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CHAPTER XXIV – RUGGLES’ OFFER

He felt as he waited for her in that flower-filled room, for she had recovered from her distaste for flowers, as he glanced at the photographs of women like herself in costumes more or less frank, more or less vulgar, he felt as though he wanted to knock down the walls and let in a big view of the West – of Montana – of the hills. With such a setting he thought he could better talk with the lady whom he had come to see.

Ruggles held an unlighted cigar between his fingers and goose-flesh rose all over him. His glasses bothered him. He couldn’t get them bright enough, though he polished them half a dozen times on his silk handkerchief. His clothes felt too large. He seemed to have shrunken. He moistened his lips, cleared his throat, tried to remember what kind of fellow he had been at Dan’s age. At Dan’s age he was selling a suspender patent on the road, supporting his mother and his sisters – hard work and few temptations; he was too tired and too poor.

Miss Lane kept him waiting ten minutes, and they were hours to her guest. He was afraid every minute that Dan would come in. The thoughts he had gathered together, the plan of action, disarranged itself in his mind every time he thought of the actress. He couldn’t forget his vision of her on the stage or at the Carlton, where she had sat opposite them and bewitched them both. When she came into the sitting-room at length, he started so violently that he knocked over a vase of flowers, the water trickling all over the table down on to the floor.

She had dazzled him before the footlights, charmed him at dinner, and it was singular to think that he knew how this dignified, quiet creature looked in ballet clothes and in a dinner dress, whose frankness had made him catch his breath. It was a third woman who stood before Ruggles now. He had to take her into consideration. She had expected him, saw him by appointment. She was a woman of mind and intelligence. She had not climbed to her starry position without having acquired a knowledge of men, and it was the secret of her success. She showed it in the dress in which she received her visitor. She wore a short walking skirt of heavy serge, a simple shirtwaist belted around, a sailor hat on her beautiful little head. She was unjeweled and unpainted, very pale and very sweet. If it had not been for the marks of fatigue under her eyes, she would not have looked more than eighteen. On her left hand a single diamond, clear as water, caught the refracted light.

“How-de-do? Glad you are back again.”

She gave him a big chair and sat down before him smiling. Leaning her elbows on her knees, she sank her face upon her hands and looked at him, not coquettishly in the least, but as a child might have looked. From her small feet to her golden head she was utterly charming.

Ruggles made himself think of Dan. Miss Lane spoke slowly, nodding toward him, in her languid voice: “It’s no use, Mr. Ruggles, no use.”

Holding her face between her hands, her eyes gray as winter’s seas and as profound, she looked at him intently; then, in a flash, she changed her position and instantly transformed her character. He saw that she was a woman, not an eighteen-year-old girl, but a woman, clever, poised, witty, understanding, and that she might have been twenty years older than the boy.

“I’m sorry you spoke so quick,” he said.

“I knew,” she interrupted, “just what you wanted to say from the start. I couldn’t help it, could I? I knew you would want to come and see me about it. It isn’t any use. I know just what you are going to say.”

“No, ma’am,” he returned, “I don’t believe you do – bright as you are.”

Ruggles gazed thoughtfully at the cold end of his unlighted cigar. It was a comfort to him to hold it and to look at it, although not for anything in the world would he have asked to light it.

“Dan’s father and me were chums. We went through pretty much together, and I know how he felt on most points. He was a man of few words, but I know he counted on me to stand By the boy.”

Ruggles was so chivalrous that his rôle at present cost him keen discomfort.

“A lady like you,” he said gently, “knows a great deal more about how things are done than either Dan or me. We ain’t tenderfeet in the West, not by a long shot, but we see so few of a certain kind of picture shows that when they do come round they’re likely to make us lose our minds! You know, yourself, a circus in a town fifty miles from a railroad drives the people crazy. Now, Dan’s a little like the boy with his eyes on the hole in the tent. He would commit murder to get inside and see that show.” He nodded and smiled to her as though he expected her to follow his crude simile. “Now, I have seen you a lot of times.” And she couldn’t help reminding him, “Not of your own accord, Mr. Ruggles.”

“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.