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CHAPTER IX – DISAPPOINTMENT

Dan Blair had not been back of the scenes at the Gaiety since his first call on the singer. Indeed, though he had told the duchess he pitied Miss Lane, he had not been able to approach her very closely, even in his own thoughts. When she first appeared on his horizon his mind was full of the Duchess of Breakwater, and the singer had only hovered round his more profound feelings for another woman. But Letty Lane was an atmosphere in Dan’s mind which he was not yet able to understand. There was so little left that was connected with his old home, certainly nothing in the British Isles, excepting Ruggles, and to the young man everything from America had its value. Decidedly the nice girl of whom he had spoken to Gordon Galorey, the print-frocked, sun-bonneted type, the ideal girl that Dan would like to marry and to spoil, had not crossed his path. The Duchess of Breakwater did not suggest her, nor did any of the London beauties. Dan’s first ideal was beginning to fade.

He left Osdene Park on protest and returned the same night to London, and all the way back to town tried to register in his mind, unused to analysis, his experience with the Duchess of Breakwater on this last visit.

He had experienced his first disappointment in the sex, and this disappointment had been of an unusual kind. It was not that he had been turned down or given the mitten, but he had seen one woman turn another down. A woman had been mean, so he put it, and the fact that the Duchess of Breakwater had refused to lend a moral hand to the singer at the Gaiety hurt Dan’s feelings. Then, as soon as his enthusiasm had calmed, he saw what a stupid ass he had been. A duchess couldn’t mix up with a comic opera singer, of course. Still, he mused, “she might have been a little nicer about it.”

The education his father had given him about women, the slender information he had about them, was put to the test now; the girl he had dreamed of, “the nice girl,” well, she would have had a tenderer way with her in a case such as this! Back of Dan’s hurt feelings, there was a great deal on the Duchess of Breakwater’s side. She had not done for herself yet. She hadn’t fetched him nearly up to the altar for nothing, and back of his disapproval, there was a long list of admirations and looks, memories of many tête-à-têtes and of more fervent kisses which scored a good deal in the favor of Dan’s first woman. The Duchess of Breakwater had gone boldly on with Dan’s unfinished education, and he really thought he loved her, and that he was in honor bound to see the thing through.

That evening, once more in the box he had taken all to himself, he listened to Mandalay, carried away with the charm of the music and carried away by the singer. He was in the box nearest the stage and seemed close to her, and he imagined that under her paint he could see her pallor and how thin she was. Nothing, however, in her acting or in her voice revealed the least fatigue. Blair had obtained a card of entrance to the theater, which permitted him to circulate freely behind the scenes, and although as yet the run of his visits had not been clear, this night he had a purpose. Dan stood not far from the corridor that led to Letty Lane’s room, and saw her after her act hurriedly cross the stage, a big white shawl wrapping her slender form closely. She was as thin as a candle. Her woman Higgins followed closely after her, and as they passed Dan, Letty Lane called to him gaily:

“Hello, you! What are you hanging around here for?”

And Dan returned: “Don’t stand here in the draft. It is beastly cold.”

“Yes, Miss,” her woman urged, “don’t stand here.”

But the actress waited nevertheless and said to Dan: “Who’s the girl?”

“What girl?”

“Why, the girl you come here every night to see and are too shy to speak to. Everybody is crazy to know.”

Letty Lane looked like a little girl herself in the crocheted garment her small hands held across her breast. Dan put his arm on her shoulder without realizing the familiarity of his gesture:

“Get out of this draft – get out of it quick, I say,” and pushed her toward her room.

“Gracious, but you are strong.” She felt the muscular touch, and his hand flat against her shoulder was warm through the wool.

“I wish you were strong. You work too darned hard.”

Her head was covered with the coral cap and feather. Dan saw her billowy skirt, her silken hose, her little coral shoes. She fluttered at the door which Higgins opened.

“Why haven’t you been to see me?” she asked him. “You are not very polite.”

“I am coming in now.”

“Not a bit of it. I’m too busy, and it is a short entr’acte. Go and see the girl you came here to see.”

Dan thought that the reason she forbade him to come in was because Prince Poniotowsky waited for her in her dressing-room. It was his first jealous moment, and the feeling fell on him with a swoop, and its fangs fastened in him with a stinging pain. He stammered:

“I didn’t come to see any girl here but you. I came to see you.”

“Come to-morrow at two, at the Savoy.”

But before Dan realized his own precipitation, he had seized the door-handle as Letty Lane went within and was about to close her room against him, and said quickly:

“I’m coming right in now.”

