The Girl From His Town

“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.”

CHAPTER XXV – LETTY LANE RUNS AWAY

He had not got up-stairs to his rooms at the Carlton before a note was handed him from the actress, bidding him to return at once to the Savoy, and Ruggles, his heart hammering like a trip-hammer, rushed up to his rooms, made an evening toilet, for it was then half-past seven, threw his cravats and collars all around the place, cursed like a miner as he got into his clothes, and red almost to apoplexy, nervous and full of emotion, he returned to the rooms he had left not three hours before.

The three hours had been busy ones at the actress’ apartment. Letty Lane’s sitting-room was full of trunks, dressing-bags and traveling paraphernalia. She came forward out of what seemed a world of confusion, dressed as though for a journey, even her veil and her gloves denoting her departure. She spoke hurriedly and almost without politeness.

“I have sent for you to come and see me here. Not a soul in London knows I am going away. There will be a dreadful row at the theater, but that’s none of your affairs. Now, I want you to tell me before I go just what you are going to do for Dan.”

“Who are you going with?” Ruggles asked shortly, and she flashed at him:

“Well, really, I don’t think that is any of your business. When you drive a woman as you have driven me, she will go far.”

He interrupted her vehemently, not daring to take her hand. “I couldn’t do more. I have asked you to marry me. I couldn’t do more. I stand by what I have said. Will you?” he stammered.

She knew men. She looked at him keenly. Her veil was lifted above her eyes and its shadow framed her small pale face on which there were marks of utter disenchantment, of great ennui. She said languidly: “What I want to know is, what you are going to do for Dan?”

“I told you I would share with him.”

“Then he will be nearly as rich?”

“He’ll have more than is good for him.”

That satisfied her. Then she pursued: “I want you to stand by him. He will need you.”

Ruggles lifted the hand he held and kissed it reverently. “I’ll do anything you say – anything you say.”

Down-stairs in the Savoy, as Dan had done countless times, Ruggles waited until he saw her motor car carry her and her small luggage and Higgins away.

In their sitting-room in the Carlton a half-hour later the door was thrown open and Dan Blair came in like a madman. Without preamble he seized Ruggles by the arm.

“Look here,” he cried, “what have you been doing? Tell me now, and tell me the truth, or, by God, I don’t know what I’ll do. You went to the Savoy. You went there twice. Anyhow, where is she?”

Dan, slender as he was beside Ruggles’ great frame, shook the elder man as though he had been a terrier. “Speak to me. Where has she gone?”

He stared in the Westerner’s face, his eyes bloodshot. “Why in thunder don’t you say something?”

And Ruggles prayed for some power to unloose his thickening tongue.

“You say she’s gone?” he questioned.

“I say,” said the boy, “that you’ve been meddling in my affairs with the woman I love. I don’t know what you have said to her, but it’s only your age that keeps me from striking you. Don’t you know,” he cried, “that you are spoiling my life? Don’t you know that?” A torrent of feeling coming to his lips, his eyes suffused, the tears rolled down his face. He walked away into his own room, remained there a few moments, and when he came out again he carried in his hand his valise, which he put down with a bang on the table. More calmly, but still in great anger, he said to his father’s friend:

“Now, can you tell me what you’ve done or not?”

“Dan,” said Ruggles with difficulty, “if you will sit down a moment we can – ”

The boy laughed in his face. “Sit down!” he cried. “Why, I think you must have lost your reason. I have chartered a motor car out there and the damned thing has burst a tire and they are fixing it up for me. It will be ready in about two minutes and then I am going to follow wherever she has gone. She crossed to Paris, but I can get there before she can even with this damned accident. But, before I go, I want you to tell me what you said.”

“Why,” said Ruggles quietly, “I told her you were poor, and she turned you down.”

His words were faint.

