or worse. Let’s not talk about such things. We always get lost in the woods when we do. Where shall you go next to look for your father?”
“I haven’t decided. There are some camps in the San Juan that I haven’t been to. Perhaps I shall go down there next.”
They went on across the bridge and presently reached the cottage on the west side. At the gate Philip declined Jean’s invitation to come in. The bitter taste was still with him, and as he walked slowly back to town he was placing Bromley as the figurant upon whom Jean’s tacit defense of the sinners was based. The play-boy’s acceptance by the Dabneys one and all was of the unreserved sort that Bromley seemed to beable to win wherever he went, and it was he who oftenest walked home with Jean when she was kept late in the millinery shop.
Philip assured himself that he wasn’t jealous; he was merely sorry. Jean was much too fine to be wasted upon a man who, by his own confession, had “gone all the gaits.” True, Bromley showed no indications of any desire to return to his wallowing in the mire; but that made no difference: hehadwallowed, and Jean knew it—knew it and was willing to condone. That was the bitter part of it. Did she, in common with other women he had heard of, accept the devil’s maxim that a reformed rake makes the best husband?
And about this business of reform: how deep did it go? Was there ever any such thing as a complete reintegration? Could a man—or a woman—ever fully regain the heights from which the descent had begun? Admitting that Bromley had a heart of gold, as he—Philip—had once characterized him for Jean, wasn’t he at best but a brand snatched from the burning? And though the brand might not spring alight again, wouldn’t there always be the charred scar and the ashes?
Philip climbed the stair in the Alamo Building determined to have a straight talk with Bromley. But the time proved to be unpropitious. The play-boy was dressing to go out—conscripted for a theater party with the Follansbees, as he put it. “Have to be decently chummy, of course,” he grumbled, “but I’d much rather go across the Creek and play parchesi with Mysie and Mary Louise.” Then: “That reminds me of something I’ve been chewing on ever since you went awaythis last time, Phil. Even with the rent of the cottage as low as I dared put it without giving the whole snap away, the load is still too heavy for Jean—much too heavy. Can’t you see it?”
Philip nodded. “I have seen it all along. I don’t know what Madame Marchande is paying Jean, but it stands to reason it isn’t enough to keep a family of four properly alive.”
“You can bet your bottom dollar it isn’t. I’ve been with them enough to note the little pinchings and scrimpings and they make my heart bleed. It is up to us, one or the other of us, to climb into the breach, and I have found the way to do it. There is a spare bed-room in the cottage, and last evening I asked Mrs. Dabney if she would be willing to take a lodger. She was so willing that she cried.”
“Well?” said Philip.
“As I say, it’s up to us—or one of us; the room isn’t big enough for two.”
“Go over there and live with them, you mean?”
“That’s it. And since they were your friends before they were mine, you shall have the first chance at it. But if you don’t go, I shall. They need the money. Think it over, and we’ll thresh it out after I come back.”
For some time after Bromley had gone, Philip sat in his reading chair thrilling to his finger-tips. To live under the same roof with Jean; to be with her daily in the close intimacies of the home life; to be able to help her legitimately in the carrying of her heavy burden until the time should come when, his own filial duty discharged and the Trask name cleared, he mightpersuade her to shift the burden to his shoulders—to his and not to Harry Bromley’s.... There was only one fly in this precious pot of ointment: that saying of Jean’s scarcely an hour old: “I suppose I am like other women. When the time comes—if it ever does come—that I think enough of a man to marry him, I shan’t ask what he has been; only what he is and means to be.” Was she trying to tell him that Bromley was the man?
It was in that hour that the virtuous ego rose to its most self-satisfied height. Jean, wise in the hard school of adversity but innocent as a child in matters touching her soul’s welfare, should be made to see that she must not risk her future happiness by marrying any man who, however lovable, had once shown the weak thread in the fabric of his character and might show it again. It should be his task to make her see it; to convince her that her duty to herself and to her unborn children lay in quite a different direction.
In the levitating exhilaration of this thought the room suddenly became too close and confining to contain him, and he put on his coat and hat and descended to the street. Conscious only of an urge to keep moving, he began to walk aimlessly, through Curtis to Sixteenth Street, past the new opera house now nearing completion, and so on down toward Larimer.
