Kitabı oku: «The Girl From His Town»

CHAPTER I – DAN BLAIR

The fact that much he said, because of his unconscionable slang, was incomprehensible did not take from the charm of his conversation as far as the Duchess of Breakwater was concerned. The brightness of his expression, his quick, clear look upon them, his beautiful young smile, his not too frequent laugh, his “new gayness,” as the duchess called his high spirits, his supernal youth, his difference, credited him with what nine-tenths of the human race lack – charm.

His tone was not too crudely western; neither did he suggest the ultra East with which they were familiar. American women went down well enough with them, but American men were unpopular, and when the visitor arrived, Lady Galorey did not even announce him to the party gathered for “the first shoot.”

The others were in the armory when the ninth gun, a young chap, six feet of him, blond as the wheat, cleanly set up and very good to look at, came in with Lily, Duchess of Breakwater. Lady Galorey, his hostess, greeted them.

“Oh, here you are, are you? Lord Mersey, Sir John Fairthrope.” She mumbled the rest of the names of her companions as though she did not want them understood, then waved toward the young chap, calling him Mr. Dan Blair, and he, as she hesitated, added:

“From Blairtown, Montana.”

“And give him a gun, will you, Gordon?” Lady Galorey spoke to her husband.

“I discovered Mr. Blair, Edie,” the duchess announced, “and he didn’t even know there was a shoot on for to-day. Fancy!”

“I guess,” Dan Blair said pleasantly, “I’ll just take a gun out of this bunch,” and he chose one at random from several indicated to him by the gamekeeper. “I get my best luck when I go it blind. Right! Thanks. That’s so, Lady Galorey, I didn’t know there was to be any shooting until the duchess let it out.”

To himself he thought with good-natured amusement, “Afraid I’ll spoil their game record, maybe!” and went out along with them, following the insular noblemen like a ray of sun, smiling on the pretty woman who had discovered him in the grounds where he had been poking about by himself.

“Where, in Heaven’s name, did you ‘corral’ – word of his own – the dear boy, Edith? How did he get to Osdene Park, or in fact anywhere, just as he is, fresh as from Eden?”

“Thought I’d let him take you by surprise, dearest. Where’d you find Dan?”

“Down by the garden house feeding the rabbits, on his knees like a little boy, his hands full of lettuces. I’d just come a cropper myself on the mare. She fell, I’m sorry to say, Edie, and hacked her knees quite a lot. One of those disguised ditches, you know. I was coming along leading her when I ran on your friend.”

The young duchess was slender as a willow, very brunette, with a beautiful, discontented face.

“I’m going to show Dan Blair off,” Lady Galorey responded, “going to give the débutantes a chance.”

Placidly nodding, the duchess lit a cigarette and began to quote from Dan Blair’s conversation: “I fancy he won’t let them ‘worry him’; he’s too ‘busy!’”

“You mean that you’re going to keep him occupied?”

The duchess didn’t notice this.

“Is he such a catch?”

Neither of the women had walked out with the guns. The duchess had a bad foot, and Lady Galorey never went anywhere she could help with her husband. She now drew her chair up to the table in the morning-room, to which they had both gone after the departure of the guns, and regarded with satisfaction a quantity of stationery and the red leather desk appointments.

“Sit down and smoke if you like, Lily; I’m going to fill out some lists.”

“No, thanks, I’m going up to my rooms and get Parkins to ‘massey’ this beastly foot of mine. I must have fallen on it. But tell me first, is Mr. Blair a catch?”

Lady Galorey had opened an address book and looked up from it to reply:

“Something like ten million pounds.”

“Heavens! Disgusting!”

“The richest young man ‘west of some river or other.’ At any rate he told me last night that it was ‘clean money.’ I dare say the river is responsible for its cleanliness, but that fact seemed to give him satisfaction.”

The duchess was leaning on the table at Lady Galorey’s side.

“Dan’s father took Gordon all over the West that time he went to the States for a big hunt in the Rockies. He got to know Mr. Blair awfully well and liked him. The old gentleman bought a little property about that time that turned out to be a gold mine.”

