I
A miner of the Coeur d'Alêne was returning alone on foot, one winter
evening, from the town in the gulch to his solitary claim far up on the
timbered mountain-side.
His nearest way was by an unfrequented road that led to the Dreadnaught,
a lofty and now abandoned mine that had struck the vein three thousand
feet above the valley, but the ore, being low-grade, could never be made
to pay the cost of transportation.
He had cached his snow-shoes, going down, at the Bruce boys' cabin, the
only habitation on the Dreadnaught road, which from there was still open
to town.
The snows that camp all summer on the highest peaks of the Coeur
d'Alêne were steadily working downward, driving the game before them;
but traffic had not ceased in the mountains. Supplies were still
delivered by pack-train at outlying claims and distant cabins in the
standing timber. The miner was therefore traveling light, encumbered
with no heavier load than his personal requisition of tobacco and whisky
and the latest newspapers, which he circulated in exchange for the
wayside hospitalities of that thinly peopled but neighborly region.
His homeward halt at the cabin was well timed. The Bruce boys were just
sitting down to supper; and the moon, that would light his lonelier way
across the white slopes of the forest, would not be visible for an hour
or more. The boys threw wood upon their low cooking-fire of coals, which
flamed up gloriously, spreading its immemorial welcome over that poor,
chance suggestion of a home. The supper was served upon a board, or
literally two boards, nailed shelf-wise across the lighted end of the
cabin, beneath a small window where, crossed by the squares of a dusty
sash, the austere winter twilight looked in: a sky of stained-glass
colors above the clear heights of snow; an atmosphere as cold and pure
as the air of a fireless church; a hushed multitude of trees disguised
in vestments of snow, a mute recessional after the benediction has been
said.
Each man dragged his seat to the table, and placed himself sidewise,
that his legs might find room beneath the narrow board. Each dark face
was illumined on one side by the fitful fire-glow, on the other by the
constant though fading ray from the window; and, as they talked, the
boisterous fire applauded, and the twilight, like a pale listener, laid
its cold finger on the pane.
They talked of the price of silver, of the mines shutting down, of the
bad times East and West, and the signs of a corrupt generation; and this
brought them to the latest ill rumor from town--a sensation that had
transpired only a few hours before the miner's departure, and which
friends of the persons discussed were trying to keep as quiet as
possible.
The name of a young woman was mentioned, hitherto a rather disdainful
favorite with society in the Coeur d'Alêne--the wife of one of the
richest mine-owners in the State.
The "Old Man," as the miners called him, had been absent for three
months in London, detained from week to week on the tedious but
paramount business of selling his mine. The mine, with its fatalistic
millions (which, it was surmised, had spoken for their owner in marriage
more eloquently than the man could have spoken for himself), had been
closed down pending negotiations for its sale, and left in charge of the
engineer, who was also the superintendent. This young man, whose
personal qualities were in somewhat formidable contrast to those of his
employer, nevertheless, in business ways, enjoyed a high measure of his
confidence, and had indeed deserved it. The present outlook was somewhat
different. Persons who were fond of Waring were saying in town that
"Jack must be off his head," as the most charitable way of accounting
for his late eccentricity. The husband was reported to be on shipboard,
expected in New York in a week or less; but the wife, without
explanation, had suddenly left her home. Her disappearance was generally
accounted a flight. On the same night of the young woman's evanishment,
Superintendent Waring had relieved himself of his duties and
responsibilities, and taken himself off, with the same irrevocable
frankness, leaving upon his friends the burden of his excuses, his
motives, his whereabouts, and his reputation.
Since news of the double desertion had got abroad, tongues had been
busy, and a vigorous search was afoot for evidence of the generally
assumed fact of an elopement, but with trifling results.
The fugitives, it was easily learned, had not gone out by the railroad;
but Clarkson's best team, without bells, and a bob-sleigh with two seats
in it had been driven into the stable yard before daylight on the
morning of the discovery, the horses rough and jaded, and white with
frozen steam; and Clarkson himself had been the driver on this hard
night trip. As he was not in the habit of serving his patrons in this
capacity, and as he would give none but frivolous, evasive answers to
the many questions that were asked him, he was supposed to be accessory
to Waring in his crime against the morals of the camp.
While the visitor enlarged upon the evidence furnished by Clarkson's
night ride, the condition of his horses, and his own frank lying, the
Bruce boys glanced at each other significantly, and each man spat into
the fire in silence.
The traveler's halt was over. He slipped his feet into the straps of his
snow-shoes, and took his pole in hand; for now the moon had risen to
light his path; faint boreal shadows began to appear on the glistening
slopes. He shuffled away, and his shape was soon lost in the white
depths of the forest.
The brothers sat and smoked by their sinking fire, before covering its
embers for the night; and again the small window, whitening in the
growing moonlight, was like the blanched face of a troubled listener.
"That must have been them last night, you recollect. I looked out about
two o'clock, and it _was_ a bob-sleigh, crawlin' up the grade, and the
horses hadn't any bells on. The driver was a thick-set man like
Clarkson, in a buffaler coat. There was two on the back seat, a man and
woman plain enough, all muffled up, with their heads down. It was so
still in the woods I could have heard if they'd been talkin' no louder
than I be now; but not a word was spoke all the way up the hill. I says
to myself, 'Them folks must be pretty well acquainted, 'less they 're
all asleep, goin' along through the woods the prettiest kind of a night,
walkin' their horses, and not a word in the whole dumb outfit.'"
"I'm glad you didn't open your head about it," said the elder brother.
"We don't know for certain it was them, and it's none of our funeral,
anyhow. Where, think, could they have been going to, supposin' you was
right? Would Jack be likely to harbor up there at the mine?"
"Where else could they get to, with a team, by this road? Where else
could they be safer? Jack's inside of his own lines up there, and come
another big snow the road'll be closed till spring; and who'd bother
about them, anyway, exceptin' it might be the Old Man? And a man that
leaves his wife around loose the way he done ain't likely to be huntin'
her on snow-shoes up to another man's mine."
