He felt as he waited for her in that flower-filled room, for she had
recovered from her distaste for flowers, as he glanced at the
photographs of women like herself in costumes more or less frank, more
or less vulgar, he felt as though he wanted to knock down the walls and
let in a big view of the West--of Montana--of the hills. With such a
setting he thought he could better talk with the lady whom he had come
to see.
Ruggles held an unlighted cigar between his fingers and goose-flesh rose
all over him. His glasses bothered him. He couldn't get them bright
enough, though he polished them half a dozen times on his silk
handkerchief. His clothes felt too large. He seemed to have shrunken. He
moistened his lips, cleared his throat, tried to remember what kind of
fellow he had been at Dan's age. At Dan's age he was selling a suspender
patent on the road, supporting his mother and his sisters--hard work and
few temptations; he was too tired and too poor.
Miss Lane kept him waiting ten minutes, and they were hours to her
guest. He was afraid every minute that Dan would come in. The thoughts
he had gathered together, the plan of action, disarranged itself in his
mind every time he thought of the actress. He couldn't forget his vision
of her on the stage or at the Carlton, where she had sat opposite them
and bewitched them both. When she came into the sitting-room at length,
he started so violently that he knocked over a vase of flowers, the
water trickling all over the table down on to the floor.
She had dazzled him before the footlights, charmed him at dinner, and it
was singular to think that he knew how this dignified, quiet creature
looked in ballet clothes and in a dinner dress, whose frankness had made
him catch his breath. It was a third woman who stood before Ruggles now.
He had to take her into consideration. She had expected him, saw him by
appointment. She was a woman of mind and intelligence. She had not
climbed to her starry position without having acquired a knowledge of
men, and it was the secret of her success. She showed it in the dress in
which she received her visitor. She wore a short walking skirt of heavy
serge, a simple shirtwaist belted around, a sailor hat on her beautiful
little head. She was unjeweled and unpainted, very pale and very sweet.
If it had not been for the marks of fatigue under her eyes, she would
not have looked more than eighteen. On her left hand a single diamond,
clear as water, caught the refracted light.
"How-de-do? Glad you are back again."
She gave him a big chair and sat down before him smiling. Leaning her
elbows on her knees, she sank her face upon her hands and looked at him,
not coquettishly in the least, but as a child might have looked. From
her small feet to her golden head she was utterly charming.
[Image]
Ruggles made himself think of Dan. Miss Lane spoke slowly, nodding
toward him, in her languid voice: "It's no use, Mr. Ruggles, no use."
Holding her face between her hands, her eyes gray as winter's seas and
as profound, she looked at him intently; then, in a flash, she changed
her position and instantly transformed her character. He saw that she
was a woman, not an eighteen-year-old girl, but a woman, clever, poised,
witty, understanding, and that she might have been twenty years older
than the boy.
"I'm sorry you spoke so quick," he said.
"I knew," she interrupted, "just what you wanted to say from the start.
I couldn't help it, could I? I knew you would want to come and see me
about it. It isn't any use. I know just what you are going to say."
"No, ma'am," he returned, "I don't believe you do--bright as you are."
Ruggles gazed thoughtfully at the cold end of his unlighted cigar. It
was a comfort to him to hold it and to look at it, although not for
anything in the world would he have asked to light it.
"Dan's father and me were chums. We went through pretty much together,
and I know how he felt on most points. He was a man of few words, but I
know he counted on me to stand By the boy."
Ruggles was so chivalrous that his rôle at present cost him keen
discomfort.
"A lady like you," he said gently, "knows a great deal more about how
things are done than either Dan or me. We ain't tenderfeet in the West,
not by a long shot, but we see so few of a certain kind of picture shows
that when they do come round they're likely to make us lose our minds!
You know, yourself, a circus in a town fifty miles from a railroad
drives the people crazy. Now, Dan's a little like the boy with his eyes
on the hole in the tent. He would commit murder to get inside and see
that show." He nodded and smiled to her as though he expected her to
follow his crude simile. "Now, I have seen _you_ a lot of times." And
she couldn't help reminding him, "Not of your own accord, Mr. Ruggles."
"Well, I don't know," he slowly admitted; "I always felt I had my
money's worth, and the night you ate with us at the Carlton I understood
pretty well how the boy with his eyes at the tent hole would feel." But
he tapped his broad chest with the hand that held the cigar between the
first and second fingers. "I know just what kind of a heart you've got,
for I waited at the stage door and I know you don't get all your
applause inside the Gaiety Theater."
