“I don’t know; I haven’t seen him since. It’s up to you to hustle, Harry. If this thing goes through, it is the end of Phil Trask. You know that as well as I do.”
“I do, indeed. Thank you for putting me on. I’ll find Phil, if I have to take out a search warrant for him.”
Losing no time, Bromley went first to the Alamo Building, and in the upper corridor he met a Jew second-hand furniture dealer coming out of Philip’s rooms and his heart sank. This meant that Philip was already disposing of his effects and preparing for flight. In the sitting-room he found Philip packing a trunk.
“Quit that, Phil, for a minute or so and talk to me,” he began abruptly. Then: “We’ll skip the preliminaries; I know all about it—what you’ve done, and what you are intending to do. Don’t you know that it is preposterously impossible?”
“No, I don’t,” was the firm denial. “It isn’t impossible. Jim Garth did it, and nothing but good came of it. He would be a different man to-day if the woman he rescued and married hadn’t died. But that is beside the mark, Harry. You know what I have done: I have spoiled my life, and I am no better than the woman I am going to marry; not half as good in some respects.”
“She isn’t too good to let you ruin yourself, world without end, by marrying her!” retorted the play-boy.
“You are mistaken again,” was the mild dissent. “She proved to me, no longer ago than last night, that she was capable of sacrificing herself utterly to break my determination. I have come around to your point of view, Harry. There is no poor wretch on earth too low down to answer the appeal if one only knows how to make it. It has cost me pretty much everything I value, or used to value, to learn this, but I have learned it, at last.”
“But, good heavens—you can’t love this woman!”
“Who said anything about love? Don’t make another mistake, Harry; it isn’t an infatuation. I am merely giving this girl a chance to become what God intended her to be—a one-man woman; and the obligation this will impose will keep me from sinking any deeper in the mud—or I hope it may.”
For a fervid half-hour the play-boy argued and pleaded, all to no purpose. It was quite in vain that, argument and persuasion failing, he plied the whip, refusing to credit the altruistic motive, and accusing Philip of making the final and fatal sacrifice to his own swollen ego; not, indeed, that he believed this to be wholly true, but only that he hoped there might be enough of the steel of truth in it to strike fire upon the hard flint of Philip’s desperate resolution.