“God!” said the boy under his breath. “That’s the way you think about truth. Lie to a woman to save my precious soul! But I expect,” he said; “you think she is so immoral and so bad that she will hurt me. Well,” he said, with great emphasis, “she has never done anything in her life that comes up to what you’ve done. Never! And nothing has ever hurt me so.”

His lips trembled. “I have lost my respect for you, for my father’s friend, and as far as she is concerned, I don’t care what she marries me for. She has got to marry me, and if she doesn’t” – he had no idea, in his passion, what he was saying or how – “why, I think I’ll kill you first and then blow my own brains out!” And with these mad words he grabbed up his valise and bolted from the room, and Ruggles could hear his running feet tearing down the corridor.

CHAPTER XXVI – WHITE AND CORAL

Spring in Paris, which comes in a fashion so divine that even the most calloused and indifferent are impressed by its beauty, awakened no answering response in the heart of the young man who, from his hotel window, looked out on the desecrated gardens of the Tuileries – on the distant spires of the churches whose names he did not know – on the square block of old palaces. He had missed the boat across the Channel taken by Letty Lane, and the delay had made him lose what little trace of her he had. In the early hours of the morning he had flung himself in at the St. James, taken the indifferent room they could give him in the crowded season, and excited as he was he slept and did not waken until noon. Blair thought it would be a matter of a few hours only to find the whereabouts of the celebrated actress, but it was not such an easy job. He had not guessed that she might be traveling incognito, and at none of the hotels could he hear news of her, nor did he pass her in the crowded, noisy, rustling, crying streets, though he searched motors for her with eager eyes, and haunted restaurants and cafés, and went everywhere that he thought she might be likely to be.

At the end of the third day, unsuccessful and in despair, having hardly slept and scarcely eaten, the unhappy young lover found himself taking a slight luncheon in the little restaurant known as the Perouse down on the Quais. His head on his hand, for the present moment the joy of life gone from him, he looked out through the windows at the Seine, at the bridge and the lines of flowering trees. He was the only occupant of the upper room where, of late, he had ordered his luncheon.

The tide of life rolled slowly in this quieter part of the city, and as Blair sat there under the window there passed a piper playing a shrill, sweet tune. It was so different from any of the loud metropolitan clamors, with which his ears were full, that he got up, walked to the window and leaned out. It was a pastoral that met his eyes. A man piping, followed by little pattering goats; the primitive, unlooked-for picture caught his tired attention, and, just then, opposite the Quais, two women passed – flower sellers, their baskets bright with crocuses and giroflés. The bright picture touched him and something of the springlike beauty that the day wore and that dwelt in the May light, soothed him as nothing had for many hours.

He paid his bill, took courage, picked up his hat and gloves and stick and walked out briskly, crossing the bridge to the Rue de Rivoli, determined that night should not fall until he found the woman he sought. Nor did it, though the afternoon wore on and Dan, pursuing his old trails, wandered from worldly meeting place to worldly meeting place. Finally, toward six o’clock, he saw the lengthening shadows steal into the woods of the Bois de Boulogne, and in one of the smaller alleys, where the green-trunked trees of the forests were full of purple shadows and yellow sun discs, flickering down, he picked up a small iron chair and sat himself down, with a long sigh, to rest.

While he sat there watching the end of the allée as it gave out into the broader road, a beautiful red motor rolled up to the conjunction of the two ways and Letty Lane, in a summer frock, got out alone. She had a flowing white veil around her head and a flowing white scarf around her shoulders. As the day on the Thames, she was all in white – like a dove. But this time her costume was made vivid and picturesque by the coral parasol she carried, a pair of coral-colored kid shoes, around her neck and falling on their long chain, she wore his coral beads. He saw that he observed her before she did him. All this Dan saw before he dashed into the road, came up to her with something like a cry on his lips, bareheaded, for his hat and his stick and his gloves were by his chair in the woods.

