Part 14

Bromley shook his head again. “I shall feel like a cad doing it, but she shan’t lack for introductions, Phil; I’ll promise you that. Want to go around to the Windsor with me after dinner and meet them?”

Philip’s laugh was a bray. “And let you start the introductions with me? Thanks, I wouldn’t be that unkind to you,” he bantered.

“Let’s talk about something pleasant,” Bromley broke in whimsically; “our friends from Mississippi, for example. You remember the little rescue plan we were talking about last week?”

“I remember telling you that it wouldn’t work.”

“But it has worked--like a charm. I bought the West Denver cottage Saturday: you know the neighborhood--respectable and neat, but not gaudy--short walk across the Curtis Street bridge to the University School for the girls--short walk to business for the dear little hat-trimmer. After I’d got the deed safely in my pocket, I called upon Mrs. Dabney and told her what I had ‘found.’ She wept tears of joy.”

“I don’t know how you do it,” said Philip discontentedly. “As many times as I have been with Jean since I took her to dinner that first evening, she has never let me see the inside of their rooms in the Whittle Block.”

The play-boy laughed.

“You know the saying about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. I got my foot in the door the first time I walked home with her--the day you went to Boulder. The younger girls took to me and called me ‘Uncle Harry’; and after that it was easy.”

“Still, I don’t see how you got Mrs. Dabney’s consent to fall in with your cottage scheme. I tried to offer Jean a loan, and she froze me so quick----”

“Of course she would. That was what you might call the heavy-hand method. I had to tell a few white lies about the cottage, but that was all in the day’s work. A mining friend of mine was moving his family to the Gunnison country and was willing to let his furnished house cheap to the right kind of tenants. Past that, all that was needed was to make the rent fit the Dabney purse.”

“But you haven’t fooled Jean with any such cock-and-bull story as that.”

“Haven’t I? That remains to be seen. Anyway, they are taking possession to-morrow, and I’m to help them. You are not in it; not in one side of it.”

“Evidently,” was the morose agreement. Then: “As I said before, I’d like to know how you do it, Harry. You can get closer to people in ten minutes than I can in a year. The first evening we were together with Jean I could see that she accepted you that quick,”--with a snap of his finger. “And she knew what you are--or rather what you were a year ago. Don’t women, good women, care whether or not a man makes a consummate fool of himself?”

Instead of laughing at this acerbic thrust, his usual reply to Philip’s censorious references to his past, Bromley grew thoughtfully silent. When he spoke, it was to say: “You may analyze women, good, bad and indifferent, until the cows come home, Philip, but you’ll never fully understand them; no man ever does, I think. That remark of yours rubs shoulders with a pretty large truth. There is a good deal of talk nowadays about the double standard. It is the women--the good women--who, unconsciously, perhaps, do the most to maintain it. Why a man who has sown a pretty generous acreage of wild oats should stand a better chance with a good woman than the other sort of man--your sort--is a question that has puzzled better brains than yours or mine. But the fact seems to remain.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Philip doggedly.

“All right; your belief isn’t obligatory, and we won’t quarrel over it. You asked me a question and I gave you the best answer I had in the box. Would you like to amble across Cherry Creek and have a look at my ‘mining friend’s’ cottage on the west side? It is too fine an evening to be wasted indoors. Besides, you’ll want to know the way.”

Together they walked down Larimer and across the bridge, turning south in a street paralleling Cherry Creek. Three short squares brought them to a darkened cottage on a corner; a small box of a place with a pocket-handkerchief lawn and two half-grown cottonwoods for shade trees. Bromley found a key and they went in. When the gas was lighted, Philip looked around. There were three bed-rooms, a sitting-room, a small dining-room and a lean-to kitchen, all plainly but comfortably furnished. True, the carpets were worn and the furniture did not match; but there was a home-like air about the place that made it seem as if the former owners had just stepped out.

“Did you buy it all, just as it stands?” Philip asked.

“No, indeed. Just the empty house. I spent a whole day ransacking the second-hand shops for the fittings; didn’t dare buy anything new, naturally--that would have been a dead give-away. Like it?”

“It will do well enough--considering who did it. Of course, it’s understood that you let me in with you on the expense?”

Bromley did not reply at once. When he did, his answer was a conditional refusal.

“No, I think not, Phil. You don’t owe Jean Dabney anything, and I do. If the time ever comes when you are in debt to her as I am, we’ll have an accounting. If you have seen all you want to, let’s go.” And he reached up to turn off the gas.

