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THE
GIRL FROM HIS TOWN
_By_
MARIE VAN VORST
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
F. GRAHAM COOTES
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1910
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Dan Blair 1
II The Duchess Approves 21
III The Blairtown Soloist 28
IV In The Coral Room 31
V At The Carlton 47
VI Galorey Seeks Advice 55
VII At The Stage Entrance 70
VIII Dan's Simplicity 76
IX Disappointment 85
X The Boy From My Town 94
XI Ruggles Gives a Dinner 109
XII The Green Knight 128
XIII The Face of Letty Lane 135
XIV From India's Coral Strands 155
XV Galorey Gives Advice 174
XVI The Musicale Program 187
XVII Letty Lane Sings 199
XVIII A Woman's Way 207
XIX Dan Awakes 214
XX A Hand Clasp 225
XXI Ruggles Returns 231
XXII What Will You Take? 234
XXIII In the Sunset Glow 242
XXIV Ruggles' Offer 250
XXV Letty Lane Runs Away 268
XXVI White and Coral 274
XXVII At Maxim's 290
XXVIII Such Stuff as Dreams 299
XXIX The Picture of It All 304
XXX Sodawater Fountain Girl 309
XXXI In Reality 315
XXXII The Prince Accepts 319
XXXIII The Things Above Ground 322
THE GIRL FROM HIS TOWN
CHAPTER I--DAN BLAIR
The fact that much he said, because of his unconscionable slang, was
incomprehensible did not take from the charm of his conversation as far
as the Duchess of Breakwater was concerned. The brightness of his
expression, his quick, clear look upon them, his beautiful young smile,
his not too frequent laugh, his "new gayness," as the duchess called his
high spirits, his supernal youth, his _difference_, credited him with
what nine-tenths of the human race lack--charm.
His tone was not too crudely western; neither did he suggest the ultra
East with which they were familiar. American women went down well enough
with them, but American men were unpopular, and when the visitor
arrived, Lady Galorey did not even announce him to the party gathered
for "the first shoot."
The others were in the armory when the ninth gun, a young chap, six feet
of him, blond as the wheat, cleanly set up and very good to look at,
came in with Lily, Duchess of Breakwater. Lady Galorey, his hostess,
greeted them.
"Oh, here you are, are you? Lord Mersey, Sir John Fairthrope." She
mumbled the rest of the names of her companions as though she did not
want them understood, then waved toward the young chap, calling him Mr.
Dan Blair, and he, as she hesitated, added:
"From Blairtown, Montana."
"And give him a gun, will you, Gordon?" Lady Galorey spoke to her
husband.
"I discovered Mr. Blair, Edie," the duchess announced, "and he didn't
even know there was a shoot on for to-day. Fancy!"
"I guess," Dan Blair said pleasantly, "I'll just take a gun out of this
bunch," and he chose one at random from several indicated to him by the
gamekeeper. "I get my best luck when I go it blind. Right! Thanks.
That's so, Lady Galorey, I didn't know there was to be any shooting
until the duchess let it out."
To himself he thought with good-natured amusement, "Afraid I'll spoil
their game record, maybe!" and went out along with them, following the
insular noblemen like a ray of sun, smiling on the pretty woman who had
discovered him in the grounds where he had been poking about by himself.
"Where, in Heaven's name, did you 'corral'--word of his own--the dear boy,
Edith? How did he get to Osdene Park, or in fact anywhere, just as he
is, fresh as from Eden?"
"Thought I'd let him take you by surprise, dearest. Where'd you find
Dan?"
"Down by the garden house feeding the rabbits, on his knees like a
little boy, his hands full of lettuces. I'd just come a cropper myself
on the mare. She fell, I'm sorry to say, Edie, and hacked her knees
quite a lot. One of those disguised ditches, you know. I was coming
along leading her when I ran on your friend."
The young duchess was slender as a willow, very brunette, with a
beautiful, discontented face.
"I'm going to show Dan Blair off," Lady Galorey responded, "going to
give the débutantes a chance."
Placidly nodding, the duchess lit a cigarette and began to quote from
Dan Blair's conversation: "I fancy he won't let them 'worry him'; he's
too 'busy!'"
"You mean that you're going to keep him occupied?"
The duchess didn't notice this.
"_Is_ he such a catch?"