"I don't believe Jack's got the coin to be meanderin' very far just
about now," said the practical elder brother. "He's staked out with a
pretty short rope, unless he's realized on some of his claims. I heard
he was tryin' to dig up a trade with a man who's got a mine over in the
Slocan country. That would be convenient, over the line among the
Kanucks. I wouldn't wonder if he's hidin' out for a spell till he
gathers his senses, and gets a little more room to turn in. He can't fly
far with a woman like her, unless his pockets are pretty well lined.
Them easy-comers easy-goers ain't the kind that likes to rough it. I'll
bet she don't bile his shirts or cook his dinners, not much."
"It's a wild old nest up there," said the younger and more imaginative
as well as more sympathetic of the brothers--"a wild road to nowhere,
only the dropping-off place."
"What gets me is that talk of Jack's last fall, when you was in the
Kootenai, about his intentions to bach it up there this winter, if he
could coax his brother out from Manitoba to bach with him. I wouldn't
like to think it of Jack, that he'd lie that way, just to turn folks off
the scent. But he did, sure, pack a lot of his books and stuff up to
the mine; grub, too, a lot of it; and done some work on the cabin. Think
he was fixin' up for a hide-out, in case he should need one? Or wa'n't
it anything but a bluff?"
"Naw," the other drawled impatiently. "Jack's no such a deep schemer as
all that comes to. More'n likely he seen he was workin' the wrong lead,
and concluded 't was about time for him to be driftin' in another
direction. 'T ain't likely he give in to such foolishness without one
fight with himself. And about when he had made up his mind to fire
himself out, and quit the whole business, the Old Man puts out for
London, stuck on sellin' his mine, and can't leave unless Jack stays
with it. And Jack says to himself, 'Well, damn it all, I done what I
could! What is to be will be.' That's about the way I put it up."
"I wouldn't be surprised," the other assented; "but what's become of the
brother, if there ever was a brother in it at all?"
"Why, Lord! a man can change his mind. But I guess he didn't tell his
brother about this young madam he was lookin' after along with the rest
of the Old Man's goods. I hain't got nothin' against Jack Waring; he's
always been square with me, and he's an awful good minin' man. I'd trust
him with my pile, if it was millions, but I wouldn't trust him, nor any
other man, with my wife."
"Sho! she was poor stuff; she was light, I tell ye. Think of some of the
women we've known! Did they need watchin'? No, sir; it ain't the man,
it's the woman, when it's between a young man and a married woman. It's
her foolishness that gits away with them both. Girls is different. I'd
skin a man alive that set the town talkin' about my sister like _she's_
bein' talked about, now."
The brothers stepped outside and stood awhile in silence, regarding the
night and breathing the pure, frosty air of the forest. A commiserating
thankfulness swelled in their breasts with each deep, clean inspiration.
They were poor men, but they were free men--free, compared with Jack.
There was no need to bar their door, or watch suspiciously, or skulk
away and hide their direction, choosing the defense of winter and the
deathlike silence of the snows to the observation of their kind.
They stared with awe up the white, blank road that led to the deserted
mine, and they marveled in homely thinking: "Will it pay?" It was "the
wrong lead this time, sure."
The brothers watched the road from day to day, and took note that not a
fresh track had been seen upon it; not a team, or a traveler on
snow-shoes, had gone up or down since the night when the bob-sleigh with
its silent passengers had creaked up it in the moonlight. Since that
night of the full moon of January not another footprint had broken the
smoothness of that hidden track. The snow-tides of midwinter flowed over
it. They filled the gulch and softly mounting, snow on snow, rose to the
eaves of the little cabin by the buried road. The Bruce boys dug out
their window; the hooded roof protected their door. They walked about on
top of the frozen tide, and entered their house, as if it were a cellar,
by steps cut in a seven-foot wall of snow.
One gray day in February a black dog, with a long nose and bloodshot
eyes, leaped down into the trench and pawed upon the cabin door.
Opening to the sound, the Bruce boys gave him a boisterous welcome,
calling their visitor by name. The dog was Tip, Jack Waring's clever
shepherd spaniel, a character as well known in the mountains as his
master. Indeed, he was too well known, and too social in his habits, for
a safe member of a household cultivating strict seclusion; therefore,
when Tip's master went away with his neighbor's wife, Tip had been left
behind. His reappearance on this road was regarded by the Bruce boys as
highly suggestive.
Tip was a dog that never forgave an injury or forgot a kindness. Many a
good bone he had set down to the Bruce boys' credit in the days when his
master's mine was supposed to be booming, and his own busy feet were
better acquainted with the Dreadnaught road. He would not come in, but
stood at the door, wagging his tail inquiringly. The boys were about to
haul him into the cabin by the hair of his neck, or shut him out in the
cold, when a shout was heard from the direction of the road above.
Looking out, they saw a strange young man on snow-shoes, who hailed
them a second time, and stood still, awaiting their response. Tip
appeared to be satisfied now; he briskly led the way, the boys
following, up the frozen steps cut in their moat-wall of snow, and stood
close by, assisting, with all the eloquence his honest, ugly phiz was
capable of, at the conference that ensued. He showed himself
particularly anxious that his old friends should take his word for the
stranger whom he had introduced and appeared to have adopted.
Pointing up the mountain, the young man asked, "Is that the way to the
Dreadnaught mine?"
"There ain't anybody workin' up there now," Jim Bruce replied
indirectly, after a pause in which he had been studying the stranger's
appearance. His countenance was exceedingly fresh and pleasing, his age
about twenty years. He was buttoned to the chin in a reefing-jacket of
iron-gray Irish frieze. His smooth, girlish face was all over one pure,
deep blush from exertion in the cold. He wore Canadian snow-shoes
strapped upon his feet, instead of the long Norwegian skier on which the
men of the Coeur d'Alêne make their winter journeys in the mountains;
and this difference alone would have marked him for a stranger from over
the line. After he had spoken, he wiped away the icy moisture of his
breath that frosted his upper lip, stuck a short pipe between his teeth,
drew off one mitten and fumbled in his clothing for a match. The Bruce
boys supplied him with a light, and as the fresh, pungent smoke
ascended, he raised his head and smiled his thanks.