In their common sitting-room that evening, while Bromley was chuckling over a magazine article which showed how little the writer really knew about the Colorado to which he had evidently made no more than a flying visit, Philip shut the _The Lady of the Aroostook_ upon a place-keeping finger to say:

“I think I owe it to myself to tell you that I went to Middleton to-day and apologized.”

“Of course; I knew you’d do that, sooner or later,” returned the play-boy, with his best impish grin. “That is what you get for having a conscience. What did he say?”

“He was very decent about it; doesn’t seem to bear malice. Shook hands with me when I got up to go and said he couldn’t blame me so very much for ‘losing my temper.’ Altogether, he made me feel like a fool--or rather like a whited sepulchre.”

“Why the simile?” queried the magazine reader.

“Because I profess better things, and he doesn’t. He is a hopeless pagan, but he shows a better Christian spirit than I did.”

This time Bromley’s grin was good-naturedly cynical.

“Deep down in your heart, Philip, you don’t really believe any such thing as that; you know you don’t,” he said accusingly.

“Why don’t I?”

“Because, at this very moment, the old self-righteous Puritan in you is patting itself on the back for its superior virtue and for the humility in which you kept the letter of the Gospel to your own satisfaction and comfort.”

“Oh, to the devil with you and your hair-splitting philosophy!” said Philip impatiently; and, relighting his pipe, he went on with his reading of the Howells novel.

XVI

THE spring of 1881, memorable for the jangling aftermath of the bitter factional political struggle of the previous year which had resulted in the nomination and election of President Garfield, waned to its close, and on the second of July the nation was shocked by the news flashed over the wires of the shooting of the President in a Washington railway station by Charles J. Guiteau.

Isolated by distance from the populous East and Middle West, the new Colorado yet felt the shock and responded to it. Partisanship and the harsh pre-election epithets of “329” and the anti-Chinese cry of “Remember the Morey letter” were forgotten, and the city of the plain marked its sorrow and indignation, as it did everything else, with a magnificent Western gesture.

Philip, now following out his plan of a blind search for his father in the various mountain mining-camps, returned to Denver early in the week following the national tragedy with other failures to add to those which had gone before.

“You mustn’t let it dig too deep into you,” Bromley urged sympathetically, after the story of the added failures had been told. “You know you admitted in the beginning that there was only the slenderest chance that you might turn him up here in Colorado. You haven’t had any later clues, have you?”

“It is all groping in the dark,” was the discouraged answer. “All I am sure of is that he would bury himself out of sight. To be the first of his name to have the finger of suspicion pointed at him, however unjustly ... you’d have to be New England born yourself to know how these things cut to the bone, Harry.”

Something of the same nature he said to Jean Dabney that evening as he was walking home with her from Madame Marchande’s. He had long since told her about the cloud on the Trask name, and of his determination to dispel it; as he made no doubt it could be dispelled if he could trace his father and persuade him to return to New Hampshire, there to fight the good fight of reinstatement with half the wealth of a Colorado gold mine to back him.

“I do hope you will succeed,” said the one who was to the full as sympathetic as Bromley. “You owe it to him to do your very best to find him.”

“To him, and quite as much to myself,” Philip amended decisively. “While the cloud remains, it rests upon all of us who bear the Trask name. Until it is cleared away I can’t ask any right-minded woman to marry me.”

They had reached the bridge over Cherry Creek and had paused to look down upon the damp sands lying dark in the starlight The young woman’s tone was merely argumentative when she said: “Don’t you think that is carrying it rather far?”

“Not as I see it. The name a man gives to his wife ought not to have even a shadow of disgrace upon it. Don’t you believe that?”

“Y-yes, I suppose I do,” was the half-hesitant reply. “Yet that seems frightfully sweeping, when you come to think of it. It seems to shut out all idea of repentance and forgiveness.”

“Take it home,” said Philip shortly. “Would you marry a man who had a bad record, or whose father had been accused of a crime and was still lying under that accusation?”

She was still staring down at the dark sands in the creek channel.

“Since the beginning of time both men and women have been forgiving worse things.”

Never before in their renewed acquaintance had he felt so strongly the difference that a year’s burden of heavy responsibilities courageously taken up and carried had made in the dark-eyed young woman standing beside him. It was only at rare intervals that a flash of the old-time, teasing mockery came to the surface. He told himself that her burden had not only sobered her; it had brought her too crudely in contact with a world of compromises--ethical compromises. He remembered what Bromley had said about the double standard of morals, and the part good women played in maintaining or condoning it, and the recollection brought a bitter taste in his mouth.

