The Girl From His Town Part 25

"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 pa.s.sionate 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-fas.h.i.+oned as the deuce, and me and Dan is quite a contrast, but I mean just what I say, my dear."

She controlled her amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 gla.s.ses, 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 t.i.tle 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 t.i.tles to the Blairtown mines. It all belongs now to me, if I choose to present my doc.u.ments. 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 gla.s.ses off while he made this a.s.sertion. 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 wors.h.i.+p him."

"Give him up, then," said Ruggles steadily.