“Why, I never heard of such a thing,” she answered sharply, angrily; “you must be crazy! Take away your hand!” And hers, as well as his, seized the handle of the door. Her small ice-cold hand brought him to his senses.

“I beg your pardon,” he murmured confusedly. “Do go in and get warm if you can.”

But instead of obeying, now that the rude young man withdrew his importuning, Miss Lane’s hands fell from the knob, and close to his eyes she swayed before him, and Dan caught her in his arms – went into her room, carrying her. He had been wrong about Prince Poniotowsky; save for Higgins, the room was empty. The woman, though she exclaimed, showed no great surprise and seemed prepared for such a fainting spell. Dan laid the actress on the sofa and then the dresser said to him:

“Please go, sir; I can quite manage. She has these turns often. I’ll give her brandy. She will be quite right.”

But Dan hesitated, looking at the bit of humanity that he had laid with great gentleness on the divan covered with pillows. Letty Lane lay there, small as a little child, inanimate as death. It was hard to think the quiet little form could contain such life, fire and motion, or that this senseless little creature held London with her voice and grace. Higgins knelt down by Letty Lane’s side, quiet, capable, going about the business of resuscitating her lady much as she laced the singer’s bodice and shoes. “If you would be so good as to open the door, sir, and send me a call page. They’ll have to linger out this entr’acte or put on some feature.”

“But,” exclaimed Blair, “she can’t go back to-night?”

“Lord, yes,” Higgins returned. “Here, Miss Lane; drink this.”

At the door where he paused, Dan saw the girl lifted up, saw her lean on Higgins’ shoulder, and assured then that she was not lifeless in good truth, he went out to do as Higgins had asked him. In a quarter of an hour the curtain rose and within half an hour Dan, from his box, saw the actress dance to the rajah her charming polka to the strains of the Hungarian Band.

CHAPTER X – THE BOY FROM MY TOWN

He went the next day to see Letty Lane at the Savoy and learned that she was too ill to receive him. Mrs. Higgins in the sitting-room told him so.

Dan liked the big cordial face of the Scotch-woman who acted as companion, dresser and maid for the star. Mrs. Higgins had an affable face, one that welcomes, and she made it plain that she was not an enemy to this young caller.

The visitor, in his blue serge clothes, was less startling than most of the men that came to see her mistress.

“She works too hard, doesn’t she?”

“She does everything too hard, sir.”

“She ought to rest.”

“I doubt if she does, even in her grave,” returned Higgins. “She is too full of motion. She is like the little girl in the fairy book that danced in her grave.”

Dan didn’t like this comparison.

“Can’t you make her hold up a little?”

Higgins smiled and shook her head.

Letty Lane’s sitting-room was as full of roses as a flower garden. There were quantities of theatrical photographs in silver and leather frames on the tables and the piano. Signed portraits from crowned heads; pictures of well-known worldly men and women whom the dancer had charmed. But a full-length picture of Letty Lane herself in one of the dresses of Mandalay lay on the table near Dan, and he picked it up. She smiled at him enchantingly from the cardboard, across which was written in her big, dashing hand: “For the Boy from my Town. Letty Lane.”

Dan glanced up at Mrs. Higgins.

“Why, that looks as though this were for me.”

The dressing woman nodded. “Miss Lane thought she would be able to see you to-day.”

The picture in his hand, Dan gazed at it rapturously.

“I’m from Blairtown, Montana, where she came from.”

“So she told me, sir.”

He laid the picture back on the table, and Higgins understood that he wanted Miss Lane to give it to him herself. She led him affably to the door and affably smiled upon him. She had a frill in her hand, a thimble on her finger, and a lot of needles in her bodice. She looked motherly and useful. Blair liked to think of her with Letty Lane. He put his hand in his pocket, but she saw his gesture and reproved him quietly: “No, no, sir, please, I never do. I am just as much obliged,” and her face remained so affable that Blair was not embarrassed by her refusal. His parting words were:

“Now, you make her take care of herself.”

And to please him, as she opened the door, she pleasantly assured him that she would do her very best.

Dan went out of the Savoy feeling that he had left something of himself behind him in the motley room of an actress with its perfumed atmosphere of roses and violets. The photograph which he had laid down on the table seemed to look out at him again, and he repeated delightedly, “That one was for me, all right! I’m the ‘boy from her town’ and no mistake.” And he thought of her as she had lain, lifelessly and pale on the dressing-room sofa, under the touch of hired hands, and how, no doubt, she had been lying in her room when he called to-day, with shades drawn, resting before the long hard evening, when London would be amused by her, delighted by her, charmed by her voice, by her body and her grace. He had wandered up as far as Piccadilly, went into a florist’s and stood before the flowers. Her sitting-room had been full of roses, but Dan chose something else that had caught his eye from the window, – a huge country basket of primroses, smelling of the earth and the spring. He sent them with his card and wrote on it, “To the Girl from My Town,” and sent the gift with a pleasure as young and as fresh as was his own heart.

