11504 lines
729 KiB
Plaintext
11504 lines
729 KiB
Plaintext
“The shining mountains,” said Gregory Compton softly, throwing back his
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head, his eyes travelling along the hard bright outlines above the high
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valley in which his ranch lay. “The shining mountains. That is what the
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Indians called them before the white man came.”
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His wife yawned frankly. “Pity they don’t shine inside as well as
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out--what we’ve got of ’em.”
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“Who knows? Who knows?”
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“We don’t. That’s the trouble.”
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But although she spoke tartly, she nestled into his arm, for she was
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not unamiable, she had been married but sixteen months, and she was
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still fond of her husband “in a way”; moreover, although she cherished
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resentments open and secret, she never forgot that she had won a
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prize “as men go.” Many girls in Butte[A] had wanted to marry Gregory
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Compton, not only because he had inherited a ranch of eleven hundred
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and sixty acres, but because, comprehensively, he was superior to the
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other young men of his class. He had graduated from the High School
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before he was sixteen; then after three years’ work on the ranch under
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his unimaginative father, he had announced his intention of leaving the
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State unless permitted to attend the School of Mines in Butte. The old
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man, who by this time had taken note of the formation of his son’s jaw,
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gave his consent rather than lose the last of his children; and for two
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years and a semester Gregory had been the most brilliant figure in the
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School of Mines.
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“Old Man Compton,” who had stampeded from his small farm in northern
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New York in the sixties to meet with little success in the mines, but
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more as a rancher, had been as typical a hayseed as ever punctuated
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politics with tobacco juice in front of a corner grocery-store, but
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had promised his wife on her death-bed that their son should have
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“schooling.” Mrs. Compton, who had arrived in Montana soon after the
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log house was built, was a large, dark, silent woman, whom none of
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her distant neighbours had ever claimed to know. It was currently
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believed in the New York village whence she came that in the early days
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of the eighteenth century the sturdy Verrooy stock had been abruptly
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crossed by the tribe of the Oneida. Ancient history in a new country
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is necessarily enveloped in mist, but although the children she had
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lost had been fair and nondescript like their father, her youngest, and
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her only son, possessed certain characteristics of the higher type of
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Indian. He was tall and lightly built, graceful, supple, swift of foot,
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with the soft tread of the panther; and although his skin was no darker
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than that of the average brunette, it acquired significance from the
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intense blackness of his hair, the thin aquiline nose, the long, narrow
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eyes, the severe and stolid dignity of expression even in his earlier
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years.
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He had seemed to the girls of the only class he knew in Butte an
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even more romantic figure than the heroes of their magazine fiction,
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particularly as he took no notice of them until he met Ida Hook at a
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picnic and surrendered his heart.
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Ida, forced by her thrifty mother to accept employment with a
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fashionable dressmaker, and consumed with envy of the “West Siders”
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whose measurements she took, did not hesitate longer than feminine
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prudence dictated. Before she gave her hair its nightly brushing her
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bold unpedantic hand had covered several sheets of pink note-paper with
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the legend, “Mrs. Gregory Compton,” the while she assured herself there
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was “no sweller name on West Broadway.” To do her justice, she also
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thrilled with young passion, for more than her vanity had responded
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to the sombre determined attentions of the man who had been the
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indifferent hero of so many maiden dreams. Although she longed to be a
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Copper Queen, she was too young to be altogether hard; and, now that
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her hour was come, every soft enchantment of her sex awoke to bind and
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blind her mate.
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Gregory Compton’s indifference to women had been more pretended than
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real, although an occasional wild night on The Flat had interested him
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far more than picnics and dances where the girls used no better grammar
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than the “sporting women” and were far less amusing. He went to this
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picnic to please his old school friend, Mark Blake, and because Nine
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Mile Cañon had looked very green and alluring after the June rains when
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he had ridden through it alone the day before. The moment he stood
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before Ida Hook, staring into the baffling limpid eyes, about which
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heavy black lashes rose and fell and met and tangled and shot apart in
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a series of bedevilling manœuvres, he believed himself to be possessed
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by that intimate soul-seeking desire that nothing but marriage can
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satisfy. He kept persistently at her side, his man’s instinct prompting
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the little attentions women value less than they demand. He also took
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more trouble to interest her verbally than was normal in one whom
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nature had prompted to silence, and he never would learn the rudiments
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of small talk; but his brain was humming in time with his eager
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awakened pulses, and Ida was too excited and exultant to take note of
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his words. “It was probably about mines, anyway,” she confided to her
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friends, Ruby and Pearl Miller. “Nobody talks about anything else long
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in this old camp.”
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Gregory’s infatuation was by no means reduced by the fact that no less
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than six young men contended for the favour of Miss Hook. She was the
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accredited beauty of Butte, for even the ladies of the West Side had
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noticed and discussed her and hoped that their husbands and brothers
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had not. It was true that her large oval blue-grey eyes, set like
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Calliope’s, were as shallow as her voice; but the lids were so broad
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and white, and the lashes so silky and oblique, that the critical
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faculty of man was drugged, if dimly prescient. Her cheeks were a
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trifle too full, her nose of a type unsung in marble; but what of that
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when her skin was as white as milk, the colour in cheek and lips of a
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clear transparent coral, that rarest and most seductive of nature’s
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reds, her little teeth enamelled like porcelain? And had she not every
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captivating trick, from active eyelash to the sudden toss of her small
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head on its long round throat, even to the dilating nostril which made
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her nose for the moment look patrician and thin! Her figure, too, with
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its boyish hips, thin flexible waist, and full low bust, which she
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carried with a fine upright swing, was made the most of in a collarless
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blouse, closely fitting skirt, and narrow dark belt.
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Miss Hook, although her expression was often wide-eyed and innocent,
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was quite cynically aware of her power over the passions of men. More
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than one man of high salary or recent fortune had tried to “annex”
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her, as she airily put it; her self-satisfaction and the ever-present
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sophistications of a mining town saving her from anything so gratuitous
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as outraged maidenhood.
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The predatory male and his promises had never tempted her, and it
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was her boast that she had never set foot in the road houses of The
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Flat. She had made up her mind long since to live on the West Side,
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the fashionable end of Butte, and was wise enough, to quote her own
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words, to know that the straight and narrow was the only direct route.
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Ambition, her sleepless desire to be a grand dame (which she pronounced
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without any superfluous accent), was stronger than vanity or her
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natural love of pleasure. By the ordinary romantic yearnings of her
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age and sex she was unhampered; but when she met Gregory Compton, she
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played the woman’s game so admirably the long day through that she
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brushed her heavy black hair at night quite satisfied he would propose
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when she gave him his chance. This she withheld for several days, it
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being both pleasant and prudent to torment him. He walked home with her
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every afternoon from the dressmaking establishment on North Main Street
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to her mother’s cottage in East Granite, to be dismissed at the gate
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coyly, reluctantly, indifferently, but always with a glance of startled
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wonder from the door.
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In the course of the week she gave him to understand that she should
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attend the Friday Night dance at Columbia Gardens, and expected him to
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escort her. Gregory, who by this time was reduced to a mere prowling
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instinct projected with fatal instantaneity from its napping ego, was
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as helpless a victim as if born a fool. He thought himself the most
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fortunate of men to receive permission to sit beside her on the open
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car during the long ride to the Gardens, to pay for the greater number
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of her waltzes, to be, in short, her beau for the night.
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The evening of Friday at Columbia Gardens is Society Night for all
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respectable Butte, irrespective of class; the best floor and the
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airiest hall in Silver Bow County proving an irresistible incentive to
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democracy. Moreover, Butte is a city of few resources, and the Gardens
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at night look like fairyland: the immense room is hung with Chinese
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lanterns depending from the rafters, the music is the best in Montana;
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and the richer the women, the plainer their frocks. A sort of informal
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propriety reigns, and millionaire or clerk pays ten cents for the
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privilege of dancing with his lady.
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Ida, who had expended five of her hard-earned dollars on a bottle
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of imported perfume, wore a white serge suit cut as well as any in
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“the grand dame bunch.” After the sixth waltz she draped her head and
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shoulders with a coral-pink scarf and led Gregory, despite the chill of
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June, out to his willing fate. The park was infested by other couples,
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walking briskly to keep themselves warm, and so were the picnic grounds
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where the cottonwoods and Canadian poplars were being coaxed to grow,
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now that the smelters which had reduced the neighbourhood of Butte to
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its bones had been removed to Anaconda.
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But farther up the cañon no one but themselves adventured, and here
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Gregory was permitted to ask this unique creature, provided with a new
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and maddening appeal to the senses, to renounce her kingdom and live on
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a ranch.
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It was all very crude, even to the blatant moon, which in the thin
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brilliant atmosphere of that high altitude swings low with an almost
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impudent air of familiarity, and grins in the face of sentiment.
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But to Gregory, who was at heart passionate and romantic, it was a
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soul-quickening scene: the blazing golden disk poised on the very crest
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of the steep mountain before them, the murmur of water, the rustling
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young leaves, the deep-breasted orientally perfumed woman with the
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innocent wondering eyes. The moon chuckled and reminded his exacting
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mistress, Nature, that were he given permission to scatter some of his
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vast experience instead of the seductive beams that had accumulated
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it, this young man with his natural distinction of mind, and already
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educated beyond his class, would enjoy a sudden clarity of vision and
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perceive the defects of grammar and breeding in this elemental siren
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with nothing but Evian instincts to guide her.
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But the dutiful old search-light merely whipped up the ancestral
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memories in Gregory’s subconscious brain; moreover, gave him courage.
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He made love with such passion and tenderness that Ida, for once
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elemental, clung to him so long and so ardently that the grinning
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moon whisked off his beam in disgust and retired behind a big black
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cloud--which burst shortly afterwards and washed out the car tracks.
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They were married in July, and Mrs. Hook, who had worked for forty
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years at tub and ironing-board, moved over to the dusty cemetery in
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September, at rest in the belief not only that her too good-looking
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daughter was safely “planted,” but was a supremely happy woman.
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Ida’s passion, however, had been merely a gust of youth, fed by
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curiosity and gratified ambition; it quickly passed in the many
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disappointments of her married life. Gregory had promised her a
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servant, but no “hired girl” could be induced to remain more than a
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week on the lonely De Smet Ranch; and Mrs. Compton’s temper finding
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its only relief in one-sided quarrels with her Chinese cooks, even the
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philosophical Oriental was prone to leave on a moment’s notice. There
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were three hired men and three in the family, after John Oakley came,
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to cook and “clean up” for, and there were weeks at a time when Ida
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was obliged to rise with the dawn and occupy her large and capable but
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daintily manicured hands during many hours of the day.
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Gregory’s personality had kindled what little imagination she had
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into an exciting belief in his power over life and its corollary, the
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world’s riches. Also, having in mind the old Indian legend of the great
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chief who had turned into shining gold after death and been entombed in
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what was now known prosaically as the De Smet Ranch, she had expected
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Gregory to “strike it rich” at once.
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But although there were several prospect holes on the ranch, dug
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by Gregory in past years, he had learned too much, particularly of
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geology, during his two years at the School of Mines to waste any more
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time digging holes in the valley or bare portions of the hills. If a
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ledge existed it was beneath some tangle of shrub or tree-roots, and he
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had no intention of denuding his pasture until he was prepared to sell
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his cattle.
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He told her this so conclusively a month after they were married that
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she had begged him to raise sugar beets and build a factory in Butte
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(which he would be forced to superintend), reminding him that the only
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factory in the State was in the centre of another district and near
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the southern border, and that sugar ranged from six to seven dollars a
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hundredweight. He merely laughed at this suggestion, although he was
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surprised at her sagacity, for, barring a possible democratic victory,
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there was room for two beet-sugar factories in Montana. But he had
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other plans, although he gave her no hint of them, and had no intention
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of complicating his life with an uncongenial and exacting business.
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By unceasing personal supervision he not only made the ranch profitable
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and paid a yearly dividend to his three aunts, according to the terms
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of his father’s will, but for the last two years, after replacing or
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adding to his stock, he had deposited a substantial sum in the bank,
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occasionally permitting his astute friend, Mark Blake, to turn over a
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few hundreds for him on the stock-market. This was the heyday of the
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American farmer, and the De Smet cattle brought the highest prices
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in the stock-yards for beef on the hoof. He also raised three crops
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of alfalfa a year to insure his live stock against the lean days of
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a Rocky Mountain winter. He admitted to Ida that he could afford to
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sink a shaft or drive a tunnel in one of his hills, but added that
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he should contemplate nothing of the sort until he had finished his
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long-delayed course in the School of Mines, and had thousands to throw
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away on development work, miners, and machinery. At this time he saw no
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immediate prospect of resuming the studies interrupted by the death of
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his father: until John Oakley came, eight months after his marriage, he
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knew of no foreman to trust but himself.
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Ida desired the life of the city for other reasons than its luxuries
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and distractions. Her fallow brain was shrewd and observing, although
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often crude in its deductions. She soon realised that the longer she
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lived with her husband the less she understood him. Like all ignorant
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women of any class she cherished certain general estimates of men,
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and in her own class it was assumed that the retiring men were weak
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and craven, the bold ones necessarily lacking in that refinement upon
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which their young lady friends prided themselves. Ida had found that
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Gregory, bold as his wooing had been, and arrogantly masculine as he
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was in most things, not only had his shynesses but was far more refined
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and sensitive than herself. She was a woman who prided herself upon
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her theories, and disliked having them upset; still more not knowing
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where she was at, to use her own spirited vernacular. She began to
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be haunted by the fear of making some fatal mistake, living, as she
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did, in comparative isolation with him. Not only was her womanly
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pride involved, as well as a certain affection born of habit and
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possible even to the selfish, rooted as it is in the animal function
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of maternity, but she had supreme faith in his future success and was
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determined to share it.
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She was tired, however, of attempting to fathom the intense reserves
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and peculiarities of that silent nature, of trying to live up to him.
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She was obliged to resort to “play-acting”; and, fully aware of her
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limitations, despite her keen self-appreciation, was in constant fear
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that she would “make a grand mess of it.” Gregory’s eyes could be very
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penetrating, and she had discovered that although he never told funny
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stories, nor appeared to be particularly amused at hers, he had his own
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sense of humour.
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II
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The young couple stood together in the dawn, the blue dawn of Montana.
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The sky was as cold and bright as polished silver, but the low soft
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masses of cloud were blue, the glittering snow on the mountain peaks
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was blue, the smooth snow fields on the slopes and in the valley were
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blue. Nor was it the blue of azure or of sapphire, but a deep lovely
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cool polaric blue, born in the inverted depths of Montana, and forever
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dissociated from art.
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It was an extramundane scene, and it had drawn Gregory from his bed
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since childhood, but to Ida, brought up in a town, and in one whose
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horizons until a short while ago had always been obscured by the
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poisonous haze of smelters, and ores roasted in the open, it was
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“weird.” Novels had informed her that sunrises were pink, or, at the
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worst, grey. There was something mysterious in this cold blue dawn up
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in the snow fields, and she hated mystery. But as it appeared to charm
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Gregory, she played up to him when he “dragged” her out to look at it;
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and she endeavoured to do so this morning although her own ego was
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rampant.
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Gregory drew her closer, for she still had the power to enthrall him
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at times. He understood the resources within her shallows as little
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as she understood his depths, but although her defects in education
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and natural equipment had long since appalled him, he was generally
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too busy to think about her, and too masculine to detect that she was
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playing a part. This morning, although he automatically responded to
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her blandishments, he was merely sensible of her presence, and his
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eyes, the long watchful eyes of the Indian, were concentrated upon the
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blue light that poured from the clouds down upon the glistening peaks.
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Ida knew that this meant he was getting ready to make an announcement
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of some sort, and longed to shake it out of him. Not daring to outrage
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his dignity so far, she drew the fur robe that enveloped them closer
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and rubbed her soft hair against his chin. It was useless to ask him
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to deliver himself until he was “good and ready”, but the less direct
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method sometimes prevailed.
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Suddenly he came out with it.
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“I’ve made up my mind to go back to the School.”
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“Back to school--are you loony?”
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“The School of Mines, of course. I can enter the Junior Class where
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I left off; earlier in fact, as I had finished the first semester.
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Besides, I’ve been going over all the old ground since Oakley came.”
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“Is that what’s in all them books.”
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“Those, dear.”
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“Those. Mining Engineer’s a lot sweller than rancher.”
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“Please don’t use that word.”
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“Lord, Greg, you’re as particular as if you’d been brought up in Frisco
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or Chicago, instead of on a ranch.”
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He laughed outright and pinched her ear. “I use a good deal of slang
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myself--only, there are some words that irritate me--I can hardly
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explain. It doesn’t matter.”
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“Greg,” she asked with sudden suspicion, “why are you goin’ in for a
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profession? Have you given up hopes of strikin’ it rich on this ranch?”
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“Oh, I shall never relinquish that dream.” He spoke so lightly that
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even had she understood him better she could not have guessed that the
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words leapt from what he believed to be the deepest of his passions.
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“But what has that to do with it? If there is gold on the ranch I shall
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be more likely to discover it when I know a great deal more about
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geology than I do now, and better able to mine it cheaply after I have
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learned all I can of milling and metallurgy at the School. But that is
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not the point. There may be nothing here. I wish to graduate into a
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profession which not only attracts me more than any other, but in which
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the expert can always make a large income. Ranching doesn’t interest
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me, and with Oakley to----”
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“What woke you up so sudden?”
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“I have never been asleep.” But he turned away his head lest she see
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the light in his eyes. “Oakley gives me my chance to get out, that is
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all. And I am very glad for your sake----”
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“Aw!” Her voice, ringing out with ecstasy, converted the native
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syllable into music. “It means we are goin’ to live in Butte!”
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“Of course.”
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“And I was so took--taken by surprise it never dawned on me till this
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minute. Now what do you know about that?”
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“We shall have to be very quiet. I cannot get my degree until a year
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from June--a year and seven months from now. I shall study day and
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night, and work in the mines during the winter and summer vacations. I
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cannot take you anywhere.”
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“Lord knows it can’t be worse’n this. I’ll have my friends to talk to
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and there’s always the movin’ picture shows. Lord, how I’d like to see
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one.”
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“Well, you shall,” he said kindly. “I wrote to Mark some time ago and
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asked him to give the tenant of the cottage notice. As this is the
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third of the month it must be empty and ready for us.”
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“My goodness gracious!” cried his wife with pardonable irritation, “but
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you are a grand one for handin’ out surprises! Most husbands tell their
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wives things as they go along, but you ruminate like a cow and hand
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over the cud when you’re good and ready. I’m sick of bein’ treated as
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if I was a child.”
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“Please don’t look at it in that way. What is the use of talking about
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things until one is quite sure they can be accomplished?”
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“That’s half the fun of bein’ married,” said Ida with one of her
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flashes of intuition.
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“Is it?” Gregory turned this over in his mind, then, out of his own
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experience, rejected it as a truism. He could not think of any subject
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he would care to discuss with his wife; or any other woman. But he
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kissed her with an unusual sense of compunction. “Perhaps I liked the
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idea of surprising you,” he said untruthfully. “You will be glad to
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live in Butte once more?”
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“You may bet your bottom dollar on that. When do we go?”
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“Tomorrow.”
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“_Lands_ sakes! Well, I’m dumb. And breakfast has to be got if I _have_
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had a bomb exploded under me. That Chink was doin’ fine when I left,
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but the Lord knows----”
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She walked toward the rear of the house, temper in the swing of her
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hips, her head tossed high. Although rejoicing at the prospect of
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living in town, she was both angry and vaguely alarmed, as she so often
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had been before, at the unimaginable reserves, the unsuspected mental
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activities, and the sudden strikings of this life-partner who should
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have done his thinking out loud.
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“Lord knows,” thought Mrs. Compton, as she approached her kitchen, with
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secret intent to relieve her feelings by “lambasting” the Mongolian and
|
||
leaving Oakley to shift for himself, “it’s like livin’ with that there
|
||
Sphinx. I don’t s’pose I’ll ever get used to him, and maybe the time’ll
|
||
come when I won’t want to.”
|
||
III
|
||
Gregory stood for some time longer, leaning on the gate and waiting
|
||
for the red fire to rise above the crystal mountains. He was eager for
|
||
the morrow, not only because he longed to be at the foundation stones
|
||
of his real life but because his mind craved the precise training, the
|
||
logical development, the intoxicating sense of expansion which he had
|
||
missed and craved incessantly during the six years that had elapsed
|
||
since he had been torn from the School of Mines. Moreover, his heart
|
||
was light; at last he was able to shift the great responsibilities of
|
||
his ranch to other shoulders.
|
||
Some six months since, his friend, Mark Blake, had recommended to him
|
||
a young man who not only had graduated at the head of his class in
|
||
the State College of Agriculture, but had served for two years on one
|
||
of the State Experimental Farms. “What he don’t know about scientific
|
||
farming, dry, intensive, and all the rest, isn’t worth shucks, old
|
||
man,” Blake had written. “He’s as honest as they come, and hasn’t a red
|
||
to do the trick himself, but wants to go on a ranch as foreman, and
|
||
farm wherever there’s soil of a reasonable depth. Of course he wants a
|
||
share of the profits, but he’s worth it to you, for the Lord never cut
|
||
you out for a rancher or farmer, well as you have done. What you want
|
||
is to finish your course and take your degree. Try Oakley out for six
|
||
months. There’ll be only one result. You’re a free man.”
|
||
The contract had been signed the day before. But Oakley had been a
|
||
welcome guest in the small household for more than practical reasons.
|
||
Until the night of his advent, when the two men sat talking until
|
||
daylight, Gregory had not realised the mental isolation of his married
|
||
life. Like all young men he had idealised the girl who made the first
|
||
assault on his preferential passion; but his brain was too shrewd,
|
||
keen, practical, in spite of its imaginative area, to harbor illusions
|
||
beyond the brief period of novelty. It had taken him but a few weeks
|
||
to discover that although his wife had every charm of youth and sex,
|
||
and was by no means a fool, their minds moved on different planes, far
|
||
apart. He had dreamed of the complete understanding, the instinctive
|
||
response, the identity of tastes, in short of companionship, of the
|
||
final routing of a sense of hopeless isolation he had never lost
|
||
consciousness of save when immersed in study.
|
||
Ida subscribed for several of the “cheapest” of the cheap magazines,
|
||
and, when her Mongolians were indulgent, rocked herself in the
|
||
sitting-room, devouring the factory sweets and crude mental drugs with
|
||
much the same spirit that revelled above bargain counters no matter
|
||
what the wares. She “lived” for the serials, and attempted to discuss
|
||
the “characters” with her husband and John Oakley. But the foreman was
|
||
politely intolerant of cheap fiction, Gregory open in his disgust.
|
||
He admitted unequivocally that he had made a mistake, but assuming
|
||
that most men did, philosophically concluded to make the best of it;
|
||
women, after all, played but a small part in a man’s life. He purposed,
|
||
however, that she should improve her mind, and would have been glad
|
||
to move to Butte for no other reason. He had had a sudden vision one
|
||
night, when his own mind, wearied with study, drifted on the verge
|
||
of sleep, of a lifetime on a lonely ranch with a woman whose brain
|
||
deteriorated from year to year, her face faded and vacuous, save when
|
||
animated with temper. If the De Smet Ranch proved to be mineralised,
|
||
Oakley, his deliverer, would not be forgotten.
|
||
He moved his head restlessly, his glance darting over as much of his
|
||
fine estate as it could focus, wondering when it would give up its
|
||
secrets, in other words, its gold. He had never doubted that it winked
|
||
and gleamed, and waited for him below the baffling surfaces of his
|
||
land. Not for millions down would he have sold his ranch, renounced the
|
||
personal fulfilment of that old passionate romance.
|
||
Gregory Compton was a dreamer, not in the drifting and aimless
|
||
fashion of the visionary, but as all men born with creative powers,
|
||
practical or artistic, must be. Indeed, it is doubtful if the artistic
|
||
brain--save possibly where the abnormal tracts are musical in the
|
||
highest sense--ever need, much less develop, that leaping vision, that
|
||
power of visualising abstract ideas, of the men whose gifts for bold
|
||
and original enterprise enable them to drive the elusive wealth of the
|
||
world first into a corner, then into their own pockets.
|
||
When one contemplates the small army of men of great wealth in the
|
||
world today, and, just behind, that auxiliary regiment endowed with the
|
||
talent, the imagination, and the grim assurance necessary to magnetise
|
||
the circulating riches of our planet; contemptuous of those hostile
|
||
millions, whose brains so often are of unleavened dough, always devoid
|
||
of talent, envious, hating, but sustained by the conceit which nature
|
||
stores in the largest of her reservoirs to pour into the vacancies of
|
||
the minds of men; seldom hopeless, fooling themselves with dreams of
|
||
a day when mere brute numbers shall prevail, and (human nature having
|
||
been revolutionised by a miracle) all men shall be equal and content to
|
||
remain equal;--when one stands off and contemplates these two camps,
|
||
the numerically weak composed of the forces of mind, the other of the
|
||
unelectrified yet formidable millions, it is impossible to deny not
|
||
only the high courage and supernormal gifts of the little army of
|
||
pirates, but that, barring the rapidly decreasing numbers of explorers
|
||
in the waste places of the earth, in them alone is the last stronghold
|
||
of the old adventurous spirit that has given the world its romance.
|
||
The discontented, the inefficient, the moderately successful, the
|
||
failures, see only remorseless greed in the great money makers. Their
|
||
temper is too personal to permit them to recognise that here are the
|
||
legitimate inheritors of the dashing heroes they enjoy in history,
|
||
the bold and ruthless egos that throughout the ages have transformed
|
||
savagery into civilisation, torpor into progress, in their pursuit
|
||
of gold. That these “doing” buccaneers of our time are the current
|
||
heroes of the masses, envious or generous in tribute, the most welcome
|
||
“copy” of the daily or monthly press, is proof enough that the spirit
|
||
of adventure still flourishes in the universal heart, seldom as modern
|
||
conditions permit its expansion. For aught we know it may be this
|
||
old spirit of adventure that inspires the midnight burglar and the
|
||
gentlemen of the road, not merely the desire for “easy money.” But
|
||
these are the flotsam. The boldest imaginations and the most romantic
|
||
hearts are sequestered in the American “big business” men of today.
|
||
Gregory Compton had grown to maturity in the most romantic subdivision
|
||
of the United States since California retired to the position of a
|
||
classic. Montana, her long winter surface a reflection of the beautiful
|
||
dead face of the moon, bore within her arid body illimitable treasure,
|
||
yielding it from time to time to the more ardent and adventurous of her
|
||
lovers. Gold and silver, iron, copper, lead, tungsten, precious and
|
||
semi-precious stones--she might have been some vast heathen idol buried
|
||
aeons ago when Babylon was but a thought in the Creator’s brain, and
|
||
the minor gods travelled the heaving spaces to immure their treasure,
|
||
stolen from rival stars.
|
||
Gregory had always individualised as well as idealised his state,
|
||
finding more companionship in her cold mysteries than in the unfruitful
|
||
minds of his little world. His youthful dreams, when sawing wood or
|
||
riding after cattle, had been alternately of desperate encounters with
|
||
Indians and of descending abruptly into vast and glittering corridors.
|
||
The creek on the ranch had given up small quantities of placer gold,
|
||
enough to encourage “Old Compton,” least imaginative of men, to use his
|
||
pick up the side of the gulch, and even to sink a shaft or two. But he
|
||
had wasted his money, and he had little faith in the mineral value of
|
||
the De Smet Ranch or in his own luck. He was a thrifty, pessimistic,
|
||
hard-working, down-east Presbyterian, whose faith in predestination had
|
||
killed such roots of belief in luck as he may have inherited with other
|
||
attributes of man. He sternly discouraged his son’s hopes, which the
|
||
silent intense boy expressed one day in a sudden mood of fervour and
|
||
desire for sympathy, bidding him hang on to the live stock, which were
|
||
a certain sure source of income, and go out and feed hogs when he felt
|
||
onsettled like.
|
||
He died when Gregory was in the midst of his Junior year in the School
|
||
of Mines, and the eager student was obliged to renounce his hope of a
|
||
congenial career, for the present, and assume control of the ranch.
|
||
It was heavily mortgaged; his father’s foreman, who had worked on the
|
||
ranch since he was a lad, had taken advantage of the old man’s failing
|
||
mind to raise the money, as well as to obtain his signature to the sale
|
||
of more than half the cattle. He had disappeared with the concrete
|
||
result a few days before Mr. Compton’s death.
|
||
It was in no serene spirit that Gregory entered upon the struggle
|
||
for survival at the age of twenty-one. Bitterly resenting his abrupt
|
||
divorce from the School of Mines, which he knew to be the gateway to
|
||
his future, and his faith in mankind dislocated by the cruel defection
|
||
of one whom he had liked and trusted from childhood, he seethed under
|
||
his stolid exterior while working for sixteen hours a day to rid the
|
||
ranch of its encumbrance and replace the precious cattle. But as
|
||
the greater part of this time was spent out of doors he outgrew the
|
||
delicacy of his youth and earlier manhood, and, with red blood and
|
||
bounding pulses, his bitterness left him.
|
||
He began to visit Butte whenever he could spare a few days from the
|
||
ranch, to “look up” as his one chum, Mark Blake, expressed it; so
|
||
that by the time he married he knew the life of a Western mining
|
||
town--an education in itself--almost as well as he knew the white and
|
||
silent spaces of Montana. With the passing of brooding and revolt his
|
||
old dreams revived, and he spent, until he married, many long days
|
||
prospecting. He had found nothing until a few weeks ago, early in
|
||
October, and then the discovery, such as it was, had been accidental.
|
||
There had been a terrific wind storm, beginning shortly after sundown,
|
||
reaching at midnight a velocity of seventy-two miles an hour, and
|
||
lasting until morning; it had been impossible to sleep or to go out of
|
||
doors and see to the well-being of the cattle.
|
||
The wind was not the Chinook, although it came out of the west, for
|
||
it was bitterly cold. Two of the house windows facing the storm were
|
||
blown in and the roof of a recent addition went off. As such storms are
|
||
uncommon in Montana, even Gregory was uneasy, fearing the house might
|
||
go, although it had been his father’s boast that not even an earthquake
|
||
could uproot it. After daybreak the steady fury of the storm ceased.
|
||
There was much damage done to the outbuildings, but, leaving Oakley to
|
||
superintend repairs, Gregory mounted his horse and rode over the ranch
|
||
to examine the fences and brush sheds. The former were intact, and the
|
||
cattle were huddled in their shelters, which were built against the
|
||
side of a steep hill. A few, no doubt, had drifted before the storm,
|
||
but would return in the course of the day. Here and there a pine tree
|
||
had been blown over, but the winter wheat and alfalfa were too young to
|
||
be injured.
|
||
He rode towards the hill where the wind had done its most conspicuous
|
||
damage. It was a long steep hill of granite near the base and grey
|
||
limestone above topped with red shales, and stood near the northeast
|
||
corner of the ranch. Its rigid sides had been relieved by a small grove
|
||
of pines; but although in spring it was gay with anemones and primrose
|
||
moss, and green until late in July, there was nothing on its ugly
|
||
flanks at this time of the year but sunburnt grass.
|
||
The old pines had clung tenaciously to the inhospitable soil for
|
||
centuries, but some time during the night, still clutching a mass of
|
||
earth and rock in their great roots, they had gone down before the
|
||
storm.
|
||
Gregory felt a pang of distress; in his boyhood that grove of pines
|
||
had been his retreat; there he had dreamed his dreams, visualised the
|
||
ascending metals, forced upward from the earth’s magma by one of those
|
||
old titanic convulsions that make a joke of the modern earthquake, to
|
||
find a refuge in the long fissures of the cooler crust, or in the great
|
||
shattered zones. He knew something of geology and chemistry when he was
|
||
twelve, and he “saw” the great primary deposits change their character
|
||
as they were forced closer to the surface, acted upon by the acids of
|
||
air and water in the oxide zone.
|
||
There he had lived down his disappointments, taken his dumb trouble
|
||
when his mother died; and he had found his way blindly to the dark
|
||
little grove after his father’s funeral and he had learned the wrong
|
||
that had been done him.
|
||
He had not gone there since. He had been busy always, and lost the
|
||
habit. But now he remembered, and with some wonder, for it was the one
|
||
ugly spot on the ranch, save in its brief springtime, that once it had
|
||
drawn his feet like a magnet. Hardly conscious of the act, he rode to
|
||
the foot of the hill, dismounted and climbed towards the grove which
|
||
had stood about fifty feet from the crest.
|
||
The ruin was complete. The grove, which once may have witnessed ancient
|
||
rites, was lying with its points in the brown grass. Its gaunt roots,
|
||
packed close with red earth and pieces of rock, seemed to strain upward
|
||
in agonised protest. Men deserted on the battlefield at night look
|
||
hardly more stricken than a tree just fallen.
|
||
As Gregory approached his old friends his eyes grew narrower and
|
||
narrower; his mind concentrated to a point as sharp and penetrating
|
||
as a needle. If the storm, now fitful, had suddenly returned to its
|
||
highest velocity he would not have known it. He walked rapidly behind
|
||
the vanquished roots and picked out several bits of rock that were
|
||
embedded in the earth. Then he knelt down and examined other pieces
|
||
of rock in the excavation where the trees had stood. Some were of a
|
||
brownish-yellow colour, others a shaded green of rich and mellow tints.
|
||
There was no doubt whatever that they were float.
|
||
He sat down suddenly and leaned against the roots of the trees. Had
|
||
he found his “mine”? Float indicates an ore body somewhere, and as
|
||
these particles had been prevented from escaping by the roots of trees
|
||
incalculably old, it was reasonable to assume that the ores were
|
||
beneath his feet.
|
||
His brain resumed its normal processes, and he deliberately gave his
|
||
imagination the liberty of its youth. The copper did not interest him,
|
||
but he stared at the piece of quartz in his hand as if it had been
|
||
a seer’s crystal. He saw great chambers of quartz flecked with free
|
||
gold, connected by pipes or shoots equally rich. Once he frowned, the
|
||
ruthlessly practical side of his intelligence reminding him that his
|
||
labours and hopes might be rewarded by a shallow pocket. But he brushed
|
||
the wagging finger aside. He could have sworn that he felt the pull of
|
||
the metals within the hill.
|
||
He was tired and hungry, but his immediate impulse, as soon as he had
|
||
concluded that he had dreamed long enough, was to go for his tools and
|
||
run a cut. He sprang to his feet; but he had taken only a few steps
|
||
when he turned and stared at the gashed earth, his head a little on
|
||
one side in an attitude that always indicated he was thinking hard and
|
||
with intense concentration. Then he set his lips grimly, walked down
|
||
the steep hillside, mounted his horse, and rode home. In the course of
|
||
the afternoon he returned to the hill, picked all the pieces of float
|
||
from the soil between the tree-roots, and buried them, stamping down
|
||
the earth. A few days later there was a light fall of snow. He returned
|
||
once more to the hill, this time with two of his labourers, who cut up
|
||
the trees and hauled them away. For the present his possible treasure
|
||
vault was restored to the seclusion of its centuries.
|
||
He had made up his mind that the ores should stay where they were
|
||
until he had finished his education in the School of Mines. He had
|
||
planned to finish that course, and what he planned he was in the habit
|
||
of executing. This was not the time for dreams, nor for prospecting,
|
||
but to learn all that the School could teach him. Then, if there
|
||
were valuable ore bodies in his hill he could be his own manager and
|
||
engineer. He knew that he had something like genius for geology, also
|
||
that many veins were lost through an imperfect knowledge (or sense)
|
||
of that science in mining engineers; on the other hand, that the
|
||
prospector, in spite of his much vaunted sixth sense, often failed,
|
||
where the hidden ores were concerned, through lack of scientific
|
||
training. He determined to train his own faculties as far as possible
|
||
before beginning development work on his hill. Let the prospector’s
|
||
fever get possession of him now and that would be the end of study. The
|
||
hill would keep. It was his. The ranch was patented.
|
||
When he had finished the interment of the float he had taken a small
|
||
notebook from his pocket and inscribed a date: June the third, eighteen
|
||
months later. Not until that date would he even ride past his hill.
|
||
Born with a strong will and a character endowed with force,
|
||
determination and a grimly passive endurance, it was his pleasure to
|
||
test and develop both. The process was satisfactory to himself but
|
||
sometimes trying to his friends.
|
||
Until this morning he had not permitted his mind to revert to the
|
||
subject. But although the hill--Limestone Hill it was called in the
|
||
commonplace nomenclature of the country--was far away and out of the
|
||
range of his vision, he could conjure it up in its minutest external
|
||
detail, and he permitted himself this luxury for a few moments after
|
||
his wife had left him to a welcome solitude. On this hill were centred
|
||
all his silent hopes.
|
||
If he had been greedy for riches alone he would have promoted a company
|
||
at once, if a cut opened up a chamber that assayed well, and reaped the
|
||
harvest with little or no trouble to himself. But nothing was farther
|
||
from his mind. He wanted the supreme adventure. He wanted to find the
|
||
ores with his own pick. After the adventure, then the practical use of
|
||
wealth. There was much he could do for his state. He knew also that in
|
||
one group of brain-cells, as yet unexplored, was the ambition to enter
|
||
the lists of “doing” men, and pit his wits against the best of them.
|
||
But he was young, he would have his adventure, live his dream first.
|
||
Not yet, however.
|
||
The swift passing of his marital illusions had convinced him that the
|
||
real passion of his life was for Montana and the golden blood in her
|
||
veins. Placer mining never had interested him. He wanted to find his
|
||
treasure deep in the jealous earth. He assured himself as he stood
|
||
there in the blue dawn that it was well to be rid of love so early in
|
||
the game, free to devote himself, with no let from wandering mind and
|
||
mere human pulses, to preparation for the greatest of all romances,
|
||
the romance of mining. That he might ever crave the companionship of
|
||
one woman was as remote from his mind as the possibility of failure.
|
||
To learn all that man and experience could teach him of the science
|
||
that has been so great a factor in the world’s progress; to magnetise
|
||
a vast share of Earth’s riches, first for the hot work of the battle,
|
||
then for the power it would give him; to conquer life; these were a
|
||
few of the flitting dreams that possessed him as he watched the red
|
||
flame lick the white crests of the mountains, and the blue clouds turn
|
||
to crimson; his long sensitive lips folded closely, his narrow eyes
|
||
penetrating the mists of the future, neither seeing nor considering
|
||
its obstacles, its barriers, its disenchantments. Thrice happy are the
|
||
dreamers of the world, when their imaginations are creative, not a mere
|
||
maggot wandering through the brain hatching formless eggs of desire
|
||
and discontent. They are the true inheritors of the centuries, whether
|
||
they succeed or fail in the eyes of men; for they live in vivid silent
|
||
intense drama as even they have no power to live and enjoy in mortal
|
||
conditions.
|
||
IV
|
||
The Comptons were quickly settled in the little cottage in East Granite
|
||
Street, for as Mrs. Hook’s furniture was solid Ida had not sold it.
|
||
There was little to do, therefore, but repaper the walls, build a
|
||
bathroom, furnish a dining-room, send the parlour furniture to the
|
||
upholsterers--Ida had had enough of horsehair--and chattel the kitchen.
|
||
Ida had several virtues in which she took a vocal pride, and not the
|
||
least of these was housekeeping in all its variety. The luxurious
|
||
side of her nature might revel in front parlours, trashy magazines,
|
||
rocking-chairs and chewing-gum, but she never indulged in these orgies
|
||
unless her house were in order. After her arrival in Butte it was quite
|
||
a month before she gave a thought to leisure. They spent most of this
|
||
time at a hotel, but Ida was out before the stores opened, and divided
|
||
her day between the workmen at the cottage, the upholsterer, and the
|
||
bargain counter. She was “on the job” every minute until the cottage
|
||
was “on wheels.” Her taste was neither original nor artistic, but she
|
||
had a rude sense of effect, and a passion for what she called colour
|
||
schemes. She boasted to Gregory at night, when she had him at her mercy
|
||
at the hotel dinner-table, that although everything had to be cheap
|
||
except the kitchen furnishings, colours did not cost any more than
|
||
black or drab. When the cottage was in order, and they moved in, he saw
|
||
its transfigured interior for the first time. The bedroom was done in
|
||
a pink that set his teeth on edge, and the little parlour was papered,
|
||
upholstered, carpeted, cushioned in every known shade of red.
|
||
“All you want is a chromo or two of Indian battlegrounds--just after,”
|
||
he remarked.
|
||
Ida interrupted tartly:
|
||
“Well, I should think you’d be grateful for the contrast to them
|
||
everlasting white or brown mountains. We don’t get away from them even
|
||
in town, now the smoke’s gone.”
|
||
“One would think Montana had no springtime.”
|
||
“Precious little. That’s the reason I’ve got a green dining-room.”
|
||
Gregory, who had suffered himself to be pushed into an arm-chair,
|
||
looked at his wife speculatively, as she rocked herself luxuriously,
|
||
her eyes dwelling fondly on the magenta paper, the crimson curtains,
|
||
the turkey red and crushed strawberry cushions of the divan, the
|
||
blood-red carpet with its still more sanguinary pattern. What
|
||
blind struggle was going on in that uninstructed brain against the
|
||
commonplace, what seed of originality, perhaps, striving to shoot forth
|
||
a green tip from the hard crust of ignorance and conceit?
|
||
He had made up his mind to suggest the tillage of that brain without
|
||
delay, but, knowing her sensitive vanity, cast about for a tactful
|
||
opening.
|
||
“Do you really intend to do your own work?” he asked. “I am more than
|
||
willing to pay for a servant.”
|
||
“Not much. I’m goin’ to begin to save up for the future right now. I’ll
|
||
put out the wash, but it’s a pity if a great husky girl like me can’t
|
||
cook for two and keep this little shack clean. You ain’t never goin’ to
|
||
be able to say I didn’t help you all I could.”
|
||
Gregory glowed with gratitude as he looked at the beautiful face of has
|
||
wife, flushed with the ardour of the true mate.
|
||
“You are all right,” he murmured.
|
||
“The less we spend the quicker we’ll get rich,” pursued Mrs. Compton.
|
||
“I don’t mind this triflin’ work, but it would have made me sick to
|
||
stay much longer on that ranch workin’ away my youth and looks and
|
||
nothin’ to show for it. Now that you’ve really begun on somethin’
|
||
high-toned and that’s bound to be a go, I just like the idea of havin’
|
||
a hand in the job.”
|
||
“Ah!-- Well-- If you have this faith in my power to make a fortune--if
|
||
you are looking forward to being a rich man’s wife, to put it
|
||
crudely--don’t you think you should begin to prepare yourself for the
|
||
position----”
|
||
“Now what are you drivin’ at?” She sprang to her feet. Her eyes blazed.
|
||
Her hands went to her hips. “D’you mean to say I ain’t good enough?
|
||
I suppose you’d be throwin’ me over for a grand dame when you get
|
||
up in the world like some other millionaires we know of, let alone
|
||
politicians what get to thinkin’ themselves statesmen, and whose
|
||
worn-out old wives ain’t good enough for ’em. Well, take this from
|
||
me and take it straight--I don’t propose to wear out, and I don’t
|
||
propose----”
|
||
“Sit down. I shall be a rich man long before you lose your beauty. Nor
|
||
have I any social ambitions. The world of men is all that interests me.
|
||
But with you it will be different----”
|
||
“You may betcherlife it’ll be different--some! When I have a
|
||
cream-coloured pressed brick house with white trimmings over there in
|
||
Millionaire Gulch nobody’ll be too good for me.”
|
||
“You shall live your life to suit yourself, in the biggest house in
|
||
Butte, if that is what you want. But there is more in it than that.”
|
||
“Clothes, of course. _Gowns!_ And jewels, and New York--Lord! wouldn’t
|
||
I like to swell up and down Peacock Ally! And Southern California, and
|
||
Europe, and givin’ balls, and bein’ a member of the Country Club.”
|
||
“All that, as a matter of course! But you would not be content with the
|
||
mere externals. Whether you know it or not, Ida, you are an ambitious
|
||
woman.” This was a mere gambler’s throw on Gregory’s part. He knew
|
||
nothing of her ambitions, and would have called them by another name if
|
||
he had.
|
||
“Not know it? Well, you may just betcherlife I know it!”
|
||
“But hardly where ambition leads. No sooner would you be settled in a
|
||
fine house, accustomed to your new toys, than you would want society.
|
||
I don’t mean that you would have any difficulty gaining admittance to
|
||
Butte society, for it is said that none in the world is more hospitable
|
||
and less particular. But whether you make _friends_ of the best people
|
||
here, much less become a leader, depends--well, upon several things----”
|
||
“Fire away,” said Ida sulkily. “You must be considerable in earnest to
|
||
talk a blue streak!”
|
||
“Business may take me to New York from time to time, but my home shall
|
||
remain here. I never intend to abandon my state and make a fool of
|
||
myself on New York’s doorstep as so many Montanans have done. Nail
|
||
up that fact and never forget it. Now, you would like to win an
|
||
unassailable position in your community, would you not?”
|
||
“Yep.”
|
||
Gregory abandoned tact. “Then begin at once to prepare yourself. You
|
||
must have a teacher and study--English, above all things.”
|
||
“My Goo-r-rd!” She flushed almost purple. For the moment she hated him.
|
||
“I’ve always suspicioned you thought I wasn’t good enough for you, with
|
||
your graduatin’ from the High School almost while you was in short
|
||
pants, and them two years and over at that high-brow School of Mines;
|
||
and now you’re tellin’ me you’ll be ashamed of me the minute you’re on
|
||
top!”
|
||
Gregory made another attempt at diplomacy. What his wife achieved
|
||
socially was a matter of profound indifference to him, but she must
|
||
reform her speech if his home life was to be endurable.
|
||
“I am forcing my imagination to keep pace with your future triumphs,”
|
||
he said with the charming smile that disarmed even Ida when irate. “If
|
||
you are going to be a prominent figure in society----”
|
||
“My land, you oughter heard the grammar and slang of some of the newest
|
||
West Siders when they were makin’ up their minds at Madame O’Reilley’s,
|
||
or havin’ their measures took. They don’t frighten me one little bit.”
|
||
“There is a point. To lead them you must be their superior--and the
|
||
equal of those that have made the most of their advantages.”
|
||
“That’s not such a bad idea.”
|
||
“Think it over.” He rose, for he was tired of the conversation. “These
|
||
western civilisations are said to be crude, but I fancy they are the
|
||
world in little. Subtlety, a brain developed beyond the common, should
|
||
go far----”
|
||
“Greg, you are dead right!” She had suddenly remembered that she must
|
||
play up to this man who held her ambitions in his hand, and she had the
|
||
wit to acknowledge his prospicience, little as were the higher walks of
|
||
learning to her taste. She sprang to her feet with a supple undulating
|
||
movement and flung herself into his arms.
|
||
“I’ll begin the minute you find me a teacher,” she exclaimed. Then she
|
||
kissed him. “I’m goin’ to keep right along with you and make you proud
|
||
of me,” she murmured. “I’m crazy about you and always will be. Swear
|
||
right here you’ll never throw me over, or run round with a P’rox.”
|
||
Gregory laughed, but held her off for a moment and stared into her
|
||
eyes. After all, might not study and travel and experience give depth
|
||
to those classic eyes which now seemed a mere joke of Nature? Was she
|
||
merely the natural victim of her humble conditions? Her father had
|
||
been a miner of a very superior sort, conservative and contemptuous of
|
||
agitators, but a powerful voice in his union and respected alike by men
|
||
and managers. Mrs. Hook had been a shrewd, hard-working, tight-fisted
|
||
little woman from Concord, who had never owed a penny, nor turned out
|
||
a careless piece of work. Both parents with education or better luck
|
||
might have taken a high position in any western community. He knew also
|
||
the preternatural quickness and adaptability of the American woman. But
|
||
could a common mind achieve distinction?
|
||
Ida, wondering “what the devil he was thinking about,” nestled closer
|
||
and gave him a long kiss, her woman’s wisdom, properly attributed to
|
||
the serpent, keeping her otherwise mute. Gregory snatched her suddenly
|
||
to him and returned her kiss. The new hope revived a passion by no
|
||
means dead for this beautiful young creature, and for the hour he was
|
||
as happy as during his rosy honeymoon.
|
||
V
|
||
When the cottage was quite in order Mrs. Compton invited two of her old
|
||
friends to lunch. As the School of Mines was at the opposite end of the
|
||
city, Gregory took his midday meal with him.
|
||
Miss Ruby Miller and her twin-sister Pearl were fine examples of the
|
||
self-supporting young womanhood of the West. Neither had struggled
|
||
in the extreme economic sense, although when launched they had
|
||
taken a man’s chances and asked no quarter. Born in a small town in
|
||
Illinois, their father, a provident grocer, had permitted each of his
|
||
daughters to attend school until her fifteenth year, then sent her
|
||
to Chicago to learn a trade. Ruby had studied the mysteries of the
|
||
hair, complexion, and hands; Pearl the science that must supplement
|
||
the knack for trimming hats. Both worked faithfully as apprentice and
|
||
clerk, saving the greater part of their earnings: they purposed to
|
||
set up for themselves in some town of the Northwest where money was
|
||
easier, opportunities abundant and expertness rare. What they heard
|
||
of Montana appealed to their enterprising minds, and, beginning with
|
||
cautious modesty, some four years before Ida’s marriage, Ruby was now
|
||
the leading hair-dresser and manicure of Butte, her pleasant address
|
||
and natural diplomacy assisting her competent hands to monopolise the
|
||
West Side custom; Pearl, although less candid and engaging, more frank
|
||
in reminding her customers of their natural deficiencies, was equally
|
||
capable; if not the leading milliner in that town of many milliners,
|
||
where even the miners’ wives bought three hats a season, she was
|
||
rapidly making a reputation among the feathered tribe. She now ranked
|
||
as one of the most successful of the young business women in a region
|
||
where success is ever the prize of the efficient. Both she and her
|
||
sister were as little concerned for their future as the metal hill of
|
||
Butte itself.
|
||
“Well, what do you know about that?” they cried simultaneously, as Ida
|
||
ushered them into the parlour. “Say, it’s grand!” continued Miss Ruby
|
||
with fervour. “Downright artistic. Ide, you’re a wonder!”
|
||
Miss Pearl, attuned to a subtler manipulation of colour, felt too happy
|
||
in this intimate reunion and the prospect of “home-cooking,” to permit
|
||
even her spirit to grin. “Me for red, kiddo,” she said. “It’s the
|
||
colour a hard workin’ man or woman wants at the end of the day--warm,
|
||
and comfortin’, and sensuous-like, and contrastin’ fine with dirty
|
||
streets and them hills. Glory be, but this chair’s comfortable! I
|
||
suppose it’s Greg’s.”
|
||
“Of course. Luckily a woman don’t have the least trouble findin’ out a
|
||
man’s weak points, and Greg has a few, thank the goodness godness. But
|
||
come on to the dining-room. I’ve got fried chicken and creamed potatoes
|
||
and raised biscuit.”
|
||
The guests shrieked with an abandon that proclaimed them the helpless
|
||
victims of the Butte restaurant or the kitchenette. The fried chicken
|
||
in its rich gravy, and the other delicacies, including fruit salad,
|
||
disappeared so rapidly that there was little chance for the play of
|
||
intellect until the two girls fled laughing to the parlour.
|
||
“It’s all very well for Pearl,” cried Miss Ruby, disposing her plump
|
||
figure in Gregory’s arm-chair, and taking the pins from a mass of red
|
||
hair that had brought her many a customer; “for she’s the kind that’ll
|
||
never have to diet if she gets rich quick. I ought to be shassaying
|
||
round with my hands on my hips right now, but I won’t.”
|
||
Miss Pearl extended herself on the divan, and Ida rocked herself with a
|
||
complacent smile. One of her vanities was slaked, and she experienced a
|
||
sense of immense relief in the society of these two old friends of her
|
||
own sort.
|
||
“Say!” exclaimed Miss Miller, “if we was real swell, now, we’d be
|
||
smokin’ cigarettes.”
|
||
“What!” cried Ida, scandalised. “No lady’d do such a thing. Say, I
|
||
forgot the gum.”
|
||
She opened a drawer and flirted an oblong section of chewing-gum at
|
||
each of her guests, voluptuously inserting a morsel in the back of her
|
||
own mouth. “Where on earth have you seen ladies smokin’ cigarettes?”
|
||
“You forget I’m in and out of some of our best families. In other words
|
||
them that’s too swell--or too lazy--to come to me, has me up to them.
|
||
And they’re just as nice--most of ’em--as they can be; no more airs
|
||
than their men, and often ask me to stay to lunch. I ain’t mentionin’
|
||
no names, as I was asked not to, for you know what an old-fashioned
|
||
bunch there is in every Western town--well, they out with their gold
|
||
tips after lunch, and maybe you think they don’t know how. I have my
|
||
doubts as to their enjoyin’ it, for tobacco is nasty tastin’ stuff, and
|
||
I notice they blow the smoke out quicker’n they take it in. No inhalin’
|
||
for them. But they like _doin’_ it; that’s the point. And I guess they
|
||
do it a lot at the Country Club and at some of the dinners where the
|
||
Old Guard ain’t asked. They smoke, and think it’s vulgar to chew gum!
|
||
We know it’s the other way round.”
|
||
“Well, I guess!” exclaimed the young matron, who had listened to this
|
||
chronicle of high life with her mouth open. “What their husbands
|
||
thinkin’ about to permit such a thing! I can see Greg’s face if I lit
|
||
up.”
|
||
“Oh, their husbands don’t care,” said Pearl, the cynic. “Not in that
|
||
bunch. They’re trained, and they don’t care, anyhow. Make the most of
|
||
Greg now, kiddo. When he strikes it rich, he’ll be just like the rest
|
||
of ’em, annexin’ right and left. Matter of principle.”
|
||
“Principle nothing!” exclaimed Ruby, who, highly sophisticated as any
|
||
young woman earning her living in a mining town must be, was always
|
||
amiable in her cynicism. “It’s too much good food and champagne, to say
|
||
nothin’ of cocktails and highballs and swell club life after the lean
|
||
and hungry years. They’re just like kids turned loose in a candy store,
|
||
helpin’ themselves right and left with both hands. Dear old boys,
|
||
they’re so happy and so jolly you can’t help feelin’ real maternal over
|
||
’em, and spoilin’ ’em some more. I often feel like it, even when they
|
||
lay for me--they look so innocent and hungry-like; but others I could
|
||
crack over the ear, and I don’t say I haven’t. Lord, how a girl alone
|
||
does get to know men! I wouldn’t marry one of them if he’d give me the
|
||
next level of the Anaconda mine. Me for the lonesome!”
|
||
“Well, I’m glad I’m married,” said Ida complacently. “The kind of life
|
||
I want you can only get through a husband. Greg’s goin’ to make money,
|
||
all right.”
|
||
“Greg won’t be as bad as some,” said the wise Miss Ruby. “He’s got big
|
||
ideas, and as he don’t say much about ’em, he’s likely thinkin’ about
|
||
nothin’ else. At least that’s the way I figure him out. The Lord knows
|
||
I’ve seen enough of men. But you watch out just the same. Them long
|
||
thin ones that looks like they was all brains and jaw is often the
|
||
worst. They’ve got more nerves. The minute the grind lets up they begin
|
||
to look out for an adventure, wonderin’ what’s round the next corner.
|
||
Wives ain’t much at supplyin’ adventure----”
|
||
“Well, let’s quit worryin’ about what ain’t happened,” said Miss Pearl
|
||
abruptly. Men did not interest her. “Will he take you to any of the
|
||
dances? That’s what I want to know. You’ve been put up and elected
|
||
to our new and exclusive Club. No more Coliseum Saturday Nights for
|
||
us--Race Track is a good name for it. We’ve taken a new little hall
|
||
over Murphy’s store for Saturday nights till the Gardens open up, and
|
||
we have real fun. No rowdyism. We leave that to the cut below. This
|
||
Club is composed of real nice girls and young men of Butte who are
|
||
workin’ hard at something high-toned and respectable, and frown hard on
|
||
the fast lot.”
|
||
“Sounds fine. Perhaps Greg’ll go, though he studies half the night. Do
|
||
you meet at any other time? Is it one of them mind improvers, too?”
|
||
“Nixie. We work all week and want fun when we get a few hours off. I
|
||
improve my mind readin’ myself to sleep every night----”
|
||
“What do you read?” interrupted Ida, eagerly.
|
||
“Oh, the mags, of course, and a novel now and then. But you don’t need
|
||
novels any more. The mags are wonders! They teach you all the life you
|
||
don’t know--all the way from lords to burglars. Then there’s the movin’
|
||
pictures. Lord, but we have advantages our poor mothers never dreamed
|
||
of!”
|
||
“Greg wants me to study with a teacher.” Ida frowned reminiscently and
|
||
fatidically. “He seems to think I didn’t get nothin’ at school.”
|
||
“Well, what do you know about that?” gasped Miss Miller. Pearl removed
|
||
her gum with a dry laugh.
|
||
“If a man insinuated I wasn’t good enough for him--” she began; Ruby,
|
||
whose quick mind was weather-wise, interrupted her.
|
||
“Greg’s right. He’s got education himself and’s proved he don’t mean
|
||
to be a rancher all his life. What’s more, I’ve heard men say that
|
||
Gregory Compton is bound one way or another to be one of the big men of
|
||
Montana. He’s got the brains, he’s got the jaw, and he can outwork any
|
||
miner that ever struck, and no bad habits. Ide, you go ahead and polish
|
||
up.”
|
||
“Why should I? I never could see that those bonanzerines were so much
|
||
better’n us, barring clothes.”
|
||
“You don’t know the best of ’em, Ide. Madame O’Reilley was too gaudy
|
||
to catch any but the newest bunch. The old pioneer guard is fine,
|
||
and their girls have been educated all over this country and the
|
||
next. Lord! Look at Ora Blake! Where’d you beat her? In these new
|
||
Western towns it’s generally the sudden rich that move to New York to
|
||
die of lonesomeness, and nowhere to show their clothes but Peacock
|
||
Alley in the Waldorf-Astoria. The _real_ people keep their homes
|
||
here, if they are awful restless; and I guess the Society they make,
|
||
with their imported gowns and all, ain’t so very different from top
|
||
Society anywheres. Of course, human nature is human nature, and some
|
||
of the younger married women are sporty and take too much when a
|
||
bunch goes over to Boulder Springs for a lark, or get a crush on some
|
||
other woman’s husband--for want mostly of something to do; but their
|
||
grammar’s all right. I hope you’ll teach them a lesson when you’re on
|
||
top, Ide. Good American morals for me, like good American stories.
|
||
I always skip the Europe stories in the mags. Don’t seem modern and
|
||
human, somehow, after Butte.”
|
||
“Now I like Europe stories,” said Ida, “just because they are so
|
||
different. The people in ’em ain’t walkin’ round over gold and copper
|
||
when they’re dishwashin’ or makin’ love, but their mines have been
|
||
turned centuries ago into castles and pictures and grand old parks.
|
||
There’s a kind of halo----”
|
||
“Halo nothin’!” exclaimed Miss Pearl, who was even more aggressively
|
||
American than her sister. “It’s them ridiculous titles. And kings
|
||
and queens and all that antique lot. I despise ’em, and I’m dead
|
||
set against importin’ foreign notions into God’s own country. We’re
|
||
dyed-in-the-wool Americans--out West here, anyhow--including every last
|
||
one of them fools that’s buyin’ new notions with their new money. All
|
||
their Paris clothes _and_ hats, _and_ smokin’ cigarettes, _and_ loose
|
||
talk can’t make ’em anything else. Apin’ Europe and its antiquated
|
||
morals makes me sick to my stomach. Cut it out, kid, before you go any
|
||
further. Stand by your own country and it’ll stand by you.”
|
||
“Well, I’ve got an answer to that. In the first place I’d like to
|
||
know where you’ll find more girls on the loose than right here in
|
||
Butte--and I don’t mean the sporting women, either. Why, I meet bunches
|
||
of schoolgirls every day so painted up they look as if they was fixin’
|
||
right now to be bad; and as for these Eastern workin’ girls who come
|
||
out here after jobs, pretendin’ it’s less pressure and bigger pay
|
||
they’re after, when it’s really to turn loose and give human nature
|
||
a chance with free spenders--well, the way they hold down their jobs
|
||
and racket about all night beats me. None of _them’s_ been to Europe,
|
||
I notice, and I’d like to bet that the schoolgirls that don’t make
|
||
monkeys of themselves is the daughters of them that has.”
|
||
“Oh, the schoolgirls is just plain little fools and no doubt has their
|
||
faces held under the spout for ’em when they get home. But as for the
|
||
Eastern girls, you hit it when you said they come out here to give
|
||
human nature a chance. Some girls is born bad, thousands and thousands
|
||
of them; and reformers might just as well try to grow strawberries in a
|
||
copper smelter as to make a girl run straight when she is lyin’ awake
|
||
nights thinkin’ up new ways of bein’ crooked. But the rotten girls in
|
||
this town are not the whole show. And lots of women that would never
|
||
think of goin’ wrong--don’t naturally care for that sort of thing a
|
||
bit--just get their minds so mixed up by too much sudden money, and
|
||
liberty, and too much high livin’ and too much Europe and too much
|
||
nothin’ to do, that they just don’t know where they’re at; and it isn’t
|
||
long either before they get to thinkin’ they’re not the dead swell
|
||
thing unless they do what the nobility of Europe seems to be doin’ all
|
||
the time----”
|
||
“Shucks!” interrupted Ruby, indignantly. “It’s just them stories in the
|
||
shady mags, and the way our women talk for the sake of effect. There’s
|
||
bad in America and good in poor old Europe. I’ll bet my new hat on
|
||
it. Only, over there the good is out of sight under all that sportin’
|
||
high life everybody seems to write about. Over here we’ve got a layer
|
||
of good on top as thick as cream, and every kind of germ swimmin’
|
||
round underneath. Lord knows there are plenty of just females in this
|
||
town, of all towns, but the U. S. is all right because it has such
|
||
high standards. All sorts of new-fangled notions come and go but them
|
||
standards never budge. No other country has anything like ’em. Sooner
|
||
or later we’ll catch up. I’m great on settin’ the right example and I’m
|
||
dead set on uplift. That’s one reason we’re so strict about our Club
|
||
membership. Not one of them girls can get in, no matter how good her
|
||
job or how swell a dresser she is. And they feel it, too, you bet. The
|
||
line’s drawn like a barbed-wire fence.”
|
||
“I guess you’re dead right,” admitted Ida. “And my morals ain’t in any
|
||
danger, believe me. I’ve got other fish to fry. I’ve had love’s young
|
||
dream and got over it. I’m just about dead sick of that side of life.
|
||
I’d cut it out and put it down to profit and loss, but you’ve got to
|
||
manage men every way nature’s kindly provided, and that’s all there is
|
||
to it.”
|
||
“My land!” exclaimed Ruby. “If I felt that way about my husband I’d
|
||
leave him too quick.”
|
||
“Oh, no, you wouldn’t. You can make up your mind to any old thing.
|
||
That’s life. And I guess life never holds out both hands full at once.
|
||
Either, one’s got a knife in it or it’s out of sight altogether.”
|
||
Ruby snorted with disgust. “Once more I vow I’ll marry none of them. Me
|
||
for self-respect.”
|
||
“Now as to Europe,” pursued Ida. “You’re just nothin’ till you’ve been,
|
||
both as to what you get, and sayin’ you’ve been there----”
|
||
“Ida,” said Ruby, shaking her wise red head, “don’t you go leaving your
|
||
husband summers, like the rest. Men don’t get much chance to go to
|
||
Europe. They prefer little old New York, anyhow--when they get on there
|
||
alone. I wonder what ten thousand wives that go to Europe every summer
|
||
think their husbands are doin’? I haven’t manicured men for nine years
|
||
without knowin’ they need watchin’ every minute. Why, my lord! they’re
|
||
so tickled to death when summer comes round they can hardly wait to
|
||
kiss their wives good-bye and try to look lonesome on the platform.
|
||
They’d like to be down and kick up their heels right there at the
|
||
station. And I didn’t have to come to Butte to find that out.”
|
||
“Greg’ll never run with that fast lot.”
|
||
“No, but he might meet an affinity; and there’s one of _them_ lyin’ in
|
||
wait for every man.”
|
||
Ida’s brow darkened. “Well, just let her look out for herself, that’s
|
||
all. I’ll hang on to Greg. But it ain’t time to worry yet. Let’s have a
|
||
game of poker.”
|
||
VI
|
||
Gregory, through the offices of his friend, Mark Blake, found a
|
||
teacher for Ida before the end of the week, Mr. William Cullen Whalen,
|
||
Professor of English in the Butte High School.
|
||
Mr. Whalen’s present status was what he was in the habit of designating
|
||
as an ignominious anti-climax, considering his antecedents and
|
||
attainments; but he always dismissed the subject with a vague,
|
||
“Health--health--this altitude--this wonderful air--climate--not for me
|
||
are the terrible extremes of our Atlantic seaboard. Here a man may be
|
||
permitted to live, if not in the deeper sense--well, at least, there
|
||
are always one’s thoughts--and books.”
|
||
He was a delicate little man as a matter of fact, but had East winds
|
||
and summer humidities been negligible he would have jumped at the
|
||
position found for him by a college friend who had gone West and
|
||
prospered in Montana. This friend’s letter had much to say about the
|
||
dry tonic air of winter, the cool light air of summer, the many hours
|
||
he would be able to pass in the open, thus deepening the colour of his
|
||
corpuscles, at present a depressing shade of pink; but even more about
|
||
a salary far in excess of anything lying round loose in the East. Mr.
|
||
Whalen, who, since his graduation from the college in his native town,
|
||
had knocked upon several historic portals of learning in vain, finding
|
||
himself invariably outclassed, had shuddered, but accepted his fate by
|
||
the outgoing mail. Of course he despised the West; and the mere thought
|
||
of a mining camp like Butte, which was probably in a drunken uproar
|
||
all the time, almost nauseated him. However, in such an outpost the
|
||
graduate of an Eastern college who knew how to wear his clothes must
|
||
rank high above his colleagues. It might be years before he could play
|
||
a similar rôle at home. So he packed his wardrobe, which included spats
|
||
and a silk hat, and went.
|
||
Nature compensates even her comparative failures by endowing them with
|
||
a deathless self-conceit. Whalen was a man of small abilities, itching
|
||
ambition, all the education his brains could stand, and almost happy
|
||
in being himself and a Whalen. It was true that Fortune had grafted
|
||
him on a well-nigh sapless branch in a small provincial town, while
|
||
the family trunk flourished, green, pruned, and portly, in Boston, but
|
||
no such trifle could alter the fact that he was a Whalen, and destined
|
||
by a discriminating heredity to add to the small but precious bulk of
|
||
America’s literature. Although he found Butte a city of some sixty
|
||
thousand inhabitants, and far better behaved than he had believed could
|
||
be possible in a community employing some fifteen thousand miners, he
|
||
was still able to reassure himself that she outraged every sensibility.
|
||
He assured himself further that its lurid contrasts to the higher
|
||
civilisation would play like a search-light upon the theme for a novel
|
||
he long had had in mind: the subtle actions and reactions of the Boston
|
||
temperament.
|
||
But that was three years ago, and meanwhile several things had happened
|
||
to him. He had ceased to wear his spats and silk hat in public after
|
||
their first appearance on Broadway; the newsboys, who were on strike,
|
||
had seen to that. He wrote his novel, and the _Atlantic Monthly_,
|
||
honored by the first place on his list, declined to give space to his
|
||
innocent plagiarisms of certain anæmic if literary authors now passing
|
||
into history. An agent sent the manuscript the rounds without avail,
|
||
but one of the younger editors had suggested that he try his hand at
|
||
Montana. He was more shocked and mortified at this proposition than
|
||
at the failure of his novel. Time, however, as well as the high cost
|
||
of living in Butte, lent him a grudging philosophy, and he digested
|
||
the advice. But his were not the eyes that see. The printed page was
|
||
his world, his immediate environment but a caricature of the subtle
|
||
realities. Nevertheless, he had what so often appears in the most
|
||
unlikely brains, the story-telling kink. Given an incident he could
|
||
work it up with an abundance of detail and “psychology,” easily
|
||
blue-pencilled, and a certain illusion. Condescend to translate his
|
||
present surroundings into the sacred realm of American fiction he would
|
||
not, but he picked the brains of old-timers for thrilling incidents of
|
||
the days when gold was found at the roots of grass, and the pioneers
|
||
either were terrorized by the lawless element or executed upon it a
|
||
summary and awful justice. Some of his tales were so blood-curdling,
|
||
so steeped in gore and horror, that he felt almost alive when writing
|
||
them. It was true that their market was the Sunday Supplement and the
|
||
more sensational magazines, whose paper and type made his soul turn
|
||
green; but the pay was excellent, and they had begun to attract some
|
||
attention, owing to the contrast between the fierceness of theme and
|
||
the neat precise English in which it was served. Butte valued him as a
|
||
counter-irritant to Mary McLane, and he became a professional diner-out.
|
||
“Do you think he’ll condescend to tutor?” Gregory had asked of Blake.
|
||
Whalen was by no means unknown to him, but heretofore had been regarded
|
||
as a mere worm.
|
||
“Sure thing. Nobody keener on the dollar than Whalen. He’ll stick you,
|
||
but he knows his business. He’s got all the words there are, puts ’em
|
||
in the right place, and tones ’em up so you’d hardly know them.”
|
||
VII
|
||
Ida was out when her prospective tutor called, and she was deeply
|
||
impressed by the card she found under the door: “Mr. William Cullen
|
||
Whalen,” it was inscribed.
|
||
It was the custom of the gentlemen of her acquaintance to express
|
||
their sense of good fellowship even upon the formal pasteboard. “Mr.
|
||
Matt Dance,” “Mr. Phil Mott,” “Mr. Bill Jarvis,” the legends read. Ida
|
||
felt as if she were reciting a line from the Eastern creed as her lips
|
||
formed again and again the suave and labial syllables on her visitor’s
|
||
card. She promptly determined to order cards for her husband on the
|
||
morrow--he was so remiss as to have none--and they should be engraved,
|
||
in small Roman letters: “Mr. Gregory Verrooy Compton.”
|
||
“And believe me,” she announced to her green dining-room, as she sat
|
||
down before her husband’s desk, “that is some name.”
|
||
Her note to Professor Whalen, asking him to call on the following
|
||
afternoon at two o’clock, was commendably brief, so impatient was she
|
||
to arrive at the signature, “Mrs. Gregory Verrooy Compton;” little
|
||
conceiving the effect it would have upon Mr. Whalen’s fastidious spine.
|
||
He called at the hour named, and Ida invited him into the dining-room.
|
||
It was here that Gregory read far into the night, and she vaguely
|
||
associated a large table with much erudition. Moreover, she prided
|
||
herself upon her economy in fuel.
|
||
Mr. Whalen sat in one of the hard, upright chairs, his stick across
|
||
his knee, his gloves laid smartly in the rolling brim of his hat,
|
||
studying this new specimen and wondering if she could be made to do him
|
||
credit. He was surprised to find her so beautiful, and not unrefined in
|
||
style--if only she possessed the acumen to keep her ripe mouth shut.
|
||
In fact he found her quite the prettiest woman he had seen in Butte,
|
||
famous for pretty women; and--and--he searched conscientiously for the
|
||
right word, and blushed as he found it--the most seductive. Ida was
|
||
vain of the fact that she wore no corset, and that not the least of her
|
||
attractions was a waist as flexible as an acrobat’s. What flesh she had
|
||
was very firm, her carriage was easy and graceful, the muscles of her
|
||
back were strong, her lines long and flowing; she walked and moved at
|
||
all times with an undulating movement usually associated with a warmer
|
||
temperament. But nature often amuses herself bestowing the semblance
|
||
and withholding the essence; Ida, calculating and contemptuous of the
|
||
facile passions of men, amused herself with them, confident of her own
|
||
immunity.
|
||
It was now some time since she had enjoyed the admiration of any man
|
||
but her husband, and his grew more and more sporadic, was long since
|
||
dry of novelty. Like most Western husbands, he would not have permitted
|
||
her to make a friend of any other man, nor even to receive the casual
|
||
admirer when he was not at home. Ida was full of vanity, although she
|
||
would have expressed her sudden determination to captivate “little
|
||
Whalen” merely as a desire to keep her hand in. He was the only man
|
||
upon whom she was likely to practise at present (for Gregory would have
|
||
none of the Club dances), and vanity can thirst like a galled palate.
|
||
She had “sized him up” as a “squirt” (poor Ida! little she recked how
|
||
soon she was to be stripped of her picturesque vocabulary), but he was
|
||
“a long sight better than nothing.”
|
||
After they had exhausted the nipping weather, and the possibility of a
|
||
Chinook arriving before night--there was a humming roar high overheard
|
||
at the moment--she lowered her black eyelashes, lifted herself against
|
||
the stiff back of her chair with the motion of a snake uncoiling,
|
||
raised her thick white lids suddenly, and murmured:
|
||
“Well, so you’re goin’ to polish me off? Tell me all my faults! Fire
|
||
away. I know you’ll make a grand success of it. Lord knows (her voice
|
||
became as sweet as honey), you’re different enough from the other men
|
||
in this jay town.”
|
||
Mr. Whalen felt as if he were being drenched with honey dew, for he
|
||
was the type of man whom women take no trouble to educate. But as that
|
||
sweet unmodulated voice stole about his ear porches he drew himself up
|
||
stiffly, conscious of a thrill of fear. To become enamoured of the
|
||
wife of one of these forthright Westerners, who took the law into
|
||
their own hands, was no part of his gentle programme; but he stared
|
||
at her fascinated, never having felt anything resembling a thrill
|
||
before. Moreover, like all people of weak passions, more particularly
|
||
that type of American that hasn’t any, he took pride in his powers
|
||
of self-control. In a moment he threw off the baleful influence and
|
||
replied drily.
|
||
“I think the lessons would better be oral for a time. Do--do I
|
||
understand that I am to correct your individual method of expression?”
|
||
“That’s it, I guess.”
|
||
“And you won’t be offended?” Mr. Whalen’s upper teeth were hemispheric,
|
||
but he had cultivated a paternal and not unpleasing smile. Even the
|
||
pale blue orbs, fixed defiantly upon the siren, warmed a trifle.
|
||
“Well. I don’t s’pose I’ll like bein’ corrected better’n the next,
|
||
but that’s what I’m payin’ for. Now that my husband’s studyin’ for a
|
||
profession, I guess I’ll be in the top set before so very long. There’s
|
||
Mrs. Blake, for instance--her husband told Mr. Compton she’d call this
|
||
week. Is she all that she’s cracked up to be?”
|
||
“Mrs. Blake has had great advantages. She might almost be one of
|
||
our own products, were it not for the fact that she--well--seems
|
||
deliberately to wish to be Western.” He found himself growing more and
|
||
more confused under the steady regard of those limpid shadowy eyes--set
|
||
like the eyes of a goddess in marble, and so disconcertingly shallow.
|
||
He pulled himself up sharply. “Now, if I may begin--you must not sign
|
||
your notes, ‘Mrs. Gregory Verrooy Compton’----”
|
||
Ida’s eyes flashed wide open. “Why not, I’d like to know? Isn’t it as
|
||
good a name as yours?”
|
||
“What has that to do with it? Ah--yes--you don’t quite understand. It
|
||
is not the custom--in what we call society--to sign in that manner--it
|
||
is a regrettable American provincialism. If you really wish to
|
||
learn----”
|
||
“Fire away,” said Ida sullenly.
|
||
“Sign your own name--may I ask what it is?”
|
||
“My name was Ida Maria Hook before I married.”
|
||
“Ida is a beautiful and classic name. We will eliminate the rest. Sign
|
||
yourself Ida Compton--or if you wish to be more swagger, Ida Verrooy
|
||
Compton----”
|
||
“Land’s sake! We’d be laughed clean out of Montana.”
|
||
“Yes, there is a fine primitive simplicity about many things in this
|
||
region,” replied Mr. Whalen, thinking of his spats and silk hat. “But
|
||
you get my point?”
|
||
“I get you.”
|
||
“Oh!--We’ll have a little talk later about slang. And you mustn’t begin
|
||
your letters, particularly to an acquaintance, ‘Dear friend.’ This is
|
||
an idealistic and--ah--bucolic custom, but hardly good form.”
|
||
He was deeply annoyed at his lack of fluency, but Ida once more was
|
||
deliberately “upsetting” him. She smiled indulgently.
|
||
“I guess I like your new-fangled notions. I’ll write all that down
|
||
while you’re thinkin’ up what to say next.”
|
||
She leaned over the table and wrote slowly that he might have leisure
|
||
to admire her figure in profile. But he gazed sternly out of the window
|
||
until she swayed back to the perpendicular and demanded,
|
||
“What next? Do you want me to say băth and căn’t?”
|
||
“Oh, no, I really shouldn’t advise it, not in Butte. I don’t wish to
|
||
teach you anything that will add to the discomforts of life--so long as
|
||
your lines are cast here. Just modify the lamentably short American _a_
|
||
a bit.” And he rehearsed her for a few moments.
|
||
“Fine. I’ll try it on Greg--Mr. Compton. If he laughs I’ll know I’m too
|
||
good, but if he only puckers his eyebrows and looks as if somethin’
|
||
queer was floatin’ round just out of sight, then I’ll know I’ve struck
|
||
the happy medium. I’ll be a real high-brow in less than no time.”
|
||
“You certainly are surprisingly quick,” said Professor Whalen
|
||
handsomely. “In a year I could equip you for our centres of culture,
|
||
but as I remarked just now it would not be kind to transform you into
|
||
an exotic. Now, suppose we read a few pages of this grammar----”
|
||
“I studied grammar at school,” interrupted Ida haughtily. “What do
|
||
you take Butte for, anyhow. It may be a mining camp, and jay enough
|
||
compared with your old Boston, but I guess we learn something mor’n the
|
||
alphabet at all these big red brick schoolhouses we’ve got--Montana’s
|
||
famous for its grand schoolhouses----”
|
||
“Yes, yes, my dear Mrs. Compton. But, you know, one forgets so quickly.
|
||
And then so many of you don’t stay in school long enough. How old were
|
||
you when you left?”
|
||
“Fifteen. Ma wouldn’t let me go to the High.”
|
||
“Precisely. Well, I will adhere to my original purpose, and defer
|
||
books until our next lesson. Perhaps you would like me to tell you
|
||
something more of our Eastern methods of speech--not only words,
|
||
but--er--syntax----”
|
||
“Oh, hang your old East! You make me feel downright patriotic.”
|
||
Professor Whalen was conscious that it was a distinct pleasure to make
|
||
those fine eyes flash. “One would think we were not all Americans,” he
|
||
said with a smile.
|
||
“Well, I guess you look upon America as East and West too. Loads of
|
||
young surveyors and mining men come out here to make their pile, and at
|
||
first Montana ain’t good enough to black their boots, but it soon takes
|
||
the starch out of ’em. No use puttin’ on dog here. It don’t work.”
|
||
“Oh, I assure you it’s merely a difference of manner--of--er tradition.
|
||
We--and I in particular--find your West most interesting--and
|
||
significant. I--ah--regard it as the great furnace under our
|
||
civilization.”
|
||
“And we are the stokers! I like your impudence!”
|
||
He had no desire to lose this remunerative pupil, whose crude mind
|
||
worked more quickly than his own. She was now really angry and he made
|
||
a mild dive in search of his admitted tact.
|
||
“My dear lady, you put words into my mouth that emanate from your own
|
||
clever brain, not from my merely pedantic one. Not only have I the
|
||
highest respect for the West, and for Montana in particular, but please
|
||
remember that the contempt of the East for the West is merely passive,
|
||
negative, when compared with the lurid scorn of the West for the East.
|
||
‘Effete’ is its mildest term of opprobrium. I doubt if your ‘virile’
|
||
Westerner believes us to be really alive, in a condition to inhabit
|
||
aught but a museum. Your men when they ‘make their pile’, or take a
|
||
vacation, never dream of going to Boston, seldom, indeed, to Europe.
|
||
They take the fastest train for New York--and by no means with a view
|
||
to exploring that wilderness for its oases of culture----”
|
||
“Well, I guess not!” cried Ida, her easy good nature restored.
|
||
“All-night restaurants, something new in the way of girls--‘chickens’
|
||
and ‘squabs’--musical shows, watchin’ the sun rise--that’s their
|
||
little old New York. They always come home shakin’ themselves like a
|
||
Newfoundland puppy, or purrin’ like a cat full of cream, but talkin’
|
||
about the Great Free West, God’s Own Country, and the Big Western
|
||
Heart. I’ve a friend who does manicurin’, and she knows ’em like old
|
||
shoes.”
|
||
Whalen, who had a slight cultivated sense of humor, laughed. “You are
|
||
indeed most apt and picturesque, dear Mrs. Compton. But--while I think
|
||
of it--you mustn’t drop your final _gs_. That, I am told, is one of the
|
||
fashionable divagations of the British aristocracy. But with us it is
|
||
the hallmark of the uneducated. Now, I really have told you all you can
|
||
remember for one day, and will take my leave. It is to be every other
|
||
day, I understand. On Wednesday, then, at two?”
|
||
VIII
|
||
Ida walked to the gate with him. She was quite a head taller than he,
|
||
but subtly made him feel that the advantage was his, as it enabled
|
||
her to pour the light of her eyes downward. He picked his way up the
|
||
uneven surface of East Granite Street, slippery with a recent fall of
|
||
snow, not only disturbed, but filled with a new conceit; in other words
|
||
thrilling with his first full sense of manhood.
|
||
Ida looked after him, smiling broadly. But the smile fled abruptly,
|
||
her lips trembled, then contracted. Advancing down the street was
|
||
Mrs. Mark Blake. Ida had known her enterprising young husband before
|
||
he changed his name from Mike to Mark, but she knew his lady wife by
|
||
sight only; Mrs. Blake had not patronized Madame O’Reilley. Ruby and
|
||
Pearl pronounced her “all right”, although a trifle “proud to look
|
||
at.” Ida assumed that she was to receive the promised call, and wished
|
||
she could “get out of it.” Not only did she long for her rocker, gum
|
||
and magazine, after the intellectual strain of the past hour, but she
|
||
had no desire to meet Mrs. Blake or any of “that crowd” until she
|
||
could take her place as their equal. She had her full share of what is
|
||
known as class-consciousness, and its peculiar form of snobbery. To be
|
||
patronized by “swells”, even to be asked to their parties, would give
|
||
her none of that subtle joy peculiar to the climbing snob. When the
|
||
inevitable moment came she would burst upon them, dazzle them, bulldoze
|
||
and lead them, but she wanted none of their crumbs.
|
||
But she was “in for it.” She hastily felt the back of her shirtwaist
|
||
to ascertain if it still were properly adjusted, and sauntered towards
|
||
the cottage humming a tune, pretending not to have seen the lady who
|
||
stopped to have a word with Professor Whalen. “Anyhow, she’s not a
|
||
bonanzerine,” thought Ida. “I guess she did considerable scrapin’ at
|
||
one time; and Mark, for all he could make shoe-blackin’ look like
|
||
molasses, ain’t a millionaire yet.”
|
||
She might indeed, further reflected Ida, watching the smartly tailored
|
||
figure out of the corner of her eye, be pitied, for she had been
|
||
“brought up rich, expecting to marry a duke, and then come down kaplunk
|
||
before she’d much more’n a chance to grow up.” Her father, Judge
|
||
Stratton, a graduate of Columbia University, had been one of the most
|
||
brilliant and unscrupulous lawyers of the Northwest. He had drawn
|
||
enormous fees from railroads and corporations, and in the historic
|
||
Clark-Daly duels for supremacy in the State of Montana, and in the
|
||
more picturesque battle between F. Augustus Heinze and “Amalgamated”
|
||
(that lusty offspring of the great Standard Oil Trust), when the number
|
||
of estimable citizens bought and sold demonstrated the faint impress
|
||
of time on original sin, his legal acumen and persuasive tongue, his
|
||
vitriolic pen, ever had been at the disposal of the highest bidder.
|
||
He had been a distinguished resident of Butte but a few years when he
|
||
built himself a spacious if hideous residence on the West Side. But
|
||
this must have been out of pure loyalty to his adopted state, for it
|
||
was seldom occupied, although furnished in the worst style of the late
|
||
seventies and early eighties. Mrs. Stratton and her daughter spent
|
||
the greater part of their time in Europe. As Judge Stratton disliked
|
||
his wife, was intensely ambitious for his only child, and preferred
|
||
the comforts of his smaller home on The Flat, he rarely recalled his
|
||
legitimate family, and made them a lavish allowance. He died abruptly
|
||
of apoplexy, and left nothing but a life insurance of five thousand
|
||
dollars; he had neglected to take out any until his blood vessels were
|
||
too brittle for a higher risk.
|
||
Mrs. Stratton promptly became an invalid, and Ora brought her home to
|
||
Butte, hoping to save something from the wreck. There was nothing to
|
||
save. As she had not known of the life insurance when they received the
|
||
curt cablegram in Paris, she had sold all of her mother’s jewels save a
|
||
string of pearls, and, when what was left of this irrelative sum after
|
||
the luxurious journey over sea and land, was added to the policy, the
|
||
capital of these two still bewildered women represented little more
|
||
than they had been accustomed to spend in six months. When Mark Blake,
|
||
who had studied law in Judge Stratton’s office after graduating from
|
||
the High School, and now seemed to be in a fair way to inherit the
|
||
business, besides being County Attorney at the moment, implored Ora
|
||
to marry him, and manifested an almost equal devotion to her mother,
|
||
whom he had ranked with the queens of history books since boyhood, she
|
||
accepted him as the obvious solution of her problem.
|
||
She was lonely, disappointed, mortified, a bit frightened. She
|
||
had lived the life of the average American princess, and although
|
||
accomplished had specialised in nothing; nor given a thought to the
|
||
future. As she had cared little for the society for which her mother
|
||
lived, and much for books, music, and other arts, and had talked
|
||
eagerly with the few highly specialised men she was fortunate enough
|
||
to meet, she had assumed that she was clever. She also believed that
|
||
when she had assuaged somewhat her appetite for the intellectual and
|
||
artistic banquet the gifted of the ages had provided, she might develop
|
||
a character and personality, possibly a gift of her own. But she was
|
||
only twenty when her indulgent father died, and, still gorging herself,
|
||
was barely interested in her capacities other than receptive, less
|
||
still in the young men that sought her, unterrified by her reputation
|
||
for brains. She fancied that she should marry when she was about
|
||
twenty-eight, and have a salon somewhere; and the fact that love had
|
||
played so little a part in her dreams made it easier to contemplate
|
||
marriage with this old friend of her childhood. His mother had been
|
||
Mrs. Stratton’s seamstress, to be sure, but as he was a good boy,--he
|
||
called for the frail little woman every evening to protect her from
|
||
roughs on her long walk east to the cottage her husband had built
|
||
shortly before he was blown to pieces somewhere inside of Butte--he
|
||
had been permitted to hold the dainty Ora on his knee, or toss her,
|
||
gurgling with delight, into the air until he puffed.
|
||
Mark had been a fat boy, and was now a fat young man with a round
|
||
rosy face and a rolling lazy gait. He possessed an eye of remarkable
|
||
shrewdness, however, was making money rapidly, never lost sight of
|
||
the main chance, and was not in the least surprised when his marriage
|
||
lifted him to the pinnacle of Butte society. In spite of his amiable
|
||
weaknesses, he was honest if sharp, an inalienable friend, and he
|
||
made a good husband according to his lights. Being a man’s man, and
|
||
naturally elated at his election to the exclusive Silver Bow Club soon
|
||
after his marriage to the snow maiden of his youthful dreams, he
|
||
formed the habit of dropping in for a game of billiards every afternoon
|
||
on his way home, and returning for another after dinner. But within
|
||
three years he was able to present the wife of whom he was inordinately
|
||
proud with a comfortable home on the West Side, and he made her an
|
||
allowance of ever increasing proportions.
