XXIII
Havingseen the Follansbees and Stephen Drew off for their hotel, Bromley lingered on the broad station-plaza platform which served as a hack stand, knowing that Philip must pass this way on his return up-town. When Philip appeared at last, not through the station archway, but at the foot of the stair leading down from the offices on the second floor, the play-boy caught step with him.
“I thought you’d show up if I waited long enough,” he began. Then, taking a leaf out of Philip’s own book of directness: “Who was the girl?”
Philip’s smile was soberly tolerant. “So you were looking on, were you? What did you see?”
“I saw you kiss her and put her on the train.”
“Well?”
“You mean it’s none of my business? I suppose it isn’t. But I did hope you’d stop short of the women, Phil.”
“Why should I?”
“For one reason, if for no other. You’ve been in love with Jean; though you may think you are not, you are still in love with her. How can you——”
Another man might have said the few words which would have made all clear. But Philip Trask was of those who rub salt into their own wounds and find a certain gruesome satisfaction in the process.
“You can’t think any worse of me than I think of myself, Harry. As for Jean ... that is all over and done with, as I told you in the beginning. The stars are not more completely out of my reach, now.”
Bromley gave it up, and they walked on up-town in silence until the Curtis Street corner was reached.
“Not going any farther my way?” Bromley inquired, pausing before he turned westward.
The drifter’s laugh was brittle. “No. Your day is ended, but mine is just fairly beginning. Good-night.”
It was on the day following this evening episode that Bromley, dropping into Charpiot’s for luncheon, found himself seated at a table for two with Reddick. For a time the talk was of mines and mining, and the opening of the new metal and coal fields in the Gunnison country, toward which two railroads were hastily extending their lines to accommodate the anticipated rush to the new district.
“More flotsam and jetsam to be caught later in our own little back-wash here in Denver,” was Reddick’s cynical prophecy; “and more crooks and tinhorns and highfliers to keep ’em company. I’m getting mighty sick of all this high-keyed razzle-dazzle and excitement, Harry. The pace is too swift for little Reddy. I don’t suppose I had taken half a dozen drinks in my life until after I came out here; and now I am getting to be a walking whiskey-barrel.”
Bromley smiled. “Why don’t you cut it out?” he asked.
“Cut it out? I can’t—not in my business. I’ll give you a sample. With the Tabor Opera House about to open, theatrical companies are beginning to book thecircuit—Denver, the Springs, Pueblo and Leadville—and, of course, I try to get a share of the haul for my railroad. This morning I went up to the Opera House office to see one of the troupe managers, and the first thing he did was to push the wall button for a round of drinks. I’d had three or four already with other pie-eyed patrons of the company, and when the bar-boy came, I ordered a plain seltzer. ‘Whatzzat?’ shouts the man from New York. ‘You’ll drink with me, or you don’t carry us a mile over your damn’ railroad, see?’ It made me so hot that I told him to go to hell, and walked out—and I lose the business.”
“It is demoralizing, I grant you,” said Bromley. “But Denver—all Colorado, for that matter—is merely in the effervescent stage; it will settle down, after a while.”
“Not until after it has beautifully spoiled a lot of us fellows who would have been at least half-way decent, normally. Just in my limited little circle I can point you to dozens of young fellows who never had any leanings toward the toboggan till they came West, but they are on it now. I’m one of ’em, and your partner’s another; only, as I told him last night, he can still be a pretty good sort of devil when the fit strikes him.”
“Last night?” echoed the play-boy. “What, in particular, happened last night?”
Briefly but succinctly Reddick told the story of the assault upon the Goguette stronghold and its outcome.
“Ah!” said Bromley at the finish; “I’m mighty glad you told me that, Reddick. I saw him putting the girl on the train and was by way of doing him a rank injustice. Afterward, I offered him his chance to tellme about it, but of course he wouldn’t take it; he isn’t built that way.”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Harry. In some ways, Phil is as queer as they make ’em. He has developed into an all-night rounder, all right; don’t make any mistake about that; but in spots he is as soft nowadays as he used to be high-headed and flinty when I first knew him a year ago. They tell me he has his hand in his pocket for the down-and-out every minute of the day. I’d like to know what hit him. It must have been something pretty solid to give him the jolt he’s had.”
“It was,” Bromley confirmed; but he added nothing to the bare admission.
“Some girl go back on him?”
“No; for a man of his make-up it was something even worse than that. I can’t tell you what it was, because, thus far, it is his own secret—or he believes it is.”
“I’ve quit,” said the passenger agent; and so the subject died.
