imagination; the mere sound of it filled Marietta with a joyful
confidence. Within the hour she had hailed a passing broker and
negotiated with him for five hundred shares of the stock at twenty cents
a share.
It was not without a strange pang, to be sure, that she wrote out her
check for the amount; for just as she was signing her name the unwelcome
thought crossed her mind that the person who was selling that amount of
stock for a hundred dollars must believe that sum of money to be a more
desirable possession than the stock! She felt the meaning of the
situation very keenly, but she did not betray her misgivings. As she
finished the scrawling signature she only lifted her head with a defiant
look, and said: "If anybody tells Jim, I'll _chew 'em up_!"
Inches, the broker, thus admonished, only laughed. Indeed, the thing
Inches admired most in Mrs. Jim was her forcible manner of expressing
herself. He admired and liked her well enough, for that and for other
reasons, to take a very disinterested pleasure in putting her in the way
of turning an honest penny.
The broker's faith in the "Horn of Plenty" was almost as implicit as
Marietta's own, and it was with no little pride that he brought the
certificate in to her the following day, and unfolded it to her dazzled
contemplation. It was a very beauteous production done in green and
gold, the design being suggestive and encouraging. It represented a
woman clad in green, pointing with a magic golden wand in her left hand
toward a group of toiling green miners, while from a golden cornucopia
in her right she poured a shower of gold upon an already portentous
pyramid of that valuable metal, planted upon a green field.
As Marietta refolded the crisply rustling paper, Inches bent his head
toward her and said, confidentially: "She's bound to touch fifty cents
inside of thirty days;" and Marietta, still thinking of the bountiful
lady of the golden cornucopia, believed him.
"Inside of thirty days" the "H. O. P.," as it was familiarly called, was
selling at forty-five cents, and the world was very much agog on the
subject. There had been fluctuations in the meanwhile, fluctuations
which Marietta watched with eager intentness. Once, on the strength of
disquieting rumors about the management, the stock dropped to sixteen
cents and Marietta's hopes sank accordingly; she felt as if she had
picked Jim's pocket. But the "H. O. P." soon rallied, and day by day it
crept upwards while Marietta's spirits crept upwards with it,
cautiously, questioningly. Should she sell? Should she hold on? If only
she might talk it over with Jim! That was something she poignantly
missed; she had never had a secret from Jim before. To make up for her
reticence on this point she used to tell him more minutely than ever of
all that went on in the shop below. Jim thought he had never known
Marietta so entertaining.
"I say, Marietta, it's a shame you're nothing but a shop-keeper's wife!"
he said to her one evening as she sat darning stockings by the
lamp-light in the dingy attic room. "You'd ought to have been a duchess
or a governor's wife or something like that, so's folks would have found
out how smart you was."
"Listen at him!" cried Marietta.
The words might have offended the taste of the governor who had failed
to secure this valuable matrimonial alliance, but the poise of the
pretty head, as she cast an affectionate look upon Jim, lying on the old
sofa, would have graced the proudest duchess of them all.
Now the "Horn of Plenty" was a Lame Gulch stock, and, since the
mining-camp of Lame Gulch had been in existence less than a year, the
value of any mine up there was a very doubtful quantity. It was perhaps
the proximity of the camp to Springtown, that fired the imagination of
the Springtown public, perhaps the daily coming and going of people
between the two points. Be that as it may, the head must have been a
very level one indeed that could keep its balance through the excitement
of that winter's "boom." There were many residents of Springtown who had
a sentiment for the Peak, more intelligent and more imaginative than any
Marietta could boast, yet it is probable that the best nature-lover of
them all shared something of her feeling, now that she had come to
regard the Peak as the mountain on the other side of which the Lame
Gulch treasures lay awaiting their resurrection.
"Just the other side of the Peak!" What magic in those words, spoken
from time to time by one and another of the Springtown people. "Just the
other side of the Peak!" Marietta would say to herself, lifting to the
noble mountain eyes bright with an interest such as he in his grandest
mood had never awakened there before.
