Part 17

THOUGH Bromley, swiftly changing from the up to the down train on the Sunday morning arrival in Leadville, should have won back to Denver at six o’clock Sunday evening, a freight wreck on the Kenosha Mountain grade held him up, and it was between nine and ten when, tired as he was by more than twenty-four hours of mountain railroad travel, he set out in search of Philip, making the rooms of the Alamo Building his starting point.

To his relief, the lighted transom assured him that the sitting-room was occupied; and when there was no answer to his knock, he opened the door noiselessly and entered. At first he thought the hunched figure in the hollowed-out easy chair beside the reading table was in a drunken stupor; but when he drew nearer he saw that the fancied stupor was merely a deep sleep of exhaustion. Silently placing a chair for himself on the other side of the table, he lighted his pipe and waited. After a time the sleeper in the hollowed chair stirred, stretched his arms over his head, and, at the smell of live tobacco smoke, opened his eyes and sat up with a jerk.

“You?” he muttered, blinking across the table at the play-boy.

“It’s nobody else. Had a good nap?”

Philip’s wordless response was to get up and reach for a half-emptied bottle standing on a bookcase; but Bromley stopped him.

“Let that alone, Phil--for the moment, anyway; long enough to tell me what has hit you. You owe me that much, at least.”

Philip sank back into the sleepy-hollow chair. “How much do you know?” he demanded sullenly.

“What Stephen Drew could tell me, added to what I happened to see at midnight last night when your train on the South Park met mine at the passing point in the mountains.”

“You were going to Leadville to hunt me up?”

“Yes. Drew told me you needed to be knocked down and dragged out.”

Philip’s dull eyes glowed suddenly. “I ought to have had a gun last night!” he broke out savagely. “Those two tinhorns robbed me blind!”

“Of course they did. That is what they were out for. No, wait; I’m not going to preach. I grant you it’s every man’s privilege to go to the devil in his own fashion. Still, I’m a trifle curious.”

Silence for the space of a long minute. Then: “You wouldn’t understand, Harry; I couldn’t make you understand if I should try. Say that the cursed atmosphere of this God-forsaken country got hold of me at last and that I stubbed my toe and fell down. That will cover it as well as anything.”

“A good many of us fall down, but we get up again. Have you got to stay down?”

“It looks that way. I haven’t anything to get up for.”

“Why haven’t you?”

“That question runs you up against a shut door, Harry; a door that I’ll never open for anybody so long as I can keep it shut. Let that be understood, once for all.”

“All right; we’ll let it go at that, if you say so. Just the same----”

“Well?”

“Oh, confound it--you know what I want to say, and can’t Phil! You’ve been more than a brother to me, ever since you picked me up out of the gutter a year ago and stood me on my two feet. Can’t you see where this thing hits me?”

Philip leaned forward, elbows on knees, face propped in his hands, lead-heavy eyes fixed upon the blank wall opposite. When he replied, the harshness had gone out of his voice.

“I can see a great many things now that I have never been able to see in the past, Harry ... one of them is that I’ve been a self-blinded Pharisee all my life. All I needed was a hard enough kick to show me that at bottom I’m no better than other men; not half as good or as strong as some other men who make no profession of their goodness or strength. I got the kick, finally--no matter how, but I got it--and ... well, I guess I have found my level. I’ve been in hell for the last fourteen days and nights, and if I am just beginning to struggle out, it is at the bottom and not at the top.”

Bromley was silent for a little time; then he said huskily: “You’re not going to break with me, Phil? I couldn’t stand for that, you know. You will have to go your own way, I suppose; but wherever you go, or whatever you do, I’m still your partner. Just remember that when the pull comes the hardest, won’t you?”

“I’ll try to. But you can’t do anything for me, Harry; nobody can. I’ve walked deliberately into the devil’s wood and got lost. If there is any way out--as there doesn’t seem to be now--I’ve got to find it for myself. Can you understand that?”

“Perhaps I can.” Another silence, and then Bromley went on: “What shall I say to Jean?--or will you say it to her yourself?”

“You know very well I won’t say it myself. If you tell her anything you must tell her the plain truth: that the man she has known as Philip Trask was a sorry hypocrite; a whited sepulchre, with the cleanliness all on the outside and full of dead men’s bones within.”

“It isn’t that bad, Philip.”

“Yes it is; just that bad. I got my kick, as I have said, and it was hard enough, God knows. Instead of taking it like a man, I went under. In a single fortnight I have measured all the depths--broken all the moorings. I have shut myself out of the world of decent people, and I’ve only decency enough left in me to know that I shall never be able to look a pure woman in the face again. I have only one comfort now, Harry, and that is that I have never given Jean any reason to believe that I was in love with her.”