After this explanation of the girl-at-the-train incident, Bromley breathed freer; and though he saw less and less of Philip as time passed, he continued to hope for the best, the hope founding itself upon nothing better, however, than an illogical theory of reactions good, bad and indifferent—swings of the pendulum, he called them. When Philip should see the ghastly emptiness of the life he was living—and he was too intelligent not to see it, in time—he would pick himself up out of the mire into which the blow to his pridehad buffeted him and be the better and broader man for the humbling experience.
Something of this confidence the play-boy tried to pass on to Jean; and he could see that while she caught at it eagerly there was always a shadow in the dark eyes when Philip was mentioned. Bromley knew what was behind the shadow: it was the fear that she had once put into words—that the prisoner of reproach would end by taking some step which could never be retraced—that would put him once for all beyond the hope of redemption and reinstatement. Wise in his generation, the play-boy knew that there might be such a step; knew, also, that a man of Philip’s temper and resolution would be precisely the one to take it if the expiatory urge should drive him far enough and hard enough.
In these talks with Jean his heart went soft with pity for her. It was plain enough now that she had let herself go as far on the road to love for Philip as Philip’s prideful self-repression had permitted her to go; and at such times he would have given anything he possessed to be able to comfort her. So far as he might, with the Eugenia Follansbee entanglement still tacitly binding him, he did what he could. On the opening night at the new opera house, upon the building and furnishing of which a princely fortune had been lavished, he had all the Dabneys as his guests; and thereafter, whenever he could persuade Jean to go out, he took her and Mysie.
It was on one of these theater nights, when Mysie, now in her final year in the University preparatory school, and with lessons to prepare for the next day,had failed him, that he discovered that his and Jean’s seats were in the same row with those of Stephen Drew, the judge and his wife and Eugenia. Since a guilty conscience needs no accuser, he was not slow to interpret Eugenia’s appraisive scrutiny of his companion during theentr’actes; and when, in the dispersal after the play, despite his best efforts to dodge the Follansbee party in the outgoing crush, he found himself and Jean jammed with Drew and Eugenia in the aisle, he was not wholly unprepared for what followed.
“Introduce me,” was the whispered command from the statuesque beauty upon Drew’s arm; and he obeyed, with such formality as the informal conditions would sanction. Then: “Harry has been neglecting us shamefully of late, Miss Dabney. Can’t you persuade him to be a little more neighborly with his old friends?”
Bromley scarcely heard Jean’s murmured reply. He made sure that the beauty’s conventional protest and query were merely another command, and one which he dare not ignore. Eugenia meant to have it out with him. There was to be no more dallying and delaying.
With this discomforting thought in his mind the short walk over to West Denver was begun in silence; and it might have so continued and ended if Jean had not opened the floodgates by asking a simple and most natural question.
“Who is Miss Follansbee, Harry?”
It struck him as a piece of disloyalty of a sort that he had never mentioned the Follansbees by name to her, though he had often spoken of his friends from Philadelphia.
“What did you think of her?” he evaded.
“I think she is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
“Wouldn’t you think there was something lacking in a man who couldn’t fall in love with her at sight?”
“Oh, that doesn’t necessarily follow,” was the cool-voiced rejoinder. “Love won’t always go where it is sent—or come when it is called.”
It all came out then; the story of the family alliance and agreement, planned while he and Eugenia were mere babes in arms; its tacit acceptance by both as they grew up; his own abnormal and inexcusable distaste for it and rebellion against it—an attitude which, he had every reason to believe, was not shared by Eugenia.
“You know something about my ratty life in the past, Jean,” he went on. “While I was doing my best to break all of the Ten Commandments, the thing fell down of its own weight, naturally. I wasn’t an ‘eligible,’ even in society’s rather loose interpretation of the word. But now——”
“But now you are no longer living that kind of a life, and you are a rich man,” she finished for him. “You are going to marry her?”
“It is up to me, isn’t it?”
“No. I should say a thousand times, no.”
“Why isn’t it?”
“Because you couldn’t do her a greater wrong than by marrying her when you don’t love her.”
“Don’t you think I could make her happy?”
“I think you could make any woman happy, in a way, if you tried. But that isn’t the question. Nodoubt there are many marriages made without love, of the kind we are talking about, on either side; and they are happy, after a fashion. But where there is love on one side and only consent on the other ... I can’t conceive of anything more dreadful for the loving one.”
“Perhaps you are right. Just the same, I don’t see where you get all this wisdom of the ages, Jean. I’ve often wondered if there were ever a wall of sophistry built so thick that you couldn’t see through it at a glance.”