He got no note of acknowledgment from his flowers. Miss Lane was evidently better and played every night; no mention was made of her indisposition in the papers. But Dan couldn’t go to the Gaiety or bear to see her make the effort which he knew must tire her beyond words to conceive.

After a few days he called at the Savoy to get news of her. He got as far as the lift when going up in it he saw Prince Poniotowsky. The sight affected Miss Lane’s townsman so forcibly that instead of going up to the dancer’s apartment Dan took himself off, and anger, displeasure and something like disgust were the only sentiments he carried away from the Savoy. He sent her no flowers, and gave himself up unreservedly to Joshua Ruggles and to a couple of men who came in to see him by appointment. And when toward four o’clock he found himself alone with Ruggles, Dan threw himself down in a big chair and looked intensely bored.

“Well, I guess we don’t need to see any more of these fellows for a week, Dan,” Ruggles yawned with relief. “I’m blamed if it isn’t as hard to take care of money as to get it. I was a poor man once, and so was your father. Those were the days we had fun.”

Ruggles took out a big cigar, struck a match sharply, and when he had lit his Henry Clay he fixed his gaze on the flying London fog, whose black curtain drew itself across their window.

“There’s a lot of excitement,” Ruggles said, “in not knowing what you’re going to get; may turn out to be anything when you’re young and on the trail. That’s the way your father and me felt. And when we started out on the spot that’s Blairtown on the map to-day, your father had forty dollars a week to engineer a busted mine and to pull the company into shape.”

Dan knew the story of his father’s rise by heart, but he listened.

“He took on with the mine a lot of discontented half-hearted rapscallions – a whole bunch, who had failed all along the line. He didn’t chuck ’em out. ‘There’s no life in old wood, Josh,’ he said to me, ‘but sometimes there’s fire in it, and I’m going to light up,’ and he did. He won over the whole lot of them in eighteen months, and within two years he had that darned mine paying dividends. Meanwhile something came his way and he took it.”

From his chair Dan asked: “You mean the Bentley claim?”

“Measles,” his friend said comically, with a grin. “Your father was sick to death with them. When he was sitting up for the first time, peeling in his room, there was a fellow, an Englishman, a total stranger, come in to see him. ‘Better clear out of here,’ your father says to him. ‘I’m shedding the damnedest disease for a grown man that ever was caught.’ ‘I’m not afraid of it,’ the Englishman said, ‘I’m shedding worse.’ When your father asked him what that was, he said the idea that he could make any money in the West. He told your father that he was going back to England and give up his western schemes, and that he had a claim to sell, and he told Blair where it lay. ‘Who has seen it?’ your father asked. ‘Any of my men?’ And the Englishman told your father that nobody had wanted to buy it and that was why he had come to him. He said he thought his only chance to sell was to hold up some blind man on his dying bed and that he had heard that Blair was too sick to stir out of his room and to prospect. Your father liked the fellow’s cheek and when he found out that he had the maps with him, your father bought the whole blooming sweep at the man’s price, which was a mere song.

“Your father never went near his purchase for a year or more, and when he had turned the mine he was managing over to the original company, with me as manager in his place, at a salary of twenty thousand dollars a year, he said to me one day, ‘Ruggles, you’ll be sorry to know that the fun is all over, I’ve struck oil.’ But the oil was copper. The whole blooming business that he’d bought of that Englishman was rich with ore. Well, that’s the story of Blairtown,” Ruggles said. “You were born there and your mother died there.”

Dan said: “Galorey told me what dad did later for the man that sold him the mine, and it was just like everything else he did, for dad was all right, just as good as they come.”

Ruggles agreed. He left his reminiscences abruptly. “Your dad and me had the fun in our time; now you are going to get the other kind; you’re going to make the dust fly that he dug up.”

And the rich young man said musingly: “I’ll bet it isn’t half as good at my end.”

And Ruggles agreed: “Not by a jugful.” And followed: “What’s on to-night? Mandalay?”

Dan’s fury at Prince Poniotowsky came back. “I guess you thought I was a little loose in the lid, didn’t you, Josh, going so often to the same play?”

“You wouldn’t have been the first rich man that had the same disease,” Ruggles answered.

