XX
Beinggratefully appreciative of a good bed after a night and a day in a narrow-gauge Pullman, Bromley slept late on the morning following his return to Denver; and when he put in an appearance in the cottage dining-room he found that the family had already breakfasted and Jean had gone to her work. Sixteen-year-old Mysie, housewifely and starry-eyed, was the only member of the household visible, and it was she who poured his coffee and made the toast.
“Did I disturb you folks when I came in last night?” he asked.
“Jeanie said she heard you; but nothing ever wakes me. I’m the sleepy-head of the family. Are your eggs cooked right?”
“How could they be otherwise if you cooked them?” said the play-boy gallantly. He liked to make Mysie talk. More than either of her sisters she retained the soft Southern speech with its submerged “r’s” and lingering vowels. “Where is Mary Louise this fine morning?”
“She and Mummie have gone marketing while it is cool. Shan’t I toast you another slice?”
Bromley let his eyes rest for a moment upon the fresh, fair young face opposite. The elder of the two younger girls was a sharp contrast to Jean, whose dark hair and eyes and warm skin were inheritances fromher far-away French ancestry. As an artist’s model Mysie Dabney might have posed for an idealized study of blushing innocence awakening, of sweet girlhood poising for the flight into womanhood.
“You spoil me utterly,” he said, smiling into the wide-open, dewy eyes. Then: “I wonder if you are old enough to let me ask you a horribly improper question?”
“Improper? Why, Uncle Harry, I don’t believe you could be improper if you should try ever so hard!”
Bromley winced at the “Uncle Harry,” though both of the younger girls had called him that almost from the beginning.
“I’m going to make a bargain with you,” he said lightly. “When is your birthday?”
“Next Sunday.”
“All right; there is a pretty birthday gift coming to you next Sunday if you will promise, after that day, to stop calling me ‘uncle.’”
The wide-open eyes opened still wider.
“Why—I thought you liked it!”
“I do—from Mary Louise; from little girls generally. But when you say it, it makes me feel as though my teeth were coming loose and my hair falling out—old and decrepit, you know.”
“I wish you’d listen!” she laughed. “What do you want me to call you—after next Sunday?—‘Misteh Bromley?’”
“Oh, dear me, no; that is ever so much worse! Couldn’t you make it just plain ‘Harry,’ without the ‘uncle’?”
He saw a faint wave of color rising to the fair neckand cheeks, and the down-dropped eyes were no longer those of a child.
“I—I’ll try,” she promised; then, as one stepping lightly from ground tremulous to ground firm: “What is the improper question that isn’t going to be improper?”
“It is about Jean, and if you don’t want to answer it you can just make a face at me and tell me it is none of my blessed business. Does Jean—do you think she cares especially about—er—Philip?”
Again the dewy eyes were downcast. “Jeanie doesn’t talk ve’y much about herself; I reckon—I mean, I think you know that. Sometimes I surmise she cares a heap about him, and sometimes I just don’t know.” Then with a naïveté which stepped well back into childhood: “I don’t think they’d be ve’y happy together; do you?”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know; maybe it’s just because Mr. Philip is so sort of don’t-touch-me good; sort of Yankee-good, ain’t—isn’t it?”
Since the Philip of the present moment was neither “Yankee-good” nor any other kind, Bromley’s reply to the innocent question was strictly aphoristic.
“When you grow up to be a woman, Mysie, you will know that men are never any too good,” he returned gravely; at which, declining a second cup of coffee, he went away before he should be tempted to say more.
Turning up at Madame Marchande’s at noon, he found that Jean had been given a half-holiday, on account of the slack midsummer season, and had gonehome. After he thought he had given her time enough to eat her luncheon, he hired a horse and buggy for the afternoon and drove over to the cottage in West Denver.
“Get your things on and come along with me for a ride,” he invited, when Jean came out to pet the little white mare from the livery stable. “I want to have a talk with you.”