|
||
Ora, who had her own idea of a bargain, had never complained of
|
||
neglect nor intimated that she found anything in him that savoured of
|
||
imperfection. She had accepted him as a provider, and as he filled this
|
||
part of the contract brilliantly, she felt that to treat him to scenes
|
||
whose only excuse was outraged love or jealousy, would be both unjust
|
||
and absurd. Moreover, his growing passion for his club was an immense
|
||
relief after his somewhat prolonged term of marital uxoriousness, and
|
||
as her mother died almost coincidentally with the abridgment of Mr.
|
||
Blake’s home life, Ora returned to her studies, rode or walked for
|
||
hours, and, after her double period of mourning was over, danced two or
|
||
three times a week in the season, or sat out dances when she met a man
|
||
that had cultivated his intellect. For women she cared little.
|
||
It never occurred to Mark to be jealous of his passionless wife,
|
||
although he would have asserted his authority if she had received men
|
||
alone in the afternoon. But Ora paid a scrupulous deference to his
|
||
wishes in all respects. She even taught herself to keep house, and
|
||
her servants manners as well as the elements of edible cooking. This
|
||
she regarded as her proudest feat, for she frankly hated the domestic
|
||
details of life; although after three years in a “Block”,--a sublimated
|
||
lodging house, peculiar to the Northwest--she enjoyed the space and
|
||
privacy of her home. Mark told his friends that his wife was the most
|
||
remarkable woman in Montana, rarely found fault, save in the purely
|
||
mechanical fashion of the married male, and paid the bills without a
|
||
murmur. Altogether it was a reasonably happy marriage.
|
||
Ora Blake’s attitude to life at this time was expressed in the buoyancy
|
||
of her step, the haughty carriage of her head, the cool bright
|
||
casual glance she bestowed upon the world in general. Her code of
|
||
morals, ethics, manners, as well as her acceptance of the last set of
|
||
conditions she would have picked from the hands of Fate, was summed up
|
||
in two words: _noblesse oblige_. Of her depths she knew as little as
|
||
Gregory Compton of his.
|
||
“This is Mrs. Compton, I am sure,” she said in her cool even voice, as
|
||
she came up behind the elaborately unconscious and humming Ida. “I am
|
||
Mrs. Blake.”
|
||
“Pleased to meet you,” said Ida formally, extending a limp hand. “Come
|
||
on inside.”
|
||
Mrs. Blake closed her eyes as she entered the parlour, but opened them
|
||
before Ida had adjusted the blower to the grate, and exclaimed brightly:
|
||
“How clever of you to settle so quickly. I shouldn’t have dared to call
|
||
for another fortnight, but Mr. Compton told my husband yesterday that
|
||
you were quite in order. It was three months before I dared open my
|
||
doors.”
|
||
“Well,” drawled Ida, rocking herself, “I guess your friends are more
|
||
critical than mine. And I guess you didn’t rely wholly on Butte for
|
||
your furniture. I had Ma’s old junk, and the rest cost me just two
|
||
hundred dollars.”
|
||
“How very clever of you!” But although Mrs. Blake was doing her best to
|
||
be spontaneous and impressed, Ida knew instantly that she had committed
|
||
a solecism, and felt both angry and apprehensive. She was more afraid
|
||
of this young woman than of her professor. Once more she wished that
|
||
Mrs. Blake and the whole caboodle would leave her alone till she was
|
||
good and ready.
|
||
Ora hastened on to a safer topic, local politics. Butte, tired of
|
||
grafting politicians, was considering the experiment of permitting a
|
||
Socialist of good standing to be elected mayor. Ida, like all women of
|
||
the smaller Western towns, was interested in local politics, and, glad
|
||
of the impersonal topic, gave her visitor intelligent encouragement,
|
||
the while she examined her critically. She finally summed her up in
|
||
the word “pasty”, and at that stage of Ora Blake’s development the
|
||
description was not inapt. She took little or no interest in her looks,
|
||
although she dressed well by instinct; and nature, supplemented by
|
||
her mother, had given her style. But her hair was almost colourless
|
||
and worn in a tight knot just above her neck, her complexion was
|
||
weather-beaten, her lips rather pale, and her body very thin. But when
|
||
men whose first glance had been casual turned suddenly, wondering
|
||
at themselves, to examine that face so lacking in the potencies of
|
||
colouring, they discovered that the eyes, deeply set and far apart,
|
||
were of a deep dark blazing grey, that the nose was straight and fine,
|
||
the ears small, the mouth mobile, with a slight downward droop at the
|
||
corners; also that her hands and feet were very slender, with delicate
|
||
wrists and ankles. Ida, too, noted these points, but wondered where her
|
||
“charm” came from. She knew that Mrs. Blake possessed this vague but
|
||
desirable quality, in spite of her dread reputation as a “high-brow”,
|
||
and her impersonal attitude toward men.
|
||
Ruby had informed her that the men agreed she had charm if she would
|
||
only condescend to exert it. “And I can feel it too,” she had added,
|
||
“every time I do her nails--she never lets anyone do that hair of hers
|
||
or give her a massage, which she needs, the Lord knows. But she’s got
|
||
fascination, magnetism, whatever you like to call it, for all she’s so
|
||
washed-out. Somehow, I always feel that if she’d wake up, get on to
|
||
herself, she’d play the devil with men, maybe with herself.”
|
||
Ida recalled the comments of the wise Miss Miller and frowned. This
|
||
important feminine equipment she knew to be her very own, and although
|
||
she would have been proud to admit the rivalry of a beautiful woman,
|
||
she felt a sense of mortification in sharing that most subtle and
|
||
fateful of all gifts, sex-magnetism, with one so colourless and
|
||
plain. That the gifts possessed by this woman talking with such
|
||
well-bred indifference of local affairs must be far more subtle than
|
||
her own irritated her still more. It also filled her with a vague
|
||
sense of menace, almost of helplessness. Later, when her brain was
|
||
more accustomed to analysis, she knew that she had divined--her
|
||
consciousness at that time too thick to formulate the promptings of
|
||
instinct--that when man is taken unawares he is held more firmly
|
||
captive.
|
||
Ida, staring into those brilliant powerful eyes, felt a sudden
|
||
desperate need to dive through their depths into this woman’s secret
|
||
mind, to know her better at once, get rid of the sense of mystery that
|
||
baffled and oppressed her. In short she must know where she was at
|
||
and know it quick. It did not strike her until afterward as odd that
|
||
she should have felt so intensely personal in regard to a woman whose
|
||
sphere was not hers and whose orbit had but just crossed her own.
|
||
For a time she floundered, but feminine instinct prompted the intimate
|
||
note.
|
||
“I saw you talkin’--talking to the professor,” she said casually. “I
|
||
suppose you know your husband got him for me.”
|
||
“I arranged it myself--” began Mrs. Blake, smiling, but Ida interrupted
|
||
her sharply:
|
||
“Greg--Mr. Compton didn’t tell me he had talked to you about it.”
|
||
“Nor did he. I have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Compton but
|
||
once--the day I married; he was my husband’s best man. Mark never
|
||
can get him to come to the house, hardly to the club. But my husband
|
||
naturally would turn over such a commission to me. I hope you found the
|
||
little professor satisfactory.”
|
||
“He’ll do, I guess. He knows an awful lot, and I have a pretty good
|
||
memory. But to get--and practice--it all--well, I guess that takes
|
||
years.” She imbued her tones with a pathetic wistfulness, and gazed
|
||
upon her visitor with ingenuous eyes, brimming with admiration. “It
|
||
must be just grand to have got all that education, and to have lived in
|
||
Europe while you were growing up. Nothing later on that you can get is
|
||
the same, I guess. You look just about as polished off as I look raw.”
|
||
“Oh! No! No!” cried Ora deprecatingly, her cheeks flooding with a
|
||
delicate pink that made her look very young and feminine. She had begun
|
||
by disliking this dreadfully common person, but not only was she by
|
||
no means as innocent of vanity as she had been trying for years to
|
||
believe, but she was almost emotionally swift to respond to the genuine
|
||
appeal. And, clever as she was, it was not difficult to delude her.
|
||
“Of course I had advantages that I am grateful for, but I have a theory
|
||
that it is never too late to begin. And you are so young--a few months
|
||
of our professor--are you really ambitious?”
|
||
“You bet.” Ida committed herself no further at the moment.
|
||
“Then you will enjoy study--expanding and furnishing your mind. It is
|
||
a wonderful sensation!” Mrs. Blake’s eyes were flashing now, her mouth
|
||
was soft, her strong little chin with that cleft which always suggests
|
||
a whirlpool, was lifted as if she were drinking. “The moment you are
|
||
conscious that you are using the magic keys to the great storehouses
|
||
of the world, its arts, its sciences, its records of the past--when
|
||
you begin to help yourself with both hands and pack it away in your
|
||
memory--always something new--when you realise that the store is
|
||
inexhaustible--that in study at least there is no ennui--Oh, I can give
|
||
you no idea of what it all means--you will find it out for yourself!”
|
||
“Jimminy!” thought Ida. “I guess not! But that ain’t where her charm
|
||
for men comes from, you bet!” Aloud she said, with awe in her voice:
|
||
“No wonder you know so much when you like it like that. But don’t it
|
||
make you--well--kinder lonesome?”
|
||
“Sometimes--lately----” Mrs. Blake pulled herself up with a deep blush.
|
||
“It has meant everything to me, that mental life, and it always shall!”
|
||
The astute Ida noted the defiant ring in her voice, and plunged in. “I
|
||
wonder now? Say, you’re a pretty woman and a young one, and they say
|
||
men would go head over ears about you if you’d give ’em a show. You’ve
|
||
got a busy husband and so have I. Husbands don’t companion much and you
|
||
can’t make me believe learning’s all. Don’t you wish these American
|
||
Turks of husbands would let us have a man friend occasionally? They
|
||
say that in high society in the East and in Europe, the women have all
|
||
the men come to call on them afternoons they like, but the ordinary
|
||
American husband, and particularly out West--Lord! When a woman has a
|
||
man call on her, she’s about ready to split with her husband--belongs
|
||
to the fast set--and he’s quail hunting somewheres else. Of course I’ve
|
||
known Mark all my life--and you who was--were brought up in the real
|
||
world--it must be awful hard on you. Wouldn’t you like to try your
|
||
power once in a while, see how far you could go--just for fun? I guess
|
||
you’re not shocked?”
|
||
“No, I’m not shocked,” said Ora, laughing. “But I don’t believe men
|
||
interest me very much in that way--although, heaven knows, there are
|
||
few more delightful sensations than talking to a man who makes you feel
|
||
as if your brain were on fire. I don’t think I care to have American
|
||
men, at least, become interested in me in any other way. In Europe----”
|
||
She hesitated, and Ida leaned forward eagerly.
|
||
“Oh, do tell me, Mrs. Blake! I don’t know a blamed thing. I’ve never
|
||
been outside of Montana.”
|
||
“Well--I mean--the American man takes love too seriously. I suppose
|
||
it is because he is so busy--he has to take life so seriously. He
|
||
specialises intensely. It is all or nothing with him. Of course I
|
||
am talking about love. When they play about, it is generally with a
|
||
class of women of which we have no personal knowledge. The European,
|
||
with his larger leisure, and generations of leisure in his brain, his
|
||
interest in everything, and knowledge of many things,--above all of the
|
||
world,--has reduced gallantry to a fine art. He may give his fancy, his
|
||
sentiment, his passion, even his leisure, to one woman at a time, but
|
||
his heart--well, unless he is very young--that remains quite intact.
|
||
Love is the game of his life with a change of partner at reasonable
|
||
intervals. In other words he is far too accomplished and sophisticated
|
||
to be romantic. Now, your American man, although he looks the reverse
|
||
of romantic, and is always afraid of making a fool of himself, when
|
||
he does fall in love with a woman--say, across a legal barrier--must
|
||
annihilate the barrier at once; in other words, elope or rush to the
|
||
divorce court. It isn’t that he is more averse from a liaison than the
|
||
European, but more thorough. It is all or nothing. In many respects he
|
||
is far finer than the European, but he makes for turmoil, and, less
|
||
subtle, he fails to hold our interest.”
|
||
“You mean he don’t keep us guessing? Well, you’re right about most of
|
||
them. I never saw a boy I couldn’t read like a page ad., until I met
|
||
my husband. I thought I knew him, too, till I’d been married to him
|
||
awhile. But, my land, he gets deeper every minute. I guess if I hadn’t
|
||
married him he’d have kidnapped me, he was that gone, and forgetting
|
||
anything else existed. Of course, I didn’t expect that to last, but I
|
||
did think he’d go on being transparent. But, believe me, the Sphinx
|
||
ain’t a patch on him. I sometimes think I don’t know him at all, and
|
||
that keeps me interested.”
|
||
“I should think it might!” exclaimed Mrs. Blake, thinking of her own
|
||
standard possession. “But then Mr. Compton is a hard student, and
|
||
is said to have a voracious as well as a brilliant mind. No doubt
|
||
that is the secret of what appears on the surface as complexity and
|
||
secretiveness. I know the symptoms!”
|
||
“P’raps. But--well, I live with him, and I suspicion otherwise. I
|
||
suspect him of having as many kind of leads, and cross-cuts, and
|
||
‘pockets’, and veins full of different kinds of ore in him as we’ve
|
||
got right under our feet in Butte Hill. Do you think”--she spoke with
|
||
a charming wistfulness--“that when I know more, have opened up and let
|
||
out my top story, as it were, I shall understand him better?”
|
||
And again Ora responded warmly, “Indeed, yes, dear Mrs. Compton.
|
||
It isn’t so much what you put into your mind--it’s more the reflex
|
||
action of that personal collection in developing not only the mental
|
||
faculties, but one’s intuitions, one’s power to understand others--even
|
||
one whose interests are different, or whose knowledge is infinitely
|
||
greater than our own.”
|
||
“I believe you could even understand Greg!” Ida spoke involuntarily and
|
||
stared with real admiration at the quickened face with its pink cheeks
|
||
and flashing eyes, its childish mobile mouth. Ora at the moment looked
|
||
beautiful. Suddenly Ida felt as if half-drowned in a wave of ambiguous
|
||
terror. She sat up very straight.
|
||
“I guess you’re right,” she said slowly. “You’ve made me see it as the
|
||
others haven’t. I’ll work at all that measly little professor gives me,
|
||
but--I don’t know--somehow, I can’t think he’ll do much more than make
|
||
me talk decent. There’s nothing _to_ him.”
|
||
Ora’s heart beat more quickly. Her indifference had vanished in this
|
||
intimate hour, also her first subtle dislike of Ida, who’s commonness
|
||
now seemed picturesque, and whose wistful almost complete ignorance
|
||
had made a strong appeal to her sympathies. For the first time in her
|
||
lonely life she felt that she had something to give. And here was raw
|
||
and promising material ready and eager to be woven, if not into cloth
|
||
of silver, at least into a quality of merchandise vastly superior to
|
||
that which the rude loom of youth had so far produced. All she knew
|
||
of Gregory Compton, moreover, made her believe in and admire him; the
|
||
loneliness of his mental life with this woman appalled her. This was
|
||
not the first time she had been forced to admit of late that under
|
||
the cool bright surface of her nature were more womanly impulses than
|
||
formerly, a spontaneous warmth that was almost like the quickening of
|
||
a child; but she had turned from the consciousness with an impatient:
|
||
“What nonsense! What on earth should I do with it?” The sense that she
|
||
was of no vital use to anyone had discouraged her, dimmed her interest
|
||
in her studies. Her husband could hire a better housekeeper, find a
|
||
hundred girls who would companion him better. And what if she were
|
||
_instruite_? So were thousands of women. Nothing was easier.
|
||
But this clever girl of the people, who might before many years had
|
||
passed be one of the rich and conspicuous women of the United States,
|
||
above all, the wife of one of the nation’s “big men,” working himself
|
||
beyond human capacity, harassed, needing not only physical comfort at
|
||
home, but counsel, companionship, perfect understanding,--might it
|
||
not be her destiny to equip Ida Compton for her double part? Ora’s
|
||
imagination, the most precious and the most dangerous of her gifts,
|
||
was at white heat. To her everlasting credit would be the fashioning
|
||
of a helpmate for one of her country’s great men. It would be enough
|
||
to do as much for the state which her imperfect father had loved so
|
||
passionately; but her imagination would not confine Gregory Compton
|
||
within the limitations of a state. It was more than likely that his
|
||
destiny would prove to be national; and she had seen the wives of
|
||
certain men eminent in political Washington, but of obscure origin.
|
||
They were Ida’s mannered, grooved, crystallised; women to flee from.
|
||
She leaned forward and took Ida’s hand in both of hers. “Dear Mrs.
|
||
Compton!” she exclaimed. “Do let me teach you what little I know. I
|
||
mean of art--history--the past--the present--I have portfolios of
|
||
beautiful photographs of great pictures and scenes that I collected
|
||
for years in Europe. It will do me so much good to go over them. I
|
||
haven’t had the courage to look at them for years. And the significant
|
||
movements, social, political, religious,--all this theft under so
|
||
many different names,--Christian Science, the ‘Uplift’ Movement,
|
||
Occultism--from the ancient Hindu philosophy--it would be delightful to
|
||
go into it with someone. I am sure I could make it all most interesting
|
||
to you.”
|
||
“My Gorrd!” thought Ida. “Two of ’em! What am I let in for?” But the
|
||
undefined sharp sense of terror lingered, and she answered when she got
|
||
her breath,
|
||
“I’d like it first rate. The work in this shack is nothing. Mr.
|
||
Compton leaves first thing in the morning, and don’t show up till
|
||
nearly six. The professor’s coming for an hour every other afternoon.
|
||
But if I go to your house I want it understood that I don’t meet anyone
|
||
else. I’ve got my reasons.”
|
||
“You shall not meet a soul. Can’t you imagine how sick I am of Butte?
|
||
We’ll have heavenly times. I was wondering only the other day of what
|
||
use was all this heterogeneous mass of stuff I’d put into my head.
|
||
But,” she added gaily, “I know now it was for you to select from. I am
|
||
so glad. And--and----” Her keen perceptions suggested a more purely
|
||
feminine bait. “You were with Madame O’Reilley, were you not? I get my
|
||
things from a very good dressmaker in New York. Perhaps you would like
|
||
to copy some of them?”
|
||
“Aw! Would I?” Ida gasped and almost strangled. For the first time
|
||
during this the most trying day of her life she felt wholly herself.
|
||
“You may just bet your life I would. I need new duds the worst way,
|
||
even if I’m not a West Sider. I’ve been on a ranch for nearly a year
|
||
and a half, and although Mr. Compton won’t take me to any balls, there
|
||
are the movin’ pictures and the mats--matinees; _and_ the street, where
|
||
I have to show up once in a while! I used to think an awful lot of my
|
||
looks and style, and I guess it’s time to begin again. I can sew first
|
||
rate, make any old thing. Do you mean it?”
|
||
“Indeed I do! I _want_ to be of help to you in every way.” She rose and
|
||
held Ida’s hand once more in hers, although she did not kiss her as
|
||
another woman might have done. “Will you come tomorrow--about two?”
|
||
“You may bet your bottom dollar I’ll come. I haven’t thanked you, but
|
||
maybe I’ll do that some other way.”
|
||
“Oh, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mrs. Blake lightly.
|
||
IX
|
||
Butte, “the richest hill in the world” (known at a period when less
|
||
famous for metals and morals as “Perch of the Devil”), is a long
|
||
scraggy ridge of granite and red and grey dirt rising abruptly out of
|
||
a stony uneven plain high in the Rocky Mountains. The city is scooped
|
||
out of its south slope, and overflows upon The Flat. Big Butte, an
|
||
equally abrupt protuberance, but higher, steeper, more symmetrical,
|
||
stands close beside the treasure vault, but with the aloof and somewhat
|
||
cynical air of even the apocryphal volcano. On all sides the sterile
|
||
valley heaves away as if abruptly arrested in a throe of the monstrous
|
||
convulsion that begat it; but pressing close, cutting the thin
|
||
brilliant air with its icy peaks, is an irregular and nearly circular
|
||
chain of mountains, unbroken white in winter, white on the blue
|
||
enamelled slopes in summer.
|
||
For nearly half the year the whole scene is white, with not a tree,
|
||
nor, beyond the straggling town itself, a house to break its frozen
|
||
beauty. It is only when the warm Chinook wind roars in from the west
|
||
and melts the snow much as lightning strikes, or when Summer herself
|
||
has come, that you realize the appalling surface barrenness of this
|
||
region devastated for many years by the sulphur and arsenic fumes of
|
||
ore roasted in the open or belching from the smelters. They ate up
|
||
the vegetation, and the melting snows and heavy June rains washed the
|
||
weakened earth from the bones of valley and mountain, leaving both as
|
||
stark as they must have been when the earth ceased to rock and began to
|
||
cool. Since the smelters have gone to Anaconda, patches of green, of a
|
||
sad and timid tenderness, like the smile of a child too long neglected,
|
||
have appeared between the sickly grey boulders of the foothills, and,
|
||
in Butte, lawns as large as a tablecloth have been cultivated. Anaconda
|
||
Hill at the precipitous eastern end of the city, with its tangled mass
|
||
of smokestacks, gallows-frames, shabby grey buildings, trestles, looks
|
||
like a gigantic shipwreck, but is merely the portal to the precious
|
||
ore bodies of the mines whose shafts, levels, and cross-cuts to the
|
||
depth of three thousand feet and more, pierce and ramify under city
|
||
and valley. These hideous buildings through which so many hundreds of
|
||
millions have passed, irrupt into the very back yards of some of the
|
||
homes, built too far east (and before mere gold and silver gave place
|
||
to copper); but the town improves as it leaps westward. The big severe
|
||
solid buildings to be found in every modern city sure of its stability
|
||
crowd the tumble-down wood structures of a day when no man looked upon
|
||
Butte as aught but a camp. And although the streets are vociferously
|
||
cobbled, the pavements are civilised here and there.
|
||
Farther west the houses of the residence section grow more and more
|
||
imposing, coinciding with the sense of Butte’s inevitableness. On the
|
||
high western rim of the city (which exteriorly has as many ups and
|
||
downs as the story of its vitals) stands the red School of Mines. It
|
||
has a permanent expression of surprise, natural to a bit of Italian
|
||
renaissance looking down upon Butte.
|
||
Some of the homes, particularly those of light pressed brick, and one
|
||
that looks like the northeast corner of the upper story of a robber
|
||
stronghold of the middle ages, are models of taste and not too modest
|
||
symbols of wealth; but north and south and east and west are the snow
|
||
wastes in winter and the red or grey untidy desert of sand and rock in
|
||
summer.
|
||
But if Butte is the ugliest city in the United States, she knows
|
||
how to make amends. She is alive to her finger-tips. Her streets,
|
||
her fine shops, her hotels, her great office buildings, are always
|
||
swarming and animated. At no time, not even in the devitalised hours
|
||
that precede the dawn, does she sink into that peace which even a
|
||
metropolis welcomes. She has the jubilant expression of one who coins
|
||
the very air, the thin, sparkling, nervous air, into shining dollars,
|
||
and, confident in the inexhaustible riches beneath her feet, knows
|
||
that she shall go on coining them forever. Even the squads of miners,
|
||
always, owing to the three shifts, to be seen on the street corners,
|
||
look satisfied and are invariably well-dressed. Not only do these
|
||
mines with their high wages and reasonable hours draw the best class
|
||
of workingmen, but there are many college men in them, many more
|
||
graduates from the High Schools of Montana. The “Bohunks,” or “dark
|
||
men,” an inferior class of Southern Europeans, who live like pigs and
|
||
send their wages home, rarely if ever are seen in these groups.
|
||
And if Butte be ugly, hopelessly, uncompromisingly ugly, her
|
||
compensation is akin to that of many an heiress: she never forgets
|
||
that she is the richest hill in the world. Even the hard grip of the
|
||
most unassailable trust in America, which has absorbed almost as much
|
||
of Montana’s surface as of its hidden treasure, does not interfere
|
||
with her prosperity or supreme complacency. And although she has
|
||
her pestilential politicians, her grafters and crooks, and is so
|
||
tyrannically unionized that the workingman groans under the yoke of his
|
||
brother and forgets to curse the trust, yet ability and talent make
|
||
good as always; and in that electrified city of permanent prosperity
|
||
there is a peculiar condition that offsets its evils: it is a city of
|
||
sudden and frequent vacancies. New York, Europe, above all, California,
|
||
swarm with former Montanans, particularly of Butte, who have coppered
|
||
their nests, and transplanted them with a still higher sense of
|
||
achievement.
|
||
Ora was thinking of Butte and the world beyond Butte, as she splashed
|
||
along through the suddenly melted snow toward her home on the West
|
||
Side. The Chinook, loud herald from Japan, had swept down like an army
|
||
in the night and turned the crisp white streets to rivers of mud. But
|
||
Ora wore stout walking boots, and her short skirt, cut by a master
|
||
hand, was wide enough to permit the impatient stride she never had
|
||
been able to modify in spite of her philosophy and the altitude. She
|
||
walked several miles a day and in all weathers short of a blizzard; but
|
||
not until the past few weeks with the admission that her increasing
|
||
restlessness, her longing for Europe, was growing out of bonds. She
|
||
wondered today if it were Europe she wanted, or merely a change.
|
||
She had, of course, no money of her own, and never had ceased to be
|
||
grateful that her husband’s prompt and generous allowance made it
|
||
unnecessary to ask alms of him. Three times since her marriage he had
|
||
suddenly presented her with a check for several hundred dollars and
|
||
told her to “give her nerves a chance” either down “on the coast,”
|
||
or in New York. She had always fled to New York, remained a month
|
||
or six weeks, gone day and night to opera, theatre, concerts, art
|
||
exhibitions, not forgetting her tailor and dressmaker; returning to
|
||
Butte as refreshed as if she had taken her heart and nerves, overworked
|
||
by the altitude, down to the poppy fields of Southern California.
|
||
Her vacations and her husband’s never coincided. Mark always departed
|
||
at a moment’s notice for Chicago or New York, alleging pressing
|
||
business. He returned, after equally pressing delays, well, complacent,
|
||
slightly apologetic.
|
||
Ora knew that she had but to ask permission to spend the rest of
|
||
the winter in New York, for not only was Mark the most indulgent of
|
||
husbands, but he was proud of his wife’s connections in the American
|
||
Mecca, not unwilling to read references in the Butte newspapers to her
|
||
sojourn among them. The “best people” of these Western towns rarely
|
||
have either friends or relatives in the great cities of the East. The
|
||
hardy pioneer is not recruited from the aristocracies of the world, and
|
||
the dynamic men and women that have made the West what it is have the
|
||
blood of the old pioneers in them.
|
||
Ora was one of the few exceptions. Her father had been the last of a
|
||
distinguished line of jurists unbroken since Jonathan Stratton went
|
||
down with Alexander Hamilton in the death struggle between the Federal
|
||
and the new Republican party. Ora’s mother, one of New York’s imported
|
||
beauties for a season, who had languished theretofore on the remnants
|
||
of a Louisiana plantation, impecunious and ambitious, but inexperienced
|
||
and superficially imaginative, married the handsome and brilliant
|
||
lawyer for love, conceiving that it would be romantic to spend a few
|
||
years in a mining camp, where she, indubitably, would be its dominant
|
||
lady. Butte did not come up to her ideas of romance. Nor had she found
|
||
it possible to dislodge the passively determined women with the pioneer
|
||
blood in their veins. The fumes afflicted her delicate lungs, the
|
||
altitude her far more delicate nerves. Judge Stratton deposited her in
|
||
the drawing-room of an eastern bound train with increasing relish. Had
|
||
it not been for his little girl he would have bade her upon the second
|
||
or third of these migrations to establish herself in Paris and return
|
||
no more.
|
||
During these long pilgrimages Ora, even while attending school in New
|
||
York, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vevey, had seen something of society, for
|
||
Mrs. Stratton was ever surrounded by it, and did not approve of the
|
||
effect of boarding school diet on the complexion. But the ardours of
|
||
her mind, encouraged always by her father, who never was too busy to
|
||
write to her, had made her indifferent to the advantages prized by Mrs.
|
||
Stratton.
|
||
Today she was conscious of a keen rebellious desire for something more
|
||
frivolous, light, exciting, than had entered her life for many a year.
|
||
There can be little variety and no surprises in the social life of a
|
||
small community--for even scandal and divorce grow monotonous--and
|
||
although she could always enjoy an hour’s intellectual companionship
|
||
with the professors of the School of Mines, whenever it pleased her
|
||
to summon them, Ora, for the first time in her twenty-six years, had
|
||
drifted into a condition of mind where intellectual revels made no
|
||
appeal to her whatever.
|
||
She had wondered before this if her life would have been purely mental
|
||
had her obligations been different, but had dismissed the thought as
|
||
not only dangerous but ungrateful. She had reason to go on her knees
|
||
to her intellect, its ambitions and its furniture, for without it life
|
||
would have been insupportable. She ordered her quickening ego back
|
||
to the rear, or the depths, or wherever it bided its time, none too
|
||
amenable; she was only beginning to guess the proportions it might
|
||
assume if encouraged; the vague phantoms floating across her mind,
|
||
will-o’-the-wisps in a fog bank, frightened her. Several months since
|
||
she had set her lips, and her mind the task of acquiring the Russian
|
||
language. It had always been her experience that nothing compared with
|
||
a new language as a mental usurper.
|
||
She had entered into a deliberate partnership with a man who protected
|
||
and supported her, and she would keep the letter, far as its spirit
|
||
might be beyond the reach of her will. Even were she to become
|
||
financially independent, it was doubtful if she would leave him for
|
||
a long period; and for New York and its social diversions she cared
|
||
not at all. What she wanted was adventure--she stumbled on the word,
|
||
and stopped with a gasp. Adventure. For the first time she wished she
|
||
were a man. She would pack two mules with a prospector’s outfit and
|
||
disappear into the mountains.
|
||
She swung her mind to the Russian grammar, enough to impale it in
|
||
the death agony; but when she had entered her home, and, after a
|
||
visit to her leisurely cook, who was a unionized socialist, ascended
|
||
to her bedroom and stood before her mirror, she decided that it was
|
||
her singular interview with the wife of Gregory Compton that had
|
||
thrown her mind off its delicate balance. She recalled that Mrs.
|
||
Compton--certainly an interesting creature in spite of her appalling
|
||
commonness--had told her flagrantly that she was young, pretty, and
|
||
attractive to men, even as are young and pretty women without too much
|
||
brains. The compliment--or was it the suggestion?--had thrilled her,
|
||
and it thrilled her again. Men sometimes had tried to make love to
|
||
her, but she had ascribed such charm as she appeared to possess to the
|
||
automatically vibrating magnet of youth; and although she had never
|
||
been above a passing flirtation, either in her mother’s salon or in
|
||
Butte, she merely had been bored if the party of the other part had
|
||
taken his courage in his hands on the morrow. Scruples did not trouble
|
||
her. The American woman, she would have reasoned, is traditionally
|
||
“cold.” American men, brought up on her code of ethics, are able to
|
||
take care of themselves.
|
||
Had she been superficial in her conclusions? Could she attract men
|
||
more potently than by a merely girlish charm and a vivacious mind? Her
|
||
memory ran rapidly over the functions of the winter, particularly the
|
||
dinners and dances. She could not recall a passing conquest. She was
|
||
angry to feel herself shiver, but she jerked off her hat, and the pins
|
||
out of her fine abundant hair. She was twenty-six. Had she gone off?
|
||
Faded? She never had been called a beauty, never had had the vanity
|
||
to think herself a beauty, but she remembered that sometimes in an
|
||
animated company she had glanced into the passing mirror and thought
|
||
herself quite pretty, with her pink cheeks and sparkling eyes. But
|
||
normally she was too washed-out for beauty, however good her features
|
||
might be, and of course she had no figure at all. She dressed well from
|
||
force of habit, and she had the carriage at least to set off smartly
|
||
cut garments, but as much might be said of a dressmaker’s “form.”
|
||
And her skin was sallow and sunburned and weather-beaten and dry, as
|
||
any neglected skin in a high altitude is sure to be. Once it had been
|
||
as white as her native snows. Her hair, also the victim of the high
|
||
dry air, and exposed to the elements for hours together, was more
|
||
colourless than Nature had made it--dull--dead. She held out a strand
|
||
in dismay, remembering how her _cendré_ hair had been admired in Paris;
|
||
then with a sudden sense of relief (it escaped from the cellar where
|
||
her ego was immured on bread and water) she informed herself that it
|
||
was her duty to invoke the services of Miss Ruby Miller. No woman with
|
||
proper pride--or self-respect--would let her skin go to pot, no, not
|
||
at any age; certainly not at twenty-six. She recalled an impulsive
|
||
remark of Miss Miller’s a few months since when arranging her hair for
|
||
a fancy-dress ball, and gave another sigh--of hope.
|
||
So does Nature avenge herself.
|
||
X
|
||
She heard her husband’s voice as he entered the house, and hastily
|
||
changed her walking suit for one of the soft tea gowns she wore when
|
||
they were alone. This was a simple thing of a Copenhagen-blue silk,
|
||
with a guimpe of fine white net, and trimmed about the neck and half
|
||
sleeves with the newest and softest of the year’s laces. She noticed
|
||
with some satisfaction that her neck, below the collar line, was very
|
||
white; and she suddenly covered the rest of it with powder, then rubbed
|
||
the puff over her face. It was ordinary “baby powder” for the bath,
|
||
for she never had indulged in toilet accessories, but it answered
|
||
its purpose, if only to demonstrate what she might have been had she
|
||
safeguarded the gifts of nature. And the dull blue gown was suddenly
|
||
becoming.
|
||
Her husband, who had spent the intervening time in the library, ran
|
||
upstairs whistling in spite of his girth--he was the lightest dancer in
|
||
Butte--and knocked on her door before going to his own room.
|
||
“Say,” he said, as he chucked her under the chin, and kissed her
|
||
maritally, “but you look all right. Run down stairs and hold your
|
||
breath until I’ve made myself beautiful. I’ve got big news for you.”
|
||
She rustled softly down the stair, wondering what the news might be,
|
||
but not unduly interested. Mark was always excited over his new cases.
|
||
Perhaps he had been retained by Amalgamated. She hoped so. He deserved
|
||
it, for he worked harder than anyone knew. And she liked him sincerely,
|
||
quite without mitigation now that the years had taught him the folly of
|
||
being in love with her.
|
||
And he certainly had given her a pretty home. The house was not large
|
||
enough to be pointed out by the conductor of the “Seeing Butte Car,”
|
||
but it had been designed by a first rate architect, and had a certain
|
||
air of spaciousness within. Mrs. Stratton had furnished a flat in
|
||
Paris two years before her husband’s death, her excuse being that the
|
||
interior of the Butte house got on her nerves, and there was no other
|
||
way to take in household goods free of duty. Ora had shipped them when
|
||
the news of her father’s death and their own poverty came, knowing that
|
||
she would get a better price for the furniture in Butte, where someone
|
||
always was building, than in Paris.
|
||
Before it arrived she had made up her mind to marry Mark Blake, and
|
||
although it was several years before they had a house she kept it in
|
||
storage. In consequence her little drawing-room with its gay light
|
||
formal French furniture was unique in Butte, city of substantial and
|
||
tasteful (sometimes) but quite unindividual homes. Mark was thankful
|
||
that he was light of foot, less the bull in the china shop than he
|
||
looked, and would have preferred red walls, an oriental divan and
|
||
Persian rugs. He felt more at home in the library, a really large room
|
||
lined from floor to ceiling not only with Ora’s but Judge Stratton’s
|
||
books, which Mark had bought for a song at the auction; and further
|
||
embellished with deep leather chairs and several superb pieces of
|
||
carved Italian furniture. Ora spent the greater part of her allowance
|
||
on books, and many hours of her day in this room. But tonight she
|
||
deliberately went into the frivolous French parlour, turned on all the
|
||
lights, and sat down to await her husband’s reappearance.
|
||
Mark, who had taken kindly to the idea of dressing for dinner, came
|
||
running downstairs in a few moments.
|
||
“In the doll’s house?” he called out, as he saw the illumination in the
|
||
drawing-room. “Oh, come on into a real room and mix me a cocktail.”
|
||
“It isn’t good for you to drink cocktails so long before eating;
|
||
Huldah, who receives ‘The People’s War Cry’ on Monday, informed me that
|
||
dinner would be half an hour late.”
|
||
“I wish you’d chuck that wooden-faced leaden-footed apology for a
|
||
servant. This is the third time----”
|
||
“And get a worse? Butte rains efficient servants! Please sit down.
|
||
I--_feel_ like this room tonight. You may smoke.”
|
||
“Thanks. I believe this is the first time you have given me permission.
|
||
But I’m bound to say the room suits you.”
|
||
Ora sat in a _chaise-longue_ of the XV^{me} Siècle, a piece of
|
||
furniture whose awkward grace gives a woman’s arts full scope. Much
|
||
exercise had preserved the natural suppleness of Ora’s body and she had
|
||
ancestral memories of all arts and wiles. Mark seated himself on the
|
||
edge of a stiff little sofa covered with faded Aubusson tapestry, and
|
||
hunched his shoulders.
|
||
“If the French women furnish their rooms like this I don’t believe
|
||
all that’s said about them,” he commented wisely. “Men like to be
|
||
comfortable even when they’re looking at a pretty woman.”
|
||
“Mama let me choose the furniture for this room, and I wasn’t thinking
|
||
much about your sex at the time. I--I think it expressed a side of me
|
||
that I wasn’t conscious of then.”
|
||
“It’s a pretty room all right.” Mark lit the consolatory cigarette.
|
||
“But not to sit in. What struck you tonight?”
|
||
“Oh, I’d been thinking of Paris.”
|
||
Mark’s face was large and round and bland; it was only when he drew his
|
||
brows together that one saw how small and sharp his eyes were.
|
||
“H’m. I’ve wondered sometimes if you weren’t hankering after Europe. I
|
||
suppose it gets into the blood.”
|
||
“Oh, yes, it gets into the blood!” Ora spoke lightly, but she was
|
||
astonished at his insight.
|
||
“I’ve never been able to send you--not as you were used to going--I
|
||
don’t see you doing anything on the cheap----”
|
||
“Oh, my dear Mark, you are goodness itself. I’ve thought very little
|
||
about it, really.”
|
||
“Suppose you found yourself suddenly rich, would you light out and
|
||
leave me?”
|
||
“We’d go together. It would be great fun being your cicerone.”
|
||
“No chance! I’m going to be a rich man inside the next ten years, and
|
||
here I stick. And I don’t see myself travelling on a woman’s money,
|
||
either. But I suppose you’d be like all the rest if you could afford
|
||
it?”
|
||
“Oh, I don’t know. Of course I look forward to spending a year in
|
||
Europe once more--I’d hardly be human if I didn’t. But I can wait for
|
||
you.”
|
||
“I’ve always admired your philosophy,” he said grimly. “And now I’ve
|
||
got a chance to put it to a real test. I believe you are in a way, if
|
||
not to be rich, at least to make a pretty good haul.”
|
||
“What do you mean?” Ora sat up straight.
|
||
“Your father made a good many wild-cat investments when he first came
|
||
out here, and the one he apparently thought the worst, for I found no
|
||
mention of it among his papers, was the Oro Fino Primo mine, which he
|
||
bought from a couple of sharks in the year you were born--that’s where
|
||
you got your name, I guess. One of the men was a well known prospector
|
||
and the Judge thought he was safe. The ore assayed about eighty dollars
|
||
a ton, so he took over the claim, paid the Lord knows how much to the
|
||
prospector, who promptly lit out, had it patented, and set a small crew
|
||
to work under a manager. They found nothing but low grade ore, which
|
||
in those days roused about as much enthusiasm as country rock. The
|
||
mine had been salted, of course. It was some time before your father
|
||
would give up, and he spent more than the necessary amount of money
|
||
to perfect the patent; always hoping. When he was finally convinced
|
||
there was nothing in it he quit. And it was characteristic of your
|
||
father that when he quit he quit for good. He simply dismissed the
|
||
thing from his mind. Well, times have changed since then. New processes
|
||
and more railroads have caused fortunes to be made out of low grade
|
||
ore when there is enough of it. Some people would rather have a big
|
||
lode of low grade ore than a pockety vein of rich quartz. As you know,
|
||
abandoned mines are being leased all over the state, and abandoned
|
||
prospect holes investigated. Well, there you are. This morning two
|
||
mining engineers from New York came into my office with a tale of woe.
|
||
They came out here to look about, and after considerable travel within
|
||
a reasonable distance of railroads found an old prospect hole with a
|
||
shaft sunk about fifty feet. It looked abandoned all right, but as
|
||
the dump was still there and they liked the looks of it they went to
|
||
the De Smet ranch house--the hole is just over the border of Greg’s
|
||
ranch--and made inquiries. Oakley, who is a monomaniac on the subject
|
||
of intensive farming and doesn’t know a mine from a gopher hole, told
|
||
them that the adjacent land belonged to no one but the government.
|
||
So they staked their claim, recorded it in Virginia City, retimbered
|
||
the shaft and sank it twenty feet deeper. They began to take out ore
|
||
that looked good for fifteen dollars a ton. Then along comes an old
|
||
prospector and tells them the story of the mine. They leave their two
|
||
miners on the job and post up to Helena to have the records examined
|
||
in the Land Office. There, sure enough, they find that the mine was
|
||
duly patented by Judge Stratton, and all of the government requirements
|
||
complied with. So they come to me. They want a bond and lease for
|
||
three years--which means they may have the privilege of buying at the
|
||
end of the lease--and offer you ten per cent. on the net proceeds. I
|
||
haven’t given them my answer yet, for I’m going to take Greg out there
|
||
next Sunday and have a look at it. There was a sort of suppressed
|
||
get-rich-quickishness in their manner, and their offer was not what
|
||
you would call munificent. Greg is a born geologist, to say nothing
|
||
of his training. I don’t mean so much in the School of Mines, but he
|
||
was always gophering about with old prospectors, and ran away into the
|
||
mountains several times when his father was alive. Never showed up all
|
||
summer. He’s at ore now every spare moment he gets, and is as good an
|
||
assayer as there is in the state. If there’s mineral on his own ranch
|
||
he’ll find it, and if there isn’t he’ll find it elsewhere. So, I do
|
||
nothing till he’s looked the property over. But in any case I think I
|
||
can promise you a good lump of money.”
|
||
Ora’s breath was short. Her face had been scarlet for a few moments
|
||
but now showed quite pale under the tan and powder. When her husband
|
||
finished, however, and she replied, “How jolly,” her voice was quite
|
||
steady.
|
||
“And shall you fly off and leave me if it pans out?”
|
||
“Of course not. What do you take me for?”
|
||
“To tell you the truth it will mean a good deal to me if you stay until
|
||
the fall. I’ve a client coming out here from New York whom I am trying
|
||
to persuade to buy the old Iron Hat mine. There’s a fortune in it for
|
||
anyone with money enough to spend rebuilding the old works and putting
|
||
in new machinery and timbers; and a big rake-off for me, if I put the
|
||
deal through. Well, this client figures to bring his wife and daughter,
|
||
and you could help me a lot--persuade them they’d have the time of
|
||
their lives if they spent several months of every year out here for
|
||
a while--he’s a domestic sort of man. After that take a flyer if you
|
||
like. You deserve it.”
|
||
“How nice of you! Here is dinner at last.” Ora felt almost physically
|
||
sick, so dazzling had been the sudden prospect of deliverance,
|
||
followed by the certainty, even before her husband asked for the
|
||
diplomatic assistance she so often had given him, that she could not
|
||
take advantage of it. Noblesse oblige! For the moment she hated her
|
||
watchword.
|
||
She mixed a cocktail with steady hand. “I’ll indulge in a perfect orgie
|
||
of clothes!” she said gaily. “And import a chef. By the way,” she
|
||
added, as she seated herself at the table and straightened the knives
|
||
and forks beside her plate, “what do you think I let myself in for
|
||
today?”
|
||
“Not been speculating? There’s a quart of Worcestershire in this soup.”
|
||
“I’ll certainly treat you to a chef. No, not speculating--I wonder if
|
||
it mightn’t be that? I called on your friend’s wife----”
|
||
“Good girl! She’s not your sort, but she’s Greg’s wife----”
|
||
“I thought she was quite terrible at first, but I soon became
|
||
interested. She’s clever in her way, ignorant as she is, and has
|
||
individuality. Before I knew it I had offered to take a hand in her
|
||
education----”
|
||
“Good lord! What sort of a hand?”
|
||
“Oh, just showing her my portfolios, giving her some idea of art. It
|
||
sounds very elemental, but one must begin somewhere. She knows so
|
||
little that it will be like teaching a child a b c.”
|
||
“I’m afraid it will bore you.”
|
||
“No, I like the idea. It is something new, and change is good for the
|
||
soul. I have an idea that I shall continue to find her as interesting
|
||
as I intend she shall find the ‘lessons’.”
|
||
“She’ll get more than lessons on art. She’ll get a good tone down, and
|
||
she needs that all right. Poor old Greg! He deserved the best and he
|
||
got Ida Hook. I tried to head him off but I might as well have tried to
|
||
head off a stampede to a new gold diggings. He ought to have married a
|
||
lady, that’s what.”
|
||
Ora glanced up quickly, then, thankful that her husband was intent upon
|
||
his carving, dropped her eyes. It was the first time he had ever hinted
|
||
at the differences of class. In his boyhood there had been a mighty
|
||
gulf between his mother and the haughty Mrs. Stratton who employed her
|
||
in what was then the finest house in Butte. But he was too thoroughly
|
||
imbued with the spirit of the West, in which he had spent his life,
|
||
to recognise any difference in class save that which was determined
|
||
by income. As soon as his own abilities, industry, and the turn of
|
||
Fortune’s wheel, placed him in a position to offer support to the two
|
||
dainty women that had been his ideals from boyhood, he knew himself to
|
||
be their equal, without exhausting himself in analysis.
|
||
As for Ora, the West was quick in her blood, in spite of her heritage
|
||
and education. Her father had assumed the virtue of democracy when
|
||
he settled in Montana. In the course of a few years a genuine liking
|
||
and enthusiasm for his adopted state, as well as daily associations,
|
||
transformed him into as typical a Westerner as the West ever turned out
|
||
of her ruthless crucible. He even wore a Stetson hat when he visited
|
||
New York. His wife’s “airs” had inspired him with an increasing disgust
|
||
which was one of the most honest emotions of his life, and the text
|
||
of his repeated warnings to his daughter, whom he was forced to leave
|
||
to the daily guidance of his legal wife (Ora’s continued presence
|
||
in Butte, would, in truth, have caused him much embarrassment), had
|
||
been to cherish her Western birthright as the most precious of her
|
||
possessions.
|
||
“Remember this is the twentieth century,” he had written to her not
|
||
long before his death. “There is no society in the world today that
|
||
cannot be invaded by a combination of money, brains, and a certain
|
||
social talent--common enough. The modern man, particularly in the
|
||
United States, makes himself. His ancestors count for nothing, if he
|
||
doesn’t. If he does they may be a good asset, for they (possibly) have
|
||
given him breeding ready-made, moral fibre, and a brain of better
|
||
composition than the average man of the people can expect. But that is
|
||
only by the way. The two most potent factors in the world today are
|
||
money and the waxing, rising, imperishable democratic spirit. That was
|
||
reborn out here in the West, and the West is invading and absorbing
|
||
the East. The old un-American social standards of the East are
|
||
expiring in the present generation, which resort to every absurdity to
|
||
maintain them; its self-consciousness betraying its recognition of the
|
||
inevitable. Twenty years hence this class will be, if still clinging
|
||
to its spar, as much of a national joke as the Western women were when
|
||
they first flashed their diamonds in Peacock Alley. That phase, you
|
||
may notice, is so dead that the comic papers have forgotten it. The
|
||
phase was inevitable, but our women are now so accustomed to their
|
||
money that they are not to be distinguished from wealthy women anywhere
|
||
except that their natural hospitality and independence make them seem
|
||
more sure of themselves. Of course the innately vulgar are to be found
|
||
everywhere, and nowhere more abundantly than in New York.
|
||
“Twenty years from now, the West will have overrun the East; it will
|
||
have helped itself with both hands to all the older civilisation has to
|
||
give, and it will have made New York as democratic as Butte--or London!
|
||
So don’t let yourself grow up with any old-fashioned nonsense in your
|
||
head. I want you to start out in life modern to the core, unhampered
|
||
by any of the obsolete notions that make your mother and most of our
|
||
relations a sort of premature has-beens. When your time comes to
|
||
marry, select a Western man who either has made his own fortune or
|
||
has the ability to make it. Don’t give a thought to his origin if his
|
||
education is good, and his manners good enough. You can supply the
|
||
frills. I wouldn’t have you marry a man that lacked the fundamentals of
|
||
education at least, but better that than one whose brain is so full of
|
||
old-fashioned ideas that it has no room for those that are born every
|
||
minute. And I hope you will settle here in this state and do something
|
||
for it, either through the abilities of the man you marry or with your
|
||
own. It isn’t only the men that build up a new state. And if you marry
|
||
a foreigner never let me see nor hear from you again. They are all very
|
||
well in their way, but it is not our way.”
|
||
Ora, who had worshipped her father and admired him above all men, never
|
||
forgot a word he uttered, and knew his letters by heart. Possibly it
|
||
was the memory of this last of his admonitions which had enabled her
|
||
to sustain the shock of a proposal from the son of her mother’s old
|
||
seamstress and of a miner who had died in his overalls underground.
|
||
It is doubtful if she would have been conscious of the shock had it
|
||
not been for Mrs. Stratton’s lamentations. That lady from her sofa in
|
||
one of the humbler Blocks, had sent wail after wail in the direction
|
||
of the impertinent aspirant. Ora, during the brief period in which
|
||
she made her decision, heard so much about the “bluest blood of the
|
||
South,” and the titled foreigners whom she apparently could have had
|
||
for the accepting when she was supposed to belong to the Millionaire
|
||
Sisterhood, that she began to ponder upon the violent contrasts
|
||
embodied in Mark with something like rapture. After the marriage was
|
||
accomplished, Mrs. Stratton had the grace to wail in solitude, and
|
||
shortly after moved on to a world where only the archangels are titled
|
||
and never have been known to marry. Ora had not given the matter
|
||
another thought. Mark had been carefully brought up by a refined little
|
||
woman, his vicious tendencies had been negligible, and he was too
|
||
keen to graduate from the High School and make his start in life to
|
||
waste time in even the milder forms of dissipation. When he married he
|
||
adapted himself imperceptibly to the new social world he entered; if
|
||
not a Beau Brummel, nor an Admirable Crichton, he never would disgrace
|
||
his aristocratic wife; and, unlike Judge Stratton, he wore a silk hat
|
||
in New York.
|
||
His last remark apparently had been a mere vapour from his subconscious
|
||
mind, for he went on as soon as he had taken the edge from his
|
||
appetite, “Perhaps Ida Hook can be made into one. I’ve seen waitresses
|
||
and chambermaids metamorphosed by a million or two so that their own
|
||
husbands wouldn’t recognise them if they stayed away too long. But
|
||
it takes time, and Ida has an opinion of herself that would make an
|
||
English duchess feel like a slag dump. Say--do you know it was through
|
||
me Greg met her? It was that week you were out on the Kelley ranch.
|
||
I met two or three of the old crowd on the street and nothing would
|
||
do but that I should go to their picnic for the sake of old times.
|
||
Greg was in town and I persuaded him to come along. Didn’t want to,
|
||
but I talked him over. Guess there’s no escaping our fate. Possibly
|
||
I couldn’t have corralled him if it hadn’t been for reaction--he’d
|
||
been whooping it up on The Flat. Well, I wished afterward that I’d
|
||
left him to play the wheel and all the rest of it for a while longer.
|
||
Greg never loses his head--that is to say he never did till he met Ida
|
||
Hook. The sporting life never took a hold on him, for while he went
|
||
in for it with the deep deliberation that was born in him, it’s just
|
||
that deliberation that saves him from going too far. He cuts loose
|
||
the minute he figured out beforehand to cut loose, and all the king’s
|
||
horses--or all the other attractions--couldn’t make him put in another
|
||
second. A girl shot herself one night out at the Five Mile House
|
||
because he suddenly said good-bye and turned on his heel. She knew he
|
||
meant it. He never even turned round when he heard her drop----”
|
||
“What a brute!”
|
||
“Greg? Not he. I’ve known him to sit up all night with a sick dog----”
|
||
“I hate people that are kind to animals and cruel to one another.”
|
||
“Greg isn’t cruel. He said he was going and he went; that’s all. It’s
|
||
his way. Girls of that kind are trash, anyhow, and when a woman goes
|
||
into the sporting life she knows enough to take sporting chances.”
|
||
“You are as bad as he.”
|
||
Mark stared at her in open-eyed amazement. He never had seen her really
|
||
roused before. “Don’t you bother your dear little head,” he said
|
||
soothingly. “Angels like you don’t know anything about that sort of
|
||
life--and don’t need to.”
|
||
Ora’s anger vanished in laughter. “Well, suppose you give me a hint
|
||
about his wife. I really am interested, and delighted at the prospect
|
||
of being of some use in the world.”
|
||
“You’re all right! Ida--well, I guess you’ll do a lot for her, by just
|
||
having her round. She’s no fool--and she certainly is a looker. If you
|
||
tone her down and polish her up I’ll feel it’s a sort of favour to
|
||
myself. Greg’ll be one of the richest men in this country some day,--if
|
||
he has to walk over a few thousand fellow citizens to get there--and I
|
||
don’t want to see him queered by a woman. Seen that before.”
|
||
“I intend to do my best, but for her sake, not his----”
|
||
“Say!” It was patent that Mark had an inspiration. “Why not take Ida
|
||
with you to Europe? I don’t like the idea of a dainty little thing like
|
||
you” (Ora was five feet six) “travelling alone, and a husky girl like
|
||
Ida could take care of you while putting on a few coats of European
|
||
polish. Greg can afford it; he must have cleared a good many thousands
|
||
on his ranch during the last two years, besides what I’ve turned over
|
||
for him; and he can live here with me and get all the comforts of
|
||
home. I’ll let you off for six months. What do you say?”
|
||
Ora was looking at him with pink cheeks and bright eyes. “You are sure
|
||
you won’t mind?”
|
||
“I’ll miss you like fun, of course; especially when you look as pretty
|
||
as you do this minute, but I think it would be a good thing for you and
|
||
better for Ida--and I’ll fire this cook.”
|
||
“Will Mr. Compton give his consent?”
|
||
“No one on God’s earth would take chances on what Gregory Compton would
|
||
do until he had done it, but I don’t mind throwing a guess that he
|
||
could live without Ida for six months and not ask me to dry his tears.
|
||
And there isn’t a mean bone in his body.”
|
||
“It would interest me immensely to take Mrs. Compton abroad. Now hurry
|
||
if you expect to get a seat at one of the bridge tables. It is late----”
|
||
“I rather thought I’d like to stay and talk to you----”
|
||
“How polite of you! But I’m tired out and going straight to bed. So
|
||
toddle along.”
|
||
XI
|
||
“Tailored suits have to be made by a tailor, but I’d like first rate to
|
||
copy this one you call a little afternoon frock. It’s got the style all
|
||
right, and I could get some cheap nice-looking stuff.”
|
||
Ida was gloating over Ora’s limited but fashionable wardrobe, and
|
||
while she held the smart afternoon frock out at arm’s length, her eye
|
||
wandered to an evening gown of blue satin and chiffon that lay over the
|
||
back of a chair.
|
||
“Glory!” she sighed. “But I’d like to wear a real gown like that.
|
||
Low-neck, short sleeves! I’ve got the neck and arms too, you bet----”
|
||
“Why not copy it?” Ora was full of enthusiasm once more. “You can do it
|
||
here, and I have an excellent seamstress----”
|
||
“Where’d I wear a rig like that? Even if I made it in China silk and
|
||
Greg took me anywheres, I couldn’t. We don’t go in for real low necks
|
||
in our bunch.”
|
||
“But surely you’ll go to the Junior Prom?”
|
||
Ida opened her mouth as well as her eyes. “The Junior Prom? I never
|
||
thought of it. Of course I’d be asked, Greg being in the Junior Class
|
||
and all----”
|
||
“Naturally.”
|
||
Ida frowned. “Well, I ain’t going. I said I wouldn’t go anywheres--to
|
||
any swell blowouts, until I’m as big as anybody there.”
|
||
“But the School of Mines is composed of young men of all classes. Each
|
||
asks his friends. The Prom is anything but an exclusive affair. You go
|
||
out to the Garden dances on Friday nights in summer?”
|
||
“Oh, in that jam--and everybody wearing their suits, or any old
|
||
thing----”
|
||
“Well, I think you should go to the Prom. Mr. Compton is the star pupil
|
||
in the School of Mines. The professors talk of no one else. I rather
|
||
think your absence would cause comment.”
|
||
“Well--maybe I’ll go. I’d like to all right. But I can’t wear low-neck.
|
||
I guess you know it wouldn’t do.”
|
||
“No doubt you are right.” Ora made no attempt at conversion; it was
|
||
encouraging that Ida had certain inclinations toward good taste, even
|
||
if they were prompted by expediency.
|
||
“Jimminy, but your room’s pretty!” exclaimed Ida. “Mine’s pink--but
|
||
lawsy!”
|
||
She gazed about the room, which, although she never had seen the sea,
|
||
recalled descriptions of its shells washed by its foam. She knit her
|
||
brows. “I guess it takes experience, and seein’ things,” she muttered.
|
||
Her eyes travelled to the little bed in one corner. It would have
|
||
looked like a nun’s, so narrow and inconspicuous was it, had it not
|
||
been for its cover of pale pink satin under the same filmy lace.
|
||
“Sakes alive!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you sleep with your husband?”
|
||
Ora was angry to feel herself coloring. She answered haughtily, “We
|
||
have separate rooms. It is the custom--I mean--I have always seen----”
|
||
“I’ve heard it was the stunt among swells, but I don’t hold to it. It’s
|
||
only at night that you’ve really got a chance to know where a man is;
|
||
and the more rope you give him the more he’ll take. What’s to prevent
|
||
Mark slippin’ out when he thinks you’re asleep? Or coming home any old
|
||
time? Besides, some men talk in their sleep. That gives you another
|
||
hold. I’m always hoping Greg will, as he talks so little when he’s
|
||
awake. You bet your life he never gets a room to himself.”
|
||
“Poor Mr. Compton!” thought Ora. “I fancy he’ll expiate.” “Shall we go
|
||
downstairs?” she asked. “I got my portfolios out this morning.”
|
||
She tactfully had shown Ida her wardrobe first, and the guest descended
|
||
to the library in high good humour. For an hour they hung over the
|
||
contents of the Italian portfolios. Ida was enchanted with the castles
|
||
and ruins, listened eagerly to the legends, and was proud of her
|
||
own knowledge of the horrors enacted in the Coliseum. But over the
|
||
photographs of the masterpieces in the Pitti and the Uffizi she frankly
|
||
yawned.
|
||
“No more cross-eyed saints, and fat babies and shameless sporting women
|
||
in mine,” she announced. “Them virgins sitting on thrones, holding
|
||
four-year-olds trying to look like six months, make me tired.”
|
||
“Oh, well, I fancy you must see the old masters for the first time in
|
||
their proper setting--and wonderful colouring----” Ora wondered if the
|
||
masterpieces would appear somewhat overrated to herself if seen for the
|
||
first time in Butte. It certainly was interesting to watch the effect
|
||
of fixed standards--or superstitions--upon an untrained but remarkably
|
||
sharp mind.
|
||
“That Last Supper looks like they’d been eating the paint,” pursued Ida.
|
||
Ora laughed. “I shan’t show you any more pictures today. This furniture
|
||
is Italian--Florentine and Venetian. Let me tell you something about
|
||
it.”
|
||
“I’d like to see all your rooms.” Ida rose and stretched herself
|
||
luxuriously. Ora thought she looked like a beautiful Persian cat.
|
||
“Houses interest me mor’n pictures, although I’ll buy them too some
|
||
day. Not old masters, though. They’d give me the willys. This carved
|
||
oak with faded gilt panels is a dream!” she exclaimed with instant
|
||
appreciation. “I’d learn wood-carving if there was anyone in this
|
||
God-forsaken camp to teach it.”
|
||
Ora clapped her hands, and once more, to Ida’s startled eyes she looked
|
||
like a very young girl. “I studied several of the crafts when I was in
|
||
Germany,” she cried, “wood-carving, brass-hammering, enamelling. I’ll
|
||
set up a workshop--let me see, the attic would be the best place, and
|
||
the furnace warms it--and teach you, and work myself. It’s just what I
|
||
need. I wonder I never thought of it----”
|
||
“Need what?” interrupted Ida sharply.
|
||
“Oh, a relief from too much study. There’s nothing like a craft for
|
||
mental workers--I should have thought of it before,” she repeated.
|
||
“What do you say?”
|
||
“I’d like it first rate, and I guess you’ll find me quick enough with
|
||
my hands, whatever you think of my cocoanut.”
|
||
“I think very highly of your cocoanut. This is my little drawing-room.”
|
||
Ida stood on the threshold for a few moments without comment. She
|
||
had never cast a thought to her Puritan inheritance, but anger,
|
||
disapproval, possessed her. She hated the room, but had no reason to
|
||
give.
|
||
“You don’t like my favourite room?” asked Ora, who was watching her
|
||
curiously.
|
||
“Is it your favourite room?” She turned this over. “No, I guess I like
|
||
the heavy, solid, durable things best.” She struggled for her reasons.
|
||
“You get your money’s worth in them. This looks like the first Chinook
|
||
would blow it clear over into North Dakota, or as if you might come
|
||
in some morning and find a heap of dust where it had been the night
|
||
before--like a corpse when the air’s let in. I didn’t mind your bedroom
|
||
being dainty and looking like some sea shells I saw once in a picture
|
||
frame,--it looks all of a piece, too, you might say; but this--with
|
||
them queer thin faded out chairs and sofas--the colours on the wood
|
||
even, and them pictures over the doors and mantel look like they would
|
||
do the final disappearing act while you wait--well, there’s something
|
||
kinder mysterious--ghostly--it looks so stiff--and--at the same
|
||
time--so kinder immoral----”
|
||
“I wonder if what you are groping for is the atmosphere of the past,
|
||
which all old furniture must have, particularly if rearranged in
|
||
something like its original setting.” Ora was regarding her with a new
|
||
interest. “This furniture came out of a _hôtel_--what we would call a
|
||
residence--with a history--several histories, I should think--and I
|
||
fancy it was all frivolous, and wicked, and exciting----”
|
||
“I ain’t no spiritualist!” said Ida tartly. “Is that what you’re
|
||
driving at?”
|
||
“I don’t know that I was thinking of occultism, even,” said Ora
|
||
lightly. “But it is interesting to find these old things have
|
||
atmosphere for you as well as for me----”
|
||
“Why is it your favourite room? Because it has ‘atmosphere’?”
|
||
“I don’t know. I doubt if I have ever given the matter a thought.”
|
||
“So this is your favourite room.” Ida turned her back on it. “H’m.
|
||
Well, maybe I’ll understand some things better one of these days than
|
||
I do now. Perhaps,” with one of her uncanny dashes of intuition, “I’ll
|
||
understand it when I do you.”
|
||
“Let us go up to the attic and look it over. I’ll have the table and
|
||
benches made tomorrow.” Something was moving toward expression in her
|
||
own mind, but she flung it aside and ran up the stair followed by Ida,
|
||
who dismissed the subject as promptly.
|
||
XII
|
||
There had been a good deal of haggling over the lease of the Oro Fino
|
||
Primo mine, the engineers demanding a three years’ lease and bond,
|
||
proposing to purchase it at the end of that period for fifty thousand
|
||
dollars. Nor were they willing to pay more than ten per cent. in
|
||
royalty, displaying the assay report on the ore and arguing that after
|
||
the necessary outlay on development work, the ore body might be too
|
||
small to repay them.
|
||
Mark, however, was determined not to close with them until he had
|
||
visited the claim with Gregory Compton, and this proved to be
|
||
impossible for several weeks. The engineers, unable to proceed, had
|
||
dismissed their men. They threatened to withdraw their offer and look
|
||
for another abandoned property. Mark told them to go ahead, and they
|
||
remained in Butte.
|
||
In the course of a month Mark and Gregory were both free on a Sunday.
|
||
They took a train for Pony, hired a rig and drove over to the Stratton
|
||
claim, dignified by the name of mine.
|
||
The claim was on a small tableland between Gregory’s own hill, which
|
||
terminated just beyond the borders of his ranch, and another slope
|
||
covered with pines and firs. The engineers had put up a windlass,
|
||
retimbered the shaft, sunk it twenty feet lower, and added a pile of
|
||
dirty looking ore to the original half-obliterated heap about the
|
||
collar of the shaft.
|
||
Gregory picked up half a dozen pieces of various sizes and examined
|
||
them. “Their assay was about right, I should think,” he said. “Looks
|
||
like good low grade ore, but not too good. It will do no harm to assay
|
||
it myself, however,” and he dropped the sample into the pocket of
|
||
his coat. Suddenly he gave a startled exclamation, and Mark saw his
|
||
nostrils dilate, his nose almost point, as he darted forward and kicked
|
||
aside a heap of loosely piled quartz. Then he knelt down and lifted
|
||
out several lumps of greyish-black ore.
|
||
“What is it?” asked Mark curiously, and feeling something of the
|
||
excitement of the hunter whose gun is trained on a bear. “D’you mean
|
||
they’ve found copper glance?”
|
||
“At a depth of sixty feet? Not exactly. This is a basic igneous rock
|
||
called pyroxenite, that may not be rich in gold but is more than likely
|
||
to be--particularly as our friends have hidden it so carefully and said
|
||
nothing about it. It may assay anywhere from ten dollars a ton to five
|
||
hundred. I’m going down.”
|
||
The shaft was inclined, four by eight, and timbered with lagging.
|
||
Gregory lit the candle he had brought and descended the ladder. He
|
||
remained below about ten minutes; when he returned to the surface he
|
||
was excited and triumphant.
|
||
“They’ve begun to drift on the vein,” he announced. “They’ve gone about
|
||
three feet--it must have been then they learned the history of the
|
||
claim. It’s pyroxenite all right, every inch of it.”
|
||
“Well, damn them!” said Mark.
|
||
“They can’t plead that they didn’t recognise the ore, uncommon as it
|
||
is, because they began to drift the moment they struck the vein. It
|
||
dips toward the ranch,” he added abruptly.
|
||
Mark whistled. “It’s pretty close. That would be a kettle of fish--if
|
||
it apexed on your land! Lawsuit. Friendship of a lifetime broken. The
|
||
beautiful Mrs. Mark Blake brings suit against the now famous Gregory
|
||
Compton----”
|
||
“Oh, nonsense!” said Gregory shortly. But he was disturbed nevertheless.
|
||
“But there’s no nonsense in the idea that your own ore bodies may be
|
||
just over the border. Why don’t you sink a shaft, just for nuts.”
|
||
Gregory, who was still excited, felt an impulse to confide his
|
||
discovery to his friend. But his natural secretiveness overcame him and
|
||
he turned abruptly away. “When I have finished at the School,” he said,
|
||
“no doubt I’ll begin gophering again, but not before. What are you
|
||
going to do about this? Let them have it?”
|
||
“I’ll let them have a piece of my mind first. What do you
|
||
advise?--that I work the mine, myself? I could easily form a company if
|
||
the ore is as rich as you think.”
|
||
“I wouldn’t take the chances. Lease the claim to them for a year.
|
||
They’ll take it for that time with all this ore in sight. If they’ve
|
||
hit a large chamber they’ll soon be netting several thousand dollars a
|
||
day. If it’s only a pocket, let them find it out. At the end of a year
|
||
you’ll know a good deal more about the mine than you do now. But keep
|
||
an eye on them so that they don’t gouge, and make them pay you twenty
|
||
per cent. royalty.”
|
||
“They’ll pay it through the nose,” said Mark emphatically.
|
||
Gregory laughed. “You feel as virtuously indignant as if you had never
|
||
tried to do anybody yourself. It’s do or be done out West as well as
|
||
back East, and precious few mines have a clean history. Marcus Daly
|
||
never would have got the best part of Butte Hill if he hadn’t kept his
|
||
mouth shut.”
|
||
“It isn’t that I’m so virtuous,” said Mark ingenuously, “but I don’t
|
||
like the idea that anybody so nearly got the best of me. And just look
|
||
at the way they covered it up.”
|
||
Gregory had kicked aside the greater part of a pile of grey ore, and
|
||
revealed quite a hillock of the pyroxenite. He put several pieces in
|
||
his pocket, discarding the first specimens. “I’ll get to work on this
|
||
tonight,” he said, “and let you know first thing in the morning. But
|
||
I’m willing to wager that it runs from sixty to a hundred dollars a
|
||
ton.”
|
||
“And not a fleck of gold to be seen!” Mark, who, like all intelligent
|
||
men of mining localities, had some knowledge of ores, examined the dark
|
||
rock attentively. “They’re some geologists,” he added with unwilling
|
||
admiration. “This would fool any ordinary mining engineer. Say!” he
|
||
cried, “I’ll not tell Ora until she’s ready to leave--she’s figuring on
|
||
going to Europe in the fall. It will be the surprise of her life, for
|
||
I led her to think she’d get only a hundred or so a month. Don’t say a
|
||
word about it to Ida.”
|
||
Gregory turned away to hide a curl of his lip. “I suppose we’d better
|
||
go over and see Oakley, as we’re so close,” he said. “He’ll probably
|
||
talk for an hour on his hobby, but any knowledge comes in useful to a
|
||
lawyer.”
|
||
“What’s he done.”
|
||
“He figured out that Iowa and the Dakotas and Kansas were likely to
|
||
have a drought next year, so he will sow about five hundred acres with
|
||
flax in May. He has already put in about three hundred acres of winter
|
||
wheat. The bottoms are reserved for alfalfa. He raises the capital and
|
||
gets half profits. If it turns out as he expects he’ll have something
|
||
at the end of a year to live on besides enthusiasm for intensive
|
||
farming.”
|
||
* * * * *
|
||
They were driving toward Pony two hours later when Gregory said
|
||
abruptly, “I’m glad that your wife and mine have taken to each other.
|
||
It is a great thing for Ida. The improvement is wonderful.” He forebore
|
||
to add, even to the man who had known his wife since childhood, “I
|
||
don’t see what Mrs. Blake gets out it,” but possibly the irrepressible
|
||
thought flew into Mark’s mind, for he replied promptly:
|
||
“It’s great for Ora. She’s tired of everybody else here; tired of so
|
||
much reading too. I’ve seen that for some time, though I haven’t let
|
||
on. A new interest was just what she wanted. Every clever woman has
|
||
a touch of the school ma’am in her, and no one can deny that Ida’s
|
||
refreshing. To Ora she’s almost a novelty. I think she rather hates to
|
||
make her over, but she’s working on her as hard as I work on a case.
|
||
Ora’s the thorough sort. What she does is done with all her might and
|
||
main. Otherwise she don’t do it at all. She’s equally accomplished at
|
||
that!”
|
||
He decided that this was the propitious moment; Gregory was in an
|
||
uncommonly melting mood, for him. “Say!” he continued, “Ora and I have
|
||
put up a little job on you. I’ve told her to take her new money and go
|
||
to Europe for six months or so--By James, she shall go, even if this
|
||
thing hangs fire and I have to sell some stock. It’s over six years
|
||
since she’s seen Europe, and I guess she pines for it all right. Well,
|
||
she wants to take Ida.”
|
||
Gregory demanded with unexpected promptness, “How much would it cost?”
|
||
“Oh, about a hundred to New York and a hundred and fifty over,” said
|
||
Mark vaguely. “Of course when two are together it costs less. And in
|
||
Europe distances are short. Ora says she shall go to _pensions_ instead
|
||
of hotels, if only because they would be two young women alone; and
|
||
they cost much less. They can also travel second-class, and third in
|
||
Germany and Switzerland. Ora says she and her friends always did it in
|
||
summer because it was cooler and more interesting. She’s sent for a lot
|
||
of Baedekers, is going to make a close estimate, then double it.”
|
||
“One of my aunts died the other day and left me a thousand dollars; she
|
||
had no family. Ida can have it. Of course I could send her more if she
|
||
needed it, but she’s clever with money.”
|
||
“That will do it.” (He knew that if it did not Ora, who would pay the
|
||
bills, would manage to hoodwink Ida.) “And you must live with me. It’ll
|
||
be fine. Bachelor’s Hall. We’ll do as we damn please.”
|
||
Gregory shook hands with him, his strong hard face illuminated with
|
||
the infrequent smile that gave it something of a sweet woman’s charm.
|
||
“Thanks, old man,” he said fervently. “Sounds good!”
|
||
XIII
|
||
Several weeks passed before Ora sent for Miss Ruby Miller. She was
|
||
busier during those weeks than she had been for many months. Ida came
|
||
every other day at one o’clock and remained until five. They carved
|
||
wood in the attic, and looked at pictures or read in the library during
|
||
the hour and a half that included tea. Ida confessed that during the
|
||
latter interval she was so bored sometimes she could scream, but added
|
||
that she would stick it out if she yawned every tooth in her head
|
||
loose. One thing that never bored her was the picture of Ora--her
|
||
working blouse changed for a dainty house gown--presiding at the
|
||
tea-table. She studied every detail, every gesture; she even cultivated
|
||
a taste for tea, which heretofore she had regarded as fit for invalids
|
||
only, like jellies and cup-custard.
|
||
Ora’s alternate days and many of her evenings were filled with social
|
||
duties. Butte was indulging in one of its hurricanes of festivity.
|
||
Mrs. O’Hagan, who lived in the largest and finest house on the West
|
||
Side, gave a series of dinner dances. Mrs. Burke, who owned the big
|
||
ugly red house of appalling architecture built by Judge Stratton in the
|
||
eighties, gave several entertainments in honour of two young visitors
|
||
from Denver. Mrs. Maginnis, who lived in another palatial residence
|
||
far west and far from the old Stratton house--which in its day had
|
||
expressed the extreme limit of the city, as of fashion--gave a ball as
|
||
brilliant as anything Ora had seen in a distant hemisphere. Flowers
|
||
may be scarce in Butte, but flowers and palms may be imported by the
|
||
carload from Helena, and the large rooms looked like an oasis in the
|
||
grey desert of Butte. Every woman wore a ball gown made by some one of
|
||
the great reiterative masters, and there were no wall flowers; for,
|
||
although the tango had not yet set the whole world dancing, the women
|
||
of Montana never had interpreted grey hairs as a signal to retire.
|
||
It was on the day after this ball that Ora had telephoned to Miss
|
||
Miller. “Can you give me an hour or two tomorrow?” she asked.
|
||
“Sure. Can I come early? I’ve got fourteen heads to dress for the
|
||
Cameron ball, and most of them want a facial too?”
|
||
“A what?”
|
||
“Face massage, and touchin’ up generally.”
|
||
“Oh.”
|
||
“It’s fine. Makes you feel as good as you look. What did you want me to
|
||
do?”
|
||
“Ob, shampoo my hair. I want to consult you about it, too--and
|
||
manicure.”
|
||
“Well, I’ll bring the creams along, and if you want a massage I’ll be
|
||
ready.”
|
||
Ora had succeeded in making Miss Miller propose what she had quite made
|
||
up her mind to try, and she rang off with a smile. The evening before
|
||
she had thought herself the plainest woman at the party, and the effect
|
||
of this discouraging conclusion had been to kill her animation and
|
||
sag her shoulders until she knew she must look as dowdy as she felt.
|
||
For the first time she realised how a blighted vanity may demoralise
|
||
the proudest intellect. It was time to get a move on, as her new but
|
||
rapidly developing friend would put it.
|
||
Ora was very proud of her work. She gave Professor Whalen due credit,
|
||
and knew that Ida toiled at her exercises, but doubted if the
|
||
uninspiring pedant would have been retained had it not been for the
|
||
sense of emulation, slightly tinctured by jealousy, she managed to
|
||
rouse in her new boon companion when they were together. But Ida was
|
||
now exercising something of her latent force of character, determined
|
||
to make the most of advantages for which she knew many a sudden-rich
|
||
woman would “give her eye teeth.” She would polish up “good and plenty”
|
||
before her husband made his strike; and waste no precious time on the
|
||
inside of her skull when she had the cash to spend on its outside.
|
||
After the first week she dropped no more g’s, her grammar rapidly
|
||
improved, and although she never would be a stylist, nor altogether
|
||
forswear slang, not only because the ready-made phrase appealed to her
|
||
unliterary mind, but because its use was ingrained, she reserved it
|
||
more and more for those that best could appreciate it. As it annoyed
|
||
Professor Whalen excessively, she went afield for new phrases “for the
|
||
fun of seeing him wriggle.”
|
||
On the other hand, whenever she felt in the mood, she gazed at him with
|
||
penitent languid eyes, promised never to use slang again, and amused
|
||
herself racking other nerves. She knew just how far to go and “turned
|
||
him off,” or “switched him back on to the track” before any real harm
|
||
was done. Some day she might let him make a scene just for the fun of
|
||
the thing, but not until she was “good and ready.”
|
||
Her feeling for Ora was more difficult to define. Sometimes she almost
|
||
loved her, not only inspired by gratitude, but because Ora’s personal
|
||
magnetism was intensified by every charm of refinement, vivacity,
|
||
mental development, as well as by a broad outlook on life and a
|
||
sweetness of manner which never infuriated her by becoming consciously
|
||
gracious. At other times she hated her, for she knew that no such
|
||
combination ever could be hers. Ora was a patrician born of patricians.
|
||
She might go to the devil, preside over one of the resorts down on
|
||
The Flat, take to drink and every evil way, and still would she be
|
||
patrician. Herself might step into millions and carry her unsullied
|
||
virtue to her grave and she never would be the “real thing.” For the
|
||
first time she understood that being “a lady” had little to do with
|
||
morals or behaviour. Nothing irritates the complacent American more
|
||
than the sudden appreciation of this fact.
|
||
“But I guess I’ll be as good as some others,” Ida consoled herself.
|
||
“After all, I don’t see so many Ora Blakes lying round loose. People
|
||
don’t bother much these days if your clothes make their mouth water and
|
||
your grammar don’t queer you.”
|
||
Gregory, when he had time to think about it--he read even at the
|
||
breakfast and dinner-table, and had an assay plant in the cellar--was
|
||
charmed with her improvement, and told her abruptly one day that if
|
||
she kept faithfully to her tasks until November he would give her the
|
||
thousand dollars he had received under the will of his aunt. “And you
|
||
can do what you like with it,” he added. “I shan’t ask you. That’s the
|
||
way I enjoyed money when I was a kid, and I guess women are much the
|
||
same.”
|
||
“A thousand dollars!” Ida was rigid, her mouth open. “Geewhil--I beg
|
||
pardon--My! But you are good!” She paused to rearrange her thoughts,
|
||
which were in danger of flying off into language her husband was paying
|
||
to remodel. “Can I really do anything with it I like?”
|
||
“You can.” He smiled at her bright wide-open eyes and flaming cheeks.
|
||
“I ain’t--haven’t said anything about it as I didn’t think it would be
|
||
any sort of use, but Ora is going to Europe in the fall, and she told
|
||
me Mark was going to try to persuade you to let me go with her. Now I
|
||
can go on my thousand dollars, if you don’t mind. Mark wants you to
|
||
stay with him.”
|
||
“He spoke to me about it--I had forgotten. There couldn’t be a better
|
||
arrangement. This is the time for you to go to Europe--while your mind
|
||
is still plastic.”
|
||
“You don’t seem to mind my going a little bit.” Rapture gave place to
|
||
suspicion. Ida was not born with faith in man.
|
||
“My dear child! What good am I to you now? You might be keeping house
|
||
for a deaf mute. All I need is the right kind of food and a comfortable
|
||
bed. I’ll get both at Mark’s. Next year you would see even less of
|
||
me than you do now. We get our last and most practical drilling in
|
||
ore-dressing, metallurgy, power-utilisation, and geology. We shall
|
||
be off half the time on geological expeditions, visits to mines in
|
||
other parts of the state, smelters, the most up-to-date of the cyanide
|
||
mills. So you see how much I shall be at home. Go to Europe and enjoy
|
||
yourself.”
|
||
“All right. I’ll go. You bet. And I’ll not miss a trick. There’ll never
|
||
be a thousand dollars better spent.”
|
||
XIV
|
||
“Now I’ve got you where I want you, and I’m goin’ to talk--goin’ to say
|
||
something I’ve been dyin’ to say for two or three years.”
|
||
Ora’s head was in the wash-basin. Miss Miller was leisurely spraying
|
||
out the lime juice with which she had drenched her hair. Ora gasped,
|
||
then gurgled something unintelligible, which Miss Ruby interpreted
|
||
as encouragement to proceed. Mrs. Blake’s manner ever since the
|
||
hairdresser’s arrival had been uncommonly winning, with something
|
||
half-appealing, half-confiding that flew straight not only to that
|
||
experienced young woman’s sympathies but to her professional instinct.
|
||
“It’s this,” she continued. “You need a thorough overhauling. In these
|
||
days, particularly in this altitude, women take care of themselves as
|
||
they go along, but you don’t. You’ve lost your complexion ridin’ and
|
||
walkin’ for hours without a veil, sometimes without a hat, and you with
|
||
a delicate skin like a baby’s and not even using creams. I heard a man
|
||
say only last Sunday--I was givin’ his wife a facial and he was sittin’
|
||
round--that it was an awful pity you had gone off so, as you were the
|
||
prettiest thing he ever laid eyes on when you came back after your pa’s
|
||
death, and if Mark--Mr. Blake--hadn’t snapped you up before any other
|
||
young man got a look at you you’d have had a dozen chances, for all
|
||
you’ve got such a reputation for brains. ‘A man can stand brains in a
|
||
white lily of a girl,’ says he, ‘but when she gets older she’s either
|
||
got to keep her complexion or cut out the brains, and Ora Blake’s done
|
||
neither’--Say if you squirm like that you’ll get your mouth and eyes
|
||
full of lemon. His wife said she didn’t believe men cared for them thin
|
||
white women anyway--she’s bustin’ with health herself--and he gave a
|
||
grunt that means a lot to a girl who knows men like I do. You never did
|
||
make anything of yourself and you’ve let yourself go these last two or
|
||
three years something shameful. If you’d take yourself in hand, get on
|
||
to yourself once for all, you’d have people twistin’ their necks off to
|
||
look at you and callin’ you a Mariposa lily, or a Princess Pine, or a
|
||
White Gladiolus and other poetry names like that. And you could get the
|
||
reputation of a beauty all right. It makes me sick.”
|
||
“Could you make me into a beauty?” Ora’s voice was remarkably languid
|
||
considering the flaming hue of her face, which, however, may have been
|
||
due to its prolonged sojourn in the wash-basin. Miss Miller had wrung
|
||
her hair out and was rubbing it vigorously.
|
||
“Couldn’t I _just_?”
|
||
As Mrs. Blake maintained a dignified silence, Miss Ruby proceeded to
|
||
develop her theme. “Now, your hair, for instance. That’s the reason
|
||
I used lemon today. You’ve been usin’ soap, and, what with this dry
|
||
climate, and no care, it’s as harsh and broken as if you’d been usin’
|
||
soda on it every day. It’s lemon and hot water for you, first, last
|
||
and always, and eggs after a journey. It needs a couple of months of
|
||
hand-massage every other day right now; after that it will be up to
|
||
you. Brush it night and morning and use a tonic twice a year.”
|
||
She paused and Ora waited with eyes closed to conceal her impatience.
|
||
Finally she opened them irresistibly and met Miss Ruby’s in the mirror.
|
||
They, too, looked embarrassed. Ora’s smile was spontaneous and sweet
|
||
and not too frequent. It seldom failed to melt reserve and inspire
|
||
confidence. She played this card without delay.
|
||
“Why don’t you go on?” she asked. “All that is most interesting and
|
||
valuable. I shall remember every word of it.”
|
||
“Well--I was afraid that what I want to say most might sound as if I
|
||
was drummin’ up trade, and the Lord knows I’ve got more to do than I
|
||
could manage if there was ten days in every week. I turned down two
|
||
ladies today to come here. I never shampoo the day of a ball.”
|
||
“My dear Miss Miller! You are an artist, and like all artists, you
|
||
not only aim at perfection yourself but your eyes and fingers ache
|
||
at imperfection. I suppose an author rewrites sentences as he reads
|
||
them, and painters must long to repaint every picture they see. As
|
||
for you--we are your page and canvas, and naturally we have the good
|
||
fortune to interest you.”
|
||
“That’s it!” cried Miss Ruby, glowing. “That’s the size of it, only I
|
||
couldn’t ever say it like that. Well, now, if you want this skin to
|
||
look like a complexion and not like a hide, I’ve got to give you a
|
||
massage every third day for quite a while. It not only needs creams and
|
||
cold applications--hot only once in a while--but an awful lot of hand
|
||
massage. It’s all run down and needs stimulating the worst way. Another
|
||
year and you’d be havin’ lines. You can’t leave yourself to nature up
|
||
here. She’s in too great a hurry to take back what she gave. And you
|
||
must cut out hot breads and trash and wear a veil when you go out in
|
||
the sun and wind. And you go to Boulder Springs once a week and take a
|
||
vapour bath.”
|
||
“But I’ll always look washed-out.”
|
||
“Not if you look fresh, and wear colours that suit you.”
|
||
“And I never was called a beauty. That man, whoever he was, merely
|
||
remembered the usual prettiness of youth. Every young girl is pretty
|
||
unless she is ugly.”
|
||
“Well, I guess you didn’t take enough pains to make people think you
|
||
were a beauty. Some--Ida Compton, for instance--don’t need to do
|
||
anything but just show themselves. Any fool--particularly a man--can
|
||
see black hair and red and white skin, and meltin’ eyes, and lashes
|
||
a yard long, and a dashin’ figure. But odd and refined types like
|
||
you--well, you’ve got to help it out.”
|
||
“How very interesting! Do you mean I must go about telling people
|
||
that I am really beautiful, if they will only look at me long enough?
|
||
Or--possibly--do you mean that I should make up?”
|
||
“I don’t mean either, ’though in a way I mean both. In the first place
|
||
you’ve got to make the most of your points. You’re not a red blonde
|
||
or a gold blonde, but what the French call sendray; in plain English,
|
||
you’ve got ash-coloured hair. Now, that makes the blondest kind of
|
||
blonde, but at the same time it’s not so common, and nature has to give
|
||
it to you. Art can’t. What you want to do is to let people see that
|
||
your colouring is so rare that you can’t get enough of it yourself,
|
||
and by and by people will think they can’t either. You’ve been wearin’
|
||
all this hair twisted into a hard knot down on your neck. That don’t
|
||
show off the hair and don’t suit your face, which is kinder square. I’m
|
||
goin’ to pull it soft about your face and ears and then coil it softly
|
||
on top of your head. That’ll give length to your face, and look as if
|
||
you was proud of your hair--which you will be in a month or two. You
|
||
mustn’t pay too much attention to the style of the moment. You’re the
|
||
sort to have a style of your own and stick to it.”
|
||
“I’m in your hands,” murmured Ora. “What next?”
|
||
“Did you really lose interest in yourself?” asked Miss Miller
|
||
curiously, and with the fine freedom of the West from class restraint.
|
||
“Or didn’t you ever have any?”
|
||
“A little of both. When I was a girl I was a frightful pedant--and--Oh,
|
||
well--Butte is not Europe, and I took refuge more than ever in books,
|
||
particularly as I could have nothing of the other arts. You know the
|
||
resources of Butte!”
|
||
“I’m glad you’re goin’ to Europe again, where I guess all kinds of
|
||
variety are on tap.--Say, perhaps you’ll find out all the new kinks for
|
||
the complexion in Paris, and tell me when you come back.”
|
||
“I will indeed!”
|
||
“I don’t hold to rippin’ the skin off, or hoistin’ it up,” said Miss
|
||
Miller firmly. “All any skin needs is steady treatment, and constant
|
||
care--constant, mind you, and never forget it. Now there’s your
|
||
profile. It’s grand. The way I’m goin’ to fix your hair’ll show it off,
|
||
and don’t you let it get scooped round the eyes, like so many women do.