"Goodness," she murmured, "they make an awful fuss about nothing."
"Now," he continued, leaning forward a trifle toward her languid, half
interested figure, "I just want you to think of him as a little boy.
He's only twenty-two. He knows nothing of the world. The money you give
to the poor doesn't come so hard perhaps as this will. It's a big
sacrifice, but I want you to let the boy go."
She smiled slightly, found her handkerchief, which was tucked up the
cuff of her blouse, pressed the little bit of linen to her lips as
though to steady them, then she asked abruptly:
"What has he said to you?"
"Lord!" Ruggles groaned. "_Said_ to me! My dear young lady, he is much
too rude to speak. Dan sort of breathes and snorts around like a
lunatic. He was dangling around that duchess when I was here before, but
she didn't scare me any."
And Letty Lane, now smiling at him, relieved by his break from a more
intense tone, asked:
"Now, you are scared?"
"Well," Ruggles drawled, "I was pretty sure that woman didn't _care_
anything for the boy. Are you her kind?"
It was the best stroke he had made. She almost sprang up from her chair.
"Heavens," she exclaimed, "I guess I'm not!" Her face flushed.
"I had rather see a son of mine dead than married to a woman like that,"
he said.
"Why, Mr. Ruggles," she exclaimed passionately, addressing him with
interest for the first time, "what do you know about me? What? What? You
have seen me dance and heard me sing."
And he interrupted her.
"Ten times, and you are a bully dancer and a bully singer, but you do
other things than dance and sing. There is not a man living that would
want to have his mother dress that way."
She controlled a smile. "Never mind that. People's opinions are very
different about that sort of thing. You have seen me at dinner with your
boy, as you call him, and you can't say that I did anything but ask him
to help the poor. I haven't led Dan on. I have tried to show him just
what you are making me go through now."
If she acted well and danced well, it was hard for her to talk. She was
evidently under strong emotion and it needed her control not to burst
into tears and lose her chance.
"Of course, I know the things you have heard. Of course, I know what is
said about me"--and she stopped.
Ruggles didn't press her any further; he didn't ask her if the things
were true. Looking at her as he did, watching her as he did, there was
in him a feeling so new, so troubling that he found himself more anxious
to protect her than to bring her to justice.
"There are worse, far worse women than I am, Mr. Ruggles. I will never
do Dan any harm."
Here her visitor leaned forward and put one of his big hands lightly
over one of hers, patted it a moment, and said:
"I want you to do a great deal better than that."
She had picked up a photograph off the table, a pretty picture of
herself in _Mandalay_, and turned it nervously between her fingers as
she said with irritation:
"I haven't been in the theatrical world not to guess at this 'Worried
Father' act, Mr. Ruggles. I told you I knew just what you were going to
say."
"Wrong!" he repeated. "The business is old enough perhaps, lots of good
jobs are old, but _this_ is a little different."
He took the turning picture and laid it on the table, and quietly
possessed himself of the small cold hands. Blair's solitaire shone up to
him. Ruggles looked into Letty Lane's eyes. "He is only twenty-two; it
ain't fair, it ain't fair. He could count the times he has been on a
lark, I guess. He hasn't even been to an eastern college. He is no fool,
but he's darned simple."
She smiled faintly. The man's face, near her own, was very simple
indeed.
"You have seen so much," he urged, "so many fellows. You have been such
a queen, I dare say you could get any man you wanted." He repeated.
"Most any one."
"I have never seen any one like Dan."
"Just so: He ain't your kind. That is what I am trying to tell you."
She withdrew her hand from his violently.
"There you are wrong. He _is_ my kind. He is what I like, and he is what
I want to be like."
A wave of red dyed her face, and, in a tone more passionate than she had
ever used to her lover, she said to Ruggles:
"I love him--I love him!" Her words sent something like a sword through
the older man's heart. He said gently: "Don't say it. He don't know what
love means yet."
He wanted to tell her that the girl Dan married should be the kind of
woman his mother was, but Ruggles couldn't bring himself to say the
words. Now, as he sat near her, he was growing so complex that his brain
was turning round. He heard her murmur:
"I told you I knew your act, Mr. Ruggles. It isn't any use."
This brought him back to his position and once more he leaned toward her
and, in a different tone from the one he had intended to use, murmured:
"You don't know. You haven't any idea. I do ask you to let Dan go,
that's a fact. I have got something else to propose in its place. It
ain't quite the same, but it is clear--marry me!"
She gave a little exclamation. A slight smile rippled over her face like
the sunset across a pale pool at dawn.
