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Old Mr. Blair had left behind him a comrade, and as far as advice could go the old man knew that his Dan would not be bankrupt.
“Advice,” Dan Blair senior once said to his boy, “is the kind of thing we want some fellow to give us when we ain’t going to do the thing we ought to do, or are a little ashamed of something we have done. It’s an awful good way to get cured of asking advice just to do what the fellow tells you to at once.”
During Ruggles’ stay in London the young fellow looked to it that Ruggles saw the sights, and the two did the principal features of the big town, to the rich enjoyment of the Westerner. Dan took his friend every night to the play, and on the fourth evening Ruggles said: “Let’s go to the circus or a vaudeville, Dan. I have learned this show by heart!” They had been every night to see Mandalay.
“Oh, you go on where you like, Josh,” the boy answered. “I’m going to see how she looks from the pit.”
Ruggles was not a Blairtown man. He had come from farther west, and had never heard anything of Sarah Towney or Letty Lane. He applauded the actress vigorously at the Gaiety at first, and after the third night slept through most of the performance. When he waked up he tried to discover what attraction Letty Lane had for Dan. For the young man never left Ruggles’ side, never went behind the scenes, though he seemed absorbed, as a man usually is absorbed for one reason only.
In response to a telegram from Osdene Park, Dan motored out there one afternoon, and during his absence Ruggles was surprised at his hotel by a call.
“My dear Mr. Ruggles,” Lord Galorey said, for he it was the page boy fetched up, “why don’t you come out to see us? All friends of old Mr. Blair’s are welcome at Osdene.”
Ruggles thanked Galorey and said he was not a visiting man, that he only had a short time in London, and was going to Ireland to look up “his family tree.”
“There are one hundred acres of trees in Osdene,” laughed Galorey; “you can climb them all.” And Ruggles replied:
“I guess I wouldn’t find any O’Shaughnessy Ruggles at the top of any of ’em, my lord. The boy has gone out to see you all to-day.”
Galorey nodded. “That is just why I toddled in to see you!”
Ruggles’ caller had been shown to the sitting-room, where he and Dan hobnobbed and smoked during the Westerner’s visit. There was a pile of papers on the table, in one corner a typewriter covered by a black cloth. Galorey took a chair and, refusing a cigarette, lit his pipe.
“I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting you in the West when I was out there with Blair. I knew Dan’s father rather well.”
Ruggles responded: “I knew him rather well too, for thirty years. If,” he went on, “Blair hadn’t known you pretty well he wouldn’t have sent the boy out to you as he has done. He was keen on every trail. I might say that he had been over every one of ’em like a hound before he set the boy loose.”
Galorey answered, “Quite so,” gravely. “I know it. I knew it when Dan turned up at Osdene – ” Holding his pipe bowl in the palm of his slender hand, he smoked meditatively. He hadn’t thought about things, as he had been doing lately, for many years. His sense of honor was the strongest thing in Gordon Galorey, the only thing in him, perhaps, that had been left unsmirched by the touch of the world. He was unquestionably a gentleman.
“Blair, however,” he said, “wasn’t as keen on this scent as you’d expect. His intuition was wrong.”
Ruggles raised his eyebrows slightly.
“I mean to say,” Lord Galorey went on, “that he knew me in the West when I had cut loose for a few blessed months from just these things into which he has sent his boy – from what, if I had a son, God knows I’d throw him as far as I could.”
“Blair wanted Dan to see the world.”
“Of course, that is right enough. We all have to see it, I fancy, but this boy isn’t ready to look at it.”
“He is twenty-two,” Ruggles returned. “When I was his age I was supporting four people.”
Galorey went on: “Osdene Park at present isn’t the window for Blair’s boy to see life through, and that is what I have come up to London to talk to you about, Mr. Ruggles. I should like to have you take him away.”
“What’s Dan been up to down there?”
“Nothing as yet, but he is in the pocket of a woman – he is in a nest of women.”
Ruggles’ broad face had not altered its expression of quiet expectation.
“There’s a lot of ’em down there?” he asked.
“There are two,” Galorey said briefly, “and one of them is my wife.”
Ruggles turned his cigarette between his great fingers. He was a slow thinker. He had none of old Blair’s keenness, but he had other qualities. Galorey saw that he had not been quite understood, and he waited and then said:
“Lady Galorey is like the rest of modern wives, and I am like a lot of modern husbands. We each go our own way. My way is a worthless one, God knows I don’t stand up for it, but it is not my wife’s way in any sense of the word.”