“Is it about Philip?” she asked; and when he made the sign of assent, she went in to get her coat and hat.
For the time it took the smart little mare to whisk them across the bridge over the Platte, and up to the farther heights on the north side overlooking the final undulations of the great plain rolling up in swelling land waves to break against Castle Rock and Table Mountain, the driving of the spirited little horse gave Bromley an excuse for postponing the thankless task he had set himself. On the watershed height between the Platte and Clear Creek, in sight of the great house that “Brick” Pomeroy had built, or had begun to build, in the flush times of the Clear Creek mining boom, there was a tiny lake, tree-shadowed, and on its shore he drove in among the cottonwoods and got out and hitched the mare.
“I’ve been wanting to show you this glorious view,” he said, as he helped his companion out of the high, side-bar buggy. “Is there anything to match it in Mississippi?”
She shook her head. “I think there is nothing like it anywhere else in the wide world.”
Bromley took the lap-robe from the buggy and spread it under one of the trees, and for a little timethey sat quietly in the face of the magnificent sweep of mountain grandeurs stretching from Long’s Peak on the north around to the dim blue bulk of Pike’s on the south. It was the young woman who broke the spell. “You said you wanted to talk to me about Philip,” she reminded him. “Did you find him?”
“No. He left Leadville about the same time that I started from Denver. Our trains passed in the night.”
“Then he is in Denver now?”
“Yes.”
Silence for a time, and then: “You needn’t be afraid to tell me. I’m not a child.”
“All right; I’ll tell you what little there is to tell. I got in late and found him in the rooms in the Alamo. He was asleep in a chair when I went in, but he woke up after a while and talked to me. Drew hadn’t exaggerated any, whatsoever. Phil has hit the bottom, good and hard.”
“He—he is drinking?”
“It is everything in the calendar, I guess—from what he said.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“No; he said that part of it was a shut door. But he isn’t charging it up to the ‘why,’ whatever that may be; he is calling it by its right name—his morbid self-righteousness and weakness.”
“He isn’t weak,” she asserted quickly. “He may say he is, but he isn’t.”
“I am merely telling you what he said. He was bitter about it at first; called himself all sorts of hard names—whited sepulchre and the like; but he softeneddown a bit before I left. What I am most afraid of now is the reaction which is bound to come.”
“How do you mean?”
Bromley stole a look aside to see how she was taking it. Her gaze was fixed upon the distant mountain skyline and there was nothing to indicate that she was moved by any emotion deeper than a friendly concern for the stumbler.
“We both know Philip pretty well,” he prefaced. “When he quits coruscating—and I think he has reached that point already—he will find himself in a valley of humiliation too deep to climb out of; or he will think it is. So he won’t try to climb; he will merely try to expiate. And that pit is likely to be as deep and as mucky as any other.”
“There was no mention made of his father?”
“No. But I am quite ready to accept your guess; that Philip found his father somewhere—probably that Monday night; and that he didn’t find what he had hoped to find.”
“You mean he may have found that his father was really a—a—that hedidtake the bank’s money?”
“Yes, that’s it. From what Philip has told me I have gathered that he was almost, or quite, alone in his belief in his father’s innocence. If it has turned out the other way, that would account for everything that has happened. Phil would feel that he shared the disgrace.”
Another little interval of silence, and at its end: “What will you do, Harry?”
“I can’t do anything; he made that perfectly plain. The most I could get out of him was a promise thathe wouldn’t try to break with me. It is just as you said Saturday at luncheon: he isn’t going to let anybody help him.”
“No; I knew he wouldn’t. But you must try to keep hold of him.”
“You may be sure I shall do that. You know how much I owe to him—and to you.”
“You don’t owe me anything at all.”
“Oh, yes, I do. Philip has told me, you know.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you were the one who prompted him to take me with him on the prospecting trip a year ago. I was a down-and-out at that time; he knew it and you knew it.”