“If women like you take that attitude, what is the use of a man’s trying to keep his record clean?” he demanded.

“Dear me! How savagely righteous you can be!” she exclaimed with a little laugh. Then she cleared the air with a plain-spoken declaration that served to increase the aloes taste in his mouth: “I suppose I am like other women. When the time comes--if it ever does come--that I think enough of a man to marry him, I shan’t ask what he has been; only what he is and means to be.”

“That is heroic--but entirely wrong,” he decided magisterially. “My code is stricter than that, and it applies to men and women alike. I mean to be able to give as much as I ask. If I can’t give, I shan’t ask.”

“What terrible spiritual pride!” she commented, laughing again. Then, soberly: “Don’t you know, I shall be truly sorry for the woman you marry.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you don’t know women at all--or yourself. And, besides, you don’t know the meaning of love; the unselfish kind that takes for better or worse. Let’s not talk about such things. We always get lost in the woods when we do. Where shall you go next to look for your father?”

“I haven’t decided. There are some camps in the San Juan that I haven’t been to. Perhaps I shall go down there next.”

They went on across the bridge and presently reached the cottage on the west side. At the gate Philip declined Jean’s invitation to come in. The bitter taste was still with him, and as he walked slowly back to town he was placing Bromley as the figurant upon whom Jean’s tacit defense of the sinners was based. The play-boy’s acceptance by the Dabneys one and all was of the unreserved sort that Bromley seemed to be able to win wherever he went, and it was he who oftenest walked home with Jean when she was kept late in the millinery shop.

Philip assured himself that he wasn’t jealous; he was merely sorry. Jean was much too fine to be wasted upon a man who, by his own confession, had “gone all the gaits.” True, Bromley showed no indications of any desire to return to his wallowing in the mire; but that made no difference: he _had_ wallowed, and Jean knew it--knew it and was willing to condone. That was the bitter part of it. Did she, in common with other women he had heard of, accept the devil’s maxim that a reformed rake makes the best husband?

And about this business of reform: how deep did it go? Was there ever any such thing as a complete reintegration? Could a man--or a woman--ever fully regain the heights from which the descent had begun? Admitting that Bromley had a heart of gold, as he--Philip--had once characterized him for Jean, wasn’t he at best but a brand snatched from the burning? And though the brand might not spring alight again, wouldn’t there always be the charred scar and the ashes?

Philip climbed the stair in the Alamo Building determined to have a straight talk with Bromley. But the time proved to be unpropitious. The play-boy was dressing to go out--conscripted for a theater party with the Follansbees, as he put it. “Have to be decently chummy, of course,” he grumbled, “but I’d much rather go across the Creek and play parchesi with Mysie and Mary Louise.” Then: “That reminds me of something I’ve been chewing on ever since you went away this last time, Phil. Even with the rent of the cottage as low as I dared put it without giving the whole snap away, the load is still too heavy for Jean--much too heavy. Can’t you see it?”

Philip nodded. “I have seen it all along. I don’t know what Madame Marchande is paying Jean, but it stands to reason it isn’t enough to keep a family of four properly alive.”

“You can bet your bottom dollar it isn’t. I’ve been with them enough to note the little pinchings and scrimpings and they make my heart bleed. It is up to us, one or the other of us, to climb into the breach, and I have found the way to do it. There is a spare bed-room in the cottage, and last evening I asked Mrs. Dabney if she would be willing to take a lodger. She was so willing that she cried.”

“Well?” said Philip.

“As I say, it’s up to us--or one of us; the room isn’t big enough for two.”

“Go over there and live with them, you mean?”

“That’s it. And since they were your friends before they were mine, you shall have the first chance at it. But if you don’t go, I shall. They need the money. Think it over, and we’ll thresh it out after I come back.”

For some time after Bromley had gone, Philip sat in his reading chair thrilling to his finger-tips. To live under the same roof with Jean; to be with her daily in the close intimacies of the home life; to be able to help her legitimately in the carrying of her heavy burden until the time should come when, his own filial duty discharged and the Trask name cleared, he might persuade her to shift the burden to his shoulders--to his and not to Harry Bromley’s.... There was only one fly in this precious pot of ointment: that saying of Jean’s scarcely an hour old: “I suppose I am like other women. When the time comes--if it ever does come--that I think enough of a man to marry him, I shan’t ask what he has been; only what he is and means to be.” Was she trying to tell him that Bromley was the man?