Neither of the women had walked out with the guns. The duchess had a bad
foot, and Lady Galorey never went anywhere she could help with her
husband. She now drew her chair up to the table in the morning-room, to
which they had both gone after the departure of the guns, and regarded
with satisfaction a quantity of stationery and the red leather desk
appointments.
"Sit down and smoke if you like, Lily; I'm going to fill out some
lists."
"No, thanks, I'm going up to my rooms and get Parkins to 'massey' this
beastly foot of mine. I must have fallen on it. But tell me first, is
Mr. Blair a catch?"
Lady Galorey had opened an address book and looked up from it to reply:
"Something like ten million pounds."
"Heavens! Disgusting!"
"The richest young man 'west of some river or other.' At any rate he
told me last night that it was 'clean money.' I dare say the river is
responsible for its cleanliness, but that fact seemed to give him
satisfaction."
The duchess was leaning on the table at Lady Galorey's side.
"Dan's father took Gordon all over the West that time he went to the
States for a big hunt in the Rockies. He got to know Mr. Blair awfully
well and liked him. The old gentleman bought a little property about
that time that turned out to be a gold mine."
With persistency the duchess said:
"How d'you know it is 'clean money,' Edith? Not that it makes a rap of
difference," she laughed prettily, "but how do you know that he is rich
to this horrible extent?"
Lady Galorey put down her address book impatiently: "Does he look like
an impostor?"
The other returned: "Even the archangel fell, my dear Edith!"
"Well," returned her friend, "this one is too young to have fallen far,"
and she shut up her list in desperation.
The duchess sat down on the edge of the lounge and raised her expressive
eyes to Lady Galorey, who once more looked at her sarcastically, and
went on:
"Gordon liked the old gentleman: he was extraordinarily generous--quite a
type. They called the town after him--Blairtown: that is where the son
'hails from.' He was a little lad when Gordon was out and Mr. Blair
promised that Dan should come over here and see us one day, and this,"
she tapped the table with her pen, "seems to be the day, for he came
down upon us in this breezy way without even sending a wire, 'just
turned up' last night. Gordon's mad about him. His father has been dead
a year, and he is just twenty-two."
"Good heavens!" murmured the duchess. Lady Galorey opened her address
book again.
"Gordon's got him terribly on his mind, my dear; he has forbidden any
gambling or any bridge as long as the boy is with us...."
Her companion rose and thrust her hands into the pocket of her tweed
coat. She laughed softly, then went over to the long window where
without, across the pane, the early winter mists were flying, chased by
a furtive sun.
"Gordon said that the boy's father treated him like a king, and that
while the boy is here he is going to look out for him."
Over her shoulder the other threw out coldly:
"You speak as though he were in a den of thieves. I didn't know Gordon's
honor was so fine. As for me, _I_ don't gamble, you know."
Lady Galorey had decided that Lily's insistent remaining gave her a
chance to fill her fountain pen. She was, therefore, carefully squirting
in the ink, and she flushed at her friend's last words.
Lady Galorey herself was the best bridge player in London, and cards
were her passion. She did not remind the lady in the window that there
were other games besides bridge, but kept both her tongue and her
temper.
After a little silence in which the women followed each her own
thoughts, the duchess murmured:
"I'll toddle up-stairs, Edie--let you write. Where did you say we were
going to meet the guns for food?"
"At the gate by the White Pastures. There'll be a cart and a motor
going, whichever you like, around two."
"Right," her grace nodded; "I'll be on time, dearest."
And Lady Galorey with a relieved sigh heard the door close behind the
duchess. Wiping her fountain pen delicately with a bit of chamois, she
murmured: "Well, Dan Blair _is_ out of Eden, poor dear, if he met her by
the gate."
A fortune of a round ten million pounds was a small part of what this
young man had come into by direct inheritance from the Copper King of
Blairtown, Montana. For once the money figure had not been exaggerated,
but Lady Galorey did not know about the rest of Dan's inheritance.
* * * * *
The young man whistling in his rooms in the bachelor quarters of Osdene
Park House, dressed for dinner without the aid of a valet. When Lord
Galorey had asked him "where his manservant was," Dan had grinned.
"Gosh, I wouldn't have one of those Johnnies hanging around me--never did
have! I can put on _my_ stockings all right! There was a chap on the
boat I came over in who let his man put on his stockings. Can you beat
that?" Blair had laughed again. "I think if anybody tickled my feet that
way I would be likely to kick him in the eye."