"Is this the road to the Waring mine--the Dreadnaught?" he asked again,
deliberately, after a pull or two at his pipe.
And again came the evasive answer: "Mine's shut down. Ain't nobody
workin' up there now."
The youngster laughed aloud. "Most uncommunicative population I ever
struck," he remarked, in a sort of humorous despair. "That's the way
they answered me in town. I say, is this a hoodoo? If my brother isn't
up there, where in the devil is he? All I ask is a straight answer to a
straight question."
The Bruce boys grinned their embarrassment. "You'll have to ask us
somethin' easier," they said.
"This is the road to the mine, ain't it?"
"Oh, that's the road all right enough," the boys admitted; "but you can
see yourself how much it's been traveled lately."
The stranger declined to be put off with such casual evidence as this.
"The wind would wipe out any snow-shoe track; and a snow-shoer would as
soon take across the woods as keep the road, if he knew the way."
"Wal," said Jim Bruce, conclusively, "most of the boys, when they are
humpin' themselves to town, stops in here for a spell to limber up their
shins by our fire; but Jack Waring hain't fetched his bones this way for
two months and better. Looks mighty queer that we hain't seen track nor
trace of him if he's been livin' up there since winter set in. Are you
the brother he was talkin' of sending for to come out and bach it with
him?"
The boys were conscious of their own uneasy looks as the frank eyes of
the stranger met theirs at the question.
"I'm the only brother he's got. He wrote me last August that he'd taken
a fit of the sulks, and wanted me to come and help him work it off up
here at his mine. I was coming, only a good job took me in tow; and
after a month or so the work went back on me, and I wrote to Jack two
weeks ago to look out for me; and here I am. And the people in town,
where he's been doing business these six years, act as if they distantly
remembered him. 'Oh, yes,' they say, 'Jack Waring; but he's gone away,
don't you know? Snowed under somewhere; don't know where.' I asked them
if he'd left no address. Apparently not. Asked if he'd seemed to be
clothed in his proper senses when last seen. They thought so. I went to
the post-office, expecting to find his mail piled up there. Every scrap
had been cleaned up since Friday last; but not the letter I wrote him,
so he can't be looking for me. The P. M. squirmed, like everybody else,
when I mentioned my brother; but he owned that a man's mail can't leave
the box without hands, and that the hands belonged usually to some of
the boys at the Mule Deer mine. Now, the Mule Deer is next neighbor to
the Dreadnaught, across the divide. It's a friendly power, I know; and
that confirms me that my brother has done just what he said he was
going to do. The tone of his letter showed that he was feeling a bit
seedy. He seemed to have soured on the town for some reason, which might
mean that the town has soured on him. I don't ask what it is, and I
don't care to know, but something has queered him with the whole crowd.
I asked Clarkson to let me have a man to show me the way to the
Dreadnaught. He calmly lied to me a blue streak, and he knew that I knew
he was lying. And then Tip, here, looked me in the eye, with his head on
one side, and I saw that he was on to the whole business."
"Smartest dog that ever lived!" Jim Bruce ejaculated. "I wouldn't wonder
if he knew you was Jack's brother."
"I won't swear that he could name the connection; but he knows I'm
looking for his master, and he's looking for him too; but he's afraid to
trail after him without a good excuse. See? I don't know what Tip's been
up to, that he should be left with a man like Clarkson; but whatever
he's done, he's a good dog now. Ain't you, Tip?"
"_He_ done!" Jim Bruce interrupted sternly. "Tip never done nothing to
be punished for. Got more sense of what's right than most humans, and
lives up to it straight along. I'd quar'l with any man that looked cross
at that dog. You old brute, you rascal! What you doin' up here? Ain't
you 'shamed, totin' folks 'way up here on a wild-goose chase? What you
doin' it fer, eh? Pertendin' you're so smart! You know Jack ain't up
here; Jack ain't up here, I say. Go along with ye, tryin' to fool a
stranger!"
Tip was not only unconvinced by these unblushing assertions on the part
of a friend whose word he had never doubted: he was terribly abashed and
troubled by their manifest disingenuousness. From a dog's point of view
it was a poor thing for the Bruce boys to do, trying to pass upon him
like this. He blinked apologetically, and licked his chaps, and wagged
the end of his tail, which had sunk a trifle from distress and
embarrassment at his position.
The three men stood and watched the workings of his mind, expressed in
his humble, doggish countenance; and a final admission of the truth that
he had been trying to conceal escaped Jim Bruce in a burst of
admiration for his favorite's unswerving sagacity.
"Smartest dog that ever lived!" he repeated, triumphant in defeat; and
the brothers wasted no more lies upon the stranger.
There was something uncanny, thought the young man, in this mystery
about his brother, that grew upon him and waxed formidable, and pursued
him even into the depths of the snow-buried wilderness. The breath of
gossip should have died on so clean an air, unless there had been more
than gossip in it.
The Bruce boys ceased to argue with him on the question of his brother's
occupancy of the mine. They urged other considerations by way of
delaying him. They spoke of the weather; of the look of snow in the sky,
the feeling of snow in the air, the yellow stillness of the forest, the
creeping cold. They tried to keep him over night, on the offer of their
company up the mountain in the morning, if the weather should prove fit.
But he was confident, though graver in manner than at first, that he was
going to a supper and a bed at his brother's camp, to say nothing of a
brother's welcome.
"I'm positive he's up there. I froze on to it from the first," he
persisted. "And why should I sleep at the foot of the hill when my
brother sleeps at the top?"
The Bruce boys were forced to let him go on, with the promise, merely
allowing for the chance of disappointment, that if he found nobody above
he would not attempt to return after nightfall by the Dreadnaught road,
which hugs the peak at a height above the valley where there is always a
stiff gale blowing, and the combing drifts in midwinter are forty feet
high.