With persistency the duchess said:

“How d’you know it is ‘clean money,’ Edith? Not that it makes a rap of difference,” she laughed prettily, “but how do you know that he is rich to this horrible extent?”

Lady Galorey put down her address book impatiently: “Does he look like an impostor?”

The other returned: “Even the archangel fell, my dear Edith!”

“Well,” returned her friend, “this one is too young to have fallen far,” and she shut up her list in desperation.

The duchess sat down on the edge of the lounge and raised her expressive eyes to Lady Galorey, who once more looked at her sarcastically, and went on:

“Gordon liked the old gentleman: he was extraordinarily generous – quite a type. They called the town after him – Blairtown: that is where the son ‘hails from.’ He was a little lad when Gordon was out and Mr. Blair promised that Dan should come over here and see us one day, and this,” she tapped the table with her pen, “seems to be the day, for he came down upon us in this breezy way without even sending a wire, ‘just turned up’ last night. Gordon’s mad about him. His father has been dead a year, and he is just twenty-two.”

“Good heavens!” murmured the duchess. Lady Galorey opened her address book again.

“Gordon’s got him terribly on his mind, my dear; he has forbidden any gambling or any bridge as long as the boy is with us…”

Her companion rose and thrust her hands into the pocket of her tweed coat. She laughed softly, then went over to the long window where without, across the pane, the early winter mists were flying, chased by a furtive sun.

“Gordon said that the boy’s father treated him like a king, and that while the boy is here he is going to look out for him.”

Over her shoulder the other threw out coldly:

“You speak as though he were in a den of thieves. I didn’t know Gordon’s honor was so fine. As for me, I don’t gamble, you know.”

Lady Galorey had decided that Lily’s insistent remaining gave her a chance to fill her fountain pen. She was, therefore, carefully squirting in the ink, and she flushed at her friend’s last words.

Lady Galorey herself was the best bridge player in London, and cards were her passion. She did not remind the lady in the window that there were other games besides bridge, but kept both her tongue and her temper.

After a little silence in which the women followed each her own thoughts, the duchess murmured:

“I’ll toddle up-stairs, Edie – let you write. Where did you say we were going to meet the guns for food?”

“At the gate by the White Pastures. There’ll be a cart and a motor going, whichever you like, around two.”

“Right,” her grace nodded; “I’ll be on time, dearest.”

And Lady Galorey with a relieved sigh heard the door close behind the duchess. Wiping her fountain pen delicately with a bit of chamois, she murmured: “Well, Dan Blair is out of Eden, poor dear, if he met her by the gate.”

A fortune of a round ten million pounds was a small part of what this young man had come into by direct inheritance from the Copper King of Blairtown, Montana. For once the money figure had not been exaggerated, but Lady Galorey did not know about the rest of Dan’s inheritance.

The young man whistling in his rooms in the bachelor quarters of Osdene Park House, dressed for dinner without the aid of a valet. When Lord Galorey had asked him “where his manservant was,” Dan had grinned. “Gosh, I wouldn’t have one of those Johnnies hanging around me – never did have! I can put on my stockings all right! There was a chap on the boat I came over in who let his man put on his stockings. Can you beat that?” Blair had laughed again. “I think if anybody tickled my feet that way I would be likely to kick him in the eye.”

Dressing in his room he whistled under his breath a song from a newly popular comic opera; and he intoned with his clear young voice a line of the words:

“Should-you-go-to-Mandalay.”

Out through his high window, if he had looked, he would have seen the misty sweep of the park under the faint moonrise and fine shadows that the leaves made in the veiled light, but he did not look out. He was dressing for dinner without a valet and giving a great deal of care to his toilet; for the first time he was to dine in the house of a nobleman and in the presence of a duchess; not that it meant a great deal to him – he thought it was “funny.”

In Dan Blair’s twenty-two years of utterly happy days his one grief had been the death of his father. As soon as the old man had died Dan had gone off into the Rockies with his guides and not “shown up” for months. When he came back to Blairtown, as he expressed it, “he packed his grip and beat it while his shoes were good,” for the one place he could remember his father had suggested for him to go.