“You are sure of that, are you?”

“Yes; quite sure. After the fatuous fashion of the complete Pharisee I have been holding off, telling myself that there was plenty of time, that I would wait until----” he stopped abruptly, and Bromley finished the sentence for him, not without an edge in his tone.

“You’d wait until the peach was fully ripe; then you’d reach up and pluck it.”

“No,” was the sober denial, made with no touch of resentment. “You must give the devil his due, Harry. It wasn’t altogether as rotten as that, though maybe it did lean a little that way, at times. Never mind; it’s all over now. You have a free field.”

“I?”

“Yes. I haven’t been blind. Jean is heart-free, and I saw at once that it was going to lie between us two. I’m eliminated.”

The edge had gone out of the play-boy’s voice and there was a faint smile at the bottom of his eyes when he said: “But, according to the way you stack things up, I am just as much of a false alarm as you are. Heaven knows, I’ve waded fully as deep in the mud as you have in the mire.”

“No; there is a difference. I know it now. Whatever you have done, you have contrived somehow, in some way, to keep your soul out of the mud. Flout the idea if you want to, but I know. I’ve lived with you for something better than a year and know what I’m talking about.”

Another interval of silence, and at the end of it Bromley got upon his feet.

“You are off?” said Philip, without looking up.

“Yes, I must go. I’m train-tired and perishing for a bath. You’re not meaning to run away from Denver, are you?”

“Oh, no; I suppose not. There is nowhere to run to.”

At the door Bromley paused with his hand on the knob.

“Just one other word, Phil--and you may throw a chair at me if it bites too hard: you’re no gambler. I mean you can’t hold your own against the crooks and short-card men.”

“You are right. I have learned my lesson out of that book this early in the game. Anything else?”

Bromley pointed to the half-empty bottle on the bookcase.

“That stuff is never much of a friend, and it is always a pretty bad enemy. I wouldn’t trust it too far, if I were you. There is always a morning after to follow the night before.”

“Yes; I have learned that, too. I am learning a good many things these days. I guess I had it coming to me. Are you going? Well, good-night.”

After Bromley had gone, Philip heaved himself wearily out of the deep chair and began to pace the floor with his head down and his hands locked behind him. Two weeks of mad, unbridled rebellion against all the inhibitions had left him weak and shattered in mind and body. Twice in the circling round of the room he reached for the bottle on the bookcase, and once he took it up and started to draw the cork. He knew that a swallow or two of the liquor would steady the twittering nerves, temporarily, at least; and that if he should drink enough of it, he could go to bed and sleep.

But the good fighting strength which had been his up to that fatal Monday evening a fortnight in the past, broken and spent though it was, strove to make itself felt. Had it already come to this, that he could no longer go to sleep without first drugging himself with whiskey? If two short weeks of indulgence had thus far maimed and crippled him, how long could he hope to delay the descent into the lowest gutter of degradation?

“No, by God!” he exclaimed finally. “No more of it to-night--not if I have to lie awake in hell till daylight!” And, such is the strength derivable from even a partial resistance to temptation, he went to bed and slept the clock around.

XX

BEING gratefully appreciative of a good bed after a night and a day in a narrow-gauge Pullman, Bromley slept late on the morning following his return to Denver; and when he put in an appearance in the cottage dining-room he found that the family had already breakfasted and Jean had gone to her work. Sixteen-year-old Mysie, housewifely and starry-eyed, was the only member of the household visible, and it was she who poured his coffee and made the toast.

“Did I disturb you folks when I came in last night?” he asked.

“Jeanie said she heard you; but nothing ever wakes me. I’m the sleepy-head of the family. Are your eggs cooked right?”

“How could they be otherwise if you cooked them?” said the play-boy gallantly. He liked to make Mysie talk. More than either of her sisters she retained the soft Southern speech with its submerged “r’s” and lingering vowels. “Where is Mary Louise this fine morning?”

“She and Mummie have gone marketing while it is cool. Shan’t I toast you another slice?”

Bromley let his eyes rest for a moment upon the fresh, fair young face opposite. The elder of the two younger girls was a sharp contrast to Jean, whose dark hair and eyes and warm skin were inheritances from her far-away French ancestry. As an artist’s model Mysie Dabney might have posed for an idealized study of blushing innocence awakening, of sweet girlhood poising for the flight into womanhood.

“You spoil me utterly,” he said, smiling into the wide-open, dewy eyes. Then: “I wonder if you are old enough to let me ask you a horribly improper question?”