|
||
Massage’ll prevent that. I wish your eyebrows and lashes was black,
|
||
like so many heroines in novels has. The contrast would be fine. But
|
||
brown’ll do, and I guess the natural is your lay. Luckily them black
|
||
grey eyes is a high note, and when you get your lips real red, you’ll
|
||
have all the colour your style can carry. The gleamin’ white skin’ll do
|
||
the rest.”
|
||
“How am I to get red lips, and what’s to make my skin gleam?”
|
||
“You’re anæmic. You go to a doctor and get a tonic right off. When I
|
||
get through with your complexion it’ll gleam all right. No powder for
|
||
you. It improves most women, but you want high lights. I don’t mean
|
||
shine when I say gleam, either. I mean that you’ve got the kind of skin
|
||
that when the tan’s off and it’s toned up and is in perfect condition
|
||
(you’ve got to be that inside, too), sheds a sort of white light. It’s
|
||
the rarest kind, and I guess it does the most damage.”
|
||
“And what good is all this beautifying to do me? And why make me
|
||
dangerous? Surely you are not counselling that I begin a predatory raid
|
||
on other women’s husbands, or even on the ‘brownies’?”
|
||
“Well, I guess not. I don’t approve of married women lettin’ men make
|
||
love to them, but I do believe in a woman makin’ the most of herself
|
||
and gettin’ all the admiration that’s comin’ to her. If you can be a
|
||
beauty, for the Lord Almighty’s sake be one. Believe me, it’ll make
|
||
life seem as if it had a lot more to it.”
|
||
“I shouldn’t wonder!”
|
||
“And you go in right off for deep breathin’ and Swedish exercises
|
||
night and mornin’. It’s the style to be thin, but you want to develop
|
||
yourself more. And they keep you limber--don’t forget that. When a
|
||
woman stiffens up she’s done for. Might as well get fat round her
|
||
waist. Now shut your eyes, I’m goin’ to massage.”
|
||
XV
|
||
“I wonder!” thought Ora, “I wonder!”
|
||
It was some four months after her first séance with Miss Ruby Miller.
|
||
There was no question of the improvement in her looks, owing, perhaps,
|
||
as much to a new self-confidence as to the becoming arrangement of
|
||
her hair and the improved tint and texture of her skin. The tonic and
|
||
a less reckless diet had also done their work; her eyes were even
|
||
brighter, her lips pink. Moreover, it was patent that the sudden
|
||
reformation was as obvious to Butte as to herself. Women confessed to a
|
||
previous fear that the “altitude had got on her nerves or something”;
|
||
as for the men, they may or may not have observed the more direct
|
||
results of Miss Miller’s manipulations, but it was not open to doubt
|
||
that her new interest in herself had revived her magnetism and possibly
|
||
doubled it.
|
||
Ora turned from the mirror in her bedroom, where she had been regarding
|
||
her convalescing beauty with a puzzled frown, and stared down at the
|
||
rough red dirt of her half-finished street--she lived far to the west.
|
||
Her eyes travelled up to the rough elevation upon which stood the
|
||
School of Mines in its lonely splendour, then down to the rough and
|
||
dreary Flat. It stretched far to the south, a hideous expanse, with its
|
||
dusty cemetery, its uninviting but not neglected road houses, its wide
|
||
section given over to humble dwellings, with here and there a house of
|
||
more pretensions, but little more beauty. It was in one of these last,
|
||
no doubt, that her father had kept his mistress, whose children, she
|
||
was vaguely aware, attended the public schools under his name. These
|
||
houses, large and small, were crowded together as if pathetically
|
||
conscious that the human element must be their all, in that sandy,
|
||
treeless, greenless waste.
|
||
There was something pathetic, altogether, thought Ora, in the bright
|
||
eagerness with which even the wealthy class made the most of their
|
||
little all. They were so proud of Columbia Gardens, a happy-go-lucky
|
||
jumble of architectures and a few young trees, a fine conservatory and
|
||
obese pansies on green checkers of lawn; they patronised its Casino so
|
||
conscientiously on Friday nights when the weather would permit. During
|
||
the winter, they skated on their shingled puddle down on The Flat as
|
||
merrily and thankfully as though it were the West End of London or
|
||
one of the beautiful lakes in one of the beautiful German “gartens.”
|
||
They motored about the hideous environs, and hung out of the car to
|
||
emphasise their rapture at the lonely tree or patch of timid verdure;
|
||
they entertained royally in their little Club House, out in another
|
||
desolate waste, or played golf without envy or malice. In short they
|
||
resolutely made the most of Butte when they were in it; they patted
|
||
Butte and themselves on the back daily; they loved it and they were
|
||
loyal to it and they got out of it as often as they possibly could.
|
||
“And I!” thought Ora, with a sense of panic. “I, who will probably get
|
||
away every five years or so--what am I waking up for--to what end? I
|
||
wonder!”
|
||
She walked slowly downstairs and, avoiding the little French
|
||
drawing-room, went into the library and sat down among her books.
|
||
Sash curtains of a pale canary colour shut out the rough vacant lots
|
||
and ugly dwellings above her home, and cast a mellow glow over the
|
||
brown walls and rows of calf-bound books. Judge Stratton had read
|
||
in four modern languages and two dead ones. The love of reading, of
|
||
long evenings alone in his deserted “mansion,” had been as striking
|
||
a characteristic of his many-sided ego as his contempt for moral
|
||
standards. Ora, who had grown into a slow but fairly thorough knowledge
|
||
of her father’s life and character, permitted her thoughts to flow
|
||
freely this afternoon and to speculate upon what her life might have
|
||
been had Judge Stratton been as upright as he was intellectually
|
||
gifted; if her mother had possessed the brains or charm to keep him
|
||
ensnared; if she herself had been left, an orphan at twenty, with the
|
||
fortune she inevitably would have inherited had her father behaved
|
||
himself--instead of finding herself penniless, ignorant of all
|
||
practical knowledge, a querulous invalid on her hands, her only suitor
|
||
the “hustling” son of her mother’s old seamstress.
|
||
Ora admitted no disloyalty to Mark as she put these questions for
|
||
the first time squarely to herself. She intended to continue to treat
|
||
him with unswerving friendship, to give him all the assistance in her
|
||
power, as long as she lived. And, as husbands went, she made no doubt
|
||
that he was one to thank her grudging providence for. But that she
|
||
would have considered him for a moment had she inherited the fortune
|
||
her father had made and dissipated was as likely as that she would have
|
||
elected to live her life in Butte.
|
||
She knew Mark’s ambitions. Washington was his goal, and he was by no
|
||
means averse from being governor of his state meanwhile. Nor would he
|
||
have been a genuine American boy, born in the traditional log cabin--it
|
||
had been a log cabin as a matter of fact--if he had not cherished
|
||
secret designs on the White House. In all this, did it prove to be more
|
||
or less, she could be of incalculable assistance to him. And she was
|
||
the more determined to render this assistance because she had accepted
|
||
his bounty and was unable to love him.
|
||
She concluded with some cynicism that the account would be squared,
|
||
being by no means blind to what she had done for him already in the
|
||
way of social position and prestige; still, it was not only his right,
|
||
but a penance demanded by her self-respect. She was living the most
|
||
unidealistic life possible to a woman of her pride and temperament, but
|
||
she would redeem it as far as lay in her power.
|
||
She moved impatiently, her brows puzzled again, and something like
|
||
fear in her heart. What did this slow awakening portend? Why had she
|
||
instinctively held it back with all her strength, quite successfully
|
||
until her new-born vanity, with its infinite suggestions, had quickened
|
||
it suddenly into imperious expression?
|
||
Certainly she was conscious of no desire for a more idealistic union
|
||
with another man. If she had inherited a fortune, she would have
|
||
married no one; not then, at all events; nothing had been further from
|
||
her desire. She would have lived in Europe and travelled in many lands.
|
||
Beyond a doubt her hunger for the knowledge that lies in books would
|
||
have been satiated long since, never would have assumed a discrepant
|
||
importance. She would be uniformly developed, and she would have met
|
||
many men. With the double passport of birth and wealth, added to the
|
||
fine manner she owed to her Southern mother, her natural vivacity and
|
||
magnetism, and a physical endowment that she now knew could have been
|
||
trained into positive beauty, she would have had her pick of men. And
|
||
when a woman may choose of the best, with ample time at her disposal,
|
||
it was incredible that the true mate, the essential companion, should
|
||
not be found before it was too late. Most marriages are makeshifts; but
|
||
for the fortunate few, with the intelligence to wait, and the developed
|
||
instinct to respond, there was always the possibility of the perfect
|
||
union.
|
||
Ora made a wry face at this last collocation. She had no yearning for
|
||
the “perfect union.” Matrimony had been too unutterably distasteful.
|
||
She turned hastily from the subject and recalled her father’s
|
||
impassioned desire that she should make the West her home, her career,
|
||
marry a Western man, give him and her state the benefit of her
|
||
endowments and accomplishments. Possibly, surfeited with Europe, she
|
||
would have returned to Montana to identify herself with its progress,
|
||
whether she married or not. She was artistic by temperament and
|
||
training, and correspondingly fastidious; she cordially detested all
|
||
careers pursued by women outside those that were the natural evolution
|
||
of an artistic gift. But she could have built herself an immense and
|
||
splendid house, filled it with the most exquisite treasures American
|
||
money could coax from the needy aristocracy of Europe, and have a
|
||
famous salon; invite the pick of the artistic, literary, musical,
|
||
and political world to visit her for weeks or months at a time,
|
||
house parties of a hundred or more, and so make her state famous for
|
||
something besides metals, intensive farming, and political corruption.
|
||
No one could deny that the state would benefit exceedingly.
|
||
Conceivably, in time she would take a husband, assuredly one of high
|
||
ambitions and abilities, one whose fortunes probably would take him to
|
||
Washington.
|
||
This brought her back to Mark, and she laughed aloud. She had been
|
||
romancing wildly; of late she had grudgingly admitted that nature may
|
||
have composed her to be romantic after she had recovered from the
|
||
intellectual obsession; and the circle had brought her round to her
|
||
husband! He was “forging ahead” with extraordinary rapidity. She made
|
||
no doubt that he would be a millionaire within the ten years’ limit
|
||
he had set himself. Nor would he rely alone upon his legal equipment
|
||
and the many opportunities to exercise it when a man was “on the job
|
||
all the time”; he watched the development of Montana’s every industry,
|
||
new and established. He “bought in on the ground floor,” gambled
|
||
discreetly in copper, owned shares in several new and promising mines,
|
||
and property on the most picturesquely situated of the new lakes
|
||
constructed for power supply. He invested what he could afford, and
|
||
with the precision of the man on the spot. Yes, he would be one of
|
||
the Western millionaires, even if not one of the inordinate ones, and
|
||
before his ten years had passed, if no untoward event occurred.
|
||
And it was on the cards that she would have her own fortune before
|
||
long. She knew that Mark (who had her power of attorney) had made
|
||
better terms with the engineers than he had anticipated, and he dropped
|
||
mysterious hints which, knowing his level head, made her indulge in
|
||
ornate dreams now and again. But he only smiled teasingly when she
|
||
demanded a full explanation, and told her that she would realise how
|
||
good or how bad her mine was when she went to the bank to sign her
|
||
letter of credit.
|
||
For one thing she felt suddenly grateful. She knew that the mine had
|
||
been leased for a year only and without bond. If, during that time it
|
||
“panned out,” she would stipulate to mine it herself when the contract
|
||
expired.
|
||
She sat up very straight and smiled. That was what she would have
|
||
liked! If her father had but willed her this mine and capital enough to
|
||
work it alone! Her fingers fluttered as they always did when handling
|
||
ore; she had wondered before if the prospector’s fever were in her
|
||
blood. How she should have enjoyed watching the rock come up in the
|
||
buckets as the shaft sank foot by foot, until they struck the vein;
|
||
always expecting chambers of incredible richness, gold, copper, silver.
|
||
She would even learn to do the pleasant part of her own assaying; and
|
||
she suddenly experienced an intense secretive jealous love for this
|
||
mine that was hers and in which might be hidden shining blocks of
|
||
those mysterious primary deposits deep in the sulphide zone; forced up
|
||
through the veins of earth, but born how or where man could only guess.
|
||
It was a mystery that she wanted to feel close to and alone with, far
|
||
in the winding depths of her mine.
|
||
She got up and moved about impatiently. Her propensity to dream
|
||
extravagantly was beginning to alarm her, and she wished uneasily that
|
||
she could discover the gift to write and work it off. Where would
|
||
it lead her? But she would not admit for a moment that her released
|
||
imagination, pulsing with vitality, and working on whatever she fed it,
|
||
only awaited the inevitable moment when it could concentrate on the one
|
||
object for which the imagination of woman was created.
|
||
The pendulum swung back and more evenly. She told herself it was both
|
||
possible and probable that she had a good property, however short it
|
||
might fall of Butte Hill. She renewed her determination to mine it
|
||
herself, and work, work, work. Therein lay safety. The future seemed
|
||
suddenly full of alarms.
|
||
And there was Mark, his career, his demands, dictated not so
|
||
insistently by him as by herself.
|
||
Ora’s soul rose in a sudden and desperate revolt beside which her
|
||
rising aversion from unmitigated intellect was a mere megrim. She
|
||
felt herself to be her father’s daughter in all her newly-opened
|
||
aching brain-cells. He had lived his life to please himself, and if
|
||
his temptations and weaknesses might never be hers--how could she
|
||
tell?--his intense vitality survived in her veins, his imperious
|
||
spirit, his scornful independence. She glanced at the rows of
|
||
calf-bound books he had handled so often. Something of his sinister
|
||
powerful personality seemed to steal forth and encompass her, sweep
|
||
through the quickened corridors of her brain. Mark Blake was not the
|
||
man he would have chosen for his daughter. Western, Mark might be to
|
||
the core, but he was second-rate, and second-rate he would remain no
|
||
matter what his successes.
|
||
And, she wondered, what would this proud ambitious parent, whose
|
||
deepest feeling had been for his one legitimate child, say to her plan
|
||
to play second fiddle for life to a man of the Mark Blake calibre? He
|
||
had wanted her to marry in the West, but he had been equally insistent
|
||
that site should develop a personality and position of her own. No
|
||
devoted suffragist could have been a more ardent advocate of woman’s
|
||
personal development than Judge Stratton had been where his daughter
|
||
was concerned. To the rights of other women he had never cast a
|
||
thought.
|
||
This was the hour of grim self-avowal. She admitted what had long moved
|
||
in the back of her mind, striving toward expression, that she hated
|
||
herself for having married any man for the miserable reason that has
|
||
driven so many lazy inefficient women into loveless marriages. She
|
||
should have gone to work. More than one of her father’s old friends
|
||
would have given her a secretaryship. She could have lived on her
|
||
little capital and taken the four years’ course at the School of Mines,
|
||
equipping herself for a congenial career. If that had not occurred to
|
||
her she could have taught French, Italian, German, dancing, literature.
|
||
In a new state like Montana, with many women raised abruptly from
|
||
the nethermost to the highest stratum, there was always a longing,
|
||
generally unfulfilled, for the quick veneer; and women of older
|
||
fortunes welcomed opportunities to improve themselves. She could have
|
||
taken parties to Europe.
|
||
She had played the coward’s part and not only done a black injustice to
|
||
herself but to Mark Blake. He was naturally an affectionate creature,
|
||
and, married to a comfortable sweet little wife, he would have been
|
||
domestic and quite happy. In spite of his enjoyment of his club, his
|
||
cards and billiards, and his buoyant nature, she suspected that he was
|
||
wistful at heart. He was intensely proud of his wife, in certain ways
|
||
dependent upon her, but she knew he had taken for granted that her
|
||
girlish coldness would melt in time and womanly fires kindle. Well,
|
||
they never would for him, poor Mark. And possessing an inherent sense
|
||
of justice, she felt just then more sympathy for him than for herself,
|
||
and placed all his good points to his credit.
|
||
She was conscious of no sympathy for herself, only of that deep
|
||
sense of puzzlement, disturbance, apprehension. Revolt passed.
|
||
Indications--the abrupt bursting into flower of many unsuspected bulbs
|
||
in her inner garden: softness, sympathy, a more spontaneous interest
|
||
in and response to others, the tendency to dream, vague formless
|
||
aspirations--had hinted, even before she took her new-born vanity to
|
||
Miss Ruby Miller, that she was on the threshold of one of the dangerous
|
||
ages (there are some ten or fifteen of them), and that unless she
|
||
had the doubtful wisdom and resolution to burn out her garden as the
|
||
poisonous fumes of roasting ores had blasted the fruitful soil of
|
||
Butte, she must prepare to face Life, possibly its terrible joys and
|
||
sorrows.
|
||
She sprang to her feet and ran upstairs and dressed for the street. At
|
||
least she had one abiding interest and responsibility, Ida Compton. She
|
||
was a self-imposed and absorbing duty, and always diverting.
|
||
XVI
|
||
“Oh, you give me the willys!”
|
||
“My dear Mrs. Compton! How often have you promised me----”
|
||
“Well, if you will stare at me like a moonstruck setter dog when I’m
|
||
trying to think up ’steen synonyms for one old word without looking
|
||
in the dictionary! I can’t blow up my vocabulary like a paper bag and
|
||
flirt with you at the same time.”
|
||
“I have no desire to flirt with you!” said Professor Whalen with great
|
||
dignity. “It is quite the reverse. You have been playing with my
|
||
feelings for months.”
|
||
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve been too set on becoming a real lady
|
||
before leaving for Europe--haven’t thought about you.”
|
||
Professor Whalen turned a deep dull red. His overlapping upper teeth
|
||
shot forward as if to snap down upon his long rather weak chin. He
|
||
stared past Ida through the open window. It was May and the snow was
|
||
melting on the mountains, had disappeared from the streets of Butte;
|
||
there is a brief springtime in Montana between the snows of winter and
|
||
the cold rains of June, and today was soft and caressing.
|
||
“I’ll tell you what is the matter with you,” said Ida, cruelly. “It’s
|
||
the spring of the year.”
|
||
Whalen sprang to his feet. For the first time in his anæmic life he was
|
||
furiously angry, and he rejoiced in the sensation. “I wish you were a
|
||
man,” he stuttered. “I’d beat you. It would do my heart good.”
|
||
“If you were a real man you would enjoy beating a woman a long sight
|
||
more,” goaded Ida, who watched him as a man-eating tigress may watch
|
||
the squirming victim between her paws. She had fed her vanity and
|
||
amused herself by playing on the little man’s pale emotions until she
|
||
was convinced he really was in love with her. She suddenly made up her
|
||
mind to force him to “let go,” and experience the sensation of being
|
||
made love to feloniously.
|
||
“I am not a brute,” announced Whalen, still in the same stifled voice.
|
||
His face was purple, but he was conscious of a warning whisper that he
|
||
was in a fair way to lose this remunerative pupil. He dismissed the
|
||
warning. There is probably no man so insignificant, in whom passion for
|
||
the imperative woman does not develop abnormally the purely masculine
|
||
conceit. He may despair in solitude, when devitalised by reaction and
|
||
doubt, but when in her presence, under her inviting eye, and hurried
|
||
to a crisis by hammering pulses and scorching blood, he is merely the
|
||
primitive male with whom to desire is to have.
|
||
Ida laughed, a low throaty husky laugh. “If you were,” she said
|
||
cuttingly, “you might stand a show.”
|
||
“It is you that are brutal,” hissed poor Whalen.
|
||
Ida leaned back in her chair and looked at him out of half-closed eyes.
|
||
“What induced you to fall in love with me, anyhow?” she demanded in her
|
||
sweet lazy voice. Whalen clenched his hands.
|
||
“I am a man if I am not a brute. You are the most fascinating woman on
|
||
earth, and you have deliberately tried to entice me from the path of
|
||
rectitude I have trod all my life----”
|
||
“What’s that?” Ida sat up straight, her brows drawn in an ominous frown.
|
||
“I have resisted you until today, but I yield----”
|
||
“What the devil are you talking about?”
|
||
“I expected to be tormented to the utmost limit. But I have stood all
|
||
of it that I purpose to stand.” His voice by this time was a subdued
|
||
roar. “I don’t care whether you love me or not. I don’t think you
|
||
could love anybody. I have read that sirens never do. But you are an
|
||
enchantress, and you have shown plainly enough----”
|
||
Ida’s frown had relaxed, but her eyes blazed. He misunderstood their
|
||
expression, as well as the sudden forward thrust of her head. He sprang
|
||
forward, caught her by the shoulders and kissed her.
|
||
“Aw!” Ida’s voice was almost a roar. She leaped to her feet, twirled
|
||
him about, caught him by the back of his collar and the seat of
|
||
his trousers, and threw him out of the window as if he had been an
|
||
offensive dog. She flung his hat and stick after him and slammed
|
||
the window down. Then she stamped her feet in inarticulate rage,
|
||
and rubbed and bit her mouth. It was one thing to play with a man’s
|
||
passions and quite another to be defiled by them. Ida seethed with the
|
||
fierce virtue of a young inexperienced and temperamentally cold woman.
|
||
For a few moments she used very bad language indeed, and struggled with
|
||
an impulse to ran after the “little puppy” and whip him in the street.
|
||
But, remembering that she was making a heroic attempt to be a grande
|
||
dame, she finally went into her bedroom and washed her face.
|
||
XVII
|
||
There was a knock on the front door. Ida, smoothing her hair, hastened
|
||
to open it, glad of diversion. Ora stood there. For a moment the girls
|
||
looked hard at each other, then burst into laughter.
|
||
“What’s up?” asked Ida. “You look----”
|
||
“My dear, it is I who should ask? Your face is crimson; you look as if
|
||
you had just given someone a beating, and I met poor little Whalen,
|
||
dusty, dishevelled, growling like a mad dog--he didn’t know me.”
|
||
“Well, I guess he won’t know himself for a while,” said Ida drily,
|
||
leading the way into the parlour. “When he comes to he’ll have his
|
||
work cut out to climb back to his little two-cent pedestal and fit on
|
||
his battered halo.” She related the incident. “What do you know about
|
||
that?” she demanded in conclusion. “Wouldn’t it come and get you?”
|
||
“I am afraid you have made an enemy. It is always best to let them
|
||
down gently, save their pride--and--ah!--it isn’t customary to throw
|
||
gentlemen out of the window!”
|
||
“Gentlemen!” snorted Ida. “He’s no gentleman. He not only kissed
|
||
me with his horrid front teeth, but he insinuated that I was just
|
||
languishing for him, the----” Once more Ida’s feelings overflowed in
|
||
language not intended for print. “It made me so mad I’d have lammed him
|
||
with the umbrella if we’d been in the hall.”
|
||
“Ida,” asked Ora abruptly, “would you have minded so much if he had
|
||
been good-looking and attractive?”
|
||
“Well--perhaps--I guess in that case I’d simply have smacked him and
|
||
let him get out quick by the front door. But I don’t want any man
|
||
touching me. I’m a married woman.”
|
||
“But if you flirt and lead them on----”
|
||
“You said once yourself that American men understood the game and knew
|
||
how to take their medicine.”
|
||
“I also said that they can fall more tiresomely in love than any other
|
||
men. Of course the Whalens don’t count. But do you intend to go on
|
||
making men fall in love with you and throwing them--metaphorically--out
|
||
of the window?”
|
||
“Much chance I’ll get.”
|
||
“You’ll find plenty of chances in Europe. You are a remarkably
|
||
beautiful woman. And Europeans take what we call flirting for shameless
|
||
encouragement.”
|
||
“Well, I guess I’ll be getting experience of the world all right. And
|
||
the Lord knows I’d like to be admired by men who have seen something. I
|
||
can take care of myself, and Greg don’t need to worry.”
|
||
“I’ve no doubt of that. Of course you are awfully fond of Mr. Compton,
|
||
aren’t you?” Ora spoke somewhat wistfully.
|
||
“Oh, yes; fond enough, fonder than a good many wives, I guess, for he’s
|
||
kind and pleasant, and no earthly trouble about the house. But when a
|
||
woman marries she gets a kid right there at the altar, and he’s her
|
||
biggest kid till his false teeth drop out on his death-bed, and his
|
||
great-grandchildren are feeding him through a tube. I don’t want any of
|
||
the other sort of kids, and I guess I’m not what you call the maternal
|
||
woman, but the Lord knows I’m a mother to Greg and a good one. I’d like
|
||
to know what he’d do without me--that’s the only reason I hate leaving.
|
||
He never thinks of changing his shoes when they’re wet, and half the
|
||
time wouldn’t eat anything but his book if I didn’t put the stuff right
|
||
in front of him.”
|
||
“Mark knows him almost as well as you do, and will look after him. My
|
||
maid, who is practically my housekeeper, and an old family servant,
|
||
will also keep a maternal eye on him.”
|
||
“He keeps himself tidy,” conceded Ida handsomely. “Wants clean things
|
||
every day, but never knows where to find them. He’ll wander out into
|
||
the kitchen where I’m cooking breakfast and ask where his socks are,
|
||
and they always in the same drawer.”
|
||
“I fancy you’ve spoiled him.”
|
||
“Not I. I don’t hold with spoiling men. They’re born spoiled anyhow.
|
||
I found Greg walking round in a dream when I married, and a pile of
|
||
socks as high as the door knob he’d thrown away because they’d holes in
|
||
them so tiny you could hardly see them. I darned every one, you bet,
|
||
and he’s wearing them now, though he don’t know it. He’s like that, as
|
||
dainty as a cat, and as helpless as a blind kitten. I am a wife and I
|
||
know my duty,” concluded Ida virtuously.
|
||
“I certainly shall give Custer minute directions. I can’t have you
|
||
worrying.”
|
||
“I’ll not worry, once I’m started. Don’t you fret! But what’s the
|
||
matter with you, Ora? You look kinder excited, and kinder--well,
|
||
harassed. How’s that out of the new pocket dictionary I’ve set up in my
|
||
head?”
|
||
“I’ll soon have to look to my own vocabulary. Oh--I----”
|
||
“Something’s up. Spit it out. It’ll do you good.”
|
||
“Dear Ida! If you must use slang, do confine yourself to that which has
|
||
passed through the mint of polite society. There is an abundance to
|
||
choose from!”
|
||
“Don’t you worry; I won’t disgrace you. But I must let out a tuck
|
||
occasionally when we’re alone. Greg wouldn’t let me go to any of the
|
||
Club dances, and I scarcely ever see Ruby or Pearl, they’re so busy--to
|
||
say nothing of myself!”
|
||
“Very well,” said Ora, laughing. “Let me be your safety valve, by all
|
||
means.”
|
||
“Fire away.”
|
||
“Oh--how am I to tell you--I scarcely know, myself----”
|
||
“I guess you’re waking up. Ruby, who knows human nature like a book----”
|
||
Ora half rose. “Have you been talking me over with Miss Miller?” she
|
||
asked haughtily.
|
||
“Not much. Hardly seen her since we met. But you interest Butte, you
|
||
know. I guess they talk you over good and plenty. It was only a few
|
||
days before you called that the Miller girls visited with me all day,
|
||
and they talked a lot about you. Ruby said that if you’d come to out of
|
||
the sleeping beauty stage, you’d make things hum, and that her fingers
|
||
just itched to get at your skin and hair.”
|
||
“She said that to me once; and I don’t mind telling you that I called
|
||
her in some time ago.”
|
||
“Oh, I’m not a bat. I’ve seen you looking prettier every day, and
|
||
there’s only one way to do it, when you’ve let yourself go. I’ve had
|
||
the benefit of Ruby’s advice for years, and I don’t propose to let
|
||
myself go, not for a minute.”
|
||
“Right you are. And do live your life normally from day to day,
|
||
developing normally. The awakening process, when the Nature that
|
||
made you is no longer content to be a mere footstool for the mind,
|
||
is almost as painful as coming to after drowning. I suddenly have
|
||
become conscious of myself, as it were; I am interested in many more
|
||
things--personal things--I seem to want far more of life than I did a
|
||
few months ago----”
|
||
“In other words, you don’t know where you’re at.”
|
||
Ora laughed merrily. “My present condition could not be stated more
|
||
patly!”
|
||
“Ora, I don’t want to pry into your confidence, and you’re not one to
|
||
give much of that anyhow, but everybody in Butte knows that you’re not
|
||
in love with Mark, and never were, nice as you treat him--only because
|
||
you couldn’t be anything but a lady if you tried. Mrs. O’Neil, one day
|
||
when she was having a massage, told Ruby all about your marriage. She
|
||
said you were the most bewildered young thing she ever saw, and that
|
||
Mark snapped you up before another young man could get a look at you.
|
||
Now, I’ve known Mark all my life--he beaued my sister who died, for a
|
||
year or two, and his mother’s cottage was just up the hill anyhow; and
|
||
although he’s a good chap and a born hustler, and bound to get rich,
|
||
he’s not the sort of man women fall in love with. You wouldn’t have
|
||
fallen in love with him, if he’d been born a millionaire, and travelled
|
||
and got Butte out of his system. And if your father had left you well
|
||
off, you wouldn’t have looked at him. There’s men, bad and good--that’s
|
||
to say, better--that women fall in love with, and there’s men bad and
|
||
good that they don’t, not in a thousand years. Poor old Mark’s a Don’t
|
||
all right. You ain’t angry at my saying all this, but Mark was like my
|
||
own brother for years?”
|
||
“Oh, no, I am not angry. You are far too matter-of-fact. You might be
|
||
discussing different grades of ore!”
|
||
“Well, that’s about it, and the poor ore can’t help itself, any more
|
||
than the slag and gangue can, and Mark’s not either of those, you bet.
|
||
He’s good metal, all right, only he didn’t come out of the Anaconda
|
||
mine--What have you turned so red about? My! But you do blush easy!”
|
||
“It’s this--do you despise me--do you think I did wrong--Oh, I mean I
|
||
have quite suddenly realised that I never should have married any man
|
||
for so contemptible a reason. I should have gone to work----”
|
||
“Work? You?”
|
||
“Why not? Many a delicately nurtured woman has earned her bread.”
|
||
“The more fool she if she could get a man to earn it for her. That’s
|
||
what they’re for. The Lord knows they pride themselves on the way they
|
||
do it, being the stronger sex, and a lot more words. I guess I’d have
|
||
married before Greg turned up if I’d met a man I was sure was going to
|
||
make something of himself. You did just right to take a good husband
|
||
and take him quick when you found yourself in a hole.”
|
||
“Yes--but----” Her blush deepened. “You see--” Ora never had had an
|
||
intimate confidant. It was doubtful if she ever would have; not, at all
|
||
events, a woman. But Ida, as she herself would have expressed it, could
|
||
always see through a stone wall when there was a crack in it.
|
||
“Oh, shucks!” she said. “Don’t let that worry you. If you don’t feel
|
||
that way first you do last, I guess. Most of us are bored to death,
|
||
but women have stood it for a few thousand years, and I guess they can
|
||
stand it for a few thousand more. We all of us have to pay high for
|
||
anything we want. That’s about the size of it. Forget it.”
|
||
“Thanks, dear, you console me.” Ora smiled with closed eyes, but she
|
||
was thrilled with a sudden inexplicable longing; like other of her
|
||
recent sensations, it puzzled and alarmed her.
|
||
“Ora!” exclaimed Ida suddenly. “There’s one thing that’s just as sure
|
||
as death and taxes; and knowing men and knowing life don’t help women
|
||
one little bit. It’s this: A woman’s got to have her love affair sooner
|
||
or later. If she marries for love she’s pretty safe, for ten or fifteen
|
||
years, anyhow. But if she doesn’t, well, she’ll get it in the neck
|
||
sooner or later--and it’ll be about the time she begins to sit up and
|
||
take notice. She’s a regular magnet then, too. So watch out.”
|
||
Ora opened her eyes. They looked like steel. “I have never given a
|
||
thought to love. There is nothing I want less. I shall continue to
|
||
make Mark as good a wife as I know how to be----”
|
||
“Oh, I’m not saying you’ll go off the hooks, like some I could mention
|
||
in your own bunch, but if the man comes along you’ll fall in love
|
||
all right. Might as well try to stop a waterfall from jumping over
|
||
the rocks. I’m not so dead sure I do know what you’d do. Pride, and
|
||
high breeding, and duty would pull one way, but--well, I guess when
|
||
you marble women get waked up good and plenty, what they call roused,
|
||
you’re the worst kind. A considerable number of other things would pull
|
||
from the opposite direction, and one of them would be the man.”
|
||
“Ida!” said Ora, aghast. “How do you know so much? Your opportunities
|
||
have been very limited.”
|
||
“Oh, have they? Wasn’t I born and brought up in a mining camp? Butte is
|
||
some education, believe me. I ran straight all right, not only because
|
||
the sporting life had no charms for me but because I figured on moving
|
||
over one of these days to Millionaire Gulch. But it wasn’t for want of
|
||
opportunity, and the same opportunities were handed over by men of your
|
||
crowd--or fixin’ to be. Besides, some women are born wise that way, I
|
||
guess, and I’m one of ’em. You’ve been living in a sort of self-made
|
||
heaven all your life, with only books for inhabitants. I could put you
|
||
wise every day in the week.”
|
||
“It is true that although I saw a good deal of life while my mother
|
||
lived so much in the world, and always have been deeply interested
|
||
in the work of the psychological novelists, particularly the
|
||
Europeans--I--well, I never applied it to my--never thought much about
|
||
it until lately. I do not seem to know myself the least little bit.”
|
||
“I guess it’ll be me--Oh, Lord, I--taking you to Europe, not you me.
|
||
I’ll see that you don’t get into mischief, for I’d hate like the
|
||
dickens to have you go to pieces over any man. Not one of them that
|
||
ever lived since Adam is worth it. They’re all right to marry, all
|
||
things being equal, but to sacrifice your life for, nixie. Any style of
|
||
man you are partial to? I’ll keep his sort off with a broom.”
|
||
“I’ve never gone so far as even to think----”
|
||
“Every woman has her style in men,” said Ida firmly. “I heard of a
|
||
woman once who had three husbands and each one had a wart on his nose.”
|
||
“Oh, you are funny! I have heard that a woman falls in love with a
|
||
type, not with the man, and, like all epigrams, that one contains a
|
||
half-truth. I had two or three girlish fancies; one was an Austrian
|
||
officer, another a French nobleman--and not impecunious--he wasn’t
|
||
a fortune hunter. The third was a New Yorker who fell in love with
|
||
my cousin and married her. I had a few heart spasms over him, in
|
||
particular; possibly because he was quite out of reach. It is true that
|
||
they were all more of or less of a type--tall and thin and dark, with
|
||
something very keen and clever and modern in their lean--rather hard
|
||
faces.”
|
||
“Hi!” cried Ida.
|
||
“What is the matter? You look at me as if you had seen a ghost.”
|
||
Ida threw back her head and laughed, showing her sharp little white
|
||
teeth, and straining her throat until the firm flesh looked thin and
|
||
drawn, over too strong muscles. “Oh, Lord! I was just thinking what
|
||
a lot of trouble I’m in for, playing dragon to my lily-white lady. I
|
||
guess about half the men in the world are brunettes, fat or lean. Say,
|
||
are you going to the Prom? It’s only a month off.”
|
||
“I hadn’t thought about it. Probably. I have been asked to be a
|
||
patroness, and Mark is sure to want to go. Have you decided what to
|
||
wear?”
|
||
“Ma gave me a coral-red silk when I married, and I’m going to make it
|
||
over and veil it with black net.”
|
||
“Splendid!” cried Ora warmly. “Bring it up to the house. Mrs. Finley is
|
||
really an excellent seamstress. We’ll all take a hand. It will be great
|
||
fun. And you will look stunning.”
|
||
“What will you wear?”
|
||
“I expect some gowns from my New York dressmaker in a few days. It will
|
||
depend upon the state of my complexion, I fancy.”
|
||
XVIII
|
||
Ora received another budget of Ida’s philosophy on the day before the
|
||
Prom; she had taken her a long string of pink coral she had found
|
||
among her old possessions, and after Ida had wound it in her hair
|
||
and round her neck, and finally tried on her gown, and then draped
|
||
Ora successively in various scarves, remnants of her own wedding
|
||
finery--being almost as interested in the new complexion as Ora
|
||
herself--they had suddenly come to the conclusion that while in Europe
|
||
they would assume the mental attitude of girls travelling without a
|
||
chaperon. They would see the world from the independent girl’s point
|
||
of view, flirt like girls, not like married women (which at least
|
||
would save their consciences), force men to accept the phenomenon. For
|
||
a time they discussed the superior advantages of being young widows,
|
||
but, alluring and even thrilling as were the possibilities evoked, they
|
||
dismissed the alternative on the ground that it might prove a bore
|
||
always to be on the defensive; man making no secret of his attitude
|
||
toward widows. Besides, they felt a delicacy about burying their
|
||
indulgent husbands even in mental effigy. As counterfeit girls they
|
||
could crowd enough excitement into six months to serve them in memory
|
||
during long periods of Butte.
|
||
“It will be some bluff,” cried Ida. “And believe me, we’ll have the
|
||
time of our lives. And no remorse in mine. I intend to flirt the limit,
|
||
for I’m just ready to quit being a mother for a while and see a man’s
|
||
eyes kindle when he comes nigh--see him playing about at the end of
|
||
a string. I didn’t have near enough of it even when I had half Butte
|
||
at my feet--excuse what sounds like conceit but is cold fact. Now,
|
||
I’m going to light up every man I take a fancy to. I don’t care an
|
||
abandoned prospect hole whether I hurt ’em or not. All they are good
|
||
for is to give us a good time.”
|
||
“Ida!” Ora was aghast as she often had been before at these naked
|
||
feminine revelations. “You talk like a man-eater. I hope to heaven I am
|
||
not like that down deep.”
|
||
“Oh, maybe you won’t be so bad because you haven’t got as much vanity.
|
||
Mine’s insatiable, I guess, and good old Mother Nature taught me the
|
||
trick of covering it up with the don’t-care-a-damn air combined with
|
||
the come-hither eye. That does the trick. And they get what hurt’s
|
||
going. I don’t. You’ll cultivate men, thinking it’s your vanity waked
|
||
up, or mere youth, or because it’s time to have a fling, but what
|
||
you really are after is the one and only man. The Companion. The
|
||
Sympathetic Soul. The Mate. All that rot. He don’t exist, kiddo. He’s
|
||
the modern immaculate conception, and he’s generally stillborn; the
|
||
bungling doctor being the plain unadulterated male inside of himself.
|
||
You’ve got to be your own companion, and if you want happiness you can
|
||
get it by expecting just nothing of men. Use them. Throw them on the
|
||
ash heap. Pass on to the next. Quit sitting on the watch tower with
|
||
your eyes trained on the horizon for the prince that is born and lives
|
||
and dies in a woman’s imagination.”
|
||
“I have seen happy--united couples--who had been married for years.”
|
||
“Oh, yes; some couples are born to jog along together, and some wives
|
||
are born man-tamers, and get a lot of satisfaction out of it. But
|
||
you’re much too high-falutin’ for that. You’ll always dream of the
|
||
impossible--not only in man but of what he’s got to give--which ain’t
|
||
much. And I didn’t need all them--those--psychological and problem
|
||
and worldly novels you made me read, translated from half a dozen
|
||
languages, either. You take my advice, Ora, and don’t start off on any
|
||
fool hunt for an ideal. Men are just matter-of-fact two-legged animals,
|
||
and as selfish as a few thousand years of fool women have naturally
|
||
made them. He does well while he’s courting because he’s naturally good
|
||
at bluff. But every bit of romance oozes out of him after he’s eaten
|
||
his first breakfast of ham and eggs at home. We can keep up the bluff
|
||
forever. Men can’t. Each one of them’s got a kid twin brother inside
|
||
that plays marbles till he dies and makes you feel older every day. No,
|
||
sir! If I ever had any delusions, I’ve got over them good and plenty.
|
||
And I thank the Lord,” she added piously.
|
||
“I think that rather adorable, you know: the eternal boy. And I fancy
|
||
it is all that saves men from becoming horrors; in this country, at
|
||
least--when you consider the unending struggle, and strain, and sordid
|
||
business of money getting. They use up all their bluff in the battle of
|
||
life, poor things. Why shouldn’t they be natural with us?...”
|
||
Ora was recalling this conversation as she sat in her bedroom on the
|
||
following evening. Her elemental yet uncannily sophisticated friend
|
||
had a way of crashing chords out of jealously hidden nerves, which no
|
||
exercise of will could disconnect from the logical parts of the brain.
|
||
If it were true that what her now rampant ego, too long starved, really
|
||
demanded was man and romance, she wished she had let herself run to
|
||
seed until it was too late to reclaim her lost beauty and adventure
|
||
into temptation. But a glance into the mirror deprived her of any
|
||
further desire to join the vast sisterhood of unattractive females.
|
||
Moreover, she had faith in the dominance of her will and common sense,
|
||
and if her beauty would help her to the mental contacts she craved with
|
||
brilliant and interesting men, far be it from her to execrate it.
|
||
She dismissed the mood of self-analysis impatiently and opened her
|
||
wardrobe, although half inclined not to attend the Prom. She was
|
||
one of the patronesses, but her presence was not essential. It was
|
||
pre-eminently the night of nights for young folks--brownies and
|
||
squabs--and the absence of a married woman of twenty-six would pass
|
||
unrecorded. Not a man in Butte interested her personally, nor was she
|
||
in a frame of mind to be interested by any of the too specialised
|
||
products of the West. Nor was she inordinately fond of dancing; there
|
||
really was no object in going to this party save to witness the début
|
||
and possible triumph of her protégée.
|
||
But she felt something more than indifference toward this party. It
|
||
was as if a gong sounded a warning in the depths of her brain--in her
|
||
subconsciousness, perhaps, where instinct, that child of ancestral
|
||
experience, dwelt. But even while she hesitated she knew that she
|
||
should go, and she took one of her new gowns from a long drawer, and
|
||
then began to arrange her hair.
|
||
It was now some five months since Miss Ruby Miller had taken her in
|
||
hand, and if the young woman’s bank account was heavier her pride as
|
||
an artist far outweighed it. Ora’s hair was soft, abundant, the colour
|
||
of warm ashes. The skin of her face was as white and transparent,
|
||
as “pearly” to use its doctor’s own descriptive word, as the fine
|
||
protected surface of her slender throat, her thin but by no means bony
|
||
neck. Her lips were pink; they never would be red; and after one taste
|
||
of “lip stick,” Ora had declined to have them improved by art. But
|
||
they were a soft country-rose pink and suited her clear whiteness far
|
||
better than scarlet. Her eyes, never so clear and startling as now,
|
||
lighted up the cold whiteness of her face and made her pink mouth look
|
||
childish and somewhat pathetic. If her lips had been red, her face
|
||
would have had the sinister suggestion so many women achieve with the
|
||
assistance of art; as it was she looked by no means harmless as she
|
||
smiled at herself in the mirror and coiled her hair softly on the top
|
||
of her head. After some experimenting she had decided that she could
|
||
not improve upon an arrangement which for the present at least was all
|
||
her own.
|
||
She rang for Custer to hook her gown. It was a very soft gown of white
|
||
satin draped about the bust with lace and chiffon. It was cut to the
|
||
waist line in the back and almost as low in front, for her figure was
|
||
hardly more developed than a growing girl’s; and it was unrelieved by
|
||
colour. She had already put on the string of pearls her mother had
|
||
hidden when the other jewels were sold in Paris. Altogether it was a
|
||
costume she would not have dared to wear even two months ago, when a
|
||
touch of colour on the bodice or in her hair was necessary to divert
|
||
attention from her spoiled complexion.
|
||
Custer had been her mother’s maid for many years and had returned with
|
||
her to Butte. After an interval of employment elsewhere, she had come
|
||
to Ora as soon as Mark had built his house. She hooked the gown, pinned
|
||
up a stray lock with an invisible hairpin, shook out the little train,
|
||
and stood off.
|
||
“It reminds me of the way your mother used to look,” she said, “and
|
||
you’re even prettier than she was, Miss Ora--now. But I fancy you’ll be
|
||
more comfortable in this gown when you wear it in London. These ladies
|
||
dress smartly enough, but never as low as the English ladies do,
|
||
leastways out here. I fancy it’s the Western men. They don’t seem to
|
||
approve of showing too much.”
|
||
“Well, I think I’ll rather enjoy startling the natives. Quick--give me
|
||
my wrap! I hear Mr. Blake coming. No controversy here.”
|
||
XIX
|
||
The Prom was held not in the School of Mines but in The Coliseum, a
|
||
large hall over a saloon and garage, half way between The Hill and The
|
||
Flat, requisitioned by all classes when the weather forbade the use
|
||
of Columbia Gardens. The walls were covered with the School colours,
|
||
copper and green, flags, and college pennants. The ceiling was a
|
||
network of electric lights with coloured globes, copper and green,
|
||
fluttering paper and sprays of apple blossoms, brought from far! “Cozy
|
||
corners” looked like fragments of a lower altitude, and the faithful
|
||
palm was on duty everywhere. The orchestra, on a suspended balcony in
|
||
the centre of the room, was invisible within the same elaborate scheme
|
||
of decoration.
|
||
When Ora entered with her husband the Grand March had finished and the
|
||
instruments were tuning for a waltz. She saw Ida standing directly
|
||
under the orchestra surrounded by several men who patently were
|
||
clamouring for dances. Even in that great room full of women dressed
|
||
from New York and Paris, Ida looked distinctive and superb. Ora smiled
|
||
proudly, as she observed her, quite oblivious that the throng of men
|
||
and women and indignant “squabs,” who had been discussing the wife
|
||
of Gregory Compton, had transferred their attention to the dazzling
|
||
apparition in white. Ida wore her gown of coral silk, whose flimsiness
|
||
was concealed under a mist of black shadow lace. The coral beads
|
||
clasped her strong white throat and fell to her supple waist. There was
|
||
a twist of coral tulle in her black hair, which was arranged in the
|
||
rolling fashion of the moment, obeyed by every other woman in the room
|
||
save Ora Blake. And her cheeks, her lips, were as coral as the fruit of
|
||
the sea. She had powdered her face lightly to preserve its tone through
|
||
exercise and heat. All the arrogance of youth and beauty and powerful
|
||
magnetism was expressed in the high poise of her head; a faint smile of
|
||
triumph curved above her little white teeth; her body was in perfect
|
||
repose yet as alert as that of a healthy young cat. The waltz began and
|
||
she glided off in the arm of a young mining engineer from the East. She
|
||
danced precisely as the best-bred women in the room danced (early in
|
||
the evening): ease without abandon, dignity without stiffness.
|
||
“Heavens, but the American woman is adaptable!” thought Ora. “I never
|
||
realised before exactly what that time-worn platitude meant. Probably
|
||
the standards in the Ida set are not so different from ours, after all.
|
||
As for looks and carriage she might have three generations behind her.
|
||
Is it democracy or the actress instinct of woman--permitted its full
|
||
development in this country for the first time in her history?”
|
||
This was not entirely a monologue, but addressed for the most part
|
||
to Professor Becke, one of the most distinguished instructors of the
|
||
School of Mines, and one of the men she liked best in Butte. He was a
|
||
tall fair man, with a keen thin fimbriated face, and long fine hands.
|
||
Ora made a point of asking him to dine with her once or twice a month.
|
||
He led the way to two of the chairs on the side of the hall after she
|
||
had announced that she did not intend to dance.
|
||
“But this is the first party we have had for weeks,” he said. “They
|
||
won’t leave you to me for long.”
|
||
“I don’t feel in the mood for dancing. Besides,” she added with a new
|
||
daring, “I’m all in white and looking very white once more; I don’t
|
||
want to get warm and spoil the effect.”
|
||
He stared into her challenging eyes as if he saw her for the first
|
||
time. In that room, full of colour and of vivid women and young girls,
|
||
she produced an almost disconcerting effect with her statuesque beauty,
|
||
her gleaming whiteness, her frail white body so daringly displayed in
|
||
its white gown. And, oddly enough, to those staring at her, she made
|
||
the other women look not only commonplace but cold.
|
||
Ora smiled to herself; she was quite aware of the impression at
|
||
work, not only on the scientific brain, but on others more readily
|
||
responsive; she had considered the prudence of practising on Butte
|
||
before departing for wider fields.
|
||
The Professor changed colour, but replied steadily: “Fancy you two
|
||
extraordinary creatures loose in Europe! You should take a bodyguard.
|
||
I can understand Compton giving his consent, for he is the kind of man
|
||
that wouldn’t remember whether his wife were twenty or forty at the end
|
||
of his honeymoon, and there can be little between them in any case. But
|
||
Blake!”
|
||
“Oh, we’ll come home without a scandal,” said Ora lightly. “Ida is the
|
||
reverse of what she looks, and I--well, I am the proverbial ‘cold’
|
||
American woman--that the European anathematises. Ida, of course, looks
|
||
the siren, and I shall have some trouble protecting her, until she
|
||
learns how far she can go. But at least I am forewarned.”
|
||
“I fancy you will have more trouble protecting yourself!” Professor
|
||
Becke’s voice was not as even as usual. His intellect was brilliant,
|
||
and illuminating, and never more so than when in the society of this
|
||
young woman whom heretofore he had admired merely as a vivacious and
|
||
exceptional mind; but, startling as this revelation of subtle and
|
||
alluring womanhood was, he remembered that he was no longer young and
|
||
that he had an admirable wife with an eagle eye; he had no intention
|
||
of scorching his fingers in the attempt to light a flame that would
|
||
guide him to the rocks even were he invited to apply the torch. But
|
||
he was a man and he sighed a little for his vanished youth. If he had
|
||
been twenty years younger he fancied that he would have forgotten his
|
||
good lady and risked burning his heart out. He moved his eyes away
|
||
deliberately and they rested on Mark Blake, mopping his scarlet face
|
||
after a lively waltz. He was a kindly man, but all that was deathlessly
|
||
masculine in him grinned with a cynical satisfaction.
|
||
“Who is that?” asked Ora abruptly, and forgetting a faint sensation of
|
||
pique.
|
||
“Ah! Who?”
|
||
She indicated a man leaning against one of the doorways, and looking
|
||
over the crowd with unseeing eyes. “Heavens! What a jaw! Is he as
|
||
‘strong’ as he looks, or is he one of Bismarck’s wooden posts painted
|
||
to look like a man of iron?--Why, it’s----”
|
||
“That is Gregory Compton, and he is no wooden post, believe me.”
|
||
“I haven’t seen him for years. _Can_ any man be as strong as _he_
|
||
looks?”
|
||
“Probably not. He hasn’t had time to discover his master weaknesses
|
||
yet, so I don’t pretend to guess at them myself. At present he is too
|
||
absorbed in squeezing our poor brains dry----”
|
||
“Doesn’t he ever smile?”
|
||
“So rarely that the boys, who have a nickname for all their fellow
|
||
students, call him ‘Sunny Jim.’”
|
||
“What do you think of his wife?” asked Ora abruptly. She hardly knew
|
||
why she asked the question, nor why she felt a secret glow at the
|
||
expected answer.
|
||
The Professor turned his appraising eye upon the substantial vision
|
||
in coral and black that tonight had been pronounced the handsomest
|
||
woman in Butte. “There could be no finer example of the obvious. All
|
||
her goods are in the front window. There are no surprises behind that
|
||
superlative beauty; certainly no revelations.”
|
||
“I wonder! Ida is far cleverer than you think, and quite capable of
|
||
affording your sex a good deal in the way of surprises, not to say
|
||
shocks.”
|
||
“Not in the way I mean--not as you will do, worse luck for my helpless
|
||
sex. There is no soul there, and, I fancy, little heart. She is the
|
||
last woman Gregory Compton should have married.”
|
||
“Why?” Ora tried to look bored but polite.
|
||
“Oh--whatever she may have for other men she has nothing for him. She
|
||
looks the concentrated essence of female--American female--egoism.
|
||
Compton needs a woman who would give him companionship when he wanted
|
||
it, and, at the same time, be willing in service.”
|
||
Ora bristled. “Service? How like a man. Are we still expected to serve
|
||
men? I thought the world was moving on.”
|
||
Professor Becke, who, like most men married to a domestic
|
||
commander-in-chief, was strenuously opposed to giving women any powers
|
||
backed up by law, asked with cold reserve: “Are you a suffragette?”
|
||
Ora laughed. “Not yet. But I just escaped being born in the Twentieth
|
||
Century. I belong to it at all events.”
|
||
“So you do, but you never have been in love----” He broke off in
|
||
embarrassment; he had forgotten for the moment that this white virginal
|
||
creature had been married for six years. She showed no resentment, for
|
||
she barely had heard him; she was looking at Gregory Compton again, and
|
||
concluding that he might appeal strongly to the supplementary female,
|
||
but must antagonise women whose highly specialised intellects, at
|
||
home only on the heights of civilisation, had submerged their primal
|
||
inheritance.
|
||
Professor Becke went on:
|
||
“Even a clever woman’s best career is a man. If you women develop
|
||
beyond nature that powerful old tyrant will simply snuff you out.”
|
||
“Well, man will go too. That may be our final triumph.”
|
||
“Atlantis over again! And quite in order that the race should perish
|
||
through the excesses of woman. Then Nature, having wiped her slate
|
||
clean with a whoop, will begin all over again and precisely where she
|
||
did before. No doubt she will permit a few records to survive as a
|
||
warning.”
|
||
“You may be right--but, although I have an idea I shall one day want to
|
||
justify my existence by being of some use, it won’t be because my sex
|
||
instinct has got the better of my intelligence. But I refuse to think
|
||
of that until I have had a royal good time for a few years.”
|
||
“That is your right,” he said impulsively. “You are altogether
|
||
exceptional--and you have had six years of Butte! I am glad your mine
|
||
has panned out so splendidly. There is quite an excitement in the
|
||
Sampling Works----”
|
||
“What?” Ora forgot Gregory Compton. “I knew the mine was doing well----”
|
||
“Surely you know that your profits in royalties already must be
|
||
something over a hundred thousand dollars----” He stopped in confusion.
|
||
Ora’s face was radiant and she never had liked Mark as sincerely as
|
||
at that moment. “It is just like him! He wanted to wait and give me a
|
||
great surprise--my husband, I mean.”
|
||
“And I have spoilt it! I am really sorry. Please don’t tell him.”
|
||
“I won’t. And I’ll be the most surprised woman in the world when he
|
||
takes me to the bank to sign my letter of credit. You needn’t mind.
|
||
I’ll have the fun of thinking about it for five months--and rolling it
|
||
up in my imagination. Ah!”
|
||
“Compton has recognised you, I think.”
|
||
Ora had met the long narrow concentrated gaze of her husband’s friend.
|
||
She bowed slightly. Compton made a step forward, hesitated, braced
|
||
himself, and walked toward her.
|
||
“A constitutionally shy man, but a brave one,” said Professor Becke
|
||
with a grim smile, as he rose to resign his seat. “A strong magnet has
|
||
pulled up many a sinking heart. Good evening, Compton. Glad you honour
|
||
our party, even if you don’t dance.”
|
||
“I intend to ask Mrs. Blake to dance.” Gregory betrayed nothing of his
|
||
inner trepidation although he did not smile. He could always rely upon
|
||
the stern mask into which he had trained his visage not to betray him.
|
||
Ora, oblivious of her resolution not to dance, rose and placed her
|
||
hand on his shoulder, smiling an absent farewell to Professor Becke.
|
||
For a moment she forgot her resentful interest in this man in her
|
||
astonishment that he danced so well. She had the impression of dancing
|
||
with a light supple creature of the woods, one who could be quite
|
||
abandoned if he chose, although he held her as if he were embracing
|
||
a feather. She wondered if it were his drop of aboriginal blood and
|
||
looked up suddenly. To her surprise he was smiling, and his smile so
|
||
altered the immobility of his face that she lost her breath.
|
||
“I feel as if I were dancing with a snowflake,” was his unexpected
|
||
remark.
|
||
“You look the last man to pay compliments and murmur sweet nothings.”
|
||
“Are you disappointed?”
|
||
“Perhaps I am. I rather liked your attitude--expression, rather--of
|
||
cool superiority.”
|
||
“Why don’t you use the word prig?”
|
||
“Oh, no!--Well, perhaps that is what I did mean.”
|
||
He stopped short, regardless of the annoyance he caused several
|
||
impetuous couples. “If you did I shall leave you right here.”
|
||
“I did not. Please go on. Everybody is staring at us. You took me
|
||
completely by surprise.”
|
||
“I? Why?”
|
||
“You are the last man I should expect the usual small talk from.”
|
||
“Small talk? Heavens knows I have none of that. Girls used to talk my
|
||
head off in self-defence. I merely said what I thought. What did you
|
||
expect me to talk about?”
|
||
“Oh--mines, I suppose.” Again, to her surprise, his face lit up as if
|
||
by an inner and jealously hidden torch. But he said soberly:
|
||
“Well, there is no more interesting subject. Never has been since the
|
||
world began. Where shall we find a seat?”
|
||
The waltz was over. The chairs were filling. Young couples were
|
||
flitting toward the embowered corners.
|
||
“Let’s go outside,” he said abruptly.
|
||
“What? On the street? And nobody goes out of doors from a ballroom in
|
||
June.”
|
||
“Good reason for going. Come with me.”
|
||
He led her to the cloak-room. “Get your wrap,” he said.
|
||
Ora frowned, but she asked for her heavy white woollen wrap and put it
|
||
on; then automatically followed him down the stairs and into the street.
|
||
“Why don’t you get your coat and hat?” she asked, still dazed. “It’s
|
||
cold, you know.”
|
||
“I never was cold in my life,” he said contemptuously. He hailed a
|
||
taxi. “I must go up to the School of Mines, and ask the result of some
|
||
assaying,” he added as he almost lifted her in. “Then we can talk up
|
||
there. May I smoke?”
|
||
“I don’t care what you do.”
|
||
He smiled directly into her resentful eyes this time and tucked the
|
||
lap-robe about her.
|
||
XX
|
||
He apparently forgot her during the short drive and stared through
|
||
the open window of the cab, his thoughts, no doubt, in the assay room
|
||
of the School, where several students, as ardent as himself, were
|
||
experimenting with ore they had managed to secure from a recently
|
||
opened mine. Ora’s resentment vanished, partly because she reflected
|
||
that a new and original experience was a boon to be grateful for in
|
||
Butte, but more because she was thrilled with the sense of adventure.
|
||
Her woman’s instinct gave assurance that he had no intention of making
|
||
love to her, but it also whispered that, whether she liked or disliked
|
||
him when the adventure was over, she would have something to remember.
|
||
And it was the first time she ever had indulged in recklessness. Butte
|
||
would be by the ears on the morrow if it learned of her escapade.
|
||
When they reached the dark School of Mines he dismissed the taxi, and
|
||
said to Ora, “Wait for me here. I shan’t be a moment.”
|
||
He disappeared and Ora shrugged her shoulders and sat down on the
|
||
steps. He returned in a few moments and extended himself over several
|
||
steps below her.
|
||
“Comfortable?” he asked.
|
||
“Very!”
|
||
“It’s a night, isn’t it?” he asked abruptly.
|
||
He was not looking at her but at the low sulphurous blue sky, with its
|
||
jewelled lattice, white, yellow, green, blue. There were no tree tops
|
||
to rustle, but from the window below came the voluptuous strains of the
|
||
Merry Widow waltz, mingling incongruously with the raucous noises of
|
||
the sleepless town: the roaring street-cars, the blasts of engines, the
|
||
monstrous purr of motor-cats.
|
||
“If we could cut out that jungle,” he said with a sigh. “Are you warm
|
||
enough?” He pulled the cloak about the lower part of her body. “I
|
||
should have taken the rug from the cab----”
|
||
“I am warm enough,” she said impatiently, and what she longed to say
|
||
was, “How in heaven’s name did you marry Ida Hook?” He had transferred
|
||
his gaze to the city and she studied his face. Then she understood. In
|
||
spite of its intense reserve and detachment, its strength and power,
|
||
its thin sensitive mouth, it was the most passionate face she had
|
||
ever seen. As a matter of fact she had been at pains to ignore the
|
||
purely masculine side of men, her fastidious mind never indulging in
|
||
comparisons. She half rose with a sense of panic. Again he looked up
|
||
solicitously.
|
||
“I am sure you are not comfortable. I could find you some cushions----”
|
||
“Please don’t. So you love beauty?” She was deeply annoyed with
|
||
herself, but could think of nothing less banal. He certainly was not
|
||
easy to talk to.
|
||
“Don’t you? It would be odd if you didn’t. One reason I brought you up
|
||
up here was because I wanted to look at you in the starlight where you
|
||
belong--the cold starlight--not in that crowded gaudy room full of mere
|
||
human beings.”
|
||
“Are you a poet? I have somehow received the impression that you are a
|
||
mere walking ambition.”
|
||
“I’m no poet if you mean one of those writing fellows.” His tone
|
||
expressed unmitigated scorn.
|
||
“Well, no doubt you have read a great deal of poetry, little as one
|
||
would suspect it.”
|
||
“Never read a line of it except when I had to decline it at school--any
|
||
more than I’ve ever read a line of fiction.”
|
||
“Well, you’ve missed a great deal,” said Ora tartly. “Poetry is
|
||
an essential part of the beauty of the world, which you seem to
|
||
appreciate. And the best of fiction is the best expression of current
|
||
history. What do you think when you star-gaze?”
|
||
“You mean, can I think at all when I haven’t read what other men have
|
||
thought?”
|
||
“No.--No doubt the most original brains are those that have not read
|
||
too much, are not choked up.” Ora made this admission reluctantly, but
|
||
he had caught her fairly. “Tell me at least what the stars suggest to
|
||
you. About everything has been said of them that can be said. The poor
|
||
old stars have been worked to death.”
|
||
“The stars above Montana are watchfires protecting the treasure below.
|
||
Perhaps they are bits of her treasures, gold, silver, copper, sapphire,
|
||
that flew upward in the final cataclysm.”
|
||
“I don’t know whether that is poetical or gross materialism.”
|
||
“No mines, no poets. Nearly all conquest from the dawn of history
|
||
down to the Boer War has had the acquisition of mineral wealth as
|
||
its real object. The civilisation that follows is incidental; it
|
||
merely means that the strongest race, which, of course, knows the
|
||
most, wins. If ever we have a war with Mexico, what will be the
|
||
cause? Mines. Incidentally we will civilise her. Peru, Mexico, India,
|
||
the Americas--all have been invaded in their turn by more civilised
|
||
nations, and all after plunder. They gave as much as they took, but
|
||
little they cared about that. What opened up California? This great
|
||
Northwest? Prospectors in search of gold. Excuse this lecture. I am the
|
||
least talkative of men, but you have jarred my brain, somehow. Read the
|
||
history of mines and mining if you want romance.”
|
||
“As a matter of fact few things interest me more. I am so glad my mine
|
||
has been leased for a year only. When that is up I am going to mine
|
||
it myself. I’ll build a bungalow out there and go down every day.
|
||
Perhaps in time I could be my own manager. At all events, think of the
|
||
excitement of watching the ore as it comes up the shaft; of running
|
||
through a lean vein and coming suddenly upon a chamber of an entirely
|
||
different kind of ore from what you had been taking out. Great shoots
|
||
full of free gold! Wire gold! Or that crisp brown-gold that looks as if
|
||
it were boiling out of the ore and makes one want to bite it! Why are
|
||
you staring so at me?”
|
||
His eyes were more widely opened and brilliant than she had seen
|
||
them. “Do you mean that?” he asked. “I’ve a great notion to tell you
|
||
something that I’ve not told anyone.”
|
||
“Do tell me!”
|
||
She leaned down eagerly. She had dismissed the feeling of panic as
|
||
something to be forgotten as quickly as possible. But her brain was on
|
||
fire to penetrate his. She felt an extraordinary mental stimulation.
|
||
But he relapsed into absolute silence, although he held his head,
|
||
lowered again, at an angle that suggested he might be thinking
|
||
intently. She moved impatiently, but he sat still, staring downward,
|
||
his eyes narrow once more. She noticed irrelevantly how black his hair
|
||
was, and her white hand went out stealthily as if magnetised, but was
|
||
immediately restored to order. In the vibrating silence she had another
|
||
glimmer of understanding. He wanted to tell her something personal,
|
||
but his natural secretiveness and habit of reserve were engaged in a
|
||
struggle with the unusual impulse. She shifted the ground.
|
||
“I wish you would tell me something of your boyhood,” she said abruptly.
|
||
He looked up in astonishment. “I never talk about myself----”
|
||
“How very egoistical.”
|
||
“Ego----”
|
||
“No, I did not say egotistical.”
|
||
“Ah!” There was another pause, although he looked at her with a frown.
|
||
“I have talked to you more than I ever talk to anyone,” he said
|
||
resentfully.
|
||
“It is the stars, to say nothing of the isolation. We might be up
|
||
on one of your escaped nuggets. Remember that I have heard of you
|
||
constantly for six years--and met you before on one of those occasions
|
||
when all persons look alike. How could I escape curiosity?”
|
||
“I brought you out to look at in the proper setting. I can’t say I had
|
||
any desire to talk to you. I suppose I should not keep you out here----”
|
||
“I am much happier and more comfortable than in that hot room. But
|
||
surely you need more recreation. Why do you never go to dances?”
|
||
“Dances? I? I only went tonight----” He, too, apparently, was
|
||
determined to keep their respective spouses out of the conversation,
|
||
for he veered off quickly. “It is a sort of religion to attend the Prom
|
||
even if you only show yourself. I was about to beat a retreat when I
|
||
saw you. Of course it was my duty to shake hands. Besides, I wanted to
|
||
see if you were real.” And he smiled up into her eyes.
|
||
“Do you know that we are flirting?”
|
||
“Well, let us flirt,” he replied comfortably. “I haven’t the least idea
|
||
what it is, but I am not a bit in love with you, if that is what you
|
||
mean.”
|
||
Ora drew herself up rigidly. “Well, you are----” she began, aware
|
||
that she had a temper. Then she laughed. Why quarrel with a novel
|
||
experience? Her anger turned into a more subtle emotion. She was well
|
||
aware of the dazzling brightness of her eyes. She leaned forward and
|
||
concentrated her mind in an attempt to project her magnetism through
|
||
them, although again with a feeling of panic; it was too much like the
|
||
magnet rushing out to the iron.
|
||
He returned that powerful gaze unmoved, although an expression of
|
||
perplexity crossed his own eyes. She was disconcerted and asked lamely:
|
||
“Is it true that you used to run away and prospect in the mountains?”
|
||
His face lit up with an enthusiasm her fascinations had been unable to
|
||
inspire; and a richer note came into his voice. “I was eleven the first
|
||
time and stayed out for six months. Two years after I ran away again.
|
||
The next time I went with my father’s permission. I worked in one of
|
||
the Butte mines one summer--but otherwise--well, you see, there is a
|
||
good deal to do on a ranch. This is the first time I have been able to
|
||
do as I please.”
|
||
Ora looked at his long slim figure, his brown hands that tonight, at
|
||
least, expressed a sort of cruel deliberate repose. Whatever they may
|
||
have been in their ranch days they were smooth and well cared for now.
|
||
“Somehow, I can’t see you handling a pick,” she said doubtfully. “Is it
|
||
true that you intend to work in the mines all summer?”
|
||
“Part of it--when I am not working in a mill or a smelter. I’d be
|
||
ashamed of myself if I couldn’t do anything that another man can do.
|
||
Some of the best miners look like rats.”
|
||
He looked like a highly-bred mettlesome race-horse himself, and Ora
|
||
wondered, as she had before tonight: “Where did he get it? Who were his
|
||
ancestors?” She had seen dukes that looked like farm hands, and royal
|
||
princesses that might have been upper housemaids, but her feminine
|
||
(and American) mind clung to the fallacy that it takes generations to
|
||
produce the clean-cut shell. She determined to look up his family tree
|
||
in Holland.
|
||
“Well--Custer--my housekeeper--will look after you,” she said as
|
||
naturally as if her thoughts had not wandered for a moment. “Shall you
|
||
do any mining on your own place before we come back from Europe?”
|
||
He started and looked at her apprehensively, then scowled.
|
||
“What is the matter? You may not know it but at this moment your face
|
||
looks like an Indian battle-axe.”
|
||
To her surprise he laughed boyishly. “You startled me. I have heard of
|
||
mind readers. Well, I will tell you what I wanted to a while back. But
|
||
you must promise not to tell--anyone.”
|
||
“I promise! I swear it! And do hurry. I’m afraid you’ll shut up tight
|
||
again.”
|
||
“No, I won’t. I don’t know that I’d tell you were it not that your own
|
||
mine is just over the border; we may have to consolidate some day to
|
||
save a lawsuit--No, I will be honest; I really want to tell you. It is
|
||
this: Close to the northeast boundary line of my ranch is an almost
|
||
barren hill of limestone and granite. Shortly before I left--last
|
||
October--I discovered float on the side of the hill. There is no doubt
|
||
in my mind that we have both come upon a new mineral belt, although
|
||
whether we are in the middle or on one edge of it is another question.”
|
||
He told her the story of the storm and of the uncovering of the
|
||
float. Nor did he end his confidence with a bare statement of fact.
|
||
He told her of his sensations as he sat on the ragged ground leaning
|
||
against the roots of the slain trees, his mental struggle, and final
|
||
resolution. Then he told her of the hopes and dreams of his boyhood,
|
||
and what it had meant to him--this sudden revelation that he had a
|
||
mine under his feet--and all his own! He talked for half an hour, with
|
||
the deep satisfaction that only a shy and silent person feels when
|
||
talking into a sympathetic mind for the first time. Ora listened with
|
||
a curious sense of excitement, as if she were overboard in a warm and
|
||
pleasant but unknown sea. There were times when she felt like talking
|
||
very fast herself. But she did nothing of the sort, merely jogging him
|
||
diplomatically when he showed signs of relapsing into silence. Finally
|
||
he stopped in the middle of a sentence and said abruptly:
|
||
“That’s all.”
|
||
“Oh! And you really have made up your mind not to begin work for a
|
||
year?”
|
||
“Quite!”
|
||
“But--have you thought--it is only tonight I learned that the engineers
|
||
who leased my mine have struck a rich vein. Suppose it dips toward
|
||
yours----”
|
||
“It does----”
|
||
“Have they put on a big force?”
|
||
“Naturally. They are rushing things, as they know they will not get the
|
||
mine another year.”
|
||
“Well, suppose their vein runs under your hill--through their
|
||
side-line?”
|
||
He stirred uneasily. “I am watching them. So far the dip is very
|
||
slight. It may take a turn, or go down straight; or,” and he smiled at
|
||
her again, “it may pinch out. Nothing is so uncertain as an ore vein.”
|
||
“Do you think it will?” asked Ora anxiously.
|
||
“No, don’t worry. I was down the other day; and did some prospecting on
|
||
my own account besides. I think you’ve got a big mine.”
|
||
“But suppose the vein should take a sudden dip to the right--you don’t
|
||
want them burrowing under your hill----”
|
||
“They won’t burrow under my hill,” he said grimly. “I should persuade
|
||
them that there was an even richer vein on their left.”
|
||
“Is there?”
|
||
“I have reason to think so. They naturally would want to avoid the
|
||
expenses of a lawsuit, and of course they would waste a lot of time
|
||
sinking a shaft or driving across. Their lease would be pretty well up
|
||
by the time----”
|
||
“You _are_ cold-blooded! What of me? I should be making nothing,
|
||
either.”
|
||
“You’d make it all later on. How much do you expect to spend in Europe
|
||
anyway? You must have made a thousand dollars a day since the first
|
||
carload of ore was smelted.”
|
||
She was on the point of replying that a woman could not have enough
|
||
money in Europe, when she remembered the conspiracy to make him believe
|
||
that a thousand dollars would cover the expenses of his wife.
|
||
“Oh, it is merely that I don’t like being one of the pawns in your
|
||
game,” she said.
|
||
“You’d have all the more later on. Ore doesn’t run away.”
|
||
“How _can_ you stay away from your mine? I feel--after all that you
|
||
have told me!--that you are wild to get at it?”
|
||
“So I am! So I am! But I said I wouldn’t and that is the end of it. I
|
||
want that last year at the School.”
|
||
“What shall you do with all that money--if your hill turns out to be
|
||
full of gold? More, I hope, than the rest of our millionaires have
|
||
done for Montana--which is exactly nothing. You might give the State a
|
||
complete irrigating system.”
|
||
“Good idea! Perhaps I will. But that is in the future. I want the fun
|
||
first----”
|
||
“Fun? It is the passion of your life, your great romance. You’ll never
|
||
love a woman like that.”
|
||
“Of course not.” But he was staring at her. He had a sensation of
|
||
something swimming in the depths of his mind, striving to reach the
|
||
surface. He changed his position suddenly and sat up. “And you?” he
|
||
asked. “You have the same vision. Couldn’t you feel the same absorbing
|
||
passion----”
|
||
“For ore?” The scorn of her entire sex was in her voice. “Dead cold
|
||
metal----”
|
||
“Every molecule, every individual atom is alive and quivering----”
|
||
“I am not interested in chemistry.”
|
||
He still stared at her. Her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes blazing. She
|
||
sprang to her feet.
|
||
“Ida is the wife for you! She’ll never ask much of you and you never
|
||
could hurt her, not even if you tried, she is fortunate in lacking just
|
||
that which you could hurt.”
|
||
“What is it?” He spoke eagerly. He, too, had risen, his eyes still on
|
||
her face. Unconsciously he held his breath.
|
||
“Oh, you wouldn’t understand it I told you--and I haven’t the least
|
||
desire to tell you. She will make you comfortable, do you credit when
|
||
you are a rich man, spend your money royally. That is all _you_ will
|
||
ask of _her_. Now, I’ll go back.”
|
||
He was a step or two below her. Their eyes were on a level. He looked
|
||
at her sombrely for a moment, then walked past her up the steps.
|
||
“You need not call a cab. I shall go home. I should only set them all
|
||
talking if I appeared in the ballroom again. You can tell Mark that I
|
||
didn’t feel well and that you took me home.”
|
||
They walked along the high terrace until they found a point of easy
|
||
descent.
|
||
“What have I said to make you angry?” he asked.
|
||
Ora laughed with determined good humour. “It was not I. It was merely
|
||
my sex that flared up. Please forget it.”
|
||
“I want to thank you for what you have done for Ida,” he said abruptly,
|
||
and it was evident that the words cost him more than his former
|
||
revelations. “It was a great thing for you to do.”
|
||
“Oh, Ida has become my most intimate friend. I have never enjoyed Butte
|
||
so much as in these last few months.”
|
||
“Has she? And Mark is my best friend.” He jerked his head in annoyance;
|
||
manifestly the remark had been too spontaneous. They were before her
|
||
gate. She extended a limp hand, but he held it firmly. He was smiling
|
||
again although he looked depressed.
|
||
“Do give me a friendly shake,” he said. “I do like you and you will be
|
||
going in a few days.”
|
||
“I do not go for five months.”
|
||
“You can go next week. I’ll square it with Mark.”
|
||
“I don’t wish to go next week. Besides, Mark expects some important
|
||
people here in the autumn, and needs my help. He has a deal on.”
|
||
“I’ll dispossess Mark of any such notion. It’s all nonsense, this idea
|
||
of a man’s needing his wife’s help in business. It’s a poor sort of man
|
||
that can’t manage his own affairs, and Mark is not a poor sort. Now,
|
||
you are angry again!”
|
||
“That would be foolish of me,” she said icily. “You merely don’t
|
||
understand. You never could. Do you want to get rid of me?” she asked
|
||
abruptly.
|
||
“Yes, I think I do.”
|
||
Then Ora relented. She also gave him the smile that she reserved as her
|
||
most devastating weapon. “I am sorry,” she murmured, “but I don’t think
|
||
I can be ready for at least three months. Nor Ida.”
|
||
“You go next week,” he said.
|
||
And go they did.
|
||
XXI
|
||
Gregory and Mark established their wives comfortably in a drawing-room
|
||
of the limited for Chicago, asked the usual masculine questions about
|
||
tickets and trunk checks, expressed their masculine surprise that
|
||
nothing had been forgotten, told them to be careful not to lean over
|
||
the railing of the observation car, nor to make themselves ill with the
|
||
numerous boxes of candy sent to the train, admonished them not to spend
|
||
too much money in New York, to send their trunks to the steamer the day
|
||
before they sailed, and give themselves at least two hours to get to
|
||
the docks; above all not to mislay their letters of credit; then kissed
|
||
them dutifully, and, as the train moved out, stood on the platform with
|
||
solemn faces and hearts of indescribable buoyancy.
|
||
“My Lord!” exclaimed Ida, as she blew her last kiss. “If Greg was going
|
||
along I’d have to take care of him every step of the way. I wouldn’t
|
||
trust him with the tickets the length of the train. Men do make me
|
||
tired. They keep up the farce that we’re children just to keep up that
|
||
other grand farce that they run the Universe. Any old plank to cling
|
||
to.”
|
||
Ora kept her sentiments to herself.
|
||
If Mark, who was fond of his wife, and more or less dependent upon her,
|
||
wondered vaguely that he should rejoice in the prospect of six months
|
||
of bachelorhood, Gregory was almost puzzled. Ida was now no more to him
|
||
personally than a responsibility he had voluntarily assumed and was
|
||
determined to treat with complete justice; but at least she made him
|
||
more comfortable than he had ever been before, and he had trained her
|
||
to let him alone. Since her rapid improvement her speech had ceased
|
||
to irritate him; she was never untidy, never anything but a pleasant
|
||
picture to look at. He had also noted on the night of the party that
|
||
she was indisputably the handsomest woman in the room and received the
|
||
homage of men with dignity and poise. He had felt proud of her, and
|
||
comfortably certain that he could trust her. Altogether a model wife.
|
||
Nevertheless as he walked out Park Street after he left Mark at his
|
||
office (Ida not only had sent his personal possessions to the Blake
|
||
house but found time to unpack and put them away) his brain, which
|
||
had been curiously depressed during the past week, felt as if full of
|
||
effervescing wine.
|
||
“Jove!” he thought, “why do men marry? What has any woman living to
|
||
give a man half as good as his freedom.”
|
||
His freedom was to be reasonably complete. He had told Ida to expect
|
||
no letters from him and not to write herself unless she were in
|
||
trouble. With all the fervour of his masculine soul he hated to write
|
||
letters. Long since he had bought a typewriter, on which he rattled off
|
||
necessary business communications so briefly that they would have cost
|
||
him little more on the wire. He knew that he should hear constantly of
|
||
his wife’s welfare from Mark, and had no desire to be inflicted with
|
||
descriptions of scenery and shops.
|
||
He felt a spasm of envy, however, as he thought of the letters Mark
|
||
would receive from Ora. _Her_ letters, no doubt, would be worth
|
||
reading, not only because she had a mind, and already had seen too much
|
||
of Europe to comment on its obvious phases, but because they would be
|
||
redolent of her subtle exquisite personality. He had once come upon a
|
||
package of old letters among his mother’s possessions and read them.
|
||
They had been written by his great-great-grandmother to her husband
|
||
while he was a soldier in the War of the Revolution. It was merely the
|
||
simple life of the family, the farm, and the woods, that she described,
|
||
but Gregory never recalled those letters without feeling again the
|
||
subtle psychological emanation of the writer’s sweet and feminine but
|
||
determinate personality; it hovered like a wraith over the written
|
||
words, imprisoned, imperishable, until the paper should fall to dust.
|
||
So, he imagined, something of Ora’s essence would take wing on the
|
||
rustling sheets of her letters.
|
||
But the spasm of envy passed. Ora would write no such letters to Mark
|
||
Blake. Her correspondence with her husband would be perfunctory,
|
||
practical, brief. To some man she might write pages that would keep him
|
||
up at night, reading and rereading, interpreting illusive phrases,
|
||
searching for hidden and personal meanings, while two individualities
|
||
met and melted.... But this yearning passed also. To receive such
|
||
letters a man must answer them and that would be hell.
|
||
He was on his way to change his clothes for overalls and get his blue
|
||
dinner pail, well filled, from Custer. But before he reached the house
|
||
he conceived an abrupt and violent distaste for life underground, an
|
||
uncontrollable desire--or one which he made no effort to control--for
|
||
long rides over the ranch, and a glimpse of Limestone Hill. It was
|
||
seven months since he had seen his ranch save in snatches, and he
|
||
wanted it now for months on end. He was not a town-bred man, and he
|
||
suddenly hated the sight of Butte with her naked angles and feverish
|
||
energies. He realised also that his mind insistently demanded a rest.
|
||
To be sure he had intended to work in the mines for eight hours of the
|
||
day, but he had planned to study for ten. Well, he would have none
|
||
of it! Caprice was no characteristic of his, but he felt full of it
|
||
this brilliant morning. If the air was so light in Butte that his feet
|
||
seemed barely to touch the ground, so clear that the mountains seemed
|
||
walking down the valley, what must it be in the country?
|
||
He went rapidly to the house, left a message for Mark, packed a
|
||
suit-case and took the next train for Pony. There he hired a horse and
|
||
rode to his ranch.
|
||
One of the sudden June rains had come while he was in the train. It
|
||
had ceased, but a mass of low clouds brushing the higher tree tops
|
||
was almost black. Their edges were silver: they were filled with a
|
||
cold imprisoned sunlight, which transformed the distant mountains into
|
||
glass, transparent, with black shadows in their depths. Montana looked
|
||
as giving an exhibition of her astral body. But as he rode the clouds
|
||
drifted away, the sky deepened to the rich voluptuous blue of that
|
||
high altitude; even the grey soil showing through the thin grass of
|
||
the granite hills looked warmer. Where the soil was thicker the ground
|
||
was covered with a gorgeous tapestry of wildflowers; the birds sang
|
||
desperately as if they knew how short was their springtime, affected
|
||
like mortals by the thin intoxicating air. Even the waters in the creek
|
||
roared as if making the most of their brief span. The mountains lost
|
||
their glassy look; blue, ice-topped, they were as full of young and
|
||
vivid life as when they danced about, heedless that the heaving earth
|
||
purposed they should wait for centuries before settling into things
|
||
of beauty for unborn man to admire. They never will look old, those
|
||
mountains of Montana; man may take the treasure from their veins and
|
||
the jewels from their crowns, but they drink forever the elixir of the
|
||
air. The blue dawn fills their spirit with a deathless exultation, the
|
||
long blue-gold days their bodies with immortal life, the starry nights,
|
||
swinging their lamps so close to the snow fields, unroll the dramas
|
||
of other worlds. They are no mere masses of rock and dirt or even of
|
||
metal, these mountains of Montana, but man’s vision of eternal youth.
|
||
Gregory drew rein on the crest of one of his own hills. Below lay
|
||
the De Smet ranch, and he drew a long breath with that sensation of
|
||
serene pride which comes to men when they contemplate their landed
|
||
possessions, or their wives on state occasions. All the arable soil,
|
||
on flat and hillside, was green; alfalfa, with its purple flowers,
|
||
filled the bottoms; the winter wheat was rippling in the wind; the
|
||
acres covered with the tender leaves of young flax were like a densely
|
||
woven lawn. On the hills and the public range roamed his cattle. All of
|
||
this fair land, including its possible treasure, was his, absolutely.
|
||
By the terms of his father’s will he paid yearly dividends from the
|
||
sale of steers and crops to three aunts, now reduced to two. Whether by
|
||
accident or design, Mr. Compton had omitted all mention of “minerals
|
||
under the earth.” Gregory had not the least objection to making these
|
||
ladies rich, when his mines yielded their wealth, but he was jealous
|
||
of every acre of his inheritance, far more of its secrets. All the
|
||
passionate intensity of his nature he had poured out on his land and
|
||
its subterranean mysteries, and he would have hailed an invention which
|
||
would enable him to dismiss every man from his employ. But his head was
|
||
hard and he always smiled grimly at the finish of his fanciful desires.
|
||
He turned his horse toward the distant group of farm buildings, then
|
||
wheeled abruptly and rode toward Limestone Hill. He had anticipated a
|
||
long talk with the enthusiastic Oakley on the subject of crops, but he
|
||
suddenly realised that he was in no mood to talk to anyone and that his
|
||
secret reason for coming to the ranch was to visit his hill. Oakley
|
||
would cling to him for hours. One glance had assured him that the crops
|
||
would have satisfied a state experimental farm. Mining would fascinate
|
||
him in its every detail, but as far as agriculture was concerned, he
|
||
was interested only in results.
|
||
As he rode toward the hill he frowned at the signs of activity on
|
||
the other side of his boundary line. A large gasoline hoist had
|
||
been installed. The waste dump was almost as high as a hill, four
|
||
“double-sixes”--six-horse teams--stood waiting to be loaded from the
|
||
ore bins. There were a group of miners’ cabins, a long mess-house, and
|
||
a blacksmith’s shop. This was the only shadow on his future: he wanted
|
||
no lawsuits, nor did he want to enter into partnership with anyone, not
|
||
even Ora Blake.
|
||
But he dismissed the matter from his mind, tied his horse, and,
|
||
although Montanans are a slow race on foot out of deference to the
|
||
altitude, ran up the hill. A glance told him that his secret was
|
||
undiscovered. He knelt down and dug up the float, his heart hammering.
|
||
And then he deliberately let the prospector’s fever take possession of
|
||
him. The soles of his feet prickled as if responding to the magnets
|
||
below; he had a fancy that gold, molten, was running through his veins.
|
||
But his brain worked clearly. He was aware that his exultation and
|
||
excitement were not due to the lure of gold alone, but to the still
|
||
more subtle pleasure that a strong and obstinate nature feels in
|
||
breaking a vow and deliberately succumbing to temptation. He had vowed
|
||
in good faith that he would not open his mine until the third of June
|
||
of the following year. But a week before he had spent an enchanted hour
|
||
with a woman, and during the rest of that night--he had walked half way
|
||
to Silver Bow and back--he had wanted that woman more than he had ever
|
||
wanted anything on earth. He had forgotten his mine.
|
||
At first he had lashed himself with scorn, remembering his infatuation
|
||
for the woman he had married. He felt something of the indignant
|
||
astonishment of the small boy who imagines himself catching a second
|
||
attack of measles, before he discovers it is scarlet fever. But it
|
||
took him only a brief time to realise that the passion inspired by Ora
|
||
Blake was so much deeper and more various than the blind subservience
|
||
to Nature that had driven him to Ida (who had not the least idea of
|
||
being a tool of Nature herself) that it was far more dangerous than
|
||
the first inevitable attack of youthful madness could ever be. It
|
||
humiliated his pride to have been the mere victim of the race, the
|
||
rudimentary male swept into matrimony by the first woman who combined
|
||
superlative femaleness with virtue. Then he wondered if he could have
|
||
loved Ora at that time; he certainly felt ten years older today.
|
||
The word love brought him to his senses. It was formidable and
|
||
definite. While he had believed himself to be in the throes of a second
|
||
fever caught from a beautiful woman’s concordant magnetism, he had felt
|
||
merely disgusted at his weakness, not in the least disloyal to his
|
||
closest friend, whom he knew no woman could tempt him to betray. But he
|
||
realised with hideous abruptness that if he were thrown with Ora Blake
|
||
for any length of time she would become so necessary to him through
|
||
the comprehensive appeal, which he only half understood, that he no
|
||
more could pluck her out of him by the roots, as men disposed of the
|
||
superficial passion when it became inconvenient, than he could tear the
|
||
veins out of his hill with his hands.
|
||
He had felt the danger dimly when with her, although he had made up his
|
||
mind even then to get her out of Montana as quickly as possible. He
|
||
vowed anew, with the first sensation of panic he had ever experienced,
|
||
that the same sky should not cover them a week hence. He knew his
|
||
influence over Mark Blake.
|
||
Then he made a deliberate attempt to banish the subject from his mind,
|
||
ordering his thoughts to their favorite haunts underground. But one
|
||
little insidious tract, so difficult to control in all brains still
|
||
young and human, showed a disposition to create startling and vivid
|
||
pictures, to dream intensely, to cast up this woman’s face, fling it
|
||
into his consciousness, with an automatic regularity that was like a
|
||
diabolical challenge to his haughty will.
|
||
He endeavoured to think of Ora with contempt: she had married a good
|
||
fellow, but one whom she must have been compelled by the circumstances
|
||
of her life to regard as her social inferior, and who assuredly was
|
||
in no sense suited to her--merely from a parasitic dread of poverty.