Blairtown was very much impressed when the heir came in from the Rockies with “a big kill,” and the orphan’s case did not seem especially disturbed. But no one in the town knew how the boy’s heart ached for the old man. When Dan was six years old his father had literally picked him up by the nape of his neck and thrown him into the water like a pup and watched him swim. At eight he sent the boy off with a gun to rough-camp. Then he took Dan down in the mines with the men. His education had been won in Blairtown, at a school called public, but which in reality was nothing more than a pioneer district school.

On Sundays Dan dressed up and went with his father to church twice a day and in the week-days his father took him to the prayer-meetings, and at sixteen Dan went to college in California. He had just completed his course when old Blair died. Then he inherited fifty million dollars.

On the day of the shoot at Osdene, Dan dropped sixty birds. He tried very hard not to be too pleased. “Gosh,” he thought to himself, “those birds fell as though they were trained all right, and the other sports were mad, I could see it.” He then fell to whistling softly the air he had heard Lady Galorey play the night before from the new success at the Gaiety, and finished it as his toilet completed itself. He took up a gardenia from his dressing-table, and fastened it in his coat, stopping on the stairs on the way down to look over into the hall, where the men in their black clothes and the women in their shining dresses waited before going into the dining-room. The lights fell on white arms and necks, on jewels and on fine proud heads. Dan Blair had been in San Francisco and in New York, on short journeys, however, which his father, the year before, had directed him to take, but he had never seen a “show” like this.

He came slowly down the broad stairway of the Osdene Park House, the last guest. In the corner, where, behind her, a piece of fourteenth century tapestry cut a green and pink square against the rich black oak paneling, the Duchess of Breakwater sat waiting. She wore a dress of golden tulle which was simply a sheath to her slender body, and from her neck hung a long rope of diamonds caught at the end by a small black fan; there was a wreath of diamonds like shining water drops linked together in her hair. She was the grandest lady at Osdene, and renowned in more than one sense of the word. As Dan saw her smile at him and rise, he thought:

“She is none too sorry that I made that record, but I hope to heaven she won’t say anything to me about it.”

And the duchess did not speak of it. Telling him that he was to take her in to dinner, she laid first her fan on his arm and then her hand. And Dan, one of those fortunate creatures who are born men of the world when they get into it, gave her his arm with much grace, and as he leaned down toward her he thought to himself:

“Well, it’s lucky for me I have my head on tight; a few more of those goo-goo eyes of hers and it would be as well for me to light out for the woods.”

Dan liked best at Osdene Park his chin-chins with Gordon Galorey. The young man was unflatteringly frank in his choice of companions. When the duchess looked about for him to ride with her, walk with her, to find the secluded corners, to talk, to play with him, she was likely to discover Dan gone off with Lord Galorey, and to come upon them later, sitting enveloped in smoke, a stand of drinks by their side.

To Galorey, who had no heir or child, the boy’s presence proved to be the happiest thing that had come to him for a long time. He talked a great deal to Dan about the old man. Galorey was poor and the fact of a fortune of ten million pounds possessed by this one boy was continually before his mind like an obsession. It was like looking down into a gold mine. Galorey tried often to broach the subject of money, but Dan kept off. At length Galorey asked boldly:

“What are you going to do with it?” On this occasion they were walking over from the lower park back to the house, a couple of terriers at their heels.

“Do with what?” Blair asked innocently. He was looking at the trees. He was comparing their grayish green trunks and their foliage with the California redwoods. A little taken aback, Lord Galorey laughed.

“Why, with that colossal fortune of yours.”

And Blair answered unhesitatingly: “Oh – spend it on some girl sooner or later.”

Galorey fairly staggered. Then he took it humorously.

“My dear chap, I never saw a sweeter, bigger man than your father. If he had been my father, I dare say I might have pulled off a different yard of hemp, but I must confess that I think he has left you too much money.”

“Well, there are a lot of fellows who are ready to look after it for me,” Blair answered coolly. Before his companion could redden, he continued: “You see, dad took care of me for twenty-one years all right, and whenever I am up a stump, why all I have to do is to remember the things he did.”

For the first time since his arrival at Osdene Dan’s tone was serious. Interested as he was in the older man, Dan’s inclination was to evade the discussion of serious subjects. With Blair’s slang, his conversation was almost incomprehensible.

