HAVING seen 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 the circuit--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
tell me 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 pride had 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 the _entr’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. No doubt 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 shake the 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--actually _hurts_!”
“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 little bit
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.