|
||
Other women went to work, even if delicately nurtured. But he was
|
||
too masculine and too little influenced by certain phases of modern
|
||
thought to condemn any woman long for turning to man in her extremity.
|
||
Privately he detested women that “did things”; better for them all to
|
||
give some man the right to protect them: marriage with a good fellow
|
||
like Mark Blake, even without love, spoilt them far less than mixing
|
||
up with the world in a scramble for bread. It would have spoilt Ora,
|
||
who was now merely undeveloped; hardened, sharpened, coarsened her.
|
||
He dismissed his abortive attempt to despise her; also a dangerous
|
||
tendency to pity her.
|
||
Before he finished his tramp he had recaptured his poise. What a woman
|
||
like Ora Blake might have to give him he dared not think of, nor would
|
||
he be betrayed again into speculation. Doubtless it was all rubbish
|
||
anyway, merely another trick of the insatiable mating instinct. If
|
||
it were more--the primal instinct plus the almost equally insistent
|
||
demands of the civilised inheritances in the brain--so much the worse,
|
||
the more reason to “cut it out.” But when he returned to the cottage in
|
||
East Granite Street he threw himself on the divan in the parlour and
|
||
slept there.
|
||
XXII
|
||
Therefore was he in no mood to fight another temptation; rather to
|
||
take a sardonic pleasure in succumbing. An hour later, in overalls,
|
||
and assisted by two of his labourers, outwardly more excited than
|
||
he, for they had worked underground and vowed they smelt ore, he was
|
||
running an open cut along the line of the float. As there was no
|
||
outcropping it was mere guesswork; it might be weeks before he struck
|
||
any definite sign of an ore body, but he was prepared to level the hill
|
||
if necessary. Until he did come upon indications that would justify
|
||
the expense, however, he was resolved not to sink a shaft nor drive a
|
||
tunnel.
|
||
They used pick and shovel until at the depth of eight feet they struck
|
||
rock. Gregory had been prepared for this and sent the unwilling but
|
||
interested Oakley into Pony for drills and powder. For two days more
|
||
they drilled and blasted; then--Gregory took out his watch and noted
|
||
the hour, twenty-three minutes after four--one of the men gave a shout
|
||
and tossed a fragment into the air.
|
||
“Stringer, by jinks!” he cried. “And it’s copper carbonate or I’m a
|
||
dead ’un.”
|
||
Gregory frowned, but laid the bit of ore gently on his palm and
|
||
regarded it with awe. He wanted gold, but at least this was his,
|
||
and the first of his treasure to be torn from its sanctuary. For a
|
||
moment the merely personal longing was lost in the enthusiasm of the
|
||
geologist, for the fragment in his hand was very beautiful, a soft rich
|
||
shaded green flecked with red; the vugs, or little cells, looked as if
|
||
lined with deep green velvet.
|
||
But he turned and stared at the mining camp beyond his boundary line.
|
||
One of the bits of float he had found last year had been gold quartz.
|
||
Had it travelled, a mere chip, from the original body to this distant
|
||
point, or danced here on the shoulders of an earthquake? Float, even
|
||
under a layer of soil was often found so far from the ore body, that
|
||
it was a more fallible guide than a prospector’s guess. He walked to
|
||
the end of the hill, while his miners shrugged their shoulders and
|
||
resumed the drilling.
|
||
The great vein of the Primo mine was dipping acutely to the right.
|
||
Might it not be wise for him to abandon his present position and sink a
|
||
shaft close to the line, trusting to his practical knowledge and highly
|
||
organized faculty to strike the vein?
|
||
He stood for half an hour debating the question, listening to the
|
||
intermittent roar of the engine, the rattle of ore dumped from the
|
||
buckets. Then he walked back to the red gash in his own land. It would
|
||
be the bitterest disappointment of his life if he failed to find gold
|
||
in his hill, but the dominant voice in his brain was always practical,
|
||
and it advised him to follow the willing metal for the present instead
|
||
of incurring the expense of a shaft and possible litigation.
|
||
“’Nother stringer!” announced one of the men, as Gregory arrived at the
|
||
long deep cut. “Guess it’s time for a windlass.”
|
||
“Guess it is. Go down to the house and get some lumber.”
|
||
He descended into the cut and looked at the unmistakable evidence of
|
||
little veins. Were they really stringer, tentacles of a great ore
|
||
body climbing toward the surface, or a mere series of independent and
|
||
insignificant veins not worth exploiting? He was in a pessimistic mood,
|
||
but laughed suddenly as he realised how disappointed he would be should
|
||
further excavation demonstrate there was no chamber of copper ore below.
|
||
Four hours later the windlass was finished and four men were at work.
|
||
At the end of the fortnight the windlass had been discarded in favor
|
||
of a gasoline hoist, and twenty-five men in three shifts were employed
|
||
upon a chamber of copper carbonate ore. The nearest of the De Smet
|
||
hills began to take on the appearance of a mining camp; a mess-house
|
||
and a number of cabins were building. Trees were falling, not only to
|
||
make room for the new “town” but to timber the mine when the time came
|
||
to sink or drift. At present those of the miners that could not be
|
||
housed by the disgusted Oakley occupied tents or rude shacks. Oakley
|
||
spent the greater part of his time escorting the great six-horse
|
||
teams from the ranch to the public road, as their drivers showed an
|
||
indifference to his precious crops only rivalled by Gregory Compton’s.
|
||
Mark took a week’s vacation after the first carload of ore had been
|
||
shipped from Pony to the sampling works in Butte and netted $65 a ton.
|
||
Gregory, who was working with his men, far too impatient and surcharged
|
||
with energy to walk about as mere manager, paid scant attention to him
|
||
during the day; but Mark was content to sit on the edge of the cut and
|
||
smoke and calculate, merely retreating in haste when the men lit the
|
||
fuses.
|
||
On the third morning, as he was approaching the mine at dawn with
|
||
his host, Gregory suddenly announced his intention of sending for a
|
||
manager; he purposed to sink a shaft on the edge of the chamber in
|
||
order to determine if the present lode was the top of a vein.
|
||
“Better take off your coat and go to work,” he added. “Do you good.
|
||
You’re getting too fat.”
|
||
“Getting? Thanks. But I don’t mind. You’ve got several hundred thousand
|
||
dollars in that chamber by the looks of things, but I suppose that
|
||
wouldn’t satisfy you?”
|
||
“Lord, no. That is merely the necessary capital to mine the entire
|
||
hill--or fight the powers that be when they get on to the fact that
|
||
I’ve got another Anaconda.”
|
||
“Do you believe it? Big pockets have been found in solitary splendor
|
||
before this.”
|
||
“This hill is mineral from end to end,” said Gregory with intense
|
||
conviction. “And I want to get to the main lode as quickly as possible.”
|
||
“By the way,” said Mark abruptly, “why don’t you locate your claim?”
|
||
“Locate? Why, the land’s mine. Patent is all right My father even
|
||
patented several placer claims----”
|
||
“Mining laws are fearful and wonderful things. Judges, with a fat
|
||
roll in their pockets, have been known to make fearful and wonderful
|
||
interpretations before this. If you’ve struck a new copper belt--well,
|
||
the enemy has billions. Better stake off the entire hill, and apply for
|
||
patents. You may be grey before you get them, but the application is
|
||
enough----”
|
||
“It would cost a lot of money, and I don’t like the idea of paying
|
||
twice over. This is costing thousands----”
|
||
“And you’ll soon be taking out thousands a week. But if you need it all
|
||
I’ll lend you the money. It would be a good investment for Ora. You can
|
||
pay me four per cent. I’ve a mind to go ahead today and begin staking
|
||
off.”
|
||
Gregory stood still with his head inclined at the angle which indicated
|
||
that he was concentrating his mind. “Very well,” he said curtly. “Go
|
||
ahead. And I don’t need your money. Stake off every inch of the hill
|
||
and have a good map made. See that the side lines are flush with the
|
||
boundary. Of course I’d never have any trouble with you, but Mrs. Blake
|
||
might take it into her head to sell. Get out a surveyor when you’re
|
||
ready for him. Don’t bother me until the thing is done.”
|
||
Mark took a longer vacation and worked off some twenty pounds. He
|
||
wished ruefully that Ora would return suddenly, for he doubted that
|
||
his love of good living would undo the excellent work when he was once
|
||
more in Butte. He employed a U. S. deputy mineral surveyor, the map was
|
||
made, Gregory applied for his patents; the lawyers’s mind was at rest
|
||
for the present, although he kept his ears open in Butte.
|
||
Gregory sank his shaft ostensibly to determine the dip and width of the
|
||
vein leading from the chamber, but secretly with the hope of meeting
|
||
the body of ore already uncovered in the Primo Mine. He was elated with
|
||
his splendid “find” and sudden wealth, but his old dream never left him
|
||
for a moment. Indeed he would have been more than willing to miss the
|
||
pyroxenite if he could come upon a lode of quartz containing free gold.
|
||
That was what he had visualised all his life. He wanted to stand in his
|
||
own stopes and flash his lantern along glittering seams, not merely
|
||
send masses of decomposed grey-black ore to the sampling works and
|
||
await returns. If he found a vein worth the outlay he would erect his
|
||
own stamp mill and listen to its music. Such is the deathless boy that
|
||
exists in all men. Mere wealth meant far less to him than the beautiful
|
||
costly toy to play with for a while.
|
||
The shaft at the end of a month had gone down eighty feet; but
|
||
had revealed only a lean vein of copper carbonates which made him
|
||
forget his dreams in the fear that his mine was pinching out. But he
|
||
persisted, and one morning when he went to the bottom of the shaft
|
||
after the smoke of the blast had cleared away, and lit his candle,
|
||
he picked up a lump of yellow ore that glittered like quartz packed
|
||
with free gold. For a moment his head swam. He knelt down and brushed
|
||
the shattered rock from several other bits of what looked like virgin
|
||
gold; and he caressed them as gently as if they had been the cheek of
|
||
his first born. But he was a geologist. He stepped into the ascending
|
||
bucket a prey to misgivings. As soon as he examined his treasure in the
|
||
sunlight he knew it at once for chalcopyrite--the great copper ore of
|
||
the sulphide zone.
|
||
After he had assayed it he philosophically dismissed regret. It ran
|
||
$26 in copper with slight values of gold and silver. Chalcopyrite ore,
|
||
as a rule, runs about five per cent. in copper, its commercial value
|
||
lying in the immense quantities in which it may be found, although it
|
||
is necessary to concentrate at the mine. If he had struck one of the
|
||
rare veins of massive chalcopyrite, averaging $25 a ton, he would take
|
||
out, after it was sufficiently developed, several thousand dollars a
|
||
day; and, like the carbonates, it could go straight to the smelter. As
|
||
a matter of fact the vein when uncovered proved to be six feet wide
|
||
and grew slightly broader with depth. The miners were jubilant over
|
||
their “fool’s gold”, and a number of people came out and asked for the
|
||
privilege of looking at what the foreman, Joshua Mann, declared to be
|
||
the prettiest pay streak in Montana.
|
||
Gregory found his chalcopyrite during the third month after he began to
|
||
investigate the hill. The chamber already had netted him over a hundred
|
||
thousand dollars and grew richer with depth. He put an extra force at
|
||
work on the promising shoot.
|
||
In the Primo Mine the luck varied. The two engineers, Osborne and
|
||
Douglas, exhausted the first lode, struck a poor vein, averaging ten
|
||
dollars a ton, then ran into a body of the ore netting as high as four
|
||
hundred dollars. Two months later they came up suddenly against a wall
|
||
of country rock. Undaunted, they drove through the mass, and struck a
|
||
lean shoot of chalcopyrite.
|
||
XXIII
|
||
“Well, what do you know about that?”
|
||
Mark’s feet were on the table in the cabin Gregory had had built for
|
||
himself on the top of the hill. The news had just been brought to them
|
||
by one of the men who had a faithful friend in the Primo Mine.
|
||
Gregory was engaged in biting a cigar to pieces. He waited some ten
|
||
minutes before replying, during which Mark smoked philosophically.
|
||
“I think this,” he said finally, “what those fellows are after
|
||
is gold, not copper. Better suggest to them to get out an expert
|
||
geologist--Holmes is a good friend of mine--who will tell them to sink
|
||
a shaft over on the right, or run a drift from the original stope. All
|
||
we need is time.”
|
||
“I’m on. But will they do it? They’re not fools and what they’re after
|
||
mainly is cash.”
|
||
“I think they’ll listen to reason. They’re not far from the boundary
|
||
line and there’s no possible doubt that the vein apexes here. The
|
||
moment they cross the line I’ll get out an injunction. That would stop
|
||
them anyhow, hold them up until their lease had expired. And their
|
||
chance is good to recover the vein on the other side. No doubt it has
|
||
faulted. Have you noticed those aspens about a hundred yards beyond
|
||
their shaft? Where there are aspens there is water. Now as there is no
|
||
water in sight it must be below the surface, and that would indicate
|
||
faulting. There might be no ore on the other side, but the chance is
|
||
worth taking. Better have a talk with Osborne tomorrow. He’s the least
|
||
mulish of the two.”
|
||
“Good. I might offer them some inducement--give them an extra month or
|
||
two. Even so we’d win out. But they’re not the only danger ahead. How
|
||
long since you’ve been in Butte?”
|
||
“Not since I began work.”
|
||
“Well, let me tell you that Amalgamated is buzzing. They’ve got on to
|
||
the fact good and plenty that you’ve got the biggest thing in copper
|
||
that has been struck in Montana for twenty years. Of course they get
|
||
figures regularly from the sampling works. They know you’ve already
|
||
taken out half a million dollars worth of ore--net--and that the new
|
||
shoot is getting richer every minute. They’re talking loud about
|
||
spoiling the market and all the rest of it. Of course that’s rank
|
||
nonsense. What worries them is a rival in Montana. If your mine was in
|
||
Colorado or Michigan they wouldn’t care shucks. You haven’t taken out
|
||
enough yet to worry them about the market. But if they can queer your
|
||
game they’ll do it. Lucky for you the smelting works need copper just
|
||
now as badly as you need them. If it were not for that strike in the
|
||
Stemwinder and the Corkscrew you might be having trouble.”
|
||
Gregory smiled, but as he set his jaw at the same time it was not an
|
||
agreeable smile. “I’m in a mood to fight somebody--and win. I wanted
|
||
gold and didn’t get it. A row with Amalgamated would relieve my
|
||
feelings--although I’d rather use my fists.”
|
||
“They’re mad, too, because you’ve named your mine ‘Perch of the Devil.’
|
||
That’s the old name for Butte, and they look upon it as a direct
|
||
challenge.”
|
||
“So it is. And you don’t suppose I’d call my mine Limestone Hill, do
|
||
you? I shouldn’t get half the fun out of it. What the devil can they
|
||
do, anyhow?”
|
||
“That’s what I’m worrying about. You never know what Amalgamated has
|
||
up its sleeve. There was just one man who was too much for them--for
|
||
a while--and that was Heinze. And they got him in the end. I believe
|
||
you’d give them a run for their money, and I don’t rank you second to
|
||
Heinze or any other man when it comes to brains or resource. But--well,
|
||
they’ve got billions--and the best legal talent in the state.”
|
||
“You deserve a return compliment. You may consider yourself counsel for
|
||
Perch of the Devil Mine.”
|
||
“Jimminy! But I’d like a chance at them.” Mark’s cigar was burning his
|
||
fingers but he only felt the fire in his brain. “Do you mean it?”
|
||
“Who else? Watch them. Put spies on them. Fight them with their own
|
||
weapons. They’ve spies among my miners. That doesn’t worry me a bit.
|
||
I merely mention it. Let’s change the subject. I’ve got to sleep
|
||
tonight. What’s the news from Europe?”
|
||
“I’ve got Ora’s last letter here; want to hear it?”
|
||
“Good Lord, no. Tell me what they are doing. I sent Ida five thousand
|
||
dollars a few days ago, so I suppose they’re flying high. She cabled
|
||
her thanks and said they were both well.”
|
||
“Don’t you really know what they’ve been doing?”
|
||
“Not a thing.”
|
||
“Well--let’s see. They went over in June. They did France, Germany--lot
|
||
of places in regulation tourist style--incidentally met several of
|
||
Mrs. Stratton’s old friends. Then they went back to Paris, where they
|
||
appear to have indulged in an orgy of clothes preparatory to a round of
|
||
country house visits on the Continent and in England. Ora writes with
|
||
great enthusiasm of--er--Ida’s improvement. Says you’d think she’d been
|
||
on top all her life, especially since she got those Paris duds, and met
|
||
a lot of smart people; makes a hit with everybody, and will astonish
|
||
Butte when she comes back.”
|
||
“That will please her!” He felt no glow of tenderness, but some
|
||
satisfaction that he could gratify the ambitions of the woman he had
|
||
married. He was still too keen on his own youthful dreams, and thankful
|
||
at their partial fulfillment, not to sympathise with those of others.
|
||
Mark left him to accept the more commodious hospitality of Oakley, and
|
||
Gregory sat for another hour smoking, hoping for the mood of sleep. But
|
||
the news had excited him, and he preferred to sit up rather than to
|
||
toss about his narrow bed. The last part of the conversation, however,
|
||
had given a new turn to his thoughts. Suddenly, unbidden, Ora flashed
|
||
into his mind and refused to be dislodged. He walked up and down,
|
||
striving to banish her as he had done before, when, sleepless, she had
|
||
peremptorily demanded his attention. Tonight she was almost a visible
|
||
presence in the little room.
|
||
He sat down again and grimly permitted his mind to dwell upon his long
|
||
communion with her on the steps of the School of Mines. He tried to
|
||
analyse his impulse to take her there. Unconventional as he was it had
|
||
never occurred to him to do such a thing before, and there were twenty
|
||
women in the room whom he would have expected to exercise a more potent
|
||
fascination had he been in the humour for a flirtation. He had been
|
||
quite honest in telling Ora that he had taken her out merely to look at
|
||
her under the stars, and in intimating that to make love to her was the
|
||
last thing in his mind. She had hardly seemed a woman at all there in
|
||
the ballroom or when he first sat at her feet; his mind was relaxed and
|
||
the “queer” romantic or poetical streak that he often deprecated had
|
||
taken possession of it; if he had had a suspicion of anything more he
|
||
would have fled from her at once, for she was the wife of his friend.
|
||
As it was he merely had dismissed Mark from his mind and tried the
|
||
experiment of setting a bit of exquisite white poetry to the music of
|
||
the stars....
|
||
As often as her memory had assailed him he had longed to rehearse that
|
||
scene; the conversation, desultory and personal; her white profile
|
||
against the flaming blue sky; the intensity and brilliancy of her eyes,
|
||
so unlooked for in her young almost colorless face; her pink mouth
|
||
that changed its expression so often; her curious magnetism, so unlike
|
||
that of the full-blooded woman--all of that and something more; the
|
||
strange community of mind--or soul?--that had drawn him on to pour
|
||
out his secret self into another self of whose contact he was almost
|
||
literally sensible,--in a sudden desire for comprehension that had been
|
||
like the birth of a new star in his mental constellation. He had felt
|
||
the thrill of her sympathy, her understanding, then another thrill of
|
||
perplexity, fear; then the little quarrel, when he had thought her more
|
||
adorable than ever, and no longer bearing the least resemblance to a
|
||
star-wraith, but wholly feminine. When he left her it was with the
|
||
confused sense that he had sojourned for a bit with the quintessence of
|
||
womanhood whom Nature had cast in a new and perilous mould.
|
||
He went over the hour again and again, hoping to bore himself, to
|
||
arrive at the conclusion that it had been a mere commonplace flirtation
|
||
with a coquette who was as cold as she looked. But he found the
|
||
recaptured scene very sweet. The power of concentration he possessed
|
||
enabled him to shut out the little room and sit at the feet of the
|
||
woman whose magic personality had penetrated the barriers he so
|
||
jealously had built about his soul and given him the first sense of
|
||
companionship he had ever known.
|
||
He was filled with a longing that shook him and hurt him, to feel that
|
||
sense of sympathetic companionship, of spiritual contact, again. And
|
||
far more. He knew that she had loved no man, that all the glory and
|
||
the riches within her were waiting--and if she had waited, and he had
|
||
waited, and they had met unfettered that night----
|
||
He sprang to his feet. His face in the smoky light looked black.
|
||
“God!” he muttered. “God! Have I fallen as low as that? If ever I think
|
||
of her again I’ll cut my heart out. I hope to God the Amalgamated puts
|
||
up the hell of a fight. What I want is a man’s work in the world, not a
|
||
play actor’s.”
|
||
XXIV
|
||
A week later, Gregory, who was down in the bottom of the shaft,
|
||
received a message by way of a descending miner that a gentleman from
|
||
Butte, one Mr. John Robinson, requested the favour of an interview, and
|
||
awaited him in the cabin on the top of the hill. At least such is the
|
||
polite translation of the message as delivered: “Say, Boss, there’s a
|
||
guy upstairs in your shack what says he’s from Butte, and’s come out to
|
||
have a chin with you--some important. Says his name is John Robinson.”
|
||
Gregory swore under his breath and for a minute his face looked ugly
|
||
and formidable. But as he stepped into the bucket and gave the signal
|
||
he permitted his expression to change to one of grim amusement.
|
||
Mr. Robinson was one of the brilliant galaxy that guided the legal
|
||
footsteps of “Amalgamated”; that powerful company, financed by Standard
|
||
Oil, which owned thirty-one of the mines of Butte openly, and exerted a
|
||
power in Montana far exceeding that of state or nation.
|
||
Gregory wore corduroy trousers and coat, and these as well as his face
|
||
and hands were white with “muck”, a mixture of rock-dust and water
|
||
which spattered everyone in the vicinity of the ore drills; but he
|
||
wasted no time to clean up before climbing to his cabin to meet the
|
||
ambassador from Amalgamated.
|
||
Mr. Robinson, a portly gentleman, still young, but manifestly the
|
||
victim of easy fortune, rose from his chair before the stove and
|
||
greeted his host with beaming smile and extended hand.
|
||
“My dear Mr. Compton!” he exclaimed. “It is a great pleasure to meet
|
||
you again. Of course you have forgotten me for I was two grades above
|
||
you in the High, when you were a little chap----”
|
||
“What have you come here for? Out with it! I’ve no time to waste. Sit
|
||
down if you like.”
|
||
Mr. Robinson colored angrily. He knew little of the man with whom he
|
||
had come to deal, but had always relied upon his urbanity and Western
|
||
heartiness to “make a hit.” He knew Mark Blake and, although he had
|
||
heard, like others, of Gregory Compton’s record at the School of Mines,
|
||
he had assumed that he was a mere student, and in other respects more
|
||
or less the same sort of man as his chum. This man looked unlike any he
|
||
had ever met. He concealed his chagrin, however, and resumed his seat.
|
||
“Really, Mr. Compton, you are somewhat abrupt----”
|
||
“Get down to business. What does Amalgamated want?”
|
||
Mr. Robinson wisely took the cue.
|
||
“To buy you out.”
|
||
“How much will they pay?”
|
||
“How much do you want?”
|
||
“What do they offer?”
|
||
“Well, between you and me. I fancy they might go as high as a hundred
|
||
thousand.”
|
||
“Tell them to go to hell.”
|
||
“How much do you want?”
|
||
“A hundred millions.”
|
||
“Good God, man, are you mad!”
|
||
“If you had permitted me to finish. I should have added--in other
|
||
words, nothing. There isn’t money enough inside of Montana, let alone
|
||
on top, to buy one acre of this ranch.”
|
||
“But--you know what most mines are--pockety--yours may peter out any
|
||
minute.”
|
||
“All right. I take the chances.”
|
||
“The history of Butte Hill is unique. There will never be another----”
|
||
“How do you know?”
|
||
“It stands to reason----”
|
||
“Why?”
|
||
“Oh, Lord, man, if you are indulging in wild dreams----!”
|
||
“My dreams concern no one but myself. I’m satisfied with my hill and
|
||
that’s all there is to it.”
|
||
“I’m afraid not. Look here, you are a fine young fellow with a
|
||
big future--people talk a lot about you--I don’t want to see you
|
||
crushed----”
|
||
“You won’t.”
|
||
“I’m not here to make threats, but you are not so--ah--unsophisticated
|
||
as to imagine that if Amalgamated sets out to get rid of you, you can
|
||
stand up against them?”
|
||
“They can’t do a damned thing and you know it. They might have a few
|
||
years ago, when a roll could be passed on the street to a judge who was
|
||
to deny or grant an injunction within a few hours, and at a time when
|
||
there was no prospect of the referendum and recall; when the people of
|
||
Montana took the buying and selling of men in the legislature as part
|
||
of the game, all in the day’s work. But Montana has caught the reform
|
||
spirit that has been sweeping over the rest of the country, and she
|
||
is also getting pretty sick of corporation power. Now, sir, not only
|
||
have I a clear title to this ranch, but I’ve staked off the entire hill
|
||
and applied for patents. If Amalgamated freezes me out of Anaconda and
|
||
Great Falls, I’ll promote a company and put up a plant of my own. With
|
||
nearly a million dollars in sight besides what I’ve taken out, you can
|
||
figure, yourself, how much trouble I’d have in New York getting all the
|
||
money I wanted. Amalgamated knows that, and my ore will continue to be
|
||
smelted in Anaconda. Of course if I were within a mile or so of Butte I
|
||
might be in some danger. They’d bore through and then claim that my ore
|
||
vein apexed in one of their properties. But I’m too far away for that.”
|
||
Gregory saw the other man’s eyes flash wide open before they were
|
||
hastily lowered. Mr. Robinson regarded the point of his cigar.
|
||
“Ah, yes,” he said. “That’s all very true. Luck is with you in a
|
||
measure, but--well, take my advice and don’t fight Amalgamated. They
|
||
have in their employ some of the most resourceful brains in the
|
||
country--that are always on the job. Heinze taught them a lesson
|
||
they’ll never forget.”
|
||
“Let’s drop the subject.” Gregory rose and opened a cupboard. “Have
|
||
something?”
|
||
He poured whiskey into two glasses. The men smiled as they drank,
|
||
Gregory sardonically, Mr. Robinson ruefully but with thoughtful eyes.
|
||
He had what Ida called the quick-rich face, large and round and fat,
|
||
and it was an admirable mask.
|
||
“Like to see the mine?” asked Gregory.
|
||
“Why, yes--do you mean it?”
|
||
“Why not? If it had any secrets your spies would have turned them over
|
||
before this. Glad to show it to you.”
|
||
They went to the shafthead and descended in one of the buckets.
|
||
“How far down have you gone?” asked Mr. Robinson, with an air of polite
|
||
interest.
|
||
“We found chalcopyrite at one hundred and ten feet, after a narrow vein
|
||
leading from the chamber near the surface, and are stoping.”
|
||
As they left the bucket they were greeted by the cheerful rhythmical
|
||
sound of hammers on the drills, and by the light of the miners’ candles
|
||
they saw the men working at different points of the dark chamber, two
|
||
on a scaffolding above.
|
||
“Great waste of labor,” said Gregory. “I shall install a compressor
|
||
before long as well as electric lighting. Of course it is only the
|
||
beginning of a mine.”
|
||
He saw the ambassador from Amalgamated smile, and turned on his heel.
|
||
“They’ll be loading the holes in a minute,” he said. “And I’d like to
|
||
show you the upper chamber.”
|
||
When they reached the surface Mr. Robinson declined to go down into the
|
||
excavation, but stood on the edge watching the busy hive below. “Great
|
||
sight,” he said admiringly. “How deep have you gone?”
|
||
“About seventy-eight feet.”
|
||
“And the end not in sight!”
|
||
“Not yet, but of course it’s only a chamber.”
|
||
“You’ve taken out close on half a million here alone.”
|
||
“Pretty near. What the devil made you suppose I’d take a paltry hundred
|
||
thousand for the hill?”
|
||
“Oh, just to avoid trouble. You have the reputation of being a very
|
||
clever man.”
|
||
“Thanks. It’s cold standing round. Wouldn’t you like to take a walk?
|
||
How’d you like to see the Primo Mine?”
|
||
As Gregory, who was watching him intently, anticipated, the man’s face
|
||
lit up. “I should like it!” he said definitely. “I hear that they too
|
||
have struck chalcopyrite. Lost their gold vein.”
|
||
“They’re nosing after it in another direction. When the lease is up I
|
||
shall consolidate with the Blakes.”
|
||
“Quite natural. Of course it’s the same vein?--the chalcopyrite, I
|
||
mean.”
|
||
“Unquestionably. And it apexes in my property.”
|
||
“Are you so sure of that?”
|
||
“Not a doubt in the world. I struck the top of the vein twelve feet
|
||
below the surface. But it will never go to the courts.”
|
||
“Of course not.”
|
||
Gregory, who looked remote, almost blank, lost not an intonation of the
|
||
other man’s voice, nor a flickering gleam in his cunning eyes. His own
|
||
head was a little on one side, which, had Mr. Robinson had the good
|
||
fortune to know him better, would have warned him that the young man
|
||
for whom he had conceived a certain respect was thinking hard and to
|
||
some purpose.
|
||
Douglas, who had a personal liking for his neighbor, unaware that he
|
||
had been the chief instrument in the upsetting of skillful plans for
|
||
untold wealth, readily gave permission to visit the mine as soon as
|
||
the smoke from a recent blast would permit. Gregory and Mr. Robinson
|
||
walked about to keep warm, the former pointing out the probability of a
|
||
faulted ore vein under the aspens, and enlarging upon the great fortune
|
||
bound to be Mrs. Blake’s in any case. Then as the man merely remarked,
|
||
“Yes, charming woman, Mrs. Blake; thought the night of the Prom she
|
||
was one of the prettiest women I ever saw. No dead easy game there”;
|
||
Gregory refrained from kicking him and said innocently.
|
||
“Good thing the law compels creditors to present their claims within
|
||
a limited time, or Amalgamated might grab this mine and bore through
|
||
to my hill. I understand Judge Stratton was heavily in debt to the
|
||
Anaconda Company when he died.”
|
||
Mr. Robinson’s face turned a deep brick-red, and he shot a piercing
|
||
glance into the narrow noncommittal eyes opposite.
|
||
“Of course--it’s too late for that, but--Oh, well----” He broke off
|
||
abruptly and walked toward the shaft as Osborne beckoned. Gregory stood
|
||
a moment, his head bent forward. He had experienced the sensation
|
||
of coming into contact with an electrical wave. But he was smiling
|
||
pleasantly as he joined his guest at the shaft house.
|
||
After the visit to the mine, during which he amiably pointed out the
|
||
dip of the vein toward his own property, and Mr. Robinson succumbed to
|
||
the charm which never missed fire when Gregory chose to exert it, they
|
||
walked back to the ranch, where a team awaited the ambassador at the
|
||
foot of the hill.
|
||
“I’ve had quite a delightful visit,” began Mr. Robinson, when Gregory
|
||
interrupted:
|
||
“I’ve no intention of letting you go. You must have supper at the farm
|
||
and meet Oakley. I’ll send off the rig and drive you in myself----”
|
||
“Oh, I couldn’t think of troubling you----” Robinson, red again, stood
|
||
in almost agitated embarrassment.
|
||
“No train to Butte till nine-thirty. You don’t want to spend four hours
|
||
in Pony?”
|
||
“The fact is----” But whatever he had on his mind died on his lips.
|
||
He looked sharply into the bland smiling eyes opposite, and concluded
|
||
abruptly, “All right. Many thanks. Glad of the chance to know you
|
||
better.”
|
||
He paid off the driver of the team and they walked toward the ranch
|
||
house, Gregory commenting on Oakley’s genius for dry farming, and
|
||
expatiating upon the excellence of the crops. Mining was not mentioned
|
||
again during the evening and the lawyer enjoyed an excellent supper.
|
||
Gregory drove him to Pony, and clung to him so closely that he had no
|
||
opportunity to visit the telegraph office or a telephone booth. They
|
||
shook hands cordially as the train moved off. When it was out of sight
|
||
Gregory sent a telegram to Mark telling him to take the first train
|
||
next morning for Virginia City and meet him in the Court House. He
|
||
took his car to a garage and spent the night in Pony. On the following
|
||
morning at nine o’clock he walked into the Tax Collector’s office at
|
||
the County Seat.
|
||
XXV
|
||
The County Treasurer, who had just come in, looked blank for a moment,
|
||
then greeted his visitor with effusive cordiality.
|
||
“Always glad to see you, Mr. Compton. It does a poor clerk’s heart good
|
||
just to look at a man who’s such a favourite of fortune. Sit down, sir.”
|
||
“I will. I’ve a good deal to say.”
|
||
“Staked off the rest of your ranch? It’ll be some little time yet
|
||
before you get those patents through you’ve applied for already----”
|
||
“What do the taxes foot up on the Oro Fino Primo Mine?”
|
||
“Ah--What?” The man’s face turned scarlet, then white. He was a young
|
||
man, clerically able, but otherwise insignificant. “Why----” Then he
|
||
became voluble.
|
||
“The Primo mine, over there near your place? It’s a new claim, isn’t
|
||
it? Never heard of it before those fellows from New York sank a
|
||
shaft and struck it rich. Why should there be any taxes before the
|
||
regular----”
|
||
“You know as well as I do that Judge Stratton patented that mine and
|
||
did the necessary amount of development work, then found it salted and
|
||
abandoned it. That was twenty-eight years ago. He forgot it, and so,
|
||
apparently, did this office. It was regarded as an abandoned prospect
|
||
hole, if anyone thought about it at all. I haven’t discussed the matter
|
||
with Mr. Blake, but assume that he’s merely been waiting for his bill.
|
||
Now, for reasons of my own, I’ve telegraphed him to meet me here this
|
||
morning, but in case he can’t come I’m prepared to pay the amount
|
||
myself. How much?” and he took out his checque book.
|
||
The treasurer looked as if the cane seat of his chair had turned to hot
|
||
coals. “Really--that is a large order, Mr. Compton. Twenty-eight years.
|
||
It will take time to go over the records.”
|
||
“I’m prepared to wait all day if necessary.”
|
||
“But why this haste?”
|
||
“I have my reasons. They don’t concern you in the least. Do they?”
|
||
“Why--no--but I am very busy----”
|
||
“Then put someone else on the job. I assume that the county is not
|
||
averse to raking in a tidy little sum in a hurry.”
|
||
“Really----”
|
||
Gregory leaned back in his chair and smiled pleasantly.
|
||
“You had a telephone from Mr. John Robinson this morning.”
|
||
This time the man started visibly, but he made an effort to control
|
||
himself. “I have just come in----”
|
||
“He telephoned to you last night, did he not? What did he offer you to
|
||
permit him to pay those taxes today?”
|
||
“I will not be insulted, sir.” The man’s voice was almost a scream.
|
||
He heartily wished he had been in training a few years longer, a
|
||
graduate of the famous Heinze-Amalgamated orgy of corruption, or of the
|
||
Clark-Daly epoch, when nearly every man in office had been bribed or
|
||
hoped to be. “I never heard of Mr. Robinson!”
|
||
“Of course he reminded you that as the taxes are long delinquent the
|
||
county has the right to put the property up at public auction, and that
|
||
in any case Mrs. Blake would hardly be given the usual year in which to
|
||
redeem it. But why auction when the money is ready to be paid over at
|
||
once? How much did he offer you?”
|
||
“I repeat----”
|
||
“I think I can guess. It was five thousand dollars. I’ll make it ten.
|
||
Get to work.”
|
||
The man, in whom excitement had destroyed his appetite for breakfast,
|
||
and who had started out in life with the usual negative ideals of
|
||
honesty, burst into tears. “My God!” he sobbed. “I’ve heard of the
|
||
third degree. Your eyes bore a hole through one. They hurt, I say. To
|
||
think that you should come in here and accuse me of taking bribes.”
|
||
“Oh, hell, cut it out. Montana may be a great state, but she has her
|
||
rotten spot like any other. She’s been so debauched the last twenty
|
||
years by open bribery that I doubt if you could lay your hand on a
|
||
hundred men in her that haven’t had a roll anywhere from five hundred
|
||
to twenty thousand dollars passed to them, and pocketed it. Estimable
|
||
citizens, too, but a man never knows his weak spot until he has a wad
|
||
of easy money thrust under his nose--or flung over his transom. You are
|
||
no worse than the rest. Do you take my offer?”
|
||
The County Treasurer recovered himself with amazing alacrity. Ten
|
||
thousand dollars in a lump never had haunted his wildest dreams.
|
||
“All right, sir. It’s a bargain. But I want bills. No checks for me.”
|
||
“I congratulate you on your foresight! But there have been times in
|
||
this state when checque books were not opened for months. You shall
|
||
have it in bills. Where are the records?”
|
||
“In the vault there.”
|
||
“I’ll sit here. If you attempt to leave the room to go to a telephone
|
||
I’ll drag you out on the Court House steps and tell the story to the
|
||
town. Now get to work.”
|
||
“I’ll keep my word, sir, and I know you’ll keep yours.” He went into
|
||
the vault and appeared later trundling out a pile of records, then sat
|
||
down at a table and concentrated his mind as earnestly as if corruption
|
||
had never blighted it. Gregory watched him until Mark entered. Then the
|
||
two men went out into the corridor, standing where they could see the
|
||
table. Gregory recounted his interview with Mr. John Robinson, and the
|
||
present sequel.
|
||
Mark listened with his mouth open, an expression of profound chagrin
|
||
loosening the muscles of his cheerful healthy shrewd face.
|
||
“By George!” he cried. “And to think that was the one thing I never
|
||
thought of. Of course I knew about the delinquent taxes, and intended
|
||
to pay them when I was good and ready; but what’s the use of forking
|
||
over till you have to? But not to have thought of this! And I pride
|
||
myself upon sleeping with one eye open--never was caught napping yet!”
|
||
And for five minutes he exploited his vocabulary of profanity, heaping
|
||
each epithet upon his own humiliated head.
|
||
Gregory laughed. “Merely another proof that two heads are better than
|
||
one. Do you stand for the ten thousand? If not I’ll pay half.”
|
||
“I’d pay fifty----”
|
||
“I’ll pay half,” said Gregory definitely. “It means as much to me as to
|
||
you.”
|
||
“All right. Jimminy, but they’re clever!” He was calmer and his astute
|
||
legal brain was moved to admiration. “But you are cleverer. I’ve always
|
||
sworn by you. They’ll get a jolt all right. How did you catch on,
|
||
anyhow?”
|
||
“I fancy I got a wireless. The other man was thinking hard and so was
|
||
I--had practically nothing else in our minds. Those things will be
|
||
better explained some day. Perhaps it was merely a good guess.”
|
||
“You hit the nail on the head all right. I’ll have a letter to write to
|
||
Ora next Sunday! She’s had a narrow squeak, and she shall know whom to
|
||
thank for it.”
|
||
“Oh, cut that out.”
|
||
Gregory went to the bank and drew the ten thousand dollars, while
|
||
Mark kept watch. When the bill was finally made out, Mark examined it
|
||
critically, and then gave his personal checque. Three months later the
|
||
County Treasurer resigned his office on the ground of ill health and
|
||
bought an orange grove in Southern California. There he and his growing
|
||
family enjoy a respected, prosperous, bucolic life.
|
||
XXVI
|
||
Gregory had scored against the most powerful combination of capital in
|
||
the world. He knew that they knew he had scored, for he had met Mr.
|
||
John Robinson as he descended the Court House steps with the husband
|
||
of the delinquent taxpayer, and he felt reasonably elated. But the
|
||
keenest and canniest brains are not infallible, and he underestimated
|
||
the resources of his mighty and now open enemy. Three mornings later,
|
||
while he was still asleep, Joshua Mann, the miner in his confidence and
|
||
devoted to his interests, burst into the cabin and shook him.
|
||
“There’s the devil to pay, sir,” he cried. “Amalgamated has staked off
|
||
a claim between our boundary line and Primo.”
|
||
Gregory sat up in bed. He never awakened dazed, but with every faculty
|
||
alert. “What are you talking about? The Primo claim almost overlaps the
|
||
ranch.”
|
||
“So anyone would think. But it doesn’t. That’s the point. Of course
|
||
the old stakes of the Primo rotted long ago. They must have got hold
|
||
of the original map. But there it is: a bit of unclaimed land between
|
||
Primo and the ranch. There isn’t much more than room to sink a shaft,
|
||
but there is, all right. Guess they’ve got us on the hip.” And having
|
||
delivered his news he relieved his mind with profanity, of which he too
|
||
had a choice assortment.
|
||
Gregory flung on his clothes and accompanied by Mann walked hastily to
|
||
the edge of the hill. There, sure enough, were the four posts and the
|
||
flaunting notice of a located claim.
|
||
“Must have done it between shifts last night,” commented the miner.
|
||
“Didn’t take long and the moon helped. By jing!--if I’d been round with
|
||
a shotgun! Well, there’ll be fun underground sames on top. The moment
|
||
they break through we’ll be ready for ’em. They may get there but they
|
||
won’t stay long. The boys will like the fun; and we’d put our last
|
||
cent on you--know a winner when we see one.”
|
||
“Put on an extra force and make them work like hell. _We must get here
|
||
first._ When I’m not below you’re boss.”
|
||
“Thank you, sir. I’ll keep ’em on the job, all right.”
|
||
“Promise them extra pay. Come up to me at eight o’clock tonight and
|
||
we’ll talk it over.”
|
||
He went back to the cabin and telephoned to Mark to come out at
|
||
once. The lawyer arrived in the course of the morning. The first ten
|
||
minutes of the interview may be passed over. Then Mark recovered his
|
||
equilibrium. He lit a cigar, demanded a drink, and elevated his feet to
|
||
the table.
|
||
“We’ll just thresh this question out, turn the spot-light on every side
|
||
of it, present and future. We ought to have done it before, but that
|
||
first victory was a little too heady. Nothing like a defeat to clear
|
||
the brain. What’s the first thing they’ll do? They won’t waste time
|
||
sinking a shaft if they can help it. That’s the hardest kind of country
|
||
rock. They’ll try to buy up the lease from Douglas and Osborne. I
|
||
haven’t the lease with me, but most leases carry a clause which permits
|
||
the original lessees to sub-let. I fancy I could get out an injunction
|
||
and delay them, however, until the lease expired. But what they can
|
||
do, all right, is to bribe those two men to give them the use of their
|
||
cross-cut--the one that has already struck your vein--while they were
|
||
sinking the shaft. Do you think they’ll fall for it?”
|
||
“My experience is that most men can be bribed if the roll is big
|
||
enough. Osborne and Douglas are pretty discouraged, although they’ve
|
||
begun to drift across the fault. I’ll talk to them, but they’re not
|
||
square men. Amalgamated could pretend to be sinking a shaft against
|
||
time itself, and be drifting for all they were worth on the Primo vein.
|
||
I understand that Amalgamated’s head geologist has been nosing round
|
||
for some time and has concluded there’s a parallel fissure in their
|
||
claim and that they can ‘prove’ apex rights.”
|
||
“How deep do you figure they’d have to sink to strike the vein at that
|
||
point?”
|
||
“About two hundred feet, owing to that surface bump.”
|
||
“And it apexes here. There’s no getting round that--with a square deal.
|
||
But they figure on proving that they’ve the main vein, and yours is
|
||
an offshoot? The case would go to Helena--to the Federal Courts--as
|
||
Amalgamated was incorporated out of the state. That’s bad. If the case
|
||
could be tried in Virginia City, and there was a good healthy suspicion
|
||
that the Judge was expecting to retire in comfort, you could apply for
|
||
a change of venue--result of that odorous chapter in our history when
|
||
every judge was on the pay roll of either Heinze or Amalgamated. Well,
|
||
at least there’s public opinion to be considered; the state is waking
|
||
up. Here is one thing we can do. If it comes to a knock-out fight and
|
||
the case goes to Helena, we can get out an expert geologist of national
|
||
reputation, whose record shows him to be above bribes, and who will
|
||
be bound to testify that the vein apexes in your claim. Becke of the
|
||
School of Mines, will find the man we want. Now, what’s your first
|
||
move?”
|
||
“To stope the vein as far as the boundary line, which of course is
|
||
my side-line, and as far down as possible. If they won in the courts
|
||
I’d have to fork over eventually, but they’d have to wait for it, and
|
||
they’ll get a good jolt underground.”
|
||
“You’re much too calm. What have you got up your sleeve?”
|
||
“I’ll tell you that when the time comes. It has nothing to do with
|
||
the present case. The best thing you can do now is to make the whole
|
||
thing public and get public opinion behind us. They don’t own all the
|
||
newspapers in the state, and they don’t own all the newspapers in the
|
||
rest of the country, either. Are you on?”
|
||
“You bet. Aren’t you afraid there’ll be a sudden strike among your
|
||
miners? After all, Amalgamated is popular among the mining class. They
|
||
pay good wages and treat the men pretty squarely all round. I’ll say
|
||
that much for them.”
|
||
“I’m not worrying about that. I’ll raise the wages of my miners, and
|
||
they like me. I call every one of them by his first name, and they’re
|
||
men--not a Bohunk among them--and like the idea, too, of a fight under
|
||
a good captain. If I’d put an Eastern manager in who’d put on dog, it
|
||
might be different, but I’ve worked shoulder to shoulder with them, and
|
||
not one of them has stuck harder to his job. Besides, Mann is devoted
|
||
to me, and has great influence over them.”
|
||
“Well, Amalgamated can’t queer you in the East, for you get your roll
|
||
from the Smelting Works. If that went back on you----”
|
||
“I’m not worrying about that, either. Torrence is a friend of mine.
|
||
He’s also a Mason. If things get hot he’ll give headquarters a hint
|
||
that my men, their blood being up, are as likely as not to make a
|
||
bonfire somewhere. Get back to town and give the story to the new
|
||
evening paper. Its lay is to fight Amalgamated for the sake of
|
||
notoriety. See that their brightest man writes a story for one of the
|
||
biggest New York and Chicago newspapers. Now, clear out. I’ve got to go
|
||
below.”
|
||
XXVII
|
||
The next day Gregory visited a mine in Lewis and Clark County which
|
||
recently had shut down, and bought a compressor at second hand. His
|
||
miners with the air drills were soon working at five times the rate
|
||
of speed that had been possible with the hand drills. The contractor
|
||
in charge of the development work on what was impudently known as the
|
||
Apex Mine, had installed a gasoline hoist, every new device, and as
|
||
large a force as it was possible at that early stage to employ with
|
||
profit. Gregory interviewed Osborne and Douglas, and obtained profuse
|
||
assurances, but Mann soon discovered that there was an increased force
|
||
on the Primo copper vein. Their original lease was nearly up but they
|
||
had accepted Mark’s offer of two months’ grace; an offer he deeply
|
||
regretted now, but the papers were signed and sealed. They made a feint
|
||
of pushing the drift across the fault, but as they employed a small
|
||
force at that point there was little room for doubt that they had been
|
||
amply compensated for a doubtful undertaking.
|
||
Meanwhile work on the great surface chamber of Perch of the Devil
|
||
Mine was drawing to a close. It had proved to be a hundred feet long,
|
||
thirty feet wide, and seventy feet deep, and had netted half a million
|
||
dollars. Some time since one of the larger houses on the West Side in
|
||
Butte, built by a millionaire while still faithful to Montana, but
|
||
whose family now spent twelve months of the year in Europe, New York,
|
||
or California, had been thrown on the market for less than a third of
|
||
its cost; new millionaires are not as plentiful in Amalgamated Butte
|
||
as of old, and that unique camp is still a perch, even for those that
|
||
make moderate fortunes; if no longer for the devil. It never will be
|
||
a favourite roost for the gamecock’s hens and chicks. The hotels and
|
||
“blocks” are always overcrowded, and even bungalows are in demand by
|
||
the energetic but impermanent young engineers and managers of the
|
||
various companies; but “palatial residences,” built by enthusiastic
|
||
citizens who either died promptly or retired in favour of their
|
||
families, are a drug on that great market they helped to build. When
|
||
the Murphy house, therefore, was advertised for sale Gregory bought it
|
||
for Ida and cabled her the news together with five thousand dollars
|
||
Mark had recently made for him on the stock-market.
|
||
Above these and other expenditures, he now had half a million dollars
|
||
to his credit, but he wanted a million more. The new vein was very rich
|
||
for chalcopyrite, but its depth was problematical, and it might drop in
|
||
values at any moment. If his belief in his hill was justified and there
|
||
were huge primary deposits below, there would be no end to his riches;
|
||
but it would take a year or more to determine that point; and meanwhile
|
||
he wanted at least a million and a half, not only to meet the possible
|
||
expenses of litigation, but to mine at depth and to open up his other
|
||
claims in case Amalgamated, when it reached the chalcopyrite vein,
|
||
claimed that it apexed in their property, got out an injunction, and
|
||
forced him to cease work on it.
|
||
But he had another and to him a still more vital reason for wishing
|
||
to make a great sum of money. Half a million dollars, particularly
|
||
when spectacularly acquired, alters a man’s position in his community
|
||
at once, and the readjustment of his own mental attitude toward life
|
||
follows as a matter of course; particularly in a country where money
|
||
not only talks but rules. He was now treated, when business took him
|
||
to any of the towns, as a permanent capitalist of the great state of
|
||
Montana; moreover, his romantic attitude toward his hill having been
|
||
inevitably dampened by its yield of mere copper, his appreciation of
|
||
its heavy contribution to his bank account was wholly practical. He not
|
||
only began to forecast himself as one of the small group of front-rank
|
||
millionaires which Montana has donated to the American Brotherhood of
|
||
Millionaires, but to be sensible of the sudden and active growth of
|
||
those business instincts he had always known were dormant in his brain.
|
||
It had needed but the rousing of his fighting instinct, the success of
|
||
its first move, and the swift countermove of the enemy, to awaken the
|
||
permanent desire, not alone to pit his brains against Amalgamated, but
|
||
to show the world what he could do. In short he was on his mettle, and
|
||
conscious for the first time of his powers and ultimate ambitions.
|
||
He had found his mine by an accident. Nature had flung it into his
|
||
lap. He was now determined to prove that he could make money with the
|
||
resources of his brain as rapidly as the more famous of the Montanans
|
||
had made it in the past, when opportunities were supposed to be more
|
||
numerous. There never was a time when opportunity did not coincide
|
||
with the man, and of this Gregory was contemptuously aware when he
|
||
dismissed the usual Wall Street resource as commonplace, beneath the
|
||
consideration of a man living in a state whose resources had barely
|
||
been tapped.
|
||
When live brains of peculiar gifts think hard and uninterruptedly on
|
||
a given subject they become magnets. Gregory paid frequent visits
|
||
to Butte and Helena, talking casually with many men. In less than a
|
||
fortnight he found his cue, and, accompanied by a civil engineer,
|
||
disappeared for a week.
|
||
XXVIII
|
||
Twenty years ago it was the ambition of every Californian, no matter
|
||
how blatant his state pride, to move to New York. Today he hopes to
|
||
live and die in California, the main reason being that the women of
|
||
his family find themselves members of a comparatively old and settled
|
||
community, enjoying many advantages and no little importance; given
|
||
frequent trips abroad they are content to remain at home in houses
|
||
of modern architecture, and to command a social position that New
|
||
York has granted to only two or three of California’s heiresses and
|
||
millionaires. Montanans, at present, those that are rich or merely
|
||
independent, are in the migratory phase of the earlier Californian; but
|
||
as New York has extended to them an even more grudging welcome than
|
||
it did to aspirants from the more picturesque state, they visit it,
|
||
after successive social disappointments, merely for its dressmakers and
|
||
those exterior advantages that may be exchanged for gold; the majority
|
||
migrate to “The Coast,” more particularly to Southern California. There
|
||
they not only find relief on the sea-level from an altitude that plays
|
||
havoc with the nerves, but, in the mushroom Southern cities, social
|
||
position may be had for the asking, and every advantage for growing
|
||
children.
|
||
Gregory had heard of a man named Griffiths, owner of the Circle-G
|
||
Ranch, a tract of land covering seventy-five thousand acres, who was
|
||
anxious to sell and move to Los Angeles. As the ranch was practically
|
||
waterless and thirty miles from a railroad, his only chance of
|
||
disposing of it was by means of an alluring bargain. He was willing
|
||
to sell the ranch, his large herds of horses and cattle, and bands of
|
||
sheep for half a million dollars.
|
||
Gregory returned to Butte without the engineer, went directly to
|
||
Blake’s office, and laid his programme before his astounded friend and
|
||
legal adviser.
|
||
He had found Griffiths a man unaccustomed to business but with his
|
||
mind set upon retiring with a capital of half a million dollars. His
|
||
efforts in money-making hitherto, had been confined to acquiring rather
|
||
than disposing of property, and his trading consisted of converting
|
||
live stock into such cash as was necessary for the purchase of
|
||
necessities not raised on his property. But he was nearly sixty, his
|
||
wife and four daughters had besought him for years to sell out and take
|
||
them to California, and he was now persuaded that he was as tired of
|
||
life in the wilds of Montana as they were. He was, however, possessed
|
||
of one fixed idea, to leave each of his “women folks” a hundred
|
||
thousand dollars when he died. Therefore would he not take a cent less
|
||
than five times that amount for his fine property; but although he
|
||
inserted the advertisement that had caught Gregory’s eye, so far he had
|
||
been unsuccessful. One man found the ranch too far from a railroad,
|
||
another no good for farming, save intensive, as it was without a water
|
||
supply; still another was willing to pay only a third of the amount
|
||
down, with easy terms for the remainder.
|
||
“It’s five hundred thousand cold cash,” said Mr. Griffiths to Gregory;
|
||
although in a burst of confidence later he had said: “What the dickens
|
||
I’m goin’ to do with that great wad of money when I get it beats me! It
|
||
turns me cold to think of it.”
|
||
Gregory had remained on the ranch two days, inventorying its stock,
|
||
buildings, and natural resources. He estimated that seventy-five per
|
||
cent. of the property was plow-land, the rest “rough, wooded, and
|
||
rolling.” There were several sets of buildings on it, and the cattle
|
||
and sheep sheds were in good condition. The cattle, sheep, and horses
|
||
could be sold on a rising market for $200,000, thus reducing the cost
|
||
of the land to four dollars an acre. After asking and receiving an
|
||
option for thirty days, Gregory intimated that he would like to extend
|
||
his trip into the mountains in search of float, and hired two riding
|
||
horses and a pack horse from his host, besides buying of him the
|
||
necessary food supply. Incidentally, in the course of conversation he
|
||
learned that there was a river “somewheres in the mountains between
|
||
thirty and forty miles northeast.”
|
||
He received more minute directions from a prospector regarding this
|
||
body of water, which was the object of his trip, and six miles from
|
||
Circle-G entered a ravine some twenty-five miles long. After climbing
|
||
one of the mountain sides that bounded the ravine, descending and
|
||
crossing another gulch, and climbing again, he and his companion saw,
|
||
far below, between the narrow walls of a cañon, an abundant mountain
|
||
stream.
|
||
The engineer proposed to divert this body of water to Circle-G Ranch.
|
||
Through the nearest mountain side he should drive a tunnel six hundred
|
||
feet long, and cross the short and crooked ravine with a thousand
|
||
feet of flume to a point where it would be necessary to drive another
|
||
tunnel, about two hundred feet in length. This would conduct the
|
||
diverted body of water into the long ravine, down which it would flow
|
||
to a point six miles above the ranch. Here the engineer purposed to
|
||
construct a dam thirty feet high for the purpose of raising the water
|
||
to an elevation from which it would flow through a canal or “ditch”, to
|
||
the more level portions of the ranch. A rough estimate of the cost of
|
||
this project, from headworks to ditch was $300,000.
|
||
He returned to Circle-G, told Mr. Griffiths that he had found no float,
|
||
but nevertheless liked the neighbourhood and was inclined to buy the
|
||
ranch and sell it in small farms to settlers. He would return to Butte
|
||
and think it over. If he concluded to buy he would pay a half million
|
||
dollars in cash, and, if Mr. Griffiths were agreeable borrow back
|
||
$300,000, for improvements, giving a mortgage at seven per cent. on
|
||
the forty thousand acres he proposed to make attractive for settlers.
|
||
He gave no hint of his irrigation project. Griffiths had known of this
|
||
body of water, but it had never occurred to him nor to anyone else to
|
||
divert it. He was a stock-grower, pure and simple, with no “modern
|
||
notions”, and Gregory had no intention of enlarging his vision. He
|
||
would pay the man his price, but he had the ruthlessness of his type.
|
||
He had more than one motive for offering to borrow back $300,000 of the
|
||
payment money; not only should he need it at once, but he feared, after
|
||
Mr. Griffiths’ confidence, and knowing his kind, that the old man would
|
||
withdraw in terror at the last moment, preferring the safe monotonies
|
||
of his ranch to the unknown responsibilities of a capitalist; like
|
||
others he had heard that it is sometimes easier to get money than to
|
||
invest it. Gregory told him to think it over and write to the Daly and
|
||
Clark Banks in Butte, and to the National Bank of Montana, in Helena,
|
||
for information regarding his own standing and financial condition. He
|
||
left the entire family in as hopeful a frame of mind as himself.
|
||
On confirmation of the report that forty thousand acres could be put
|
||
under water by gravity, he should close the deal at once, file a notice
|
||
of appropriation for forty thousand miner’s inches of water, and begin
|
||
work on the first tunnel. He then intended to lay the matter before
|
||
one of the great land selling organisations of Chicago or New York,
|
||
proposing that he be paid $1,400,000 for the forty thousand acres of
|
||
irrigated land, subject to mortgage; demonstrating that the land so
|
||
purchased for thirty-five dollars an acre (or forty-three and a half
|
||
dollars including the mortgage) could readily be sold to settlers
|
||
for one hundred, if railroad facilities were provided. As a further
|
||
inducement, to cover the cost of railroad construction, he would
|
||
execute a deed and place it in escrow, as a guarantee and evidence of
|
||
good faith, and accompanied by a contract authorising the land selling
|
||
company to dispose of the remaining thirty-five thousand acres at ten
|
||
dollars an acre. The construction of the railroad would add materially
|
||
to the value of the unirrigated land also, and a pledge of this portion
|
||
of the property as security that the railroad would be built would be
|
||
acceptable, because the estimated cost, with liberal allowances, was
|
||
under $350,000.
|
||
The sum paid him by the land selling company would, in addition to the
|
||
large sum realised by the sale of the live stock, give him at least
|
||
$1,600,000, or $1,100,000 over the half million originally invested.
|
||
Mark listened with his eyes and mouth wide open.
|
||
“By George!” he exclaimed, when Gregory finished. “Did you dope all
|
||
that out yourself? That’s the talk of a man who’s been in the land
|
||
business for years. How did you ever think of it?”
|
||
“What’s a man’s brain given to him for--to turn round in a circle? Do
|
||
you find the plan feasible?”
|
||
“It’s feasible all right--given a cold half million in hand and brains
|
||
behind it--plus imagination. That’s where you win out. You’ll be the
|
||
richest man in Montana yet.”
|
||
“I intend to be.”
|
||
“And the first man born here to make one of the old-time fortunes.”
|
||
“I hadn’t thought of that!”
|
||
Mark dismissed enthusiasm and put his own astute brain to work.
|
||
“The hitch will be with your land selling company. They might be
|
||
dazzled, even convinced, but they’re cold-blooded, and they never have
|
||
any too much cash on hand. What special line of argument do you propose
|
||
to hand out?”
|
||
“Several. I didn’t go to the Circle-G Ranch without making certain
|
||
investigations beforehand. In the first place Government statistics
|
||
prove the productivity of Montana soil without irrigation. I am not the
|
||
first to discover that this same soil when irrigated is insured against
|
||
crop failure. In the second place a study of the U. S. Government
|
||
reclamation projects convinced me that I could, all things being
|
||
favourable (such as water supply and gravity), put a large tract of
|
||
land under water at a very small cost compared to the cost under the
|
||
plan of procedure adopted by the Government. By the plan I have mapped
|
||
out I can sell both land and water for less than the cost of water
|
||
alone under the Government direction. But I have a final inducement
|
||
which I believe will bring the selling company to terms. Those forty
|
||
thousand acres when irrigated will be peculiarly adapted to the growing
|
||
of seed peas. This is the best soil in the country for peas. Now the
|
||
seed houses of the country are in great need of large quantities
|
||
of seed peas, and the selling company could easily interest these
|
||
concerns to the extent of securing their financial backing. They would
|
||
no doubt buy large blocks themselves. Such an opportunity has never
|
||
been offered them--forty thousand acres under the ditch, and adequate
|
||
railroad service. This will enable the selling company to raise an
|
||
initial payment to me of $200,000. And if I guarantee the ditch and the
|
||
railroad they are in a position to make the same guarantee to settlers
|
||
to whom they may make sales in a retail way. They’ll have no difficulty
|
||
getting $100 an acre retail; and the seed houses no doubt would invest
|
||
and become real owners, thus saving the profit now paid to farmers who
|
||
grow for them under contract. Got it?”
|
||
“I get you. But why put all of your own money into the ranch? Ora has
|
||
taken something like half a million out of that mine. I could let you
|
||
have that.”
|
||
“I’ll risk no woman’s money. Of course I shouldn’t put my own in if I
|
||
didn’t believe it to be a dead sure thing, but there’s always risk.” He
|
||
took a packet of papers from his overcoat pocket. “Here are the option
|
||
and abstract of titles. I wish you would examine them. Say nothing of
|
||
all this at present--nor for a long time after. I’ll spring it when
|
||
I’m ready--which will be after I’ve disposed of the irrigated land.
|
||
Will you go out with me when I return to Circle-G? I shall want you to
|
||
attend to the details of sale and to the location of the water rights.”
|
||
“I’ll go all right. And I’m only living to see what you’ll do next.”
|
||
XXIX
|
||
Meanwhile the story of the Compton-Amalgamated war was the sensation
|
||
not only of Montana but of the entire country. The Butte morning
|
||
papers ignored it, but the _Evening Bugle_ reaped a golden harvest.
|
||
The editor himself, who was the Montana correspondent of one of the
|
||
great New York dailies, made his reputation with the most sensational
|
||
“stuff” that had gone from the Northwest since Heinze retired from the
|
||
field. The hill swarmed with reporters. Two Eastern newspapers sent
|
||
special correspondents to the spot. In less than a fortnight the public
|
||
knew all there was to know and far more. Perch of the Devil Mine was
|
||
photographed inside and out, and its uncompromising ugliness but added
|
||
to its magnetism; which emanated from a “solid hill of metal just below
|
||
a thin layer of barren soil.” The general reader, who admired the
|
||
colour of copper, conceived that it emerged in solid sheets.
|
||
Gregory refused to be interviewed or photographed, but was snapshotted;
|
||
and his long sinewy figure and lean dark face, his narrow eyes and
|
||
fine mouth, won the championship of every woman partial to the type.
|
||
The women’s papers, as well as those run by radicals, socialists, and
|
||
conservative men of independent tendencies, advocated his cause against
|
||
the wicked trust; nor was there a newspaper in the country, however
|
||
capitalised, that resisted the temptation to make him “big news.” To
|
||
his unspeakable annoyance he began to receive letters by the score,
|
||
most of them from women; but he lost no time employing a secretary
|
||
whose duty was to read and burn them. He appreciated his fame very
|
||
vaguely, for between his mine and the innumerable details connected
|
||
with his new ranch, he had little time to devote to newspapers or his
|
||
own sensations. But although personal notoriety was distasteful to him
|
||
and reporters a nuisance, he felt more than compensated by the success
|
||
of his publicity scheme, and the assurance that it was causing the
|
||
enemy unspeakable annoyance and apprehension.
|
||
He paid a visit to Chicago after work had begun on the first tunnel,
|
||
and spent several days with the interested but cautious officials
|
||
of the greatest of the land selling companies. Like all silent men,
|
||
when he did talk it was not only to the point, but he used carefully
|
||
composed arguments incisively expressed. He indulged in no rhetorical
|
||
flights, no enthusiasms, no embellishment of plain facts. He might
|
||
have been a mathematician working out an abstract problem in algebra;
|
||
and this attitude, combined with his reputation as a “winner”, and the
|
||
details of his cautious purchase of Circle-G Ranch, finally impressed
|
||
the company to the extent of sending one of their number, who was an
|
||
expert in land values, to the ranch. Gregory accompanied him, took him
|
||
to the mountain river, showed him the engineer’s report, pointed out
|
||
the undeviating slope between the river and the ranch, and the land’s
|
||
rich chocolate brown soil of unlimited depth. The upshot was that the
|
||
expert returned to Chicago almost as enthusiastic as if the original
|
||
scheme were his. After consultation with several of the seed houses,
|
||
the land company agreed to buy on Compton’s terms, and to pay $200,000
|
||
down, $500,000 at the end of sixty days, and $700,000 at the end of
|
||
four months.
|
||
* * * * *
|
||
Ora and Ida had asked for an extension of leave, as they had not
|
||
yet “done” Italy, Spain, and Egypt, and both husbands had given a
|
||
willing consent; Gregory from sheer indifference; Mark because he was
|
||
so busy that he no longer had time to miss his wife. He refused to
|
||
give Ora’s picture to the enterprising correspondents, but they found
|
||
no difficulty with the local photographer. They had not been long
|
||
uncovering the romantic history of the Oro Fino Primo Mine, and it made
|
||
a welcome pendant to the still recourseful “story” of Perch of the
|
||
Devil. Ora’s beauty, accomplishments, charm, family history, as well
|
||
as her present social progress in company with her “equally beautiful
|
||
friend”, the wife of the hero of the hour, became public property.
|
||
Altogether, Butte, after several years of oblivion, was happy and
|
||
excited. So far, although mineralogically the most sensational state
|
||
in the Union, and the third in size, she had given to the world but
|
||
four highly specialized individuals: Marcus Daly, perhaps the greatest
|
||
mine manager and ore wizard of our time; W. A. Clark, who accumulated
|
||
millions as a moving picture show rolls in dimes; F. Augustus Heinze,
|
||
who should be the greatest financial power in America if brains
|
||
were all; and the Sapphic, coruscatic, imperishable Mary McLane. An
|
||
outstanding quartette. But Daly was dead, Clark was but one of many
|
||
millionaires, submerged in New York, Heinze was reaping the whirlwind,
|
||
and the poet was nursing her wounds. Montana was in the mood for a new
|
||
hero, and the American press for a new and picturesque subject to “play
|
||
up for all he was worth.”
|
||
XXX
|
||
Ora and Ida were sitting at one of the little round tables in the
|
||
pretty green and wicker smoking-room of the Hotel Bristol in Genoa,
|
||
drinking their coffee and smoking their after-luncheon cigarettes, when
|
||
Ida, who was glancing over the _Herald_, cried,
|
||
“Aw!”
|
||
Ora looked round in surprise. Ida often relieved the strain when they
|
||
were alone by relapsing into the vernacular, but was impressively
|
||
elegant in public.
|
||
“What is it?” she asked apprehensively. “Anybody we know dead? That is
|
||
about all the news we ever get in these Continental----”
|
||
“Dead nothing. Greg’s struck a bigger bonanza than I had any idea
|
||
of, and Amalgamated is after it. They tried to corral your mine for
|
||
delinquent taxes, but got left. Found a bit of unclaimed land between
|
||
your claim and the ranch and staked off. They’re sinking a shaft and
|
||
mean to prove that the vein--Greg’s--apexes in their claim. Wouldn’t
|
||
that come and get you! Just listen.” And she read aloud an embellished
|
||
but not untruthful tale. “Glory, I hope they don’t get him! That would
|
||
be the end of all my fond dreams.”
|
||
“I have an idea that Mr. Compton was born to win. At all events you
|
||
have your new house in Butte, and all the money you can spend for the
|
||
present.”
|
||
“Yes, but I want money to spend in Butte, live in that house, and make
|
||
things hum. However, I guess you’re right. I’ll bet on Greg. Here come
|
||
the letters. Hope you get one from Mark as I’d like some real news.”
|
||
A page with letters in his hand had entered the room. He served the
|
||
young American ladies first as their tips were frequent and munificent,
|
||
particularly Ora’s. The other people in the room were English and
|
||
Italian.
|
||
Ida’s letters were from Ruby and Pearl. Ora’s from Mark, Professor
|
||
Becke, and two of her English friends. She opened her husband’s first.
|
||
It contained an account of the threatened loss of her mine, her narrow
|
||
escape, and Gregory’s rescue. It was graphically written. Mark fancied
|
||
himself as a letter writer and never was averse from impressing his
|
||
clever wife.
|
||
Ora’s face flushed as she read; she lost her breath once or twice.
|
||
She pictured every expression of Gregory’s eyes as he perforated the
|
||
clerk; her heart hammered its admiration. She was too thoroughly
|
||
Montanan and the daughter of her father to be horrified at bribery and
|
||
corruption. For the moment she forgot gratitude in her exultation that
|
||
he had triumphed over the mightiest trust in the country. But before
|
||
she finished the letter she sighed and set her lips. She handed it
|
||
deliberately to Ida.
|
||
“Here is an account of the first development,” she said casually. “It
|
||
will interest you.”
|
||
Ida read the letter hastily. “Well, they caught him napping after all,”
|
||
she said with profound dissatisfaction. “He dreams too much, that’s
|
||
what. He’s got a practical side all right, but he isn’t on the job all
|
||
the time. I’d like to write and tell him what I think of him but guess
|
||
I’d better keep my mouth shut.”
|
||
“It was Mark’s fault as much as Mr. Compton’s--more. He should have had
|
||
a new map made of my claim; or, if he did have one made, he should have
|
||
studied it more carefully. Anybody to look at it would assume that it
|
||
touched the boundary line of your--Mr. Compton’s ranch.”
|
||
“Well, Greg’ll get out of it some way. When he does sit up and take
|
||
notice he doesn’t so much as wink, and so far as he knew or cared the
|
||
rest of the world might have waltzed off into space. Lucky it hit him
|
||
to buy the house and send that last five thousand before he snapped
|
||
close on Amalgamated----”
|
||
“What does Miss Miller have to say?”
|
||
“Nothing much but ecstasies over my house. The Murphys had taste, it
|
||
seems, so I won’t have to do a thing to it. Say, Ora, don’t you feel as
|
||
if you’d like to go back?”
|
||
Ora looked up and her face turned white. “Go back? I thought you wanted
|
||
to stay over here for a year, at least. We haven’t half seen Europe
|
||
yet--to say nothing of Egypt.”
|
||
“Yes--I know--but sometimes I feel homesick. It isn’t only that I want
|
||
to make Butte sit up; but--well, I suppose you’ll laugh, but I miss
|
||
the mountains. I never thought much about them when I was there, but
|
||
they’ve kind of haunted me lately.”
|
||
“There are mountains in Europe.”
|
||
“I know, but they’re just scenery. Our mountains are different.”
|
||
Ora looked at her speculatively. It was not the first time that Ida
|
||
had surprised her with glow-worms flitting across her spiritual night,
|
||
although she seemed to be so devoid of imagination, or what she would
|
||
have called superfluous nonsense, as to inspire her more highly
|
||
organised friend with envy. Her mental and artistic development had
|
||
been rapid and remarkable but uneven. She yawned through the opera and
|
||
symphony concerts. She would always be bored by pictures unless she
|
||
could read a “story” in them, although she had now mastered the jargon
|
||
of art as well as most of her quick-witted country-women. In Florence
|
||
and Rome she had “struck” after one morning of picture galleries, but
|
||
she showed a spontaneous and curious appreciation of the architecture
|
||
of the Renaissance. Ora had expected the usual ecstasies over the old
|
||
castles of England and Germany, but although Ida admired them heartily,
|
||
and even declared they made her feel “real romantic,” it was for the
|
||
Renaissance palaces of France and of the cities they visited in Italy
|
||
that she reserved her instant and critical admiration. Ora, who like
|
||
most imaginative people played with the theory of reincarnation, amused
|
||
herself visioning Ida in Burne-Jones costumes, haunting the chill
|
||
midnight corridors of a Florentine palace, dagger in hand, or brewing
|
||
a poisoned bowl. If Ida possessed a rudimentary soul, which suffered
|
||
a birth-pang now and then, Ora had caught more than one glimpse of a
|
||
savage temper combined with a cunning that under her present advantages
|
||
was rapidly developing into subtlety. But Ida indulged too little in
|
||
introspection to develop her inmost ego other than automatically. To
|
||
mental progress she was willing to devote a certain amount of labour.
|
||
Whenever they were not on a train or visiting at country houses, she
|
||
spent an hour every morning with a teacher of either French or Italian;
|
||
German she had refused to “tackle,” but, to use her own phrase, she
|
||
“ate up” the Latin languages, and her diction was remarkably good. If
|
||
picture galleries replete with saints, virgins, madonnas and Venuses
|
||
bored her, she returned more than once to the portrait rooms in the
|
||
Pitti and the Uffizi galleries, haunted the museums with their mediæval
|
||
and Renaissance furniture and tapestries, and eagerly visited every
|
||
palace to which the public was admitted.
|
||
And she proved herself as adaptable as Ora had hoped. In England she
|
||
bored her way through the newspapers until she was able to sustain her
|
||
part in political conversation. She soon discerned that English people
|
||
of assured position and wide social experience liked a certain degree
|
||
of picturesque Americanism when it was unaccompanied by garrulity
|
||
or blatant ill-breeding. She amused herself by “giving them what
|
||
they wanted,” and was a more pronounced success than Ora, who was
|
||
outwardly too much like themselves, yet lacking the matchless fortune
|
||
of English birth. But this did not disturb Ora, who made more real
|
||
friends, and derived endless amusement observing Ida. On one occasion
|
||
they visited for a week at one of the country homes of a duke and
|
||
duchess that had entertained Mrs. Stratton many years ago, and Ida had
|
||
enchanted these bored but liberal products of a nation that led with
|
||
too much indifference the Grand March of Civilisation with her Western
|
||
“breeziness” and terminology (carefully selected), combined with her
|
||
severely cut and altogether admirable gowns, and her fine imposing
|
||
carriage. From this castle she went on with Ora to one leased by an
|
||
ambitious American more English than the English, who permitted herself
|
||
to indulge in a very little fashionable slang, but had consigned the
|
||
American vernacular to oblivion in the grave of her ancestors. Here Ida
|
||
was languid and correct (save at the midnight hour when she sought Ora,
|
||
not only for relaxation but the instructions she was never too proud to
|
||
receive); her English slang (which she had “swapped” for much of her
|
||
own with her various British admirers) was impeccable, and she flirted
|
||
like a stage duchess.
|
||
She estimated the various aristocracies she entered under Ora’s wing
|
||
as a grand moving picture show run for the benefit of Americans, and
|
||
was grateful to have an inside seat, although nothing would have bored
|
||
her more than to take a permanent position in their midst. With their
|
||
history, traditions, psychology, she concerned herself not at all; nor
|
||
did she in any way manifest a desire to cultivate the intellectual
|
||
parts of her shrewd, observing, clutching brain. She threw away as many
|
||
opportunities as she devoured, but on the whole proved herself somewhat
|
||
more adaptable than the usual American woman elevated suddenly from the
|
||
humbler walks of life to the raking searchlights of Society. In Berlin
|
||
and Vienna she repeated her social triumphs, for, although Americans
|
||
do not penetrate far below the crust of Continental society, smart
|
||
men abound in the crust; Ida graduated as an adept in flirtation with
|
||
agreeable and subtle men of the world, yet keeping the most practical
|
||
at arm’s length with a carefully calculated Western directness and
|
||
artlessness that amounted to genius.
|
||
In France and Italy the dazzling fairness of Ora had its innings. A
|
||
vague suggestion of unreality, almost morbid, and a very definite one
|
||
of unawakened womanhood, combined with a cultivated mind, ready wit,
|
||
and air of high breeding, gave her a success as genuine as Ida’s and
|
||
somewhat more perilous. But she soon learned to tread warily, after her
|
||
theories of European men had been vindicated by personal experience.
|
||
In fact, after the two girls had ceased to be mere tourists they had
|
||
taken the advice of one of Mrs. Stratton’s friends and enlisted the
|
||
services of an indigent lady of title as chaperon. Lady Gower had been
|
||
little more than a figurehead but had served her purpose in averting
|
||
gossip; and now that her charges were tourists again had returned to
|
||
her lodgings in Belgravia. As maids also are a doubtful luxury when
|
||
travelling they had recently dismissed the last of a long line.
|
||
On the whole the two girls had got on together amazingly well. They had
|
||
had their differences of opinion, but Ora was too proud to quarrel,
|
||
Ida too easy-going and appreciative of the butter on her bread. It was
|
||
fortunate, however, that Gregory had been able to provide his wife
|
||
with an abundance of money, for she was far too shrewd, and far too
|
||
interested in prices, to remain hoodwinked for long. After three months
|
||
of sight-seeing and _pensions_ both had been glad to leave the tourist
|
||
class and mingle in the more spectacular life of the great world, and
|
||
that had meant trousseaux in Paris. There Ida had “gowned” herself
|
||
for the first time, and her delight in her fashionable wardrobe had
|
||
been equalled only by her satisfaction in driving a bargain. At present
|
||
they were resting in Genoa, a favourite city of Ora’s, after a hard ten
|
||
weeks in Rome.
|
||
XXXI
|
||
They finished their letters and went up to their rooms to rest, for
|
||
they had “done” several churches and the Campo Santo during the morning.
|
||
“Thank the lord,” said Ida, as they walked up the stairs after waiting
|
||
ten minutes for the lift, “there are no picture galleries in this
|
||
town that one _must_ see. The rest of the programme is streets and
|
||
architecture, which is worth while. These internal streets make me feel
|
||
as if I were going right through to China, or whatever is underneath
|
||
Italy. Genoa, before it had any houses on it, must have looked like
|
||
Last Chance Gulch, Helena, Montana.”
|
||
They had reached their connecting rooms. Ida extended herself on a
|
||
sofa, Ora made herself as comfortable as possible in a chair and lit a
|
||
cigarette.
|
||
“Say, kid,” pursued Ida, “you smoke too much. Follow my illustrious
|
||
example. I go just so far and no farther--one cigarette after each meal
|
||
because it makes me feel nice and aristocratic. You’re the kind that
|
||
lets a habit run away with you. I deliberate. You drift. See?”
|
||
Ora laughed. “Funny thing, nature! Anyone would say quite the opposite
|
||
of each of us.”
|
||
“It’s like life. Not a blooming thing is just what you figure it out
|
||
beforehand. Here I wanted the Collins house and I’ve got the Murphy.
|
||
And Greg, that I figured on being a millionaire by the time I got back,
|
||
has gone and tied himself up in litigation, or is heading that way.”
|
||
“You ungrateful wretch! You came to Europe ‘figuring’ on making a
|
||
thousand dollars serve for the entire trip and you already have had
|
||
eleven thousand. Most rules work both ways. But you don’t really want
|
||
to go back?”
|
||
“I do. It’s been growing for some time and now it’s ingrowing. You can
|
||
get enough of anything and I’ve had enough of Europe. Besides, I’d
|
||
like to get back to a country where lifts are elevators and don’t go
|
||
to sleep a few times on the way up; where it doesn’t take an hour to
|
||
draw a bath, which it does wherever it’s pronounced băth; where you can
|
||
drink plain water, and don’t have cheese or garlic or grease in all
|
||
your food; where you are never taken for what you ain’t; where you are
|
||
never cheated and overcharged because you’re an American; where you
|
||
don’t have to see a sight a minute; where you don’t have to talk up to
|
||
people who don’t give a hang about anything that interests you; where
|
||
you are not looked upon as a rank outsider by ancient aristocrats and
|
||
concierges, no matter how polite they try to be; and where the word
|
||
democracy means what it is. Over here every socialist--I’ll bet every
|
||
anarchist--would give his front teeth to be a king, a duke, or even
|
||
a rich bourgeois. That’s what’s the matter with all of them. Give me
|
||
America, above all, old Montana. A little money and a lot of ‘go’ are
|
||
all you need out there.”
|
||
“Oh, Ida! Ida! will you never appreciate the glory of Europe? Is that
|
||
all you have got out of it?”
|
||
“I’ve squeezed it dry, all right, and I’ll take back a lot more than
|
||
I figured on. Watch me when I’m swelling round Butte, imitating the
|
||
chaste simplicity of a British duchess--minus the duds they generally
|
||
sport. There’s nothing like Europe to teach you what’s what--especially
|
||
the way we’ve seen it--put you wise in ten thousand different ways, and
|
||
fill your mind with pretty pictures--that ain’t in galleries. But after
|
||
all it’s just a course in the higher education, and you’re outside
|
||
of it all, every minute. To live you’ve got to go back to your own
|
||
country.”
|
||
“That’s true enough!”
|
||
“Could you marry a European and live over here for the rest of your
|
||
life and never see those mountains again that just seem to belong to
|
||
you--or even screaming old Butte?”
|
||
“No!” Ora spoke with uncommon vehemence. “I couldn’t!”
|
||
Ida raised herself on her elbow and looked at her friend shrewdly. “I
|
||
can’t see that you’ve enjoyed yourself so much over here. It seems to
|
||
me that you’ve got your fun out of showing me round. You had more real
|
||
gaiety in you in Butte. You may not know it but you look pretty sad
|
||
sometimes.”
|
||
“Life is sad--mighty sad.”
|
||
“Is it? That’s a new one for me. I think it a pretty fine old
|
||
proposition. What went wrong with you--early in the game?”
|
||
“Nothing. Travel is tiring, I’m not as strong as you are.”
|
||
“You’re as tough as a pine knot, for all you look like a lily expecting
|
||
to be decapitated by the first wind. Well, you won’t tell if you won’t,
|
||
but I’ll tell you what you need. You’ve never been in love and that’s
|
||
a sort of ache in women until they’ve taken a good dose of the only
|
||
medicine. I rather hoped you’d met your fate in the Marchese Valdobia.
|
||
He’s the sort you once told me was your type, and you seemed to like
|
||
him pretty well for about five weeks in Rome. The lord knows he was
|
||
tall enough, and dark enough, and thin enough, and looked as if he had
|
||
a beastly temper besides. Then you turned him down good and hard. I was
|
||
sorry----”
|
||
“My dear Ida! Are you regretting that I did not have a liaison with
|
||
Valdobia? I remember your virtuous sentiments in Butte. Perhaps it is
|
||
time for us to return!”
|
||
“Oh, I’m all right. But I’m that advanced I wouldn’t mind you having an
|
||
affair the least bit if it would make you happy----”
|
||
“Happy! What happiness do you imagine there can be when you are
|
||
absolutely at the mercy of a man?--when you never know whether you will
|
||
see him again or not?--a woman has no real hold on a lover. Matrimony
|
||
with the man you love may have its agonies, but at least you live with
|
||
him, you make his home; his interests are yours, he is dependent upon
|
||
you for comfort and sympathy; there are a thousand ways in which you
|
||
can endear and enchain him. But a lover, whom you meet in secret for
|
||
one purpose only, who can give you no real companionship--oh, no! I
|
||
shall not court that particular form of suffering. Life is hard enough
|
||
without that! I’ve known women with lovers and so have you.”
|
||
“I don’t say it would last forever; nothing does, for that matter. But
|
||
at least you would live for a little while--come down off the unearthly
|
||
plane you roost on now. Whatever you went through, it would leave you
|
||
all-round developed and philosophical--in a frame of mind to see and
|
||
accept life as it is. You need hardening. I was born hard. You’re as
|
||
soft as mush, for all you look like those marble bores in the Vatican,
|
||
and as romantic as if you’d spent all your life in a castle in a wood
|
||
with the drawbridge up. I believe you even keep a diary----”
|
||
“Diary----” Ora sat up straight.
|
||
“I’ve seen and heard you writing by the yard, late at night, mostly. It
|
||
wasn’t letters, because we always get those off our chest just after
|
||
breakfast--fine system. Unless you’re a budding author----”
|
||
“They were letters!” Ora, who was strung up to a high pitch and merely
|
||
smoking for relief, felt a defiant impulse to indulge in the impudence
|
||
of confession. “I’ve written yards and yards of letters to a man----”
|
||
“What? And you don’t send them off!”
|
||
“I don’t know him.”
|
||
“Good lord, what next? An ideal, I suppose.”
|
||
“Yes--that’s it.”
|
||
“Do you mean you never saw him--anyone to suggest him--it? What gender
|
||
has an ideal, anyhow?”
|
||
“I saw him--talked with him, once. I said I didn’t know him.”
|
||
“And you’re in love with him!”
|
||
“Not in the least. He simply jolted my imagination, gave me the idea of
|
||
what might be--have been. I--it is hard to express--I feel in a sort
|
||
of mental--spiritual?--affinity with him. When I write I have a queer
|
||
sense of absolute communion--as if we were talking--I suppose it is
|
||
because I know he would understand if I could send the letters----”
|
||
“And you’ve never sent one?”
|
||
“Of course not. It is--well, just a little private one-sided drama I’m
|
||
living; a sort of book of which I am the heroine. While I write I am
|
||
alive. The rest of the time I wonder what I was put on this earth at
|
||
all for.”
|
||
“Look at here, Ora, the best thing we can do is to send for old Gower
|
||
and go back to Rome. You’ll be having nerves first thing you know.
|
||
No, we’d cut out the annex. I’m dead sick of her, and everybody knows
|
||
we’re all right; in Rome they don’t care, anyhow. You could have a real
|
||
romance. We’d take one of those old palaces, haunted, moth-eaten, with
|
||
one of those antique porters that looks as if he’d let out midnight
|
||
lovers ten centuries ago, and beds that twenty centuries have died in.
|
||
That would just suit you. I’d enjoy a second-hand romance first rate,
|
||
and be the trusted friend.”
|
||
“Ida, you are incorrigible! Even if I cared a penny about Valdobia do
|
||
you suppose I would betray my husband?”
|
||
“Rats! Don’t you suppose Mark has a girl down on The Flat? Greg has,
|
||
I’ll bet--well, don’t look as if you were going to faint. What’s the
|
||
use of being a dog in the manger? Mark’ll be the same old devoted when
|
||
you get back.”
|
||
“Oh, do keep quiet! And I wish I might never see Butte again. I think
|
||
I’ll write to Mark and ask him to move to New York. He now has plenty
|
||
of money to wait, and it wouldn’t take him long to establish himself
|
||
anywhere----”
|
||
“I thought you loved Montana--wanted to do something big for her----”
|
||
“We’ve been away a long time. I fancy I’m weaned. It is only once in a
|
||
while that I feel a pull--merely because I was born there.”
|
||
“Well, Mark won’t leave, believe me. He’s Western from the cut of his
|
||
back hair to his love of the free-and-easy. No New York for him except
|
||
the all-night two or three times a year. Butte’s your fate unless you
|
||
leave him.”
|
||
“I’ll never do that, but I’d like to stay over here for another year
|
||
or two. Remember, I was brought up in Europe--and--and--I _might_ meet
|
||
the man--If you want to know I’ve tried. I’d never go as far as you
|
||
suggest, but I could get something--companionship, perhaps, out of it.”
|
||
“When you meet the man you’ll forget all you ever knew, and men don’t
|
||
companion for a cent when there’s nothing in it. I haven’t been turning
|
||
them inside out these last six months for nothing; what I don’t
|
||
know about men wouldn’t fill a thimble. Why don’t you round up your
|
||
letter-man?”
|
||
“That is forever impossible.”
|
||
“Do give me a hint who he is. I’m half dead with curiosity. Where’d you
|
||
meet him?”
|
||
“Keep quiet. I’m going to take a nap.”
|
||
“Well,” said Ida, yawning and stretching herself, “so am I, if you’ve
|
||
closed up. When we get back to Butte and there’s no more sight-seeing
|
||
on, we’ll have to cut out these siestas or we’ll get fat, and then
|
||
good-bye.”
|
||
XXXII
|
||
They went out at half-past five and joined the dense sauntering throng
|
||
under the arcade of the Via Venti Settembre. All Genoa turns out at
|
||
this hour with apparently no object but to amble and stare. The two
|
||
girls, particularly Ora, who appeared to be the only blonde in the
|
||
city, were almost mobbed. Every other man spoke to them, or rolled
|
||
his eyes and twirled his moustache. But they preserved a lofty and
|
||
blank demeanour, and were practically unmolested. The Genoese works
|
||
almost as hard as the American during a few hours of the day and haunts
|
||
the afternoon throngs only to amuse himself indolently. If one woman
|
||
ignores him he passes on philosophically to the next.