“Dad didn’t gas much,” the boy said, “but I could draw a map of some of the things he did say. He used to say he made his money out of the earth.”

The two were walking side by side across the rich velvet of the immemorial English turf. The extreme softness of the autumn day, its shifting lights, its mellow envelope, the beauty of the park – the age, the stability, the harmony, served to touch the young fellow’s spirits. At any rate there was a ring in him, an equilibrium that surprised Galorey.

“‘Most things,’ dad said to me, ‘go back to the earth.’” He struck the English turf with his stick. “Dad said a fellow had better buy those things that stay above the ground.” Dan smiled frankly at his companion. “Curious thing to say, wasn’t it?” he reflected. “I remembered it, and I got to wondering after I saw him buried, ‘what are the things that stay above the ground?’ The old man never gave me another talk like that.”

After a few seconds Galorey put in:

“But, my dear chap, you did give me a shock up there just now when you said you were going to spend ‘all your money on some girl.’”

The millionaire took a chestnut from his pocket. He held it high above his head and the little dog that had been yelping at his heels fixed his eyes on it. Blair poised it, then threw it as far as he could. It sped through the air and the terrier ran like mad across the park.

“I like girls awfully, Gordon, and when I find the right one, why, then I’m going to feel what a bully thing it is to be rich.”

Lord Galorey groaned aloud.

“My dear chap!” he exclaimed.

The spell of the day, the fragrant beauty of the time and place and hour were clearly upon Dan Blair. Lord Galorey was sympathetic to him. The terrier came tearing back with the chestnut held between his thick jaws. Dan bent down to take the nut from the dog and wrestled with him gently.

“Swell little grip he’s got. Nice old pup! Let it go now!” And he threw the nut far again, and as the terrier ran once more Blair thrust his hands down in his pockets and began softly to whistle the tune of Mandalay.

He said slowly, going back to his subject: “It must be great to feel that a fellow can give her jewels like the Duchess of Breakwater’s, ropes of ’em” – he nodded toward the house – “and a fine old place like this now, and motors and yachts and all kinds of stuff.”

His eyes rested on the suave lines of the Elizabethan house, with its softened gables and its banked terraces. Possibly his vivid imagination pictured “some nice girl” there waiting, as they should come up, to meet him.

“I have always thought it would be bully to find a poor girl – pretty as a peach, of course – one who had never had much, and just cover her with things. Hey, there!” he cried to the terrier, who had come running back, “bring it to me.”

They had come up to the terrace by this, and Dan’s confidence, fresh as a gush of water from a rock, had ceased. His face was placid. He didn’t realize what he had said.

From out of one of the long windows, dressed in a sable coat, her small head tied up in a motor scarf, the Duchess of Breakwater appeared. She greeted them severely, and Lord Galorey hear her say under her breath to Dan:

“You promised to be back to drive with me before dinner, Dan. Did you forget?”

And as Galorey left the boy to make his peace, the first smile of amusement broke over his face. He felt that the duchess had between her and her capture of Dan Blair’s heart the elusive picture of some “nice girl” – not much perhaps, but it might be very hard to tear away the picture of the ideal that was ever before the blue eyes of this man who had a fortune to spend on her!

CHAPTER II – THE DUCHESS APPROVES

His attentions to the Duchess of Breakwater had not been so conspicuous or so absorbing as to prevent the eager mothers – who, true to her word, Lady Galorey had invited down – from laying siege to Dan Blair. Lady Galorey asked him:

“Don’t you want to marry any one of these beauties, Dan?” And Blair, with his beautiful smile and what Lily called his inspired candor, answered:

“Not on your life, Lady Galorey!”

And she agreed, “I think myself you are too young.”

“No,” Dan refuted, “you are wrong there. I shall marry as fast as I can.”

His hostess was surprised.

“Why, I thought you wanted your fling first.”

And Dan, from his chair, in which, with a book, he had been sitting when Lady Galorey found him, answered cheerfully:

“Oh, I don’t like being alone. I want to go about with some one. I should like a fling all right, but I want to fling with somebody as I go.”