“Improper? Why, Uncle Harry, I don’t believe you could be improper if you should try ever so hard!”

Bromley winced at the “Uncle Harry,” though both of the younger girls had called him that almost from the beginning.

“I’m going to make a bargain with you,” he said lightly. “When is your birthday?”

“Next Sunday.”

“All right; there is a pretty birthday gift coming to you next Sunday if you will promise, after that day, to stop calling me ‘uncle.’”

The wide-open eyes opened still wider.

“Why--I thought you liked it!”

“I do--from Mary Louise; from little girls generally. But when you say it, it makes me feel as though my teeth were coming loose and my hair falling out--old and decrepit, you know.”

“I wish you’d listen!” she laughed. “What do you want me to call you--after next Sunday?--‘Misteh Bromley?’”

“Oh, dear me, no; that is ever so much worse! Couldn’t you make it just plain ‘Harry,’ without the ‘uncle’?”

He saw a faint wave of color rising to the fair neck and cheeks, and the down-dropped eyes were no longer those of a child.

“I--I’ll try,” she promised; then, as one stepping lightly from ground tremulous to ground firm: “What is the improper question that isn’t going to be improper?”

“It is about Jean, and if you don’t want to answer it you can just make a face at me and tell me it is none of my blessed business. Does Jean--do you think she cares especially about--er--Philip?”

Again the dewy eyes were downcast. “Jeanie doesn’t talk ve’y much about herself; I reckon--I mean, I think you know that. Sometimes I surmise she cares a heap about him, and sometimes I just don’t know.” Then with a naïveté which stepped well back into childhood: “I don’t think they’d be ve’y happy together; do you?”

“Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know; maybe it’s just because Mr. Philip is so sort of don’t-touch-me good; sort of Yankee-good, ain’t--isn’t it?”

Since the Philip of the present moment was neither “Yankee-good” nor any other kind, Bromley’s reply to the innocent question was strictly aphoristic.

“When you grow up to be a woman, Mysie, you will know that men are never any too good,” he returned gravely; at which, declining a second cup of coffee, he went away before he should be tempted to say more.

Turning up at Madame Marchande’s at noon, he found that Jean had been given a half-holiday, on account of the slack midsummer season, and had gone home. After he thought he had given her time enough to eat her luncheon, he hired a horse and buggy for the afternoon and drove over to the cottage in West Denver.

“Get your things on and come along with me for a ride,” he invited, when Jean came out to pet the little white mare from the livery stable. “I want to have a talk with you.”

“Is it about Philip?” she asked; and when he made the sign of assent, she went in to get her coat and hat.

For the time it took the smart little mare to whisk them across the bridge over the Platte, and up to the farther heights on the north side overlooking the final undulations of the great plain rolling up in swelling land waves to break against Castle Rock and Table Mountain, the driving of the spirited little horse gave Bromley an excuse for postponing the thankless task he had set himself. On the watershed height between the Platte and Clear Creek, in sight of the great house that “Brick” Pomeroy had built, or had begun to build, in the flush times of the Clear Creek mining boom, there was a tiny lake, tree-shadowed, and on its shore he drove in among the cottonwoods and got out and hitched the mare.

“I’ve been wanting to show you this glorious view,” he said, as he helped his companion out of the high, side-bar buggy. “Is there anything to match it in Mississippi?”

She shook her head. “I think there is nothing like it anywhere else in the wide world.”

Bromley took the lap-robe from the buggy and spread it under one of the trees, and for a little time they sat quietly in the face of the magnificent sweep of mountain grandeurs stretching from Long’s Peak on the north around to the dim blue bulk of Pike’s on the south. It was the young woman who broke the spell. “You said you wanted to talk to me about Philip,” she reminded him. “Did you find him?”

“No. He left Leadville about the same time that I started from Denver. Our trains passed in the night.”

“Then he is in Denver now?”

“Yes.”

Silence for a time, and then: “You needn’t be afraid to tell me. I’m not a child.”

“All right; I’ll tell you what little there is to tell. I got in late and found him in the rooms in the Alamo. He was asleep in a chair when I went in, but he woke up after a while and talked to me. Drew hadn’t exaggerated any, whatsoever. Phil has hit the bottom, good and hard.”

“He--he is drinking?”

“It is everything in the calendar, I guess--from what he said.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No; he said that part of it was a shut door. But he isn’t charging it up to the ‘why,’ whatever that may be; he is calling it by its right name--his morbid self-righteousness and weakness.”

“He isn’t weak,” she asserted quickly. “He may say he is, but he isn’t.”