It was in the final block that he saw something that jerked him down out of the clouds and set his feet upon the pavement of the baser realities. In the center of the block was one of the evidences of Denver’s “wide-openness”: a luxurious gambling palace running, like many others in the city of the moment,without let or hindrance from the police. Through the green baize swinging doors, as he was passing, Philip saw an entering figure and recognized it.
“Jim Garth!” he muttered, and hung upon his heel. He knew that Bromley had been “staking” the big miner from time to time, and had himself refused point blank to join in the contributions, arguing that it was not only good money thrown away, but that it was merely giving a man of ungoverned appetites the means of further degrading himself. But now, in an upsurge of righteous responsibility—the legitimate child of the thoughts he had been entertaining—he was moved to lay a restraining hand upon this weak-willed giant who had toiled with him and Bromley through the bitter winter in the Saguache. Before he realized exactly what he meant to do, or how he should go about it, he had pushed the swinging doors apart and was ascending the softly carpeted stair.
At the top of the stair he found a doorkeeper guard, but with a single appraising glance the man let him pass into the room beyond. For a moment he stood just inside the door, blinking and bewildered. The transition from the cool outdoor air and semi-darkness of the street to the brilliant light and smoke-drenched atmosphere of the crowded upper room dazed him. It was the first time he had ever set foot within a gambling “hell,” and it was some little time before he could force himself to begin a slow circuit of the room in search of Garth.
To the soul inspired by predetermined righteousness the scene was a blasting commentary on the depravity of human nature. The haggard, eager, lusting faces ofsome of the players contrasting with the blank immobility of others—the seasoned gamblers; the monotonous click of the chips as some nervous amateur ran them through his fingers; the skirling spin of the roulette balls followed by therat-tat-tatas they came to rest in the red or black.... Philip saw and heard and hastened, with a feeling that if he should linger too long the fell madness of the place might somehow obtain a lodgment in his own brain. He must find Garth quickly and drag him out.
It was at the upper end of the room that he came to a green-covered table with inlaid cards in its center and a double row of players ringing it, the inner row sitting and the outer standing. Upon a high stool at one end sat the “lookout,” a man with the face of a graven image and watchful eyes that marked each bet as it was placed upon the table; and at one side sat the dealer, turning up cards with practiced dexterity out of the nickel-plated box on the table before him.
Philip’s gaze swept the ring of faces until he came to that of the shirt-sleeved dealer, flipping the cards two by two with automatic precision out of the box under his hands. One glance at the clean-cut, deeply lined face with its cold eyes, thin nostrils and lean jaw was all that was needed, and Philip’s heart skipped a beat and stood still. His fruitless search of the past few weeks for his father had ended—here!
Gropingly, and as if his sight had suddenly failed him, he edged his way around the table and touched the shirt-sleeved man on the shoulder. The cold gray eyes were lifted to his for a flitting instant; then the dealer made a sign to his substitute and got up from hisplace, saying quietly to Philip: “I’ve been expecting you. We’ll go up-stairs.”
Wholly speechless, Philip followed his father into the hall, up a stairway and into a room on the third floor where a gas jet, turned low, was burning. John Trask reached up and turned the gas on full.
“Might as well sit down,” he said to his son; and Philip sank into a chair and fought for speech. But the words would not come. The crushing silence was broken at length by the father.
“You’ve been looking for me?”
Philip nodded and moistened his dry lips to say, “Everywhere.”
“I thought most likely you might—after I saw your name in the papers as one of the ‘lucky-strikers.’” Then: “You knew me—without the beard?”
“Of course,” said Philip dully. “You look just the same, only older.”
“I am older; a good deal older than the six years will account for. Tell me about your mother and sisters: you hear from them, don’t you?”
“They are well—and well provided for, now.”
“I suppose they have given me up for dead, haven’t they?”
“I don’t know; I only know that I hadn’t.”
“Maybe it would have been better if you had.”
“No!” Philip broke in desperately. “There is something for you to do—a thing I can help you do, now that I have money.”
“What is it?”
“To go back to New Hampshire with me and fight those liars, who said you stole from the bank, to afinish in the courts; to make the Trask name once more what it has always been—an honest one. I’ll back you, to the last dollar there is in my half of the mine.”
The thin lips of the older man parted in the ghost of a smile.
“Spoken like a good son—or at least a dutiful one,” he said, in a tone that seemed slightly acid. “But why be so anxious about the name?”
“Why?—why?” Philip demanded. “Why shouldn’t I be anxious about it? Isn’t it the name I bear?”
“A name is nothing unless you make it something—but we won’t argue about that. You say you want me to go back to New Hampshire and set things right. It hasn’t occurred to you that there might be a certain difficulty in the way?”
“You mean the fact that you didn’t stay and fight it out at the time?”
The ghost of a smile came again.
“No; I didn’t mean that. I mean the fact that not all of your money could help me to prove what isn’t so. I took the money from the bank; stole it, you’ll say, though I chose to call it squaring accounts with Hiram Witherspoon, who had kept me on starvation wages for years. I took it and got away with it.”
Once again Philip’s heart skipped a beat and stopped, and for a moment the room whirled in dizzying circles for him.
“You—you stole it?” he faltered, in a voice that he scarcely recognized as his own. Then, helplessly: “I—I don’t understand.”
“You wouldn’t,” was the curt reply, “you are toomuch of a Sanborn. They never kick over the traces.” A pause, and then: “You’d never understand in a month of Sundays, Phil. Your grandfather was a hard man and a hypocrite. He never took his hand off my collar until after I was a man grown—bull-necked me into everything I ever did, even to my marriage with your mother, forgetting that I had the same blood in me that he had in him. He lived a double life until he died, and thought nobody knew; but I knew, and I did the same until the time came when I could help myself and bolt—with the other woman.”
“Oh, my God!” Philip groaned, and covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight of the man who sat opposite, calmly indifferent, as it seemed, to the havoc he had wrought.
When Philip looked up it was to say harshly: “Where is the other woman now?”
“She is here—in Denver. She does a turn now and then at the Corinthian when the cards run queer for me.”
Philip staggered to his feet in a desolate rage.
“Then I’m the son of a thief, a gambler and the paramour of a kept woman!” he blazed out madly. “That’s the name I bear, is it?—the reward I get for believing in you, like the damned fool that I was, when everybody else was against you?” He shook his fist in his father’s face. “Do you know what you’ve done to me? You’ve killed my soul—that’s what you’ve done!—blasted my faith in all humankind! Let me get out of here, before I—Oh, God!...”
He choked and clapped his hands to his face, stumbling toward the door. As he fumbled for the knoband twisted it, the chill voice behind him said: “You had no call to chase me, and you needn’t worry about the name. I haven’t called myself John Trask since I left New Hampshire. And one thing more: I’ve put a bullet through a man before this for saying less than you said a minute ago. That’s all, I guess.”
Philip groped his way through the upper passage and down the two flights of stairs to the sidewalk. The reaction from the fit of mad rage set in as he stepped into the open air and he went suddenly weak and nauseated. The Tabor Building was just opposite, and in the alley beside it he saw the light of the saloon at the back. Two minutes later he had staggered across the street, up the alley and into the lighted bar-room, which proved to be momentarily empty of other patrons. “Whiskey!” he gasped, leaning against the bar. “I’m sick!”
The bartender set out the bottle and a glass of water, and spun the empty whiskey glass along the polished mahogany. With a hand that was shaking as if with palsy, Philip tilted the bottle, poured himself a drink that ignored the miniature pig etched in the side of the glass with the motto, “Don’t drown the hog,” and gulped it down. The neat liquor was like a draft of liquid fire to his unaccustomed palate and throat, and he choked and strangled until the bartender reached over and put the glass of water into his hand with a grinning comment: “Guess you hain’t got the knack yet o’ takin’ it straight, son. Wash ’er down with a chaser o’ water.”
With his throat still afire, Philip took to the streets. Since the huge drink he had just swallowed was thefirst he had ever taken, its intoxicating effect was almost instantaneous. Before he had walked half a dozen blocks his brain was spinning and he fancied he was treading upon thin air. From that time on, consciousness faded little by little; all he knew was that he was walking, walking endlessly, sometimes through streets that seemed dimly familiar, at other times with all the surroundings singularly strange.
Finally he found himself climbing what he took to be the steps of the Alamo Building to his rooms, drenched and permeated now with an overpowering desire to sleep. In some odd way the steps did not seem quite right; there were not enough of them. And there was a lighted door at the top which was opened for him before he could reach for the knob. It was at this conjuncture that reasoning consciousness forsook him completely. He had a vague impression that somebody—Bromley it would be, of course,—was leading him somewhere; that his feet, from being so lately shod with wings, had become unaccountably leaden; that there were more steps to be climbed; and after that, the oblivion of a sleep profound and trance-like.
When he awoke he found himself lying, fully clothed, upon a bed in a strange room. The window shades were drawn, but the morning sun was shining upon them. On the edge of the bed, with her single garment slipping over one shoulder, sat a girl with carmined lips and pencilled eyebrows; she was laughing at him and saying: “Had a good sleep, honey?” adding: “You certainly had a lovely jag on last night when you turned up here. Did somebody dope you?”
Philip leaped up and slewed himself around to sit beside the strange girl. The quick movement set a trip-hammer pounding in his head, and he had to wince and press his temples and wait a minute before he could master the throbbing pain and say, “Where am I?”
“As if you didn’t know!” she gibed. “You sure had a skinful, but I guess you still knew enough to come where you’d be took care of. Here’s your pocketbook. Wonder somebody didn’t nip it off you before you got here.”
Slowly he began to realize where he was.
“Are you trying to tell me that I’ve been here all night, with you?”
“Oh, no; not with me; not any; just with yourself. A cannon wouldn’t ’ve waked you after we got you up-stairs.”
“What made you take me in?”
The girl laughed again and pointed at the pocketbook in his hands.
“That, and your good clothes. The madam said she knew you wasn’t no dead-beat.”
Soberly he took a bank-note from the well-stuffed pocketbook and gave it to her.
“Is that enough?” he asked. “I’m new to this sort of thing.”
The girl flung her arms around his neck and kissed him.
“You’re a dandy—a prince!” she said; and as he staggered to his feet and reached for his hat: “Have you got to go, right away? If you’ll wait, I’ll dig you up a cup of coffee for a bracer.”
“No; I’ll go.”
“All right; I’ll show you the way out. There ain’t nobody else up in the house yet. It’s early.”
She ran down the stair ahead of him and snapped the night latch on the front door to let him out. As he passed her she patted him softly on the shoulder. “Good-by, honey, dear. You’ll come back again, won’t you? And next time, for Pete’s sake, don’t get so parboiled that you won’t know me.”
When he reached the sidewalk he turned to look back at the place. He knew the house. It was one that Middleton had pointed out to him a year in the past as one of the few places of the sort where, as the fat-faced tonnage clerk had phrased it, “a man needn’t carry a burglar-proof safe with him to be sure of finding his wallet when he wakes up in the morning.”
Philip looked at his watch. It had run down and he swore at it under his breath. The aftermath of the single gluttonous drink was still with him in the shape of a parched throat, a dry tongue, a fiercely aching head and a set of jangled nerves. At first, he thought he would go to his rooms and take a cold bath; but after he had gone a block or two in that direction he changed his mind and once more sought the saloon in the rear of the Tabor Building. The night bartender was still on duty and he grinned when Philip came in.
“Want a little of the hair o’ the dog that bit you, I reckon?” he said, setting out the bottle and glasses.
Philip poured a drink, a small one, this time, and since the mere smell of the liquor gagged him, he held his nose as he drank. The stimulant steadied the twittering nerves; and it did more—it cleared his brainand brought the desolating revelation of the night back with a vividness that hurt like the stabbing of needles. He set his watch by the bar-room clock. As the girl in the other street had said, it was quite early. Bromley would not be up yet. Suddenly it came to him that he could not face Bromley; not yet, at any rate. He must eat breakfast first; and he went around to Charpiot’s for the meal.
The breakfast, a light one, for his stomach was still in revolt, was hastily despatched; and as he was leaving the table the play-boy came in.
“Hello, there!” he exclaimed. “You are still in town? I looked into your room and saw your bed hadn’t been slept in, so I concluded you’d taken a night train to somewhere.”
“No,” Philip replied soberly; “I haven’t been out of town.”
“Well, don’t rush off. Sit down and be neighborly while I get a bite of breakfast.”
“No,” Philip repeated, “I’ve got to go.” Then he turned back and forced himself to look his partner in the eyes. “That matter we were talking about last night before you went to the theater: I’m not going to take that room at the Dabneys’. You are the one to go there.”
The play-boy looked his surprise.
“Why—what’s the matter with you, Phil? When I spoke of it last night, I thought you looked tickled purple.”
“Last night was last night, and this morning is another day. Say that I don’t care to give up the stuffy luxuries of the apartment in the Alamo, if you like.Anyway, I’m not going to move; that is all there is to it.”
And with this curt refusal he turned his back upon his partner and left the dining-room.