“There is nothing the matter with Mandalay, but I’m not gone on any actress living, Josh; you are in the wrong pew.”

Dan altered his indolent pose and sat forward. “But I am thinking of getting married,” he said.

“I hope it’s to the right girl, Dan.”

And with young assurance Blair answered: “It will be if I marry her. I know what I want all right.”

“I hope she knows what she wants, Dan.”

“How do you mean?”

“You or your money. You have the darnedest handicap, my boy.”

Blair flushed. “I’ll get to hate the whole thing,” he said ferociously. “It meets me everywhere – bonds – stocks – figures – dividends – coupons – deeds – it’s too much!” he said suddenly, with resentment. “It is too much for me. Why, sometimes I feel a hundred years old, and like a hunk of gold.”

Ruggles, in answer to this, said: “Why, that reminds me of what a man remarked about your father once. It was the same English chap your father bought the claim of. Speaking of Blair, he said to me: ‘You know there’s all kinds of metal bars, and when you cut into them some is bullion and some’s coated with aluminum, and there’s others that when you cut down, cut a clean yellow all along the line.’ If, as you say, you feel like a hunk of metal, it ain’t bad if it is that kind.”

“It’s got to stop coming in between me and the woman I marry, all right, though.” Dan did not pursue his subject further, for his feelings about the duchess were too unreal to give him the sincere heartiness with which he would have liked to answer Ruggles.

He went over to the window, and, with his hands in his pockets, stood looking out at the fog. Ruggles, at the table, opened the cover of the book of Mandalay and took out the four checks made out to Lady Galorey and which he had forgotten. He hurriedly thrust them into his pocket.

“Come away, Dannie,” he said cheerfully, “let’s do something wild. I feel up to most anything with this miserable fog down on me. If it had any nerve it would take some form or shape, so a man could choke it back.”

Ruggles blew his nose violently.

“There’s nothing to do,” said Dan in a bored tone.

“Why don’t you see who your telegram is from?” Ruggles asked him. It proved to be a suggestion from Gordon Galorey that Dan should meet him at five o’clock at the club.

“What will you do, Rug?”

“Sleep,” said the Westerner serenely; “I’m nearly as happy in London as I am in Philadelphia. It’s four o’clock now and I can’t sleep more than four hours anyway. Let’s have a real wild time, Dannie.”

Dan looked at him doubtfully, but Ruggles’ eyes were keen.

“What kind of a time do you mean?”

“Let’s ask the Gaiety girl for dinner – for supper after the theater.”

“Letty Lane? She wouldn’t go.”

“Why not?”

“She is awfully delicate; it is all she can do to keep her contracts.”

He knows that, Ruggles thought. “Let’s ask her and see.” He went over to the table and drew out the paper. “Come on and write and ask her to go out with us to supper.”

“See here, Rug, what’s this for?”

“What’s strange in it? She is from our state, and if you don’t hustle and ask her I am going to ask her all alone.”

Dan was puzzled as he sat down to the table, reflecting that it was perfectly possible that old Ruggles had fallen a prey to the charms of an actress. She wouldn’t come, of course. He wrote a formal invitation without thinking very much of what he said or how, folded and addressed his note.

“What did you say?” Ruggles asked eagerly.

“Why, that two boys from home wanted to give her a supper.”

“Well,” said Ruggles, “if the answer comes while you are at the club I’ll open it and give the orders. Think she’ll come?”

“I do not,” responded Dan rather brutally. “She’s got others to take her out to supper, you bet your life.”

“Well, there’s none of them as rich as you are, I reckon, Dan.”

And the boy turned on him violently.

“See here, Josh, if you speak to me again of my money, when there’s a woman in the question – ”

He did not finish his threat, but snatched up his coat and hat and gloves and went out of the door, slamming it after him.

Mr. Ruggles’ profound and happy snore was cut short by the page boy, who fetched in a note, with the Savoy stamping on the back. Ruggles opened it not without emotion.

“Dear boy,” it ran, “I haven’t yet thanked you for the primroses; they were perfectly sweet. There is not one of them in any of my rooms, and I’ll tell you why to-night. I am crazy to accept for supper” – here she had evidently struck out her intended refusal, and closed with, “I’m coming, but don’t come after me at the Gaiety, please. I’ll meet you at the Carlton after the theater. Who’s the other boy? L. L.”

The “other boy” read the note with much difficulty, for it was badly written. “He’ll have to stop sending her flowers and going every night to the theater unless he wants a row with the duchess,” he said dryly. And with a certain interest in his rôle, Ruggles rang for the head waiter, and with the man’s help ordered his first midnight supper for an actress.