It was in that hour that the virtuous ego rose to its most self-satisfied height. Jean, wise in the hard school of adversity but innocent as a child in matters touching her soul’s welfare, should be made to see that she must not risk her future happiness by marrying any man who, however lovable, had once shown the weak thread in the fabric of his character and might show it again. It should be his task to make her see it; to convince her that her duty to herself and to her unborn children lay in quite a different direction.

In the levitating exhilaration of this thought the room suddenly became too close and confining to contain him, and he put on his coat and hat and descended to the street. Conscious only of an urge to keep moving, he began to walk aimlessly, through Curtis to Sixteenth Street, past the new opera house now nearing completion, and so on down toward Larimer.

It was in the final block that he saw something that jerked him down out of the clouds and set his feet upon the pavement of the baser realities. In the center of the block was one of the evidences of Denver’s “wide-openness”: a luxurious gambling palace running, like many others in the city of the moment, without let or hindrance from the police. Through the green baize swinging doors, as he was passing, Philip saw an entering figure and recognized it.

“Jim Garth!” he muttered, and hung upon his heel. He knew that Bromley had been “staking” the big miner from time to time, and had himself refused point blank to join in the contributions, arguing that it was not only good money thrown away, but that it was merely giving a man of ungoverned appetites the means of further degrading himself. But now, in an upsurge of righteous responsibility--the legitimate child of the thoughts he had been entertaining--he was moved to lay a restraining hand upon this weak-willed giant who had toiled with him and Bromley through the bitter winter in the Saguache. Before he realized exactly what he meant to do, or how he should go about it, he had pushed the swinging doors apart and was ascending the softly carpeted stair.

At the top of the stair he found a doorkeeper guard, but with a single appraising glance the man let him pass into the room beyond. For a moment he stood just inside the door, blinking and bewildered. The transition from the cool outdoor air and semi-darkness of the street to the brilliant light and smoke-drenched atmosphere of the crowded upper room dazed him. It was the first time he had ever set foot within a gambling “hell,” and it was some little time before he could force himself to begin a slow circuit of the room in search of Garth.

To the soul inspired by predetermined righteousness the scene was a blasting commentary on the depravity of human nature. The haggard, eager, lusting faces of some of the players contrasting with the blank immobility of others--the seasoned gamblers; the monotonous click of the chips as some nervous amateur ran them through his fingers; the skirling spin of the roulette balls followed by the _rat-tat-tat_ as they came to rest in the red or black.... Philip saw and heard and hastened, with a feeling that if he should linger too long the fell madness of the place might somehow obtain a lodgment in his own brain. He must find Garth quickly and drag him out.

It was at the upper end of the room that he came to a green-covered table with inlaid cards in its center and a double row of players ringing it, the inner row sitting and the outer standing. Upon a high stool at one end sat the “lookout,” a man with the face of a graven image and watchful eyes that marked each bet as it was placed upon the table; and at one side sat the dealer, turning up cards with practiced dexterity out of the nickel-plated box on the table before him.

Philip’s gaze swept the ring of faces until he came to that of the shirt-sleeved dealer, flipping the cards two by two with automatic precision out of the box under his hands. One glance at the clean-cut, deeply lined face with its cold eyes, thin nostrils and lean jaw was all that was needed, and Philip’s heart skipped a beat and stood still. His fruitless search of the past few weeks for his father had ended--_here_!

Gropingly, and as if his sight had suddenly failed him, he edged his way around the table and touched the shirt-sleeved man on the shoulder. The cold gray eyes were lifted to his for a flitting instant; then the dealer made a sign to his substitute and got up from his place, saying quietly to Philip: “I’ve been expecting you. We’ll go up-stairs.”

Wholly speechless, Philip followed his father into the hall, up a stairway and into a room on the third floor where a gas jet, turned low, was burning. John Trask reached up and turned the gas on full.

“Might as well sit down,” he said to his son; and Philip sank into a chair and fought for speech. But the words would not come. The crushing silence was broken at length by the father.

“You’ve been looking for me?”

Philip nodded and moistened his dry lips to say, “Everywhere.”

“I thought most likely you might--after I saw your name in the papers as one of the ‘lucky-strikers.’” Then: “You knew me--without the beard?”

“Of course,” said Philip dully. “You look just the same, only older.”

“I am older; a good deal older than the six years will account for. Tell me about your mother and sisters: you hear from them, don’t you?”

“They are well--and well provided for, now.”

“I suppose they have given me up for dead, haven’t they?”

“I don’t know; I only know that I hadn’t.”

“Maybe it would have been better if you had.”

“No!” Philip broke in desperately. “There is something for you to do--a thing I can help you do, now that I have money.”

“What is it?”