“Does she want Dan to go along on her road?” Ruggles asked. “And how far?”
“We are financially strapped just now,” said Galorey calmly, “and she has got money from the boy.” He didn’t remove his pipe from his mouth; still holding it between his teeth he put his hand in his pocket, took out his wallet, drew forth four checks and laid them down before Ruggles. “It is quite a sum,” Galorey noted, “sufficient to do a lot to Osdene Park in the way of needed repairs.” Ruggles had never seen a smile such as curved his companion’s lips. “But Osdene Park will have to be repaired by money from some other source.”
Ruggles wondered how the husband had got hold of the checks, but he didn’t ask and he did not look at the papers.
“When Dan came to the Park,” said Galorey, “I stopped bridge playing, but this more than takes its place!”
Ruggles’ big hand went slowly toward the checks; he touched them with his fingers and said: “Is Dan in love with your wife?”
And Lord Galorey laughed and said: “Lord no, my dear man, not even that! It is pure good nature on his part – mere prodigality. Edith appealed to him, that’s all.”
Relief crossed Ruggles’ face. He understood in a flash the worldly woman’s appeal to the rich young man and believed the story the husband told him.
“Have you spoken to the boy?”
“My dear chap, I have spoken to him about nothing. I preferred to come to you.”
“You said,” Ruggles continued, “there were two ladies down to your place.”
Galorey had refilled his pipe and held it as before in the palm of his hand.
“I can look after the affairs of my wife, and this shan’t happen again, I promise you – not at Osdene, but I’m afraid I can not do much in the other case. The Duchess of Breakwater has been at Osdene for nearly three weeks, and Dan is in love with her.”
Ruggles put the four checks one on top of the other.
“Is the lady a widow?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“So that’s the nest Dan has got into at Osdene,” the Westerner said. And Galorey answered: “That is the nest.”
“And he has gone out there to-day – got a wire this morning.”
“The duchess has been in an awful funk,” said Galorey, “because Dan’s been stopping in London so long. She sent him a message, and as soon as Dan wired back that he was coming to the Park, I decided to come here and see you.”
Ruggles ruminated: “Has the duchess complications financially?”
“Ra-ther!” the other answered.
And Ruggles turned his broad, honest face full on Galorey: “Do you think she could be bought off?”
Galorey took his pipe out of his mouth.
“It depends on how far Dan has gone on with her. To be frank with you, Mr. Ruggles, it is a case of emotion on the part of the woman. She is really in love with Dan. Gad!” exclaimed the nobleman. “I have been on the point of turning the whole brood out of doors these last days. It was like imprisoning a mountain breeze in a charnel house – a woman with her scars and her experience and that boy – I don’t know where you’ve kept him, or how you kept him as he is, but he is as clear as water. I have talked to him and I know.”
Nothing in Ruggles’ expression had changed until now. His eyes glowed.
“Dan’s all right,” he said softly. “Don’t you worry! He’s all right. I guess his father knew what he was doing, and I’ll bet the whole thing was just what he sent him over here for! Old Dan Blair wasn’t worth a copper when the boy was born, and yet he had ideas about everything and he seemed to know more in that old gray head of his than a whole library of books. Dan’s all right.”
“My dear man,” said the nobleman, “that is just where you Americans are wrong. You comfort yourself with your eternal ‘Dan’s all right,’ and you won’t see the truth. You won’t breathe the word ‘scandal’ and yet you are thick enough in them, God knows. You won’t admit them, but they are there. Now be honest and look at the truth, will you? You are a man of common sense. Dan Blair is not all right. He is in an infernally dangerous position. The Duchess of Breakwater will marry him. It is what she has wanted to do for years, but she has not found a man rich enough, and she will marry this boy offhand.”
“Well,” said the Westerner slowly, “if he loves her and if he marries her – ”
“Marries her!” exclaimed the nobleman. “There you are again! Do you think marriage makes it any better? Why, if she went off to the Continent with him for six weeks and then set him free, that would be preferable to marrying her. My dear man,” he said, leaning over the table where Ruggles sat, “if I had a boy I would rather have him marry Letty Lane of the Gaiety. Now you know what I mean.”
Ruggles’ face, which had hardened, relaxed.
