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