Dressing in his room he whistled under his breath a song from a newly
popular comic opera; and he intoned with his clear young voice a line of
the words:
"_Should-you-go-to-Mandalay._"
Out through his high window, if he had looked, he would have seen the
misty sweep of the park under the faint moonrise and fine shadows that
the leaves made in the veiled light, but he did not look out. He was
dressing for dinner without a valet and giving a great deal of care to
his toilet; for the first time he was to dine in the house of a nobleman
and in the presence of a duchess; not that it meant a great deal to
him--he thought it was "funny."
In Dan Blair's twenty-two years of utterly happy days his one grief had
been the death of his father. As soon as the old man had died Dan had
gone off into the Rockies with his guides and not "shown up" for months.
When he came back to Blairtown, as he expressed it, "he packed his grip
and beat it while his shoes were good," for the one place he could
remember his father had suggested for him to go.
Blairtown was very much impressed when the heir came in from the Rockies
with "a big kill," and the orphan's case did not seem especially
disturbed. But no one in the town knew how the boy's heart ached for the
old man. When Dan was six years old his father had literally picked him
up by the nape of his neck and thrown him into the water like a pup and
watched him swim. At eight he sent the boy off with a gun to rough-camp.
Then he took Dan down in the mines with the men. His education had been
won in Blairtown, at a school called public, but which in reality was
nothing more than a pioneer district school.
On Sundays Dan dressed up and went with his father to church twice a day
and in the week-days his father took him to the prayer-meetings, and at
sixteen Dan went to college in California. He had just completed his
course when old Blair died. Then he inherited fifty million dollars.
On the day of the shoot at Osdene, Dan dropped sixty birds. He tried
very hard not to be too pleased. "Gosh," he thought to himself, "those
birds fell as though they were trained all right, and the other sports
were mad, I could see it." He then fell to whistling softly the air he
had heard Lady Galorey play the night before from the new success at the
Gaiety, and finished it as his toilet completed itself. He took up a
gardenia from his dressing-table, and fastened it in his coat, stopping
on the stairs on the way down to look over into the hall, where the men
in their black clothes and the women in their shining dresses waited
before going into the dining-room. The lights fell on white arms and
necks, on jewels and on fine proud heads. Dan Blair had been in San
Francisco and in New York, on short journeys, however, which his father,
the year before, had directed him to take, but he had never seen a
"show" like this.
He came slowly down the broad stairway of the Osdene Park House, the
last guest. In the corner, where, behind her, a piece of fourteenth
century tapestry cut a green and pink square against the rich black oak
paneling, the Duchess of Breakwater sat waiting. She wore a dress of
golden tulle which was simply a sheath to her slender body, and from her
neck hung a long rope of diamonds caught at the end by a small black
fan; there was a wreath of diamonds like shining water drops linked
together in her hair. She was the grandest lady at Osdene, and renowned
in more than one sense of the word. As Dan saw her smile at him and
rise, he thought:
"She is none too sorry that I made _that_ record, but I hope to heaven
she won't say anything to me about it."
And the duchess did not speak of it. Telling him that he was to take her
in to dinner, she laid first her fan on his arm and then her hand. And
Dan, one of those fortunate creatures who are born men of the world when
they get into it, gave her his arm with much grace, and as he leaned
down toward her he thought to himself:
"Well, it's lucky for me I have my head on tight; a few more of those
goo-goo eyes of hers and it would be as well for me to light out for the
woods."
* * * * *
Dan liked best at Osdene Park his chin-chins with Gordon Galorey. The
young man was unflatteringly frank in his choice of companions. When the
duchess looked about for him to ride with her, walk with her, to find
the secluded corners, to talk, to play with him, she was likely to
discover Dan gone off with Lord Galorey, and to come upon them later,
sitting enveloped in smoke, a stand of drinks by their side.
To Galorey, who had no heir or child, the boy's presence proved to be
the happiest thing that had come to him for a long time. He talked a
great deal to Dan about the old man. Galorey was poor and the fact of a
fortune of ten million pounds possessed by this one boy was continually
before his mind like an obsession. It was like looking down into a gold
mine. Galorey tried often to broach the subject of money, but Dan kept
off. At length Galorey asked boldly:
"What are you going to do with it?" On this occasion they were walking
over from the lower park back to the house, a couple of terriers at
their heels.