Letty Lane’s hands went to her heart and her face took on a deadly pallor. She did not seem glad to see him. Out of his passionate description of the hours that he had been through, of how he had looked for her, of what he thought and wanted and felt, the actress made what she could, listening to him as they both stood there under the shadows of the green trees. Scanning her face for some sign that she loved him, for it was all he cared for, Dan saw no such indication there. He finished with:

“You know what Ruggles told you was a lie. Of course, I’ve got money enough to give you everything you want. He’s a lunatic and ought to be shut up.”

“It may have been a lie, all right,” she said with forced indifference; “I’ve had time to think it over. You are too young. You don’t know what you want.” She stopped his protestations: “Well, then, I am too old and I don’t want to be tied down.”

When he pressed her to tell him whether or not she had ceased to care for him, she shook her head slowly, marking on the ground fine tracery with the end of her coral parasol. He had been obliged to take her back to the red motor, but before they were in earshot of her servants, he said:

“Now, you know just what you have done to me, you and Ruggles between you. For my father’s sake and the things I believed in I’ve kept pretty straight as things go.” He nodded at her with boyish egotism, throwing all the blame on her. “I want you to understand that from now, right now, I’m going to the dogs just as fast as I can get there, and it won’t be a very gratifying result to anybody that ever cared.”

She saw the determination on his fine young face, worn by his sleepless nights, already matured and changed, and she believed him.

“Paris,” he nodded toward the gate of the woods which opened upon Paris, “is the place to begin in – right here. A man,” he went on, and his lips trembled, “can only feel like this once in his life. You know all the talk there is about young love and first love. Well, that’s what I’ve got for you, and I’m going to turn it now – right now – into just what older people warn men from, and do their best to prevent. I have seen enough of Paris,” he went on, “these days I have been looking for you, to know where to go and what to do, and I am setting off for it now.”

She touched his arm.

“No,” she murmured. “No, boy, you are not going to do any such thing!”

This much from her was enough for him. He caught her hand and cried: “Then you marry me. What do we care for anybody else in the world?”

“Go back and get your hat and stick and gloves,” she commanded, keeping down the tears.

“No, no, you come with me, Letty; I’m not going to let you run to your motor and escape me again.”

“Go; I’ll wait here,” she promised. “I give you my word.”

As he snatched up the inanimate objects from the leaf-strewn ground where he had thrown them in despair, he thought how things can change in a quarter of an hour. For he had hope now, as he hurried back, as he walked with her to her car, as he saw the little coral shoes stir in the leaves when she passed under the trees. The little coral shoes trod on his heart, but now it was light under her feet!

Jubilant to have overcome the fate which had tried to keep her hidden from him in Paris, he could hardly believe his eyes that she was before them again, and, as the motor rolled into the Avenue des Acacias, he asked her the question uppermost in his mind:

“Are you alone in Paris, Letty?”

“Don’t you count?”

“No – no – honestly, you know what I mean.”

“You haven’t any right to ask me that.”

“I have – I have. You gave me a right. You’re engaged to me, aren’t you? Gosh, you haven’t forgotten, have you?”

“Don’t make me conspicuous in the Bois, Dan,” she said; “I only let you come with me because you were so terribly desperate, so ridiculous.”

“Are you alone?” he persisted. “I have got to know.”

“Higgins is with me.”

“Oh, God,” he cried wildly, “how can you joke with me? Don’t you understand you’re breaking my heart?”

But she did not dare to be kind to him, knowing it would unnerve her for the part she had promised to play.

He sat gripping his hands tightly together, his lips white. “When I leave you now,” he said brokenly, “I am going to find that devil of a Hungarian and do him up. Then I am going to tackle Ruggles.”

“Why, what’s poor Mr. Ruggles got to do with it?”

Dan cried scornfully: “For God’s sake, don’t keep this up! You know the rot he told you? I made him confess. He has had this mania all along about money being a handicap; he was bent on trying this game with some girl to see how it worked.” He continued more passionately. “I don’t care a rap what you marry me for, Letty, or what you have done or been. I think you’re perfect and I’ll make you the happiest woman in the world.”