“I have seen that lady,” he exclaimed with satisfaction; “I have seen her several times.”
Galorey sank back into his chair and neither man spoke for a few seconds. Turning it all over in his slow mind, Ruggles remembered Dan’s absorption in the last few days. “So there are three women in the nest,” he concluded thoughtfully, and Gordon Galorey repeated:
“No, not three. What do you mean?”
“Your wife” – Ruggles held up one finger and Galorey interrupted him to murmur:
“I’ll take care of Edith.”
“The Duchess of Breakwater you think won’t talk of money?”
“No, don’t count on it. She is aiming at ten million pounds.”
Ruggles was holding up the second finger.
“Well, I guess Dan has gone out to take care of her to-day.”
Dan and Ruggles had seen Mandalay from a box, from the pit and from the stalls. On the table lay a book of the opera. While talking with Galorey, Ruggles had unconsciously arranged the checks on top of the libretto of Mandalay.
“I’ll take care of Miss Lane,” Ruggles said at length.
His lordship echoed, “Miss Lane?” and looked up in surprise. “What Miss Lane, for God’s sake?”
“Miss Letty Lane at the Gaiety,” Ruggles answered.
“Why, she isn’t in the question, my dear man.”
“You put her there just now yourself.”
“Bosh!” Galorey exclaimed impatiently, “I spoke of her as being the limit, the last thing on the line.”
“No,” corrected the other, “you put the Duchess of Breakwater as the limit.”
Galorey smiled frankly. “You are right, my dear chap,” he accepted, “and I stand by it.”
A page boy knocked at the door and came in holding out on a salver a card for Mr. Ruggles, and at the interruption Galorey rose and invited Ruggles to go out with him that night to Osdene. “Lady Galorey will be delighted.”
But Ruggles shook his head. “The boy is coming back here to-night,” and Galorey laughed.
“Don’t you believe it! You don’t know how deep in he is. You don’t know the Duchess of Breakwater. Once he is with her – ”
At the same time that the page boy handed Mr. Ruggles the card of the caller, he gave him as well a small envelope, which contained box tickets for the Gaiety. Ruggles examined it.
“I have got some writing to do,” he told Galorey, “and I’m going to see a show to-night, and I think I’ll just stay here and watch my hole.”
As soon as Galorey had left the Carlton, Mr. Ruggles despatched his letters and his visitor, made a very careful toilet, and after waiting until past eight o’clock for Dan to return to dinner, dined alone on roast beef and a tart, and with perfect digestion, if somewhat thoughtful mind, left the hotel and walked down the dim street to the brilliant Strand, and on foot to the Gaiety.
CHAPTER VII – AT THE STAGE ENTRANCE
Ruggles, from his stall, for the fourth time saw the curtain go up on Mandalay and heard the temple bells ring. One of the stage boxes was not occupied until after the first act and then the son of his friend came in alone and sat far back out of sight of any eyes but the keenest, and those eyes were Ruggles’. Letty Lane, delicious, fantastic, languishing, sang to Dan; that was evident to Ruggles. He was a large man and filled his stall comfortably. He sat through the performance peacefully, his hands in his pockets, his big face thoughtful, his shirt front ruffled. To look at him, one must have wondered why he had come to Mandalay. He scarcely lost any of the threads of his own reflections, though when Miss Lane, in response to a call from the house, sang her cradle song three times, he seemed moved. The tones of her pure voice, the cradling in her arms of an imaginary child, her apparent dovelike purity, her grace and sweetness, and her cooing, gentle tone, to judge by the softening of the Westerner’s face, touched very much the big fellow who listened like a child. At the end he drew his handkerchief slowly across his eyes, but the tears, or rather moisture, that rose there was not all due to Miss Lane’s song, for Ruggles was extremely warm.
He could see that in his box the boy sat transfixed and absorbed. Dan went out in the second entr’acte and was absent when the curtain went down. Ruggles, as well, left before the performance was over, to make his way outside the theater to the stage exit, where there was already gathered a little group, looked after by a couple of policemen. Close to the curb a gleaming motor waited, the footman at its door. Ruggles buttoned his coat up to his chin and took his place close to the door, over which the electric light showed the words “Stage Entrance.” A poor woman elbowed him, her shabby hat adorned by a scraggly plume, a gray shawl wrapped round her shoulders. A girl or two, who might have been flower sellers in Piccadilly in the daytime, a couple of toughs, a handful of other vagrants smelling of gin, a decent man in working clothes, a child in his arms, formed the human hedge Letty Lane was to pass between – a singular group of people to spend an hour hanging about the streets at the exit of a theater well toward midnight. So the naïve Ruggles thought, and better understood the appearance of the young fellows in evening clothes who hovered on the extreme edge of the little crowd. Dan, however, was not of these.