She looked up with the light in the dark eyes that he was never quite able to read or to fathom.
“We were both right: you have proved it. Philip said to me once that whatever you had done, you had kept your soul clean.”
“He did, eh? He said the same thing to me, no longer ago than last night. That’s all either of you know about it. A year ago I wasn’t worth the powder it would have taken to blow me up, Jean; that is the plain, unvarnished fact. I’m not right sure that I am any better now; not in Philip’s definition of goodness. Thanks to you and to him, I’ve got a pot of money; and money brings responsibility; and responsibility bespeaks some little effort at decent living. There you have it in a nutshell.”
“I know,” she smiled; “I have heard you talk before.” Then: “You spoke just now of Philip’s definition of goodness. Don’t you think it is the right one?”
“Oh, yes; I suppose it is, when you come right down to the foundation of things. The only danger is that it may breed a prickly lot of spiritual pride. That was the chief thing that was the matter with Phil—a pride that made him not only hate the sin, but despise the sinner. The pride is gone now, and in going it has taken some of the righteous hardness along with it, which, you might say, is all to the good. I don’t believe he will ever set himself up in judgment again upon the poor sinners—which is something gained, isn’t it?”
“Yes; but the price he is paying is terribly high.”
“Sure it is. Yet I’m not losing hope. There are certain mazes in this thing we call life out of which a man has to grope his own way, if he can. There is good stuff in Phil—royally good stuff at bottom, as we both know. If—in the reaction—he doesn’t do something everlastingly to smash his whole future——”
She nodded slowly. “That is the greatest danger; that he will cut himself off from every chance of getting back. There are two Denvers over there,”—with a glance backward at the city of the plain lying map-like under the afternoon sun. “I think you know what I mean.”
“I do. There are good doors that are slow to open to the wayfarer, and a lot of bad ones that are always open. At the present moment Philip is one of the many drifters. But I am still betting on him.”
“If we only knew a little more about it,” she offered musingly. “If we could find out where he went that Monday evening after you left him——”
He took her up quickly.
“You’d like to have me try to run the thing down, Jean?”
“I suppose we have no right to pry. And yet, if we knew——”
“I understand. If we can place the father, we shall at least know how bad things are, and if they are or are not altogether past mending. I’ll do my best. Anything else suggest itself?”
“You will not lose sight of Philip. He needs your friendship now more than ever.”
“I’ll do my best there, too. But in his present frame of mind it is going to be a man-sized job to brother him, even a little. He thinks he has put himself beyond the pale—says so in so many words. Another man might say some such thing in a morning-after gust of remorse; but he means it.”
“That is just it,” she said sorrowfully. “He is going to punish himself a great deal more savagely than—than he needs to. That is the part of his pride that isn’t dead yet. Shall we go back now? If you don’t mind, I—I think I’d like to go home.”
“Kittie will take you there as fast as we’ll let her,” said Bromley cheerfully; and the little white mare confirmed the promise at a pace that made her driver wonder how she had ever come to be degraded to hack service in a livery string. As he was cutting the buggy at the cottage gate, Jean laid a hand on his arm.
“Please don’t say anything to Mummie or the girls,” she begged.
“Not a word,” he agreed; and then: “You mustn’t let it hit you too hard, Jeanie.”
“I’ll try not to. But you and Philip have been sogood to us; and it seems such a pity!—so wretchedly unnecessary.”
“It isn’t always given to us poor blind mortals to distinguish between what is necessary and what isn’t,” he countered comfortingly. And with this restating of a truth which was hoary with age long before he was born, he drove away, wiping his brow and muttering under his breath. “Lord! I’m glad that much of it is over, anyway. She never gave me a glimpse at that stabbed little heart of hers, but I know how it hurt, just the same.” Then, apostrophizing the offender: “Phil, old boy, if you ever take a tumble to yourself and realize what you’ve done, you’ll find you’ve got something perilously resembling murder to answer for ... you certainly will, for a fact!”