XVII
Passingout through the hotel office with one thought effacing all others, namely, that companionship of any sort was not to be endured, Philip, a prey to the instinctive urge that drives the wounded animal to seek a hiding place, pulled his hat over his eyes, signalled to a passing cab and got in, telling the driver to take him to the Alamo Building.
Reaching his rooms, he scribbled a note for Bromley, merely saying that he was going out of town, filled a travelling-bag, jamming things into it with little regard for long-established habits of care and orderliness, and was presently on his way to the Union Depot, urging the cab driver to haste and still more haste. By a margin of seconds he caught the South Park train for Leadville; and as the short string of top-heavy, narrow-gauge cars went swaying and lurching out over the switches in the West Denver yard, he was choosing an isolated seat in the chair-car where he could settle himself to look the catastrophic revelation of the night fairly in the face.
With the scene of the revelation actually withdrawing into the distance, a vast incredulity seized him. Could it be possible that he had grown up in daily association with his father without so much as suspecting the existence of the iron-hard, desperate underman biding its time beneath an exterior so like that of othermen in his walk of life as to be wholly unremarkable? It seemed fantastically unbelievable. Yet, in looking back upon the conventional New England home life he saw how it might be so.
The atmosphere of the home, as he had always known it, had been one of silent restraint, and there had been nothing like man-to-man comradeship between his father and himself. Not that this was at all singular. He had known many other households in the homeland in which the same spirit of reticence and aloofness, the same repression of all the emotions, were the natural order of things. The attitude was ingrained in the bone and blood; a heritage which, as he now realized, was his and his forebears’; the bequeathing of the stern stock which had fled from tyranny in England only to set up a repressive tyranny of its own in the new land beyond the sea.
But such reflections as these did not serve to lessen the completeness, the crushing completeness, of the blow that had fallen. Where was now that righteous pride of race he had paraded before Jean Dabney, the boast of honest and upright ancestors he had so confidently made?—he, the son of a thief, a gambler, a hardened breaker of the laws of God and man. Of what use to him now was the growing hoard of gold in the Denver bank, since it could never buy back that which was irretrievably lost? How could he go on living from day to day with the knowledge that the accident of any day might give some sensation-mongering newspaper reporter the chance to write up Lucky-strike Trask of the “Little Jean” as the son of a well-known local faro-dealer and sporting man? Inhis mind’s eye he could visualize the mocking headlines, and a wave of impotent rage, the agony of a tortured ego, swept over him.
He had no desire to eat when the train halted at the midday dinner station and did not leave his place in the chair-car. Later, through the long afternoon, he looked out, with eyes that saw without perceiving, upon the passing panorama of canyon cliffs and forested mountain slopes, of undulating distances in the South Park and the uplifted peaks of the Mosquito Range, deep in the misery of his wounding; aghast at the prospect of the future. It was with an added degree of wretchedness that he realized that his love for Jean Dabney, restrained and calmly calculated hitherto, seemed to have been set free in the chaotic crash of things, blazing up in passionate intensity now that its object was, as he told himself bitterly, snatched out of reach. That he could never go to her with the story of his humiliating discovery was the first sickening conclusion that had burned itself into his consciousness; and now this was followed by the appalling after-conclusion that he could not go to her at all; that the discovery in the gambling hell had cut him off at once and irrevocably from all association with her.
It was only natural that the thought of his own lapse, the fact that he had taken his first drink and in the drunkenness of it had spent the night in a brothel, seemed of small account in the general wreck. With the family honor already dragged so deeply in the mire of disgrace and criminality, what he might or might not do made little difference one way or the other. Not that he cherished as yet any desperate or boyishdetermination to take a fool’s revenge by plunging into dissipation. There was only a dull indifference. Pride was dead and the barriers of self-control had been broken down, but life still had to be lived, in some fashion.
Upon arriving in Leadville he had himself driven to the hotel where he and Bromley had put up after they had come out of the mountains with Drew in the spring. Still having no desire to eat, he tried to smoke; and when the pipe, on an empty stomach, nauseated him, he went to the bar and called for a drink. As in the morning, the swallow or two of whiskey wrought a miracle and he sought the dining-room and ate a hearty meal. Afterward, with a mild cigar that had none of the dizzying effects of the empty-stomach pipe, he sat in the lobby, and it was there that Drew ran across him.
“Back with us again, are you?” was the genial promoter’s greeting as he drew up a chair and planted himself in it for his own after-dinner smoke. “When did you reach?”
“Just an hour or so ago,” Philip answered, surprised to find himself able to tolerate and even to welcome the companionship of the older man. “I came up on the South Park day train.”
“And how is Henry Wigglesworth? Still making a quiet joke of the world at large?”
“Harry is all right. Good luck hasn’t spoiled him, as I was afraid it might.”
“Inclined to be a little wild, was he?” Drew remarked.
“When I first met him, yes. And I was foolishenough to think that I had to brother him. Queer what notions a man gets into his head, sometimes.”
Though he did not look aside, he knew that Drew was regarding him curiously.
“You come of brothering stock, don’t you, Trask?”
“At one time I was ass enough to think so. That was another of the queer notions. How is the ‘Little Jean’ coming along?”
“Splendidly. The vein values are increasing as we drive in on the lode. We are making another clean-up from the plates this week, and you’ll get a dividend that will warm the cockles of your heart.”