"Trust Tip," they said; "he'll show you the trail across the mountain to
the Mule Deer"--a longer but far safer way to shelter for the night.
"Tip is fly; he'll see me through," said Jack's brother. "I'd trust him
with my life. I'll be back this way possibly in the morning; but if you
don't see me, come up and pay us a visit. We'll teach the Dreadnaught to
be more neighborly. Here's hoping," he cried, and the three drank in
turn out of the young fellow's flask, the Bruce boys almost solemnly as
they thought of the meeting between the brothers, the sequel to that
innocent hope. Unhappy brother, unhappy Jack!
He turned his face to the snows again, and toiled on up the mountain,
with Tip's little figure trotting on ahead.
"Think of Jack's leavin' a dog like that, and takin' up with a woman!"
said Jim Bruce, as he squared his shoulders to the fire, yawning and
shuddering with the chill he had brought with him from outside. "And
such a woman!" he added. "I'd want the straight thing, or else I'd
manage to git along without. Anything decent would have taken the dog
too."
"'Twas mortal cute, though, of the youngster to freeze on to Tip, and
pay no attention to the talk. He knows a dog, that's sure. And Tip
knowed him. But I wish we could 'a' blocked that little rascal's game.
'Twas too bad to let him go on."
"I never see anybody so stuck on goin' to a place," said the elder
Bruce. "We'll see him back in the morning: but I'll bet he don't jaw
much about brother Jack."
* * * * *
The manager's house at the Dreadnaught had been built in the time of
the mine's supposititious prosperity, and was the ideal log cabin of
the Coeur d'Alêne. A thick-waisted chimney of country rock buttressed
the long side-wall of peeled logs chinked with mud. The front room was
twenty feet across, and had a stone hearth and a floor of dressed pine.
Back of it were a small bedroom and a kitchen into which water was piped
from a spring higher up on the mountain. The roof of cedar shakes
projected over the gable, shading the low-browed entrance from the sun
in summer, and protecting it in winter from the high-piled snows.
Like a swallow's nest it clung in the hollow of the peak, which slopes
in vast, grand contours to the valley, as if it were the inside of a
bowl, the rim half broken away. The valley is the bottom of the bowl,
and the broken rim is the lower range of hills that completes its
boundary. Great trees, growing beside its hidden streams far below, to
the eye of a dweller in the cabin are dwarfed to the size of junipers,
and the call of those unseen waters comes dreamily in a distant,
inconstant murmur, except when the wind beats up the peak, which it
seldom does, as may be seen by the warp of the pines and tamaracks, and
the drifting of the snows in winter.
To secure level space for the passage of teams in front of the house, an
embankment had been thrown up, faced with a heavy retaining-wall of
stone. This bench, or terrace, was now all one with the mountain-side,
heaped up and smoothed over with snow.
Jack, in his winter nest-building, had cleared a little space for air
and light in front of each of the side windows, and with unceasing labor
he shoveled out the snow which the wind as constantly sifted into these
pits, and into the trench beneath the hooded roof that sheltered the
gable entrance.
The snow walls of this sunken gallery rose to the height of the
door-frame, cutting out all view from without or within. A perpetual
white twilight, warmed by the glow of their hearth-fire, was all that
the fugitives ever saw of the day. Sun, or stars were alike to them. One
link they had with humanity, however, without which they might have
suffered hardship, or even have been forced to succumb to their savage
isolation.
The friendly Mule Deer across the mountain was in a state of winter
siege, like the Dreadnaught, but had not severed its connections with
the world. It was a working mine, with a force of fifty or more men on
its pay-roll, and regular communication on snow-shoes was had with the
town. The mine was well stocked as well as garrisoned, and Jack was
indebted to the friendship of the manager for many accustomed luxuries
which Esmée would have missed in the new life that she had rashly
welcomed for his sake. No woman could have been less fitted than she, by
previous circumstances and training, to take her share of its hardships,
or to contribute to its slender possibilities in the way of comfort. A
servant was not to be thought of. No servant but a Chinaman would have
been impersonal enough for the situation, and all heathen labor has been
ostracized by Christian white labor from the Coeur d'Alêne.
So Jack waited upon his love, and was inside man and outside man, and as
he expressed it, "general dog around the place." He was a clever cook,
which goes without saying in one who has known good living, and has
lived eight years a bachelor on the frontier: but he cleaned his own
kitchen and washed his own skillets, which does not go without saying,
sooner than see Esmée's delicate hands defiled with such grimy tasks. He
even swept, as a man sweeps; but what man was ever known to dust? The
house, for all his ardent, unremitting toil, did not look particularly
tidy.
Its great, dark front room was a man's room, big, undraped and
uncurtained, strongly framed,--the framework much exposed in
places,--heavy in color, hard in texture, yet a stronghold, and a place
of absolute reserve: a very safe place in which to lodge such a secret
as Esmée. And there she was, in her exotic beauty, shivering close to a
roaring fire, scorching her cheeks that her silk-clad shoulders might be
warm. She had never before lived in a house where the fires went out at
night, and water froze beside her bed, and the floors were carpetless
and cold as the world's indifference to her fate. She was absolutely
without clothing suited to such a change, nor would she listen to
sensible, if somewhat unattractive, suggestions from Jack. Now, least of
all times, could she afford to disguise her picturesque beauty for the
sake of mere comfort and common sense, or even to spare Jack his worries
about her health.
It was noon, and the breakfast-table still stood in front of the fire.
Jack, who since eight o'clock had been chopping wood and "packing" it
out of the tunneled snow-drift which was the woodshed into the kitchen,
and cooking breakfast, and shoveling snow out of the trenches, sat
glowing on his side of the table, farthest from the fire, while Esmée,
her chair drawn close to the hearth, was sipping her coffee and holding
a fan spread between her face and the flames.
"Jack, I wish you had a fire-screen--one that would stand of itself, and
not have to be held."