“Look sharp, Cissy,” the workingman spoke to his child, holding her well up. “When she comes hout she’ll pass close to yer, and you sing hout, ‘God bless yer.’”
“Yes, Dad, I will,” shrilled the child.
The woman in the gray shawl drew it close about her. “Aw she’s a true lidy, all right, ain’t she? I expect you’ve had some kindness off her as well?”
The man nodded over the child’s shoulder. “Used to be a scene shifter, and Miss Lane found out about my little girl last year – not this lass, not Cissy, Cissy’s sister – and she sent ’er to a place where it costs the eyes out of yer head. She’s gettin’ well fast, and we, none of us, has seen her or spoken to Miss Lane. She doesn’t know our names.”
And the woman answered: “She does a lot like that. She’s got a heart bigger’n her little body.”
And a big boy in the front row said back to the others: “Well, she makes a mint of money.”
And the woman who had spoken before said: “She gives it nearly all to the poor.”
Ruggles was evidently on the poor side of the waiting crowd; the handful of riffraff around him with its stench of dirt and gin. A better looking set collected opposite and there was the gleam of white shirt fronts.
“Now, there she comes,” the father saw her first. “Sing out, Cissy.”
The door opened and a figure quickly floated from it, like a white rose blown out into the foggy darkness. It floated down the few steps to the street between the double row of spectators. A white cloak entirely covered the actress. Her head was hidden by a white scarf, and she almost ran the short gantlet to her motor, between the cries of “God bless you!” – “Three cheers for Letty Lane” – “God bless you, lady!” She didn’t speak or heed, however, or turn her head, but held her scarf against her face, and the man who slowly lounged behind her to the car, and put her in and got in after her, was not the man Joshua Ruggles had waited there to see. He hung about until the footman had sprung up and the car moved softly away, the stage entrance door shut, then he followed along with the crowd, with the few faithful ones who had waited an hour in the cold mist to cry out their applause, not to a singer in Mandalay but to a woman’s heart.
CHAPTER VIII – DAN’S SIMPLICITY
The Duchess of Breakwater was not sure how close Dan Blair’s thoughts were to marriage, but the boy from Montana was the easiest prey that had come across the beautiful and unscrupulous woman’s range. He had told her that he stayed on up in London to see a man from home, and when after four days he still lingered in town, she found his absence unbearable, and sent him a wire so worded that if he had a spark of interest in her he must immediately return to the Park. She had never been more lovely than when Dan found her waiting for him.
She had ordered tea in her sitting-room. She told him that he looked frightfully seedy, asked him what he had been doing and why he had stopped so long away, and Blair told her that old Ruggles, his father’s friend, had run over to see him with a lot of papers for Dan to read and sign and closed with a smile, telling her that he guessed she “didn’t know much about business.”
“I only know the horrid things of business – debts, and loans, and bills, and fussing.”
“Those things are not business,” Dan answered wisely; “they are just common or garden carelessness.”
She asked him why he had not brought Ruggles out to Osdene, and he told her he couldn’t have done a stroke of work with the old boy down here at the Park.
Stirring his tea, he appreciated the duchess. The agreeable picture she made impressed him mightily.
“Do you know,” he asked suddenly, “what you make me think of?”
And she responded softly: “No, dear.”
“A box of candy. This room with its stuffed walls, and you in it are good enough – ”
“To eat?” she laughed aloud. “Oh, you perfectly killing creature, what an idea!”
And as he met her eyes with his clear ones, with a simplicity she could never hope to reach, he put his tea-cup down; and as he did so the duchess observed his strong hands, their vigor, well-kept and muscular, but not the dandified hands of the man who goes often to the manicure.
“If it hadn’t been for one thing,” the boy went on, “I would have thought of nothing else but you, every minute I’ve been away.”
“Mr. Ruggles?” suggested the duchess.
“No, the Gaiety girl, Letty Lane. You know I told you in the box that she was from my town.”
The young man, who had flown back to Osdene Park in answer to a telegram, began to take his companion into his confidence.
