XXIV
Itwas on one of these matchless September nights, when the stars were blazing in the black bowl of the heavens with a lustrous brilliancy that shamed the flaring gas street-lamps of the city of the plain, that the younger son of an English lord, who was supposed to be learning cattle ranching at first-hand on a range in Middle Park, wound up a day of gaudy dissipation in Denver by galloping his bronco down Holladay Street, yelling like a madman and firing his pistols right and left in true Wild West fashion.
To escape the flying bullets, the few late-hour pedestrians dodged for shelter as best they might, darting into alleyways or disappearing through doors that were always open after candle-lighting. As on a certain other epoch-marking night, Philip found his door of refuge opening for him apparently of its own accord, and when it was quickly closed behind him a pair of silken-soft arms went about his neck, and a voice that he had recalled many times in the past few weeks said, “Gee, Mr. Prince-man! It took you a fine long time to remember where I lived, didn’t it? But I knew you’d come, some time. That shooting fool didn’t hit you, did he?”
Philip unwound the clinging arms from his neck, but he did it gently.
“No, I’m not hurt,” he answered. “I was on myway here, and all he did was to hurry me a little. Were you expecting anybody else?”
“Not me. I’d just come down when I heard the racket in the street and was opening the door to see what had broke loose. Want to go in the parlor with the bunch for a while?”
“No; we’ll go up to your room. I want to talk to you.”
She slipped an arm around him as they went up the stairs together, saying: “This is like old times, only the other time you was too parboiled to know where you was going. You ain’t been drinking to-night, have you?”
“Not enough to amount to anything. I am as nearly sober as I ever get to be, nowadays.”
In the room above a gas jet was burning low, and the girl turned it on full. Philip took off his hat and coat and threw them on the bed.
“I don’t want to drink any more to-night, and I don’t want you to drink,” he said. “But I’ll pay my way, just the same.” He handed her a twenty-dollar gold piece: “Take this down to Madam Blanche and tell her your friend is buying her best for the house, and that it is the price he is paying to be let alone.”
While she was gone, he made a slow circuit of the room, alert to all the small details of his surroundings. By this time he knew the household routine of such places—that each woman took care of her own room. There were little hints of personality that were not lost upon him: a single late-blooming rose in a tiny vase on the dresser, placed exactly in the middle of the freshly laundered linen cover; the girl’s comb andbrush and toilet appliances as clean and shining as if they had just come from the shop; spotless cleanliness everywhere. He pulled the dresser drawers open, one by one; here, too, there were decent orderliness and the smell of fresh laundering.
She came in just as he was closing the drawers and laughed good-naturedly.
“Didn’t find anything to bite you, did you?” she asked. Then: “Blanche says the house is yours. She’ll turn everybody else out in the street, if you say so.”
“I don’t want any part of the house but this,” he returned. Then he reminded her of an omission: “When I was here before, you didn’t tell me your name.”
“A name’s nothing. They call me ‘Little Irish’ here, and I’ve never told ’em the name my mother gave me.”
“But you will tell me, won’t you?”
“If you care enough for me to want to know. It’s Mona—Mona Connaghey is the whole of it.”
Philip sat down, and immediately she came and perched on his knee. Almost roughly he caught her up and planted her in a chair.
“I want to talk sense to you, Mona, and I can’t do it if you stir up the devil in me,” he told her soberly.
“Is it the devil you’re calling it?” she laughed.
“Yes; and you know well enough that is the right name for it. But never mind; let me ask you this: I know it is a part of your business to tell lies and nothing but lies to any man who comes here. Can you tell the truth for once in a way, if you try?”
“I guess so, maybe—to you.”
He fixed her with a half-absent gaze. “How old are you, Mona?”
“If I live till Christmas, I’ll be twenty.”
“Twenty years old and well on the road to hell,” he said musingly; adding: “Or perhaps you are not calling it hell?”
“Am I not?” she flashed back. “But what’s the use? You didn’t come here to put the whip to me, did you? God knows, I can do that well enough for myself!”
“No,” he answered, “I came to ask you a few questions. What is there for a woman in your condition to look forward to?—or is there anything?”
Her lips twisted in a wry smile.
“A few years of this, maybe, and then a little bigger dose of the chloral than it takes to put you to sleep. That is, for them that have got the nerve.”
“Nothing else?”
“Oh, yes; in a way of speaking. Once in a while a bit of heaven comes now and then to one or another of us—when some man lets a girl go and live with him till he gets tired of her.”
“And you call that heaven?”
“Some does: for me, I’d say it depends on who the man is.”
He lighted a cigar and puffed at it in silence. And when he spoke again: “Do you care to tell me what brought you to this, Mona?”
“You wouldn’t want to know.” Then, in lower tones and with her face averted: “I ain’t got no hard-luck story to tell. I just went bad because I was ... but what’s the use of trying to make you see? It’sjust in the blood, or it ain’t; and I’m thinking it ain’t in your blood at all.”
He smiled soberly.
“Maybe there are worse things in my blood than anything you will ever have to plead guilty to. But that is neither here nor there. Tell me this, Mona: if you could have one wish, and could be sure it would be granted, what would it be?”
“My God! Can you ask me that?—after what I’ve been telling you?”
“I can and I do. I have been thinking a good deal about you since—since that morning when you sat here on the bed and told me how I came to be here in this room. You were honest with me then. I’ve been wondering if you could go on being honest with me.”
“You mean that you’d take me out of this—for a little while—and let me—let me——”
“No,” he denied gravely; “I didn’t mean that. But if I should do that—what then?”
A soft light leaped into the blue Irish eyes and for a moment the reckless look vanished and the girl’s face became almost beautiful.
“I’d—I’d work my fingers to the bone to make it last as long as I could—with you!”
“Why with me, rather than with another man?”
“I can tell,” she said. “You’re not like other men. Even when you’re drunk, you don’t forget. I know!”
Another little silence, and at the end of it: “You must know the truth about me, Mona. I have been to the bottom—I’m on the bottom, now; just as much out of the decent running as you are. And I have fallen so hard that it makes me feel for other peoplewho are caught and can’t get loose. Can you understand that?”
“It’s terribly dumb I’d be if I couldn’t—the way I’m living.”
“All right; then we’ll go on. When I was here before it seemed to me that you hadn’t gone quite stony hard—as some of them do; that if you had a chance, you might climb back. Would you?”
She shook her head.
“There’s no chance for the woman; you’d know that very well.”
“There is one chance; just one, I suppose. Do you want to get out of this badly enough to marry me, Mona?”
“Marry you?My God, man, what are you talking about! Do you think I’d——”
“Wait,” he commanded; “let me finish. We won’t say anything about love; we’ll leave that out of it. I have money, and I can take you away from Denver, where you are known, and give you your chance to straighten up. No, I am neither drunk nor crazy, and this is no sudden thing with me. I know what I am proposing, and I want to do it. I have talked with a man who knows you, and he tells me you have no home to go to; no people of your own who would take you in. That is why I am offering you a chance with me.”
To his astonishment the girl sprang up and flung herself upon the bed, burying her face in his overcoat and sobbing as if her heart would break. He let her alone; let the fit of weeping exhaust itself. It was a good sign, he decided; it showed that there were still depths that could be touched—deeply touched. But he was whollyunprepared for what followed when she sat up, wiping her eyes and smiling at him through her tears. For this is what she said:
“You dear, dear man! Do you know, I’d rather die, right here in this room to-night, than marry you?”
“But why?” he demanded. “Don’t you want to get out of this life?”
“Not at the price—the price you’d have to pay. Oh, don’t I know? There’s not a corner on God’s green earth you could take me to where there wouldn’t be some man to turn up and say, ‘Hell’s chickens! there’s “Little Irish”—the girl that used to be in Madam Blanche’s in Denver!’ And that isn’t all, either, nor the worst of it. Some day you’ll brace up and go back to the other world—the one you come from. A man can do that whenever he likes, and you’ll do it. And then you’d be tied to a——”
“Don’t say it,” he interrupted quickly. “What you are saying only makes me more determined. I shall get a license in the morning, and to-morrow afternoon I shall expect you to be ready to go with me.” He threw a handful of gold coins on the bed. “There is money to square you with Madam Blanche, and to pay for whatever you want to buy. Let me have my coat.”
For a moment, while he was struggling into his coat, he thought she had acquiesced. She sat on the bed with her hands tightly clasped and would not look up at him. Dimly he sensed that there was a struggle of some sort making the tapering shapely fingers grip until they were bloodless. Then....
When he won out to the open air of the street his brow was wet and his hands were trembling. There had been a fierce battle in the upper room, and he had come out of it a victor, though only in the strength of a glimpse into the heart of a woman—a glimpse vouchsafed to him in the thick of the struggle. With every wile and weapon she possessed she had fought to make him stay; and but for the saving glimpse which had shown him what her real object was, he might have yielded.
“Poor little lost soul!” he muttered, as he turned his steps toward the better-lighted cross street. “Reddick didn’t strain the truth when he said she had heroine stuff in her. She knew if she could make me stay, there would be no more talk of marriage; and it was for me that she wanted to kill that chance—not for herself. What a hell of a world this is, anyway!”