"Bless you! I'd be your fire-screen, only I think I'm rather hotter than
the fire itself. I insist that you take some exercise, Esmée. Come, walk
the trench with me ten rounds before I start."
"Why do you start so early?"
"Do you call this early? Besides, it looks like snow."
"Then, why go at all?"
"You know why I go, dearest. The boys went to town yesterday. I've had
no mail for a week."
"And can't you exist without your mail?"
"Existence is just the hitch with us at present. It's for your sake I
cannot afford to be overlooked. If I fall out of step in my work, it may
take years to get into line again. I can't say like those ballad
fellows:
'Arise! my love, and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee.'
"I wish I had. We'll put some money in our purse, and then we'll make
ourselves a home where we please. Money is the first thing with us now.
You must see that yourself."
"I see it, of course; but it doesn't seem the nearest way to a fortune,
going twice a week on snow-shoes to play solo at the Mule Deer mine.
Confess, Jack dear, you do not come straight away as soon as you get
your mail."
"I do not, of course. I must be civil, after a fashion, to Wilfrid
Knight, considering all that he is doing for me."
"What is he doing for you?"
"He's working as hard as he can for me in certain directions. It's best
not to say too much about these things till they've materialized; but he
has as strong a backing as any man in the Coeur d'Alêne. To tell you
the truth, I can't afford _not_ to be civil to him, if it meant solo
every day in the week."
Esmée smiled a little, but remained silent. Jack went around to the
chimney-piece and filled his pipe, and began to stalk about the room,
talking in brief sentences as he smoked.
"And by the way, dearest, would you mind if he should drop in on us some
day?" Jack laughed at his own phrase, so literally close to the only
mode of gaining access to their cellarage in the snow.
Esmée looked up quickly. "What in the world does he want to come here
for? Doesn't he see enough of you as it is?"
"He wants to see something of you; and it's howling lonesome at the Mule
Deer. Won't you let him come, Esmée?"
"Why, do you want him, Jack?"
"I want him! What should I want him for? But we have to be decent to a
man who's doing everything in the world for us. We couldn't have made it
here, at all, without the aid and comfort of the Mule Deer."
"I'd rather have done without his aid and comfort, if it must be paid
for at his own price.
"Everything has got to be paid for. Even that inordinate fire, which you
won't be parted from, has to be paid for with a burning cheek."
"Not if you had a fire-screen, Jack," Esmée reminded him sweetly.
"We will have one--an incandescent fire-screen on two legs. Will two be
enough? A Mule Deer miner shall pack it in on his back from town. But we
shall have to thank Wilfrid Knight for sending him. Well, if you won't
have him here, he can't come, of course; but it's a mistake, I think. We
can't afford, in my opinion, not to see the first hand that is held out
to us in a social way--a hand that can help us if it will, but one that
is quite as strong to injure us."
"Have him, then, if he's so dangerous. But is he nice, do you think?"
"He's nice enough, as men go. We're not any of us any too nice."
"Some of you are at least considerate, and I think it very inconsiderate
of Mr. Wilfrid Knight to wish to intrude himself on me now."
"Dearest, he has been kindness itself, and delicacy, in a way. Twice he
has sent a special man to town to hunt up little dainties and comforts
for you when my prison fare"--
"Jack, what do you mean? Has Wilfrid Knight been putting his hand in his
pocket for things for me to eat and drink?"
"His pocket's not much hurt. Don't let that disturb you; but it is
something to send a man fifteen miles down the mountain to pack the
stuff. You might very properly recognize that, if you chose."
"I recognize nothing of it. Why did you not tell me how it was? I
thought that you were sending for those things."
"How can I send Knight's men on my errands, if you please? I don't show
up very largely at the mine in person. You don't seem to realize the
situation. Did you suppose that the Mule Deer men, when they fetch these
things from town, know whom they are for? They may, but they are not
supposed to."
"Arrange it as you like, but I will not take presents from the manager
of the Mule Deer."
"He has dined at your table, Esmée."
"Not at _my_ table," said Esmée, haughtily averting her face.
"But you have been nice to him; he remembers you with distinct
pleasure."
"Very likely. It is my rôle to be nice to people. I should be nice to
him if he came here now; but I should hate him for coming. If _he_ were
nice, he would not dream of your asking him or allowing him to come."
"Darling, darling, we can't keep it up like this. We are not lords of
fate to that extent. Fellows will pay you attention; they always have
and they always will: but you must not, dearest, imply that I am not
sensitive on the point of what you may or may not receive in that way. I
should make myself a laughing-stock before all men if I should begin by
resenting things. I could not insult you so. I will resent nothing that
a husband does not resent."
"Jack, don't you understand? I could have taken it lightly once; I
always used to. I can't take it lightly now. I cannot have him come
here--the first to see us in this _solitude à deux_, the most intimate,
the most awful--"
"Of course, of course," murmured Jack. "It is awful, I admit it, for
you. But it always will be. Ours is a double solitude for life, with the
world always eying us askance, scoring us, or secretly envying us, or
merely wondering coarsely about us. It takes tremendous courage in a
woman; but you will have the courage of your honesty, your surpassing
generosity to me."
"Generosity!" Esmée repeated. "We shall see. I give myself just five
years of this 'generosity.' After that, the beginning of the end. I
shall have to eliminate myself from the problem, to be finally generous.
But five years is a good while," she whispered, "to dare to love my love
in, if my love loves me."
There could be no doubt of this as yet. Esmée could afford to toy
sentimentally with the thought of future despair and final
self-elimination.
"Come, come," said Waring; "this will never do; we must get some fresh
air on this." He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, pocketed it, and
marched into an inner room whence he fetched a warm, loose cloak and a
pair of carriage boots.
"Fresh air and exercise!"
Esmée, seeing there was to be no escape from Jack's favorite specific
for every earthly ill, put out her foot, in its foolish little slipper,
and Jack drew on the fur-lined boots, and laced them around the silken
ankles.
He followed her out into the snow-walled fosse, and fell into step
beside her.
"May I smoke?"
"What affectation! As if you didn't always smoke."
"Well, hardly, when I have a lady with me, in such a public place."
* * * * *
"Oh me, oh me!" Esmée suddenly broke forth, "why did I not meet you when
you were in New York the winter before! Well, it would have settled one
or two things. And we might be walking like this now, before all the
world, and every one would say we were exactly suited to each other. And
so we are--fearfully and wonderfully. Why did that fact wait to force
itself upon us when to admit it was a crime? And we were so helpless
_not_ to admit it. What resources had I against it?"
"God knows. Perhaps I ought to have made a better fight, for your sake.
But the fight was over for me the moment I saw that you were unhappy. If
you had seemed reasonably content with your life, or even resigned, I
hope I should have been man enough to have taken myself off and had it
out alone."
"I had no life that was not all a pretense and a lie. I began by
thinking I could pretend to you. But you know how all that broke down.
Oh, Jack, _you_ know the man!"
"I wouldn't go on with that, Esmée."
"But I must. I must explain to you just once, if I can."
"You need not explain, I should hope, to me."
"But this is something that rankles fearfully. I must tell you that I
never, never would have given in if I hadn't thought there was something
in him, really. Even his peculiarities at first seemed rather
picturesque; at least they were different from other men's. And we
thought him a great original, a force, a man of such power and capacity.
His very success was supposed to mean that. It was not his gross money
that appealed to me. You could not think that I would have let myself be
literally sold. But the money seemed to show what he had done. I thought
that at least my husband would be a man among men, and especially in the
West. But"--
"Darling, need we go into all this? Say it to yourself, if it must be
said. You need not say it to me."
"_I_ am saying it, not you. It is not you who have a monstrous,
incredible marriage to explain. I must explain it as far as I can. Do
you think I can afford to be without your respect and comprehension
simply because you love me?"
"But love includes the rest."
"Not after a while. Now let me speak. It was when he brought me out
here that I saw him as he is. I measured him by the standards of the
life that had made him. I saw that he was just a rough Western man, like
hundreds of others; not half so picturesque as a good many who passed
the window every day. And all his great success, which I had taken as a
proof of ability, meant nothing but a stroke of brutal luck that might
happen to the commonest miner any day. I saw how you pretended to
respect his judgment while privately you managed in spite of it. I could
not help seeing that he was laughed at for his pretensions in the
community that knew him best. It was tearing away the last rag of
self-respect in which I had been trying to dress up my shameful bargain.
I knew what you all thought of him, and I knew what you must think of
me. I could not force myself to act my wretched part before you; it
seemed a deeper degradation when you were there to see. How could I let
you think that _that_ was my idea of happiness! But from the first I
never could be anything with you but just myself--for better or for
worse. It was such a rest, such a perilous rest, to be with you, just
because I knew it was no use to pretend. You always seemed to understand
everything without a word."
"I understood _you_ because I gave my whole mind to the business. You
were in my thoughts night and day, from the moment I first saw you."
"Yes," said Esmée, passing over this confession as a thing of course in
a young man's relations with his employer's wife. "It was as if we had
been dear friends once, before memory began, before anything began; and
all the rest came of the miserable accident of our being born--mis-born,
since we could not meet until it was too late. Oh, it was cruel! I can
never forgive life, fate, society--whatever it was that played us this
trick. I had the strangest forebodings when they talked about you,
before I saw you--a premonition of a crisis, a danger ahead. There was a
fascination in the commonest reports about you. And then your perfectly
reckless naturalness, of a man who has nothing to hide and nothing to
fear. Who on earth could resist it?"
"I was the one who ought to have resisted it, perhaps. I don't deny that
I was 'natural.' We're neither of us exactly humbugs--not now. If the
law that we've broken is hunting for us, there will be plenty of good
people to point us out. All that we shall have to face by and by. I wish
I could take your share and mine too; but you will always have it the
harder. That, too, is part of the law, I suppose."
"I must not be too proud," said Esmée. "I must remember what I am in the
eyes of the world. But, Jack dear, if Wilfrid Knight does come, do not
let him come without telling me first. Don't let him 'drop in on us,' as
you said."
"He shall not come at all if it bothers you to think of it. I am not
such a politic fellow. It's for your sake, dearest one, that I am
cringing to luck in this way. I never pestered myself much about making
friends and connections; but _I_ must not be too proud, either. It's a
handicap, there's no doubt about that; it's wiser to accept the fact,
and go softly. Great heavens! haven't I got you?"
"I suppose Wilfrid Knight is a man of the world? He'll know how to spare
the situation?"
"Quite so," said Jack, with a faint smile. "You needn't be uneasy about
him." Then, more gravely, he added:--
"He knows this is no light thing with either of us. He must respect your
courage--the courage so rare in a woman--to face a cruel mistake that
all the world says she must cover up, and right it at any cost."
"That is nonsense," said Esmée, with the violence of acute
sensitiveness. "You need not try to doctor up the truth to me. You know
that men do not admire that kind of courage in women--not in their own
women. Let us be plain with each other. I don't pretend that I came here
with you for the sake of courage, or even of honesty."
Esmée stopped, and turned herself about, with her shoulders against the
wall of snow, crushing the back of her head deep into its soft, cold
resistance. In this way she gained a glimpse of the sky.
"Jack, it does look like a storm. It's all over gray, is it not? and the
air is so raw and chilly. I wish you would not go to-day."
"I'll get off at once, and be back before dark. There shall be no solo
this afternoon. But leave those dishes for me. I despise to have you
wash dishes."
"I hate it myself. If I do do it, it will be to preserve my
self-respect, and partly because you are so slow, Jack dear, and there's
no comfort in life till you get through. What a ridiculous, blissful,
squalid time it is! Shall we ever do anything natural and restful again,
I wonder?"
"Yes; when we get some money."
"I can't bear to hear you talk so much about money. Have I not had
enough of money in my life?"
"Life is more of a problem with us than it is with most people."