Suppose the "Horn of Plenty" should go to a dollar!--to five
dollars,--to ten dollars,--to twenty-five dollars! Her mind took the
leap with ease and confidence. Had not Bill Sanders said that there were
forty millions in it, and had he not seen the mine with his own eyes?
Marietta had a mental picture of a huge mountain of solid gold, and
when, to complete the splendor of the impression, men talked of "free
gold," the term seemed to her to signify a buoyant quality, the quality
of pouring itself out in spontaneous plenty. She heard much talk of this
kind, for the "H. O. P." was the topic of the hour, and her customers
discussed it among themselves. Forty millions almost in plain sight!
That was forty dollars a share, and she had five hundred shares! And all
this time she was thinking, not of wealth and luxury, but only of a snug
cottage in a side street, where there should be two windows in the
sitting-room, where she might sit and chat with Jim while she made her
flower-books, planning what they should do when he got well. How little
she asked; how reasonable it was, how fair! And if only the "H. O. P."
were to go to five dollars a share she would venture it.
Meanwhile people were bidding forty-five cents, and Inches had called
twice in one morning to ask if she would not sell at that price.
"What makes them want it so much?" she asked on the occasion of his
second visit.
"Oh, just an idea they've got that it's going higher," Inches answered
indifferently.
"Well, s'posing it is; why should I want to sell?"
"Why, you'd have made a pretty good thing in it, and you might like to
have your bird in hand, don't you know?"
Marietta sat down to her flower-books and worked on composedly, while
Inches still lingered.
"That's a real pretty painting of the Peak over there," he remarked
presently, nodding his head toward a crude representation of that
much-travestied mountain.
Marietta knew better, but she said nothing.
"What do you ask for that now?" he persisted.
"Oh, I guess about a hundred dollars," she returned facetiously. "The
Peak comes high now-a-days, 'cause Lame Gulch is right round on the
other side."
There was another pause before the broker spoke again.
"Then, s'posing I could get you forty-six cents for your stock, would
you take it? That's rather above the market price, you know."
"'Taint up to my price," said Marietta, trying to make a group of
painter's brush look artistic.
"What would you take for it then?" asked Inches.
Marietta put down her work and drew herself up, to rest her back, and
make an end of the interview at a blow.
"Look here, Mr. Inches," she said, with decision; "seeing you want the
stock so bad, I guess I'll hold on to it!"
She was still holding on with unwavering persistence when, a few days
after that, Dayton came into the shop. He wondered, as he entered the
door, what could be the unpleasant association that was aroused in him
by the familiar atmosphere of skins and dried flowers and general
"stock in trade" which pervaded the place. No sooner did his eye fall
upon Marietta coming towards him, however, than he recalled the
distasteful part of adviser which had been forced upon him on the
occasion of his last visit. He tried to think that he had washed his
hands of the whole matter, but, "Mrs. Jim," he found himself saying;
"did you go into mines the other day?"
"Yes."
"What did you buy?"
"H. O. P."
"What did you pay?"
"Twenty cents."
"Sold yet?"
"No."
Dayton took the little parcel she was handing him. He had come in for a
lead-pencil and had bought, in addition, a stamp-box, a buttonhook, and
a plated silver photograph frame, not one of which newly acquired
treasures he had the slightest use for. They were very neatly tied up,
however. He wished Mrs. Jim would stick to her legitimate business which
she did uncommonly well.
"I think I would sell out my 'H. O. P.' if I were you," he said.
"Isn't it going any higher?" she asked.
"Very likely; but it's a swindle."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean that the management's bad, and they don't know the first
thing about what they've got, any way. Honestly, Mrs. Jim, it isn't safe
to hold."
Marietta's heart sank; if she sold her stock what was to become of the
little house with the two windows in the sitting-room? She did not
reply, and Dayton went on:
"Of course," he said; "I can't tell that the thing won't go to a dollar,
but there is really no basis for it. I've sold out every share I held,
and I don't regret it, though it has gone up ten points since then."
Marietta regarded him attentively. There was no mistaking his
sincerity,--and he probably knew what he was talking about.
"Well," she said at last, with a profound sigh; "I guess I'll do as you
say. It worked pretty well the other time."
"That's right, Mrs. