XXVII
“I sawwhat you saw as we were leaving the room—yes. But what did Philip do afterward?” Jean asked, looking up from her seat in the low wicker rocking-chair.
After taking Jean home on the night of the tragedy, Bromley had gone back to the tenement building to stand by as a loyal partner should, and for the three succeeding days his room in the West Denver cottage had remained unoccupied. Late the third evening he had returned to find Jean sitting up, sewing, with the two younger girls poring over their school books in the rear half of the double sitting-room.
“Phil did his full duty,” was his answer to the low-voiced question. “Took everything upon his own shoulders—funeral arrangements, and all that; acted just as if there had been no breach between his father and himself—a thing he wouldn’t have done six months ago, not if the heavens had fallen.”
“And you have been helping?”
“Naturally, I did what I could—which wasn’t much beyond backing Phil up and running errands. He seemed glad to have me to lean upon, so I stayed with him. It was the least I could do.”
“Of course. Where is his father now?”
“Vanished into thin air, right after the funeral; wouldn’t tell Phil where he was going; wouldn’t takeany of Phil’s money; wouldn’t talk, except to say that he wouldn’t get in Philip’s way again—not if he had to take the other side of the world for his.”
“And Philip—where is he?”
“He left on to-night’s train for New Hampshire. He is going back to square the—er—the matter with the bank—so far as a return of the money can do it.”
“But he didn’t need to go in person to do that, did he?”
“That is what I told him; but he seemed to think he ought to go and face it out, man to man; that it was part of the price he must pay for the sake of the name—since his father wouldn’t pay any of it. I imagine, too, that he wants to be there to bargain that his mother and sisters are not to be harried by a revival of talk about the old scandal.”
She nodded complete intelligence, saying, “I told you you didn’t know the real Philip, Harry.”
“I didn’t; I admit it. He is as gentle and compassionate now as he used to be opinionated and hard. But he still believes he has put himself entirely beyond the pale.”
She made a swift little gesture of appeal. “You must try to make him understand that there isn’t any pale—not in his sense of the word—after he comes back.” Then: “He is coming back, isn’t he?”
Bromley nodded. “Yes; I think he is coming back. But as to making him understand: I fancy there is only one person in the world who can do that successfully, Jean. That person is yourself.”
She bent lower over her sewing. “What makes you say that, Harry?”
He was not looking at her when he answered. His gaze had wandered to the far end of the room; to a girlish face framed in a tousled mass of yellow hair; ripe lips pressed together and the fair brow wrinkled as their owner puzzled over her lesson for the next day.
“I say it, Jeanie, dear, because, in spite of everything he has been and has done, Philip loves you, even as you love him,” he said. “But he believes he has sinned beyond your forgiveness. If you can forgive him——”
She looked up to see why he had let the sentence lapse, and when the distracting reason became apparent, she laid her work aside and slipped away to the bed-room she shared with Mysie. When she came back she was holding one hand behind her. Suddenly the play-boy found himself staring at a reflection of his own face in a little hand-mirror. He glanced up at her with the boyish smile that endeared him to all women.
“You are a little wretch, Jean!” he laughed. “You caught me red-handed, didn’t you?—just as you said you would that day when we were out in the Highlands. All right; it’s a fact, and I plead guilty. But I’ll be good and patient and wait until you won’t have to say that I’m robbing the cradle. Now that you know what I was dreaming about, may I go and see if I can’t give Mysie a bit of help? She seems to be finding her trigonometry harder than usual to-night, judging from the way she is making faces at it.”
Bromley’s prediction that Philip would return toColorado came true within a fortnight, and the news of his arrival reached the play-boy through Reddick. Going at once to the rooms in the Alamo Building, Bromley found the returned traveller opening his mail.
“You made a quick trip, Phil,” was his greeting. “How did you find things in the old home?”
Philip laid the envelope opener aside and felt for his pipe.
“I found them pretty much as I expected to. And there was nothing to stay for, after my errand was done.”
“No trouble about the errand, was there?”
“No. The bank people didn’t ask any questions. They were only too glad to see the color of their money again.”
“And your mother and sisters?”
“They wanted me to stay, of course. They couldn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t retire and settle down at home as a solid citizen; why I should want to go back to the outlandish West.”
“Well, why should you?” Bromley asked, with his most disarming smile.
“You know the answer to that as well as I do, Harry. In the old rut at home I had to be once more a Pharisee among the people who had known me from childhood, and one week of that was enough. Another week of it would have stifled me.”
The play-boy’s smile broadened into a grin. “There is plenty of breathing room out here, if that is what you want.”
“Not room enough—in Denver.”
“No? Whereabouts, then?”
Philip picked up a badly spelled letter written in pencil and glanced over it.
“This is from Jim Garth. He has found a prospect up somewhere near the Mount of the Holy Cross, and he asks me if I will grub-stake him for a winter’s work on it. I shall leave this evening to put in the winter with Jim. He says his claim is at altitude eleven thousand and something. There ought to be breathing space enough up there.”
“But why, Phil?”
“I think you know why. This gold-mad country, or my own innate weakness or wickedness—call it what you please—has made a sorry castaway of me, Harry. As you know very well, I’ve travelled a long and crooked trail since we came out of the mountains together last spring. I don’t know whether or not I can find my way out of the woods; it’s all rather chaotic just now. I only know that I want to go bury myself for a while and see if I can’t fight through to daylight, somewhere and somehow.”
After a little pause, Bromley said: “You are thinking only of yourself, Phil? What about Jean?”
“Jean? I thought I had given you time enough there, Harry.”
“Nonsense! Jean loves me dearly—as a brother—as she ought to. I’m going to marry Mysie when she is old enough; that is, if she’ll have me.”
“Mysie? I never dreamed of that! But how about the Follansbee affair?”
“Humph!” said the play-boy. “You don’t keep up with the neighborhood gossip. Eugie begged off sometime ago. She is going to marry Stephen Drew next month.”
“Oh; so that little problem solves itself, does it? But we were speaking of Jean. How much does she know about my father—and me?”
“All there is to know. She has known it all along.”
“And she doesn’t despise me?”
“You’ll not get anything out of me; go and ask her for yourself. Or are you going to drop out for a whole winter without seeing her?”
It was the new Philip who turned his face away and said, quite humbly: “I’m not fit to go to her now, Harry; you know that. It would be a sacrilege—another and worse indecency—to go to her with the smell of the pit-fires still in my clothes. I love her too well for that.”
“But you have never told her so.”
“No; and it is too late, now.”
The play-boy got out of his chair.
“Perhaps you are right, Phil; I won’t say you are not. Is there anything I can do toward helping you in the make-ready?”
“No; nothing that I think of. I’ll outfit in Leadville.”
“All right; I’ll be at the train to see you off.” And as he shook hands at parting: “Don’t you know, Phil, there are times when I almost envy you your confounded old burn-yourself-at-the-stake Puritan conscience? There are, for a fact; and this is one of them. Good-by—till this evening.”