"Let us go where nature solves the problem. There was an old song one of
my nurses used to sing to me--
'Oh, islands there are, in the midst of the deep,
Where the leaves never fade, and the skies never weep.'
"Can't we go, Jack dear? Let us be South Sea Islanders. Let's be
anything where there will be no dishes to wash, or somebody to wash them
for us."
"We will go when we get some money," Jack persisted hauntingly.
"Oh, hush about the money! It's so uncomplimentary of you. I shall begin
to think"--
"You must not think. Thinking, after a thing is done, is no use. You
must 'sleep, dear, sleep.' I shall be back before dark; but if I am not,
don't think it strange. One never knows what may happen."
When he was gone Esmée was seized with a profound fit of dawdling. She
sat for an hour in Jack's deep leather chair by the fire, her cloak
thrown back, her feet, in the fur boots, extended to the blaze. For the
first time that day she felt completely warm. She sat an hour dreaming,
in perfect physical content.
Where did those words that Jack had quoted come from, she mused, and
repeated them to herself, trying their sound by ear.
"Then sleep, dear, sleep!"
They gathered meaning from some fragmentary connection in her memory.
"If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love, and all its smart--
Then sleep, dear, sleep!"
"And not a sorrow"--
She could recall no more. The lines had an echo of Keats. She looked
across the room toward the low shelves where Jack's books were crammed
in dusty banishment. It was not likely that Keats would be in that
company; yet Jack, by fits and starts, had been a passionate reader of
everybody, even of the poets.
She was too utterly comfortable to be willing to move merely to lay the
ghost of a vanished song. And now another verse awoke to haunt her:--
"But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love, and all its smart--
Then die, dear, die!"
"'T is deeper, sweeter"--
Than what? She could not remember. She had read the verses long ago, as
a girl of twenty measures time, when the sentiment had had for her the
palest meaning. Now she thought it not extravagant, but simply true.
"Then die, dear, die!"
She repeated, pillowing her head in the satin lining of her cloak. A
tear of self-forgiving pity stole down her cheek. Love,--of her own
fair, sensitive self; love of the one who could best express her to
herself, and magnify her day by day, on the highest key of modern poetic
sympathy and primal passion and mediæval romance,--this was the whole of
life to her. She desired no other revelation concerning the mission of
woman. In no other sense would she have held it worth while to be a
woman. Yet she, of Beauty's daughters, had been chosen for that
stupidest of all the dull old world's experiments in what it calls
success--a loveless marriage!
When at length the fire went down, and the air of the draughty room grew
cool, Esmée languidly bestirred herself. The confusion that Jack had
left behind him in his belated departure began to afflict her--the
unwashed dishes on the table, the crumbs on the floor, the half-emptied
pipe and ashes on the mantel, the dust everywhere. She pitied herself
that she had no one at her command to set things right. At length she
rose, reluctantly dispensing with her cloak, but keeping the fur boots
on her feet, and began to pile up the breakfast dishes, and carry them
by separate journeys to the kitchen.
The fire had long been out in the cook-stove; the bare little place was
distressingly cold; neither was it particularly clean, and the nature of
its disorder was even more objectionable than that of the sitting-room.
Poor Jack! Esmée had profoundly admired and pitied his struggles with
the kitchen. What man of Jack's type and breeding had ever stood such a
test of devotion? Even young Sir Gareth, who had done the same sort of
thing, had done it for knighthood's sake, and had taken pride in the
ordeal. With Jack such service counted for nothing except as a
preposterous proof of his love for her.
Suppose she should surprise him in house-wifely fashion, and treat him
to a clean kitchen, a bright fire, and a hot supper on his return? The
fancy was a pleasing one; but when she came to reckon up the unavoidable
steps to its accomplishment, the details were too hopelessly repellent.
She did not know, in fact, where or how to begin. She mused forlornly on
their present situation, which, of course, could not last; but what
would come next? Surely, without money, plucked of the world's respect
and charity, they were a helpless pair. Jack was right; money they must
have; and she must learn to keep her scruples out of his way; he was
sufficiently handicapped already. She hovered about the scene of his
labors for a while, mourning over him, and over herself for being so
helpless to help him. By this time the sitting-room fire had gone quite
down; she put on a pair of gloves before raking out the coals and laying
the wood to rebuild it. The room had still a comfortless air, now that
she was alone to observe it. She could have wept as she went about,
moving chairs, lifting heavy bearskins, and finding dirt, ever more
dirt, that had accumulated under Jack's superficial housekeeping.
Her timid attempt at sweeping raised a hideous dust. When she tried to
open the windows every one was frozen fast, and when she opened the door
the cold air cut her like a knife.
She gave up trying to overhaul Jack's back accounts, and contented
herself with smoothing things over on the surface. She possessed in
perfection the decorative touch that lends an outward grace to the
aspect of a room which may be inwardly unclean, and therefore
unwholesome, for those who live in it.
It had never been required of her that she should be anything but
beautiful and amiable, or do anything but contribute her beauty and
amiability to the indulgent world around her. The hard work was for
those who had nothing else to bestow. She laid Jack's slippers by the
fire, and, with fond coquetry, placed a pair of her own little
mouse-colored suedes, sparkling with silver embroidery, close beside
them. Her velvet wrap with its collar of ostrich plumes she disposed
effectively over the back of the hardwood settle, where the shimmering
satin lining caught a red gleam from the fire. Then she locked the outer
door, and prepared to take Jack's advice, and "sleep, dear, sleep."
At the door of her bedroom she turned for a last survey of the empty
room--the room that would live in her memory as the scene of this most
fateful chapter of her life. That day, she suddenly remembered, was her
younger sister's wedding-day. She would not permit the thoughts to come.
All weddings, since her own, were hateful to her. "Hush!" she inwardly
breathed, to quell her heart. "The thing was done. All that was left was
dishonor, either way. This is my plea, O God! There was no escape from
shame! And Jack loved me so!"