|
||
“Lord, but I’d like to get a move on!” exclaimed Ida. “Why don’t they
|
||
_walk_? Is this what they call exercise? And I wouldn’t mind their
|
||
ogling and speaking if they only wouldn’t pinch. I’ll give this side a
|
||
rest, anyhow.” And she dexterously changed places and drew Ora’s other
|
||
arm through her own.
|
||
“I love them, pinches and all,” said Ora, warmly. “They are like
|
||
children in one way, and yet they really know how to rest and enjoy
|
||
themselves, which is more than our men ever do. Even the working-class
|
||
enjoys life over here. I wonder why they emigrate?”
|
||
They had passed round the corner of the arcade and entered the Piazza
|
||
Defarrari, working their way toward the Via Roma. Ora stopped before
|
||
one of the cantinas behind the statue of Garibaldi. “Look at those men
|
||
drinking their cheap wine and gossipping. They look as if they hadn’t a
|
||
care in the world.”
|
||
“Give me the hustling American,” said Ida contemptuously. “I don’t call
|
||
this life. They’re just drifting along waiting for the Angel Gabriel
|
||
to blow his trump. What makes them so lazy and contented? They know
|
||
they can go just so far over here and no farther. Ancient history made
|
||
classes and masses, and while they have fun, some of them, thinking
|
||
they’re socialists, they know that most of them will stay put. But the
|
||
only real fun in life is getting ahead of the next fellow and knowing
|
||
that your chance is as good as any.”
|
||
“What a truly American sentiment!”
|
||
“I’m American, all right, and that’s the reason I want to get back to
|
||
Butte, where things hum every minute, and there’s no real poverty.
|
||
Fancy calling these left-overs ‘middle-class’ like our miners. Every
|
||
one of those looks forward to being President of Amalgamated one of
|
||
these days, or striking it rich in the mountains.”
|
||
“There are different varieties of happiness, fortunately for several
|
||
billions that are seeking it.”
|
||
“Do you know,” said Ida, abruptly, as they turned into the Galleria
|
||
Mazzini from the Via Roma, “it’s queer, but I feel more at home in
|
||
Italy than I have anywhere else over here, although I had a really
|
||
better time in England and Germany and Austria. I don’t hit it off much
|
||
with Italians, but--well--I have a more settled-down feeling.”
|
||
“That’s odd!”
|
||
“Why?”
|
||
“Oh, I’ve been romancing about you a bit, fancying you a reincarnation
|
||
of one of those fascinating abominable women of the Renaissance, who
|
||
had innumerable lovers and poisoned their husbands, or rivals. You
|
||
would look quite wonderful in those long velvet or brocaded gowns, with
|
||
sleeves that come down over the hands, and pearls twined in your hair.”
|
||
“That’s not a bad idea. Maybe I was, although I don’t see myself
|
||
with lovers or thinking anybody worth swinging for. Several American
|
||
reincarnations must have changed my habits; but I don’t mind looking
|
||
the part. Good idea--when we get back to Paris I’ll have several of
|
||
those Renaissance costumes made. They won’t go out of style, either.
|
||
Greg can fork over the pearls later.”
|
||
“You’ll be a picture. I wish I had thought of it before. Don’t you
|
||
think you are capable of jealousy?”
|
||
“Nixie. To be jealous you’ve got to have a fearful crush; and thank the
|
||
lord I don’t love anybody but myself and never shall.”
|
||
“That is often the secret of love for some man--of most men’s love for
|
||
a woman, I imagine! Perhaps it creates the most powerful delusion of
|
||
all.”
|
||
“Well, none of it in mine. Me for the great society act. I’m going to
|
||
be the grandest dame in Montana, and when I’ve wrung that dry I’ll move
|
||
on to New York. Greg says he won’t, means to live and die in Montana,
|
||
but I guess he’ll manage to stand it if I desert him occasionally.
|
||
If he’s got a hill full of copper he won’t know whether I’m in Butte
|
||
or the Waldorf-Astoria. You look better, Ora; you ought to stay out
|
||
of doors more and watch these funny old crowds. You’ve got a nice
|
||
colour, and smile as if you meant it--Oh! that’s it, is it? Well, thank
|
||
goodness, I’ve got a front seat----”
|
||
“What on earth are you talking about?”
|
||
“Pretending you haven’t seen him? I like that!”
|
||
Ida felt the arm within her own stiffen. “Valdobia! Don’t leave me for
|
||
a moment.”
|
||
“I won’t, although, believe me, the rôle of gooseberry is no cinch.”
|
||
“I’ve played it for you often enough.”
|
||
“You have, and I’m a dead game sport. Lord! he looks more bad-tempered
|
||
than ever. Probably every meal he’s eaten since you left has disagreed
|
||
with him, including macaroni.”
|
||
“He’s not bad-tempered. Hot-tempered, no doubt, but I’m sure he’s kind
|
||
and quite amiable. He’s rather grim, and of course he’s lived pretty
|
||
hard and is disillusioned. That is all.”
|
||
“That’s right, stand up for him. Bad sign--or a good one! He’s seen us!”
|
||
Valdobia’s eyes flashed recognition, although he lifted his hat with
|
||
unsmiling lips, and made no effort to push his way through the crowd.
|
||
Ora favoured him with a glance of chill indifference as she returned
|
||
his salutation, but she noticed that he made the young Genoese
|
||
patricians look provincial. He not only was tall and gracefully built,
|
||
his carriage military, but he had the air of repose and distinction,
|
||
as well as the keen, tolerant, detached glance, of the man who has
|
||
spent his life in the great world, and, on the whole, subordinated
|
||
his weaknesses to his brain. It was evident that he was dressed from
|
||
Conduit Street, and at first glance, in spite of his dark colouring
|
||
and fine Roman features, his nationality was not obtrusive; he looked
|
||
the cosmopolitan, the man-of-the-world, who might have made his
|
||
headquarters in any one of her great capitals. As a matter of fact,
|
||
while in the diplomatic service he had lived in several, including a
|
||
short sojourn in Washington; but after coming into a large inheritance
|
||
through the death of his father and of an energetic uncle who had
|
||
boldly gone into business and prospered, he had travelled for a year in
|
||
Africa and India and then settled in Rome.
|
||
If he was too indifferent or too wise to hurry he managed to make his
|
||
way consistently toward them, although a crowd had formed about a
|
||
bulletin board to read the latest news from the seat of war. He stood
|
||
opposite them in three or four minutes and shook hands politely with
|
||
both.
|
||
“At last!” he said. “I called at the Bristol, and have been looking
|
||
for you ever since.” He had a warm deep voice but his tones and manner
|
||
expressed less than his words.
|
||
“You don’t have to look far in Genoa,” said Ida, giving him a cordial
|
||
smile and handshake to cover Ora’s chilling welcome. “If the whole town
|
||
turns out for what it calls exercise, each quarter seems to keep to
|
||
itself. We see the same faces every day.”
|
||
Valdobia fell into step beside Ida, who at once began to chatter
|
||
questions about their common acquaintance in Rome. She grinned mentally
|
||
as she rattled off titles, recalling the wiry little figure of her
|
||
mother at the wash-tub, and her father with his “muck”-spattered
|
||
overalls and blue dinner pail; but Valdobia, too accustomed to titles
|
||
to note whether Americans were lavish in their use or not, replied
|
||
naturally and refrained from glancing at the woman who had given his
|
||
self-centred ego the profoundest shock it had ever received. He was
|
||
now thirty-eight. In his early manhood he had loved with the facility
|
||
and brevity of his race. Then for six years, after his return to Rome,
|
||
he had been the lover of a brilliant and subtle woman ten years older
|
||
than himself, who, for a short time, inspired in him the belief that
|
||
at last he had entered the equatorial region of the _grande passion_.
|
||
This passed off, and she became a habit, which lasted until, with
|
||
the decline of her beauty, she lost much of her finesse, as well as
|
||
her control over both temper and complexion. It had taken him a year
|
||
or more to regain his liberty, and when he did, after scenes that
|
||
he fain would dismiss from his memory, he determined to keep it. His
|
||
long experience with a woman of many characteristics and one or two
|
||
noble qualities, before she gossipped and inflamed them to death, had
|
||
thoroughly disillusioned him, and since his release his gallantries
|
||
had been lighter than in his youth. When he first met Ora Blake he was
|
||
attracted merely by her cold fairness, redeemed from classic severity
|
||
by her brilliant seeing eyes, which so often sparkled with humour, and
|
||
amused at her naïve and girlish attitude of happiness in temporary
|
||
freedom; so successfully practised by herself and Ida. He had supposed
|
||
her to be little more than twenty, and had wondered if her husband
|
||
were even busier than the average American, to let her run away so
|
||
soon. When she told him she was twenty-seven, and had been married
|
||
seven years, he found himself speculating on the temperament of a woman
|
||
whom time and life had left untouched. Shortly after, he received a
|
||
biographical sketch of her from Mrs. O’Neil, also of Butte, who was
|
||
wintering in Rome and entertaining such of the aristocracy as she met
|
||
at her Embassy. It was some time since his thoughts had dwelt upon
|
||
any woman when alone, and when he found himself sitting by his window
|
||
in the evening dreaming over his cigar instead of amusing himself in
|
||
the varied life of Rome after his habit, he was at first amused, then
|
||
angry, finally apprehensive. He had no desire for another period of
|
||
torment, followed by the successive stages that finished in impatience
|
||
and satiety.
|
||
He tried flirting with her, making her talk about herself, focussing
|
||
her mind on the years she seemed determined to ignore, in the hope
|
||
of discovering that she was commonplace. But Ora, who found him more
|
||
interesting than any man she had met in Europe, also a conquest to be
|
||
proud of, continued to make herself interesting--and elusive--with a
|
||
skill and subtlety that so closely resembled the frank ingenuousness of
|
||
the West, that the man accustomed to the patented finesse of European
|
||
women experienced the agreeable sensation of renewing his youth. He
|
||
felt himself falling in love like a schoolboy, and meditated flight. He
|
||
remained in Rome, however, and made a deliberate attempt to fascinate
|
||
her. Then one day when Ida was pouring tea at the Embassy, chaperoned
|
||
by Lady Gower, he found Ora alone, indisposed after a sleepless night,
|
||
and lost his head. Ora, who was in no mood to let him down gently and
|
||
reserve him for conversational pleasures, dismissed him abruptly,
|
||
and had not seen him since. She had regretted her impatience, for he
|
||
was always worth talking to, her feminine liking for his type was
|
||
very strong, and she had amused herself fancying that if she had not
|
||
permitted another man to rule her imagination she might have found her
|
||
fate in this one. But as he had presumed to follow her when she had
|
||
banished him summarily, she greeted him with cool civility and resumed
|
||
her study of the kaleidoscopic crowd.
|
||
Suddenly she moved her head in a fashion that suggested the lifting of
|
||
one of the little ears that lay so close to her head and were not the
|
||
least of her points. The ear was on the side next to her companion in
|
||
arms. Could it be that Ida was flirting with Valdobia? Mrs. Compton’s
|
||
manner and speech were as correct as her smartly tailored suit and hat
|
||
of black velvet and the calm pride of her bearing, but she was talking
|
||
with sweet earnestness to the Roman about himself and expressing her
|
||
plaintive gratitude that he had cared to follow them to Genoa, where
|
||
she at least was very lonely. It had not been possible for Ora to see
|
||
the flash of understanding these two had exchanged after Valdobia’s
|
||
first puzzled glance, but she did see many heads turn to look at the
|
||
handsome and well-matched couple. Even the Italian women did not
|
||
smile ironically as they so often did at the too obvious American
|
||
tourist. Ida not only had delivered herself of every exterior trace
|
||
of commonness, but would no more have appeared on the street looking
|
||
the mere tourist than she could be betrayed into adopting the extreme
|
||
of any new style by the persuasive Parisian. She saw Ora’s head come
|
||
round her shoulder, and her voice deepened to the soft husky tones she
|
||
reserved for decisive moments with her agitated admirers, then dropped
|
||
so low that only the man, with his head bent, could hear the words. At
|
||
this stage of the flirtation’s progress Ora noted that the approving
|
||
glances of the sympathetic Italians were accompanied by significant
|
||
smiles.
|
||
They had reached the end of the long Galleria for the second time and
|
||
turned. The crowd was thin. The restaurants were filling. Shutters
|
||
were rattling down over the windows of the tempting shops. Said Ora
|
||
abruptly,
|
||
“I think I’d like to dine in one of these cafés--the Milano. The
|
||
Bristol dining-room is a little Ritz, and it’s a bore to dress.”
|
||
Valdobia leaned forward with a pleasant smile. “I should like nothing
|
||
better, but you must dine with me.”
|
||
“Why not? What do you say, Ida?”
|
||
“I’d love it. The food is good and the crowd more interesting.”
|
||
They entered the bright café and seated themselves at one of the side
|
||
tables, the two girls on the bench against the wall, Valdobia in the
|
||
chair opposite. A number of the tables were already occupied, several
|
||
by stout comfortable couples, but the majority by men with their hats
|
||
on, playing dominoes or reading the evening papers. Opposite the door
|
||
was a long table set forth with the delicacies of the season: raw meat,
|
||
winter vegetables, oranges, and kicking lobsters.
|
||
Valdobia, assiduously waited upon by the proprietor himself (whose
|
||
wife, surrounded by several of her children, smiled benignantly from
|
||
the cashier’s desk), ordered a special dinner; a light soup (the table
|
||
d’hôte soup was a meal in itself), spaghetti, inimitably cooked veal
|
||
in brown butter, salad, freshly caught fish, ices, and a bottle of the
|
||
host’s most precious Chianti.
|
||
“I never could have pictured you in a Bohemian restaurant,” said Ora,
|
||
smiling brilliantly into the face of her host. “Have you ever been in a
|
||
place like this before?”
|
||
“About as often as I have weeks to my credit.” He looked steadily
|
||
into her snapping eyes. “You have studied Italians to little purpose
|
||
if you’ve not discovered their partiality for their native cooking.
|
||
These plain little cafés are the last strongholds in our large cities.
|
||
Even the restaurants where the business men go for luncheon are queer
|
||
imitations of London or Paris.”
|
||
“We like to come here because the men pay no attention to us. It is men
|
||
of your class that know how to make us thoroughly uncomfortable.”
|
||
“Quite so. Every class has its own code. In ours it may be said
|
||
that the women set the pace. They demand open admiration and we are
|
||
gallant enough to give it. This class bothers itself little about the
|
||
unattainable, and merely throws you the passing tribute they would
|
||
throw to the Queen, or to a beautiful work of art.”
|
||
“Which they appreciate. Would that our working-classes did. On this
|
||
side the masses are as likely as not to spend their holidays in a
|
||
picture gallery or a museum. Ours can think of nothing better than a
|
||
saloon.”
|
||
“That may be the fault of your great country. The crude mind is
|
||
easily trained. Give your working-people more galleries and museums
|
||
and fewer saloons--or cantinas with their light wines, and beer
|
||
gardens, instead of rum and whiskey. But it is unfair to expect a new
|
||
and heterogeneous--almost chaotic--country to compete with twenty
|
||
centuries.” Two pairs of American eyes flashed, and he continued
|
||
suavely. “I fear that the old standards of my own people are in danger
|
||
of being demoralised by socialism and the new craving for raw spirits.
|
||
That is becoming a serious question with us.” He turned to Ida. “It is
|
||
far more odd to see you without your usual train of admirers--both of
|
||
you. How do you stand it?”
|
||
“Oh, we’re merely recuperating,” said Ida lightly, and smiling into his
|
||
admiring eyes. “We will return to the fray refreshed and more dangerous
|
||
than ever.”
|
||
“How much longer shall you stay here?”
|
||
“A week or two. Then we go on to Paris. After that Egypt, Spain, or
|
||
some other old place.”
|
||
“But not without seeing Monte Carlo? You must let me show it to you.”
|
||
“I suppose that is an old stamping ground of yours?”
|
||
“I go once a year, although, like a good many other pleasures, it has
|
||
lost its irresistible fascination. But I shall enjoy seeing you catch
|
||
the gambling fever.”
|
||
“I’m not very susceptible to microbes, but I don’t doubt Mrs. Blake
|
||
will gamble the clothes off her back. That would be the good old
|
||
Montana style.” And she told him something of life in Butte before it
|
||
indulged in one of its spasms of exterior reform, and of the present
|
||
life on The Flat.
|
||
“I must see your Butte,” he said enthusiastically. “An English friend
|
||
of mine has a ranch in Wyoming, and I may go out there next year.”
|
||
Ora stood this until the fish had been removed; then she emerged
|
||
conclusively from the cold and nervous apathy that had possessed her
|
||
for several days, and began to sparkle. Ida was no match for her
|
||
when she chose to exert herself, for that native product only really
|
||
shone when able to employ her own rich vocabulary. She subsided
|
||
with a smile and devoted herself to the excellent dinner, while Ora
|
||
entertained their fastidious host with bright little stories of the
|
||
adventures they never failed to experience, being two young women who
|
||
travelled with their eyes and ears wide open. Valdobia, now satisfied
|
||
that he had recaptured the interest of his lady and been in a measure
|
||
forgiven, gave her all his attention; although not a man disposed to
|
||
conversational exertion, he took pains to interest her in return. They
|
||
discussed the news of the day and the latest books; and his deference
|
||
to her opinions was very flattering, although he did not permit a
|
||
flash of his eyes to betray his passionate delight at being once more
|
||
with this woman whom he thought lovelier and more desirable than ever.
|
||
Ora wore a blue velvet suit, not too dark, and a little hat of the
|
||
same shade with a long feather that nestled in her warm ashen hair.
|
||
Her cheeks were as pink as her lips, and she held her chin up as if
|
||
drinking in the elixir of her native air. She looked very young and
|
||
wholly without guile.
|
||
She continued to enchant him until they were in the Bristol, and the
|
||
lift stopped at the first floor. Then she abruptly bade him good-night,
|
||
and ascended to her room, while the others went into the smoking-room
|
||
and ordered coffee at one of the smaller tables.
|
||
“Well?” said Ida, smiling. “I’m not the sort that talks in circles
|
||
except when I’m on parade. I’m glad you’ve come. Ora was fearfully down
|
||
about something. I believe she likes you better than any man she has
|
||
met over here. A little flirtation will do her no end of good.”
|
||
Valdobia coloured. He was as practical as most Italians, but by no
|
||
means given to the direct method of speech with women. Love simplifies
|
||
among other things, however, and after a moment he put down his cup and
|
||
looked her straight in the eyes.
|
||
“I think I shall take you into my confidence,” he said. “I know that
|
||
you are honest and that I can trust to your discretion----”
|
||
“You bet.”
|
||
Ida relaxed her spine with her speech and settled herself comfortably.
|
||
“And you could give me great assistance. I want to persuade your
|
||
friend--may I call her Ora to you? It is a beautiful name and I have
|
||
said it so often to myself----”
|
||
“Ora goes.”
|
||
“I want to persuade Ora to divorce her husband and marry me.”
|
||
“Aw--that is--Good Lord!” Ida sat up straight and nearly dropped her
|
||
cup. “That’s a large order.”
|
||
“Rather. But I--now--want nothing less. I am sick of the other sort of
|
||
thing, even if she were not too good for it. I want to marry--and she
|
||
is the only woman I ever have wanted to marry.”
|
||
“Hm. You Italians haven’t the name of being the best husbands in the
|
||
world. How long would you be faithful to her?”
|
||
“I have no intention of ever being anything else.”
|
||
“That’s what they all say--think, no doubt.”
|
||
“I shall be.” He spoke with intense conviction.
|
||
“Well, perhaps--you’ve lived your life. I should think you men would
|
||
get mighty sick of dancing about and never coming to anchor. But
|
||
divorce? There’s Mark, you know.”
|
||
“Her present husband?”
|
||
“Yes, and a rattling good fellow. He married Ora when she didn’t know
|
||
which way to turn, and she is really grateful to him, and as fond of
|
||
him as if he were her own brother. I don’t think she’ll turn him down.”
|
||
“Women have been known to desert their brothers before this! I mean to
|
||
make her love me, and if I do--how she could love a man!--I fancy I can
|
||
persuade her.”
|
||
“I like Mark and I don’t want to see him thrown down. He’s not what you
|
||
might call in love with Ora--he got discouraged pretty early in the
|
||
game. But he’s fond of her and proud of her, and he has ambitions. She
|
||
could help him a lot.”
|
||
Valdobia lit another cigarette.
|
||
“Better have a liaison and get over it. Then he’ll never know, and what
|
||
men don’t know don’t hurt them.”
|
||
“I shall do nothing of the sort. I mean to marry her. Will you help me
|
||
or not?”
|
||
“Ora’d look fine all right in that old palace of yours. It would suit
|
||
her a long sight better than Butte, or even Washington--let alone
|
||
Helena; Mark wouldn’t mind a bit being Governor of Montana. Have you
|
||
got a castle in the country?”
|
||
“I have several.”
|
||
“Fine! I’d visit you every year.”
|
||
“No one would be half as welcome.”
|
||
“I’ve been away from America so long and seen so much, and Butte seems
|
||
so far away, that I’ve kind of lost my bearings. If you’d come over
|
||
there and lay your siege, I guess I’d fight you to the last ditch.”
|
||
“Permit me to remind you that we are in Italy, a state several
|
||
centuries ahead of yours in civilisation, even if we lack your facile
|
||
divorce laws. I know something of Mr. Blake from Mrs. O’Neil. Can you
|
||
picture Ora finishing her life with him?”
|
||
“No, I can’t, and that’s a fact. I wonder there hasn’t been a grand
|
||
bust-up before this. It will come some day. Why not now?”
|
||
“Quite so.”
|
||
“And Mark could get a dozen girls to suit him better, make him nice and
|
||
comfy. He’ll never get any real companionship out of Ora, fine as she’s
|
||
always treated him. A man like that needs a running mate.”
|
||
“I shall waste none of my mental energy in sympathy for Mr. Mark Blake.
|
||
American husbands, so far as I have been permitted to observe, are
|
||
accustomed not only to being deserted for months and even years at a
|
||
time, but to periodical divorce.”
|
||
“It’s not quite as bad as that, but Mark has the elasticity of an india
|
||
rubber ball, and that’s a fact.”
|
||
“Good. Will you help me?”
|
||
Ida hesitated an instant longer, then, dimly conscious that her answer
|
||
in a measure was dictated by a profound instinct she made no attempt to
|
||
define, exclaimed, “It’s a go. I believe it will be all for the best.
|
||
Shake.” And she gave his hand a hearty grasp.
|
||
“You are a brick,” he murmured, with a sensation of gratitude he had
|
||
rarely experienced. “But there is one thing more. Please give her no
|
||
hint of this, for the present at least. Tell her, and make her believe
|
||
it, that I have not come here to trouble her, that she need never fear
|
||
to trust herself alone with me. Tell her that I only want to enjoy her
|
||
society and make things pleasant for her.”
|
||
“Right you are. Ora’s not the sort you can rush. But don’t overdo it
|
||
and make her think you’ve altogether got over it. Sometimes that piques
|
||
and works out all right and sometimes it don’t. She’s as proud as
|
||
Lucifer and might get over her fancy for you while she was still mad.”
|
||
“You do know your sex! I’ll use all the art I’ve ever acquired.”
|
||
“Respectful devotion without humility, and pained self-control. That’s
|
||
your lay.”
|
||
He laughed heartily. “We’ll drift for the present.”
|
||
“Well, now, drift out. I want to go up and sound her. I’m simply
|
||
expiring to know what she’s thinking about at the present moment.”
|
||
XXXIII
|
||
When Ida reached her room she put her ear to the closed door leading
|
||
into Ora’s, and heard the scratch of the hotel pen.
|
||
“May I come in?” she asked softly.
|
||
There was a rattle of paper, the snap of a trunk lid, and then Ora said
|
||
in tones as dulcet, “Come in, dear.”
|
||
Ida entered and found Ora extended on the sofa.
|
||
“What did you run off like that for?” she asked, as she selected the
|
||
least uncomfortable of the chairs in the fresh and artistic but hardly
|
||
luxurious room. “The poor man was as glum as a funeral until he’d had
|
||
two cups of coffee and several cigarettes.”
|
||
“I was tired. And I really think he has followed you.”
|
||
“You don’t think anything of the sort. His heart was in his patent
|
||
leathers when he met us, and I just tided him over. He gave me a
|
||
message for you. Shall I deliver it?”
|
||
“Why not?” asked Ora languidly.
|
||
“He wants me to impress you with the fact that he’s not come here to
|
||
make love to you, just to enjoy your exhilarating society----”
|
||
“Is he over it?” Ora’s eyes flashed upward.
|
||
“Not exactly, but he has no intention of making any more breaks, and
|
||
being cut off from the solace of your company now and then--principally
|
||
now, I guess. He’s got to see you or go off to India and shoot tigers.
|
||
But he’s really much nicer than I had any idea of, and is anxious to
|
||
give us a good time. Life is a desert, kid, with all the men we know in
|
||
the next town. Men were invented to amuse us, so do continue to thaw.
|
||
You did bravely when you got started, and no harm will be done. If you
|
||
can’t fall in love with him you can’t, and he’s prepared to take his
|
||
medicine. He’s a good sport. A man like that can behave himself when he
|
||
sets his mind to it.”
|
||
“Is he indulging in the hope that I can be made to care for him?”
|
||
“Men are so conceited that they always hope for the best. But he’ll
|
||
not worry you, that’s the point. It will be fine to have him pilot us
|
||
about; perhaps he’ll get us inside of one of those old palaces in the
|
||
Via Garibaldi. And he’ll take us to Monte Carlo. How do you feel about
|
||
it?”
|
||
“I don’t care whether he goes or stays, but on the whole I am rather
|
||
glad he is here. He has brains and I like to talk to clever men that
|
||
have seen the world.”
|
||
“And don’t keep me hitched to your elbow all the time, for mercy’s
|
||
sake. I hope he’ll dig up some friend of his here who will beau me.
|
||
Give him a chance and remember he is a gentleman and has passed his
|
||
word.”
|
||
“Is this a plot?” Ora laughed. “Don’t worry. I won’t bore you any
|
||
more than I can help. I fancy I am quite safe, for he never really
|
||
can see me alone, as we have no salon here. Besides, in long days of
|
||
sight-seeing he’ll no doubt recover, and we shall become merely the
|
||
best of friends.”
|
||
“That’s what I’m figuring on. Now, cut out those love letters and come
|
||
down to earth.”
|
||
Ora sat up in her indignation. “Love letters? I’ve not written a line
|
||
of love.”
|
||
“What in the name of goodness do you write about then to this lover in
|
||
the air?”
|
||
“Oh, I just--_talk_--about everything that interests me--the things
|
||
one says to a familiar spirit--that is if there were such a thing--but
|
||
otherwise has to keep to oneself always.”
|
||
“And you don’t call them love letters, because you leave out the
|
||
‘darlings’ and ‘dears’? Good thing the man will never see them.
|
||
Good thing for more reasons than one. Men hate long letters. If I’d
|
||
disobeyed orders and inflicted Greg, I never would have got that house
|
||
and the extra ten thousand.”
|
||
“And yet he was in love with you once?”
|
||
“Thought he was. Just had the usual attack of brain fever men always
|
||
get when they can’t have the girl they want without marrying her.
|
||
Lasted about a month. Greg cares too much for other things for any
|
||
woman to last more than a few minutes in his life, anyway. Just the
|
||
husband for me.”
|
||
Ora was swinging one foot and looking at the point of her slipper.
|
||
“I shan’t destroy those letters,” she said finally, “because they have
|
||
meant something to me that nothing in this life ever will again. But
|
||
I’ll write no more.”
|
||
* * * * *
|
||
They remained in Genoa for ten days longer. Valdobia, who had taken
|
||
rooms at the Miramare, gave them a dinner and they met several of his
|
||
Genoese friends, but none of the men was blest with Ida’s critical
|
||
approval. Her demand for the admiration of men was merely a part of her
|
||
insolent pride in her beauty and magnetism and her love of power; she
|
||
had little natural coquetry, and wasted no time on a man who bored her
|
||
or was not “worth while.” She particularly hated soft dark eyes, and
|
||
the two unfortunate young scions of the aristocracy of Genoa invited
|
||
by Valdobia, had peculiarly lovely orbs that they rolled exceedingly.
|
||
But it was a merry party, for no people can be gayer than the Genoese,
|
||
and they played baccarat until two in the morning; a new experience
|
||
for the Americans. During the hours devoted to the game Ida had the
|
||
satisfaction of observing that two pairs of flaming dark eyes had
|
||
apparently forgotten the existence of woman. Even Valdobia, who held
|
||
the bank twice and lost a good deal of money, became very keen on the
|
||
table, although he kept Ora beside him and taught her all that one can
|
||
learn of a game of chance. The stakes ran very high toward the end,
|
||
Valdobia lost several thousand francs, and Ora five hundred. She would
|
||
have lost more, no doubt, for she found it an interesting and exciting
|
||
experience, but Valdobia dictated her stakes, and she meekly obeyed.
|
||
Ida, who had been wary, came out even.
|
||
“You don’t catch me dropping good money when I don’t get something good
|
||
enough in return,” she announced as they entered her room at the hotel.
|
||
“It’s fun all right, but like most things that are off on a side-track
|
||
from your main purpose in life, just to be nibbled at. I prefer bridge
|
||
anyhow.”
|
||
“Do you? I think I like the game of chance. I don’t mind losing----”
|
||
“Well, I do. It made me sick to see you lose five hundred francs, and
|
||
if it hadn’t been for Valdobia you’d have lost as much more. I couldn’t
|
||
sleep a wink if I’d lost a hundred plunks.”
|
||
Ora laughed. “It would be great fun to see you really excited and
|
||
carried away about something. I hope you will have visions of sudden
|
||
wealth at Monte Carlo and forget the world.”
|
||
“Not much!” said Ida contemptuously. “I’ll be rich, all right, but
|
||
it’ll be because I take no chances. I knew whom I was marrying, and
|
||
he’ll make the millions. You’ll never see me spend a cent unless it
|
||
brings in good interest, like clothes, and tips, and entertaining.
|
||
And the only thing that could excite me would be if Amalgamated got
|
||
the hill, and Greg had to go to work to make his fortune as a mining
|
||
engineer. But I’m not the kind to get wrinkles worrying. Lord! Don’t
|
||
the people in this town ever go to sleep?”
|
||
Their windows were close to the Via Venti Settembre, although on a
|
||
short side street. It is possible that the afternoon throngs are
|
||
replaced by a different set in the evening, and these again by lovers
|
||
of the night; but certain it is that the more inviting of the streets
|
||
are rarely deserted until dawn, and the later the revellers the
|
||
more noisy they are; following a universal law of nature. When the
|
||
light-hearted Genoese has sung all his songs to the stars and chattered
|
||
at the top of his voice for several hours, he stands still and screams.
|
||
The girls put their heads out of the window, wondering if anyone were
|
||
being murdered below. A group of young men were standing in a circle
|
||
and outscreaming one another.
|
||
Ida slammed the long windows together, fastened the catch and covered
|
||
them with the heavy shutters. “Me for beauty sleep,” she said; “I like
|
||
air all right, but I like quiet better. Good night.”
|
||
Ora left her window open and lay thinking for a long time. She liked
|
||
the new excitement of gambling, and she was divided between regret
|
||
and gratitude that for the last five days she had enjoyed thoroughly
|
||
the society of the man who would have been the chief exponent of
|
||
the type she admired had he possessed more primitive strength of
|
||
personality; had he been obliged to develop his native forces in a
|
||
fierce battle with life instead of having been from, birth one of her
|
||
favourites. But he was a man, brave, unsoftened by luxury, quick, keen,
|
||
resourceful, modern to his finger-tips, an almost perfect companion.
|
||
What more could any woman ask? Ora wondered just what it was she did
|
||
ask. She felt very grateful to him, however. Her regret was that her
|
||
unreal life seemed to be over, or slept profoundly when she perversely
|
||
and tentatively summoned it. That life had been terrible in its
|
||
intensity, only retreating now and again when real events crowded,
|
||
or she deliberately tried to interest herself in a new and charming
|
||
personality. But all men sooner or later faded to the transparency of
|
||
wraiths beside the vital figure that dominated her imaginative life.
|
||
Would Valdobia accomplish the miracle? At least he gave her peace for
|
||
the moment. She fell asleep smiling and deliberately thinking of him.
|
||
XXXIV
|
||
On the following day they lunched at a large restaurant opposite
|
||
the Bourse, a favourite resort of the two girls; it amused them to
|
||
watch the keen clever business men of Genoa at their midday meal in
|
||
leisurely conversation and enjoyment of their excellent food and wine;
|
||
contrasting them with the American who took five minutes for lunch,
|
||
achieving dyspepsia instead of nutriment, and possibly accomplishing
|
||
less than a race which has been commercial and acquisitive since the
|
||
dawn of its history. There is little real poverty in Genoa and great
|
||
wealth.
|
||
They had come too late to secure one of the tables overlooking the
|
||
Piazzi Defarrari, and were facing the windows, at one of the longer
|
||
tables, when Valdobia, who sat opposite, rose with a word of apology
|
||
and went behind them to greet a man with a pleasant English voice.
|
||
“Lord John Mowbray,” whispered Ida. “He’s all right, but, lord, I’ll be
|
||
glad to get back to a country where a few men are plain mister.”
|
||
Nevertheless, as the Englishman bent over her with a delighted word of
|
||
greeting, she lifted her heavy eyes to his with the expression of one
|
||
whose long suppressed hopes have blossomed at last.
|
||
“I wish I could join you,” he said ruefully, “but I am with a party of
|
||
friends.”
|
||
“Get rid of them after lunch,” murmured Ida, “and come with us. We
|
||
are going to explore all those interesting little streets down in the
|
||
gulch--that is to say the ravine, or whatever it was once--and it would
|
||
be jolly to have you along.”
|
||
“I will,” he said, with fervour, “and I know what a gulch is. My
|
||
brother is ranching in Wyoming, and I may join him there in a few
|
||
months. I believe he also has interests in Butte.”
|
||
“Good! We’ll begin to get friendly right now. So long.” Valdobia
|
||
returned to his chair, and she asked, “Is he a brother of your Wyoming
|
||
friend?”
|
||
“He is, and no doubt we’ll go out together. Your Northwest must be the
|
||
realest thing left in the world.”
|
||
“It’s that, all right. And it will be no end of fun having you out
|
||
there!” She smiled sardonically, and Ora coloured and moved restlessly.
|
||
She was vaguely aware of a new drama unfolding, and had no wish to
|
||
analyse it.
|
||
Mowbray, to Ida’s satisfaction, not only deserted his friends after
|
||
luncheon, but permitted them to go on to Rome without him and lingered
|
||
in Genoa. He was a fair well set-up young Englishman, with a nonchalant
|
||
manner and an inflammable heart. Ida had met him at a country house and
|
||
amused herself “landing him,” but as she had left England immediately
|
||
after, and hunting had claimed all his ardours, she neither had seen
|
||
nor heard from him since. Although she meant to keep him at her elbow
|
||
as long as he served her purpose, she knew him to be a shy youth under
|
||
his natural buoyancy and quick intelligence, and did not disturb her
|
||
placid mind with visions of “scenes.” On the whole she liked Englishmen
|
||
better than any of the men she had met in Europe, for they had more
|
||
pride and self-control where women were concerned; if things went
|
||
deeper with them they were less likely to offend her cold purity with
|
||
outbursts of passion: which, she confided to Ora, “made her sick.”
|
||
To her delight Valdobia took them one afternoon to call on an elderly
|
||
relative who lived in one of the great palaces of the Via Garibaldi.
|
||
They were escorted up to the top floor; the rooms on the other
|
||
_pianos_ were either closed or emitted the chill breath of the tomb.
|
||
Their destination was a large lofty room, inadequately heated by a
|
||
stove in one corner; their noble hostess was fortified against the
|
||
cold by several shawls and a foot-warmer. She had invited three other
|
||
aristocratic relics in to look at “the Americans,” and, although the
|
||
principessa and her friends were more polite than they would have been
|
||
to intruding bourgeoises of their own country, it was apparent that
|
||
they could find little to say to two young women from a land of which
|
||
they had a confused and wholly contemptuous apprehension. They knew
|
||
that its chief title to fame was its original discovery by a Genoese,
|
||
that the lower classes emigrated to it a good deal, and that many
|
||
American women, who spent far too much money on their clothes, visited
|
||
Europe and occasionally married above them. More than this they neither
|
||
knew nor cared to know. So far as they were concerned new countries did
|
||
not exist.
|
||
Conversation languished. Ida was suppressed, and divided between a
|
||
desire to laugh and to scream. Ora, with a heroic effort, talked about
|
||
the mistake the average American made in seeing so little of Genoa;
|
||
but, having laid aside her furs out of politeness, she was shivering,
|
||
and unable to drink the strong coffee which immediately succumbed to
|
||
the temperature of the room.
|
||
She sent an appealing glance to Valdobia, who was smiling to himself.
|
||
Lord John, who had been honoured by a chair beside his hostess, treated
|
||
with the consideration due his ancient lineage, was delivering himself
|
||
of spasmodic clauses, with one eye on Valdobia.
|
||
“Jimminy!” whispered Ida, who now felt quite at home with her fellow
|
||
conspirator, “if you don’t get us out of this quick I’ll have
|
||
high-strikes, and Ora’ll get a cold and be laid up for a week. I always
|
||
keep her in bed when she has a cold.”
|
||
Valdobia rose instantly. “We have an engagement in half an hour,” he
|
||
said to his mother’s second cousin. “Perhaps you will permit me to show
|
||
these ladies over the palace?”
|
||
“Oh, do!” exclaimed Mowbray, acting on instinct, for he was too cold
|
||
and too unnerved to think. “I’d like jolly well to see it myself; must
|
||
be rippin’.”
|
||
The permission was given with some graciousness, and the party bowed
|
||
themselves out. As they descended the grand staircase, they heard a
|
||
buzz of voices behind them, as of several elderly ladies talking at
|
||
once.
|
||
“We’d be roasting on red-hot coals this minute if there were any in
|
||
that refrigerator,” said Ida, “but I don’t care so long as we are going
|
||
to see the real part of the palace.”
|
||
An aged major domo showed them through the magnificent reception rooms,
|
||
built for entertaining a proud and gorgeous aristocracy in the days
|
||
when Genoa was known throughout Europe as “La Superba.” They were hung
|
||
with tapestries or cordova leather, and filled with priceless pictures,
|
||
porcelains, enamels, gold and silver ware, and massive furniture.
|
||
Valdobia told them dramas sentimental and tragic which had been
|
||
enacted within the walls of the historic house. But they had to stamp
|
||
about to avoid a chill, and were glad to emerge into the warmer air of
|
||
even the narrow street.
|
||
“Well,” announced Ida, as they walked rapidly out of the Via Garibaldi
|
||
into the broad sunshine of the Piazza delle Fontane Marose, “if
|
||
that’s a sample of your ancient aristocracy no more of it in mine. My
|
||
curiosity is satisfied for good and all. Why on earth don’t they live
|
||
like human beings?”
|
||
“Or steam-heated Americans?” asked Valdobia, smiling. “Console yourself
|
||
with the assurance that you are the only Americans that have ever
|
||
crossed that threshold.”
|
||
“It doesn’t console me one little bit, and I feel pneumonia coming on.
|
||
Let’s walk as fast as we know how!” And accompanied by the willing
|
||
Englishman she started off with a stride that soon left the others far
|
||
behind.
|
||
“It is true,” said Valdobia disgustedly, “that this older generation
|
||
does not know how to live, not in any sense. They possess the greatest
|
||
wealth in Italy, and they hoard it as if poverty stared them in the
|
||
face. They have only to turn on the electric lights once a week and
|
||
provide a simple supper to make Genoa one of the most delightful cities
|
||
in Europe, but they won’t even do that. They have the finest jewels
|
||
in Italy and never wear them except on the rare occasions when the
|
||
King and Queen visit Genoa and command them to the royal palace. Thank
|
||
heaven there is a younger set, equally well born, that live in the new
|
||
apartment houses or in those villas up on the hills, and are neither
|
||
too economical nor too antiquated in their ideas to enjoy life. Those
|
||
old people are divided up into intimate little sets and spend their
|
||
lives gossipping about the rest of Genoa or talking of the past. But I
|
||
do hope you did not take cold.”
|
||
“I didn’t, and I really enjoyed it!” said Ora, smiling mischievously.
|
||
“I amused myself thinking what would happen if I told our uncomfortable
|
||
hostess that my father’s sister had married a Roman relative of her
|
||
husband; but I wouldn’t have relieved the situation for the world. I
|
||
suppose they are fumigating themselves.”
|
||
“I don’t doubt it. They think they are aristocratic and are merely
|
||
provincial.”
|
||
“How different you are!” Ora looked at him admiringly. “One hardly
|
||
could believe that you belonged to the same race.”
|
||
“I don’t. I am a Roman, and a citizen of the world. No doubt you, too,
|
||
have a root that runs back into the dark ages, but today is all that
|
||
counts with us. I mean that in more senses than one!” And, although he
|
||
smiled, he gave her a quick side-glance.
|
||
“I hope so. I am well aware that you are enjoying yourself immensely.”
|
||
Ora felt it quite safe to flirt with him in the open street.
|
||
“Do you like me a little better?”
|
||
“Rather. Friendly companionship is my chief idea of happiness, now that
|
||
I am more or less tired of books.”
|
||
“Is it? May it be my good fortune to initiate you into a higher! You
|
||
have everything to learn!”
|
||
“Have I? I wonder!”
|
||
“What do you mean by that? Have you ever been in love?”
|
||
“Not the least little bit!”
|
||
“You said that rather too vehemently. It is my turn to wonder.” This
|
||
time he looked hard at her and his face was grim. He had a way of
|
||
setting his jaw that reminded her of the man whose haunting memory had
|
||
made her alternately happy and miserable during many long months. She
|
||
looked away hastily.
|
||
“The kind of love you mean I have not the very least knowledge of. You
|
||
must believe that.”
|
||
“Of what other kind, then?”
|
||
“Oh, all women dream, you know,” she said lightly. “They have a sort of
|
||
ideal that consoles them for missing the realities of life. You come
|
||
quite close to it,” and once more she sparkled her eyes at him.
|
||
“I have no intention of letting you flirt with me,” said Valdobia
|
||
calmly. “My flirting days are over. I shall remain the best of your
|
||
friends until you love me or send me to the other end of the world.”
|
||
“Well, don’t become serious and spoil everything.”
|
||
“I shall not lose my head, if that is what you mean,” he said drily. “I
|
||
find the present state of affairs very pleasant. Let us overtake the
|
||
others and go for a drive.”
|
||
XXXV
|
||
“Well,” said Ora, when she and Ida had returned to the hotel to dress
|
||
for dinner, “did you have a queer feeling when you were prowling
|
||
through those dim old rooms, furnished three or four hundred years ago,
|
||
and the scene of all sorts of romance and tragedy?”
|
||
“I had a queer feeling all right. Had visions of rheumatism, sciatica,
|
||
pneumonia, and a red nose for a week. I suppose those wonderful velvet
|
||
gowns they wore--in pictures, anyhow--were padded inside, and they
|
||
slept in them; didn’t take them off all winter. If I lived in one of
|
||
those palaces today I’d surely lose all my good American habits.”
|
||
“Didn’t you have any haunting sense of mystery--of having been there
|
||
before?”
|
||
“Nixie! No wonder I murdered if I ever was. However,” she added
|
||
thoughtfully, “there’s no telling what I might have felt if they’d had
|
||
a furnace in the house. There was something wonderful about it, all
|
||
right--being in those musty old rooms, that fairly smelt of the past. I
|
||
guess they’ll haunt me as some of those Roman palaces have that are not
|
||
shown to the public. But don’t put weird ideas into my head, Ora. They
|
||
don’t gee with Butte. The severely practical is my lay.”
|
||
“Don’t you think there could be romance and tragedy in Butte?”
|
||
“Oh, plenty of shooting, if you mean that; and mixing-up. But people
|
||
don’t stay jealous long enough to get real tragic about it; they just
|
||
get a divorce. We’ve improved on daggers and poisoned bowls and rings,
|
||
and the rest of it. Good old Butte!”
|
||
They all dined at the Bristol that night, and soon after nine o’clock
|
||
had the smoking-room to themselves. Ida, indeed, carried Mowbray off
|
||
into the reading-room. Ora sighed as she found herself alone with the
|
||
handsome distinguished Roman of the type that even in minor exponents
|
||
so often compelled her response. Why didn’t she love him? He was
|
||
proving himself the ideal companion. There was apparently no question
|
||
to which he had not given some thought, and he knew far more about the
|
||
subjects that appealed to her than she did herself. They discussed
|
||
the ever-fascinating sexual problems impersonally, delicately, and
|
||
exhaustively, a feat in itself, an experience Ora never had enjoyed
|
||
before; for while it drew them together it apparently neither disturbed
|
||
Valdobia nor altered his attitude toward her. His analyses of politics
|
||
and of the fashionable authors of the day were the acutest she had
|
||
heard or read, and he enlarged her knowledge of the world by his
|
||
anecdotes of life in the different capitals of Europe that he knew so
|
||
well. He could be personal without egotism, and his sense of humour was
|
||
keener than her own. While he treated her ideas and criticisms with
|
||
deference he forced her to look up to him and to feel only pleasure in
|
||
his masterful mind and great experience.
|
||
Tonight he made her talk about herself; and, artfully beating about her
|
||
life’s most significant chapter, she expressed herself with a freedom
|
||
and veracity which she found another novel and fascinating experience;
|
||
her confidences to Ida were superficial and sporadic. She could feel
|
||
his sympathy and understanding flow toward her, although he uttered
|
||
no sentimental platitudes, and let only his eyes express a little
|
||
of what he felt. But for the hour she glowed with a sense of utter
|
||
companionship, her mind was stimulated to the pitch of excitement; she
|
||
caught herself wishing that they could have these long intimate talks
|
||
for the rest of their lives, and that he would sometimes hold her hand
|
||
to complete the sense of perfect understanding.
|
||
When they parted at midnight and she walked slowly up the stairs
|
||
alone--Ida had dismissed Mowbray an hour since--she sighed again.
|
||
Why didn’t she feel the pull? What was the nature of that mysterious
|
||
current that seemed to vibrate between two people only out of the
|
||
world’s billions, and was quite independent of mental identities?
|
||
Certainly passion was not the only source. If she had been free and
|
||
never had met Gregory Compton she would have married Valdobia and given
|
||
him all he craved; for his magnetism was by no means confined to his
|
||
brain. Why could not she love him as it was? She had not been the
|
||
heroine of one of those passionate love affairs that leave a woman
|
||
cold for several years, perhaps for ever. The intensity of emotion she
|
||
had experienced during these months in Europe had been one-sided, a
|
||
mere madness of the imagination. She had yet to realise that a woman
|
||
can live more profoundly and completely with a man in her imagination
|
||
than when in daily contact with his discouraging weaknesses, his
|
||
inability to reach her impossible standard, and impinged upon by the
|
||
disintegrating forces of daily life.
|
||
Such women as Ora Blake, endowed with a certain measure of creative
|
||
imagination, yet spending their maturing years unnaturalised citizens
|
||
in a cross-section of life which barely brushes their aloofness in
|
||
passing, develop as unnormally as those that cultivate this exotic
|
||
garden of the mind for fame and fortune. If they find a mate while the
|
||
imagination is still as young as their years, these highly organised
|
||
women, with every sense and faculty keenly alert, and stimulated by
|
||
mental contact as others may be by drugs and wine, have the opportunity
|
||
at least to be the happiest beings on earth. If they marry a brute,
|
||
or are forced to fight the world for bread, a wide channel is dug in
|
||
the brain through which flow the normal and crowding thoughts of the
|
||
average, commonplace, adaptable woman; which is perhaps the best of all
|
||
educations for life.
|
||
But Ora had married a kind prosaic man who soon learned to let her
|
||
alone, and kept her in a comfort that burdened her days with leisure.
|
||
If she had been unimaginative no harm would have been done. She either
|
||
would have grown fond of her essential husband and become a domestic
|
||
angel, or consoled herself with society and bridge. But, misplaced in
|
||
life, she belonged to the intellectual aristocracy of the earth, who
|
||
are the loneliest of its inhabitants, unless they can establish an
|
||
invisible bond with their fellow-beings by offerings from that mental
|
||
garden which is at once their curse and their compensation for the
|
||
doubtful gift of life.
|
||
Ora was too indifferent to the world to care to weave this gossamer
|
||
bridge, and had grown accustomed to mental solitude. But she had
|
||
never placed any curb on her imagination. In the days when her only
|
||
solace was books it enabled her to visualise the _mise-en-scène_ of
|
||
the remote or immediate past, the procession of the traveller, or the
|
||
abstractions of science; as if she were in one of those theatres
|
||
where the great modern manager threatens to atrophy what imagination
|
||
is left in the world. It even enabled her to enjoy fiction whose scene
|
||
was a land of which she had no personal knowledge; a rare gift in the
|
||
American, whose demand for familiar settings and characters keeps our
|
||
literature commonplace. And she could at will shut her eyes and wander
|
||
in Europe when Butte became insufferable.
|
||
Her surrender to the obsession of Gregory Compton had been gradual;
|
||
she had fought it, not only out of loyalty to her husband and her
|
||
friend, but because the future menaced terrors against which she had no
|
||
desire to pit her strength. But she had finally cast defiance to the
|
||
future, and dismissed her phantom loyalty with a shrug. Mark no doubt
|
||
had consoled himself for her defection long since; to Ida a husband
|
||
was a money-maker pure and simple. She herself would never see Gregory
|
||
Compton again if she could avoid it; or, if life took her inevitably
|
||
back to Butte, no doubt her infatuation would have been cured by mental
|
||
satiety, and she would be able to greet him with the indifference that
|
||
is ever the portion of the discarded lover.
|
||
Having arrived at this reasonable conclusion, she had dismissed
|
||
cynicism, cowardice, and qualms, to limbo, and entered upon one of
|
||
those exalting, tormenting, incredibly sweet, and profoundly depressing
|
||
mental love affairs, which, lacking the element of comedy inevitable in
|
||
all actual relations between men and women, obsess the mind and detach
|
||
it from life.
|
||
After she parted from Valdobia, puzzled and wistful, she recalled one
|
||
week during which she had been completely happy. Ida was visiting
|
||
friends uncongenial to herself, and she had gone alone to Bruges. In
|
||
that ancient city of almost perfect beauty, she had given the wildness
|
||
in her nature uninterrupted liberty. She had written letters that no
|
||
woman yet has sent to a man without regretting it, for in this stage
|
||
of man’s progress, at least, he wants little of the soul of woman. It
|
||
is possible that the women who live in their imaginations are the most
|
||
fortunate, after all, for they arbitrarily make man the perfect mate
|
||
he possibly may be some centuries hence. At all events Ora imagined
|
||
Gregory Compton with her unremittingly, deliberately ignoring the
|
||
depression that must descend upon her when once more companioned by his
|
||
wife. It had seemed to her that her step had never been so buoyant,
|
||
her body so light. People had paused to stare at the beautiful young
|
||
American with her head in the air looking as if she were about to
|
||
sing. It had been a wonderful, an almost incredible experience, and
|
||
she never had been able quite to recapture it even when alone in the
|
||
night. But she had wondered sometimes if life held any happiness as
|
||
real as that had been, and she wondered again as she switched off her
|
||
light and flung herself into the bed that had witnessed so much despair
|
||
before Valdobia had appeared and put a quietus on her imagination.
|
||
She wondered also if the passion of the soul were so much greater
|
||
than the common experience of man and woman that its indulgence must
|
||
forever make life itself unreal. She felt that this question threw some
|
||
light on her problem, then dismissed the subject peremptorily. She
|
||
might regret that extraordinary love affair, with its terrors and its
|
||
delights, but she would bury it once for all; and she fell asleep with
|
||
the wise remark:
|
||
“What fools we are! Oh, lord, what fools!”
|
||
XXXVI
|
||
After this she discarded what was left of her crust, and emerged like
|
||
a butterfly. The present was delightful, she would enjoy it without
|
||
analysis or retrospect. She met several clever and interesting men,
|
||
but had eyes for no one but Valdobia. They explored Genoa until they
|
||
knew it almost as well as the natives, spending hours down in the long
|
||
twisted streets, so narrow that no vehicle had ever visited them, and
|
||
swarming like the inside of an anthill. Harrowing adventures were
|
||
impossible, for the Genoese masses if discourteous are neither a
|
||
lawless nor an impertinent race. Ora and Ida might have roamed alone,
|
||
and been unmolested save by the enterprising shopkeepers that dealt in
|
||
filigree. They rode over the steep hills in the trams, and took long
|
||
motor drives in the brilliant winter sunshine to the picturesque towns
|
||
and villages down the Riviera. Then, on a Saturday morning, they bade
|
||
good-bye to the ancient city and took the train for Monte Carlo.
|
||
The girls established themselves in a small hotel opposite the Casino
|
||
Gardens, the men in the great hotel that lies between the Casino and
|
||
the International Sporting Club.
|
||
“I suppose we really should have sent for Lady Gower,” said Ora,
|
||
doubtfully, as they hooked each other up for dinner. “It’s stretching
|
||
the point rather to come to a place like Monte Carlo with two men.
|
||
We’ll be sure to run into a dozen people we know.”
|
||
“Oh, bother! I love the idea of feeling real devilish for once.
|
||
Besides, anything goes at Monte Carlo, and everybody is interested in
|
||
gambling and nothing else. What good would old Norfolk-Howard do us,
|
||
anyhow, asleep on a sofa. She never could keep awake after ten, and
|
||
nobody’d know in those big rooms whether she was there or not. We’re
|
||
Americans, anyhow, and I’m having the time of my life. Lord John is a
|
||
perfect dear.”
|
||
“Well, at least I am thankful that you are no longer in a hurry to
|
||
return to Butte.”
|
||
“Butte’ll keep, I guess. The more experiences I take back the
|
||
more they’ll think of me. Gives me backbone to feel a real
|
||
woman-of-the-world. Besides, kid, it’s good philosophy to drink the
|
||
passing moment dry. Amalgamated may bust us any minute. You look
|
||
prettier every day, and I’m not going off either.”
|
||
She wore a severely cut gown of black velvet, the corsage draped with
|
||
coral-coloured chiffon. Her first evening gowns, cut by the ruthless
|
||
Parisian, had caused her many qualms but they had been growing more
|
||
_décolleté_ ever since; and so superb were her neck and shoulders that
|
||
she had ceased to regret her lack of jewels. Ora had refrained from
|
||
buying any, although she longed for sapphires; but she always wore her
|
||
pearls. Tonight her gown was of a misty pale green material from which
|
||
she rose like a lily from its calyx. She still wore her hair massed
|
||
softly on the top of her head, and although not as tall as Ida, and far
|
||
from being as fully developed, was an equally arresting figure. No two
|
||
women were ever more excellent foils, and that may have been one secret
|
||
of their amicable relations.
|
||
They dined with their cavaliers at one of the fashionable restaurants,
|
||
then, after an hour in the Casino rooms, which were not at all to their
|
||
taste, with their ornate walls and dingy crowd, went by means of lifts
|
||
and underground corridors over to the International Sporting Club.
|
||
Valdobia and Mowbray had put them up at this exclusive resort during
|
||
the afternoon and they entered the roulette rooms at once. Here the
|
||
walls were chastely hung with pale grey satin, and all the colour was
|
||
in the company. The long tables were crowded with smart-looking men
|
||
and women of both worlds, although only the ladies that had stepped
|
||
down from ancestral halls dared to show a grey hair or a wrinkle. The
|
||
cocottes were so young and fresh as well as beautiful that to Ora and
|
||
Ida they looked much like girls of their own class. All, young and old,
|
||
were splendidly dressed and bejewelled; and if there was excitement
|
||
in their brains there was no evidence of it in their calm or animated
|
||
faces. They might have been a great house-party amusing themselves with
|
||
some new and innocuous game.
|
||
Our party walked about for a time dividing their attention between the
|
||
spinning balls, the faces of the players, and the gowns of the women;
|
||
even those of the cocottes were not eccentric, although worn with a
|
||
certain inimitable style. Their ropes of pearls were also the longest
|
||
in the room. A number of the most notable men in Europe were present,
|
||
princes of reigning houses, and statesmen high in the service of their
|
||
country.
|
||
In spite of the absence of that feverish excitement which is supposed
|
||
to pervade these gambling rooms of Monte Carlo (and which is absent
|
||
from the Casino even when a man shoots himself and is whisked out), Ora
|
||
wandered about in a curious state of exaltation. The cool splendour
|
||
of the rooms, the atmosphere of high breeding and restraint, the
|
||
gratification of the æsthetic sense at every turn, the beauty of
|
||
the women and the distinguished appearance of the men made it a
|
||
romantic and memorable scene. Notwithstanding the constant clink of
|
||
gold, the monotonous admonitions of the croupiers, it was a sort of
|
||
worldly fairyland, this apotheosis of one of the most perilous of
|
||
human indulgences. These people might be gambling for greed or mere
|
||
excitement, being blasé of other mundane diversions, but they were at
|
||
the same time so frank and so reserved, so pleased and so indifferent,
|
||
that they produced the illusion of sojourning on a plane high above the
|
||
common mortal with his commonplace loves and disasters and struggles
|
||
to exist or shine. No wonder that men came here to forget the burdens
|
||
of state, women Society’s conservatisms or the inconstancy of man. For
|
||
the hour, and the hour generally lasted until four in the morning, they
|
||
lived in a world apart, and a duchess sat next to a cocotte with a
|
||
serene indifference that amounted almost to democracy.
|
||
“I don’t know that romantic is the word I should use,” said Valdobia,
|
||
laughing; Ora had uttered some of her thoughts aloud; “but I think I
|
||
know what you mean. The people that come here can afford to lose; their
|
||
minds are almost as carefully composed as their costumes; they are both
|
||
pleasantly reckless and frivolous; this is their real play-time; the
|
||
world beyond these four walls is obliterated; if they lose they shrug
|
||
their shoulders, and if they win they experience something like a real
|
||
thrill; in short, being soaked in worldliness, it is their only chance
|
||
to feel primitive--for gambling was practised by the most ancient
|
||
tribes of which we have any knowledge. At the Casino most of those
|
||
people are subconsciously wondering how they are going to pay their
|
||
hotel bills and get out of Monte Carlo, calm as they manage to look;
|
||
but here--well, here you see the quintessence of the world’s frivolity.
|
||
No wonder it creates a heady atmosphere. Do you want to gamble?”
|
||
“Of course I do.”
|
||
“Well, put a louis on the red. I’ll follow your stakes. Perhaps we’ll
|
||
bring each other luck.”
|
||
They staked and won, staked and won again, seven times running without
|
||
removing their winnings from the red. Then Valdobia said, “Don’t tempt
|
||
fortune too far. The luck may turn to the green any moment. Suppose we
|
||
try ours _en plein_.” He selected the number 39, and once more they
|
||
won. Ora, her hands full of gold, turned to him with blazing eyes. Her
|
||
cheeks were crimson. Valdobia laughed.
|
||
“You mustn’t look so happy,” he said teasingly, “or these old stagers
|
||
will know that you are what your friend calls a hayseed. Better change
|
||
all this gold into notes.”
|
||
“Notes? I want my gold. Paper never did mean anything to me.”
|
||
“What a child you are--ah! I must leave you for a moment. The Duc----”
|
||
he mentioned a prince of his royal house--“wishes to speak to me. Don’t
|
||
try _en plein_ again. That rarely happens twice. Put a louis at a time
|
||
on the red.”
|
||
He left her. Ora deliberately placed not only her double handful of
|
||
gold on the red, but pushed forward the pile that had accumulated
|
||
before her. Red came up and doubled her winnings. She added to her
|
||
already imposing hillock the gold shoved toward her, and, with a quick
|
||
glance at Valdobia, who was deep in conversation with his prince, took
|
||
a thousand franc note from her châtelaine bag and laid it on top of
|
||
the gold. Once more she won, and met the sympathetic smiles of the
|
||
croupiers, who in the Sporting Club, at least, are very human persons.
|
||
She was about to add another thousand franc note, when Valdobia
|
||
returned. He swept her gold and notes off the red just as _rien ne va
|
||
plus_ sounded above the buzz of conversation behind the tables.
|
||
“What on earth are you doing?” he asked angrily. “I don’t like to see a
|
||
woman gamble like that.”
|
||
Ora pouted and looked like a naughty child.
|
||
“But I want to gamble. Give me my money. What have you to say about it?”
|
||
“I brought you here--and I shall not bring you again if you are going
|
||
to gamble like that old Frankfurt banker over there. Why not follow the
|
||
example of Mrs. Compton, who is decorously putting five franc pieces on
|
||
the green at the next table?”
|
||
“Oh, Ida! I like the sensation of doing big things. You just said we
|
||
enjoyed letting loose our primitive instincts.”
|
||
“Is that the way you felt? Well, here are three louis. Stake one at a
|
||
time. I shall change the rest into notes and give them to you at the
|
||
hotel.”
|
||
He kept his eye on her, and she staked her gold pieces one after
|
||
another and lost.
|
||
“Now,” he said, “come into the bar and have a glass of wine or a lemon
|
||
squash. I want to talk to you.”
|
||
They found seats in a corner of the bar behind a little table, and
|
||
Ora demurely ordered a lemonade. “I suppose you are going to scold
|
||
me,” she murmured, although her cheeks were still flushed and her eyes
|
||
rebellious. “What difference did it make? I am not poor, and I had won
|
||
nearly all that I risked, anyhow. You have seen women gamble all your
|
||
life. One would think that you were a hayseed, yourself.”
|
||
“Shall I be quite honest? I fancy I was jealous. For the first time I
|
||
saw you completely carried away. I had hoped to furnish that impulse
|
||
myself!”
|
||
“It is a wonderful sensation,” she said provokingly. “I doubt if
|
||
anything but gambling could inspire it.”
|
||
“Do you?” But he knew that it was no time for sentiment, and asked
|
||
curiously, “Are you so fond of gold? I never saw such a greedy little
|
||
thing.”
|
||
“Remember I’ve walked round over gold for the best part of my life, and
|
||
have a mine of my own. It fascinates me, but not because I care much
|
||
about riches--I like the liberty that plenty of money gives; that, to
|
||
my mind, is all that wealth means. But I loved the feeling of being
|
||
possessed, of being absolutely reckless. I should have liked to know
|
||
that my whole fortune depended upon that spinning ball. That would
|
||
have been worth while! It makes one forget everything--everything!”
|
||
He looked at her with half-closed eyes. “You have a secret chapter in
|
||
your life,” he said. “Some day I shall read it. But I can’t make up my
|
||
mind whether you are a born gambler or not.”
|
||
Ora shrugged her shoulders. “To tell you the truth I shouldn’t care if
|
||
I never saw a gambling table again. I have had the sensation. That is
|
||
enough. I will admit I was rather disappointed not to lose that immense
|
||
stake. Lucky at cards, you know.”
|
||
“And you think you are unlucky in love?” Valdobia laughed, but his face
|
||
was still grim. “How many men have you had in love with you already?”
|
||
“That doesn’t count!”
|
||
He turned pale. “What do you mean by that?”
|
||
“I mean that I don’t believe I am destined to happiness. Don’t you
|
||
think we know our lines instinctively?”
|
||
“I know that you are trying to torment me. You are still excited and
|
||
angry, so I shall not permit your words, significant as they are, to
|
||
keep me awake tonight.” He was smiling again, but she saw the anger in
|
||
his own eyes, and said impulsively:
|
||
“I rather like you better than usual tonight. You have made me do
|
||
something I didn’t want to do, and anger is becoming to you.”
|
||
“The eternal female! Well, God knows, I wouldn’t have you abnormal.
|
||
What is this?”
|
||
A page was standing before the table with a telegram in his hand. “Pour
|
||
M. le Marquis de Valdobia,” he said.
|
||
With a word of apology Valdobia opened the telegram. Ora, watching him,
|
||
saw his face turn white.
|
||
“What is it?” she asked anxiously. “I do hope it is not bad news.” She
|
||
felt a sharp pang at the possibility of losing him.
|
||
He rose and looked at his watch. “My mother is very ill,” he said. “A
|
||
train goes in an hour and ten minutes. I must take it. But there is
|
||
something I want to say to you before I go; I may be detained in Rome.
|
||
Will you get your wrap and come into the gardens for a few moments?”
|
||
“I am so sorry,” murmured Ora, with real sympathy. “Of course I will
|
||
go.”
|
||
He took her to the cloak-room. “Wait here for a moment,” he said. “I
|
||
must telephone to my man to pack and meet me at the train; and tell
|
||
Mowbray not to look for us later.”
|
||
He left her, and Ora watched the passing couples, trying not to think.
|
||
She was a little frightened, but still too excited to shrink from a
|
||
possible ordeal.
|
||
XXXVII
|
||
He returned in a few moments, and they left the Club House by the main
|
||
entrance and strolled toward the gardens; then he suddenly led her to
|
||
the terrace. There were many people walking in the tropical scented
|
||
park of the Casino, but the digue above the Mediterranean was deserted.
|
||
Monte Carlo can be cold in May but it can be as warm as July in
|
||
February, and the night was mild and beautiful. The sea under the stars
|
||
was almost as blue as by day. The air was very still, although a band
|
||
was playing somewhere, far away. From the other side of the bay came
|
||
the faint humming of an aeroplane. There was to be an aviation meet on
|
||
the morrow, and no doubt one of the airmen was about to make a trial
|
||
flight.
|
||
They sat down on one of the benches, and Valdobia folded his arms, then
|
||
turned and leaned his elbow on the back of the seat and his head on his
|
||
hand.
|
||
“I am not quite in the mood for love-making,” he said, “after the news
|
||
I have received; but I can’t go without letting you know why I followed
|
||
you to Genoa--without some sort of an understanding.”
|
||
Ora looked at him out of the corner of her eye. His face was set and
|
||
determined, but she concluded that he was not the man to be dangerous
|
||
when grieving for his mother.
|
||
“What is it?” she asked softly. “I know, of course, that you--like me.”
|
||
“I love you, and I want to marry you. I wish you to divorce your
|
||
husband and marry me. Don’t give me your final answer now,” he
|
||
continued, as Ora interrupted him. “It is not a question to decide
|
||
in a moment. But while I am gone think it over. You do not love your
|
||
husband. I know all your arguments from your friend. She made them when
|
||
I first gave her my confidence. They don’t weigh with me for a moment.
|
||
You will never spend your life with that man, good as he may be. As for
|
||
obligations, you discharged them long ago. I can make you happy, and I
|
||
believe that you know I can.”
|
||
“I don’t know.” Ora, stunned for a moment, felt thrilled and
|
||
breathless. “Oh, I don’t know!”
|
||
“I have begun to feel sure that you have loved another man, or fancied
|
||
that you loved him. Would it be possible for you to marry him if you
|
||
divorced your husband?”
|
||
Ora hesitated, then answered, “No.”
|
||
“Why is he not your lover?”
|
||
“That would be impossible, even if I would do such a thing, and you
|
||
know I would not.”
|
||
He gave a sharp sigh of relief. “I _felt_ that he had not been. Why is
|
||
it impossible?”
|
||
“There are complications. I cannot explain them. But he could not be
|
||
less to me if he were dead.”
|
||
“Does he love you?”
|
||
Ora hesitated again. “I have sometimes felt--no, of course, it is
|
||
impossible. I let my imagination run away with me, that was all.”
|
||
“You mean that he never told you--that he doesn’t write to you?”
|
||
“I met him only once, and I have never seen his handwriting.”
|
||
“Well, dismiss him from your mind. You have imagination and have
|
||
dreamed, because your demands upon life are very great, greater than
|
||
you know; and oddly enough, considering your opportunities, fruition
|
||
has eluded you. But the time has come for you to live; and you could
|
||
live!”
|
||
Ora looked down at her hands. They were ungloved and looked very white
|
||
and small. Valdobia suddenly covered them with one of his own, and bent
|
||
his face close to hers. She saw that he had forgotten his mother, and
|
||
gave a little gasp.
|
||
“Ora!” he said. “Don’t you know how happy I could make you? I not only
|
||
could teach you love, of which you know nothing, but we could always be
|
||
companions, and you are the loneliest little creature I have ever met.”
|
||
To her astonishment she saw two tears splash on his hand, and winking
|
||
rapidly discovered that they had fallen from her own eyes. As she would
|
||
have detested to see a man cry, she melted further, and whispered,
|
||
“Oh, yes, life with you would be very delightful. I know that. I fancy
|
||
the other man, even if I could marry him, would make me miserable.
|
||
He--American men that amount to anything give their wives very little
|
||
of themselves.”
|
||
“And you would be lonelier still! I have known American women that
|
||
loved their busy husbands--that _seeking_ type. They interested me,
|
||
poor things--rushing madly about trying to fill their lives. If you
|
||
join that sisterhood it will kill you. I am not an idler, for I have
|
||
business interests to which I devote a certain amount of time, but I
|
||
have leisure, and I not only should give you the companionship you have
|
||
craved all your life, but I can offer you the world in all its variety.
|
||
Now dismiss this man, whoever he is, from your mind. Even were I beside
|
||
the question, it is your duty to yourself as a woman of character, not
|
||
a sentimental schoolgirl.”
|
||
“Yes, that is true.”
|
||
“That sort of thing is morbid, besides being quite beneath a woman of
|
||
pride and dignity. But women often romance about some dream-hero until
|
||
they have found the right man. Can you doubt that I am the man for you?
|
||
You were made for Europe, not for America, and for a man that can give
|
||
you everything--everything!”
|
||
“Yes, I know.” She moved restlessly. “If I could only feel just one
|
||
thing more for you! I hardly know what to call it--I like you better
|
||
than anyone in the world. I almost love you. Why don’t I?” Her voice
|
||
was suddenly full of passion and she clasped both of her hands about
|
||
his own. “If you could only make me, I should worship you.”
|
||
He glanced about rapidly. They were quite alone. He put his arm round
|
||
her and she felt it vibrate. His face was flushed and his breath
|
||
short. She could feel his heart thumping against her head, and she
|
||
was fascinated for more reasons than one: she knew that it was many
|
||
years since any woman had roused him to strong emotion, and it was the
|
||
first great passion that had ever been close to her save in her stormy
|
||
imagination. She was enthralled for a moment, and some of the wildness
|
||
in her own nature stirred. But it was too soon, she must have time to
|
||
think. She cast about desperately and found her inspiration.
|
||
“We have been here a long time!” she said hurriedly. “You will miss
|
||
your train. Your mother may be very ill.”
|
||
He dropped his arm, and stood up.
|
||
“You are a woman of infinite resource,” he said. “And no little
|
||
cruelty. Will you consider what I have asked you--seriously?”
|
||
His anger as well as his power to control himself always fascinated
|
||
her, and she also experienced a spasm of contrition. She rose and gave
|
||
him her hand; her eyes were frank and kind.
|
||
“Yes,” she said. “I will consider it, and think of you always--and miss
|
||
you horribly. Will you telegraph to me every day?”
|
||
“Two or three times a day, probably. And don’t think I am really angry
|
||
with you. If you are cruel it is only because you don’t understand. I
|
||
am glad that you do not, for it is only women that have loved greatly
|
||
that have forgotten how to be cruel. Come. I must take you to your
|
||
hotel.”
|
||
PART II
|
||
PART II
|
||
I
|
||
Two weeks later Ora and Ida sailed from Havre. Gregory had cabled, and
|
||
the _Herald_ had published a dramatic account, of the wounding of Mr.
|
||
Mark Blake in the tunnel of his wife’s mine. The engineers’ lease had
|
||
expired and he had closed down the mine temporarily. The sinking of
|
||
the inclined shaft in the “Apex” had proceeded very slowly owing to
|
||
the uncommon hardness of the rock; it would seem that Nature herself
|
||
had taken a hand in the great fight and enlisted for once on the side
|
||
of the weaker power. Although when Osborne and Douglas had turned over
|
||
the mine, their cross-cut almost had reached the point on the vein
|
||
which the new shaft expected to strike, Gregory had risen twice in the
|
||
night and walked along the hill beyond his boundary, reasonably sure
|
||
that all the blasting was not in the shaft, his keen ear detecting
|
||
muffled reverberations slightly to the east and at a greater depth. He
|
||
communicated his suspicions to Mark, and on the following night they
|
||
examined the lock on the Primo shaft house and discovered that it had
|
||
been tampered with. They went down by way of the ladder; and in the
|
||
cross-cut on the chalcopyrite vein they found miners working with hand
|
||
drills. There was a desperate hand-to-hand fight with the manager and
|
||
shift boss; the miners, who were bohunks, proceeding phlegmatically
|
||
with their work.
|
||
The four men had wrestled out into the station at the foot of the
|
||
shaft, where they had drawn their “guns”; each had been wounded, but
|
||
only Mark seriously. He had received a ball in the lung and another
|
||
in the leg. The night was bitterly cold and it was some time before
|
||
Gregory and the two antagonists could get him to the surface. He had
|
||
insisted upon being taken to a hospital in Butte; and, between loss of
|
||
blood, shock, and pneumonia, his condition was precarious.
|
||
The girls, who had left Monte Carlo two days after Valdobia’s sudden
|
||
departure, received the news in Paris, where they were replenishing
|
||
their wardrobes. Ora, torn with remorse, and terrified with vague and
|
||
tragic visions of the future, was in a distracted condition; but Ida,
|
||
although she sincerely lamented the possible demise of her old friend,
|
||
did not lose her head. She gave final and minute orders to tailors and
|
||
dressmakers, instructed them to send the trousseaux in bond directly to
|
||
Great Falls, Montana, devoted a morning to the selection of hats both
|
||
for herself and her friend, and packed all the trunks. Mowbray, always
|
||
willing to be useful, bought their tickets and escorted them to Havre.
|
||
Ida thanked him with something like real warmth as they parted at the
|
||
head of the gangplank, and promised him the “time of his life” when he
|
||
came to Montana in the summer.
|
||
“Now, buck up,” she said, smiling into his disconsolate face; “you know
|
||
I’m not flirting with you. We’re the best of pals. I’ll be glad to see
|
||
you, all right, and perhaps I’ll find a nice little heiress for you.”
|
||
“Oh, don’t!” Mowbray tried to arrange his features for the benefit of
|
||
the passersby. “You know I’m fond of you no end. Why----”
|
||
“Get along now. That’s the last whistle. Good-bye, and write me nice
|
||
gossippy letters. It’s only a few months, anyhow.”
|
||
Mowbray walked down the gangplank with his head in the air, and, as he
|
||
turned on the dock to lift his hat, Ida noticed that his face, whose
|
||
charm was its boyish gayety, looked suddenly older, and almost as
|
||
determined as Valdobia’s.
|
||
“Oh, Lord!” she thought, as she turned away, “men! They’re as alike as
|
||
lead pencils in a box. But I guess I can manage him.”
|
||
Ora stayed in bed for two days; reaction left her physically exhausted
|
||
and she slept most of the time. On the third day Ida peremptorily
|
||
dressed her and took her on deck. A wireless from Gregory, announcing
|
||
that Mark was holding his own, further revived her, and before they
|
||
reached New York another wireless was still more reassuring. A few
|
||
years before, when the ores of Butte Hill were roasted in the open
|
||
and the poisonous fumes were often as thick as the worst of London
|
||
fogs, pneumonia ran its course in twenty-four hours to the grave, but
|
||
in these days the patient had a fighting chance despite the altitude.
|
||
The Butte doctors were experts in pneumonia, so many of the careless
|
||
miners were afflicted, and Mark not only had a sound constitution but
|
||
never had been a heavy drinker. There was every reason to expect him to
|
||
pull through, as Ida assured her friend whenever they were alone; but
|
||
she managed to meet several agreeable people, and kept herself and Ora
|
||
companioned by them throughout the voyage.
|
||
Valdobia was still in Rome; his mother was dying. He had written daily
|
||
to Ora and she had read and reread his letters. They said neither too
|
||
much nor too little; but he was one of life’s artists and he managed
|
||
to pervade them with an atmosphere that was both sweet and disturbing.
|
||
His telegram, when he had read the news of her husband’s misadventure
|
||
in the newspapers, was a masterpiece. If he was unable to grieve over
|
||
the possibility of Mr. Blake’s abrupt removal from a scene where he was
|
||
the one superfluous actor, too well-bred to betray his relief, and too
|
||
little of a hypocrite to be verbose in condolence, his attitude was
|
||
so finely impersonal, and it was so obvious that he knew exactly how
|
||
she felt, that Ora liked him more than ever if only for rousing her
|
||
stricken sense of humour.
|
||
She had thrust his letters and telegrams into the depths of her steamer
|
||
trunk, but after she had made up her mind that Mark would recover (her
|
||
lively imagination picturing him hobbling among the orange groves of
|
||
Southern California while she guided his footsteps and diverted his
|
||
mind), she retrieved the correspondence and read it every night when
|
||
alone in her stateroom. Valdobia’s devotion not only gave her courage,
|
||
but his strong imposing personality stood with a haughty and confident
|
||
menace between herself and Gregory Compton. She refused to think on her
|
||
future, beyond the long convalescence of her husband, but had it not
|
||
been for her meeting with Valdobia and her deliberate installment of
|
||
his image on the throne of her adventurous imagination, she doubted if
|
||
she would have had the courage to return to Montana. As it was there
|
||
were moments when the poignant mental life she had led with Gregory
|
||
Compton reached a long finger from the depths to which it had been
|
||
consigned and sketched his image in her mind as vividly as if he stood
|
||
before her; while her whole being ached with longing and despair. But
|
||
her will was strong; she banished him summarily and reinstated the
|
||
Roman who was so like and so unlike the man compounded of the old world
|
||
and the new in the mortar of the Northwest.
|
||
Ida, with an unexpected delicacy, refrained from curiosity, and
|
||
although she had too much tact to avoid all mention of Valdobia, only
|
||
alluded to him casually. She left Europe out of the conversation as
|
||
much as possible, and amused Ora, when they were alone, with the
|
||
plans of her campaign in Butte. When they reached quarantine Ora was
|
||
horrified to find herself surrounded by reporters. The Paris _Herald_
|
||
had published the story of her mine as well as her picture and Ida’s,
|
||
but they hardly had been sensible of their notoriety until, on the
|
||
steamer, they were among Americans once more. It was manifest that they
|
||
were “big news” in their own country, and Ora fled to her stateroom,
|
||
leaving Ida to face the reporters alone.
|
||
Ida was undaunted; moreover she was quick to seize her first
|
||
opportunity to dazzle Butte. She made herself amiable and interesting
|
||
to the young men, her natural cunning steering her mid-stream, in this
|
||
her first interview: an ordeal in which most novices are wrecked on
|
||
the tropic or the arctic shore. She thanked them as warmly for their
|
||
news that Mr. Blake had left that morning with his doctors and nurses
|
||
in a private car for Southern California, and expected his wife to
|
||
go directly to Los Angeles, as if Ora had not received a wireless to
|
||
that effect an hour before; she modestly told them something of her
|
||
social experiences abroad, answered the inevitable questions regarding
|
||
suffrage, excused Ora, “who was naturally upset”, and expatiated upon
|
||
her happiness in returning to live in Butte. They thought this odd, but
|
||
were so delighted with her mixture of dignity and naïveté that they
|
||
rushed to their respective desks and told the world that the wife of
|
||
Gregory Compton had been the guest of princes and was the handsomest
|
||
woman in America.
|
||
Ora was almost gay at the prospect of going directly to California,
|
||
although she was obliged to make the journey alone. It was early in
|
||
the afternoon when they landed. Ida established Ora in the first
|
||
Overland Limited that left the Grand Central Station, and returned to
|
||
the Waldorf-Astoria, where she had engaged rooms for a month. She had
|
||
no intention of returning to Butte ignorant of New York. Westerners
|
||
of wealth, old and recent, visited New York casually several times
|
||
a year; and not to know it, even with Europe to her credit, stamped
|
||
a woman with the newness of the new-rich who wore all their jewels
|
||
all the time. Ida had seen many women make fools of themselves and
|
||
had no intention of leaving any penetrable spaces in her armour. She
|
||
spent every morning in the shops, or in the establishments of the
|
||
exclusive dressmakers, tailors and milliners that were patronized by
|
||
the fashionable women of Butte and Helena, giving them liberal orders.
|
||
She saw all the new plays, heard the more famous of the opera singers,
|
||
and even attended three symphony concerts. She drove in the Park every
|
||
afternoon or joined the throngs on Fifth Avenue; and she took tea or
|
||
lunch in the different hotels and restaurants devoted to fashion.
|
||
Sometimes she sat in the gangways of her own famous hostellerie,
|
||
recalling with a tolerant smile her early crude ambitions--had
|
||
they died less than a year ago?--to trail her feathers up and down
|
||
Peacock Alley. She wore one of her severest tailored suits upon these
|
||
occasions, and maintained an air of stately detachment that somewhat
|
||
counteracted the always startling beauty of her face and figure. No man
|
||
took his courage in his hand.
|
||
One afternoon she sat longer than usual, for she had set her teeth that
|
||
day and walked through the Metropolitan Museum. She fell to musing,
|
||
and with a more sustained introspection than was her habit, upon the
|
||
changes that had taken place within herself during the past year;
|
||
wondering “how deep they had struck”, if she really were as altered as
|
||
she must appear even to the raking eye of Butte; or if she merely had
|
||
developed her native characteristics while polishing her surface and
|
||
furnishing her mind.
|
||
She also endeavoured to analyse her attitude toward returning to her
|
||
husband, but gave this up, although puzzled that it was not more
|
||
obvious. But her mind was clear on one point. If Gregory desired her
|
||
society he must spend his week-ends in Butte; nothing would induce her
|
||
to return to the De Smet ranch. She had not even a spasm of curiosity
|
||
to see the famous Perch of the Devil Mine.
|
||
II
|
||
Ida was not given to imaginative excursions, but during the three
|
||
days’ journey from New York to Butte, she made no acquaintances,
|
||
resting in the seclusion of her drawing-room; and after she had read
|
||
all the magazines her mind began to people itself. Although the ladies
|
||
of Butte, whom she now regarded as equals, moved along the central
|
||
highway, Gregory was always turning the corners, and she visualised
|
||
him most frequently advancing hurriedly toward the station as the
|
||
train entered--both late, of course. She rehearsed the meeting many
|
||
times, never without a pricking sense of awkwardness, for she now
|
||
fully realised that when a woman and her husband have not communicated
|
||
save on the wire for nearly a year, the first interview is liable
|
||
to constraint. He always had been difficult to talk to. Would he be
|
||
bored if she tried to entertain him as Ora would entertain Mark: with
|
||
such excerpts of their many experiences as a confiding husband might
|
||
appreciate? She never had understood him. Out of her greater knowledge
|
||
of the world and men should she be better able to fathom the reserves
|
||
of that strange silent nature--or did she really care whether she could
|
||
or not? Although she had made up her mind to greet him at the station
|
||
with the warmth of an old friend, and flatter him with her delight in
|
||
returning home, she had not the faintest idea how she should carry off
|
||
the long evening--if the train were on time.
|
||
It was not. Probably no Northwestern train has arrived on time in
|
||
the history of the three railroads. Ida’s train, due at seven in
|
||
the evening, arrived at midnight. Her Pullman was at the end of the
|
||
long dark platform, and as she walked slowly toward the station
|
||
building--which looked like the bunk-house of an abandoned mining camp
|
||
in the desert--searching for someone to carry her hand baggage--porters
|
||
being non-existent in the Northwest--she saw neither Gregory nor
|
||
any other familiar face. For the first time in her life she felt a
|
||
disposition to cry. But as she tossed her head higher and set her
|
||
lips, a young man approached and asked if she were Mrs. Gregory
|
||
Compton. He was a pleasant looking youth, and she was so grateful to be
|
||
called by name that she forgot her new reserve and replied emphatically
|
||
that she was.
|
||
“I am your chauffeur,” he said. “Your new car arrived a few days ago,
|
||
and Mr. Compton ’phoned me to meet you. Have you any hand baggage?”
|
||
Ida indicated her portmanteau and hat box in the dark perspective and
|
||
went on to inspect her car. It was a handsome limousine, lighted with
|
||
electricity, and for a moment she took a childish pleasure in examining
|
||
its fittings. But as the man returned and piled her baggage in front
|
||
she asked irrepressibly:
|
||
“Is Mr. Compton not in Butte?”
|
||
“No, ma’am. He hasn’t been in Butte for weeks. Lively times out at the
|
||
mine, I guess.”
|
||
“And my house? Had I not better go to a hotel?”
|
||
“Oh, the house is all right. Mr. Compton’s secretary ’phoned to an
|
||
agency, and they put in three or four in help. I guess you’ll find
|
||
everything all right.”
|
||
Ida entered her car, but scowled at its luxuries. By this time she
|
||
was “mad clean through.” “The famous American husband!” she thought,
|
||
gritting her teeth. “Best in the world--not. If it’s my horse, my dog,
|
||
my wife with an Englishman, it’s business first last and always with an
|
||
American. European men are courteous whether they mean it or not, but
|
||
Americans only remember to be polite when they have time. Ten months
|
||
and he can’t leave his mine long enough to meet me when I arrive at
|
||
midnight!”
|
||
Her pleasure in returning to Butte had turned as flat as spilt
|
||
champagne. She did not even glance at the gay electric signs and
|
||
midnight activities of Broadway as her car rolled through that
|
||
sleepless thoroughfare toward the West Side. But when her chauffeur,
|
||
who had ignored the speed limit, stopped abruptly before a large house
|
||
of admirable architecture and blazing with lights, her face flushed
|
||
with excitement and she forgot her recalcitrant spouse. The door was
|
||
opened at once and two maid servants ran down the steps. They were
|
||
young, neatly dressed and capped, and it was evident that their service
|
||
was dictated not only by curiosity but by sympathy.
|
||
“Welcome home, ma’am,” one of them, a Swede, said shyly as Ida stepped
|
||
to the pavement. “It’s too bad your train was so late. The cook’s got a
|
||
nice hot supper for you.”
|
||
Ida, who was not easily touched, felt as grateful to these smiling
|
||
girls as to her friendly chauffeur, and for a moment was tempted to
|
||
“come down off her perch” and revel in human companionship. But she
|
||
knew that it “wouldn’t work”; she merely thanked them graciously and
|
||
ascended the wide steps of her new home, that palatial residence of
|
||
cream-colored pressed brick of her unswerving desires. While the maids
|
||
were taking her bags and boxes upstairs, she walked through the large
|
||
rooms of the lower floor. Everything was in the best modern style of
|
||
furnishing, the prevailing tone dim and rich, with Eastern rugs on the
|
||
hardwood floors; French tapestries and carved oak furniture and stained
|
||
glass in the library--also a few books; paler tapestries set in panels
|
||
in the immense drawing-room, and many beautiful pieces of furniture
|
||
carefully selected with an eye to both contrast and mating. Out of
|
||
this room opened a dining-room that looked like a baronial hall, and
|
||
although the Murphys had taken their silverware they had left their
|
||
china, imported from Limoges, and their glass ware, made for them by a
|
||
Venetian firm that had supplied Ida’s grandes dames for thirty years.
|
||
In short it was one of those stately and sumptuous interiors, furnished
|
||
by the best houses in New York, which one associates exclusively with
|
||
the three or four great cities of the United States, and is always
|
||
unwarrantably surprised to find in the newer cities of the West.
|
||
Ida made a pretence of eating her dainty supper, remembered that she
|
||
was now a grande dame and visited the kitchen to say an appreciative
|
||
word to the cook, then ascended to her bedroom divided between anger
|
||
and a depression so foreign to her temperament that she barely
|
||
recognised it for what it was.