“I knew that girl,” Dan said, “when she wasn’t more than fourteen. She sold me soda-water over the drug store counter. I always thought she was bully, bright as a button and pretty as a peach. Once, I remember, I took six chocolate sodas in one day just to go in and see her. I had an awful time. I most died of that jag, and yet,” he said meditatively, “I don’t think I ever spoke three words to her, just said ‘sarsaparilla’ or ‘chocolate’ or whatever it might happen to be. Ever since that day, ever since that jag,” he said with feeling, “I couldn’t see a stick of chocolate and keep my head up! Well,” went on the boy, “Sarah Towney sang in our church for a missionary meeting, and I was there. I can remember the song she sang.” He spoke with unconscious ardor. He didn’t refer to the hymn, however, but went on with his narrative. “She disappeared from Blairtown. I never had a peep at her again until the other night. Gosh!” he said fervently, “when I saw her there on the stage, why, I felt as though cold water was running up and down my spine.”
The duchess, as a rule, was amused by his slang. It seemed vulgar to her now.
“Heavens,” she drawled, “you are really too dreadful!”
He didn’t seem to hear her.
“She’s turned out a perfect wonder, hasn’t she? A world-beater! Why, everybody tells me there isn’t another like her in her specialty. Of course I have heard of Letty Lane, but I haven’t been out to things since I went in mourning, and I’ve never run up against her.”
“Really,” drawled the duchess again, “now that you have ‘run up against her’ what are you going to do with her? Marry her?”
His honest stare was the greatest relief she had ever experienced. He repeated bluntly: “Marry her? Why the dickens should I?”
“You seem absorbed in her.”
He agreed with her. “I am. I think she’s great, don’t you?”
“Hardly.”
But the cold voice of the duchess did not chill him. “Simply great,” he continued, “and I’m sorry for her down to the ground. That is what is the matter. Didn’t you notice her when she came into the Carlton that night?”
“What of it, silly? I thought she looked as thin as a shad in that black dress, and the way Poniotowsky goes about with her proves what an ass he is.”
“Well, I hate him,” Blair simply stated; “I would wring his neck for twenty cents. But she’s very ill; that is what is the matter with her.”
“They all look like that off the stage,” the duchess assured indifferently. “They are nothing but footlight beauties: they look ghastly off the boards. I dare say that Letty Lane is ill, though; the pace she goes would kill anybody. Have some more tea?”
He held out his cup and agreed with her.
“She works too hard – this playing almost every night, singing and dancing twice at the matinées, I should think she would be dead.”
“Oh, I don’t mean her professional engagements,” murmured the duchess.
A revolt such as had stung him when they criticized her at the Carlton rose in him now.
“It is hard to believe,” he said, “when you hear her sing that dove song and that cradle song.”
But his companion’s laugh stopped his championship short.
“You dear boy, don’t be a silly, Dan. She doesn’t need your pity or your good opinion. She is perfectly satisfied. She has got a fortune in Poniotowsky, and she really is ‘a perfect terror,’ you know.”
Affected slightly by her cold dismissal of his subject, he paused for a moment. But his own point of view was too strong to be shaken by this woman’s light words.
“I suppose if she wasn’t from my town – ” At his words the vision of Letty Lane with the coral strands on her dress, came before his eyes, and he said honestly: “But I do take an interest in her just the same, and she’s going to pieces, that’s clear. Something ought to be done.”
The Duchess of Breakwater was very much annoyed.
“Are you going to talk about her all the time?” she asked with sharp sweetness. “You are not very flattering, Dan.”
And he returned peacefully, “Why, I thought you might be able to help her in some way or another.”
“Me!” She laughed aloud. “Me help Letty Lane? Really – ”
“Why, you might get her to sing out here,” he suggested. “That would sort of get hold of her; women know how to do those things.”
His preposterous simplicity overwhelmed her. She stirred her tea, and said, controlling herself, “Why, what on earth would you have me to say to Letty Lane?”
“Oh, just be nice to her,” he suggested. “Tell her to take care of herself and to brace up. Get some nice woman to – ”
The duchess helped him. “To reform her?”
“Do her good,” the boy said gently.
“You’re too silly for words. If you were not such a hopeless child I would be furious with you. Why, my dear boy, she would laugh in your face and in mine.”
As the duchess left the tea-table she repeated: “Is this what you came up from London to talk to me about?”