"Laugh," he said humbly; "don't keep in. I know I am old-fashioned as
the deuce, and me and Dan is quite a contrast, but I mean just what I
say, my dear."
She controlled her amusement, if it was that. It almost made her cry
with mirth, and she couldn't help it. Between laughing breaths she said
to him:
"Oh, is it all for Dan's sake, Mr. Ruggles? Is it?" And then, biting her
lips and looking at him out of her wonderful eyes, she said: "I know it
is--I know it is--I beg your pardon."
"I asked a girl once when I was poor--too poor. Now this is the second
time in my life. I mean just what I say. I'll make you a kind husband. I
am fifty-five, hale as a nut. I dare say you have had many better
offers."
"Oh, dear," she breathed; "oh, dear, please--please stop!"
"But I don't expect you to marry me for anything but my money."
Ruggles put his cigar down on the edge of the table. He looked at his
chair meditatively, he took out his silk handkerchief, polished up his
glasses, readjusted them, put them on and then looked at her.
"Now," he said, "I am going to trust you with something, and I know you
will keep my secret for me. This shows you a little bit of what I think
about you. Dan Blair hasn't got a red cent. He has nothing but what I
give him. There's a false title to all that land on the Bentley claim.
The whole thing came up when I was home and the original company, of
which I own three-quarters of the stock, holds the clear titles to the
Blairtown mines. It all belongs now to me, if I choose to present my
documents. Dan knows nothing about this--not a word."
The actress had never come up to such a dramatic point in any of her
plays. With her hands folded in her lap she looked at him steadily, and
he could not understand the expression that crossed her face. He heard
her exclamation: "Oh, gracious!"
"I've brought the papers back with me," said the Westerner, "and it is
between you and me how we act. If Dan marries you I will be bound to do
what old Blair would have done--cut him off--let him feel his feet on the
ground, and the result of his own folly."
He had taken his glasses off while he made this assertion. Now he put
them on again.
"If you give him up I'll divide with the boy and be rich enough still to
hand over to my wife all she wants to spend."
She turned her face away from him and leaned her head once more upon her
hands. He heard her softly murmuring under her breath, with an absent
look on her face, accompanied by a still more incomprehensible smile.
"That's how it stands," he concluded.
She seemed to have forgotten him entirely, and he caught his breath when
she turned about abruptly and said:
"My goodness, how Dan will hate being poor! He will have to sell all his
stickpins and his motor cars and all the things he has given me. It will
be quite a little to start on, but he will hate it, he is so very
smart."
"Why, you don't mean to say--" Ruggles gasped.
And with a charming smile as she rose to put their conversation at an
end, she said:
"Why, you don't mean to say that you thought I _wouldn't stand by him_?"
She seemed, as she put her hands upon her hips with something of a
defiant look at the older man, as though she just then stood by her
pauperized lover.
"I thought you cared some for the boy," Ruggles said.
"Well, I am showing it."
"You want to ruin him to show it, do you?"
As though he thought the subject dismissed he walked heavily toward the
door.
"You know how it stands. I have nothing more to say." He knew that he
had signally failed, and as a sudden resentment rose in him he
exclaimed, almost brutally:
"I am darned glad the old man is dead; I am glad his mother's dead, and
I am glad I have got no son."
The next moment she was at his side, and he felt that she clung to his
arm. Her sensitive, beautiful face, all drawn with emotion, was raised
to his.
"Oh, you'll kill me--you'll kill me! Just look how very ill I am; you are
making me crazy. I just worship him."
"Give him up, then," said Ruggles steadily.
She faltered: "I can't--I can't--it won't be for long"--with a terrible
pathos in her voice. "You don't know how different I can be: you don't
know what a new life we were going to lead."
Stammering, and with intense meaning, Ruggles, looking down at her,
said: "My dear child--my dear child!"
In his few words something perhaps made her see in a flash her past and
what the question really was. She dropped Ruggles' arm. She stood for a
moment with her arms folded across her breast, her head bent down, and
the man at the door waited, feeling that Dan's whole life was in the
balance of the moment. When she spoke again her voice was hard and
entirely devoid of the lovely appealing quality which brought her so
much admiration from the public.
"If I give him up," she said slowly, "what will you do?"
"Why," he answered, "I'll divide with Dan and let things stand just as
they are."
She thought again a moment and then as if she did not want him to
witness--to detect the struggle she was going through, she turned away
and walked over toward the window and dismissed him from there. "Please
go, will you? I want very much to be alone and to think."