|
||
The large upper hall had been fitted up as a billiard room, and with a
|
||
continuous divan broken only by the doors of the bedrooms. Ida threw
|
||
it an appreciative glance, but it merely emphasised the fact that
|
||
there was no man in the house, and she did not linger. Mrs. Murphy,
|
||
evidently a brunette, had furnished her bedroom and dressing-room in
|
||
primrose yellow and much lace. Ida approved both as unreservedly as
|
||
she had the rest of the house, thankful there was nothing to alter;
|
||
like many women she had consummate taste in dress and none whatever
|
||
for house decoration; although unlike most of these disparate ladies
|
||
she was quite aware of her deficiencies. She knew when a room was all
|
||
that it should be, but could not have conceived one of the details,
|
||
much less the unimpeachable combination. The sex instinct teaches
|
||
those subtleties of personal adornment likely to allure the male, and
|
||
arrest the anxious eye of other females, but ancestral brain-cells are
|
||
necessary for the more civilised accomplishment.
|
||
Ida’s eyes fell on the telephone beside her bed and lingered. She
|
||
forgot her beautiful room and the successive throbs of gratified
|
||
ambition, in an overwhelming desire to call up Gregory and tell him
|
||
what she thought of him. But she was a woman in whom calculation
|
||
was stronger than impulse, and in the past year she had learned to
|
||
control her temper, not only because a carefully nourished refinement
|
||
had crowded out some of the weeds of her nature, but because her
|
||
ever-growing intelligence despised lack of self-control in all things.
|
||
So she merely undressed herself, her eyes wandering every few minutes
|
||
to the telephone. It was incredible that he did not ring her up. That,
|
||
at least, would take but a few moments of his precious time.
|
||
However, she fell asleep immediately after her bath, and it was the
|
||
telephone bell that awakened her at eight o’clock. This time she
|
||
frowned at it, for she wanted to sleep; but she sat up, put the
|
||
receiver to her ear and asked languidly: “Well?”
|
||
A strange man’s voice replied: “Is this Mrs. Compton?”
|
||
“Yes. Why am I disturbed so early?”
|
||
“I’m sorry--this is Mr. Compton’s secretary speaking--but Mr. Compton
|
||
told me to call you at eight o’clock. He always comes in for breakfast
|
||
at this time--here he is.”
|
||
“Hello! How are you? What time did you get in?” Gregory’s voice was
|
||
elaborately polite and as eager as any lover’s of yesteryear.
|
||
“Are you interested?” Ida’s heart beat thickly, but her tones were
|
||
crisp. “I arrived at midnight. Really, I expected you to meet me. That
|
||
is generally considered the decent thing to do.”
|
||
“Oh! I’m sorry it was impossible. I can’t leave the mine at present.
|
||
How did you like the house?”
|
||
“I am enchanted with it--and with the limousine. When are you coming
|
||
in?”
|
||
“I can’t say at present. I dare not leave for a moment. You will find a
|
||
deposit to your credit at the Daly bank.”
|
||
“Thanks. Would--shall I run out?”
|
||
“Better not. There is always danger of rows.”
|
||
“But of course I’m wild to see the mine. You forget how famous it is.”
|
||
“Better wait awhile. It really isn’t safe.”
|
||
“Very well. How’s your wound? Where were you hurt, anyhow?”
|
||
“Not worth mentioning, as I cabled you, and I suppose you got my
|
||
telegram in New York saying I was all right again. Sure you got
|
||
everything you want?”
|
||
“I am overwhelmed by all this luxury, and your generosity.”
|
||
“Glad you like it. Has Mrs. Blake gone to California?”
|
||
“She went directly from the steamer. How is Mark getting on. I’ve had
|
||
only notes from Ora.”
|
||
“All right. He doesn’t write but has telegraphed once or twice. He’d
|
||
better stay below several months. Write Mrs. Blake to persuade him to
|
||
take things easy. He had a close call. I can get along without him for
|
||
awhile, but I can’t afford to lose him. Will you see to this?”
|
||
“I’ll write Ora today. She’s in no hurry to return to Butte--was
|
||
delighted at the prospect of going to California, and intends to take
|
||
Mark to Santa Barbara, where she knows a lot of people.”
|
||
“Ah! Good. Well, I must get some breakfast. Amuse yourself.”
|
||
“And you won’t be in for several days?”
|
||
“Afraid not. Good-bye.”
|
||
Ida set the receiver back on the table, but it was some minutes before
|
||
she lay down again. She sat thinking, with compressed lips. Born
|
||
with intuitive knowledge of men, she had, as she once remarked to
|
||
Ora, turned a goodly number of them inside out during the past year.
|
||
Gregory Compton did not intend to live with her again. She knew this
|
||
as conclusively as if his kind matter-of-fact tones had expressed the
|
||
direct message. Before she left home it never had occurred to Ida to
|
||
wonder if her husband still loved her or not, and she had learned to
|
||
accept his consuming masculine interest in matters mineralogic as all
|
||
in the day’s work. Now she wondered if he had ceased to love her then
|
||
or since. That he took no further interest in her as a woman, although
|
||
amiably determined to do his duty as her legal provider, would have
|
||
been almost patent to an imagination as riotous as Ora’s; to Ida,
|
||
practical and clear-sighted, there was not a loophole for delusion.
|
||
In a few moments she relaxed the tension of her body and lay down.
|
||
“Well!” she thought impatiently, “what’s the matter with me, anyhow?
|
||
Isn’t it what I always hopefully looked forward to? Did I ever pretend
|
||
to be anything but resigned--or to be in love with him after the first
|
||
few weeks? I guess I’m spoiled with too much devotion, that’s what.
|
||
Seeing too many men lose their heads. Much their old heads are worth.
|
||
But I guess I don’t like being turned down for once. Goose. It’s my lay
|
||
to cut out pique and sing a song of thanksgiving that I’ve got pretty
|
||
nearly everything I ever romanced about and set my mind on. It’s a
|
||
pretty good old world when things come your way, and women’ll never be
|
||
happy till they learn to put men in the same place that men put us--on
|
||
a handy little side-track. I’ve got a whole parlour car instead of an
|
||
upper berth like some poor devils, so I’ll quit whining. But if there’s
|
||
another woman in the case, let them both look out--that’s all!”
|
||
III
|
||
Ida slept for two hours longer and rose in a philosophical mood. As
|
||
she more than once had remarked to Ora, “nothing in life is just what
|
||
you figured it out beforehand”; and this, one of life’s most unwelcome
|
||
lessons, it had not taken her twenty-six years to learn. She had, in
|
||
fact, accepted and docketed it while women twice her age were nursing
|
||
their illusions.
|
||
She had expected to be met at the station not only by her husband but
|
||
by Ruby and Pearl, to say nothing of reporters. “She had slunk in like
|
||
a nobody,” and her husband declined to feed the fires of her vanity,
|
||
blazing so merrily these last ten months. Never mind. She had the
|
||
genius of quick readjustment and a sharp eye for the next move in the
|
||
great law of compensation.
|
||
“And believe me,” she thought, as she put the finishing touches to her
|
||
smart morning street costume, and taught the admiring Swede how to pin
|
||
on a veil, “the gods have provided the goods pretty liberally, and I
|
||
don’t belong to the immortal order of female jackasses. Nine-tenths of
|
||
women’s troubles, mental and physical, sprout in that hothouse corner
|
||
of their skulls they call imagination. None of it in mine. Let us
|
||
eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die. Wait till I’m launched in
|
||
Butte. And just wait till I give a dinner party to the second son of an
|
||
English duke. Tra la la!”
|
||
Before the morning was over even philosophy had folded her wings. If
|
||
life had been niggardly yesterday she gave with both hands today. When
|
||
Ida arrived at the bank she was received with exceeding deference by
|
||
the vice-president and informed that he had recently invested two
|
||
hundred thousand dollars in her name, acting on instructions from Mr.
|
||
Compton; and that as a large part of it was in mortgages the interest
|
||
in some cases ran as high as eight per cent. The money had been placed
|
||
in his hands for investment shortly after the great land deal, details
|
||
of which had reached the public ear in due course and greatly added to
|
||
the prestige of Gregory Compton. In fact it had invested his remote
|
||
and ambiguous personality with an almost sinister significance. As
|
||
Ida listened to the story of this transaction (she barely had opened
|
||
a newspaper in New York and knew nothing of it), she found herself
|
||
wondering if it could be true that once she had possessed this man of
|
||
whom even bankers spoke with bated breath. It was patent that they
|
||
stood in awe not only of the rapid and masterly strokes which had
|
||
increased his little patrimony by something over two millions in less
|
||
than a year, but of his colossal luck, his sensational reputation as a
|
||
“winner”, and his open defiance of the greatest of all great trusts.
|
||
It seemed to Ida, as she sat in the vice-president’s office listening
|
||
to his classification of her husband with Marcus Daly, W. A. Clark,
|
||
and F. Augustus Heinze, the three commanding figures heretofore in the
|
||
financial history of Montana, and to predictions that Compton would go
|
||
farther than any one of his predecessors, that she might have known
|
||
Gregory in his extreme youth or in some previous existence; but that
|
||
this man who now not only ranked first in the eyes of all Montana,
|
||
but had focussed the attention of a continent, no longer touched
|
||
her life save as a fairy-godfather. It was the first time that she
|
||
had appreciated his fame. She had been absorbed in Europe and its
|
||
diversions--and diverters; the new wealth had been accepted as a matter
|
||
of course; her imagination had not been powerful enough to visualise at
|
||
a distance what her mind grasped the moment the facts were presented to
|
||
her in the measured yet glowing terms of a bank’s president.
|
||
“He always did feel himself a cut above me,” she thought grimly as she
|
||
left the building and walked down Main Street. “And now, I suppose, he
|
||
thinks Perch of the Devil is Mount Olympus, and that he is some god.
|
||
It would be fun to put a nick or two in his halo--but never mind: I’ve
|
||
got a cool two hundred thousand--_and_ a palatial residence, _and_ a
|
||
limousine--sounds like a fairy tale. There’s nothing mean about him,
|
||
anyhow.”
|
||
When she reached her beautiful home she found four reporters awaiting
|
||
her. They apologised for not meeting her at the train, but as hour
|
||
after hour had passed with discouraging reports, they finally had
|
||
gone home to recuperate for the next day’s labours. Ida dismissed the
|
||
last of her regrets, and told them all that she wished Butte to know
|
||
at once, showed the women the contents of her trunks, which the maids
|
||
were unpacking, promised to let them know when the newer Paris wardrobe
|
||
arrived, and finally gave them lunch. Reporters are the quickest people
|
||
in the world to detect affectations, assumptions, and false values, and
|
||
the most merciless in their exposure; but, although these four were on
|
||
the alert, they could find neither traces of original commonness nor
|
||
imitation of the British aristocracy. Ida apparently had consigned the
|
||
slang of her former class to the limbo of careless grammar, and she was
|
||
so simple and natural that they failed to discover how clever she was;
|
||
they agreed, as they walked down Broadway, that she was merely a marvel
|
||
of adaptability, like so many others that had done credit to the great
|
||
state of Montana, to say nothing of the fluid West in general.
|
||
But, although Ida could be anything she chose when occasion demanded,
|
||
she always sought relief from the strain as quickly as possible.
|
||
Immediately after the departure of the reporters she telephoned for her
|
||
limousine and drove to the large “Block” in the heart of the business
|
||
district where Miss Ruby Miller kept the looks of the Butte ladies up
|
||
to par. As she left the elevator she saw that the familiar door was
|
||
open as usual and the old screen before it. She tapped discreetly, and
|
||
Miss Ruby came out into the hall, removing the cold cream from her
|
||
hands with her apron.
|
||
“Ide!” she cried rapturously, throwing both arms about her friend’s
|
||
velvet shoulders. “Glory be, but I’m glad to see you and you do look
|
||
fine----”
|
||
“How mean of you not to meet me----”
|
||
“We had it all fixed and supper here, but gave it up at ten o’clock.
|
||
For all we knew you might not get in till morning, and you know how we
|
||
work----”
|
||
“Well, I’ll forgive you if you both come to dinner with me tonight. I
|
||
want to have one good old time before I sit up and play the grande dame
|
||
act for weeks on end----”
|
||
“I guess you’re one now without any play-acting. You look the real
|
||
thing all right. And I guess we won’t see so awful much of you now----”
|
||
“Do you mean because I’m harnessed up to a bunch of money----” began
|
||
Ida in high indignation.
|
||
“Oh, I know you’ll always feel the same, but grand dames and our sort
|
||
don’t gee at the same table. The West is democratic but it ain’t too
|
||
democratic. Don’t think I’m jealous. You’re just where I’d like to
|
||
be myself, and I’m proud that one of us has got to the top so quick.
|
||
My! But Mr. Compton’s a wonder. To think that I ever dared call him
|
||
Greg--even behind his back. Well, he’ll be just as proud of you as you
|
||
are of him. Pearl’ll want to see your hats.”
|
||
“She can copy them all. Be sure to come early.”
|
||
She felt warmed by the little interview, but as she went down in the
|
||
elevator she admitted to herself that her future intercourse with her
|
||
old friends must be sporadic, no matter what her loyalty; and she
|
||
wondered if her new friends would take their place; or even be to her
|
||
the half of what Ora had become in the long intimacy of travel. She
|
||
shrugged her handsome shoulders. If you elected to mount in life, you
|
||
must pay the toll. Were she abruptly returned to the old cottage in
|
||
East Granite Street certainly Ruby and Pearl would not compensate her.
|
||
No, not for a moment. You may slip back in life if you are not strong
|
||
enough to hold on, but you do not deliberately turn back even for the
|
||
friends of your youth. Neither does Progress halt and sit down to wait
|
||
for its failures to catch up. Ida leaned back in her limousine and met
|
||
the interested eyes of many pedestrians of both sexes as her chauffeur
|
||
drove her about for an hour to get the air, and incidentally to be
|
||
looked at.
|
||
Today she was in a mood to enjoy Butte, and she deliberately summoned
|
||
the long anticipated sensations. She revelled in the gaunt grey
|
||
ugliness of Anaconda Hill which flung its arrogant head high above the
|
||
eastern end of the great hill itself; in the sensation of driving over
|
||
miles of subterranean numbered streets, some of them three thousand
|
||
feet below, to which that famous mass of rock and dirt and angular
|
||
buildings was the portal. She leaned far out of her car to admire the
|
||
glittering mountains that looked like blue ice topped with white, and
|
||
decided that they were far more original and beautiful than the Alps of
|
||
Austria and Switzerland; certainly they tugged at her heartstrings and
|
||
at the same time filled her with an unprecedented desire to sing. She
|
||
noticed for the first time that the violet foothills against the nearer
|
||
mountain east of the city seemed to close the end of the streets as the
|
||
Alps did in Innspruck, and gave the ragged overgrown camp clinging to
|
||
its high perch in the Rockies a redeeming touch of perfect beauty.
|
||
She drove out to Columbia Gardens, bought flowers from the conservatory
|
||
for her rooms, and wandered about recalling the many gay times she had
|
||
had in the dancing pavilion. But her eye was suddenly arrested by the
|
||
steep mountain behind, then dropped slowly to the base. It was there
|
||
that she had promised to marry Gregory Compton. She remembered his
|
||
young passion and her own. She had never felt anything like it again;
|
||
nor had he ever been quite the same. Was it one of those “supreme
|
||
moments” novelists so blithely alluded to? The logical inference of
|
||
that old bit of bathos was that such moments had no duplicates. She
|
||
felt faint and dizzy for a moment; then walked back to her car, smiling
|
||
grimly as she realised that she had experienced a fleeting echo of that
|
||
vast unattainable desire women live and die cherishing or bewailing.
|
||
“Poor things! Poor things!” she thought, with the first pang of pity
|
||
her sex had ever inspired. “No wonder they go in for suffrage, art,
|
||
work, any old thing. Home,” she added to the chauffeur.
|
||
She peremptorily dismissed all thought of the past during the drive
|
||
back to town and reverted to her pleasure in once more feeling a part
|
||
of her surroundings, hideous though they might, for the most part, be;
|
||
instead of walking with alert critical eye through what always must
|
||
seem to her the animated pages of ancient history. But her complacency
|
||
received a sudden shock. The car was rolling along Park Street when her
|
||
eye rested upon a man’s face vaguely familiar. She had bowed graciously
|
||
and the face was behind her before she realised that the man was
|
||
Professor Whalen, and that, for a second, she had looked into a pair of
|
||
pale blue eyes that sent her a swift message of hate.
|
||
Ida shuddered. The warm light air of her beloved Rockies turned cold
|
||
and heavy. “I feel as if I’d stepped on a snake and just missed getting
|
||
bitten,” she thought, putting her sensations into a concrete form,
|
||
after her habit. “I had forgotten the little viper was alive, and I
|
||
wish to goodness he wasn’t.” She had flouted superstition always, but
|
||
she could not shake off the sense of menace and evil that had vibrated
|
||
from the man until she was within her own doors once more. Then she
|
||
became as oblivious of Whalen’s existence as during that late exotic
|
||
period when everything connected with her old life had seemed too crude
|
||
to be real.
|
||
The parlour maid handed her a note that had arrived an hour before from
|
||
Mr. Luning, Mark’s partner. Mrs. Blake, he wrote, had bought a present
|
||
for Mrs. Compton in Paris and sent it to the care of her husband’s
|
||
firm. Mr. Luning had gone the day before to Great Falls to clear it in
|
||
the Custom House, and now had the pleasure of forwarding the boxes, etc.
|
||
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Ida, “what can it be?”
|
||
“There’s four big boxes in the back hall, ma’am.”
|
||
Ida lost no time. If Ora had given her a present it must be worth
|
||
looking at, and she went as rapidly as dignity would permit to the
|
||
nether regions and ordered the boxes opened. The present proved to
|
||
be a magnificent silver service, from many dozens of “flat ware” to
|
||
massive platters, vegetable dishes, flower, fruit and bon-bon pieces,
|
||
and candelabra. The delighted servants made a shining display on
|
||
the dining-room table, and after Ida had gloated over it for a time
|
||
and informed her audience that it was copied from a royal service
|
||
in the Louvre, she went suddenly up to her bedroom. This time she
|
||
did shed a few tears, and as she looked at her handkerchief in some
|
||
wonder she decided that there was at least one person that she loved,
|
||
“hard-headed” as she was, and that Ora Blake had found the one soft
|
||
spot in her flinty heart and wormed herself into it. She went to
|
||
her desk immediately and wrote Ora a letter that was almost tender,
|
||
admitting that she missed her “like fury”, and begging her to return
|
||
soon.
|
||
“Greg telephoned this morning,” she concluded, oblivious that she was
|
||
betraying the fact that she had not seen her husband, “and told me to
|
||
tell you to keep Mark down below for several months. But his lungs must
|
||
be well by this time or he’d be dead. And the rest of him will mend all
|
||
the sooner in this magnificent air. Heavens, but it’s good to breathe
|
||
it again! It makes one feel as if the atmosphere of Europe hadn’t been
|
||
aired for a century. I’ve got a wonder of a house and a jim dandy of a
|
||
limousine, but ever since I came I’ve felt kind of homesick, and I’ve
|
||
just realised it’s for you, old girl. So, come home. Once more ten
|
||
million thanks.”
|
||
And when Ruby and Pearl dined with her that night she realised that all
|
||
her old zest in their society was gone. Ida Hook, at least, had “passed
|
||
on.”
|
||
IV
|
||
It was on the morning of this same day that Gregory sat alone in his
|
||
cabin uncommonly idle, for he still spent the greater part of his
|
||
time underground, when not away on business connected with his new
|
||
investments and deals. For the last week he had not left the hill, and
|
||
although he was on the alert to hear his geological acumen vindicated,
|
||
he was in no mood to find pleasure in his mine. His conscience, an
|
||
organ that troubled him little, was restive. In spite of his liberal
|
||
disbursements, he knew that he had treated Ida unfairly. He had long
|
||
since made up his mind to obliterate her from his personal life, and,
|
||
if the truth must be told about a man who had snapped his fingers in
|
||
the face of the most formidable combination of capital in the world,
|
||
he was afraid to meet his wife. Vanity, he argued, in such women takes
|
||
the place of warmth, and he had no mind to burden his memory and
|
||
resource with an endless chain of subterfuges; nor had he any relish
|
||
for the bald statement that since he could not have the woman he wanted
|
||
he would have none; and that his mine, as complex and mysterious,
|
||
as provocative of dreams, as capricious and satisfying as woman
|
||
herself--to say nothing of hard work and increasing power--was to fill
|
||
his life.
|
||
Ida might rage, stamp, scream, with her hands on her hips, her superb
|
||
eyes flashing. Worse still, she might weep, lamenting that he loved her
|
||
no longer--if he made her hurried friendly calls. Far, far worse, he
|
||
might succumb to her beauty and superlative femaleness and hate himself
|
||
ever after. His was to be a life of unremitting and constructive work;
|
||
he must keep that blue flame burning on the altar in his sanctuary. If
|
||
he never paused to draw it up into his consciousness he must know it
|
||
was there.
|
||
Better stay away until she understood all that it was necessary
|
||
she should know, wore out her pique in private, and accepted the
|
||
situation. But he would have felt better this morning if he had heard
|
||
that her train had arrived early in the evening. He might be ruthless,
|
||
even where women were concerned, but he was also sensitive and capable
|
||
of tenderness.
|
||
But he was not thinking of Ida alone. He was listening for the
|
||
footsteps of Joshua Mann, and in a few moments he heard them, as
|
||
well as the angry growl of his foreman’s voice. Mann entered without
|
||
ceremony.
|
||
“I’ve been looking for you, sir. We’ve the devil’s own luck again----”
|
||
“Apex struck the Primo vein?”
|
||
“No, and won’t for fifty feet yet. But--well--I hate to say it--we’ve
|
||
lost our vein--cut off as short as if it had been sawed. Of course,
|
||
it’s faulted, and God only knows where its dropped to--or how far.
|
||
A prettier shoot of ore was never uncovered. What’s worrying me is
|
||
that--oh, hell!--just suppose that’s what Amalgamated is sinking on. My
|
||
head’s going round. Can I have something?”
|
||
Gregory waved his hand toward the cupboard where his visitors found
|
||
refreshment. When Mann had braced himself, his employer tapped a large
|
||
sheet of paper that lay on the table.
|
||
“Come here,” he said. “I made this map some time ago, and calculated
|
||
to a day when you would lose the vein. I guessed our vein had faulted
|
||
before Amalgamated got busy. But don’t worry. They’re either on a
|
||
parallel vein or on a mere fork.” His pencil moved along the vein
|
||
already stoped, travelled over the fault line and recovered a vein
|
||
further down. “Hundred feet,” he said. “With air drills and unless the
|
||
fault breccia is uncommonly hard, which I don’t think is the case, we
|
||
should find it in less than three weeks. They can’t get through that
|
||
rock for at least a month. Even then they may not touch us, but then
|
||
again they may, and we must be there first. Cut across the fault at
|
||
once and follow it on the footwall side to the east. Get well into the
|
||
footwall. If you don’t recover the vein inside of a hundred feet I’ll
|
||
stand to lose a thousand dollars and you’ll be the winner.”
|
||
“I guess not,” said Mann admiringly. “But, by jing! I was worried. You
|
||
never can tell about them faults. When the old earth split herself up
|
||
and got to slipping she not only lost one side of herself sometimes,
|
||
but twisted about as if she was having fun with the apex law of Montana
|
||
in advance. But I figure out that you’re like old Marcus Daly--you’ve
|
||
got a sort of X-ray in your eye that sees the ore winking below. So
|
||
long.”
|
||
He departed to carry encouragement to the anxious miners, and Gregory
|
||
went out and walked along his hill. By this time he knew every inch
|
||
of it, and had found indications of ore in his other claims while
|
||
superintending the development work necessary before perfecting his
|
||
patents. If Amalgamated sank on his present vein and the courts
|
||
enjoined him from working it until the matter of apex rights was
|
||
settled, he would simply go ahead and sink through the carbonates in
|
||
his other claims to those vast deposits of chalcopyrite with which he
|
||
was convinced his hill was packed. He knew the geological history of
|
||
every mine in Montana, and while he had given up all hope of finding
|
||
gold on his estate save in small incidental values, he believed that he
|
||
possessed one of the greatest copper deposits in the Rocky Mountains.
|
||
And now that even one vein of his hill was threatened, he dismissed his
|
||
old dreams with a shrug and transferred his undivided affection to the
|
||
exciting treasure the earth had given him. There were few surprises
|
||
in gold mines. A great copper mine might make geological history. In
|
||
two districts, Butte and Castle Mountain, copper glance, an ore of
|
||
secondary enrichment, had been found far down in the sulphide zone
|
||
below chalcopyrite, chief of the primary ores. He believed that he
|
||
should find glance at depth of nine hundred feet. If there were masses
|
||
of it he should take out millions in a year, for chalcopyrite was the
|
||
richest of the permanent copper ores of this region, running as high as
|
||
79.8.
|
||
He had been on amiable terms with the manager and engineer of the Apex
|
||
Mine since the battle underground, and he crossed the claim unmolested
|
||
to make his daily inspection of the Primo shaft house. But there had
|
||
been no further attempt to use the cross-cut, although the Apex people
|
||
had managed before they were discovered to drive to the point upon
|
||
which they expected to sink.
|
||
Gregory walked up the hill beyond to look at the cottage just
|
||
completed, which was to be occupied by the manager and foreman of the
|
||
Primo Mine as soon as Mark reopened it. He had been about to begin
|
||
operations, cutting across the fault Gregory had demonstrated--a fault
|
||
parallel to the one in Perch of the Devil--when he was shot nearly to
|
||
death.
|
||
The cottage was situated in a clearing in the pine woods, somewhat
|
||
apart from the cabins, which were being renovated and made comfortable
|
||
for the miners. Gregory was so positive that the pyroxenite vein would
|
||
be recovered just beyond the row of aspens, some sixty feet below
|
||
the tableland, that Mark, who believed his friend to be an inspired
|
||
geologist, was preparing for a long period of mining; although if
|
||
it had been a quartz mine Gregory, sure as he was of his judgment,
|
||
would not have permitted him to put up a mill and concentrating plant
|
||
until sufficient ore had been blocked out to warrant the expense. But
|
||
pyroxenite went direct to the smelter, and a cottage could always be
|
||
rented.
|
||
The little bungalow had two bedrooms besides one for a Chinese servant,
|
||
a bathroom, and a large living-room with a deep fireplace, a raftered
|
||
ceiling, and pine walls stained brown. Gregory, as he realised how
|
||
cosy it would be when furnished, wondered that he had been satisfied
|
||
with his two-roomed cabin for so long. He had been too absorbed to
|
||
think of comfort, but today he felt a desire for something more
|
||
nearly resembling a home than a perch. He looked through the windows
|
||
at the sibilant pines, the pink carpet of primrose moss, the distant
|
||
forests rising to the blue and white mountains; and then he sighed as
|
||
he glanced slowly about the long room and pictured it furnished in
|
||
warm tones of red and brown, wondering if either of the men would be
|
||
married. It would be an ideal home for a honeymoon.
|
||
He twitched his shoulders impatiently and went outside. To his surprise
|
||
he saw a wagon ascending the hill laden with lumber, the seats occupied
|
||
by the contractor and carpenters that had built the bungalow.
|
||
“What’s up?” he asked, as the contractor leaped to the ground.
|
||
“Another bungalow. Perhaps you could suggest a site. It’s to be near
|
||
this, and the same size. We had a telegram from Mr. Blake yesterday.”
|
||
“But what does he want of two cottages?”
|
||
“Can’t say, sir, unless he means to come out here to get well.”
|
||
“That’s nonsense. He knows he could stay at my house on the ranch.”
|
||
But Gregory was not in the habit of thinking aloud. After indicating
|
||
a site he swung back to his hill, angry and apprehensive. Could it
|
||
be possible that Mark intended to spend the summer at the mine and
|
||
bring his wife with him? As soon as he reached his cabin he sat down
|
||
at his table, and after getting his friend’s present address from
|
||
Luning, telephoned a long distance message to Pony to be telegraphed
|
||
to Mr. Mark Blake in Santa Barbara. Its gist was that the weather was
|
||
abominable and that Mark must not think of anything so foolish as to
|
||
bring his weakened heart and lungs to this altitude. His services
|
||
would be imperative later when his solicitous friend locked horns with
|
||
Amalgamated, and meanwhile he was, for heaven’s sake, to take care of
|
||
himself and remain on the coast until he was in a condition to work day
|
||
and night.
|
||
He received an answer that afternoon.
|
||
“No intention of leaving here for two months. Lungs pretty good, but
|
||
shall wait for leg to heal. Ora wants present cottage for herself as
|
||
she intends to spend summer at mine. Will you be on the lookout for a
|
||
manager? He can live in the lessee’s shack until the new cottage is
|
||
built. Might begin operations at once. Hope this not too much trouble.
|
||
Mark.”
|
||
This message was transmitted over the telephone, and, to the excessive
|
||
annoyance of the operator, who happened to be the belle of Pony,
|
||
Gregory asked her three times, and with no excess of politeness, to
|
||
repeat it. The third time he wrote it out and stared at the words as if
|
||
the unsteady characters were recombining into a sketch of the infernal
|
||
regions.
|
||
“Good God!” he thought. “And I can’t get away!”
|
||
Was Mark mad? Was she mad? Then he realised the blissful ignorance of
|
||
both regarding the drama he so often had swept from the stage of his
|
||
mind, that secret dweller in the most secret recesses of his soul.
|
||
Doubtless Ora never had thrown him a thought since they parted at her
|
||
gate. He remembered her expressed intention to live at her mine when
|
||
the lease was up, her desire to adventure underground, her intense
|
||
appreciation of the romance of mining. He closed his eyes, his face
|
||
relaxed. So long as she cared nothing for him there was no danger; he
|
||
might daydream about her a bit. At least--at last!--he should see her
|
||
again, talk to her, work with her, help her as no one else could help
|
||
her. If the association he would have avoided was inevitable why not
|
||
welcome it as a brief oasis in what must be an arid life, so far as
|
||
mortal companionship was concerned?
|
||
But he was not the man to dream long. Presently he opened his eyes,
|
||
set his jaw until it looked a yard long, put on his overalls, and went
|
||
underground.
|
||
V
|
||
Butte long since had made up its mind as to the social future of
|
||
Mrs. Gregory Compton. That Ida’s mother had been a laundress and her
|
||
father a miner concerned the ladies of Butte as little as many similar
|
||
outcroppings of family history peculiar not only to Montana but to all
|
||
regions of recent exploitation and rapid growth.
|
||
In the hearty welcome extended to the newcomer, with either the
|
||
money or the personality to command its attention, Butte more nearly
|
||
resembles London than any other city in the world. To pasts she is
|
||
indifferent, provided they are not resurrected as models for a present:
|
||
she asks no questions of a pretty, amiable, amusing woman who pays
|
||
her the compliment of sojourning in her midst, so long as the lady
|
||
exercises an equal reticence--assuming reticence to be her virtue--and
|
||
plays the social game with _savoir faire_. Distractions on that high
|
||
perch are few, social life ebbs oftener than it flows, many of the
|
||
large houses are closed for the greater part of the year, and only the
|
||
very young, who care not where they are so long as they may dance, find
|
||
life in an overgrown mining camp as satisfactory as their elders find
|
||
New York.
|
||
But the hospitality of Butte is genuine and founded largely upon common
|
||
sense. Most of the women composing its society have enjoyed wealth for
|
||
many years: they have travelled extensively; and if they continue to
|
||
make their homes in Butte it is solely on account of their own business
|
||
interests or those of their men. They argue that to deprive themselves
|
||
of even the casual diversion, assuming the exclusive airs of large
|
||
and resourceful communities, would merely put them on a level with
|
||
thousands of other small towns slowly stagnating, be unworthy of their
|
||
worldly experience, and of the large free spirit of the Northwest which
|
||
has pervaded that isolated camp since they came with their husbands or
|
||
fathers to take a hand in its history.
|
||
As for Mrs. Gregory Compton all they knew of her in her present
|
||
stage of development was favourable, although several had a lively
|
||
remembrance of the rosy black-haired Ida Hook delivering her excellent
|
||
mother’s laundry work at their back door, and receiving more or less
|
||
of her “cheek.” But they had heard, at the time, of her lessons with
|
||
Professor Whalen, and of Ora Blake’s coincident interest. Of her social
|
||
advantages and triumphs in Europe the press had kept them informed; she
|
||
returned to Butte, in fact, as one new-born. Moreover, she now owned
|
||
one of the finest houses in the city for entertaining, they knew that
|
||
she had elected to shine in Butte rather than in London (that Mecca of
|
||
so many quick-rich women without position in their own country); and
|
||
above all she was the wife of Gregory Compton, the man in whom Montana
|
||
was beginning to feel assured it could take an unequivocal pride, not
|
||
only for his diabolical cleverness, but because he was as “straight”
|
||
as the Twentieth Century in the United States of America would permit.
|
||
Butte felt devoutly grateful to Ida for being and returning, and, with
|
||
that utter lack of affectation that characterised it, began calling two
|
||
days after her arrival.
|
||
Ida would have been glad to have had Ora’s support and advice during
|
||
this ordeal--which caused her far more apprehension than ducal
|
||
week-ends. But she summoned all her acquired knowledge and tact,
|
||
fortified it with her native and supreme confidence in herself, and
|
||
made no mistakes. Butte was charmed with the severe rich gowns that set
|
||
off her haughty head and warmly colored face and the long, flowing,
|
||
yet stately lines of her beautiful figure; charmed also with a manner
|
||
that was both simple and dignified. She showed no enthusiasm at being
|
||
taken up so promptly, neither did she quite accept it as a matter of
|
||
course. If her talk ranged freely over common acquaintance in London,
|
||
the Paris dressmakers of the season, the new opera, the plays of the
|
||
moment in New York, it was without glibness, and she took a firm hold
|
||
on the older and more important women of the community by confiding to
|
||
them that she should not make her first venture in the difficult art of
|
||
entertaining until her friend Mrs. Blake returned to help her through
|
||
the novitiate. Many of the younger women were the wives of Amalgamated
|
||
officials and attorneys, or of men in a relationship to that mighty
|
||
power but one degree further removed; but the men individually were too
|
||
broad-minded to cherish a personal grudge against Compton, and they
|
||
were, moreover, quite as eager as their mates to meet his handsome wife.
|
||
During the ensuing fortnight Ida dined out every night, went to a
|
||
bridge party every afternoon, as well as to several luncheons, teas,
|
||
and dances. She wore a different costume every time she appeared in
|
||
public; but although there was at the moment nothing in Butte to
|
||
compare with her gowns she never produced the effect of outshining the
|
||
other women by anything but her beauty and individual style. In short
|
||
her success was so immediate and so final that, although she liked
|
||
these ladies of her native town even better than she had anticipated,
|
||
her rapid conquest soon lost its novelty, and she wished that Ora would
|
||
return; not only because she missed her increasingly, but because to
|
||
entertain in her great house would give her a new and really poignant
|
||
excitement, and lift her definitely from the ranks of the merely
|
||
received.
|
||
Gregory telephoned every few days, and never twice at the same hour.
|
||
When she found herself restlessly awaiting the ring of the instrument,
|
||
she dashed out of the house angrily and took a walk. If she found upon
|
||
her return that he had called her up, she felt that he had given her
|
||
the excuse to telephone to him, and she soon learned at what hours she
|
||
could find him either in his cabin or down in the mine, where he had
|
||
a booth. She was furious at what she called her raging female vanity,
|
||
and if she could have found another man to assuage it she would not
|
||
have hesitated to press him into service at whatever cost to himself.
|
||
But, as happens more often than not, there was not an unmarried man in
|
||
Butte old enough to be worthy of a fastidious woman’s notice. She would
|
||
have yawned in the face of “Brownies”, and, although more than one
|
||
roving husband would have placed himself at her disposal, she was the
|
||
last woman to court scandal or even gossip. She longed for the advent
|
||
of Lord John Mowbray, whose gayety would distract her mind, and whose
|
||
devotion make her forget that she was a neglected wife. She could throw
|
||
dust into the eyes of Butte by pretending to be his matrimonial sponsor.
|
||
But for the first time she wished that she had children. The great
|
||
house seemed to demand the patter of small feet, the slamming of
|
||
doors, a row of naughty faces peering over the banister of the second
|
||
floor. It was terribly silent. And yet she had felt settled down in
|
||
that house at once, so long had one of its kind been the object of her
|
||
unswerving desire; its atmosphere already seemed to hang listless with
|
||
ennui. She subscribed to both the state and city suffrage fund, for
|
||
she felt a new sympathy for women who were trying to fill their lives,
|
||
and sincerely hoped they would invent some game that would make them
|
||
independent of men.
|
||
Seventeen days after her return she was sitting in the library, trying
|
||
to forget her solitary luncheon in a novel when she heard the front
|
||
doorbell ring. Her servants were amiable but not too competent, and she
|
||
waited impatiently and in vain for one of them to answer the summons.
|
||
She restrained the impulse to open the door herself. This was now an
|
||
obsolete custom among her new acquaintance; although having the front
|
||
door shut in one’s face while the colored maid took one’s card to the
|
||
lady of the stately mansion was hardly an improvement, and this had
|
||
been her experience a day or two ago. She rang the bell in the library.
|
||
Still there was no sign of life from the high-priced young women who
|
||
doubtless were gossipping over the back fence. Ida’s curiosity overcame
|
||
her. The hour was too early for callers. It might be a cable. She stole
|
||
to the front door and peered through its curtain of Honiton lace. Then
|
||
she gave a war whoop which would have horrified her servants--who,
|
||
careless as they were, stood in awe of her--flung the door open, caught
|
||
Ora in her arms and almost carried her into the library.
|
||
“Good Lord, but I’m glad to see you!” she cried. “I’m just about dead
|
||
of lonesomeness. Why didn’t you telegraph? I’d have met you if your
|
||
train didn’t get in till two in the morning.”
|
||
Ora laughed and disentangled herself, although she kissed Ida warmly.
|
||
“I just got in--came here on the way from the station and sent my bags
|
||
to the house--but I always did hate to be met. How beautiful your house
|
||
is.”
|
||
“It’s all right. But it’s about as cheerful to live alone in as one
|
||
of those palaces in the Via Garibaldi! My, but I’m glad you’re here.
|
||
You’re the only person I ever missed, and being a real lady for weeks
|
||
on end is telling on my plebeian health. I didn’t have any relief even
|
||
in New York. How’s Mark?”
|
||
“Quite well, except for his broken leg.”
|
||
“Is he here?”
|
||
“Oh, no--I left him in Santa Barbara--that is to say at the Club House
|
||
at Montecito, the fashionable suburb. He has a jolly circle of friends
|
||
there, and has no desire to travel any further until he can walk.”
|
||
Ida put her hands on Ora’s shoulders and turned her round to the
|
||
light. “What’s up?” she demanded. “You look fine, as pretty as a
|
||
picture--but--different, somehow.”
|
||
“I’ve left Mark.”
|
||
Ida glanced into the hall. The opening of back doors indicated that one
|
||
of the maids had condescended to remember she was a wage earner. “Let’s
|
||
go upstairs,” said Ida; and as they crossed the hall she said to the
|
||
girl who was hastening to the front door with a propitiating smile,
|
||
“You’re just about ten minutes too late, as usual, and the next time it
|
||
happens you lose your job. I’m not the sort that sits down and wails
|
||
over the servant question. This house will be run properly if I have to
|
||
send East for help. Now put on your hat and run down to Mrs. Blake’s
|
||
house and bring up her bags, and tell them to send her trunks here.
|
||
“Yes, you’re going to stay with me for the present,” she said, as Ora
|
||
protested. “Don’t say another word about it.”
|
||
Ora shrugged her shoulders, and when they were in Ida’s bedroom she
|
||
took off her hat and coat and wandered about aimlessly for a few
|
||
moments. Ida was almost breathless with impatience and a curious sense
|
||
of apprehension that vaguely recalled the strange terror Ora had
|
||
inspired on the day of their meeting. Ora wore a blue frock, and Ida
|
||
noticed that the yellow room did not dim her fair radiance. If possible
|
||
she was holding her head higher than usual, her skin “gleamed” more
|
||
than ever, there was a curious light in her always brilliant eyes, half
|
||
defiant, half exultant.
|
||
“Do sit down!” said Ida sharply, cutting short Ora’s voluble approval
|
||
of the room. “There, that’s right,” as Ora flung herself into a chair.
|
||
“Now, fire away. You’re brimming over with something. Do you mean that
|
||
you’ve left Mark for good and all?”
|
||
“Yes.”
|
||
“Told him so?”
|
||
Ora nodded.
|
||
“Did you tell him about Valdobia, or what? For heaven’s sake open up.”
|
||
“No, I--I thought I wouldn’t tell him everything at once. I told him
|
||
that I meant to spend the rest of my life in Europe, and that it
|
||
was only fair to himself to divorce me--he can do it easily on the
|
||
ground of desertion--and marry someone who would make a real home for
|
||
him--make him happy.”
|
||
“Ah! Mark’s the sort women marry but don’t fall in love with. And what
|
||
did he say when you handed him that?”
|
||
“He was rather broken up.”
|
||
“Really! And you? I always had an idea that when it came to the point
|
||
you wouldn’t do it. You have high-falutin’ notions about honor,
|
||
noblesse oblige, and all the rest of it, to say nothing of being really
|
||
soft, as I once told you. There’s only one thing that would make you
|
||
hard--to everyone else--and that’s being in love----”
|
||
“That is it!” exclaimed Ora eagerly. “I’ve made up my mind to marry
|
||
Valdobia. I wasn’t so sure when I left Europe, but you know what
|
||
separation often does----”
|
||
“Yes,” said Ida dryly, “I do. Well, Mark will have to take his
|
||
medicine, I guess. I’ve never doubted, since Valdobia joined us in
|
||
Genoa, that he was the man for you. It’s fate, I guess. But tell me
|
||
what Mark said, after all. Did he consent?”
|
||
“There was nothing else to do. He knew I meant it. I broke it to
|
||
him by degrees. Besides, he knew how it was long before I left for
|
||
Europe. He had practically given me up. Of course he was fond of me--I
|
||
had become a habit and made him comfortable, besides being useful
|
||
to him--but--well, I gave him six years--my youth!” she burst out
|
||
passionately. “What wouldn’t I give to wipe out those years, be twenty
|
||
again and free! I tried to make him understand that I was no longer in
|
||
the least like the bewildered undeveloped girl he had married; and that
|
||
I bore as little resemblance to the intellectual automaton I made of
|
||
myself later. I told him that I was awake once for all, and that rather
|
||
than live again with a man I couldn’t care for I’d be boiled in oil.
|
||
Then he understood.”
|
||
“I should think he might! Of course he asked if there was another man?”
|
||
“Yes, but I told him that was neither here nor there; that in any case
|
||
I should leave him and live in Europe.”
|
||
“Poor Mark! Tied by the leg, and lost in the shuffle!”
|
||
“You know as well as I do that I have nothing in me for Mark and that
|
||
if I cared as little for Valdobia it would only be fair to give him
|
||
a second throw for happiness. When I left him he was quite resigned,
|
||
and we have agreed to remain the best of friends. I shall leave him my
|
||
power of attorney as before, and he will continue to manage my affairs.”
|
||
“How much more sensible we are in our Twentieth Century! No doubt he
|
||
will visit you in the Palazzo Valdobia when he takes a whirl at Europe.”
|
||
“Why not? But tell me you think I did right, Ida?” Ora’s voice was very
|
||
sweet and plaintive.
|
||
“You did what you were bound to do, I guess, when you met a man that
|
||
could throw a lariat round the neck of that romantic imagination of
|
||
yours. Right? I don’t know. I guess I’ve got the same old streak of
|
||
Puritan Americanism in me, although if other people want to have
|
||
_liaisons_ and divorces it’s none of my affair. Women will do more and
|
||
more as they damn please, I guess, men having set them such a good
|
||
example for a few centuries. But I simply hate the idea of losing you.
|
||
I want you right here in Butte. Lord, I’ve almost forgotten may slang!”
|
||
Ora laughed with something like her old merriment. “Oh, you’ll have
|
||
me for an escape valve for a while yet. Valdobia’s mother is dying of
|
||
some lingering horrible disease. It wouldn’t be decent for me to go to
|
||
Rome, and I should be lonely anywhere else. So, I’ve made up my mind
|
||
to stay here during the summer at least, and realise a dream I used
|
||
to indulge in before I ever knew I could fall in love.” Once more she
|
||
looked straight at Ida, this time with the slow expectant smile of a
|
||
child. “I’m going to reopen my mine and run it myself--of course I
|
||
shall have a manager. Mark has written, or telegraphed, to Mr. Compton
|
||
to find one for me--but I shall live out there and go down every day,
|
||
and make believe I am doing something, too--at all events realise that
|
||
it _is_ my mine. Mining has always--that is, always did fascinate me
|
||
more than anything else on earth. I shall be devoted to Valdobia when I
|
||
am married to him, but I simply must have that adventure first----”
|
||
“For heaven’s sake don’t go dotty like Gregory over a hole in the
|
||
ground. If you get that bee buzzing round in your skull I pity poor
|
||
Valdobia. If it were not for his mother I’d cable to him to come
|
||
out----”
|
||
Ora’s face set with a hardness that arrested Ida’s observant eye.
|
||
“Don’t you do anything of the sort. Mark said once about my father,
|
||
‘It was characteristic of him that when he quit he quit for good.’ I
|
||
am always discovering more and more of my father in me. I’ll live that
|
||
old dream and it will finish when Valdobia and I both are free. Then I
|
||
shall wipe it off the slate--consign it to limbo.” She sprang to her
|
||
feet and stretched out her arms. “I am going to do exactly as I please
|
||
as long as I am free. Of course I am mad about Valdobia--you know that
|
||
I wouldn’t marry him if I were not--but I am mad too about liberty and
|
||
my mine. This is my only chance. And I am a Montanan, born in the Rocky
|
||
Mountains. I want something of the life that has made my state famous
|
||
before I become a European. I’ve never had anything of her but Butte. I
|
||
want the wild mountains--I want, above all, the mine that has given me
|
||
my freedom. I’m going to wear overalls and go down into the mine every
|
||
day.”
|
||
“A sweet sight you’ll be!” said Ida disgustedly. “And the miners--Oh,
|
||
they’ll just love the idea of having a woman at their heels! What on
|
||
earth has got hold of you? It’s the only time I’ve ever known you
|
||
to get off your base. Why, there’s nothing a woman can do at a mine
|
||
unless she’s a graduated mining engineer, and nothing then that a man
|
||
couldn’t do better. You’ll be in the way and you’ll soon be bored to
|
||
death yourself. If you’re so crazy about Montana why don’t you do some
|
||
of those great things for her that your father suggested? And how do
|
||
you reconcile your marriage to an Italian with your devotion to your
|
||
father’s memory?”
|
||
Ora turned away her head. “My father gave me too much of himself to
|
||
expect me to play the rôle of ministering angel to anything. I intend
|
||
to invest in Montana the greater part of all that I take out of my
|
||
mine. If it gives me one of the great fortunes I shall endow my state
|
||
in some way--as Mark may suggest. But I cannot live here. That is
|
||
for ever settled. When I go to Europe I shall never return--not even
|
||
to America. I shall forget my life here, everything connected with
|
||
it--everything! One side of me is already European. I shall become
|
||
wholly so.”
|
||
“Somehow,” said Ida slowly, and with the sensation of being so close
|
||
to something that she couldn’t see it, “I don’t get the idea that
|
||
you’re so mad about Valdobia. Long since I figured that when you did
|
||
love a man you’d be a sort of white pillar of flame about him. I
|
||
firmly believe that Valdobia is the man for you, but, well--he fell
|
||
too quickly. He didn’t make you suffer, never kept you guessing for
|
||
a minute. The women that turn men’s heads are a good deal like men
|
||
themselves; they’ve got to be hurt hard and kept on tenterhooks before
|
||
they are in a condition to accommodate the virus. You are fond of
|
||
Valdobia, and well you may be, but mad isn’t the right word----”
|
||
“Oh, yes it is! It is!” Ora was walking up and down the room. “You must
|
||
believe that I love him as I never dreamed I could love anybody----”
|
||
“Hi!” cried Ida. “Your letter-man! That’s what! You were more nearly in
|
||
love with him than you are with Valdobia, and because, for some reason
|
||
or other, you couldn’t get him. Where is he?”
|
||
Ora’s eyes looked large and blank. “That! I had quite forgotten it.
|
||
It was the last of a long line of mental love affairs. Those always
|
||
evaporate even from the memory when the real man comes along.” She
|
||
sighed heavily and sat down once more. “I know that I shall be happy
|
||
with Valdobia, only I am not happy now. That is so far off! And of
|
||
course I feel badly about poor Mark. But I couldn’t help it. Not to do
|
||
it would have been worse. And I should go off my head meanwhile if I
|
||
didn’t have this mine. Do you think I could remain here in Butte and go
|
||
to dinners and bridge parties? I should scream in their faces. I must
|
||
have work. Be sure I can find something to do at the mine--I suppose
|
||
there are a laboratory and assay office. And there will always be the
|
||
excitement of hoping to find free milling gold--at present what could
|
||
be more exciting than to drift for that lost vein?”
|
||
“It wouldn’t keep me awake nights. But have your own way. I don’t want
|
||
you down with nerves, and that will happen if you don’t look out.”
|
||
“If I don’t get my own way.”
|
||
“Exactly. But I wish your way marched with mine. I’ve missed you like
|
||
fury--Say!--here’s an idea: I’ll go back to Europe with you now if you
|
||
like, and stay until you marry. There are lots of places we planned to
|
||
go to and didn’t----”
|
||
“Ida, you are a dear! And you longed so for Butte. Why it would be like
|
||
tearing an author from his unfinished magnum opus. Besides--well--you
|
||
have a husband----”
|
||
“Oh, Lord! Gregory is running the Universe at present. Women don’t
|
||
exist for him. Shall we go?”
|
||
Ora shook her head. Her face had turned from white to pale. “No. I must
|
||
spend these last months of my freedom here in my state. And that lost
|
||
vein--it pulls me. I _must_ have that life for a few months--for the
|
||
first and last time. You--you--might spend your week-ends with me.”
|
||
Ida scowled and turned away her head. She had no intention of admitting
|
||
even to Ora that Gregory deliberately avoided her. “Not I. I hate the
|
||
sight of the De Smet ranch. Go, if you like, but I feel sure you will
|
||
come in often. And before you go I wish you would do me a favour.”
|
||
“Of course I will.”
|
||
“Let me give you a dinner. I want to begin that sort of thing and
|
||
you’ll furnish the excuse besides helping me out.”
|
||
“Very well. Have it soon. I want to go to the mine as quickly as
|
||
possible. I shall begin to send out the furniture for my bungalow
|
||
tomorrow.”
|
||
“A week’s notice will be enough. I’ll write the invitations today.
|
||
There’s another reason I want to give this dinner. Gregory hasn’t been
|
||
seen anywhere with me--hates going out. But I shall make him understand
|
||
that he must come to my first dinner--or people will be talking--and I
|
||
hate people prying into my affairs. Besides, it will be his duty to you
|
||
as the wife of his best friend. (He needn’t know you’ve left Mark yet
|
||
awhile.) I’m not hankering for the rôle of the neglected wife; and I’m
|
||
sick of making excuses. For all Butte knew I might not have laid eyes
|
||
on my husband since my return.”
|
||
And although she spoke bravely Ora knew that she had not. “We’ll have
|
||
the dinner,” she said warmly. “And it will be great fun to get it
|
||
up----”
|
||
“Now, come this minute and go to bed. You are to stay with me as
|
||
long as you are in this camp, and I’m going to tone you up, and make
|
||
you rest as we used to in Europe every afternoon--hard work in this
|
||
altitude but it can be done. I’ve got to go to a bridge party now, and
|
||
you are to sleep. If you feel rested when I get back, I’ll call up two
|
||
or three of your old friends and ask them to come informally to dinner.
|
||
So long.”
|
||
She closed the door of her best spare room on Ora and walked slowly
|
||
back to her own, her brows drawn; once more quick with a sensation
|
||
of profound uneasiness, of being close to something that she could
|
||
not see. But it was not her habit to ponder for long over the elusive
|
||
and obscure. “Guess I’m worried about Ora’s health,” she thought
|
||
impatiently, and rang for her maid.
|
||
VI
|
||
Two days later Gregory received the following note from his wife:
|
||
DEAR GREGORY:
|
||
Ora is here, and before going out to the mine has promised to help
|
||
me through the ordeal of my first big dinner. Entertaining goes with
|
||
this house, and although I am beginning somewhat sooner, perhaps,
|
||
than is necessary, I have my reasons. I have asked twenty-four
|
||
people, the most important of the older and the younger married
|
||
sets. The dinner is to be at eight o’clock Tuesday. I want you to
|
||
come. Yow have been very generous, but there is one thing more that
|
||
you can do for me and I feel that I have the right to demand it.
|
||
If you no longer care for me, that is something I cannot help; nor
|
||
you either for that matter. But so far as the world knows, I am
|
||
your wife, and if we are never seen together there is bound to be
|
||
disagreeable gossip. I don’t want to be gossipped about. It is vulgar
|
||
and it complicates life. The Butte women I most wanted to know are
|
||
all right, but the town has the usual allowance of fools and scandal
|
||
mongers. By showing yourself at my first dinner in your own house
|
||
you will muzzle them. You can arrive in time for dinner and take a
|
||
late train back to Pony, if there is one. But please come. I am sure
|
||
if you think it over you will admit that I am merely proving my new
|
||
knowledge of the world in asking for your formal protection.
|
||
IDA.
|
||
Gregory read this note hastily when he found it in his morning mail-bag
|
||
in company with many business letters, to which he also gave scant
|
||
attention: he was in haste to go underground. There was still no sign
|
||
of the lost vein, and nineteen days of the three weeks’ limit he had
|
||
set himself were gone. But they broke into it that same afternoon. He
|
||
barely left the mine until the following morning, but he finally sought
|
||
his cabin and bed satisfied that the recovered vein of copper pyrite
|
||
was, like the original, six feet thick and as rich in values. When he
|
||
awoke he remembered Ida’s note, and although it had provoked a frown of
|
||
annoyance when he read it, his spirits were now so ebullient that he
|
||
not only admitted the justice of her demand, but would have granted
|
||
almost anyone a reasonable request.
|
||
Moreover, as he reread the note, its restraint and dignity struck
|
||
him forcibly, as well as its remote likeness to the Ida Hook he had
|
||
wooed in Nine Mile Cañon. Certainly she had made the most of her
|
||
opportunities!
|
||
And apparently she had recovered from her first disappointment, or
|
||
pique--if, indeed, she had felt either--and he assumed that the
|
||
last year, crowded with exceptional experiences, had made her over
|
||
into something like a woman of the world. No doubt among her many
|
||
accomplishments she had acquired self-control. (That she might also
|
||
have acquired finesse did not occur to him.) He dismissed the fear
|
||
that she would make a scene--and himself thoroughly uncomfortable. On
|
||
the whole it would be interesting to see Ida as a bird of paradise.
|
||
He remembered her in shirtwaists and serviceable skirts, and recalled
|
||
that he had sometimes thought it a pity she should not have the plumage
|
||
worthy of her beauty and style.
|
||
And if the fates had willed that he must meet Ora Blake again he
|
||
preferred that the first interview should be in public.
|
||
He rang up Pony and in the course of half an hour was connected with
|
||
Butte.
|
||
“Hello!” he said cordially, as he heard his wife’s voice. “Got your
|
||
letter, but couldn’t find time to answer before. I’ll come to the
|
||
dinner with pleasure.”
|
||
“Oh, I am so glad.” Ida’s tones were crisp and cool. There was none of
|
||
the husky warmth that Gregory suddenly remembered; nor any of the old
|
||
common inflection. “Are your evening togs at Mark’s?”
|
||
“Yes, will you send for them?”
|
||
“I’ll have everything here in one of the spare rooms. The maid will
|
||
show you up if you are late. It takes me hours to dress.”
|
||
“All right. Say--Ida--I wish you’d persuade Mrs. Blake to give up that
|
||
idea of coming out here. It won’t work. She’ll only be in the way of
|
||
the men, and if there was a big row on would be one more responsibility
|
||
for her manager. I suppose she knows I’ve opened up her mine. Besides,
|
||
it’s no place for a woman anyhow. There are only a few women--miners’
|
||
wives--in my camp; none in the others.”
|
||
“I’ve told her all that. But--well--you don’t know Ora.
|
||
Gambling--taking long chances--is in her blood, I guess. You should
|
||
have seen her at Monte Carlo. You must take in Mrs. Cameron, but I am
|
||
putting Ora on your left as it is time you two got acquainted. Try to
|
||
dissuade her. I want her to stay here with me.”
|
||
“I’ll do my best. How are you getting on? Butte still panning out?”
|
||
“I adore Butte and find nothing to change. It’s too wonderful--to have
|
||
all your old dreams come true like this! I hope your mine is behaving.
|
||
I heard a rumour the other day that you had lost your vein----”
|
||
“Just found it again!”
|
||
Ida noted the exultant ring of his voice, and was about to laugh when
|
||
she changed her tactics swiftly. “Good! I know just how fine you
|
||
feel--and that it wasn’t the loss of money that worried you either.
|
||
Well, the dinner will be a sort of celebration. Good-bye.”
|
||
“Good-bye.” There was a faint accent of surprise in Gregory’s voice.
|
||
Ida smiled and returned to her interrupted toilette.
|
||
“Just let me get a good chance at him once more,” she thought. “I’ll be
|
||
eating copper before I get through, but I don’t know him or his sex if
|
||
he won’t be nibbling off the same chunk.”
|
||
VII
|
||
The next week was the busiest she had ever known. All the people
|
||
that had called on her called again on Ora. Her cook collapsed when
|
||
told to prepare a dinner for twenty-eight people, and Ida, who would
|
||
not hearken to a public caterer and his too familiar idiosyncrasies,
|
||
telegraphed to St. Paul for a chef. What moments she had to spare after
|
||
consultations with this autocrat, with a temperamental designer of menu
|
||
cards, and with two high-handed young women whom she had been persuaded
|
||
by the charitable Mrs. Cameron to engage to decorate her rooms, were
|
||
spent with certain works on copper and mining that she had procured
|
||
from the public library.
|
||
She looked forward to the evening of her dinner party with a secret
|
||
excitement that seemed to fork its lightning into every recess of her
|
||
brain, and electrify it with a sense of the fulness of life--that
|
||
hinted intoxicatingly of life’s perfections. Not only was she to live
|
||
the wildest dream of Ida Hook, but she had made up her mind to bring
|
||
the most important man in Montana to her feet on that triumphant night.
|
||
That the man was her husband, won the first time without an effort,
|
||
lost through her own indifference and ignorance, added tenfold to the
|
||
zest of the game. She knew the impression he must retain of her: crude,
|
||
obvious in her sex allurement, cheaply dressed, a sort of respectable
|
||
mining-camp siren; all her fascinations second-rate, and her best
|
||
points in the eyes of an absent-minded husband her good-natured
|
||
mothering and admirable cooking.
|
||
If she had returned to find him as she had left him, a mere brilliant
|
||
hard-working student, and automatically attentive to his home partner,
|
||
no doubt she would have slipped into her original rôle at once, for she
|
||
was normally amiable, and she had strict ideas of wifely duties, which
|
||
her insistent vanity and deliberate flirtations never for a moment
|
||
endangered. They also filled the practical wants of a nature not
|
||
derived from artistic ancestors. She had had her “flyer”, and, allowing
|
||
for social triumphs, returned to Butte to settle down; although it
|
||
had been with a certain complacency that she had reflected during the
|
||
homeward journey upon the altered circumstances which would enable her
|
||
to live like a civilised being in her own apartments and see far less
|
||
of her husband than formerly.
|
||
Her complacency had been treated to a succession of shocks since her
|
||
return; it had, in fact, finally gasped out its life; although it had
|
||
left self-confidence behind to sit at the feet of her shrewd clear
|
||
mind. She found a zest entirely new in bringing to his knees a man who
|
||
had been her husband when she was too raw and conceited to appreciate
|
||
him, who had developed into a personage, and who had conquered his mere
|
||
maleness and put women out of his life: she had consulted a detective
|
||
agency and convinced herself that her only rival was the mine. Ida was
|
||
nothing if not practical. Before preparing for her siege she chose to
|
||
know exactly where she stood. A rival of her sex would have demanded
|
||
one sort of tactics; a mere mine and the quickened business instinct
|
||
of a dreaming but outclassing brain, although she did not underrate
|
||
their peculiar dead walls and buffers, exacted a different and more
|
||
impersonal assault--at first.
|
||
Much that she had failed to understand in her young husband was clear
|
||
to her now. His silences, his formidable powers of concentration, his
|
||
habit of thinking out his purposes unto the smallest detail before
|
||
verbal expression, his tendency to dream, combined with lightning
|
||
processes of thought, were the indispensable allies of his peculiar
|
||
gifts: she had talked with too many brilliant and active men during the
|
||
past year, to say nothing of her daily association with Ora, for whose
|
||
inherited and progressive intellect she had the highest respect, and
|
||
her own development had been too positive, rapid, and normal, not to be
|
||
fully aware that men born with the genius to conquer life were equipped
|
||
with powerful imaginations that necessarily made them silent thinkers.
|
||
She had become intensely proud of her husband since her return, and his
|
||
neglect, coupled with his scrupulous generosity, had stung her pride
|
||
and aroused both desire and determination to recapture what she had
|
||
lost. She had no great faith in her capacity for love; but not only
|
||
was she fascinated by Gregory for the first time but she found him more
|
||
worthy of her accomplished coquetry than any man she had met in Europe.
|
||
She was firm in her resolve to repossess her husband, but not merely to
|
||
satisfy that pride which was the evolution of a more primitive vanity;
|
||
she felt a certain joyousness, a lilt of the spirit, at the thought of
|
||
spending her life with him, of being the complete helpmate of such a
|
||
man; even a disposition to dream, which was so new in her experience
|
||
that she banished it with a frown. “If I let go like other fool women,
|
||
I’ll make a grand mess of it,” was her characteristic reflection.
|
||
She was dressing for the dinner when she heard him enter the house. The
|
||
parlour maid for once remembered her instructions, and led him up to
|
||
his room, which was on the opposite side of the hall from his wife’s
|
||
and at the extreme end. Her door was ajar, she heard his voice--whose
|
||
depth and richness were decimated by the telephone--his light foot
|
||
ascending the stair. For the moment she lost her breath, then with
|
||
an angry jerk of the shoulders regained her poise, and, in tones
|
||
careless enough to reassure any husband suddenly overwhelmed with the
|
||
awkwardness of his position, called out:
|
||
“Good evening, Gregory. Hope you’ll find everything you want in your
|
||
room. Ring if you don’t. See you downstairs.”
|
||
“Oh--thanks!” Gregory swallowed an immense sigh of relief. “I’ll be on
|
||
time.”
|
||
Ida, assisted by the “upstairs girl”--she had not yet found a ladies’
|
||
maid willing to come to Butte--continued her toilette. Her gown was
|
||
as nearly Renaissance as she thought her native Northwest would
|
||
stand at this stage of her social progress. It was “built”--a word
|
||
more appropriate to woman’s dress A.D. 1600 than today--of heavy
|
||
turquoise-blue brocade, the design outlined here and there with gold
|
||
thread. The long wrinkled sleeves almost covered her hands, and,
|
||
like the deep square of the neck, were tipped with fur. Her mass of
|
||
blue-black hair was closely twisted around her head from brow to the
|
||
nape of her neck, held above the low forehead by a jewelled stiletto
|
||
Ora had given her in Genoa, “to remind her of her midnight diversions
|
||
in the Renaissance palace over which her dim ancestral memories
|
||
brooded.” This she had dismissed as damn nonsense, but she liked the
|
||
stiletto with its rudely set stones, and had promised to wear it the
|
||
first time she got inside one of her near-Renaissance gowns.
|
||
The pale subtle blue of the dress made her eyes look light and
|
||
altogether blue, the thick black underlashes and full white underlids
|
||
giving them an expression when in repose of cold voluptuousness. Her
|
||
skin against the dark edge of fur was as white as warm new milk.
|
||
Her costume and her regal air would have made her noticeable in the
|
||
proudest assemblage. She was well aware that not only was she a very
|
||
beautiful woman tonight but a dangerous one. And she might have stepped
|
||
from one of the tarnished frames in the Palazzo Valdobia.
|
||
After the maid had been dismissed, she examined herself even more
|
||
critically. The coral of lip and cheek, while still eloquent of youth
|
||
and health, was more delicate than of old; all suggestion of buxomness
|
||
had disappeared. She looked older than when she had left Butte; the
|
||
casual observer would have given her thirty years; her cheeks were
|
||
less full, her mouth had firmer lines; the cold grey-blue eyes more
|
||
depth, justified their classic setting. Even her profile, released by
|
||
the finer contour of cheek and thrown into high relief by the severe
|
||
arrangement of her hair, contributed to the antique harmonies of her
|
||
head and form.
|
||
“You’ll do,” she said to her image, and went down stairs.
|
||
Several guests arrived at once and she was standing before her antique
|
||
English chimneypiece carved in California, chatting with three of
|
||
them when Gregory entered the room. She nodded amiably as if they
|
||
had met too recently for formalities. He took the cue and paused to
|
||
exchange a few words with two men that stood near the door. But Ida
|
||
had seen the startled opening of his narrow eyes which meant so much
|
||
in him. She also noted that, as other guests came in, he looked at
|
||
her again and again. In truth Gregory was startled almost out of his
|
||
trained stolidity. He had known a certain side of Ida’s cleverness,
|
||
and believed when he sent her abroad that she would make much of her
|
||
opportunities, the greatest of which was her constant association
|
||
with Ora Blake; but that she would return in less than a year looking
|
||
the great lady, and the handsomest woman he had ever seen, even his
|
||
energetic imagination had failed to consider. Magnetism, as of old,
|
||
surrounded her like an aura, but to this he was insensible, his own
|
||
magnetism having been caught and entangled with that of another. He
|
||
felt very proud of his wife, however, and, with a sudden impulse
|
||
of loyalty, he crossed the room and stood at her side. He also was
|
||
prompted to say in a tone pitched to reach other ears:
|
||
“By George, you are simply stunning. I haven’t seen
|
||
this--a--frock--dress--before.”
|
||
“Gown, my dear, gown. It only arrived a few days ago. I shall take you
|
||
to Europe with me next time--”
|
||
“Take him soon!” said Mrs. Cameron. “Don’t give him time to wear out
|
||
before he has begun to live. Our tired business men!”
|
||
“Next year!” said Ida, gayly. “He has half-promised and I’ll not let
|
||
him off.” As she looked into his eyes with bright friendliness, his
|
||
face relaxed with the smile which, she suddenly remembered, always had
|
||
won her from anger or indifference. He was openly delighted with her,
|
||
the more completely as he was both puzzled and relieved to see that
|
||
those splendid eyes held neither cold anger nor feminine reproach.
|
||
Moreover, although they softened for an instant before she was obliged
|
||
to turn away, it was with an expression that made her look merely sweet
|
||
and womanly, not in the least coquette or siren. Other guests claimed
|
||
her attention. He heard her give a little hiss, and saw her eyes flash.
|
||
Then he forgot her. Ora had entered the room.
|
||
Her gown, of some soft imponderable fabric that gave the impression
|
||
of depth in colour, was the peculiar flaming blue of the night sky of
|
||
Montana. Gregory was reminded instantly of the night they had sat on
|
||
the steps of the School of Mines, with the pulsing sky so close above
|
||
them. The upper part of the gown was cut in points that curved above
|
||
her slight bust, the spaces between filled with snow-white chiffon
|
||
which appeared to be folded softly about the body. She wore her pearls,
|
||
but at the base of her slender throat was a closely fitting string of
|
||
Montana sapphires, of the same hot almost angry blue. Her little head
|
||
with its masses of soft ashen hair seemed to sway on the long stem-like
|
||
neck, her stellar eyes blazed. Her costume extinguished every other
|
||
blue in the room.
|
||
“Really!” said Mrs. Cameron, whose black eyes under her coronet of
|
||
iron grey hair were snapping, “these two dear friends should have had
|
||
a consultation over their costumes for tonight.” She had never liked
|
||
Ora, and although, as the leader of Butte society, she made a point of
|
||
speaking well of all whom she did not feel obliged to ignore, she had
|
||
taken a deep liking to Ida; moreover, always a handsome woman herself,
|
||
she felt both sympathetic and indignant. This was Ida’s night, and she
|
||
scented treachery.
|
||
She had addressed her remark to Gregory, but although he looked at
|
||
her politely he would not have heard thunder crashing on the roof. He
|
||
wondered if he were standing erect; he had a confused impression that
|
||
that wonderful blue gown was burning alcohol whose fumes were in his
|
||
head and whose flames swirled through all his senses. And the woman
|
||
within those curling blue flames was so much more beautiful than his
|
||
memory of her that he forgot not only his recent tribute to Ida, but
|
||
her bare existence until she tapped him sharply on the arm.
|
||
“Dinner has been announced,” she said. “You are to take in Mrs.
|
||
Cameron.” Ida was smiling again; she had dismissed anger and annoyance;
|
||
nothing was to dim the radiance of her spirits tonight. She and Ora
|
||
would be at opposite ends of the table, and she could keep the length
|
||
of the drawing-room between them when they returned.
|
||
Gregory’s face never betrayed him, particularly when he kept his
|
||
eyelids down, and, as he shook hands with Ora in the dining-room he
|
||
told her he was glad to see her again as casually as if his hand had
|
||
not tingled to crush hers. He talked with Mrs. Cameron, however, as
|
||
long as possible, but when her attention was claimed by the man on her
|
||
right, he was obliged to turn to Ora. By this time his blood was still.
|
||
Eating is commonplace work, and talking the inevitable platitudes of a
|
||
dinner’s earlier courses will steady the most riotous pulses.
|
||
Ora smiled impersonally; her eyes might have beheld the husband of her
|
||
friend for the first time.
|
||
“I am so glad to be able to ask you something about my mine,” she said.
|
||
“Ida tells me that you have reopened it.”
|
||
“Yes, they are already through the fault and driving for the vein.
|
||
There happened to be a good man here looking for a job when I got
|
||
Mark’s telegram, a young engineer from the East, named Raymond. The
|
||
miners are good capable men, too, and as Osborne and Douglas installed
|
||
a compressor, the work should be pretty quick. I fancy you’ll recover
|
||
the vein in a week or two.”
|
||
“I wonder if I shall? Mark thinks you infallible, but it seems too good
|
||
to be true.”
|
||
“The vein is there, about a hundred feet down, but how rich it is I do
|
||
not venture to predict.”
|
||
“Well, never mind,” Ora smiled happily. “I shall have the fun of
|
||
looking for it, and I want to be with the men when they find it.”
|
||
“Oh--Ah--It really would be better for you to give up that idea of
|
||
going out there to stay----”
|
||
“I thought I would give to you the opportunity to say that at once! Do
|
||
go on and relieve your mind.”
|
||
“It is neither safe nor desirable,” he said sulkily. “I may have a row
|
||
on my hands any minute. Your men and my men are a decent lot, but the
|
||
Apex have employed a lot of scum so ignorant that there is no knowing
|
||
what they may do in a crisis--in the hope of currying favour with
|
||
their superiors. They would merely be made scapegoats or--canned--I
|
||
beg pardon, fired--but they don’t know that, and they’re as hard a lot
|
||
as Europe ever kicked on to our dump heap. Better stay here for the
|
||
present.”
|
||
“I’ve sent out all the furniture for the bungalow, and Custer and a
|
||
Chinaman to put it in order. I suppose my engineer can camp in the
|
||
other cottage until it is finished. That is quite close to mine, I
|
||
understand.”
|
||
“Oh, of course--but why not stay at my ranch house----”
|
||
“That is too far from the scene of operations. Please don’t bother
|
||
about me. I should hate to think I was on your mind--you have enough! I
|
||
shall be well protected, and I’ve even bought an automatic. I suppose
|
||
being a born Westerner I should call it a gun. But it’s such a little
|
||
one. I shall carry it always----”
|
||
“Yes, promise that.”
|
||
“I’ve even had a little bag made, like those they wore years ago, to
|
||
fasten to my belt, and I shall keep it in that.”
|
||
“Very well.” He dismissed the subject. “I--ah--there’s something I
|
||
heard today, but perhaps I should not speak of it. Only Mark is such an
|
||
old friend of mine----”
|
||
“I suppose you saw Mr. Luning and he told you that we are to separate.”
|
||
“Yes, that is it.”
|
||
“I intend to live in Europe: I suppose you think that a callous reason.”
|
||
“It’s as good as most reasons for divorce in this country. When is Mark
|
||
coming back?”
|
||
“Not for two months. Nothing will be done until then. I want to have my
|
||
mining experience first and I shall leave Montana as soon as the papers
|
||
are served.”
|
||
“Ah!”
|
||
Her partner claimed her at the moment and, his own still being
|
||
occupied, he observed her furtively. He thought that she too looked
|
||
older, but not because advantages had improved her; rather--he groped
|
||
for the words that would give definiteness to his impression--as if
|
||
some experience had saddened her. She had a softer expression. The
|
||
blood rushed to his head and he almost choked with jealousy, his
|
||
intuitions carrying him straight to the truth. “By God! She has loved
|
||
some man,” he thought. Then he set his teeth. So much the better.
|
||
But when she turned to him again, he said impulsively, although his
|
||
tones were light:
|
||
“You never did fit this Western life of ours. Of course you have found
|
||
a more civilised mate in Europe?”
|
||
“You are all wrong,” she said gaily. “My only love at present is my
|
||
mine. My mine! You should understand if anybody can.”
|
||
“Oh, yes, I understand that magnet. But I naturally thought----”
|
||
“What everybody else will think when the news is out. But I am
|
||
astonished that you should jump at anything so commonplace.” Her heart
|
||
was hammering under the concentrated intensity of his gaze; and as
|
||
if he realised suddenly that he might be betraying himself he said
|
||
sarcastically:
|
||
“As there are--I was told today--no less than six divorces pending in
|
||
this set which my wife has the honour to entertain tonight, and as all
|
||
are to intermarry, so to speak, when liberated, my conclusion in your
|
||
case was probably due to the force of suggestion.”
|
||
“Well, I forgive you if you promise to believe none of the absurd
|
||
stories you are sure to hear. I am in love with freedom. Now tell me
|
||
what you think of Ida? Isn’t she wonderful?”
|
||
Gregory looked down the table at his wife sitting between the two most
|
||
important men in Butte and entertaining both with animated dignity. She
|
||
met his eyes and smiled brilliantly. She knew that he was proud of her;
|
||
she had accomplished the second manœuvre in her flank attack: her first
|
||
had been to put him at his ease.
|
||
“Yes,” he said to Ora. “She is. It is almost beyond belief. And she is
|
||
your handiwork!” The two might have been life-long intimates, and Ida
|
||
a mere kinswoman of both, so little did the oddity of this discussion
|
||
occur to Gregory at least.
|
||
“And in a way my present to you.” Ora spoke with a charming
|
||
graciousness. “Mark had given me a tremendous idea of your abilities.
|
||
The day I met Ida I saw her possibilities, and I made up my mind then
|
||
and there that when the world claimed you your wife should be not only
|
||
an inspiration but equipped to render you the practical and social help
|
||
that every rising man needs. Isn’t it splendid to think that she will
|
||
always sit at the head of your table?”
|
||
Gregory was staring hard at her again. “You did that deliberately?” he
|
||
asked.
|
||
“Yes. Deliberately. Ida is so clever that she was bound to develop with
|
||
your rising fortunes, particularly if you sent her to Europe. But it
|
||
would have taken longer. I couldn’t wait. My father inspired me with
|
||
the deepest admiration and respect for our Western men. I had made up
|
||
my mind that you were born into the front rank, and I wanted, as a
|
||
Western woman, and my father’s daughter, to do something to help you.
|
||
Tell me that you are satisfied and that you are as proud of Ida as she
|
||
is of you--that--that--you simply adore her.” She did not flinch, and
|
||
looked him straight in the eyes, her own full of young, almost gushing,
|
||
enthusiasm. Her heart had almost stopped beating.
|
||
“I certainly am proud of her, and grateful to you. No doubt she will be
|
||
very helpful if I am forced into politics to conserve my interests.”
|
||
His tones were flat. He had come to his senses, and he was too loyal
|
||
to hint that he no longer loved his wife: but Ora’s face was suddenly
|
||
flooded with a lovely colour, and her eyes looked like grey mist
|
||
through which the sun was bursting. She asked him,
|
||
“Aren’t you going to stay with us for a few days! We’d love to have
|
||
you?”
|
||
“I take the 6.10 for Pony in the morning. If I disappear before the
|
||
others it will be to snatch a few hours’ sleep in that gorgeous
|
||
four-poster in my room. After living in two rooms for so long I am
|
||
oppressed with all this magnificence----”
|
||
“Two rooms!” Ora’s voice rang out like an excited child’s. Gregory,
|
||
marvelling at the quick transitions of her sex, thought he had never
|
||
seen anyone look so happy. The gentle melancholy that had roused his
|
||
jealousy was obliterated. “Two rooms!”
|
||
“There is another shack just beyond where my Chinaman cooks for me, and
|
||
bunks, but I have only a bedroom and office--and a bathroom of sorts.
|
||
Even my secretary sleeps at the ranch house.”
|
||
“You dear innocent millionaire. No doubt the proletariat, reading of
|
||
your sudden wealth, and cursing you, pictures you wallowing in luxury.
|
||
Well, you shall come and sit sometimes in my comfortable living-room.
|
||
It is time you relearned the a, b, c, of comfort--before you relapse
|
||
into the pioneer.”
|
||
“Your bungalow looks as if it could be made very homelike.” He spoke
|
||
with unconscious wistfulness, and she raised friendly and impersonal
|
||
eyes to his.
|
||
“You shall see. I have what the French call the gift of installation,
|
||
and I have sent out nice things. I shall make tea for you when you come
|
||
to the surface at the end of the afternoon shift, and you shall sit in
|
||
the deepest of my chairs.”
|
||
“It sounds like heaven,” said Gregory, who despised tea.
|
||
Professor Becke, who had taken her in, and Mrs. Cameron simultaneously
|
||
addressed their temporary partners, and Gregory was now to listen to
|
||
an account, both spirited and kindly, of the admiration his wife had
|
||
excited in her native town. Mrs. Cameron suspected the breach, in spite
|
||
of the clever acting of both, and made up her mind to do what she could
|
||
to bridge it. She had not an inkling of the cause, for, like Ida, she
|
||
knew nothing of that fateful hour on the steps of the School of Mines;
|
||
but as there was no gossip abroad about either Gregory or his wife,
|
||
she inferred that it was one of those misunderstandings that so often
|
||
separate young couples, always prone to take themselves too seriously.
|
||
She knew that Gregory would value her praise; he not only had been
|
||
fond of her as a schoolboy, when he spent an occasional Saturday
|
||
with her son, but he knew that her experience of the world was very
|
||
wide. She was a woman whom long years of wealth had enabled to travel
|
||
extensively, she visited intimately at some of the greatest country
|
||
homes in Europe, and she had her own position in New York. She subtly
|
||
made Gregory feel prouder still of Ida, and then said teasingly:
|
||
“It is well that you have her devotion. I know of three men that are
|
||
quite off their heads about her----”
|
||
“Ah? Who are they?” A sultan may weary of his sultana, but his sultana
|
||
she is all the same.
|
||
“That I’ll not tell you. Even your wife could not, I fancy. I’ve never
|
||
seen a woman treat men with a more careless impartiality. What a
|
||
relief--with all these divorces pending. Merely a shuffling of cards,
|
||
too, I understand. It is disgusting. I asked your wife as a personal
|
||
favour to me to invite none of them tonight. Butte either has long
|
||
orgies of respectability or goes quite off her head.”
|
||
“My wife is singularly indifferent to men for a beautiful woman,”
|
||
replied Gregory, comfortably ignorant of his beautiful wife’s
|
||
depredations abroad. “Nor is she likely to countenance divorce. She has
|
||
a good deal of her old New England mother in her.” He had a haughty
|
||
contempt for explanations as a rule, but his quick instinct had caught
|
||
the significance of his companion’s remarks; knowing that Ida must wish
|
||
to stand well with this amiable but rigid arbiter of Butte’s court of
|
||
last resort, he added:
|
||
“I am sorry not to be in Butte oftener, and give her what little
|
||
assistance a man may, but it is all I can do to leave the mine for a
|
||
few hours every week or two.”
|
||
“That is the fate of too many of our American women married to our
|
||
too busy American men. But--well--Gregory--I have married sons and
|
||
daughters, and I am an old friend of yours. Young wives must not be
|
||
neglected, and resentment eats like a cancer until women are old enough
|
||
to be philosophical. Just think that over.” And before he could answer
|
||
Ida gave the signal and the men were left alone.
|
||
VIII
|
||
As the women dispersed about the long drawing-room Ora laid her arm
|
||
lightly round the waist of Ida, who was standing for the moment apart.
|
||
“Your dinner is a tremendous success, my dear,” she said, “and so are
|
||
you. That gown! It makes mine look so crude. I wish I had worn white as
|
||
I intended until the last minute. How splendidly everything went off.
|
||
Not a detail to criticise, and every woman has worn something new from
|
||
New York or Paris. But you--well, Ida, you are always beautiful, of
|
||
course, but tonight you are something more than lovely.”
|
||
“Oh, am I?” Ida gave a little gasp, forgetting her passing astonishment
|
||
at so much tribute from Ora at once. “Well, I ought to be. I never felt
|
||
quite like this in all my life. Geewhil--no, I’m too happy even for
|
||
slang. I wish I could sing.”
|
||
Ora sighed. “I’ve always known you would get everything you wanted, and
|
||
I can guess just how you feel tonight. You are a complete success. How
|
||
many people ever are able to say that?”
|
||
“Yes, I feel as if I owned the earth!” But her brows met in a puzzled
|
||
frown. “I never felt, though, as if even the conquest of Butte would
|
||
all but send me off my head. I never feel very much excited about any
|
||
old thing; it’s not my make; but I’ve got a sort of shiver inside of
|
||
me, and a watery feeling in the heart region. If that chef had spoilt
|
||
the dinner I’d have gone out and wrung his neck.”
|
||
“Well, nothing can go wrong now. The worst is over, and no dinner was
|
||
ever more delicious. Why don’t you let them dance? I know that Mrs.
|
||
O’Hara plays.”
|
||
“Good idea! I’ll ring this minute for a few of those extra near-waiters
|
||
to take out the rugs and move the furniture.”
|
||
Two of the younger women, who had returned not long since from San
|
||
Francisco, were showing their scandalised friends the turkey-trot when
|
||
the men came down the hall from the dining-room. Ida drew Gregory aside.
|
||
“Tell me,” she asked, with an eager almost childish note in her voice
|
||
new to him. “Did it go off well? Am I all I ought to be after all the
|
||
money you have spent on me? Do I look nice in my fine clothes?”
|
||
Gregory patted her on the shoulder. “I know little about such things,”
|
||
he said kindly, “but it outclassed all the banquets I’ve been obliged
|
||
to attend in the last six or eight months. I felt quite proud that it
|
||
was in my own house--yours, to be literal--and Mrs. Blake assured me
|
||
that she had never seen anything better done.”
|
||
“Ora is an angel, and without her--but you know all that. Tell
|
||
me--well, Gregory, I want a good old-fashioned compliment!”
|
||
His voice lost its bantering tone and became formal with gallantry:
|
||
“You are, as ever, the handsomest woman in Montana. I shouldn’t wonder
|
||
a bit if those New York reporters were right and that you are the
|
||
handsomest woman in America.”
|
||
Ida looked for a long moment into his eyes. Again her brows met in a
|
||
puzzled frown, this time because her singular lightness of spirit had
|
||
fled abruptly. She was too proud, too far developed beyond the old Ida,
|
||
to put forth the arts of the siren until they were alone; but she asked
|
||
softly, and again with that almost childish naïveté:
|
||
“Do you really admire me?”
|
||
“You are all right,” he said with a heartiness that masked a sudden
|
||
misgiving. “I must come in and take you to the theatre the next time a
|
||
good show comes to town. Let me know. I’ll gratify my vanity by sitting
|
||
beside you in a box----”
|
||
“There’s a play tomorrow night. Stay over!”
|
||
“I’m sorry. I don’t dare. Apex is sinking for all she’s worth. We may
|
||
have a set-to any minute. It was a risk even to come away for a night.”
|
||
“Oh, do let me go out, and down into the mine----”
|
||
“I should think not. And do your best to keep Mrs. Blake in Butte for
|
||
at least a week.”
|
||
“Well, let me go out when the danger is over. I long to see
|
||
chalcopyrite in the vein. I saw some beautiful specimens at the School
|
||
of Mines the other day. It looks like pure gold.”
|
||
He looked at her in amazement. “What on earth do you know about ores?
|
||
Did you include Freiberg in your itinerary?”
|
||
“This is Butte, remember. I no sooner returned than I realised how
|
||
interesting she was.”
|
||
“Ah, well, when this affair is settled, come out and stay with Mrs.
|
||
Blake and I’ll take you down. I’ve no place to put you up. Even the
|
||
ranch house is full. Mrs. Blake’s manager and foreman are boarding
|
||
there at present, and Oakley also puts up my secretary----”
|
||
“And those crops Oakley put in with such enthusiasm?” cried Ida with a
|
||
sudden inspiration, and racking her memory. “Did they turn out as he
|
||
expected? Was there a drought--in--in--those states?”
|
||
“What a memory you have! Yes, Oakley is doing wonders, and the drought
|
||
arrived as per schedule. He would scorn to put the ranch under the
|
||
ditch, although that is my long suit at present.”
|
||
“I suppose Circle-G Ranch looks like Holland by this time.”
|
||
“Not quite yet! But the work is progressing splendidly, all except----”
|
||
He paused. It had never been his habit to talk to her, and the
|
||
complicated details of business he regarded as beyond the intelligent
|
||
apprehension of any woman. But as Ida moved closer to him with
|
||
wide-open eyes she looked intelligent enough to understand anything,
|
||
and a letter received that morning had been on his mind ever since.
|
||
“There is some trouble about the railroad,” he said. “The Land Company
|
||
was to build it, but either doesn’t want the bother or really has lost
|
||
a lot of money, as it claims. I placed a deed in escrow which pledges
|
||
me to build it if the Land Company failed to keep its agreement; and
|
||
the seed houses, which bought several large blocks of land, and a
|
||
number of private settlers are demanding that the railroad be begun--it
|
||
was to be finished at the end of a year----”
|
||
Ida saw her opportunity and grasped it. “We both must do our duty, and
|
||
not monopolise each other,” she said hurriedly. “But tell me all about
|
||
it after they have gone. Now, go and dance with Kitty Collier. She’s
|
||
the best-looking woman in Butte. I can’t dance in this harness, but
|
||
I’ll talk English politics with my portlier guests.” As he smiled and
|
||
moved toward the music, she laid her hand lightly on his arm. “I want
|
||
to thank you for coming tonight, Gregory,” she said. “It means a great
|
||
deal to me socially. Besides, it is good to see you again.” And this
|
||
time she looked very sweet; but there was a slight aloofness in her
|
||
manner, as if to admonish him that, although he was forgiven, there was
|
||
still a breach which it was for him to close. Then she added lightly:
|
||
“Well, we’ll talk it all over later. Go, now, and dance.”
|
||
* * * * *
|
||
Gregory stood by the front door talking to two of the men, whose wives
|
||
had walked on; their homes were but a door or two away. Ida ran up the
|
||
stairs to Ora’s room, where they unhooked each other.
|
||
“You look tired,” said Ida, sympathetically.
|
||
“Oh, I am tired,” replied Ora, her arms hanging. “Tired. Tired.”
|
||
“It’s a long while since you danced like that. Just drop into bed. Lend
|
||
me a scarf, will you?”
|
||
She covered her opened gown with the lace and walked slowly over to
|
||
her room. Then she suddenly turned back to the head of the stairs. The
|
||
three men were still talking below.
|
||
“Gregory,” she called, and her voice was very sweet.
|
||
“Yes?”
|
||
“Lock up, will you? The servants have gone to bed.”
|
||
“I will.”