The lady of the house was not a philosopher nor an analyst. She had certain affairs of her own and was engrossed in them and lived in them. As far as Lady Galorey was concerned the rest of the world might go and hang itself as long as it didn’t do it at her gate-post. But Blair couldn’t leave any one indifferent to him very long, not unless one could be indifferent to a blaze of sunlight; one must either draw the blinds down or bask in its brightness.

She laughed. “You’re perfectly delicious! You mean to say you want to be married at once and let your wife fling around with you?”

“Just that.”

“How sweet of you, Dan! And you won’t marry one of these girls here?”

“Don’t fill the bill, Lady Galorey.”

“Oh, you have a sweetheart at home, then?”

“All off!” he assured her blithely, and rose, tall and straight and slender.

The Duchess of Breakwater had come in, indeed she never failed to when there was any question of finding Blair.

Dan stood straightly before the two women of an old race, and the American didn’t suggest any line of noble ancestors whatsoever. His features were rather agglomerate; his muscles were possibly not the perfect elastic specimens that were those muscles whose strain and sinew had been made from the same stock for generations. He was, nevertheless, very good to look on. Any woman would have thought so, and he bent his blond head as he looked at the Duchess of Breakwater with something like benevolence, something of his father’s kindness in his clear blue eyes. Neither of the noble ladies vaguely understood him. His hostess thought him “a good sort,” not half bad, a splendid catch, and the other woman, only a few years his senior, was in love with him. The duchess had married at eighteen, tired of her bargain at twenty, and found herself a widow at twenty-five. She held a telegram in her hand.

“We’ve got the box for Mandalay to-night at the Gaiety, and let’s motor in.”

Only Lady Galorey hesitated, disappointed.

“Too bad – I had specially arranged for Lady Grandcourt to drive over with Eileen. I thought it would be a ripping chance for her to see Dan.”

When at length the duchess had succeeded in getting Dan to herself toward the end of the day in the red room, after tea, she said:

“So you won’t marry a London beauty?”

And rather coldly Dan had answered:

“Why, you talk, all of you, as if I had only to ask any girl of them, and she would jump down my throat.”

“Don’t try it,” the duchess answered, “unless you want to have your mouth full!”

Dan did not reply for a second, but he looked at her more seriously, conscious of her grace and her good looks. She was certainly better to look at than the simple girls with their big hands, small wits, long faces, and, as the boy expressed it, “utter lack of get-up.” The duchess shone out to advantage.

“Why don’t you talk to me?” she asked softly. “You know you would rather talk to me than the others.”

“Yes,” he said frankly; “they make me nervous.”

“And I don’t?”

“No,” he said. “I learn a lot every time we are together.”

“Learn?” she repeated, not particularly flattered by this. “What sort of things?”

“Oh, about the whole business,” he returned vaguely. “You know what I mean.”

“Then,” she said with a slight laugh, “you mean to say you talk with me for educational purposes? What a beastly bore!”

Dan did not contradict her. She was by no means Eve to him, nor was he the raw recruit his simplicity might give one to think. He had had his temptations and his way out of them was an easy one; for he was very slow to stir, and back of all was his ideal. The reality and power of this ideal Dan knew best at moments like these. But the Duchess of Breakwater was the most lovely woman – the most dangerous woman that had come his way. He liked her – Dan was well on the way to love.

The two were alone in the big dark room. At their side the small table, from which they had taken their tea together, stood with its empty cups and its silver. Without, the day was cold and windy, and the sunset threw along the panes a red reflection. The light fell on the Duchess of Breakwater, something like a veil – a crimson veil slipped over her face and breast. She leaned toward Dan, and between them there was no more barrier than the western light. He felt his pulses beat and a tide rising within him. She was a delicious emanation, fragrant and near, and as he might have gathered a cluster of flowers, so in the next second he would have taken her in his arms, but from the other room just then Lady Galorey, at the piano, played a snatch from Mandalay, striking at once into the tune. The sound came suddenly, told them quickly some one was near, and the Duchess of Breakwater involuntarily moved back, and so knocked the small tray, jostled it, and it fell clattering to the floor.