“I have lived a long time in the past year, Harry; you know that,” she answered, with a little catch in her voice; and then she began to talk about the play they had just sat through, and there were no more confidences.
Dutifully obeying the command concealed under the conventional protest and query, Bromley made a telephone appointment with Eugenia, and at the proper calling hour the following afternoon presented himself at the furnished house in Champa Street taken for the season by the Follansbees. It was the statuesque beauty herself who admitted him and led the way to the darkened drawing-room, and her first question, when they were alone together, was disconcertingly direct.
“This Miss Dabney I met last night, Harry: is she the daughter of the widow you are boarding with in West Denver?”
“One of three daughters; the others are schoolgirls. Jean is the man of the family; she is a hat-trimmer in Madame Marchande’s.” It took a good deal to shakethe play-boy’s easy confidence in himself, but he had a feeling that if he gave the grim demon of consternation the merest shadow of an opening, he would be lost.
“She is a very pretty girl; much too pretty to be wearing out her life in a millinery shop, don’t you think?”
“I do,” he asserted frankly. “But there seems to be no present help for it.”
“Isn’t there? When I saw her with you last night, I was—I was——”
Coming in out of the bright sunlight, Bromley had been half blind in the cool, darkened room. But now that his eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom he saw that his lovely questioner had stopped in curious embarrassment. Her eyes were downcast and she was folding and refolding the filmy handkerchief in her lap. Suddenly she left her chair and came to sit beside him on the old-fashioned, rep-covered sofa.
“Harry, dear,” she began, “I have something terrible to confess; but first let me ask you.... Last night, you know, when I saw you with Miss Dabney, and saw how pretty and sweet she is ... Harry, aren’t you the least bit in love with her?”
He tried to turn the question aside with a laugh.
“You wouldn’t ask that if you could see her sister next younger. Mysie is the raving beauty of the family.”
“No, but, really, Harry; I’m dreadfully in earnest. Wouldn’t you marry Jean Dabney if you were—if you were free?”
Again he evaded, rather clumsily—for him—this time.
“It wouldn’t rest with me, Eugie. Jean hasn’t the remotest idea of marrying anybody.”
The beauty beside him, statuesque no longer, but almost girlish in her confusion, sighed deeply.
“You are making it terribly hard for me, Harry, but I suppose I deserve every bit of it. I—I’ve been untrue to you and to our—to our engagement.”
It took every atom of his self-control to keep him from bounding to his feet. “Wha—what’s that?” he gasped.
“It’s your fault, in a way,” she pleaded defensively. “We might never have known anything about Mr. Drew if you hadn’t told him we were here in Denver.”
“Stephen Drew!” He almost shouted the name.
“Yes. He asked me last night, you know—after we came home from the theater. I tried to stop him; I knew I ought to; but—but he wouldn’t stop.”
He turned and put his hands on her shoulders. “Tell me just one thing, Eugie: do you love Steve Drew? Is that it?”
She lifted swimming eyes to his for a flitting instant and then dropped them quickly.
“You can say anything you please to me, Harry, dear; I know I deserve it: but—but I love him so hard that it hurts—actuallyhurts!”
“God bless you, Eugie, dear,” he broke out, taking her in his arms and kissing the tears away. “Don’t you cry for a single minute. Your happiness is all I care for—all I’ve ever cared for. And you have picked a man in all his inches. Don’t you fret the least littlebit about a thing that was handed out to us, wrapped up in the original package years and years ago, by the old folks!”
“You—you’re not sorry—not even a little?” she faltered.
“How could I be sorry when you have found your true happiness, my dear? That is the biggest thing in the world. And Steve will make you happy. He is one of the finest!—head and shoulders above any other man I’ve met in Colorado. I wouldn’t give you up to a rotter: but to Stephen Drew.... But see here, I’ve got an appointment at the bank, and it’s nearly closing time, right now. Will you forgive me if I run?”
She got up and went with him to the door. At the moment of leave-taking she said shyly: “You’ll marry Miss Dabney some day, won’t you, Harry? I want you to be happy, too.”
“I don’t have to marry anybody to be happy; I’m perfectly happy this minute, because you are. As for Jean ... as I’ve said, I’m sure she isn’t thinking about marrying. There was—er—another man, you know, and he has put himself out of the running. That is why I’ve been taking her out a bit and trying to make it easier for her. She is a dear girl, and I wish you knew her better. They are good people—good old Southern stock left poor by the war. Isn’t that your telephone ringing? I’ll bet that is Drew, wanting to tell you he is coming out. I’m escaping just in time. Good-by, you happy girl!” And, kissing her again, and even more exuberantly than before, he fled to keep the mythical appointment.