|
||
“Don’t forget,” and omitting to add a good-night, she went swiftly to
|
||
her room, changed her formal evening gown for a soft combination of
|
||
yellow silk and lace that made her look like a tulip in a primrose bed,
|
||
let down the black masses of her hair, and threw herself into a deep
|
||
chair. But there was no repose in her attitude. More than once her body
|
||
stiffened and she raised her head. Pride and shrewdness forbade her
|
||
to leave her door open, and it would be impossible to hear that light
|
||
panther-like tread on the heavy carpet of the stair. The front door
|
||
might have closed while she was changing in the dressing-room.
|
||
Suddenly she heard it slam. Nervous as she was she smiled
|
||
reminiscently. Gregory might be soft of foot, but otherwise he was as
|
||
noisy as most men. Then the smile froze until her lips were distended
|
||
in a grin. Another door had slammed. Gregory was in his own room.
|
||
After a few moments she became aware that her body was rigid and that
|
||
she was grasping the arms of her chair. She rose with an exclamation of
|
||
impatience, but stood with her head bent, listening intently. Suddenly
|
||
she swayed a little, once more flooded with that sense of excited
|
||
gladness with which guests and chefs had had naught to do: she thought
|
||
she heard a door open softly, a light footfall. But her straining
|
||
ear-drums had deceived her. The house was as still as a mausoleum.
|
||
She pressed her hands against her breast in the gesture the stage has
|
||
borrowed from life; her heart felt as if swimming against an undertow.
|
||
Then she began pacing up and down. After her habit she tried to arrange
|
||
her thoughts by putting them into words, and, as people still do off
|
||
the stage, muttered them aloud.
|
||
“My God! Do I care as much as that? Do I really _care_? No! No! No!
|
||
Any woman of pride, let alone vanity, would make up her mind to bring
|
||
her husband back--especially if she could make him as proud of her
|
||
as I made him of me tonight. And when he still thinks me beautiful.
|
||
What woman wouldn’t? Even if she didn’t have an ounce of any kind of
|
||
feeling for him? Men are only interesting when they forget about us in
|
||
that purely masculine world where women are warned off the grass. To
|
||
lure them back--that is the spice of life in this country. And if one
|
||
doesn’t succeed the first time--he may be so tired and sleepy that he’s
|
||
forgotten about me--or shy, afraid I’d laugh at him--the world does not
|
||
come to an end tonight--What an idiot I am! I made him admire me more
|
||
than ever, astonished him--why am I not satisfied for the present?--It
|
||
can’t be that I care--that I long for him to come--Good God! I’d rather
|
||
be dead than _that_!”
|
||
But she went to the door and, laying her ear against it, listened until
|
||
she became aware that her lungs were bursting with imprisoned breath.
|
||
Then she sank into a chair trembling, her eyes filled with fear. A
|
||
moment more and she flung her arms over the table and dropped her face
|
||
upon them and broke into heavy weeping.
|
||
IX
|
||
Ora looked round the large living-room of her bungalow with a deep
|
||
sense of content. The walls were covered with a material coarse in
|
||
weave and of a red warm but not too bright. The colour was repeated in
|
||
the divan and chairs, melting softly into browns that harmonised with
|
||
the heavy beams of the ceiling. A few Navajo rugs covered the floor.
|
||
Above the divan of many cushions was a bookshelf crowded with the new
|
||
fiction of two continents. Several shelves, built like a bookcase,
|
||
occupied a corner and were furnished more ponderously. In the middle
|
||
of the room a large table was half covered with the best periodicals
|
||
of the day, although there was room for a large lamp with a red shade
|
||
and a vase filled with wild flowers. Down at the far end of the room,
|
||
which was about thirty feet long, and opposite the kitchen, were
|
||
the dining-table and a small sideboard. The main door opened upon a
|
||
verandah, and one beside the fireplace into a narrow hall, giving
|
||
privacy to the bedrooms. Ora had no atavistic yearnings for the life
|
||
of the pioneer; she might feel as much at home in a bungalow as in a
|
||
palace, but elementals, save when pictorially valuable, like overhead
|
||
beams, were rigidly excluded.
|
||
Her hands clasped behind her, she drifted up and down the long room,
|
||
her mode of ambulation expressing the state of her mind. Quick and
|
||
final as she could be in decision, if necessity spurred, the deeper
|
||
sensuousness in her nature impelled her to drift whenever circumstances
|
||
would permit. For two months she intended to drift--or gamble! She had
|
||
not come out here further to alienate the affections of her friend’s
|
||
husband, and those old tumultuous dreams were still crowded in some
|
||
remote brain cell with seals on the door. She had even told herself in
|
||
so many words that she had no desire for anything so terrific as their
|
||
complete materialisation. She had plumbed the depth and intensity of
|
||
life in her imagination. Let that suffice. And reality was not so much
|
||
to be feared because of the wreck it might make of her life as because
|
||
it was reasonably sure to leave a corpse in her memory, instead of that
|
||
ever burning soul of past delights.
|
||
But she had come out to her mine to enjoy the constant companionship
|
||
of Gregory Compton before she left her country for ever and married
|
||
a European. That much she owed to the extraordinary imaginative
|
||
experience in which they had been one. If she could spend long hours
|
||
with him, make him as eager for her companionship as she was for his,
|
||
forget his mine now and then, feel that mysterious and satisfying bond
|
||
of the spirit, she would ask no more, not even an admission of love
|
||
when they parted.
|
||
When a woman goes on a still hunt for a man’s soul she is far more
|
||
dangerous than the obvious siren, for her self-delusion is complete,
|
||
her guards are down, her wiles disarming. Ora had had too little
|
||
practical experience of men to be prepared to admit, in spite of her
|
||
abstract knowledge of life, that there has been but one foundation of
|
||
love since the world began, and never will be another till life on
|
||
this planet ends, whatever may be the starry mysteries of the spheres.
|
||
But while she was (spasmodically) too honest to deny even her own sex
|
||
encumbrance, she believed, like many other, particularly American women
|
||
of narrow experience, that it had been politely emasculated by the
|
||
higher civilisation, was merely synonymous with poetry, romance, and
|
||
sentiment. This convention was imported to the New World by England’s
|
||
middle-class and became a convenient national superstition. It is on
|
||
the wane.
|
||
That Gregory, granted she were successful in capturing his soul, might
|
||
desire to contribute the rest of himself to the spoils, now that she no
|
||
longer was the wife of his friend, let loose those subversive passions
|
||
she had divined the night of their meeting and dared to recognise in
|
||
the realm of imagination, she would have refused to admit had the
|
||
possibility occurred to her. She was out for the ideal, and not yet had
|
||
she learned to take her imagination in hand like a refractory child.
|
||
Moreover, she had an imperious will, gracefully as she concealed it.
|
||
This last year of freedom and wealth and feminine triumphs had tempered
|
||
that will into a pliable and dangerous weapon. What she wanted she
|
||
would have. As she planned a thing so should it work out. But the
|
||
details--ah, they were veiled in the future, and from their mysteries
|
||
came this reflex vibration, this pleasant sense of drifting, of
|
||
wondering how it would all begin and what would happen next.
|
||
In a sense it had begun. Gregory had called two days before to ask
|
||
if she were comfortable. He was in his overalls (purposely), and had
|
||
refused at first to sit down, but finally had succumbed to the deepest
|
||
of the chairs before the log fire. He had finished by remaining for
|
||
supper, and again had occupied the chair until eleven o’clock. Neither
|
||
had suspected the other’s secret passion, for love before union, being
|
||
nine parts imagination, needs solitude for indulgence, and is capable,
|
||
moreover, of long and satisfying quietudes if fed with externals. There
|
||
was sheer delight in sitting together by that warm intimate fire,
|
||
at the dining-table at the end of the long shadowy room, in feeling
|
||
cut off from the world on the edge of that rough mountain camp, in
|
||
listening to the soughing of the pines during the silences. That both
|
||
were on their guard lest the other take fright and the experience
|
||
be impossible of repetition but exaggerated the atmosphere of
|
||
friendliness, of almost sexless comradeship. Gregory betrayed one only
|
||
of his reflections: he admitted to himself what Ora subtly compelled
|
||
him to admit, and had no difficulty in divining, that the companionship
|
||
of woman was a blessed thing, and that he had been the loneliest of men.
|
||
Their talk was mainly of ores! She was permitted to learn how little
|
||
else interested him in comparison with the enthralling inside of
|
||
Montana. But he told her also the legends of the great copper mines on
|
||
Lake Superior, so old that copper was found pure, looking much like the
|
||
smelted product from the copper ores of the later geological formations
|
||
of the Rocky Mountains. These vast mines, particularly that on Isle
|
||
Royal, bore unmistakable signs of having been worked systematically
|
||
by a prehistoric people experienced in mining; presumably by the
|
||
Atlantans, who, after their own mines were worked out and they still
|
||
demanded “orichalcum” for their monuments and bronze for their
|
||
implements, went annually in ships for the metal. That there had been
|
||
a self-supporting mining colony on Isle Royal was indicated by certain
|
||
agricultural remains.
|
||
Gregory and Ora had amused themselves reconstructing that old time
|
||
when the metal island was as lively as today, and considerably more
|
||
picturesque--owing to the alternative of skins for muck-spattered
|
||
overalls; an underground chapter of the Niebelungenlied, its gnomes
|
||
toiling down in those two miles of workings, stoping out less in a
|
||
hundred years than the methods of today force a mine to yield in one.
|
||
How they must have swarmed to the surface, regardless of discipline,
|
||
at the first signal of the approaching ships, their one link with a
|
||
world that was not all water and forest and underground cavern. By
|
||
what tortuous way did those archaic ships travel from the Atlantic to
|
||
the northwest corner of that vast inland sheet; unless, indeed, which
|
||
is likely, subsequent upheavals have destroyed a waterway which may
|
||
have connected sea and lake prior to 10000 B.C.[B] How many of those
|
||
old ships lie in the bed of Lake Superior, laden with rude nuggets of
|
||
copper, pounded from the gangue, or, who knows? smelted by a lost art
|
||
into sheets and blocks? Archaic ships rode high, and no doubt those
|
||
from Atlantis were overladen; for what has kept Atlantis in the realm
|
||
of myth so long save the unscientific legend that she perished of greed
|
||
and its vicious offspring? What archaic mysteries may not the terrible
|
||
storms of that great north lake yet uncover? What strange variety of
|
||
copper, washed and bitten by the waters of twelve thousand years, for
|
||
which the enraptured geologist must find a new name? Who knows?--the
|
||
bed of Lake Superior may be one unbroken floor of malachite; and the
|
||
North American Indian of that region the descendant of those ancient
|
||
miners, abandoned and forgotten when Atlantis plunged to the bottom of
|
||
the sea.
|
||
It was Ora who advanced these last frivolous theories, and--the clock
|
||
striking eleven--Gregory sprang to his feet.
|
||
“Likely as any,” he said. “All theories change about as often as it
|
||
is time to get out a new edition of an encyclopædia, or develop a
|
||
‘new school’ which makes its reputation by the short cut of upsetting
|
||
the solemn conclusions of its predecessors. I’m going down into the
|
||
mine.” He bolted out with no further ceremony, but Ora was long since
|
||
accustomed to the manners of Western men. She went to bed feeling that
|
||
sadness had gone out of the world.
|
||
She had not seen him since. Nor had anything new and interesting
|
||
happened. Her manager, Raymond, refused to take her down in the mine,
|
||
alleging that when Apex broke into the workings of Perch of the Devil,
|
||
there was sure to be a fight, and the bohunks would retreat, not up
|
||
their own shaft but through the tunnels of the Primo mine. The young
|
||
man was manifestly distressed to refuse any boon to so charming a
|
||
woman, and he and his foreman had moved at once into the half-finished
|
||
cottage, but he heartily wished her back in Butte, nevertheless. The
|
||
best of miners love a fight, and it would be impossible to protect her
|
||
from flying bullets if the row was continued above ground. Ora merely
|
||
had laughed when he begged her to return or to remain within doors, but
|
||
had promised to be prudent and flourished her automatic .25.
|
||
X
|
||
She glanced at the clock. It was half-past three. She knew that Gregory
|
||
frequently went below in the morning, and had half expected that he
|
||
would cross over to her hill for a moment when he came up at three
|
||
o’clock. The drifting mood vanished. She decided that two days were
|
||
enough for feminine passivity and went to her bedroom and changed her
|
||
pretty house frock for a stout out-of-doors’ costume of forest green
|
||
tweed: as she had no mind to look either the outworn Western heroine of
|
||
romance, or a fright, she had omitted khaki from her mountain wardrobe.
|
||
She tied a light green veil round her head, put on a pair of loose
|
||
chamois gloves, selected a green parasol lined with pink, and went out
|
||
to give the fates a gentle shove.
|
||
Hitherto she had so far yielded to the solicitude of her manager as to
|
||
take her walks through the pine woods above her bungalow, but today she
|
||
marched deliberately through her grove and stood for several moments
|
||
on the edge of the little bluff above the tableland on which her claim
|
||
was located. It was her first prolonged look at the three mining
|
||
camps, for she had arrived at night. She had driven out occasionally
|
||
to mining camps with her father, once or twice with Mark; the scene
|
||
was both typical and picturesquely ugly. In or near the centre of each
|
||
claim was the shaft house; fifty feet beyond--the distance prescribed
|
||
by law to prevent overhead fires from communicating with underground
|
||
timbers--were the buildings containing the hoisting machinery and the
|
||
compressed air plant. Scattered about were the shacks of the miners,
|
||
the long bunk- and mess-houses, blacksmith and carpenter shops. Just
|
||
below the Apex claim, and on Government land, an enterprising publican
|
||
had established himself. On all sides were other claims of recent
|
||
location, for there had been the inevitable rush.
|
||
The rude buildings were grey and weather-beaten, and all traces of the
|
||
gentle spring verdure had disappeared. About the collar of each shaft
|
||
was an immense dump heap, waste rock brought up from the depths, and
|
||
the highest of these was on Perch of the Devil. Near each were the ore
|
||
bins, but these for the most part were empty, and, save on the De Smet
|
||
hill, there was a notable absence of “double-sixes.” The Primo vein had
|
||
not been recovered, Apex had not yet touched bottom; Gregory Compton,
|
||
for reasons best known to himself, had changed his original plan and
|
||
was merely uncovering his new vein, taking out as little of its ore as
|
||
possible. His bins were furnished with ore from the second level of his
|
||
mine, where work had proceeded steadily on the original vein.
|
||
The men off shift were standing about in groups as they did in Butte,
|
||
or passing in and out of the saloon. And the racket was deafening: the
|
||
roar of the machinery in the hoisting and compressor houses, the crash
|
||
of rock dumped from the buckets or skips, the ringing of hammer on
|
||
anvil. The scene was not beautiful but it was alive! One could fancy
|
||
the thrill of the hidden metals, knowing that their hour, after vast
|
||
geological ages of waiting, was come; that, like mortals, they were to
|
||
agonise in the crucible of life and achieve their ultimate destiny.
|
||
Ora walked through the grove until she was beyond the long mess-house
|
||
at the back of her claim, climbed over the abrupt rise of Apex--which,
|
||
combined with the hardness of the rock, had made its task so long--and,
|
||
ascertaining that the larger buildings hid her, crawled under the De
|
||
Smet fence, and drew a long breath as she set her feet squarely on the
|
||
famous Perch of the Devil. Here the buildings, large and small, were
|
||
scattered up to the brow of the hill and over on the other side. It
|
||
had, in fact, something of the appearance of a growing village with
|
||
irregular streets; and before several of the cabins children were
|
||
playing, or women took their Monday washing from the line. The fronts
|
||
of some of these cottages were painted white, and here and there
|
||
flowers grew in boxes. There were even a reading-room and a large
|
||
“general store.” Altogether Perch of the Devil looked as if it might
|
||
grow larger, and more solid and permanent of aspect, with the years.
|
||
Ora walked through the crooked streets on the steep hillside until
|
||
she reached the deep chamber into which had leached the acids of the
|
||
centuries to enrich the ores, and incidentally Gregory Compton.
|
||
Thousands of tons of dump made a hill in itself and shut off the view
|
||
to the south, but below were the acres of waving wheat, the alfalfa
|
||
with its purple flower, the sprouting flax, the winding creek that
|
||
was often dry but sometimes wet, the brush sheds for the cattle, the
|
||
substantial farm buildings. The broad peaceful expanse looked as
|
||
if even a winter wind had never shaken it, so entirely did it seem
|
||
dissociated from the frantic energies of its northeast corner. And
|
||
still beyond was perfect beauty: the massive pine-covered mountains,
|
||
rising tier above tier, ridges of the great Rockies, far away and up to
|
||
the sky-cutting line, glittering with eternal snows. For a few moments
|
||
Ora forgot the raucous noises about her, Nature delivering herself
|
||
of her precious children with loud protesting pains. Then she turned
|
||
suddenly and looked upward.
|
||
Gregory had just stepped from his cabin. For a moment he did not see
|
||
her, but stood staring, his hands in his pockets, at the distant
|
||
mountains. He wore his favourite overalls and a battered cap on
|
||
the back of his head; but he looked so remote in spirit from that
|
||
materialising costume that Ora watched him with a sensation of helpless
|
||
jealousy. Not for a moment could she delude herself that he was
|
||
thinking of her. He looked like a seer.
|
||
“Can you see right into the heart of those mountains?” she asked
|
||
lightly, as she walked up the hill toward him. “You looked as if your
|
||
imagination were ‘blocking out’ thousands of tons of gold quartz.”
|
||
He started and coloured, but smiled with a sudden pleasure at the
|
||
charming picture in the foreground. “Something like that. This mine
|
||
is all right, and now that I’ve got over my disappointment, I have a
|
||
feeling for it that I guess I’ll never have for another mine--something
|
||
like the affection for one’s first born! But all the same I intend to
|
||
have a gold mine one of these days. Have you been admiring my view?”
|
||
He had walked down and joined her.
|
||
“Yes, but that is not what I came over here for. Nor is it what I came
|
||
out to the mines for. I brought a small library, but I find I am not in
|
||
the humour for books. I want to be doing something myself. Mr. Raymond
|
||
won’t take me down into my mine. I want to go down into yours--now.”
|
||
He hesitated a moment. “Well--why not? Apex is not working this
|
||
afternoon--something the matter with their compressor. They sounded
|
||
pretty close to our workings this morning, but the men quit about one
|
||
o’clock, and as they didn’t blast it was probably because the holes
|
||
weren’t deep enough. I’ve just been told that they can’t get to work
|
||
again before tomorrow. But you look much too fine!”
|
||
“Everything cleans; and I’ll leave my veil and parasol in the shaft
|
||
house.”
|
||
“All right,” he said abruptly. “Come along.”
|
||
When they were in the shaft house he asked, “Will you go down in the
|
||
skip or by the ladder?”
|
||
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly do anything so ignominious as to go down in a
|
||
bucket, and I’m very agile. How far is it?”
|
||
“A hundred feet. I shall only take you to the first level.”
|
||
Ora peered down into the black and slanting and apparently bottomless
|
||
well. A ladder was built flat against one side. A skip full of ore was
|
||
banging against the sides of the other compartment on its way up. She
|
||
looked again at the ladder, shuddered, and set her teeth.
|
||
Gregory put two candles in his pocket, inserted his long limber body
|
||
into the narrow aperture and ran down sideways.
|
||
“Oh!” gasped Ora. “I can’t do that. Please wait. I--I think I’d better
|
||
go down backward.”
|
||
“By all means. Sit down and turn round. I’ll catch hold of one of your
|
||
feet and put it on a rung. The rest will be easy.”
|
||
Ora followed these instructions gingerly, concluding that the skip
|
||
would have been more dignified. Then she forgot dignity and only
|
||
wondered if her bones had gone out of her: she had rolled over on her
|
||
equatorial zone and was kicking helplessly in the void. But as Gregory
|
||
caught her feet and planted them safely she set her teeth once more and
|
||
summoned her pride.
|
||
“Glad you have on stout boots,” he said, practically. “We’ve not enough
|
||
water in the mine for pumps, but it’s a little damp underfoot. Wait a
|
||
minute while I light a candle.” He struck a match and performed this
|
||
feat; how, Ora could not even guess; but she glanced down sideways and
|
||
saw that he was holding the lighted candle up at arm’s length.
|
||
“Come on,” he said. “You mustn’t be frightened.”
|
||
“I’m not a bit frightened, but don’t go too fast.”
|
||
Gregory, who was running down the ladder, moderated his pace, and sent
|
||
up an occasional word of cheer. Suddenly Ora heard a horrid noise below
|
||
like the crash and roar of an express train. “Has the mine fallen in?”
|
||
she gasped.
|
||
“Hope not. That’s the tram with ore and rock for the skip. By and by
|
||
we’ll use the waste rock to fill up the stopes with, but we’re only
|
||
blocking out at present.”
|
||
“How frightfully interesting mining is--in all its details!” Ora’s
|
||
hands were smarting, and every part of her, not excluding her
|
||
imagination, felt as if on the rack. “That noise is over!”
|
||
“Did I hear you say ‘Thank heaven’?”
|
||
“Of course not. How much farther is it? Haven’t we passed the first
|
||
level?”
|
||
“If we had I should be carrying you. Only about twenty feet more.”
|
||
And a few moments later, with the deepest sigh of relief she had ever
|
||
drawn, she was standing in the small station beside the shaft.
|
||
“It’s hard work the first time,” he said sympathetically. “But you’ll
|
||
soon get used to it.”
|
||
“How dark it is!”
|
||
“I’ll put in electricity when my troubles with Amalgamated are over.”
|
||
He lit another candle and handed it to her. “Be careful of your frock.”
|
||
The ore car was rumbling away in the distance. Gregory followed the
|
||
sound down the tunnel and Ora kept close at his heels. “I suppose we’ll
|
||
see something after a while?” she ventured. “I can’t see even you now,
|
||
only your candle.”
|
||
“We’ll soon be out of this,” he said cheerfully. “You see, we’ve had
|
||
to walk under the chamber from which I took that great deposit of
|
||
carbonates, and then some----” He paused a moment, but not before he
|
||
had turned acutely to the left. “This is where I lost the vein. We
|
||
are in the fault now. How would you like to be in an earthquake that
|
||
broke a vein in two and hurled one end----” His voice was lost in the
|
||
rattling roar of the compressed air drills, although there was nothing
|
||
to be seen until they reached another little station and faced a wider
|
||
drift on the right, some twelve feet long. Candles were flaring from
|
||
the miners’ candlesticks, whose long points were thrust into stulls or
|
||
the softer part of the rock, and four men were manipulating two of the
|
||
cumbersome air drills which stood on tripods. Gregory made a sign to
|
||
the shift boss, who shut off a valve, and the din stopped abruptly.
|
||
“Now,” said Gregory. “This is what you have come for.” He moved his
|
||
candle along the brassy glitter of chalcopyrite in the vein, steadying
|
||
her with his arm, for the floor was uneven and littered.
|
||
Ora trembled. She forgot the arm about her; it felt like mere steel
|
||
for that matter; she was in one of the magic caverns of her dreams and
|
||
she thrilled to the magnet of the ores. “It looks like pure gold,” she
|
||
whispered.
|
||
“So it is in a sense, and far more beautiful to look at in the vein.”
|
||
They had been standing near the opening of the drift. He guided her
|
||
down toward the farther end; the miners made way for them and went out
|
||
to the station nothing loath; owing their lives to what has cost many a
|
||
man his life and more, the caprice of a woman.
|
||
“I want to show you how the holes look before we put the sticks of
|
||
powder in,” Gregory began, as he waved his candle once more aloft, this
|
||
time over a less dazzling surface. He stopped abruptly. She felt his
|
||
body stiffen. Then, as he whirled her about, he screamed to the men:
|
||
“Get out! Run!”
|
||
Ora had the sensation of being swept along by a bar of steel burrowing
|
||
into the flesh of her waist. But in another instant she had lost all
|
||
sense of her body. There was a shock as if something had hit the hill
|
||
at its foundations, a dull roar, and then the crash of falling rock
|
||
behind them.
|
||
The men were all ahead. Ora dimly could see them running like rabbits
|
||
up the fault drift. Then she became conscious of the stifling sickening
|
||
smell of powder and a bursting sensation in her head. No one paused for
|
||
a second, nor drew breath until all had turned the corner and were in
|
||
the main level. For a space nothing was heard but the hoarse effort to
|
||
refill tormented lungs. The men leaned against the walls of the tunnel.
|
||
Ora leaned against Gregory. All sense of fear had departed out of
|
||
her. She had had her baptism of fire and doubted if she ever should be
|
||
capable of the sensation of fear again.
|
||
The silence lasted but a moment. Out of the intense darkness flew oaths
|
||
like red-hot rocks from boiling craters.
|
||
“Shut up!” said Gregory sharply. “There’s a lady here. And light up
|
||
if you have any extra candles. I’ve dropped mine. We must find out if
|
||
anybody is missing.”
|
||
“I held on to mine,” said Ora proudly. Gregory lit it, and the shift
|
||
boss counted his men. “All here, sir; but by jink, it was a narrow
|
||
squeak. The--the--the----”
|
||
“Never mind--who’s this?” A man was running toward them from the
|
||
direction of the shaft.
|
||
“It’s me, sir.” Gregory recognised Mann’s voice. “I’ve just got on to
|
||
what they were up to. There wasn’t a blamed thing the matter with the
|
||
compressor. They just meant to catch us off guard--anybody hurt?”
|
||
“All right. How did you find out?”
|
||
“I suspicioned something crooked, so I got one of those damned bohunks
|
||
drunk and bribed him. They’d put in the sticks before they quit,
|
||
pretending the compressor had gone wrong and they couldn’t finish
|
||
drilling. I suppose they sneaked back while I was getting the story,
|
||
and lit the fuses.”
|
||
“You’ll let us get back at ’em, boss?” demanded the men.
|
||
“Oh, yes,” said Gregory, in a voice of deadly irony. “We’ll get back at
|
||
them.”
|
||
He was holding the candle. Ora saw him bend his head forward in the
|
||
attitude so characteristic of him. But he raised it in a moment.
|
||
“Go up, every one of you,” he said, “and down to the saloon. Talk
|
||
about what happened, but assume that it was an accident. Any fighting
|
||
above ground and you’ll be canned. Say that there’s a big cave-in and
|
||
we’re obliged to quit work on this level for the present. See that
|
||
that spreads all over Apex camp. Say that I’ve given you the rest of
|
||
the shift off. Come down as soon as you’ve had your drink and said
|
||
your say. Jerry”--to the shift boss--“you watch the Apex shaft house.
|
||
I don’t figure that they’ll go down under an hour, on account of the
|
||
smoke, but if they do just drop below. I’ll wait for you here. And
|
||
before you come,” he added grimly, “go over to the compressor house
|
||
and tell them to turn the steam on the air line.”
|
||
“Hooray!” The shouting of the men made almost as much noise in the
|
||
tunnel as the recent explosion. “That’s the ticket, boss. Oh, we won’t
|
||
do a thing to them!”
|
||
“Get out of this,” said the shift boss. “Don’t take more than one
|
||
drink; and hold on to your tempers, or there’ll be no fun below.”
|
||
A moment later Gregory and Ora were alone in the tunnel.
|
||
XI
|
||
“How did you guess?” asked Ora.
|
||
“I didn’t guess. I saw a drill hole just beyond where my men were
|
||
working. I also did a little quick deduction. Miners blast just before
|
||
they go off shift. The afternoon change of shift is at three o’clock.
|
||
As I told you I had seen the Apex men come up about one o’clock when
|
||
their compressor stopped. That hole not only told me that they were
|
||
closer than we had thought, but that they were up to devilment. I
|
||
guessed that they had timed to blast just before we were ready to drill
|
||
at that point. Were you very much frightened?”
|
||
“I didn’t like it.” Ora knew that bravery in woman makes no appeal to
|
||
the lordly male. “But I hardly had time to think; and after all you
|
||
left me nothing to do.”
|
||
“Well, you were game and didn’t scream or cry,” he conceded handsomely.
|
||
“Let’s light up.”
|
||
They had walked as far as the station at the foot of the shaft. Gregory
|
||
unlocked the door of a small cupboard, found two candles and inserted
|
||
them in miners’ candlesticks that were stabbed into the walls. They
|
||
flickered in the draft as a skip rattled up from the second level, but
|
||
relieved the oppressive darkness.
|
||
“Why, your hair is down!” exclaimed Gregory.
|
||
Ora put up a hand. “So it is! Well--I am sure I never should know if my
|
||
hair fell down at a good play, and ours was live drama. I’ll braid it
|
||
and put on my veil up above.”
|
||
He watched her for a moment as she sat on a box braiding her long fair
|
||
hair, vaguely recalling the legend of the Lorelei. He noticed that her
|
||
eyes as she peered up at him looked green in that uncertain light. But
|
||
in a moment his thoughts wandered from her. He folded his arms and
|
||
stared downward.
|
||
Ora leaned back against the wall. She saw that he had forgotten her,
|
||
but had made up her mind to accept him as he was; she had no more
|
||
desire to dictate his moods than to read in advance the book of the
|
||
next two months. There was the same pleasurably painful vibration in
|
||
her nerves as on the night when she had piled stake upon stake at Monte
|
||
Carlo. From that scene her thoughts travelled naturally to Valdobia and
|
||
she suddenly laughed aloud.
|
||
“What are you laughing at?” demanded Gregory suspiciously.
|
||
“I was trying to imagine that we were imprisoned in the underground
|
||
dungeon of an Italian palace in the middle ages.”
|
||
“Hard work, I should think. Although if we had a cave-in I guess the
|
||
results would be about the same.”
|
||
“And you? Were you seeing your minerals winking three thousand feet
|
||
below?”
|
||
He laughed then, and sat beside her. “At all events the mystery down
|
||
there is more romantic than your mediæval dungeons--and so will the
|
||
great underground caverns be when the ores have been taken out.”
|
||
“Pity the caverns--stopes!--have to be filled up with débris to prevent
|
||
the mine caving in,” said Ora flippantly. “I went underground in Butte
|
||
last week--to the eighteenth level of the Leonard. Nothing but endless
|
||
streets and cross-alleys, all numbered----”
|
||
“And you didn’t find that interesting?” he asked indignantly. “To be
|
||
a third of a mile below the surface of the earth and find it laid out
|
||
like a city, with streets and rooms, and stations ten times as large as
|
||
this, and lighted with electricity?”
|
||
“Yes, but the knowledge that you have a third of a mile of those
|
||
streets and rooms--seventeen levels of them--on top of you, supported
|
||
only by waste rock in the stopes, and timbers that are always snapping
|
||
in two from the terrific pressure--timbermen working at every
|
||
turn--‘Save YOURSELF’ the first thing you see when you leave that
|
||
cage--Oh, well, I felt there was quite enough romance on top of the
|
||
earth.”
|
||
“I am deeply disappointed in you. You told me once--why, even
|
||
lately----”
|
||
“Oh, I haven’t changed the least little bit. Nothing in life,” and she
|
||
looked at him with laughing eyes, “interests me as much at present
|
||
as these two mines. But I am thankful that we are still within a
|
||
reasonable distance of the surface. I am quite content to screw up
|
||
my eyes and wander in fancy among the primary deposits close to the
|
||
central fires. If I had a mine like yours, full of the beautiful copper
|
||
ores instead of that hideous pyroxenite of mine, I should leave a
|
||
glittering layer in every stope, support the roof with polished stone
|
||
columns, light with hidden electric bulbs, and wander from one to the
|
||
other imagining myself in Aladdin’s palace.”
|
||
“A fine practical miner you would make. It’s lucky that your mine is
|
||
pyroxenite, not quartz. That is if you want to live in Europe.--Do you?”
|
||
“Of course. What have I in this part of the world? A mine cannot
|
||
satisfy a woman for ever. I suppose you wouldn’t care if you never saw
|
||
a woman again!”
|
||
“Oh!” He was looking hard at her.
|
||
“What else were you thinking of just now?” asked Ora, with that
|
||
perverse desire to be superficial which so often possesses American
|
||
women in decisive moments.
|
||
He sighed impatiently. “I’ve got a big job on my hands, one that will
|
||
take me away from here more or less. Did Mark tell you of a land deal I
|
||
put through?”
|
||
“I should think so!”
|
||
“Well, I’ve got to build that railroad. Apex will close down when it
|
||
finds I won’t let its men work underground. Amalgamated’s next move
|
||
will be to bring suit for apex rights, and get out an injunction to
|
||
enjoin me from working on that vein until the case is decided. As soon
|
||
as I have driven them out now, however, I must get to work on the
|
||
railroad--find my engineers--Oh, there are too many details to bother
|
||
you with. But it means that I must spend a good deal of time in Butte
|
||
until the thing is started----”
|
||
“How delighted Ida will be!” interrupted Ora softly. “And that house
|
||
will be so comfortable after your cabin.”
|
||
For a moment he did not speak. Nor did his face betray him; but she
|
||
fancied that his muscles stiffened. He replied suavely: “I should
|
||
have gone on to say that it is more likely I shall have to attend to
|
||
the matter in Helena. That is the centre of the land interest. It is
|
||
doubtful if I could find the sort of men I want in Butte.”
|
||
“Have you any other land schemes on hand?”
|
||
“Not at present.”
|
||
“What does that mean?”
|
||
“Well--when I have taken a couple more millions out of this hill
|
||
I shall begin to buy land, put it under the ditch, build the short
|
||
railroads that may be necessary, and sell to small farmers--in other
|
||
words push along the colonisation of this state. I believe you gave me
|
||
that idea--the night we talked Butte--the first time, I mean.”
|
||
“I thought you had forgotten that night altogether.”
|
||
“Forgotten it!” Ora’s heart stood still at the explicit vibration in
|
||
his well-ordered voice. She leaned back and closed her eyes. He had
|
||
loved her all these months, dreamed of her as she had dreamed of him.
|
||
Her first sensation of wonder and delight was succeeded by a faint
|
||
disappointment.
|
||
She had the instinct of the born huntress, although she was far too
|
||
highly civilised to have recognised it before. She wondered if his
|
||
capitulation meant her own deliverance, too ignorant in the ways of
|
||
love to guess that whether this were a passing or a permanent phase
|
||
depended on the man.
|
||
While Gregory hurried on to tell her of all he should be able to do
|
||
for Montana with the millions at present locked in the vaults of his
|
||
hill, she had a full moment of honesty, and confessed that she had come
|
||
out here to make Gregory Compton love her. And he did! It was a mighty
|
||
personality to conquer; and the victory had been won long since! But
|
||
the disappointment passed in a cynical smile. That he had no intention
|
||
of declaring himself her lover was as patent as his inhuman power of
|
||
self-control. Here were barricades to storm if barricades she wanted?
|
||
What difference? And did she?
|
||
He sprang to his feet and stood at the foot of the shaft, looking up.
|
||
“They’re coming down,” he said.
|
||
Joshua Mann emerged a moment later.
|
||
“Apex bunch being rounded up to go below,” he said. “Our men are on the
|
||
way.”
|
||
“Steam on the air line?”
|
||
“You bet!”
|
||
“Let’s get to work.” He turned to Ora. “Stay here till I come back,” he
|
||
said peremptorily. “I can’t take you up in the skip now.”
|
||
“I am quite comfortable,” said Ora, coolly. “How many men will come
|
||
down?”
|
||
“Five.” And he and Mann disappeared into the tunnel.
|
||
Ora waited until the other men had descended one by one and run into
|
||
the blackness. Then she dislodged one of the candlesticks from the wall
|
||
and ran after them. When she reached the fault drift she thrust the
|
||
long point of the candlestick into a stull before turning the corner.
|
||
Then she crept toward the station, from which she could witness the
|
||
punishment about to be inflicted upon the Apex men, whatever it might
|
||
be.
|
||
There was a glimmer of light in the new drift. Ora saw the men binding
|
||
a piece of hose to the same length of pipe. They attached the hose to
|
||
the air line and held it just inside the ragged hole some twelve feet
|
||
above.
|
||
There was a distant murmur of voices overhead and to the right. The
|
||
solitary candle was extinguished. The murmur of voices in the drift
|
||
which led from Apex shaft along the continuation of the Primo vein grew
|
||
louder. Men were laughing. One man was giving orders. It appeared that
|
||
they were to let themselves down and go systematically to work on the
|
||
Perch vein, which was now driving under the Apex claim.
|
||
Ora heard a sharp whispered word: “Now!” and barely recognised
|
||
Gregory’s voice. A second later and she was deafened by the roar and
|
||
hiss of escaping steam, mingled with shrieks of agony above, and
|
||
fiendish cat-calls and jeers below, all expressed in the spectacular
|
||
profanity of the mining camp. The episode was over in a moment. The
|
||
Apex men tumbled over one another in their anxiety to leave the scene,
|
||
and those manifestly disabled--Ora could hear them gasping horribly as
|
||
the steam was turned off abruptly--were dragged away. She felt her own
|
||
way rapidly along the fault drift, snatched her candlestick from the
|
||
wall as she turned the corner, and scampered back to the shaft station.
|
||
When the men arrived she was sitting demurely on the box. Gregory
|
||
evidently had telephoned from the other station, for the skip came
|
||
rattling down just before his appearance at the head of his laughing,
|
||
cursing column.
|
||
“Did it go off well?” asked Ora.
|
||
“Did it?” cried Mann, tossing his cap in the air.
|
||
“They’re settled for the moment,” said Gregory. “They’ll come back at
|
||
us later with steam on their own air line, and slacked lime; but we’ll
|
||
be ready for them. They stand no show.”
|
||
Two of the men had been left on watch. Gregory lifted Ora into the
|
||
skip. He and Mann stood on the edge. A second more and Ora was
|
||
holding her breath as they were hurtled upward at express speed, the
|
||
metal car banging from side to side of the shaft. In something under
|
||
three-quarters of a minute Gregory helped her to alight in the shaft
|
||
house, while the skip descended for the miners.
|
||
“Well,” he said, smiling, as she lifted her braid to the top of her
|
||
head and wound the veil about it, “have you supped full of sensations
|
||
for one day?”
|
||
“The last was the worst! And I do mean the skip. Now that we are where
|
||
you cannot beat me I will confess that I followed you and saw your neat
|
||
little mediæval revenge from the station----”
|
||
“Hush!” Gregory glanced about apprehensively, and drew her outside.
|
||
“You mustn’t tell anyone else that. You don’t want to be summoned to
|
||
the witness stand, I suppose?”
|
||
Ora gasped. “I never thought of that.”
|
||
“When will women let men do their thinking?” Gregory looked the
|
||
primeval male as he scowled down at her. Nor did he mitigate her alarms
|
||
with the information that underground battles seldom were continued in
|
||
the courts. “Now, I am going to take you to your cottage, and I want
|
||
you to stay there until the trouble is over. The men are bound to get
|
||
drunk and fight. Better go to Butte----”
|
||
“I won’t.”
|
||
“Very well, then, stay in your house.”
|
||
“And be bored to death? Besides. I need exercise. I’ll roam all over
|
||
the place unless you promise to come to supper every night and then
|
||
take me for a walk in the woods.”
|
||
His eyes flickered. “Perhaps your engineer----”
|
||
“He’s a mere child. I hate boys. And I must have exercise.”
|
||
He looked at her with apparent stolidity for another moment, but she
|
||
knew that he was investigating her expressive orbs. They expressed
|
||
nothing that could be construed as flirtation, coquetry, or personal
|
||
interest in himself. He saw himself mirrored there merely as the friend
|
||
of her husband and the husband of her friend. “Very well,” he said
|
||
curtly and swung on his heel. “I suppose I must look out for you. Come
|
||
along.”
|
||
XII
|
||
Gregory had worn a clean suit of overalls into the mine. He was now
|
||
spattered from head to foot, including his face and hands, but he swung
|
||
along beside Ora with an unconsciousness of his disreputable appearance
|
||
that was quite superb. All the miners of the three camps’ off shift
|
||
were gathered about the saloon. As Gregory appeared the greater number
|
||
of these men cheered wildly, but the “dark men,” who stood apart,
|
||
maintained an ominous silence.
|
||
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll take a shot at you some night?” asked Ora.
|
||
“How they must hate you!”
|
||
“You don’t go into any business nowadays and put it over without
|
||
running the risk of being shot by some sort of down-and-outer. What’s
|
||
the sense in worrying? Unless I’m much mistaken we’ll be rid of that
|
||
scum inside of twenty-four hours.”
|
||
And he was right. There was another battle underground, in which more
|
||
of the Apex men were scalded, and the Perch men unhurt. Then the Apex
|
||
men refused to work, and the mine closed. Gregory was shot at on the
|
||
following night, and Joshua Mann was slightly wounded. Both the Perch
|
||
and Primo men tumbled out of bed, hunted down the offenders, and
|
||
chased them into Pony, riddling the air with shot and rending it with
|
||
bloodthirsty yells. It would be some time before Apex would be able to
|
||
hire miners of any nationality willing to trust themselves between the
|
||
two belligerent camps. But bohunks--more recent importations--would
|
||
return in the future, if any. These ignorant and friendless South
|
||
Europeans can be killed for about two hundred dollars apiece, whereas
|
||
it costs several thousands to kill an American, Cornishman, or
|
||
Irishman, as he leaves behind him an equally intelligent family or
|
||
friends. It was unlikely, in any case, that high class miners would
|
||
“take a job” in the predatory Apex. They not only liked Gregory
|
||
Compton because he was his own manager and worshipped by his miners,
|
||
but because he possessed in overflowing measure the two qualities that
|
||
the American in his heart of hearts respects most, luck and bluff.
|
||
Amalgamated immediately brought suit against Gregory Compton, charging
|
||
not only that the faulted vein apexed in their claim, but that his
|
||
original patent was agricultural and gave him no lateral rights in
|
||
mining; furthermore, that a patented claim could not be repatented.
|
||
This was a fine legal point and could impoverish several generations
|
||
before it was decided.
|
||
Gregory paid no attention to this suit beyond issuing an invitation
|
||
through the press to eight of the leading geologists of the United
|
||
States and Canada to come to Montana at his expense and make a personal
|
||
inspection of the two veins. If they did not agree that the vein on
|
||
which he had been working, containing a shoot of chalcopyrite six
|
||
feet wide, and of the highest grade, was the original vein, and the
|
||
Primo-Apex a mere stringer, or at most a fork from his, he would let
|
||
the suit go by default. The geologists promptly accepted, and it was
|
||
agreed that they should all arrive in Butte on the second of June.
|
||
Once more Gregory Compton had scored. Scientific men are normally
|
||
honest, although the great fees offered to geologists frequently infuse
|
||
their judgment with that malleable quality peculiar to the lawyer under
|
||
the subtle influence of his brief. But these men, all of high repute,
|
||
would be too afraid of one another, and of the merciless newspaper men
|
||
that would accompany them, to deliver aught but a just verdict. Gregory
|
||
knew that Amalgamated was profoundly disconcerted, and that in the face
|
||
of public opinion it was improbable that the suit ever would be brought
|
||
into court. But they could devil him meanwhile, and he was enjoined
|
||
from working on the recovered vein until the case should be decided.
|
||
He accepted the injunction without protest and transferred the miners,
|
||
whom he had kept hard at work blocking out until the last minute, down
|
||
to the second level of the mine.
|
||
“They’ll get a jolt from that quarter, too,” said Gregory to Ora, and
|
||
he was not referring to the miners. “They’ll go on fighting me for
|
||
years, no doubt, but I’ll spring some sort of a facer on them every
|
||
time. They may have more money, but I have enough.”
|
||
“You never feel afraid they may beat you in the end?”
|
||
“Beat me?” Gregory’s eyes glittered. “Not unless they bore a hole in
|
||
my skull and introduce a microbe that will devour my brains. I can get
|
||
ahead of them in more ways than one. Long before all the ore on the
|
||
second level is stoped out I shall be in a position to put up my own
|
||
reduction works if they freeze me out of Anaconda or Great Falls. If I
|
||
ever go into politics it will be to fight for a state smelter.”
|
||
Ora looked at him speculatively. He was walking up and down her
|
||
living-room with a swift gliding motion peculiar to him in certain
|
||
moods; his head was a little bent as if his narrow concentrated gaze
|
||
were following a trail.
|
||
“I believe you love the fight as much as any part of it,” she said.
|
||
“I do. And as soon as I’ve taken out money enough I’m going to buy
|
||
a big tract of land, irrigate it, plant it in beets, put up a sugar
|
||
refinery and fight the Havemeyer trust.”
|
||
“Why don’t you form a company, buy your beet land, and put up the
|
||
factory now? You could raise all the money you wanted.”
|
||
“No companies or partners for me,” he said curtly. “What I’ll do I’ll
|
||
do alone. I want no man’s help and no man’s money. And I certainly want
|
||
no other man’s ideas interfering with mine.”
|
||
Ora sighed. He had been away for a week on his railroad and land
|
||
business, and during this, their first meeting since his return, he had
|
||
talked of nothing save his mine and the new possibilities of Circle-G
|
||
Ranch. Investigation of the soil and timber values of the 35,000 acres
|
||
which he had originally hypothecated as a guarantee that the railroad
|
||
should be built, but which perforce had reverted to him when the Land
|
||
Selling Company had failed to keep this part of their contract, would
|
||
be worth, after proper transportation facilities were insured, not
|
||
less than twenty-five dollars an acre. A member of the Land Selling
|
||
Company whom he had taken with him had been convinced of this, and that
|
||
the soil was peculiarly adapted to the raising of apples by intensive
|
||
culture. As soon as the railroad was built there would be no difficulty
|
||
in selling the timber and the rest of the land, and the Company had
|
||
agreed to buy it. His profits would be $875,000, and the railroad would
|
||
cost but $300,000.
|
||
No wonder, thought Ora, that a man with a business brain of that
|
||
calibre had little place in it for woman. True, he had called her up
|
||
once from Helena, evidently seized with a sudden desire to hear her
|
||
voice, but he had been interrupted; and the only tangible result had
|
||
been to keep her in such a fever of expectancy that she barely had
|
||
left the house lest he call her up again and she miss him. He did not,
|
||
and her nerves had become so ragged that she almost had hated him
|
||
and obeyed the impulse to pack her trunks and flee to Europe. He had
|
||
come to see her within an hour of his return, but, beyond his rare
|
||
delightful smile and a hard pressure of the hand, he had manifestly
|
||
been too absorbed to feel any personal appeal beyond her always welcome
|
||
companionship.
|
||
And the next morning he telephoned that he was leaving for Butte. Ida
|
||
had reminded him of his promise to appear in public with her. Mary
|
||
Garden was to sing that night and she had taken a box. He had grumbled
|
||
but finally agreed to go, as he had business in Butte which might
|
||
as well be transacted that afternoon. Ida thanked him politely and
|
||
promised him an interesting party at dinner. Then she called up Ora and
|
||
invited her, but Ora declined on the plea of good taste; the story of
|
||
her impending divorce was common property, and it was hardly decent for
|
||
her to appear in public.
|
||
XIII
|
||
Reaction, after the emotional recognition of the subtle but certain
|
||
change that had been wrought in her unsuspected depths, had filled Ida
|
||
for many hours with a sullen rage against Gregory Compton and herself.
|
||
But in a day or two the buoyancy of youth and the common sense, of
|
||
which she possessed an uncommon store, asserted themselves, and, while
|
||
devoting her time to the small daily distractions of society, her
|
||
determination to win back her husband never waned for a moment. She
|
||
knew that she must play the waiting game, keep a sharp eye out for the
|
||
blessed opportunity and pounce upon it, but make no attempt to “rush
|
||
things.”
|
||
The day after the Apex mine closed down, she rang him up and offered
|
||
her congratulations, told him something of the excitement in Butte,
|
||
then rang off before he began to feel detained. As he passed through
|
||
Butte later, on his way to Helena, he could do no less than call on
|
||
her, and, to his relief and her secret rage, he found several pleasant
|
||
people taking tea in the library. But she showed her pride in him so
|
||
frankly that he could not but be flattered, and talked so intelligently
|
||
of the undoubted sequel of the battle underground that he forgot her
|
||
guests and addressed his conversation to her. She drew him on to
|
||
describe that grim but picturesque episode underground, and he would
|
||
have been less than man had he failed to be sensible of the rise of
|
||
his chest while surrounded by a breathless circle of charming women.
|
||
When they were about to withdraw tactfully and leave him alone with
|
||
his wife, he glanced at his watch, bade them all a hasty good-bye and
|
||
bolted out to catch his train. Ida once more had been able to exhibit
|
||
to her little world an evidence of the pleasant understanding between
|
||
herself and her busy husband, and got what consolation out of this fact
|
||
that she could.
|
||
“I can wait,” she thought grimly. “I can wait! I guess patience is my
|
||
one all-wool-and-a-yard-wide virtue. I’ll wait!”
|
||
She gave several small dinners and a dancing party, devoted to the new
|
||
excitement of “ragging,” in which no one became more proficient than
|
||
herself. She “went” harder than ever, and even joined the more extreme
|
||
younger set (elegantly known as “The Bunch”) one night in a progress
|
||
among the road houses of The Flat, and danced in the ballroom of the
|
||
Five Mile House until dawn. But she had no real taste for this side
|
||
of life; and did penance by visiting the Poor Farm and several other
|
||
charities under the wing of Mrs. Cameron. Her popularity on all sides
|
||
was unchallenged, and not only was she firmly established in the city
|
||
of her heart, but Mrs. Cameron had offered to take a house with her in
|
||
New York for the following winter if she cared to mount still higher.
|
||
She was gratified and grateful, but she was filled with that desperate
|
||
loneliness that only a man can banish.
|
||
On the night of the opera she wore black velvet unrelieved and never
|
||
had looked handsomer. The neck of the apparently inseverable gown was
|
||
cut square, and her beautiful arms were exposed as far to the top as
|
||
fashion permitted; she wore her hair banded closely about her head,
|
||
and, at the base of her throat, a barbaric necklace of dull red and
|
||
blue stones that she had picked up in an antiquity shop in Munich. As
|
||
she sat in her box between Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Collier, one of the
|
||
handsomest and best dressed of the younger women of Butte, Gregory, who
|
||
sat behind and facing the house, saw that during the first entr’acte
|
||
the audience levelled its glasses at her constantly, and that,
|
||
indisputably, she divided the honours of the night with the prima donna.
|
||
He looked at her more than once himself, her classic beauty, or the
|
||
classic effect she made it produce, appealing to his æsthetic sense as
|
||
beauty in any form always did. He wondered a little that it should so
|
||
have lost its once irresistible appeal to his senses, wondered again
|
||
if he could not still have loved her well enough to live with had Ora
|
||
never entered his life. Certainly he was very proud of her, and her
|
||
conversation as well as her personality interested him. He respected
|
||
her profoundly for what she had achieved, giving her full credit for
|
||
the revolution in appearance, manners, and speech, in spite of her
|
||
exceptional opportunities. Then he forgot her as his thoughts wandered
|
||
to Ora, whom he saw sitting alone in her warm shadowy room, in which he
|
||
had come to feel so much at home. As he always went to her when he was
|
||
tired, after a day filled with excitement or hard physical labour, he
|
||
experienced only peace and content in her nearness; but when away, as
|
||
tonight, and with the music of Thaïs singing into his keen responsive
|
||
nerves, he was filled with an inexpressible longing.
|
||
He was roused by a faint exclamation from Ida. She was leaning forward.
|
||
A moment later a man, whom he had never seen before and who looked like
|
||
an Englishman of distinction, silently entered the box. Ida left her
|
||
chair, and gave him both her hands in greeting, then went with him out
|
||
into the passageway where their conversation would not interfere with
|
||
her guests’ enjoyment of the music.
|
||
Gregory felt very much like any other husband at that moment. He
|
||
was conscious of no sting of jealousy, or stab of doubt, but he did
|
||
not like it. He also received a distinct impression that his rights
|
||
of proprietorship were menaced. Moreover, he was so invaded by mere
|
||
curiosity that it was with difficulty he refrained from gratifying it
|
||
at once. But, although he belonged to the type of Western man who would
|
||
shoot the filcher of his woman without an instant’s consideration, he
|
||
was the last man in the world to make a fool of himself.
|
||
Ida tried his patience but a few moments. As soon as the curtain fell
|
||
she re-entered the box and presented the stranger as Lord John Mowbray,
|
||
who had arrived by the evening train and sought the opera house as a
|
||
relief from the hotel. She did not add that he had telephoned at once
|
||
to her house and followed her as quickly as he could change his clothes.
|
||
The husband was the last to be made known to the distinguished
|
||
stranger, and in spite of Mowbray’s ability to look vacuous, and
|
||
Gregory’s to look like a graven image, neither could repress a spark
|
||
under his lowered lids. Mowbray reared his haughty crest at once and
|
||
turned away. Like many young Englishman he blushed easily, and he was
|
||
by no means the first man to feel uncomfortable under the eyes of
|
||
Gregory Compton. He felt the colour rising to his white forehead, and
|
||
was not sorry to present his splendid back and length of limb to that
|
||
searching gaze.
|
||
He sat close to Ida during the last act, and then the party went to her
|
||
house to supper, there being no restaurant worthy the name in Butte.
|
||
Gregory detained Ida at the door after the other had entered.
|
||
“Good night,” he said. “Luning promised to wait for me at his office. I
|
||
shall talk to him until it is time to catch the train for Pony.”
|
||
“Oh, I am so sorry,” said Ida politely, and smiling charmingly. “So
|
||
will the others be. And I wanted you to talk to Lord John. His brother
|
||
has a ranch in Wyoming, and he has come here on some mining business.
|
||
I am so glad to see him again. The men here are--well, they are all
|
||
right, but quite absorbed in one thing only--whatever their profession
|
||
or business happens to be. Lord John knows a little about everything. I
|
||
am sure you would like him. Do ask me to take him out to the mine. He
|
||
is a friend of Ora’s, too. She will ask us if you don’t.”
|
||
“Come whenever you like. If I’m not there my foreman will show you
|
||
round. Good night.” And he was off. Ida, feeling that Mowbray’s arrival
|
||
had been timed by Providence, went in to her guests.
|
||
XIV
|
||
“Who is this Mowbray?” Gregory asked Ora abruptly on the following
|
||
evening. He was in Ora’s living-room, his long legs stretched out to
|
||
the fire.
|
||
Ora, who was working on a small piece of embroidery in a frame,
|
||
superlatively feminine, enveloped in a tea gown imponderable and white,
|
||
looked up in surprise. They had been sitting together for an hour or
|
||
more and their conversation had been wholly of his plans to entertain
|
||
his party of geologists, and the attention this sensational flank
|
||
attack had attracted throughout the country.
|
||
“Is Lord John here?”
|
||
“Yes. Came into the box last night. Handsome chap.”
|
||
“Mowbray is a dear. We saw a great deal of him, and he bought our
|
||
tickets and helped us off generally, when we were so upset over your
|
||
cable.”
|
||
“Ah! Tame cat? General utility man?”
|
||
“Hardly! He’s full of life and a charming companion.”
|
||
“Hm.”
|
||
There was another silence and then he asked abruptly: “Is he in love
|
||
with Ida?”
|
||
This time Ora dropped her work and sat up rigidly; her hands turned
|
||
cold. There was a peculiar alteration of pitch in Gregory’s voice that
|
||
might register jealousy in a hypersensitive ear. And when his face
|
||
looked most like a bronze reproduction of itself, his friends deduced
|
||
that he was masking emotion.
|
||
Ora’s brain always worked swiftly. Was it possible that by subtle
|
||
manipulation she could reunite this man and her friend? That he loved
|
||
herself she no longer doubted, but it was equally doubtful if he would
|
||
ever confess it; on the cards that if he did he never would see her
|
||
again. If she left the country after adroitly re-awakening his interest
|
||
in Ida and playing on his vanity and jealousy, would not reaction, the
|
||
desire for consolation and companionship, carry him straight to the
|
||
wife whose beauty and magnetism had once, and not so long ago, aroused
|
||
all the ardours of his manhood? Ida was far more beautiful now, and
|
||
quite capable of holding any man. Ora did not for a moment believe
|
||
that Ida loved her husband, or never would she herself have returned
|
||
to Butte; but she had divined her mortification, her wounded pride;
|
||
and as a young and beautiful woman Ida needed and was entitled to the
|
||
protection of her husband.
|
||
Was this her moment? Her great opportunity? Her bosom heaved, her
|
||
breath came short. Almost she experienced the subtle delights of
|
||
renunciation, of sacrifice, of the martyrdom of woman. It would be a
|
||
great rôle to play, a great memory. And after all she had Valdobia. It
|
||
was this last irresistible reflection that gave her soaring spirit a
|
||
sharp tumble and she laughed aloud.
|
||
Gregory turned his head and smiled as he met the cynical amusement in
|
||
her eyes. “What is it?”
|
||
“I was merely commiserating poor Mowbray. Of course he is more or less
|
||
_épris_; but Ida--she hasn’t it in her to love any man.”
|
||
“That is the conclusion I arrived at long ago. But it looked as if he
|
||
had followed her here, and I don’t care for that sort of talk.”
|
||
“He had planned to visit his brother in Wyoming before we met him in
|
||
Genoa. Don’t worry. Ida never will let any man compromise her. She’ll
|
||
parade her son of a duke for the benefit of Butte, but if he shows
|
||
signs of getting out of hand she’ll pack him off.”
|
||
“Yes, Ida is too ambitious to compromise herself.”
|
||
And then another little arrow flew into Ora’s brain. Her hands
|
||
trembled, but she clenched them in her lap. “Gregory,” she said
|
||
steadily, “as you and Ida no longer love each other, why don’t you
|
||
suggest a divorce? She could marry Mowbray and have a big position in
|
||
London--his brother is almost sure not to marry--is a wreck--Ida would
|
||
be quite in her element as a duchess--and you--you would be free--if
|
||
you ever wanted to marry again.”
|
||
When nature has given a man a dark skin and he has permitted it to
|
||
accumulate yearly coats of tan, it is difficult for him to turn white
|
||
under the stress of emotion; but Gregory achieved this phenomenon as
|
||
he realised abruptly what freedom might mean to him. He stood up and
|
||
leaned his back against the high chimneypiece, thrusting his hands
|
||
into his pockets; he had long nervous fingers which sometimes betrayed
|
||
him when his face was set.
|
||
“Ida would never consent to a divorce,” he said heavily. “She’s got all
|
||
sorts of old-fashioned American ideals. The West has the reputation for
|
||
being lawless, and it’s got more Puritans to the square inch than are
|
||
left in New England. Ida’s one of them.”
|
||
“She may have acquired more liberal ideas in Europe.”
|
||
“She told me that she didn’t care if she never saw Europe again. Last
|
||
night I had quite a long talk with her before the others came in for
|
||
dinner. She said she thought it the duty of Western women--particularly
|
||
the women of the newer Northwest--to live in their native state and
|
||
only go away occasionally in order to bring something back to it. She
|
||
intimated that you put that idea into her head when you two first met.”
|
||
“Oh, yes, I believe that to be right, whatever I may do, myself.”
|
||
“What is your idea in going to Europe to live? You are just the sort of
|
||
woman the West needs.” He bit out his words in the effort to be calm
|
||
and casual.
|
||
“I don’t feel that I have any place here.”
|
||
Gregory started on a restless walk up and down the room.
|
||
“Look at here,” he shot out finally, “are you--I haven’t said anything
|
||
about it--but--of course I’ve wanted to--are you determined to leave
|
||
Mark? He’s one of the best fellows in the world. I hate to see him
|
||
thrown down. You--you--I think you should reconsider.”
|
||
“I had done all my considering before I spoke to Mark. I am doing
|
||
him the greatest possible kindness. He needs another sort of woman
|
||
altogether to make him happy. And I? Have I not my right to happiness?
|
||
Do you think I could find it with Mark?”
|
||
“No!” The word exploded. “And you--shall you marry again?”
|
||
“I don’t know.” Ora spoke in a strangled voice. New possibilities were
|
||
shaking her to her foundations. For a moment the perverse imp in the
|
||
purely feminine section of her brain counselled her to run away as
|
||
ever from the serious mood in man, to play with great issues and then
|
||
dodge them. But she brushed the prompting aside with frantic haste and
|
||
summoned her courage. If this was happiness coming to her grasp she
|
||
would seize it.
|
||
Gregory came swiftly back from the farther end of the room and stood
|
||
before her. He had set the muscles of the lower part of his face so
|
||
tightly that he could hardly open his mouth, but his narrow eyes were
|
||
blazing. “If Ida would give me my freedom,” he said, “I should want to
|
||
marry you. Do you understand?”
|
||
Ora stood up. Her white face was so radiant that Gregory fell back.
|
||
“You love me?” he asked.
|
||
“Yes.--Oh, yes----”
|
||
“You would marry me?”
|
||
“Yes!”
|
||
Gregory stared at her, wondering if she really were suffused with white
|
||
fire. Her hands fluttered toward him, and his own face was suddenly
|
||
relaxed, unmasked. Ora’s lips parted and she bent forward. She knew
|
||
then why men and women sacrificed the world when they found their
|
||
predestined mates. Here was the one man who could give her primal joy,
|
||
suffocate her intellect. And the knowledge that she was capable of
|
||
such passion and of the sacrifices it might involve gave her far more
|
||
satisfaction than her former brief mood of renunciation.
|
||
She made another step forward, but Gregory was at the door. “Talk to
|
||
Ida!” he said harshly. “I leave it to you. Go to see her tomorrow. You
|
||
can do anything with her. You must!”
|
||
And he was out of the house. He left the door open and Ora could hear
|
||
his light running footsteps.
|
||
XV
|
||
On the following morning Gregory, who had spent the night in the mine
|
||
and had just come up to the cabin, heard his telephone ring as he was
|
||
about to take his bath and go to bed. His first impulse was to ignore
|
||
the summons, but, his business instinct prevailing, he went into the
|
||
office and unhooked the receiver.
|
||
“Well?” he asked, in a voice both flat and uninviting.
|
||
“It is Ida. How tired your voice sounds. I won’t keep you a minute. I
|
||
have a plan to suggest. Why not let me put up those geologists? Mrs.
|
||
Cameron has asked me to stay with her and will come over and help me
|
||
entertain them at meals. It will not only save you a fearful hotel bill
|
||
but keep them from wandering into the wrong fold.”
|
||
“Good idea!” Gregory’s voice was more animated.
|
||
“I’ll get Professor Becke to take them down into one of the big mines
|
||
here, take them out myself to yours, amuse them between times with the
|
||
prettiest women in town--in short stick to them closer than a brother.”
|
||
“Good! You are the right sort. I’ll meet them at the train--on the
|
||
night of the second, it is--and take them right up to your house. It’s
|
||
putting you to a lot----”
|
||
“Not a bit. It will be immense fun. Good-bye.”
|
||
* * * * *
|
||
On that same morning Ora went to Butte. She had telephoned to Ida, and
|
||
Mowbray met her at the train with the limousine.
|
||
“Mrs. Compton had to go to some charity meeting or other,” he said, as
|
||
they shook hands warmly. “I am to drive you about for an hour.”
|
||
This was better fortune than Ora, who possessed little of Ida’s
|
||
patience and talent for the waiting game, had dared to anticipate.
|
||
“How jolly!” Her face lost its traces of a sleepless night as it
|
||
flashed with hope and enthusiasm. “And after that dreadful train! Drive
|
||
to the Gardens,” she said to the chauffeur.
|
||
She pointed out Anaconda Hill as they passed under that famous portal,
|
||
and the shaft houses of other mines, suggesting that he go down with
|
||
the geologists when they made the inevitable descent. “But you will
|
||
find your visit to Mr. Compton’s mine more satisfactory,” she added
|
||
lightly. “You will see more ore in the vein. How do you like him?”
|
||
Mowbray growled something in his thick inarticulate English voice, and
|
||
Ora grasped her opportunity. She turned to him with the uncompromising
|
||
directness her sinuous mind knew so well how to assume.
|
||
“Take me into your confidence,” she said peremptorily. “I can help you.
|
||
At all events keep you from making any mistakes with Ida. She is what
|
||
is called a difficult proposition. Are you in love with her?”
|
||
Mowbray turned a deep brick-red and frowned, but he answered
|
||
intelligibly: “You know jolly well I am.”
|
||
“Then let me tell you that there is only one way you can get her. Ida
|
||
is moral to the marrow of her bones. You might make her love you, for
|
||
she and her husband are practically separated, but you can get her only
|
||
by persuading her to divorce Mr. Compton.”
|
||
“I’ve thought of that. Of course I’d rather marry her. I’m a decent
|
||
sort myself--hate skulking--and lying--she’s the last woman I’d want to
|
||
compromise. But I’m so beastly poor. I’ve only twelve hundred pounds a
|
||
year.”
|
||
“And she has forty thousand pounds now of her own. You need not
|
||
hesitate to spend the capital, for Mr. Compton is most generous, and is
|
||
sure to give her much more. He is bound to be a multimillionaire--it is
|
||
only a question of a few years.”
|
||
“Does he want his own freedom?”
|
||
“I am not in his confidence. But as they no longer care for each other
|
||
and have agreed to live apart--merely showing themselves together in
|
||
public occasionally to avoid gossip--it is natural to suppose that he
|
||
would be indifferent, at least. He cannot be more than thirty, and will
|
||
be sure to want his freedom sooner or later.”
|
||
“This is splendid of you!” cried the Englishman gratefully. “She’s not
|
||
happy. I know that, and now I shall know just what to do.”
|
||
“Sympathise with her. Make yourself necessary--make her feel the
|
||
neglected wife, and what a devoted husband would mean. You have the
|
||
game in your own hands, and I will help you.”
|
||
XVI
|
||
Ora discerned certain changes in Ida as the three reunited friends,
|
||
with so many pleasant memories in common, talked gaily at luncheon.
|
||
It was not only that she was a trifle thinner but there were shadows
|
||
in her eyes that gave them troubled depths. The curves of her mouth
|
||
also were less assured, and her strong, rather large, but beautiful
|
||
hands had a restless movement. Ora, whose imagination was always ready
|
||
to spring from the leash and visualise a desired conclusion, pictured
|
||
Ida, if not already in love with this good-looking and delightful
|
||
Englishman, as circling close; neglected and mortified, she longed for
|
||
the opportunity to live her life with him; in short was champing the
|
||
bit.
|
||
Ora led the conversation--no great adroitness was necessary--to the
|
||
many divorces pending in Butte at the moment. Ida sniffed. Ora asserted
|
||
gaily that they were merely a casual result of an era of universal
|
||
progress and individualism; one of the commonplaces of modern life
|
||
that hardly called for comment. “You are so up to date in everything
|
||
else, my dear,” she concluded, “that I wonder you cling to such old
|
||
middle-class prejudices.”
|
||
“I guess there are a few conservatives and brakes left in this
|
||
country,” said Ida, drily. “I may look back with horror at the time
|
||
when I chewed gum and walked out of a restaurant with a toothpick in my
|
||
mouth, but Ma hammered most of my good old-fashioned prejudices into
|
||
my back with the broom-handle, and I’m no more likely to forget her
|
||
opinion of divorce--the poor get it sometimes as well as the rich--than
|
||
the bastings I got if I played hookey from school, or sneaked out after
|
||
dark alone with a beau.”
|
||
“My mother was exactly the same,” said Ora, with that charming
|
||
spontaneity which so often robbed her words of the subtle insult of
|
||
condescension, or the more cryptic of irony. “If I hadn’t happened to
|
||
be a book-worm and had indulged in clandestine love affairs I should
|
||
have been shut up on bread and water. And she had all a Southern
|
||
woman’s horror of divorce. But, dear Ida! That was in the dark ages.
|
||
We live in the most enlightened and individualistic era of the world’s
|
||
history. I have kept my eyes and ears open ever since. Nor do I believe
|
||
for a moment that we are getting any worse--we merely have achieved a
|
||
more well-bred indifference toward other people’s affairs. One can hear
|
||
a scandal a minute in large towns and small, if one has nothing better
|
||
to do than listen; but whereas in our mothers’ time a woman was dropped
|
||
if she was ‘talked about,’ today we don’t turn a hair at anything short
|
||
of a quite superlative divorce court scandal--not even about girls;
|
||
always provided that they continue to dress well, and keep on being
|
||
charming and spending money.”
|
||
“That is about the most cynical thing I ever heard you say.”
|
||
“The truth always sounds cynical. You laugh at me for dreaming and
|
||
being an idealist, but I never have shut my mind to facts as you do.”
|
||
“I don’t even blink the old facts. I don’t like them, that’s all. I
|
||
don’t say, of course, that if I were married to a brute who came home
|
||
drunk and beat me--but this swapping husbands like horses--well, I’m
|
||
content to be a brake as long as there’s any wheel to freeze to. You
|
||
know I’m not hitting at you,” she added hastily. “I’d give you the moon
|
||
if you wanted it; but I put you in a class by yourself, that’s all.”
|
||
“Oh,” cried Ora, laughing. “Let us change the subject before you prove
|
||
that your logic turns feminine at the crucial test. Heavens! How
|
||
hideous Butte is. We drove----”
|
||
“Hideous? Butte?” demanded Ida indignantly.
|
||
“Oh, you see it through the glamour of a triumphal progress. Wait until
|
||
the novelty has worn off. How do you find it?” she asked Mowbray, who
|
||
had relished his excellent luncheon and admired his ally’s tactics.
|
||
“Rippin’ air. Nearly took a header out of the window this mornin’
|
||
thinkin’ I had wings. But as for looks--those mountains in the
|
||
distance are not half-bad, but the foreground is--er--a little
|
||
ragged--and--new--you know.” He smiled into Ida’s warning eyes.
|
||
“Really, dear lady, I can understand that you were keen on gettin’
|
||
home again, because home is home, don’t you know. But beauty--tell me
|
||
just where you do find it.”
|
||
Ida tossed her head. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and mine
|
||
beholds it. That is enough for me. Now, run along to the Club. I
|
||
haven’t seen Ora for ages. You may come back for tea.”
|
||
She led the way up to her bedroom and they made themselves comfortable
|
||
and lit their cigarettes.
|
||
“Odd as it would seem,” said Ida, “to those east and west of us who
|
||
have an idea that Butte has been on one prolonged spree since she
|
||
was really a camp, I have to enjoy my occasional cigarette on the
|
||
sly. A few of the younger women smoke, when they have locked the
|
||
doors and pulled the blinds down--and of course The Bunch does; but
|
||
the majority--and those that never bat an eyelash at cocktails and
|
||
champagne--think it indecent for a woman to smoke. Funny world.”
|
||
“Butte is a provincial hole. As there are no strangers present you
|
||
needn’t bother to defend it. I’ve just had a brilliant idea. Why don’t
|
||
you divorce Mr. Compton and marry Mowbray?”
|
||
“Aw!” Ida dropped her cigarette and burned a hole in her skirt. “Are
|
||
you raving crazy?”
|
||
“I thought I was advancing a peculiarly level-headed suggestion----”
|
||
“None of it in mine!”
|
||
“But, my dear Ida, you will tire inevitably of this old camp. The
|
||
glamour of all this return in a gilded chariot drawn by the cheering
|
||
populace will wear off in about six months. So will your own novelty
|
||
for them. It is all indescribably cheap, anyhow. If you send Mowbray
|
||
away now, he will try to forget you, and forgetting is man’s peculiar
|
||
accomplishment. You will have missed a great opportunity. You and Mr.
|
||
Compton are manifestly indifferent to each other. Seize your chance,
|
||
dear--not only for happiness, but for a splendid social position,
|
||
before----”
|
||
Ora paused. Ida was glaring ahead of her with her heavy black brows
|
||
pushed low over her flaming eyes. Her lips were drawn back over her
|
||
sharp little teeth. Her nostrils were distended. She looked like some
|
||
magnificent beast of the jungle stalking her prey.
|
||
“By God!” she whispered, her whole body heaving, “I’ll have him back. I
|
||
was a fool before I left, and maybe I shouldn’t have left him at all.
|
||
It’s never safe to leave a man. But when I do get him back he’ll be
|
||
glad of all I’ve learned. He’s like a lunatic with a fixed idea just
|
||
now--but wait.”
|
||
Ora felt cold and numb. She tried to rise, and wondered if the shock
|
||
had paralysed her. She managed to articulate: “You love him then?”
|
||
But not even to Ora could Ida make any such admission; she who always
|
||
had flouted both sentiment and passion! She recovered herself and
|
||
tossed her head.
|
||
“Love! Who cares about love? Do you think I’m the sort of woman a man
|
||
can throw down for a mine? I wouldn’t stand it even it were another
|
||
woman--but ore! It makes me sick. I won’t be thrown down. And I’ll get
|
||
him back!”
|
||
Ora too had recovered herself. She lit another cigarette. “I’m so glad
|
||
you don’t care, dear. No man is worth agonising over, as you so often
|
||
have said yourself. Forgive the doubt. I should have remembered that
|
||
you were far too clever and worldly-wise for that sort of thing. That
|
||
is the main reason that I am willing to marry Valdobia: I can be fond
|
||
of him, like him always, be grateful for his companionship, but he
|
||
can’t tear my heart out.”
|
||
“I thought you told me when you came back that you were mad about him?”
|
||
“Oh, I fancy I was strung up that day. When I am excited I always
|
||
exaggerate. But do think over what I have said about Mowbray. And it
|
||
would be heavenly to have you in Europe.”
|
||
“My mind’s made up. I guess I’m American to my core and marrow. Titles
|
||
will never seem natural to me, and I guess we’ll both live to see them
|
||
so tangled up with democracy that those that are left will look like
|
||
old labels on new cans. No has-beens in mine. Oh, chuck it! What’s this
|
||
I hear about little Whalen--that he’s resigned from the High and been
|
||
out in the mountains prospecting since the beginning of Spring? I’ve
|
||
only seen him once since I came back and then he looked like a viper
|
||
that had been stepped on.”
|
||
“I met him the other day when I was out walking. He bought a claim of
|
||
one of the prospectors that swarmed out there as soon as they heard
|
||
of the Primo and the Perch strikes. He wore overalls and a beard.
|
||
I scarcely knew him. He talked rather wildly about the hill he has
|
||
located on being another Perch of the Devil.”
|
||
“I guess Gregory is responsible for that and a good many other wild
|
||
dreams. I hear that a lot of young men are coming out from the East
|
||
this Summer to prospect in those hills. Well, they’ll succeed or fail
|
||
according to their luck mostly. Let’s go out. You’ve got two hours
|
||
before your train goes--but if you’ve got a list a yard long----”
|
||
And the two sallied forth in perfect peace to shop.
|
||
XVII
|
||
Ora had more than one cause for uneasiness when she returned to her
|
||
little home in the pine woods, but paramount was the fear that she
|
||
should not see Gregory Compton again unless by accident. She rose
|
||
early after another almost sleepless night and spent a distracted day
|
||
wandering over the hills, returning at intervals to inquire if her
|
||
telephone bell had rung. Once more she felt a disposition to run away,
|
||
anathematising the slavery of love. Only the hope that Mowbray would
|
||
wear down Ida’s resistance kept her from yielding to the impatient,
|
||
imaginative, too highly organised woman’s impulse to flee when love
|
||
seems hopeless and a nervous explosion imminent. She still refused to
|
||
feel traitorous to Ida, but she did wonder once or twice if she ever
|
||
should dare to face her as Mrs. Gregory Compton. Ida was the reverse of
|
||
a fool. She might be blind now, for obvious reasons--but Ora shrugged
|
||
her shoulders at the vision of Ida’s horror and wrath. What did she
|
||
care for Ida or any other woman if she got her man?
|
||
She made one of her sudden dashes into the house as the telephone bell
|
||
was ringing. For the moment she thought she was about to faint; then,
|
||
both appalled and angry at the lawless behaviour of her nerves, she
|
||
stamped her foot, shook herself, marched over to the telephone, took
|
||
down the receiver, and asked in a bored voice: “Well?”
|
||
“I shall come to supper tonight if you will have me?” Gregory’s tones
|
||
were those he employed when “canning” a miner.
|
||
“Delighted.” Ora’s nerves fell into place like good little soldiers.
|
||
“Will you be here at seven?”
|
||
“About. I prefer to have you tell me here what she had to say.”
|
||
“Constitutionally opposed at present, but that was to be expected.
|
||
Seeds always sprout if well planted and judiciously watered. Our friend
|
||
from England will do his part.”
|
||
“Good. We’ll say no more about it. But I shall go to see you as usual.”
|
||
“Why not? We are not fools or children. Any new developments at the
|
||
mine?”
|
||
“Shaft has reached third level. Vein seems to be about the same
|
||
richness as on the second. Mann is here. Good-bye.”
|
||
As Ora, her body no longer braced and rigid, but so filled with the
|
||
languor of happiness that she wanted to throw herself down on the divan
|
||
and sleep, crossed the room, she became aware that someone was standing
|
||
in the outer doorway. His hat was in his hand, and as she focussed her
|
||
absent gaze she managed to recognise Professor Whalen. Her impulse
|
||
was to turn her back and run into her bedroom; but Ora was always a
|
||
great lady. She could be extremely rude to a member of her own class,
|
||
but she had never permitted herself to wound the morbid sensitiveness
|
||
of those to whom fortune had been less kind. So, secretly wondering
|
||
if the little man really stood there, or if anything so insignificant
|
||
mattered, she went forward smiling and offered him her hand.
|
||
“So good of you to come and have a cup of tea with me.” She rang a
|
||
bell and ordered tea of her Chinaman. “But why did you dress up? I am
|
||
accustomed to overalls and flannel shirts, and quite like the idea of
|
||
living in a mining camp.”
|
||
Whalen sat on the edge of his chair and stared into the fire, twirling
|
||
his hat in his hands. “I guess I’ve got to be a gentleman again,” he
|
||
said with a short laugh. “There’s nothing else left for me to be.”
|
||
“Oh! I hope----”
|
||
“My find--and I paid a thousand dollars for the claim--was nothing but
|
||
a gash vein. Nothing in that but low grade carbonates.”
|
||
“But are you so sure? Often veins appears to pinch out a hundred feet
|
||
or more above a really rich lode.”
|
||
“I’ve poured into that hole all my savings; all I had saved from my
|
||
salary during four years, and every cent of my reward in the field of
|
||
letters. I even--and against my secret resolutions--consumed a legacy
|
||
left me by an uncle.”
|
||
“Perhaps if you would ask Mr. Compton to look at your claim--he is a
|
||
sort of ore wizard----”
|
||
“I’ll ask no favours of Gregory Compton!” Whalen burst out, violently.
|
||
“Were it not for him I never would have been enticed into this foolish
|
||
venture. I cannot realise it--I, who was brought up in the most
|
||
conservative corner of this conservative country--I, a pedagogue, a
|
||
man of letters, that I should have so far descended as to become a
|
||
prospector--live in a hut, cook my own bacon, dig with a pick----” He
|
||
paused choking.
|
||
“Doubtless you remembered that some of the greatest millionaires in the
|
||
country began that way. Or possibly the Northwest kindled your sense
|
||
of adventure--that is inherent in every real man. But why blame Mr.
|
||
Compton?”
|
||
Whalen had recovered his breath. He spat out his words. “Why should a
|
||
man like that have all the luck? And such colossal luck! Who is he?
|
||
What is he? In what way does he compare with me--a man of no family, of
|
||
no culture, of no intellect----”
|
||
“Mr. Compton has given evidence that he has one of the best brains this
|
||
country has produced.” Ora spoke evenly but with a glint in her eye.
|
||
“Oh, yes, _brains_! I make a fine distinction between mere brains and
|
||
intellect. He has the sort of mental composition those men always
|
||
seem to have in order that they may make use of their luck and roll
|
||
up millions. But intellect? Not a cell. He has never read anything. I
|
||
journeyed with him from Pony to Butte not long since and endeavoured
|
||
to engage him in conversation. I might as well have tried to talk to a
|
||
mummy--and an ill-mannered one at that. The moment I left the subject
|
||
of mines he merely looked out of the window.”
|
||
Ora laughed merrily, and poured out the tea the Chinaman had brought
|
||
in. “Perhaps it is just that lack of overdevelopment that we call
|
||
intellect which permits these men to concentrate upon their genius for
|
||
making money.”
|
||
“But that has nothing to do with their luck in the beginning. Luck!
|
||
Blind luck! Fool’s luck! And why not to me? Why to this Gregory
|
||
Compton? I never believed in luck before, but since this rush, and
|
||
my own personal experience----” He swallowed a mouthful of tea
|
||
too hastily, scalded himself, and, while he was gasping, Ora said
|
||
soothingly:
|
||
“You cannot help believing in luck if you study the early history of
|
||
any mining state. There are hundreds of stories of prospectors--you
|
||
have told of many yourself; the majority had little or no education,
|
||
less science. Out of a hundred evenly equipped with grit, common sense,
|
||
some practical knowledge of ores, perhaps two would find a rich pocket
|
||
or placer. Four or five possibly made a strike that would insure them
|
||
a competence if they neither gambled nor drank. The rest nothing--not
|
||
after forty years of prospecting in these mountains. I fancy there is
|
||
something in that old phrase about the lucky star; in astronomical
|
||
parlance the position of the planets at the moment of one’s birth.”
|
||
“But why not I?” wailed the professor. “Why--why this--well, he is a
|
||
friend of yours--Gregory Compton?”
|
||
“_Why not?_”
|
||
“I am infinitely his superior in every way!” cried Whalen in perfect
|
||
good faith. “It is I who should have discovered those millions and
|
||
taken them to Beacon Street, not this obscure young Westerner, son of
|
||
an illiterate old ranchman----”
|
||
“But you didn’t,” said Ora, patiently. “Besides, the fates are not
|
||
unjust. They made you a member of the New England aristocracy, and gave
|
||
you intellect. Do not be unreasonable and demand the mere prospector’s
|
||
luck as well.”
|
||
Whalen looked at her suspiciously, but her eyes were teasing, not
|
||
satiric. He had admired her always more than any woman he had met in
|
||
the West, and had come to her blindly to be consoled. Suddenly he saw
|
||
an indefinable change steal over her face, although her mouth remained
|
||
curled with the stereotyped smile she kept for the Whalens. It was as
|
||
if something deep in her brilliant eyes came to life, and her slight
|
||
bust rose under the stiff shirtwaist. Whalen’s ears were not acute and
|
||
he did not hear the light footstep that preceded a peremptory knock.
|
||
Ora crossed the room swiftly and opened the door. Whalen was no fool,
|
||
and he had written fiction for four years. He had guessed at once that
|
||
his beautiful hostess loved the man who demanded admittance, and when
|
||
he heard Gregory Compton’s voice he almost whistled. But he merely
|
||
arose and frowned.
|
||
“Knocked off and thought I would run in early,” Gregory was beginning,
|
||
when he saw Whalen. “How are you?” he asked with more cordiality than
|
||
he usually wasted upon the little man. His spirits always flew to his
|
||
head when he met Ora, stolid as he might look. “How’s your mine getting
|
||
on?” he added, as he selected the longest of the chairs before the
|
||
fire. “Heard it had petered out.”
|
||
“It has!”
|
||
“I’ll go over and have a look at it tomorrow if you like. I fancy
|
||
you’re located too close to one of the faults. The trouble with you
|
||
amateur prospectors--or buyers of prospectors’ claims--is that you
|
||
don’t take a geologist out with you. You lose your heads over an assay
|
||
report on exceptional specimens. But I’d like to see for myself.”
|
||
“It’s no use,” said Whalen gloomily. “I have used up all my money in
|
||
that----” He had learned to swear in mining camp society, but he pulled
|
||
himself up hastily, “that hole.”
|
||
“If I think there is anything there I’ll grub-stake you. Nobody would
|
||
buy your claim, but somebody might jump it if you let it lapse, and I
|
||
want to know who my neighbours are. Have you patented it?”
|
||
“Not yet.”
|
||
“Spent five hundred dollars on it?”
|
||
“_Have_ I!”
|
||
“Well, I’ll look at it tomorrow, and if I think it’s good for anything
|
||
I’ll help you out. I am going to Helena in a day or two. Come along and
|
||
apply for your patent.”
|
||
“You are very kind.” Whalen felt repentant, and more grateful than he
|
||
had ever condescended to feel before. “I’ll expect you tomorrow.” He
|
||
inferred that he could best show his gratitude by taking himself off,
|
||
and rose. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Blake. This hour has been refreshing
|
||
and inspiring after my long absence from civilisation.”
|
||
“You must come soon again,” said Ora sweetly, as she marshalled him
|
||
out. “The best of luck.”
|
||
She went to her bedroom for a few moments, and when she returned wore
|
||
a soft tea gown made of several shades of woodland greens. She seated
|
||
herself in her favourite chair, straight, with a high carved back, and
|
||
took up her neglected embroidery. “Dinner will not be ready for half an
|
||
hour,” she said. “How long that little man did stay. I am glad you made
|
||
a friend of him, for I have always imagined that he could be venomous,
|
||
and before you came in he was by way of hating you. Now tell me the
|
||
surprise you have for the geologists and newspaper men on the second
|
||
level.”
|
||
And for the next three hours they talked of ores.
|
||
XVIII
|
||
“Give me your hand, Gregory. I am no coward, but this is the first time
|
||
I have ever been underground. My father would never permit it, nor my
|
||
mother after him.”
|
||
Gregory extended his long arm behind him and Ida’s warm firm fingers
|
||
clung to his hand. They had just left the skip at the second level of
|
||
his mine. The geologists and the newspaper men, together with herself,
|
||
Lord John, Gregory, and Mann, had entered the mine by way of the Primo
|
||
shaft, inspected the insignificant vein of copper which had merely
|
||
been blocked out, awaiting the possible erection of a concentrating
|
||
plant--for it was not worth the expense of freight to Anaconda--thence
|
||
down the ladder from the hole blasted by Apex, and into the drift
|
||
where the magnificent vein of Perch of the Devil also merely had been
|
||
blocked out; but for a more subtle reason. The case in Gregory’s favour
|
||
was so flagrant that the great men had laughed, although gracefully
|
||
submitting to interviews on the spot and expressing themselves with
|
||
as few technicalities as possible. That the Primo copper upon which
|
||
Apex had also sunk was a mere attenuated fork of the great vein which
|
||
indisputably had faulted from the original vein in Gregory Compton’s
|
||
property the reporters could see for themselves. Under the Apex law
|
||
Gregory was within his lateral rights in sinking under the adjoining
|
||
claim and thence under the Primo mine; and as far beyond as the vein
|
||
persisted.
|
||
Against a man less determined and resourceful than Gregory Compton
|
||
a wealthy corporation could obtain any verdict it demanded; but to
|
||
persist in a suit for Apex rights after this public exposition would
|
||
make any trust the laughing-stock of a continent. Even to persist
|
||
in the claim that he was mining under an agricultural patent, and
|
||
therefore outside his rights, would be mere petty persecution; and
|
||
inevitably both suits would steal noiselessly to limbo. Amalgamated
|
||
knew when it was beaten and would take its medicine with a grimace and
|
||
watch for its next opportunity.
|
||
Ida, although she disliked the sensation of being underground, the
|
||
chill of the tunnels and the drip of candle-grease on her smart linen
|
||
skirt, had been deeply impressed by the scene in the excavation on the
|
||
Perch vein: the men with their keen upturned faces, their peering eyes
|
||
so close to the moving candles, the little yellow flames travelling
|
||
along the beautiful yellow metal, the eager nervous hands of the
|
||
newspaper men, the intense blackness beyond the radius of the candles.
|
||
But her eyes returned constantly to her husband’s face. His eyes
|
||
gleamed with copper fires. His profile against the dark background of
|
||
the cavern looked as if carved in the rock by some prehistoric race.
|
||
The blood scorched her face and her heart leapt with pride as she heard
|
||
these distinguished men defer to him, express their admiration without
|
||
reserve. A year ago he had been as little known as when she married
|
||
him. Today his extraordinary abilities were recognised by the entire
|
||
country, and tomorrow he would be one of its colossi.
|
||
She was the only woman that had gone down. Mrs. Cameron and Mrs.
|
||
Collier had preferred to remain comfortably with Ora in the bungalow,
|
||
or to help her spread the tables under the pines, where luncheon was to
|
||
be served. Therefore was she privileged to keep close to the host, and
|
||
when they descended into the blackness of the second level she embraced
|
||
further her feminine prerogatives. Mann had gone down first, the guests
|
||
had followed, and Gregory, after a vain protest, had taken her down in
|
||
the skip when it returned for himself.
|
||
The rest of the party had pushed forward, for they had been promised a
|
||
surprise. Ida would have lingered, but Gregory pulled her on. He wanted
|
||
to hear the comments. The racket of the drills had stopped. Ida saw the
|
||
last of the guests disappear up a short ladder.
|
||
“Am I to go up into a stope?” she asked.
|
||
“If you want to see what we’ve come for.” He ran up the ladder, and she
|
||
followed, insinuated herself into the hole and stood upright in the
|
||
large excavation on the vein.
|
||
“Is it gold?” she gasped.
|
||
“No, but it’s a streak--a shoot--of chalcopyrite ten feet wide and of
|
||
the highest value. And it may go down eight or nine hundred feet before
|
||
it loses its richness and degenerates into a lower grade of ore. But
|
||
there may be millions of tons of that. This is one of the few great
|
||
shoots of chalcopyrite known.”
|
||
“Gregory!” said Ida ecstatically, “do you remember I always had such
|
||
faith in you that I urged you so often to prospect on the ranch that
|
||
you got quite cross?”
|
||
“Yes, I remember.”
|
||
“Never say I doubted you. I may be enchanted at all this success and
|
||
recognition of your abilities, but I have never had the least sensation
|
||
of surprise.”
|
||
Gregory smiled down into the eager beautiful face so close to his
|
||
shoulder. She had manipulated him down the ladder into the tunnel and
|
||
for the moment they were alone. “I hope you are half as proud of me as
|
||
I am of you,” he said gallantly, although he was a trifle uneasy; not
|
||
because she looked as if she might kiss him there in the semi-dark, but
|
||
because he felt an impulse to kiss her. For the moment he regretted the
|
||
wild romance upon which he was embarked, the torments of its present,
|
||
the tragic possibilities of its future. Ida now would make an ideal
|
||
wife, demanding far less of his jealously guarded inner self, to say
|
||
nothing of his time, than Ora, who had that most terrible of all gifts,
|
||
a passionate soul. But this disloyalty was brief, and he frowned and
|
||
disengaged his hand, although he was far from suspecting that Ida had
|
||
yielded to the temptation to pay him deliberate court.
|
||
“I shall be able to give you a string of pearls before long,” he said
|
||
lightly, “or a million or two to play with. I want to hear what these
|
||
men have to say. Suppose you go back with Lord John, and tell them that
|
||
we are coming up soon for lunch. Ring the bell in the station twice for
|
||
the skip and three times for hoist.”
|
||
Ida shrank back against the wall as if she had been struck, but when
|
||
Lord John, who had made several futile attempts to separate her from
|
||
her husband, came eagerly forward, she left Gregory to the chorus of
|
||
enthusiasm and congratulation, and obeyed his directions.
|
||
XIX
|
||
Ida was in such high spirits during the luncheon that she managed to be
|
||
brilliant and amusing within the limits of her expurgated vocabulary.
|
||
Only Ora, who knew her so well, saw the sombre fire in the depths of
|
||
her eyes, the sudden twist of her mouth at the corners, noted that
|
||
her cheeks were crimson instead of their usual delicate coral, the
|
||
occasional clenching of her hands. But she had little time to speculate
|
||
upon the cause, for the large party were her guests, and, like any
|
||
other Rocky Mountain hostess in the liquid month of June, she feared
|
||
the sudden drenching of her tables.
|
||
But the day remained fine, and the geologists, who ever since their
|
||
arrival in Butte had evinced a remarkable indifference to geology as a
|
||
topic for conversation, were as lively as the newspaper men, and deeply
|
||
appreciative of the good looks and animated conversation of the four
|
||
women who ate almost nothing in their efforts at mental subdivision.
|
||
Ora had invited also her engineer and Professor Whalen, placing the
|
||
latter as far from Ida as possible; but she saw that he was covertly
|
||
watching the woman he must hate. Ida had thrown him a careless nod when
|
||
they met by the tables in the grove; and he had returned it with a bow
|
||
of surpassing dignity.
|
||
Gregory, now that the men of science and of the press had served his
|
||
purpose, was eager to be rid of them, and excused himself when the
|
||
luncheon was half over, on the plea that he was his own manager and
|
||
needed at the mine. He disappeared into the Primo shaft house, as he
|
||
often took that short cut to his own shaft, and Mowbray, who had been
|
||
silent, for Gregory affected his buoyant spirits unaccountably, moved
|
||
his chair up beside Ida and endeavoured to divert her mind from the
|
||
general to the specific. But she snubbed him and he relapsed into
|
||
gloom. On the train, however, when she saw that Whalen, who was on his
|
||
way to Helena to apply for his patent, was watching her, she flirted
|
||
pointedly with the handsome Englishman.
|
||
The guests were to leave Butte on the seven o’clock train, which,
|
||
fortunately for the strain that all were beginning to feel, was only
|
||
half an hour late. When it had pulled out and Ida had waved her last
|
||
farewell, she walked in silence to her car, and intimated with a
|
||
curt nod that Mowbray might take the seat beside her. “But tell Ben
|
||
where you want to go,” she said, “for I can’t ask you to dine with me
|
||
tonight.”
|
||
Mowbray told the chauffeur to drop him at the Club and then asked his
|
||
lady, whose animation had dropped to zero, if anything had happened to
|
||
annoy her, or if she were merely worn out.
|
||
“Don’t ask me any questions,” said Ida sharply. “I’m sorry to seem
|
||
inhospitable but I’ve got something to think out. You can go to the
|
||
dance at the Country Club.”
|
||
“I shall more likely go to my rooms and write letters. Don’t worry
|
||
about me. Shall we have a ride tomorrow morning?”
|
||
“I don’t know.”
|
||
Mowbray was always philosophical about women, having been brought
|
||
up with many sisters. “You are tired out,” he said without too much
|
||
sympathy. “Just call me up if you feel like doing anything in the
|
||
morning.”
|
||
“All right. Good night.”
|
||
She left him at the Silver Bow Club. Her own house was only a few
|
||
blocks distant. She told the maid who admitted her that she wanted no
|
||
dinner and should go to bed at once and without assistance. When she
|
||
reached the seclusion of her bedroom she locked the door, flung her hat
|
||
on the floor and stamped on it, broke several valuable objects, and
|
||
then paced up and down, gritting her teeth to keep from screaming.
|
||
There was but one person on earth that she hated more than she hated
|
||
Gregory Compton and that was herself. She had meant to play a waiting
|
||
game of many interviews, in which her fine calculation had mapped out
|
||
the insidious approach, the adroit pushing aside of barrier after
|
||
barrier, until Gregory returned almost inadvertently to his allegiance.
|
||
She had no desire for romantic scenes; they would have embarrassed
|
||
herself, and with her instinctive knowledge of man, she knew that
|
||
Gregory would shrink back from any situation that might involve
|
||
explanations. Nor did she wish to let a man so absorbed as Gregory feel
|
||
that he was loved too much, lest he chafe at the thought of feminine
|
||
exactions, and his mind continue to dwell upon the delights of freedom.
|
||
He might be capable of moments when the woman alone existed, but there
|
||
would be long intervals when he would hate a woman’s clinging arms if
|
||
they made him ten minutes late for his work, particularly if he was
|
||
headed for his beloved mine. Ida, shrewd, self-controlled, watchful,
|
||
knew herself, now that her powers were developed, to be the natural
|
||
mate for such a man. He would drive a temperamental woman mad.
|
||
And she had seemed to make a steady progress. The geologists had
|
||
remained for three days in Butte before visiting Perch of the Devil.
|
||
On the second evening they had been entertained by the professors of
|
||
the School of Mines, but on the other two evenings she had given them
|
||
elaborate dinners, and Gregory had attended each. She had seen that he
|
||
was increasingly proud of her, and grateful. Upon both occasions they
|
||
not only had had a little talk apart but he had drifted back to her
|
||
more than once.
|
||
And today she had spoiled everything! In the darkness of that mine she
|
||
had weakened and made open love to him. She had practically offered
|
||
herself--she ground her teeth as she thought of her clinging fingers,
|
||
her appealing eyes, her cheek almost brushing his--and he had rejected
|
||
her--with consideration, but finality!
|
||
If he had knocked her down she would have cherished hope. But in this
|
||
hour she had none. His indifference was colossal. The busiest men in
|
||
America had their women; she no longer could comfort herself with the
|
||
delusion that the mine was a controlling and exclusive passion; she
|
||
merely had ceased completely to attract him--and she remembered how
|
||
thorough he was; she no more could relight those old fires than she
|
||
could blow life into the dead ashes of Big Butte. He would turn to
|
||
another woman one of these days; it was not within human possibility
|
||
that he would go through life without love; but not to her! not to
|
||
her! She would do to entertain his friends, to flaunt his wealth
|
||
and advertise his success; in time no doubt he would treat her as a
|
||
confidential friend; but sexually she was an old story. It was apparent
|
||
that the mere thought bored him; it was only when Gregory was bored
|
||
that he was really polite.
|
||
If she could but have accepted this, resigned all hope, instead of
|
||
subjecting herself to humiliation; she, who had never failed to send
|
||
the blood to a man’s head with a glance! She didn’t want to hate him.
|
||
She didn’t want to hate herself. Why could she not have been content to
|
||
accept the inevitable with philosophy and grace?
|
||
The answer that, owing to some mysterious law of her being, she loved
|
||
him, made her want to smash everything else in the room; but she would
|
||
have some difficulty concealing the present wreckage from her servants,
|
||
so she bit her handkerchief to shreds instead.
|
||
When the furies had tired her body she fell into a chair and although
|
||
her brain was still hot with the blood sent there by excitement and
|
||
lack of food, she admitted frankly that the peculiar nature of her
|
||
agitation was due to wounded pride and intense mortification; had
|
||
she arrived at a point where she no longer could hope, but without
|
||
self-betrayal, she might have wept bitter tears, but there still would
|
||
have been a secret sweetness in loving him. Now, she growled out her
|
||
hatred. She longed to do something to hurt him. If she only were
|
||
another sort of woman! She would go to Mowbray’s rooms, go to Helena
|
||
with him for a week. And simultaneously she yearned to be consoled, not
|
||
only in her heart but in her wounded pride.
|
||
Should she ask her husband for a divorce; revenge herself by becoming
|
||
an English duchess? Ora, in the moment or two they had found together
|
||
at the station, had told her that Mowbray’s older brother was at Davos,
|
||
unmistakably dying of tuberculosis, and that his engagement, insisted
|
||
upon by his father, had been broken. Valdobia had given her this news
|
||
in his last letter, adding the hope that his friend would bring Ida
|
||
back with him that they might all be together once more.
|
||
Was this the solution of her problem? A marriage that would demonstrate
|
||
to Gregory Compton that her moment of seeming weakness was mere
|
||
coquetry; a marriage that would raise her an immeasurable social
|
||
distance above him; a permanent dissociation from everything that could
|
||
remind her of him and this terrible obsession that had disorganised
|
||
her being, reduced her to the grovelling level of the women whose
|
||
dependence on the favour of man she had always despised?
|
||
When she reflected that her revenge would fall flat, Gregory’s not
|
||
being the order of mind to appreciate the social pre-eminence of a
|
||
titled race, she ground her teeth, again. There was nothing left but
|
||
to consider herself. Should she choose the part that not only would
|
||
exalt her station and fill her life with the multifarious interests of
|
||
a British peeress, but banish this man in time from her memory; or stay
|
||
on and alternate torments with moments of indescribable sweetness when
|
||
he smiled upon her? And might she not yet manipulate him into her net
|
||
if she continued to play the waiting game? Or would she go wholly to
|
||
pieces the first time they were alone together?
|
||
Her pride strangled at this possibility and brought her to her feet.
|
||
The blood was still boiling in her head, she knew what nerves were for
|
||
the first time in her life. She made up her mind to go out and walk. In
|
||
this part of the town she was not likely to meet anyone.
|
||
She found another hat, put on a warm coat, and let herself out of the
|
||
house. It was ten o’clock. All the West Side, no doubt, was at the
|
||
Country Club.
|
||
For a time she walked rapidly and aimlessly, trying to focus her mind
|
||
on other things. But when a woman is in love and the path is stony, she
|
||
is obsessed much as people are that suffer from shock and reiterate
|
||
ceaselessly the circumstances of its cause. Her brain seethed with
|
||
hate, longed for revenge. Nothing would have gratified her more than to
|
||
take the secret revenge of infidelity. Many a woman has taken a lover
|
||
for the satisfaction of laughing to herself at her husband’s dishonour;
|
||
to dishonour being the most satisfactory of all vengeance, whether open
|
||
or concealed.
|
||
She realised abruptly that her thoughts had led her unconsciously to
|
||
the door of John Mowbray’s lodgings. The flat had been lent him by a
|
||
banker to whom he had brought a letter from his brother, and who had
|
||
gone East immediately after his arrival; the banker’s wife lived in
|
||
Southern California. It occupied the second story of a house in West
|
||
Broadway and had its own entrance on a side street. Mowbray had given a
|
||
tea there a day or two before, and Ida had presided.
|
||
She did not delude herself for a moment that she could take her
|
||
full revenge upon the unconscious Gregory, but at least she could do
|
||
something quite shocking, something that would infuriate a husband.
|
||
Ida was not afraid of any man, least of all one that wished to make a
|
||
duchess of her, but it would be an additional satisfaction to torment
|
||
him, and an adventure with a spice of danger in it no doubt would
|
||
restore her equilibrium. If Mowbray made violent love to her she felt,
|
||
by some obscure process of feminine logic, that she would forgive
|
||
Gregory Compton.
|
||
She glanced hastily up and down the street, then more sharply,
|
||
wondering if she had dreamed that once or twice she had looked over her
|
||
shoulder with the sense of being followed. It was a bright moonlight
|
||
night. No one was in sight. She rang the bell of Mowbray’s flat. The
|
||
door was opened from above. At the head of the stairs stood the Jap who
|
||
served as housekeeper and valet.
|
||
She hesitated a moment, taken aback. She had forgotten the servant.
|
||
Then she closed the door behind her. “Is Lord John in?” she asked
|
||
negligently.
|
||
The Jap spread out his hands deprecatingly. “His lordship not at home,”
|
||
he announced.
|
||
Ida hesitated another moment, then ascended the stair and entered the
|
||
living-room. “Turn on the lights,” she said, “I shall wait for him.”
|
||
The Jap obeyed orders, bowed, and withdrew. For a moment Ida was
|
||
tempted to telephone to the Silver Bow Club, but Mowbray was sure to
|
||
return soon to write his letters, and she liked the idea of giving him
|
||
a surprise. She lit a cigarette, selected a novel from the bookcase,
|
||
and sank into the most comfortable of the chairs. The room was warm;
|
||
both body and brain were very weary. The cool night air had driven the
|
||
blood from her head. She yawned, dropped the book, fell sound asleep.
|
||
She awoke as the clock was striking half-past one. She was still alone.
|
||
For a moment she stared about her, bewildered, then rose and laughed
|
||
aloud.
|
||
“This is about the flattest----” She went swiftly out into the hall
|
||
and awoke the slumbering Jap. “You little yellow devil,” she cried,
|
||
“why didn’t you tell me that his lordship had gone to the party at the
|
||
Country Club?”
|
||
Once more the Jap was deprecating. “Madam did not ask.”
|
||
Ida produced a gold piece. “Well, you are not to tell him that I came,
|
||
nor anyone else. If you do I’ll wring your neck.”
|
||
The Jap’s eyes, fixed upon the gold, glistened. “Why should I tell?” he
|
||
asked philosophically; and having pocketed the coin ran downstairs and
|
||
bowed the lady out.
|
||
When Ida was about to turn the corner she whirled about, this time
|
||
with a definite sensation of being followed. But the street was empty
|
||
save for a man slouching down the hill with an unsteady gait, his head
|
||
nodding toward his chest. It was a familiar sight in any mining town;
|
||
nevertheless she quickened her steps, and in a moment was safe within
|
||
her own house.
|
||
XX
|
||
On the morning following the departure of the geologists Gregory took
|
||
the bit between his teeth and went in to Butte to see his wife. In his
|
||
first moment of shock and confusion it had seemed to him best that Ora,
|
||
whose subtlety he recognised, was the one to manipulate Ida’s still too
|
||
formalistic mind toward the divorce court; but he was unaccustomed to
|
||
relegate any part of his affairs to others, least of all to a woman.
|
||
Nor did he think it necessary to inform Ora of his sudden decision.
|
||
He might work almost double shift to keep her out of his thoughts and
|
||
diminish temptation, and he might marry her and continue to love her
|
||
passionately; but she would obtain little ascendency over him. He knew
|
||
what he wanted; he had trained his will until at times it appeared
|
||
formidable even to himself, and he was as nearly the complete male that
|
||
regards woman, however wonderful, as the supplementary female as still
|
||
survives.
|
||
He had few illusions about himself, and it had crossed his mind more
|
||
than once, since the hope of divorce had dazzled both of them, that
|
||
for a year or two or least there must be a certain amount of friction
|
||
between a nature like his and a complex, super-civilised, overgrown
|
||
feminine ego like Ora Blake. While he had sat with his legs stretched
|
||
out to the fire and his eyes half closed, his body weary, but mentally
|
||
alert, he had received certain definite impressions of an independent
|
||
almost anarchical mind, contemptuous of the world and its midges save
|
||
as they might be of use to herself; of a mind too well-bred ever to
|
||
be managing and exacting in any vulgar sense, but inexorable in its
|
||
desires and as unscrupulous in their pursuit as her father had been; of
|
||
a superlative refinement coupled with a power of intense and reckless
|
||
passion found only in women possessing that quality of imagination that
|
||
exalts and idealises the common mortal attributes. Moreover, it was a
|
||
mind that, the first joy of submission and surrender diminished, would
|
||
think for itself.
|
||
Until that night when both had dropped the mask for a moment he had
|
||
never thought of her as a complicated ego, merely as one from whom
|
||
he felt temporarily separated after a union of centuries; and it had
|
||
been the reluctant admission that he knew her very little, save as a
|
||
gracious woman and his own companion, that had enabled him to school
|
||
himself to spend long hours with her alone as before. He had tumbled
|
||
blindly into matrimony once, and no matter how much he might love this
|
||
woman, to whom he had seemed from the first to be united by a secret
|
||
and ancient bond, he was determined none the less to marry the second
|
||
time with his eyes wide open.
|
||
But although his glimpses of Ora’s winding depths gave him moments of
|
||
uneasiness he always fell back upon the complacent reflection that he
|
||
was a man, a man, moreover, with a cast-iron will, and that the woman
|
||
did not live who would not have to adapt herself to him did he take her
|
||
to wife.
|
||
Until the day before the party at the mines he had been content to
|
||
drift, but a certain moment down in his own mine had given a new and
|
||
abrupt turn to both thoughts and purpose. Ida might have spared herself
|
||
her agonies of shame: she had not betrayed her love, but she had given
|
||
him a distinct impression that she was employing her redoubtable
|
||
feminine weapons to reduce him to his old allegiance. He had remembered
|
||
for a poignant moment that he once had loved this woman to distraction,
|
||
and during that moment he saw her again as the most beautiful and
|
||
distracting of her sex. His brief surrender had filled him with fury.
|
||
He had no intention of despising himself. From boyhood up he had had
|
||
nothing but contempt for the man that did not know his own mind. If
|
||
it had not been for this serene confidence in himself, he, who was
|
||
constitutionally wary in spite of the secret and wistful springs of
|
||
romance in his nature and the apparent suddenness of his bold plunges,
|
||
never would have married Ida Hook, nor any woman, until he had sounded
|
||
her thoroughly. But he had behaved like any hot-headed and conceited
|
||
young fool, and, much as he now admired Ida, it both infuriated him and
|
||
appalled him to feel even for a moment toward her as he had in his raw
|
||
inexperienced youth.
|
||
He therefore made up his mind to go to her like a rational being and
|
||
ask her to give him his freedom. They had made a mistake. They were
|
||
reasonable members of an advanced civilisation, where mistakes were
|
||
recognised and rectified whenever possible. He did not doubt for a
|
||
moment that reason and logic must appeal as forcibly to a woman as to
|
||
himself.
|
||
The door of his wife’s house was opened after the usual delay, and the
|
||
maid told him that Mrs. Compton was upstairs in the billiard room “or
|
||
somewheres.” He took the stairs three steps at a time lest his courage
|
||
evaporate; but drew a long breath of relief when he entered the large
|
||
square hall and saw nothing of Ida. He would have rung for the maid,
|
||
but reflected that no doubt he had already provided enough gossip
|
||
for the republic below stairs without admitting that he did not know
|
||
his way round his wife’s house. He was about to knock on each door
|
||
in turn when he noticed that one in a corner at the end of the hall
|
||
was open and that it led into a narrow passageway. Beyond there was
|
||
light, possibly in one of those boudoirs of which he had heard. Mrs.
|
||
Murphy would have been sure to have a boudoir, and no doubt Ida, little
|
||
disposed as she was to indolence, spent some part of her mornings in it.
|
||
He adventured down the passageway that terminated in a large room
|
||
full of sunlight. He saw his wife standing in the middle of this room
|
||
looking about her with a curious expression of wistfulness. The little
|
||
hall was carpeted, but she heard him almost as soon as he saw her; she
|
||
would have known those light swift footsteps in a marching army. He was
|
||
inside the room before she could reach the doorway and close it behind
|
||
her and astonished to see a deep blush suffuse her face. His quick
|
||
darting glance took in his surroundings as he shook hands with her. The
|
||
room was a nursery.
|
||
“I had two beds put in here and have just seen that they were taken
|
||
out,” stammered Ida.
|
||
Her embarrassment was communicable, but he said gruffly as he walked to
|
||
the window, “Didn’t know the Murphys had children.”
|
||
“Oh, yes, they had two little ones. Seven in all. I think it odd they
|
||
should have left the toys here even if they are rich enough to buy toys
|
||
every day. There is something sacred about a child’s toys.”
|
||
Ida was merely talking against time, but she hardly could have said
|
||
anything better calculated to arrest his attention.
|
||
He turned and looked at her in astonishment.
|
||
“Do you mean to intimate--that you wish you had children? You?”
|
||
Ida’s brain as well as her body was very weary, but it sprang to action
|
||
at once. “Oh, yes,” she said intensely. “Oh, yes! And I might have had
|
||
two! They would be wonderful in this house.”
|
||
“But----” He cast about desperately. “With two children you could not
|
||
have gone to Europe.”
|
||
“That wouldn’t have mattered.”
|
||
“But--don’t you realise that it is this last year of unusual advantages
|
||
that has developed you so--so--remarkably? You hated children----”
|
||
“And do you suppose it was Europe that made me want children?”
|
||
“Oh, of course, nothing is as simple as that. You were taken out of
|
||
yourself, out of your narrow self-sufficient little life; all your fine
|
||
latent powers were developed----”
|
||
“But not altogether by Europe! Still, I don’t deny that it woke me up,
|
||
gave me not one new point of view but many, developed me, if you like
|
||
that better. Would you like lunch earlier? You get up at such unearthly
|
||
hours----”
|
||
“I’m not hungry. I want to talk to you. That is what I came for. Won’t
|
||
you sit down--no, not here! Let us go where there are comfortable
|
||
chairs. I--I am tired.”
|
||
“Very well. Let us go down to the library.” As she walked before him he
|
||
noted that her superb body, which usually looked as if set with fine
|
||
steel springs, was heavy and listless.
|
||
The masculine looking room below restored his balance.
|
||
“You don’t look as well as usual,” he remarked, as he threw himself
|
||
into the deepest of the chairs. “Yesterday was a hard day, and you had
|
||
had those men on your hands for----”
|
||
“I am tired,” said Ida briefly, “but it doesn’t matter. What do you
|
||
want to talk to me about?”
|
||
He did not answer for a few moments, then he stood up and thrust his
|
||
hands into his pockets and scowled at the carpet. Involuntarily Ida
|
||
also rose to her feet and braced herself, crossing her arms over her
|
||
breast.
|
||
“It is impossible for this to go on,” said Gregory rapidly. “It is
|
||
unnatural. People don’t submit to broken lives in these days. I think
|
||
you had better get a divorce and be happy. Mowbray seems to be a fine
|
||
fellow. Of course no one doubts that he has followed you here. He could
|
||
make you happy, and as soon as I am able--in a year or two--I shall
|
||
give you a million; in time more.”
|
||
“Oh! Oh!”
|
||
“You surely cannot want to live for ever like--like--this!”
|
||
“I have no desire to marry again. Have you?” She shot the question at
|
||
him, every nerve on edge with suspicion.
|
||
But the last thing in his mind was to betray Ora, and he answered
|
||
promptly. “No. But I am absorbed in my mine, and my life will be more
|
||
crowded every year with accumulating interests. You are a woman. You
|
||
are young--and--and--you wish for children.”
|
||
Ida believed that after her revelation of yesterday he had come to let
|
||
her down gently. She determined to throw her all on one heavy stake. If
|
||
she lost, at least she would have had the satisfaction of telling him
|
||
that she loved him; she had already sacrificed her pride, and there was
|
||
a reckless sweetness in the thought of revealing herself absolutely to
|
||
this man. When a woman loves a man not quite hopelessly she experiences
|
||
almost as much satisfaction in listening to her own confession as to
|
||
his.
|
||
She drew herself up, her arms still across her breast, and Gregory
|
||
thought he had never seen a woman look so dignified and so noble.
|
||
“Listen, Gregory,” she said, with no tremor in her voice but deepening
|
||
sadness in her eyes, “I regret that I have no children because they
|
||
would be yours. I am willing to live and die alone because I have
|
||
lost your love. I know how I lost it, but, as I look back over my
|
||
crudity and ignorance, I do not see how I could have kept it. You were
|
||
immeasurably above and beyond me. Nature, or some mental inheritance,
|
||
gave you sensitiveness, refinement, distinction, to say nothing of
|
||
brains. I had to achieve all that I am now. I was a raw conceited fool
|
||
like thousands of American girls of any class, who think they are
|
||
just a little too good for this world. I had ceased to love you in
|
||
my inordinate love of myself, and the natural consequence was, that
|
||
as I made no attempt to improve myself, I lost you as soon as my halo
|
||
of novelty had disappeared. I took for granted, however, that I was
|
||
returning from Europe to the old conditions. When I discovered that
|
||
you had no such intention I was piqued, astonished, angry. But when
|
||
I thought it all out I understood. You were within your rights, and
|
||
you have behaved with decency and self-respect. I have nothing but
|
||
unmitigated contempt for two people that continue to live together as
|
||
a mere matter of habit and convenience. They are the real immoralists
|
||
of the world, and the girls that ‘go wrong’ know it and laugh at the
|
||
reformers. Of course I never had ceased to love you down deep, but it
|
||
took just the course of conduct you pursued to make me known to myself.
|
||
I realise that it is hopeless--too late. I never intended to betray
|
||
myself, but I did so in an unguarded moment yesterday. Otherwise I
|
||
never should have told you all this. I have realised since then that
|
||
I have lost you irrevocably, but at least if I cannot be your wife I
|
||
will be no man’s, and I shall continue to bear your name--and see you
|
||
sometimes.”
|
||
Gregory, feeling as if he were being flayed, had dropped upon the edge
|
||
of a chair and buried his face in his hands. When she finished he said
|
||
hoarsely: “I never dreamed--I never imagined--I thought you incapable
|
||
of real feeling----”
|
||
“I think I was then. And since--Well, you are only a man, after all,
|
||
and I made you think what I chose until yesterday--Do you mean----” she
|
||
added sharply, “that you did not guess--did not _know_ yesterday?”
|
||
“It never occurred to me. I thought you merely were flirting a
|
||
little----”
|
||
“Hi!” cried Ida. Then she got back into her rôle. “It doesn’t matter,”
|
||
she said with sad triumph. “I am glad I have told you. As for the
|
||
future? You have convinced Butte that we are the best of friends. Stay
|
||
away if you wish unless I give an entertainment where your absence
|
||
would cause too much comment. You don’t want to marry again, but you
|
||
may feel yourself as free as air. And one day--when you are worn out,
|
||
tired of the everlasting struggle in which you moneymakers work harder
|
||
than the day labourer, with his eight-hour laws and freedom from the
|
||
terrific responsibilities of money; when you begin to break and want
|
||
a home, I will make one for you. There is the doorbell. Lord John is
|
||
coming for lunch. I shall give him his dismissal--once for all.”
|
||
Gregory stood up and took her hand. He had a vague masculine sense of
|
||
unfairness somewhere but he could not begin to define it, and he was as
|
||
deeply impressed as discouraged. “You are a grand woman, Ida,” he said.
|
||
“This is not an hour that any man forgets. I wish that you might be
|
||
happy.”
|
||
“Nature never intended that people on this planet should be happy--only
|
||
in spots, anyhow. And don’t worry about me. You have put me in the way
|
||
of getting a great deal out of this old game we call life, and I am
|
||
grateful to you. Good-bye.”
|
||
They shook hands and Gregory went out into the hall as the maid was
|
||
admitting Lord John. This time the men made no pretence at politeness.
|
||
They merely glared and passed.
|
||
XXI
|
||
The Primo vein had been recovered some time since and Ora had traversed
|
||
the fault drift twice and watched the drilling from the station; not
|
||
only to assert her rights as mistress of the mine but to experience the
|
||
sensations she had anticipated. She soon discovered that when a woman
|
||
is in love, and the issue doubtful, other interests fail to provide
|
||
sensations. But she went down into the mine every day and roamed
|
||
through the older workings. She was tormented and restless, but by no
|
||
means without hope; and this being the case she sometimes wondered
|
||
why she continued to write to Valdobia as if nothing had occurred to
|
||
interfere with their tacit engagement. It was her duty to tell him the
|
||
truth, at once, but she switched off all other currents every Saturday
|
||
morning and wrote her Roman long gay tantalising letters; being gifted
|
||
as a scribe, like so many women, she made them notable with amusing and
|
||
enlightening incidents of mining-camp life.
|
||
She had not seen Gregory since Monday evening. He had gone suddenly to
|
||
Butte on the morning following the visit of the geologists, and had
|
||
telephoned her that he should take the afternoon train to the Capital
|
||
and no doubt be detained for several days. She had expected that he
|
||
would telephone or telegraph from Helena; that he would write was too
|
||
much to expect; she had never seen his handwriting. But he had not
|
||
recognised her existence.
|
||
Four days after his departure she went down into her mine and walked as
|
||
far as the ragged opening blasted by the Apex men, thinking of Ida. How
|
||
much longer would it be before Mowbray overcame her prejudices, and her
|
||
own independent and proud spirit revolted under her husband’s complete
|
||
indifference? Few women were given such an opportunity for revenge both
|
||
subtle and open as Mowbray was offering to Ida Compton.
|
||
It was at this point in her reflections that Ora heard a light
|
||
footfall coming down the fault drift of Perch of the Devil. Without
|
||
an instant’s hesitation she descended the short ladder that had been
|
||
placed between the two drifts for the benefit of the geologists, and
|
||
relit her candle. She met Gregory in the little station. He also held
|
||
a candle, but he was so startled at the apparition that he dropped it.
|
||
She thrust the point of her candlestick into a wooden post.
|
||
“I was going over to see you,” he said unsteadily as he picked up
|
||
his candle, relighted it, and mechanically followed her example. He
|
||
turned abruptly and walked half way up the drift and back, while she
|
||
stood still, shivering with anxiety. Something had put his determined
|
||
serenity out of joint. A crisis impended. She felt her unsteadiness
|
||
and sat down suddenly on the edge of an ore car, fancying this
|
||
dimly lighted room and the black passage leading to it looked as a
|
||
death-house cell must look on the eve of execution.
|
||
Finally she stammered: “What is it? Please tell me?”
|
||
He leaned against the wall in front of her. “I am afraid it’s all
|
||
up,” he said lifelessly. “I went in on Tuesday to ask Ida to obtain a
|
||
divorce. She refused to listen. She has no wish to remarry and will
|
||
have none of divorce. Nothing could have been more definite than our
|
||
interview.”
|
||
“But--but surely in time--if we have patience----”
|
||
“There is no hope. Mowbray entered as I left. She intended to dismiss
|
||
him at once.”
|
||
Ora, without reasoning, of which she was incapable at the moment, felt
|
||
that he had been convinced by more than argument and mere words. She
|
||
flung her arms over her lap and dropping her head upon them burst into
|
||
a wild transport of tears and sobs; she was so unused to all expression
|
||
of emotion that she neither knew nor cared how to control it, and the
|
||
tears swept out the floodgates that had held her passion in check.
|
||
She looked up suddenly and saw Gregory standing over her with twitching
|
||
face and clenched hands; and exulting in the complete abandonment of
|
||
all the controls that civilisation has bred, she sprang to her feet,
|
||
flung herself into his arms and her own arms about his neck. She had
|
||
her immediate reward, for he nearly crushed her, and he kissed her
|
||
until they both were breathless and reeling.
|
||
This was the passion she had read and dreamed of; for once the
|
||
realities were commensurate; instinct warned her to postpone argument
|
||
and prolong the moment to its utmost. There was room in her brain
|
||
for the doubt if such a moment ever could come again, so little of
|
||
love-making is wholly unpremeditated. So she clung to him and kissed
|
||
him, and in that dim cavern his dark face, so reminiscent of those
|
||
great prehistoric races that interested him, looked as he felt,
|
||
primeval man that had found his mate.
|
||
But, whatever his ancient inheritance, he was the immediate product
|
||
of a highly practical civilisation. His keen calculating brain sent a
|
||
lightning flash across his passion. He lifted her off her feet and sat
|
||
her down on the ore car. Then he took a candlestick in either hand.
|
||
“Come to the other station,” he said peremptorily, and led the way to a
|
||
less dangerous seclusion.
|
||
He was half way up the fault drift before Ora, subdued but rebellious,
|
||
stooped mechanically and found the veil that she wore in place of a
|
||
hat when in the mines. She followed him slowly. She felt rather than
|
||
reasoned that she had missed her opportunity and wished angrily that
|
||
she had had lovers and knew better how to manage men. By the time she
|
||
reached the shaft station the confusion in her mind had lifted somewhat
|
||
and she had arrived at the conclusion that she could not overcome him
|
||
in the same way again, but must use her brains. She sat down on the box
|
||
and smoothed her hair with apparent unconcern.
|
||
Gregory had disposed of the two candlesticks and said, his voice
|
||
still unsteady: “There isn’t much to say, but I want to have my last
|
||
interview with you in my mine. I cannot get away from here for two or
|
||
three days. Will you leave at once?”
|
||
“Will you listen to me? I have my right to be heard?”
|
||
“What is there to say?”
|
||
She clasped her hands in her lap and looked up at him. Gregory
|
||
sighed and set his teeth. She looked surpassingly lovely and rather
|
||
helpless--women, at their best, always seemed to him pathetic.
|
||
“Gregory,” she said, “you don’t doubt that I love you?”
|
||
“No. But what is the use? Do you suppose I am going to make you my
|
||
mistress--all Montana would know it in less than no time. I’m no
|
||
saint, but it wouldn’t work--not for us!”
|
||
“But you want me?”
|
||
“Oh!” He turned away, then swung round upon her. She had stood up. Her
|
||
head was bent forward. “You should help me out!” he cried angrily.
|
||
“Can’t you see--it’s you I’m thinking of. Do you suppose I want all
|
||
the sporting women in Butte making horrible jokes about you--all your
|
||
friends cutting you? What’s a man good for if he doesn’t protect a
|
||
woman?”
|
||
“Love affairs have lasted for years without being found out.”
|
||
“Precious seldom. And we are not buried in a big city. I must live
|
||
out here and you would either have to live out here too, or I should
|
||
be sneaking into your house in Butte. A business-like intrigue!
|
||
Remember I lived somewhat before I married. Sentiment and romance soon
|
||
evaporate----”
|
||
“Oh, yes, that is always what I have thought when I have read the
|
||
American novelists’ attempts to portray what they call a ‘guilty love’.
|
||
The only word that expresses it delicately is _liaison_, and the
|
||
setting should be foreign as well. There is no background here. We are
|
||
still under the drab shadow of Puritanism. I have heard it estimated
|
||
that twenty-five thousand American women go abroad every year to
|
||
indulge in a fleeting _liaison_ that gives them courage to endure the
|
||
desperately material and commonplace life of this country for another
|
||
year. You don’t understand that because you never have been in Europe.
|
||
But Egypt--Italy--in Southern Europe anywhere--with its unbridled
|
||
beauties of nature and its far more poetic beauties that centuries of
|
||
art have given it--and a thousand years of love behind us--Oh, cannot
|
||
you imagine how wonderful love would be? Do you think _I_ should ever
|
||
want to come back?”
|
||
Gregory was staring at her. “Do you mean,” he stammered, “that you
|
||
would sacrifice your reputation openly--your future--do you care enough
|
||
for that?”
|
||
“I mean I love you so exclusively that I wish I had a thousand times
|
||
more to sacrifice.”
|
||
“But--but--there are always Americans travelling--and you know many
|
||
Europeans----”
|
||
“They are always easy to avoid. There are villas with walls, and pink
|
||
flowers on top of the walls. And we could travel and see the wonders of
|
||
art when the tourist season was over. Nor would I monopolise you. You
|
||
could have the society of men of brains and achievement everywhere.”
|
||
He continued to stare at her radiant wistful face. He had known that
|
||
she loved him, but it had never occurred to him that she would be
|
||
willing to give up the world for his sake. She was a proud woman, an
|
||
aristocrat, she had an exceptional position everywhere; the great world
|
||
when they parted stood ready to offer its consolations.
|
||
She had unrolled a heavenly vision! His mind had revolted from debasing
|
||
her to the status of what is euphemistically known in the West as
|
||
“sporting women”; he also remembered the immediate disillusionments
|
||
of his younger manhood and wondered if the hideousness of Butte had
|
||
been responsible. The Mediterranean with its ancient civilisations
|
||
flourishing and forgotten before the historic period, Egypt, full-grown
|
||
offspring of a still more ancient but vanished civilisation--both
|
||
called to that archæological instinct so closely allied to the
|
||
geological, made him fancy he heard faint ancestral voices. Ora’s
|
||
eyes were holding his, and her gaze was as powerful as his own. For
|
||
the moment he no longer was a son of the newest section of the newest
|
||
world. The turquoise waters of the Mediterranean spread before him, but
|
||
he saw it alive with galleys----
|
||
He jerked his eyes away, folded his arms and stared downward. He must
|
||
think rationally, not with vapours in his brain. It might be that he
|
||
would be more than fool to sacrifice to any consideration the one
|
||
chance for happiness in perfect union that life would offer him.
|
||
Suddenly he became aware that he was staring at the rocky floor of his
|
||
mine, of its first level; the flickering candle flames revealed bits
|
||
of bright yellow metal. And below was the second level with its superb
|
||
shoot of copper ore ten feet wide. And below, on the third level, still
|
||
was the vein far more beautiful than virgin gold. And down--down--in
|
||
those vast unlocked caverns--what mysteries--what wonder-ores might not
|
||
the earth harbour for him alone to find and name----
|
||
“What are you thinking of?” cried Ora sharply. Then she threw out her
|
||
arms wildly. “I know! I know! It is those accursed ores! Oh, God! What
|
||
have I in me, I, a mere woman, to compensate for the loss of a mine? I
|
||
was a fool--Of course! Of course!”
|
||
But Gregory, although his blood had frozen in his veins at the horrid
|
||
vision of a permanent divorce from his mine, would make no such
|
||
admission.
|
||
“Ora,” he said quietly, “it would be very wonderful--for about three
|
||
months. You would despise me if I were content to dawdle away my life
|
||
in an olive grove, or throw away my best years and these great energies
|
||
nature has given me, doing nothing in that old civilisation in which
|
||
I could find no place. And in time you would resent the weakness that
|
||
had stranded you with no recourse in life but myself. That sort of
|
||
thing has never been a success and never will be, because nature did
|
||
not make man to live on love alone, and it is much the same with the
|
||
intellectual woman. It wouldn’t work. Not with us. I have known from
|
||
the beginning that it must be marriage or nothing. And Ida would not
|
||
divorce me if I ran away with you. She would be entitled to her revenge
|
||
and she would take it.” He leaned forward and signalled the station
|
||
call. “Please take the skip when it comes. I am going below.” And he
|
||
ran down the ladder.
|
||
XXII
|
||
Ora got into the skip and was whisked to the surface.
|
||
She drew the veil over her head and face, wishing dimly that she had
|
||
gone home through the mines; but a moment later the veil fell to her
|
||
shoulders unnoticed. As she crossed the Apex claim she was vaguely
|
||
aware that someone, almost in her path, lifted his hat. She bowed
|
||
automatically, feeling like those poor wound-up royalties who must
|
||
smile graciously upon their loyal people even though a cancer devour
|
||
the body or the brain reel with sorrow.
|
||
Whalen, abnormal in vanity and conceit though he was, took no
|
||
offence; not only was this in his estimation the one great lady of
|
||
the Western annex, but he was startled by the expression in her fixed
|
||
eyes of anguish, terror, and surprise. He had seen Gregory Compton go
|
||
down into his mine not a half an hour ago, and it was easy for his
|
||
fictionised if unimaginative mind to conjure up a hazy picture of the
|
||
scene underground. He turned very red, partly from gratification at
|
||
being so close to human passion and pain, but more from the knowledge
|
||
that he shortly could offer all the elements for another and a still
|
||
more dramatic crisis. At the same time he could do the one woman he
|
||
admired in this wilderness a good turn and heal his cankerous ache for
|
||
vengeance.
|
||
Ora went on to her little house and sank into a chair before the
|
||
burnt-out logs. Her body felt as if it were a vessel into which
|
||
had been poured all the waters of woman’s bitterness and despair.
|
||
Nevertheless, her predominant sensation was astonishment. For a year
|
||
she had lived in a fool’s paradise, indissolubly mated with Gregory
|
||
Compton. It was only in the moment when the idea of his own divorce
|
||
flashed into her mind that she realised she had meant to have him for
|
||
ever, that her imagination had been a mere playground on which she had
|
||
romped, and abruptly abandoned when she saw reality standing at the
|
||
gate.
|
||
Since that day, interrupted only by the fevers and doubts of love,
|
||
she had accepted with joy her predestined fate as the visible mate
|
||
of Gregory Compton. Else what did it all mean? She had counted
|
||
on marriage, but that respectable solution had faded into utter
|
||
insignificance as soon as the shock of Ida’s refusal had passed. To
|
||
fling the world aside, to regard it as a mere whirling speck in the
|
||
void, followed as a matter of course. She and this man would fill all
|
||
space.
|
||
And she had lost. It was over. _Over. Over._ For a time the
|
||
astonishment consequent upon the mental reiteration of this fact held
|
||
her. Her mind, quick, alert, sinuous as she had always found it, was
|
||
unable to readjust itself. How could anything be over that manifestly
|
||
had been created to go on for ever? What, then, did it all mean: that
|
||
mutual recognition when they had sat together that night in Butte,
|
||
that long mental obsession, this later perfect understanding, this
|
||
indubitable power to find in each other complete happiness? Over. And
|
||
by the man’s decree. How odd. How odd. And what a tragic waste.
|
||
She knew that the mine had pulled him, but she was too much the woman
|
||
to take a mine seriously. There had been some other reason. He loved
|
||
her; she never doubted that. He had resisted--why? She groped back
|
||
through her limited experience, wondering if the trouble were that
|
||
she had had so little. Life had not begun with her until a year ago.
|
||
She had been a mere student, deliberately living in the unreal, often
|
||
deluding, world of books, the worst of all preparations for life.
|
||
Some women were independent of experience, knew men by instinct. She
|
||
felt that Ida, in a similar situation, would have had her way. She
|
||
had not managed cleverly; no doubt with all her charm and her natural
|
||
allurement for men, even a certain acquired coquetry, she was one of
|
||
those women that could theorise brilliantly, but failed utterly to
|
||
manage their own affairs at critical moments.
|
||
She was well aware that she had not been developing along ideal
|
||
lines of late, particularly since she had come out here with the
|
||
unadmitted intention of stealing her friend’s husband. By all the laws
|
||
of tradition she should be wicked all through. Pride, diffidence,
|
||
fastidiousness--one or all, she was in no condition to decide--had
|
||
prevented her from playing the deliberate rôle of siren. She sighed and
|
||
wished that life could be played upon the formula adopted by so many
|
||
brilliant novelists: a steady unrelenting development of character upon
|
||
strictly logical lines and by means of cunningly created situations,
|
||
that was as much like life as a mother’s formula would be for the
|
||
thoughts and deeds of her children at a given hour a year hence.
|
||
Ora did not know that most people in their rare moments of honest
|
||
introspection find themselves singularly imperfect. She had looked for
|
||
greater consistency in her complex recesses; assuming that if she made
|
||
up her mind to take the husband of any woman, and that woman her best
|
||
friend, she would be wholly hard and wicked, and, for the sake of the
|
||
result, quite willing to achieve this consistent imperfection. And such
|
||
hardness would be the surest of all solaces in the event of failure.
|
||
She felt neither hard nor nearly as wicked as she should, but she did
|
||
recognise the fact that if she had one more chance she would win by
|
||
hook or crook.
|
||
Her thoughts swung to Ida. What had she said to Gregory in that last
|
||
decisive interview? Ida was as clever as the devil. She would watch
|
||
her chance and make just the right appeal at the right moment. Gregory
|
||
could be ruthless to the woman of whom he had wearied or to the woman
|
||
he loved, but if his wife played upon his honour, his Western chivalry,
|
||
his sense of fair play, and reiterated her own rights--to her would he
|
||
lower his flag if it struck the life out of his own heart, and left
|
||
himself nothing to feed the deep passion and romance of his nature for
|
||
the rest of his life.
|
||
In any case Ida had won.
|
||
Once more Ora wished that she had gone to work when she found herself
|
||
penniless after her father’s death. She would have developed normally,
|
||
and it was unthinkable that in the little world of Butte she would not
|
||
have met Gregory Compton while he was free. Then not only would she be
|
||
happy today but know nothing of those abysmal depths in her soul which
|
||
she execrated while yielding to them and lamenting that for the time
|
||
being they were no worse. Love may be divine when all goes well, or
|
||
one is born into the cult of the martyr, but when it comes too late
|
||
to passionate natures associated with virile and accomplished minds,
|
||
it can be the very spawn of hell. Ora’s regret that she was not of the
|
||
breed of those finished wantons of history that rose to fame on the
|
||
shattered hearts of men was born of expediency. Could she have been
|
||
given her choice and Gregory Compton she would have elected to be fine
|
||
and noble, consummating the lofty dictates of her superior intellectual
|
||
endowment. Not yet had she realised that lacking a ruthless centralised
|
||
ideal, rarely allied to brilliant intellects, the souls of women even
|
||
more than those of men (who have less time and more poise) are the
|
||
playthings of Circumstance.
|
||
She became aware that her Chinaman was crossing the room, and before
|
||
she could refocus her wandering mental vision and intercept him, he had
|
||
opened the front door and admitted Professor Whalen.
|
||
XXIII
|
||
Ida had broken a dinner engagement and sat alone in her library. She
|
||
knew that Gregory had passed through Butte that day on his way from
|
||
Helena to Pony; she had seen him leave the Block where his lawyers
|
||
had their offices and jump into a waiting taxi. He was not the man to
|
||
take a cab for anything but an imminent train. She had rushed home,
|
||
but he had neither called nor telephoned. She reasoned that he would
|
||
be more than man if he were not reluctant to see her again after their
|
||
last embarrassing interview, that there was no cause for fresh doubts,
|
||
and that there was literally nothing for her to do at present but
|
||
continue to play her waiting game. But she felt both sad and nervous,
|
||
and wondered if it were in her to despair, to “cut and run” like
|
||
other women; or whether it might not be wise to absent herself for a
|
||
time. Gregory was the sort of man to appreciate delicacy, and after
|
||
an absence of two months they would meet quite naturally. She could
|
||
visit Yellowstone and Glacier Park, and send him pleasant impersonal
|
||
postcards.
|
||
But although she hesitated to acknowledge it, she was tired of her
|
||
waiting game, she wished that “fate would get a move on”, and she had
|
||
left her husband once with unforeseen results. She leaned her elbows
|
||
on her knees and pressed her hands against her face. She had always
|
||
cherished a high opinion of her cleverness in regard to men, but she
|
||
was nonplussed. For a woman of her resource there should be some
|
||
alternative to waiting. She knew that she had made a deep impression
|
||
on her husband in that momentous interview, but who could say that he
|
||
had not deliberately put the memory of it out of his mind? Certainly
|
||
there was no sign that it had softened him or paved the way for her
|
||
reinstatement into his life.
|
||
She was alarmed at her waning self-control. During these last few days
|
||
she barely had been able to play her part in society; the people at
|
||
the various functions she had attended had seemed to her confused and
|
||
absent mind like marionettes that she could sweep off the stage with
|
||
her arm, and she had retreated into her shell lest she insult them
|
||
irreparably.
|
||
She brought her heavy brows together. Could there be another woman
|
||
after all? Gregory was cleverer than any detective. Why should it occur
|
||
to him to suggest divorce, he a man so absorbed in a mine that he had
|
||
forgotten how to live--merely out of consideration for a discarded wife
|
||
whose existence he generally managed to forget? It was certainly odd,
|
||
and its idiosyncrasies grew and swelled as she brooded. She wondered
|
||
if she had been a fool. But who in heaven’s name could the woman be?
|
||
Of course it was only a passing fancy, but could she wait, _could she
|
||
wait_?
|
||
She was aroused by a slight cough, discreet but full of subtle
|
||
insolence. She sprang to her feet, and Whalen smiled as he saw her
|
||
drawn face and bloodshot eyes. He stood just within the door, and held
|
||
a cap in his hand. He wore a light automobile coat; a pair of goggles
|
||
only half covered his bulging brow. His upper teeth were clamped down
|
||
over his lower lip, a habit when steadying his nerves. Ida thought she
|
||
had never seen him look so hideous, so like a mongrel cur.
|
||
“What do you want?” she asked.
|
||
“How gracious you are! How like Mrs. Blake, who would not forget her
|
||
manners if she----”
|
||
“I’ve got no manners for your sort. Get out.”
|
||
“Oh, not yet. I’ve something to say. I’ve waited for over a year, but
|
||
my time has come----”
|
||
“You’ll go out the way you went last time if you don’t say what you’ve
|
||
got to say pretty quick and get out by yourself.”
|
||
Whalen looked over his shoulder nervously, and measured the distance
|
||
to the front door. He had asked leave of the maid to announce himself,
|
||
and, when she had disappeared, reopened the door and left it ajar.
|
||
“It won’t take me long,” he said grimly. “It took me a little longer to
|
||
tell Mrs. Blake, for she was hard to convince; but she _was_ convinced
|
||
before I left. It is merely this: I saw you go into Lord John Mowbray’s
|
||
rooms on Monday night shortly after ten o’clock and come out at
|
||
half-past one.”
|
||
“Oh, you did, did you? I had a feeling all the time there was a sneak
|
||
in the neighbourhood. Well, much good your spying will do you. Lord
|
||
John was at the Country Club until three in the morning and everybody
|
||
knows it.”
|
||
She spoke calmly, but she was profoundly disturbed. She continued,
|
||
however, in the same tones of cutting contempt, for she saw that he was
|
||
taken aback, “I merely misunderstood an invitation of Lord John’s for
|
||
a bridge party. I thought it was for that night, and although I was
|
||
surprised to find myself the first and Lord John not there, I sat down
|
||
to wait and fell asleep. I had had a hard day. I only condescend to
|
||
explain,” she continued witheringly, “because you are as venomous as a
|
||
mad dog and it is as well to muzzle you at once.”
|
||
“I don’t believe a word of that yarn, and neither will anyone else. I
|
||
certainly managed to convince Mrs. Blake----”
|
||
“Not she. She must have laughed in your face----”
|
||
“Oh no! Not Mrs. Blake! But I will admit that it was not easy to make
|
||
her believe ill of you. Perhaps I should not have succeeded, but when a
|
||
woman is eager to believe----” He laughed and shrugged his shoulders;
|
||
but once more he cast a quick glance at the line of retreat. The heavy
|
||
library table was between them.
|
||
“What the devil do you mean?” Ida spoke roughly, but her heart began to
|
||
hammer. She felt a sudden impulse to run away, but she stood rigidly
|
||
and glared at him. “Here!” she continued, “come to the point. Spit
|
||
out your poison. What particular object had you in trying to set my
|
||
best friend against me? It would have been more like you to run to a
|
||
newspaper.”
|
||
“That later. I wanted to do Mrs. Blake a good turn and at the same
|
||
time let her be the one to tell your husband that he could secure his
|
||
freedom without further delay----”
|
||
“What do you mean? What do you mean?” Ida’s eyes were staring as if
|
||
they saw a vision of herself at the stake; she tossed off her pride
|
||
as she would a hampering cloak. “Ora! Ora! Oh, not Ora! You liar!”
|
||
she screamed. “Prove what you said quick----” But he saw that she had
|
||
caught the edge of the table and that her body was swaying.
|
||
“Oh, neither will deny it now,” he replied in a tone of deadly quiet.
|
||
“She went out there to be near him, no doubt of that; and he’s spent
|
||
hours on end in that bungalow. I went to Helena and back with him and I
|
||
guessed that something was up, for he was glummer and more disagreeable
|
||
than usual; and this afternoon when I saw her come up out of his mine
|
||
I guessed they had had a painful scene and parted. So I told her she
|
||
had the game in her own hands, and that I’d go on the stand and swear
|
||
to what I saw. No husband would believe anything but the truth, nor
|
||
this town either. You might prove that your lord made a fool of you and
|
||
amused himself elsewhere, but you’re done for all the same; and I guess
|
||
Mr. Compton would manage his divorce all right. Then two people that
|
||
are madly in love will be happy----”
|
||
Ida’s strength rushed back and the world turned scarlet. She picked
|
||
up a heavy bronze from the table and hurled it at him. But Whalen was
|
||
expecting a physical assault in some form. He ducked and fled. When she
|
||
reached the open door he was not in sight.
|
||
XXIV
|
||
Ora watched the clock until twenty minutes after eleven.
|
||
The miners changed shift promptly, and the last should have gone down
|
||
the Primo shaft by a quarter past at the latest. The shaft house would
|
||
be empty, as no hoisting was being done on the night shift.
|
||
She turned out the light in her living-room, wrapped herself in a dark
|
||
lodenmantel, a long cape with a hood that she had worn while climbing
|
||
in Bavaria, and let herself out. She walked through the grove to the
|
||
edge of the bluff above her camp and stood for a few moments, listening
|
||
intently. Some ten minutes since she had heard the warning shriek of an
|
||
automobile horn, but the garage of her manager, who had motored Whalen
|
||
into Butte, was on the flat, and he had had time either to go down into
|
||
the mine or climb to his own cottage.
|
||
The moon was at the full and the scene as sharply outlined as by day,
|
||
although less animated. Save for the usual raucous noises of a mining
|
||
camp the only sign of life was in the saloon. Some one was playing a
|
||
pianola, and through the open door she saw men standing at the bar. For
|
||
a moment she was tempted to take the surface path across the camps; but
|
||
the risk was too great. Some one was sure to be abroad, and although
|
||
she had been willing to brave the scorn of the world when there was no
|
||
apparent alternative, she shrank from the plain Saxon the miners would
|
||
use if they saw her. From Gregory’s shaft house she could reach his
|
||
cabin by the path behind the abandoned cut.
|
||
A light was burning in her shaft house. She was not expert enough to
|
||
descend the ladder candle in hand, and for a moment faltered above the
|
||
darkness of the well; she had not been down before at night. Then she
|
||
reflected that it was always night in the mines and descended without
|
||
further hesitation.
|
||
At the foot of the shaft the usual station was one with the chamber
|
||
left after removing the first large deposit of ore. They had merely
|
||
cut through the vein at this point without stoping, and the great
|
||
excavation had a lofty roof. Ora struck a match and lit a candle
|
||
near by. On the day of the geologists’ visit a number of miner’s
|
||
candlesticks had been thrust into what little wood there was in the
|
||
chamber, and the candles were but half burnt out. Then she lit the one
|
||
she had brought in her pocket. Accustomed as she was by this time to
|
||
the route underground by chamber and gallery to the Perch mine, she
|
||
always picked her way carefully, particularly down the first drift;
|
||
her lessees, impatient at the leanness of the connecting vein, and not
|
||
wishing to spend either the time or the money to sink the shaft another
|
||
hundred feet, had understoped, and the holes were ill-covered.
|
||
She crossed the large black cavern toward the first of these tunnels,
|
||
or drifts, sweeping the candle about her head, and then holding
|
||
it downward, for she always feared cave-ins. The room was almost
|
||
untimbered, owing to the hardness of the rock.
|
||
She had almost reached the mouth of the drift, when she paused
|
||
suddenly, listened intently, and then blew out her candle. Some one
|
||
was on the ladder. It was one of the miners, no doubt. Something had
|
||
detained him above ground, and not daring to summon the shaft house
|
||
man, he was sneaking down the ladder. He would go on down to the second
|
||
level of the mine. Ora stood motionless, her hood pulled over her white
|
||
face. Her miners were good average men, but the saloon flourished, and
|
||
was no doubt responsible for the present delinquency.
|
||
Then once more she listened intently. The upper part of her body
|
||
stiffened like a startled animal’s. Whoever was coming down was making
|
||
his first descent by foot; not only was his progress slow, but he was
|
||
breathing heavily, and hesitating between rungs, as if it were his
|
||
first experience of an inclined ladder. Miners hate the shaft ladder,
|
||
and will resort to any subterfuge to avoid it, but they are experts
|
||
in “negotiating” it nevertheless. No doubt this was some green hand,
|
||
recently employed. Or possibly the man was drunk.
|
||
Then suddenly Ora turned cold with the chill of the mine itself, a
|
||
mere physical attribute that her warm blood had never deigned to
|
||
notice before. A form was slowly coming into view below the high roof
|
||
of the cavern, and although it was little more than a blot on the
|
||
general blackness, Ora’s keen eyes, accustomed to the faint relief
|
||
given by the candle near the shaft, noted as it descended further
|
||
that it covered more of the ladder than it should. Miners are almost
|
||
invariably thin and they wear overalls. This person wore a heavy cape
|
||
like her own. But it was not alone the garment, which any miner would
|
||
scorn, that betrayed the sex of the invader; it may have been the
|
||
physical awkwardness, the shallow breathing, or some subtle psychical
|
||
emanation--or all--that warned Ora of the approach not only of a woman
|
||
but of a malignant force.
|
||
And this woman was following her. There was no doubt in her mind of
|
||
that. She suffered a moment or two of furious unreasoning terror as
|
||
she crouched against the wall and watched that shadow against a shadow
|
||
slowly descend the final rungs of the ladder. Her first impulse had
|
||
been to flee down the drift, but there was danger of falling into one
|
||
of the gouge holes and disabling herself. She dared not relight her
|
||
candle.
|
||
Shaking, terrified as she never had been in her life--for she was
|
||
normally brave, and it was not a normal woman she feared but that
|
||
aura of hate and lust for vengeance--undecided, putting up a frantic
|
||
prayer that Gregory would come to her rescue, she pulled the hood over
|
||
her face and almost sank to her knees. The woman, breathing heavily,
|
||
reached the last rung and touched the ground as warily as a cat. For a
|
||
moment she stood drawing in deep breaths like sighs, but which escaped,
|
||
to tormented ears, like a hiss. Ora, her eyelids almost meeting over
|
||
the intense concentration of her gaze, saw the woman fling back the
|
||
mantle that covered her, throw out her arms as if to relax the muscles
|
||
after the strain of the descent. Then she turned suddenly, snatched the
|
||
candlestick from the wall and held it above her head.
|
||
For the moment Ora thought her heart had stopped. The woman was Ida.
|
||
Her heavy lowered brows were like a heavy band across the white
|
||
ghastliness of her face. Her eyes glittered horribly. Her lips were a
|
||
mere tight line. Her black hair, loosened, fell over her face. Ora’s
|
||
hypnotised gaze tore itself from those slowly moving eyes and lowered
|
||
itself instinctively to Ida’s right hand. It held the stiletto she had
|
||
given her in Genoa. The slanting rays of the candle fell on the jewels
|
||
of the hilt. Then she knew that Ida had followed her down into the mine
|
||
to kill her.
|
||
Her courage came back as quickly as it had fled. Ora’s brain might
|
||
be democratic but her soul was haughty. The friendship of the past
|
||
eighteen months between herself and this woman suddenly shaped itself
|
||
as forced and artificial, and she was filled with a cold surprise and
|
||
anger. _Who_ was Ida Hook that she should presume to question Ora
|
||
Stratton? Similar reflections, no doubt, stiffened many a noble when on
|
||
his way to the guillotine at the behest of the _canaille_.
|
||
Ora was beyond the ray of the candle at present but Ida was beginning
|
||
to move forward, her eyes almost blank in spite of their brilliancy,
|
||
moving from side to side, striving to pierce the darkness, her head
|
||
bent forward to catch the slightest sound. It was evident that she had
|
||
seen Ora go into the shaft house, and knew that she could not be far
|
||
off.
|
||
Ora took the automatic from the bag at her waist, pointed it at the
|
||
roof of the cave and fired twice. The din was terrific in that confined
|
||
space. Ida shrieked, dropped the stiletto and candle, and flung her
|
||
arms about her head. Ora hastily lighted two other candles, and then
|
||
retreated against the wall. She believed that the terrible inhibition
|
||
in Ida’s tormented mind was shattered, but she kept the automatic in
|
||
her hand, nevertheless.
|
||
The reverberations died away and once more the mine was as silent as
|
||
only a deserted level of a mine can be. Ida raised her head and saw
|
||
Ora. She gave a strangled cry and moved forward a step. Then her arms
|
||
fell heavily to her side. She did not even pick up the dagger. The
|
||
inhuman tension of her mind relaxed, the body barely had force enough
|
||
to hold itself together.
|
||
“I came here to kill you,” she said. “But I can’t do it. I’ve been mad
|
||
for hours, and I wish I could have found you in bed as I thought I
|
||
would. I could have killed you then. But I saw you come down here--Have
|
||
you told him?”
|
||
“No. He was down in the mine until eleven. I was on my way to tell
|
||
him--to break down his resistance tonight!”
|
||
“His resistance?” Ida raised her head. She had lost the pitch necessary
|
||
for murder, but her mind began to recover its alertness and her
|
||
drooping body to set its springs in motion. “What do you mean by that?
|
||
I thought he was in love with you.”
|
||
Ora laughed. She was filled with an utter despair, but the knife was
|
||
still in Ida and she could turn it round. “Oh, yes, make no doubt of
|
||
that. He loves me and will as long as he lives----”
|
||
“Not much he won’t!” roared Ida. “If I’ve been too quick for you you’ll
|
||
never tell him now, and he practically gave me his word the other day
|
||
that he’d never even ask me for a divorce again. That means you go and
|
||
go quick, and if you think Gregory will have nothing to do but sit down
|
||
and nurse your memory----”
|
||
The blood flew to Ora’s head and she hastily dropped the automatic into
|
||
her bag. “I’ll not go!” she said. “And what is more I shall tell him.
|
||
When Gregory knows that you spent three hours in Mowbray’s rooms at
|
||
night----”
|
||
“Mowbray was not there! He was at the Country Club----”
|
||
“_Was_ he?”
|
||
“Yes, and it can be proved. Moreover, you know me well enough----”
|
||
“It doesn’t matter what can be proved or what I believe. You waited for
|
||
Mowbray--Do you suppose that Gregory--or any court of law----”
|
||
“My God!” cried Ida. “You! You! I think it was that drove me off my
|
||
head more than the prospect of disgrace and losing Gregory. You! What
|
||
in God’s name is possessing you? I always knew that you would be the
|
||
concentrated essence of all damn fool women that ever lived when you
|
||
did fall in love, but I never believed it was in you to do anything
|
||
dishonourable----”
|
||
“And would you have believed that you, the concentrated essence of all
|
||
that is cool, deliberate, calculating, would ever be inspired to commit
|
||
murder? And for a man? What’s the use of talking? People possessed by
|
||
love either are wholly themselves while it lasts, or are abnormal and
|
||
should not be held accountable even to the law. I suppose this means
|
||
that you too love Gregory Compton?”
|
||
“Yes it does!” cried Ida, the more vehemently because it shamed her
|
||
to put this unwonted weakness into words. “I do, damn it all! I do. I
|
||
thought I was immune, but I guess we are all born with the microbe and
|
||
it bites when the soil is good and ready.” Her anger had vanished,
|
||
for in spite of Ora’s defiance she knew that she was master of the
|
||
situation. She kicked the stiletto contemptuously aside, clasped her
|
||
hips with her large firm hands and threw back her shoulders. “Now!” she
|
||
said, “admit right here that you know I didn’t go to Mowbray’s rooms
|
||
for any old intrigue. That kind of thing isn’t in me and you know it.”
|
||
“I will confess I was surprised--I refused to believe it at first--Oh,
|
||
I suppose I don’t. But it doesn’t matter----”
|
||
“Are you ready to come with me this minute to Gregory and tell him that
|
||
yarn--knowing that I can prove Mowbray wasn’t there--I say _go with
|
||
me_--not by yourself.”
|
||
Ora made no reply. She was beaten but she was not ready to admit it.
|
||
“You may bet your life on one thing,” continued Ida. “You go with me
|
||
or you don’t go at all, for I’ll stick to you like wet paint until
|
||
this thing is settled once for all. Now just tell me what you meant a
|
||
while back by Gregory’s resistance? When you found I wouldn’t consent
|
||
to a divorce--of course you put him up to ask me, you traitorous little
|
||
white devil--did you want him to elope with you?”
|
||
“Yes I did!”
|
||
“And he wouldn’t!”
|
||
“He--he would not sacrifice me----”
|
||
“Shucks! Where did you want him to go? To Europe?”
|
||
“Yes.”
|
||
“Good Lord! And what did you think you were going to do with him over
|
||
there? Spoon in orange groves for forty years?”
|
||
“There are several thousand resources in Europe besides orange
|
||
groves--but you would never understand----”
|
||
“Oh, don’t I understand? It’s I that does understand, not you, or you
|
||
would never have made such an asinine proposition to Gregory Compton.
|
||
Why on earth didn’t you propose some place with _mines_--Mexico,
|
||
Alaska, China--Then you might have stood some show--but
|
||
Europe--Gregory--Do you remember those American business men that
|
||
always looked as if they had left their minds in an office at the top
|
||
of a thirty-story building, and their bodies were being led round by a
|
||
string? The vision of Gregory astray in Europe for the rest of his life
|
||
would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. Talk about the conceit of
|
||
man. It isn’t a patch on that of a woman when she gets the bug inside
|
||
her head that she can be ‘everything’ to a man. I can manage Gregory
|
||
till doomsday when I get him back, but you’d lose him inside of six
|
||
months no matter which way you got him----”
|
||
“That couldn’t be true! I recognised that he was mine--_mine_--the
|
||
night we met before I left----”
|
||
“What’s that?”
|
||
“Oh, yes, I met him once before I went abroad with you--we talked for
|
||
an hour----”
|
||
“And he was the man you wrote those letters to in Europe----”
|
||
“Yes.”
|
||
“And I your most intimate friend!”
|
||
“I never sent them, and you did not care for him then----”
|
||
“Oh, I don’t see you apologising if you had turned heaven into hell.
|
||
You made up your mind then to have him, I suppose?”
|
||
“No. And not even when I came out here. I only wanted to be with
|
||
him--know him a little better--have that much--Oh, I couldn’t make you
|
||
understand any more than that I can suffer as much as if I were the
|
||
best of women who had lost her husband by death. It was only after
|
||
Mowbray came--there seemed a prospect----”
|
||
“Well, I don’t know that I blame you so much, for I certainly bluffed
|
||
it pretty well. I can forgive you for that but not for meaning to make
|
||
me out a strumpet and send me to the muck heap, disgraced for the rest
|
||
of my life. Well, come along. Let us go straight to Gregory and let him
|
||
decide.”
|
||
Ora did not move.
|
||
“It’s either that or you go back to Butte with me tonight and start for
|
||
Europe tomorrow morning.”
|
||
“I know when I am beaten. I will leave. And don’t imagine that you have
|
||
won because you are in the right. We have emerged from the dark ages of
|
||
superstition, and we know that the wicked are not punished if they are
|
||
strong enough. Nor are the virtuous rewarded for mere virtue--not once
|
||
in ten thousand times. You have won because you are stronger than I.
|
||
That is all.”
|
||
“It’s enough for me.”
|
||
Ora laughed. “Do you really believe that you can win him back? He’ll
|
||
not forget me, because I can always fire his imagination. He is as
|
||
indifferent to you as only a man can be when the woman is an old story.”
|
||
“That was a nasty one! But I’m not worrying. I have been at a
|
||
disadvantage since I got back, thinking my only rival was a hole in
|
||
the ground. But take this from me, Ora: when a woman knows where she
|
||
stands, and has the inside track, and has her nerve with her, the man
|
||
has no show whatever. Nor the other woman. I’ll get him back all right.
|
||
And he’ll forget you. That’s a man’s long suit.”
|
||
“We’ll neither of us ever know, so it doesn’t matter. I shall never see
|
||
him again. That is all that matters to me.”
|
||
“And Valdobia?”
|
||
“I shall marry him. I suppose--after a while.”
|
||
“I don’t mind saying that he is much too good for you.”
|
||
“Possibly. And he’ll love me the more.”
|
||
“And shall you tell him of this little interlude?”
|
||
“Certainly not.”
|
||
“Well, I always have maintained that the woman who confessed anything
|
||
to a man was a fool, but it certainly is a queer mix up.”
|
||
“I don’t know that I should so much mind telling him, after all. Men
|
||
are too practical to resent any but the literal infidelity. And he is
|
||
the only person living that understands me. Gregory does not and never
|
||
would care to. Why could not I have had this madness for the one man
|
||
who is really fitted to be my mate--whose ideas of life are my own, who
|
||
has so much the same order of mind? Why should I love Gregory Compton,
|
||
a man I not only cannot marry, but with whom I never could find a real
|
||
companionship. My God! Why? Why?”
|
||
“There are several ways of getting ahead of life,” said Ida drily, “and
|
||
one is not asking ‘Why’ too often. That’s just one of her little traps
|
||
to keep you discontented. You and Gregory Compton! It certainly is
|
||
funny. What did you talk about anyway?”
|
||
Ora threw out her arms and laughed wildly. “Ores. Ores. Ores. I tried
|
||
to interest him in many of the things that interested me. He didn’t
|
||
even try to understand what I was driving at. One night I offered to
|
||
read to him--I had a lively new volume of memoirs in mind--he asked
|
||
if I had any work on copper. I read to him for three hours from a
|
||
book called ‘The Copper Mines of the World,’ technicalities and all.
|
||
Of course he had read it before, but it seemed to delight him. We
|
||
literally had no common meeting ground but ores, but we loved each
|
||
other madly. Oh, don’t tell me that it was mere passion!” she broke out
|
||
as angrily as if Ida had interrupted her. “Valdobia is attractive in
|
||
far more ways and better looking. Gregory has met many women.--If that
|
||
were all we should have bored each other long since--we never could
|
||
have held each other’s imaginations while apart.--I tell you it is some
|
||
deep primary bond--something that older races perhaps could explain.
|
||
Why should we meet at all in this life----”
|
||
“I guess when we understand all the different brands of love we’ll
|
||
vaccinate and be immune. Shut your teeth, Ora, and take your medicine.
|
||
And for heaven’s sake let us get out of this damp hole. I’ll help you
|
||
and Custer pack and we’ll go to Butte in the car I came out in. Have I
|
||
got to go up that ladder!”
|
||
“No, we’ll go over to the Perch mine and ring for the skip there. My
|
||
engineer is not on duty during the ‘graveyard shift.’”
|
||
XXV
|
||
On the following morning Ida, having seen Ora on the train bound for
|
||
Chicago, went at once to a public garage, rented the touring car she
|
||
had used the night before, and was driven out to the mines. She walked
|
||
up to the cabin on the crest of Perch of the Devil and, finding it
|
||
empty, summoned a miner who was lounging near and bade him call Mr.
|
||
Compton. The man asked to be allowed to use the telephone in the
|
||
office, obtained connection with the second level of the mine, and
|
||
announced in a few moments that the boss was on his way up.
|
||
Ida, who had dropped wearily into a chair, merely nodded as Gregory
|
||
entered. He was as pale as a dark man can be, and his voice when he
|
||
spoke sounded as if he had been running.
|
||
“What is it?” he demanded. “Has anything happened----”
|
||
“To Ora? Nothing, except that she is on her way East and to Europe.
|
||
Tired, no doubt, but quite well.”
|
||
Gregory drew a short sigh of relief, and sat down before his table,
|
||
shading his eyes with his hand. “Well?” he asked. “What is it?”
|
||
“I haven’t come out here to make a scene, or even to reproach you. I
|
||
believe that I should have the self-restraint to ignore the subject
|
||
altogether if it were not for that man, Whalen. Some one must put an
|
||
extinguisher on him at once and you are the one to do it. That is why
|
||
I am obliged to tell you that I found out yesterday about you and Ora.
|
||
I had begun to believe there must be some woman in the case but I had
|
||
not the least suspicion of Ora. I not only believed her to be the soul
|
||
of honour, but I thought she was really in love with the Marchese
|
||
Valdobia, a Roman who has everything to offer that a woman of her type
|
||
demands, and to marry whom she had demanded a divorce from Mark. She
|
||
has been tacitly engaged to him ever since we left Europe.”
|
||
Ida saw the muscles in Gregory’s long body stiffen as if he were about
|
||
to spring, and his eyes glitter through the lattice of his fingers.
|
||
But he made no comment, and after giving him time to assimilate her
|
||
information, she added more gently:
|
||
“Console yourself with the reflection that she would have thrown him
|
||
over for you. But she knows now what a mistake she would have made. Ora
|
||
is one of those atavistic Americans that are far more at home in Europe
|
||
than in the new world. She has gone where she belongs and Valdobia is
|
||
her man.”
|
||
She paused again. He was still silent, and she continued less fluently:
|
||
“Now I come to the unpleasant part for myself. To begin at the
|
||
beginning: I made an enemy of little Whalen before I went abroad. He
|
||
had the sublime impudence to kiss me one day, and I simply took him by
|
||
the back of his neck and the seat of his pants and threw him out of the
|
||
window. He has had it in for me ever since.”
|
||
In spite of the various emotions raging within him, Gregory laughed
|
||
aloud at the picture. The atmosphere felt clearer. Ida went on with
|
||
more confidence:
|
||
“Of course you know that Lord John Mowbray followed me here. He wanted
|
||
me to get a divorce and marry him, as Valdobia had planned with Ora.
|
||
I liked him well enough, but even if I had been free it never would
|
||
have occurred to me to marry him, and no one knew better than he that
|
||
I didn’t care a copper cent for him. His hope after he came here--a
|
||
hope in which he was encouraged by Ora--was that, as you were so loudly
|
||
indifferent, pride might drive me to leave you and make a brilliant
|
||
marriage. Well, I was tempted for a moment. It was on the night of the
|
||
day I had been down in the mine with you. I believed that I had given
|
||
myself away absolutely, offered myself and been refused as casually as
|
||
if I had been some woman of the streets; told you almost in so many
|
||
words that I loved you and been invited with excruciating politeness to
|
||
go to the devil.
|
||
“Well, that night I nearly went off my head. I had a whole mind, for
|
||
a few moments, to ring up Mowbray and tell him that I would get my
|
||
freedom and leave the country for ever. But that passed. I couldn’t
|
||
have done it, and I knew it, in spite of the blood pumping in my head.
|
||
I went out for a walk, for I had smashed a few things already. Then the
|
||
mad impulse came to me to call on Mowbray. I knew that I’d treat him
|
||
no better than I had treated Whalen if he so much as tried to kiss me.
|
||
But I wasn’t afraid. He was too keen on marrying me to take any risks.
|
||
What I wanted was to do something real devilish--to be more elegant,
|
||
something quite the antithesis of all that is _comme il faut_. So I
|
||
went. Mowbray wasn’t there. He had gone to the dance at the Country
|
||
Club. I sat down to wait for him and fell asleep. When I awoke it was
|
||
after one o’clock and I was still alone. I can tell you I got out
|
||
pretty quick. I had slept the blood out of my head and I felt like a
|
||
fool. I bribed the Jap not to tell Mowbray or anyone else.
|
||
“Well, the point of all this is--and the only reason I have told
|
||
you--Whalen saw me go in and waited for me to come out. He believed
|
||
that he had found his chance for revenge at last. No doubt he would
|
||
have told you on the way to Helena, but he hasn’t the spunk of a road
|
||
agent at the wrong end of a gun. So he took his tale to Ora when he got
|
||
back.--But before I go any further I want you to say that you believe
|
||
I had no wrong motive in going to Mowbray’s rooms. Of course a hundred
|
||
people could testify that he did not leave the Country Club until three
|
||
o’clock, but that is not the point with you.”
|
||
“I believe you,” said Gregory. He was intensely interested.
|
||
Ida drew a long sigh and the colour came back to her face. Her eyes,
|
||
heavy with fatigue, sparkled. “Well! Whalen was all for drinking his
|
||
cup of revenge down to the dregs. It wasn’t enough to spring a mine
|
||
under me, he must see what I looked like when it blew up the first
|
||
time. After he told Ora he posted into Butte and managed to get into
|
||
my house unannounced--that maid has been fired. I was in the library
|
||
on the other side of the room. The doorway was good enough for him. He
|
||
told me. Some time I’ll tell you all I felt. After he had lit out with
|
||
the Venus of Milo flying after him, I went stark mad. I made up what
|
||
mind I had left to kill Ora and kill her quick.”
|
||
“What?” Gregory sat up and stared at her, his eyes wide open. And,
|
||
astounded as he was, the immortal vanity of man thrilled responsively
|
||
to the reckless and destructive passions he had inspired in these two
|
||
remarkable women.
|
||
“I got a touring car and arrived at the foot of her hill--a little
|
||
after eleven it was, I guess. There was a light in her living-room, and
|
||
I made up my mind to wait until I was sure she was alone and in her
|
||
bedroom. Then I intended to get in somehow or other and kill her with
|
||
that stiletto she gave me in Genoa. It was a notion of hers that I had
|
||
been one of the wicked dames of the Renaissance, and I just naturally
|
||
took the hint. While I was waiting the light went out and almost
|
||
immediately I saw her hurry down the path that led to her claim and go
|
||
into her shaft house. I knew on the instant that she was going to you,
|
||
and that she took that route to avoid being seen. My mind could grasp
|
||
that much in spite of the fixed idea in it--that she was on her way to
|
||
tell you Whalen’s story. This was true as I found out afterwards. She
|
||
went that night, partly because she couldn’t keep it any longer, partly
|
||
because she wanted to tell you when you were alone in your cabin at
|
||
night and she could also bind you hand and foot with that Lorelei hair
|
||
of hers. It takes the hyper-civilised super-refined Oras to stick at
|
||
nothing when their primitive instincts loosen up.
|
||
“Well--I went into the shaft house, and listened until I no longer
|
||
could hear her on the ladder. Then I followed. Glory! Shall I ever
|
||
forget going down that ladder? I felt as if every muscle in my body
|
||
were being torn up by the roots; and I had to carry the stiletto
|
||
between my teeth. And pitch dark. All my clothes in the way every step.
|
||
It was enough to take the starch out of tragedy, and I guess it would
|
||
have flattened me out if it hadn’t been just the one thing that could
|
||
make me madder still.
|
||
“I’ll give you the details of that scene some other time. I’m too
|
||
tired now. It is enough to say that she had a pistol and made such an
|
||
infernal racket with it--shooting at the roof--that something busted in
|
||
my head and I came to. Then we had it out. She agreed to leave because
|
||
she knew me too well to believe I had gone to Mowbray’s rooms for any
|
||
horrid purpose, and he hadn’t been there anyway. I told her that if she
|
||
told you it would have to be before me, and she knew that she couldn’t
|
||
brazen it through. So I packed her and got her off this morning. That
|
||
means that I had no sleep last night.”
|
||
She stood up and Gregory rose also. “Now, there are two things more,”
|
||
she said with no lack of decision in her voice, whatever her fatigue of
|
||
body. “You must settle Whalen, and you must move to Butte and live in
|
||
my house, even if you are only there once or twice a week. Whalen, the
|
||
moment he discovers that Ora has gone, will run about Butte defaming
|
||
me, or carry the story to the papers. It wouldn’t do me much good to
|
||
prove that Mowbray wasn’t there. People like to believe the worst,
|
||
and in time would forget that Mowbray had been at the Club on that
|
||
particular night. My set might be all right. But the rest--and my
|
||
servants--and Ruby and Pearl! They always use the word ‘bad,’ and, as
|
||
Ora says, an intrigue is only decent in a foreign language. It gives me
|
||
the horrors to think of it. But if we are seen together twice a week,
|
||
and you are known to be living in the house, however often you must be
|
||
absent, nobody will listen to a story that is not headed toward the
|
||
divorce court.”
|
||
“I’ll buy Whalen’s claim and tell him to get out of Montana. He’ll go!
|
||
As for the rest of your programme--please be sure, Ida, that I stand
|
||
ready to protect you now and always. You are not only my wife but an
|
||
extraordinary woman, and I am very proud of you.”
|
||
“Oh, the extraordinary woman hasn’t been born yet, in spite of the big
|
||
fight the sex is putting up,” said Ida lightly, as they left the cabin
|
||
and walked down the hill. “When women really are extraordinary they
|
||
will be just as happy without men as they now want to be with them.
|
||
They try with all their might to be hard, and they can ring outside
|
||
like metal, but inside they are just one perpetual shriek for the right
|
||
man to come along--that is all but a few hundred thousand tribadists.
|
||
But they’ve made a beginning, and one day they’ll really be able to
|
||
take men as incidentally as men take women. Then we’ll all be happy.
|
||
Don’t you fool yourself that that’s what I’m aiming at, though. I’m the
|
||
sort that hangs on to her man like grim death.”
|
||
“You’re all right!” said Gregory, who, man-like, was automatically
|
||
readjusting himself to the inevitable.
|
||
He handed her into the tonneau of the car, and tucked the robe about
|
||
her. She gave his hand a hearty friendly shake, for she was much too
|
||
wise and too tired for sentiment. “Don’t you worry about Ora,” she
|
||
said. “Custer is with her and she has the drawing-room, and is probably
|
||
sound asleep at this moment. It must be very restful to get a tragic
|
||
love affair off your chest.”
|
||
And then the car rolled off and she fell asleep at once.
|
||
PART III
|
||
PART III
|
||
They stood together in the dawn, the blue dawn of Montana. Silver stars
|
||
were winking dimly in the silver sky, clear save above the glittering
|
||
peaks of the distant range, which reflected the blue of a bank of
|
||
clouds above. And all the vast and snowy expanse was blue; and the snow
|
||
on the pine trees of the forest.
|
||
No one stirred in the two camps, not abroad at least; and even the
|
||
shacks and larger buildings built with as little regard for beauty were
|
||
transformed and glorified by the white splendour of winter. On the
|
||
crest of Perch of the Devil was a long gracefully built bungalow, also
|
||
heavily laden with snow, and between the posts of its verandah hung
|
||
icicles, iridescent blue in the dawn.
|
||
A small lawn had been cultivated, and they leaned over the gate of the
|
||
fence that surrounded it, not wrapped in one buffalo robe, but in heavy
|
||
automobile coats, their heads protected from the intense cold by fur
|
||
caps. But they stood close together, and even a passing stranger would
|
||
have known that there was harmony between them. Both were looking at
|
||
the cold loveliness of the dawn and admiring it subconsciously, and
|
||
both were thinking of other things. Gregory was visualising a ranch he
|
||
had bought not long since near those mountains, and the wire gold but
|
||
a few feet below the surface, found a fortnight ago while ditching. He
|
||
had his gold mine at last, but it merely would hasten his grooming for
|
||
the millionaire brotherhood, and had given him none of the exultant
|
||
ecstasy he had dreamed of in the days before he had opened Perch of
|
||
the Devil. The gold mine was not in his hill! Only the sharp, cool,
|
||
calculating business wing of his brain appreciated it. The mine beneath
|
||
his feet was still the object of his deep affections.
|
||
And sometimes, down in the depths of that mine (never above ground), he
|
||
sat alone for a few moments and thought of Ora. He had forced her out
|
||
of his mind when she went out of his life, but nothing could dislodge
|
||
her from his ivory tower, although in time to come she might gather
|
||
dust for years on end. For months after she married Valdobia she seemed
|
||
to have taken his memory to Rome with her; but she brought it back in
|
||
time.
|
||
In those rare moments when he peered through the windows of that inner
|
||
temple, he, too, sometimes asked, “Why?” What had it all meant? It
|
||
had been perfect love--yet so lamentably imperfect; not only because
|
||
they were torn apart, but because they would not have found permanent
|
||
happiness together. Between some subtle essence of their beings there
|
||
was an indissoluble bond, but their minds were not in accord, and
|
||
neither would have been adaptable save during that fluid period when
|
||
even strong egos lose their bearings and float on that inevitable sea
|
||
of many tides called Love; knowing that when it casts them on the shore
|
||
whence they came, once more will they be as malleable as rock crystal.
|
||
But what had it all meant?
|
||
And his wife made him very happy. He found her increasingly desirable
|
||
as a life companion. She adapted herself to every angle of his
|
||
character while losing none of her own picturesque individuality; made
|
||
no impossible exactions either on his soul or his time; was always
|
||
beautiful to look at; and the most level-headed of his friends.
|
||
Even men of less complicated egos have been able to love two women at
|
||
once and survive.
|
||
And Ida? She at least had what she wanted, she was a philosopher, and
|
||
therefore as happy as may be. By constant manœuvring she saw more of
|
||
her busy husband than falls to the lot of most American wives married
|
||
to too successful men. She had made herself so necessary to him that he
|
||
returned from his many absences almost as eager to see her as his mine.
|
||
On these hurried trips she never accompanied him, not only because it
|
||
was wise to let him miss her, and to think of her always in the home
|
||
setting, but because they gave her the opportunity to retain her hold
|
||
on Butte; to enjoy her beautiful house there and her many friends.
|
||
Suddenly Gregory raised his head. Then he lifted the ear flap of his
|
||
fur cap. High above there was a loud humming, as of the wind along
|
||
telegraph wires, or the droning of many bees, or the strumming of an
|
||
aerial harp. The month was March and the weather forty degrees below
|
||
zero. The very sky, whose silver was growing dim, looked frosted, but a
|
||
moment later Gregory felt a warm puff of air on his cheek.
|
||
“The Chinook!” he said softly.
|
||
Another puff touched them both lightly, then a long wave of warm air
|
||
swept down and about them.
|
||
“It’s chinooking, certainly,” said Ida, opening her fur coat and
|
||
pushing back her cap. “I hope that means we’ve had the last of winter.”
|
||
Again there was a long diving wave, almost hot in its contrast to the
|
||
cold air rising from the ground, and still accompanied by that humming
|
||
orchestra above. But in a few moments the hum had deepened into a roar
|
||
down in the tree tops and about the corners of the buildings on the
|
||
hill. The icicles fell from the eaves and lay shattered and dissolving
|
||
on the porch, the snow was blown up in frosty clouds and melted as it
|
||
fell.
|
||
“It’s the last of winter, I guess,” said Gregory. “We’re not likely to
|
||
have another long spell of cold. Spring has come. And so has daylight.
|
||
Let’s go in, old girl.”
|
||
THE END
|
||
FOOTNOTES:
|
||
[A] Pronounced Bute.
|
||
[B] Plato dates the submergence of the last of Atlantis (the island of
|
||
Poseidonis) about 9,000 years before the priests of Sais told its story
|
||
to Solon, who lived 600 B.C. The Troano MSS. in the British Museum,
|
||
written by the Mayas of Yucatan about 3500 B.C., assert that it took
|
||
place 11560 B.C. The archaic records of India give the date of the
|
||
fourth and final catastrophe that overwhelmed the remnant of the once
|
||
vast continent (which Darwin and other naturalists claim must have
|
||
extended from the American to the European continent to account for the
|
||
migration of plants found in Miocene strata) as 9564 B.C. |