“Money,” said Philip half contemptuously. “When you don’t have it, it’s the most desirable thing in the world. And when you get it——” he broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished.
The promoter smiled. “Money is only a means to an end, of course. If it is not too personal a question, what are you doing with yours?”
“Nothing, as yet. Bromley is investing his share here and there, setting me a good example. But I haven’t followed it.”
From that the talk went back to the gulch on the western slope, and Drew told how the shut-in valley had been overrun by prospectors as soon as the snow was off. A few small leads had been discovered higher up the gulch, but nothing at all comparable with the “Little Jean.” Reference to the hard winter the discoverers of the “Little Jean” had put in led Drew to ask about Garth; and the mention of the big miner’s name stabbingly reminded Philip of the chanceincident in which Garth had figured, and which had led up to the blotting out of all recollection of him.
“Garth is in Denver; or he was yesterday,” he replied.
“Pity about Jim,” said the promoter. “At bottom he’s a man, right; but he can’t let liquor and the paste-boards alone. He has been moderately well-fixed at least three times, to my certain knowledge, and each time he has blown it all; gambled it and given it away—or so much of it as he didn’t pass across the bar.”
Philip was conscious of a curious little shock when he realized that this cataloguing of Garth’s weaknesses now stirred no resentful or condemnatory emotion in him.
“Perhaps that is the way in which he gets the most out of life,” he offered colorlessly. “There is no accounting for the difference in tastes.”
“No; but Big Jim is really worth saving, if somebody would take the trouble,” Drew put in, adding: “I don’t suppose anybody has ever cared enough for him to try to brace him up—at least, nobody since his wife died.”
“He was married?” Philip queried. “I worked beside him all winter and never knew that.”
“It was one of those cases you read about—and seldom see in real life,” Drew went on reminiscently. “It happened in one of the intervals when Jim was on top, financially. A gambler, whose name I have forgotten, brought a girl here from the East—a ‘chippy,’ I suppose you’d call her—abused her shamefully, made her support him for a time and then abandoned her. Jim heard about it, and after marrying the girl off-hand,hunted up the gambler and shot him within an inch of his life. The girl turned out to be a jewel as Jim’s wife; stuck to him through thick and thin, and actually got him to stop drinking and gambling. Then the altitude, and the hard life she had lived before she met Jim, grabbed her and she died. Naturally, poor old Jim went all to pieces again.”
“Naturally,” Philip agreed. His eyes were narrowed and he was conscious of a curious deadening of the heart. The story of Garth’s tragedy did not move him as it would have moved him no longer ago than yesterday. Instead, he was asking himself why Garth shouldn’t take to drink and dissipation to drown his grief? For that matter, why shouldn’t any man, if he happened to lean that way?
Drew looked at his watch and rose.
“I have an appointment that I was about to forget,” he said. “Intending to stop over with us for a while?”
“Perhaps. I haven’t made any plans.”
“All right; we’ll get together again. While you are here, my office is at your disposal, of course. Come around and make it your loafing place.”
After Drew had left him, Philip lighted another of the mild cigars and took to the streets, walking until he was sodden with weariness. Again and again the meager details of Garth’s tragedy passed themselves in review. So the big miner had once made his little gesture of righteousness by marrying a woman of the class for which the world has no place of repentance, had he? That was fine! How crassly he had misjudged Garth. Bromley’s insight had been better.Was the play-boy’s assumption that there was no hard-and-fast line to be drawn between the sheep and the goats—that there was good in the worst and bad in the best—the right one, after all?
Philip’s thoughts went back to the scene of the early morning when he had awakened to find a girl with pencilled eyebrows and painted lips sitting on the edge of his bed in the strange room. “Scum of the earth,” he had been calling her and her kind; and yet she, and her still more degraded house mistress, had taken him in and cared for him, and had not robbed him and turned him helpless into the street, as they might have done. He had a vivid picture of the girl sitting there and laughing at him as he opened his eyes. She was pretty, in a way, and her talk and manner had given him the impression of recklessness and misguiding rather than hardness. Was she one of these who are more sinned against than sinning? He wondered.
Tired out finally, he returned to the hotel and went to bed. In the life which was already withdrawing into a far-away past he had always been able to fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow; but now, though it was past midnight and he was weary to utter exhaustion, sleep would not come. Over and over the harrowing details of the discovery of his father and the scene in the upper room over the gambling den rehearsed themselves as he tossed and tumbled and tried to banish them; and at last, in sheer desperation, he got up and dressed and went down to the lobby floor. The bar-room was closed, and he appealed to the night clerk, money in hand.
“I’m sick and can’t sleep,” he said. “Couldn’t youbreak in back there and get me a drink? I don’t want to take to the streets at this time of night.”
The clerk smiled knowingly. “Got a hang-over, have you? I guess I can fix you.” He disappeared, to return presently with a pint bottle of whiskey. “Think that will do the business for you?” he asked.
“Yes; thanks. Don’t bother about the change.”
Once more in his room, he slipped out of his clothes, took a stiff drink, and stretched himself upon the bed. In a little time the curious and altogether pleasant feeling of levitation came and he floated off through a spacious region of dreams which grew vaguer and vaguer until they vanished in an abyss of forgetfulness.