About five o'clock of that dark winter day Esmée was awakened from her
warm sleep by a loud knocking on the outside door. It could not be Jack,
for he had carried with him the key of the kitchen door, by which way he
always entered on his return. It was understood between them that in his
absences no stranger could be admitted to the house. Guests they did not
look for; as to friends, they knew not who their friends were, or if,
indeed, they had any friends remaining since their flight.
The knocking continued, with pauses during which Esmée could fancy the
knocker outside listening for sounds within the house. Her heart beat
hard and fast. She had half risen in her bed; at intervals she drew a
deep breath, and shifted her weight on its supporting arm.
Footsteps could be heard passing and repassing the length of the trench
in front of the house. They ceased, and presently a man jumped down
into the pit outside her bedroom window; the window was curtained, but
she was aware that he was there, trying to look in. He laid his hand on
the window-frame, and leaped upon the sill, and shook the sash,
endeavoring to raise it; but the blessed frost held it fast. The man had
a dog with him, that trotted after him, back and forth, and seconded his
efforts to gain entrance by leaping against the door, and whining, and
scratching at the lock.
The girl was unspeakably alarmed, there was something so imperative in
the stranger's demand. It had for her startled ear an awful assurance,
as who should say, "I have a right to enter here." Who was it, what was
it, knocking at the door of that guilty house?
It seemed to Esmée that this unappeasable presence had haunted the place
for an hour or more, trying windows, and going from door to door. At
length came silence so prolonged and complete that she thought herself
alone at last.
But Jack's brother had not gone. He was standing close to the window of
the outer room, studying its interior in the strong light and shadow of
a pitch-pine fire. The room was confiding its history to one who was no
stranger to its earlier chapters, and was keen for knowledge of the
rest.
This was Jack's house, beyond a doubt, and Jack was its tenant at this
present time, its daily intimate inhabitant. In this sense the man and
his house were one.
The Dreadnaught had been Jack's first important mining venture. In it he
had sunk his share of his father's estate, considerable time and
reputation, and the best work he was capable of; and he still
maintained, in accordance with his temperament, that the mine was a good
mine, only present conditions would not admit of the fact being
demonstrated. The impregnable nature of its isolation made it a
convenient cache for personal properties that he had no room for in his
quarters in town, the beloved impedimenta that every man of fads and
enthusiasms accumulates even in a rolling-stone existence. He was all
there: it was Jack so frankly depicted in his belongings that his young
brother, who adored him, sighed restlessly, and a blush of mingled
emotions rose in his snow-chilled cheek.
What reminder is so characteristic of a man as the shoes he has lately
put off his feet? And, by token, there were Jack's old pumps waiting for
him by the fire.
But now suspicion laid its finger on that very unnamed dread which had
been lurking in the young man's thoughts. Jack, the silent room
confessed, was not living here alone. This could hardly be called
"baching it," with a pair of frail little feminine slippers moored close
beside his own. Where had Jack's feet been straying lately,--on what
forbidden ground,--that his own brother must be kept in ignorance of
such a step as this? If he had been mad enough to fetch a bride to such
an inhuman solitude as this,--if this were Jack's lawful honeymoon, why
should his bliss be hedged about with an awkward conspiracy of silence
on the part of all his friends?
The silent room summoned its witnesses; one by one each mute, inanimate
object told its story. The firelight questioned them in scornful
flashes; the defensive shadows tried to confuse the evidence, and cover
it up.
But there were the conscious slippers reddening by the hearth. The
costly Paris wrap displayed itself over the back of Jack's honest
hardwood settle. On the rough table, covered with a blanket wrought by
the hands of an Indian squaw, glimpsed a gilded fan, half-open, showing
court ladies, dressed as shepherdesses, blowing kisses to their
ephemeral swains. Faded hot-house roses were hanging their
heads--shriveled packets of sweetness--against the brown sides of a
pot-bellied tobacco-jar, the lid of which, turned upside down, was doing
duty as an ash-receiver. A box of rich confectionery imported from the
East had been emptied into a Dresden bowl of a delicate, frigid pattern,
reminding one of such pure-bred gentlewomen as Jack's little mother,
from whom he had coaxed this bit of the family china on his last home
visit.
We do not dress up our brother's obliquity in euphemistic phrases; Jack
might call it what he pleased; but not the commonest man that knew him
had been willing to state in plain words the manner of his life at
present, snowed in at the top of the Dreadnaught road. Behold how that
life spoke for itself: how his books were covered with dust; how the
fine, manly rigor of the room had been debased by contact with the
habits of a luxurious dependent woman!
Here Jack was wasting life in idleness, in self-banishment, in
inordinate affections and deceits of the flesh. The brother who loved
him too well to be lenient to his weakness turned away with a groan of
such indignant heartbreak as only the young can know. Only the young and
the pure in heart can have such faith in anything human as Jack's
brother had had in Jack.
Esmée, reassured by the long-continued silence, had ventured out, and
now stepped cautiously forward into the broad, low light in the middle
of the room. The fireshine touched her upraised chin, her parted lips,
and a spark floated in each of her large, dark, startled eyes. Tip had
been watching as breathless and as motionless as his companion, but now
at sight of Esmée he bounded against the sash, and squealed his
impatience to be let in. Esmée shrank back with a cry; her hands went up
to her breast and clasped themselves. She had seen the face at the
window. Her attitude was the instinctive expression of her convicted
presence in that house. And the excluded pair who watched her were her
natural judges: Fidelity that she had outraged, and Family Affection
that she had wronged.
Tip made further demonstrations at the window, but Esmée had dragged
herself away out of sight into her own room.
The steps of the knocker were heard, a few minutes later, wandering
irresolutely up and down the trench. For the last time they paused at
the door.
"Shall we knock once more, Tip? Shall we give her one more chance? She
has seen that I am no ruffian; she knows that you are a friend. Now if
she is an honest woman let her show herself! For the last time, then!"
A terrific peal of knocking shocked the silence. Esmée could have
screamed, there was an accent so scornfully accusative in this last
ironical summons. No answer was possible. The footsteps turned away from
the door, and did not come back.