“I am merely telling you what he said. He was bitter about it at first; called himself all sorts of hard names--whited sepulchre and the like; but he softened down a bit before I left. What I am most afraid of now is the reaction which is bound to come.”

“How do you mean?”

Bromley stole a look aside to see how she was taking it. Her gaze was fixed upon the distant mountain skyline and there was nothing to indicate that she was moved by any emotion deeper than a friendly concern for the stumbler.

“We both know Philip pretty well,” he prefaced. “When he quits coruscating--and I think he has reached that point already--he will find himself in a valley of humiliation too deep to climb out of; or he will think it is. So he won’t try to climb; he will merely try to expiate. And that pit is likely to be as deep and as mucky as any other.”

“There was no mention made of his father?”

“No. But I am quite ready to accept your guess; that Philip found his father somewhere--probably that Monday night; and that he didn’t find what he had hoped to find.”

“You mean he may have found that his father was really a--a--that he _did_ take the bank’s money?”

“Yes, that’s it. From what Philip has told me I have gathered that he was almost, or quite, alone in his belief in his father’s innocence. If it has turned out the other way, that would account for everything that has happened. Phil would feel that he shared the disgrace.”

Another little interval of silence, and at its end: “What will you do, Harry?”

“I can’t do anything; he made that perfectly plain. The most I could get out of him was a promise that he wouldn’t try to break with me. It is just as you said Saturday at luncheon: he isn’t going to let anybody help him.”

“No; I knew he wouldn’t. But you must try to keep hold of him.”

“You may be sure I shall do that. You know how much I owe to him--and to you.”

“You don’t owe me anything at all.”

“Oh, yes, I do. Philip has told me, you know.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That you were the one who prompted him to take me with him on the prospecting trip a year ago. I was a down-and-out at that time; he knew it and you knew it.”

She looked up with the light in the dark eyes that he was never quite able to read or to fathom.

“We were both right: you have proved it. Philip said to me once that whatever you had done, you had kept your soul clean.”

“He did, eh? He said the same thing to me, no longer ago than last night. That’s all either of you know about it. A year ago I wasn’t worth the powder it would have taken to blow me up, Jean; that is the plain, unvarnished fact. I’m not right sure that I am any better now; not in Philip’s definition of goodness. Thanks to you and to him, I’ve got a pot of money; and money brings responsibility; and responsibility bespeaks some little effort at decent living. There you have it in a nutshell.”

“I know,” she smiled; “I have heard you talk before.” Then: “You spoke just now of Philip’s definition of goodness. Don’t you think it is the right one?”

“Oh, yes; I suppose it is, when you come right down to the foundation of things. The only danger is that it may breed a prickly lot of spiritual pride. That was the chief thing that was the matter with Phil--a pride that made him not only hate the sin, but despise the sinner. The pride is gone now, and in going it has taken some of the righteous hardness along with it, which, you might say, is all to the good. I don’t believe he will ever set himself up in judgment again upon the poor sinners--which is something gained, isn’t it?”

“Yes; but the price he is paying is terribly high.”

“Sure it is. Yet I’m not losing hope. There are certain mazes in this thing we call life out of which a man has to grope his own way, if he can. There is good stuff in Phil--royally good stuff at bottom, as we both know. If--in the reaction--he doesn’t do something everlastingly to smash his whole future----”

She nodded slowly. “That is the greatest danger; that he will cut himself off from every chance of getting back. There are two Denvers over there,”--with a glance backward at the city of the plain lying map-like under the afternoon sun. “I think you know what I mean.”

“I do. There are good doors that are slow to open to the wayfarer, and a lot of bad ones that are always open. At the present moment Philip is one of the many drifters. But I am still betting on him.”

“If we only knew a little more about it,” she offered musingly. “If we could find out where he went that Monday evening after you left him----”

He took her up quickly.

“You’d like to have me try to run the thing down, Jean?”

“I suppose we have no right to pry. And yet, if we knew----”

“I understand. If we can place the father, we shall at least know how bad things are, and if they are or are not altogether past mending. I’ll do my best. Anything else suggest itself?”

“You will not lose sight of Philip. He needs your friendship now more than ever.”

“I’ll do my best there, too. But in his present frame of mind it is going to be a man-sized job to brother him, even a little. He thinks he has put himself beyond the pale--says so in so many words. Another man might say some such thing in a morning-after gust of remorse; but he means it.”

“That is just it,” she said sorrowfully. “He is going to punish himself a great deal more savagely than--than he needs to. That is the part of his pride that isn’t dead yet. Shall we go back now? If you don’t mind, I--I think I’d like to go home.”