"Do with what?" Blair asked innocently. He was looking at the trees. He
was comparing their grayish green trunks and their foliage with the
California redwoods. A little taken aback, Lord Galorey laughed.
"Why, with that colossal fortune of yours."
And Blair answered unhesitatingly: "Oh--spend it on some girl sooner or
later."
Galorey fairly staggered. Then he took it humorously.
"My dear chap, I never saw a sweeter, bigger man than your father. If he
had been my father, I dare say I might have pulled off a different yard
of hemp, but I must confess that I think he has left you too much
money."
"Well, there are a lot of fellows who are ready to look after it for
me," Blair answered coolly. Before his companion could redden, he
continued: "You see, dad took care of me for twenty-one years all right,
and whenever I am up a stump, why all I have to do is to remember the
things he did."
For the first time since his arrival at Osdene Dan's tone was serious.
Interested as he was in the older man, Dan's inclination was to evade
the discussion of serious subjects. With Blair's slang, his conversation
was almost incomprehensible.
"Dad didn't gas much," the boy said, "but I could draw a map of some of
the things he did say. He used to say he made his money out of the
earth."
The two were walking side by side across the rich velvet of the
immemorial English turf. The extreme softness of the autumn day, its
shifting lights, its mellow envelope, the beauty of the park--the age,
the stability, the harmony, served to touch the young fellow's spirits.
At any rate there was a ring in him, an equilibrium that surprised
Galorey.
"'Most things,' dad said to me, 'go back to the earth.'" He struck the
English turf with his stick. "Dad said a fellow had better buy those
things that stay above the ground." Dan smiled frankly at his companion.
"Curious thing to say, wasn't it?" he reflected. "I remembered it, and I
got to wondering after I saw him buried, '_what are_ the things that
stay above the ground?' The old man never gave me another talk like
that."
After a few seconds Galorey put in:
"But, my dear chap, you did give me a shock up there just now when you
said you were going to spend 'all your money on some girl.'"
The millionaire took a chestnut from his pocket. He held it high above
his head and the little dog that had been yelping at his heels fixed his
eyes on it. Blair poised it, then threw it as far as he could. It sped
through the air and the terrier ran like mad across the park.
"I like girls awfully, Gordon, and when I find the right one, why, then
I'm going to feel what a bully thing it is to be rich."
Lord Galorey groaned aloud.
"My dear chap!" he exclaimed.
The spell of the day, the fragrant beauty of the time and place and hour
were clearly upon Dan Blair. Lord Galorey was sympathetic to him. The
terrier came tearing back with the chestnut held between his thick jaws.
Dan bent down to take the nut from the dog and wrestled with him gently.
"Swell little grip he's got. Nice old pup! Let it go now!" And he threw
the nut far again, and as the terrier ran once more Blair thrust his
hands down in his pockets and began softly to whistle the tune of
_Mandalay_.
He said slowly, going back to his subject: "It must be great to feel
that a fellow can give her jewels like the Duchess of Breakwater's,
ropes of 'em"--he nodded toward the house--"and a fine old place like this
now, and motors and yachts and all kinds of stuff."
His eyes rested on the suave lines of the Elizabethan house, with its
softened gables and its banked terraces. Possibly his vivid imagination
pictured "some nice girl" there waiting, as they should come up, to meet
him.
"I have always thought it would be bully to find a poor girl--pretty as a
peach, of course--one who had never had much, and just cover her with
things. Hey, there!" he cried to the terrier, who had come running back,
"bring it to me."
They had come up to the terrace by this, and Dan's confidence, fresh as
a gush of water from a rock, had ceased. His face was placid. He didn't
realize what he had said.
From out of one of the long windows, dressed in a sable coat, her small
head tied up in a motor scarf, the Duchess of Breakwater appeared. She
greeted them severely, and Lord Galorey hear her say under her breath to
Dan:
"You promised to be back to drive with me before dinner, Dan. Did you
forget?"
And as Galorey left the boy to make his peace, the first smile of
amusement broke over his face. He felt that the duchess had between her
and her capture of Dan Blair's heart the elusive picture of some "nice
girl"--not much perhaps, but it might be very hard to tear away the
picture of the ideal that was ever before the blue eyes of this man who
had a fortune to spend on her!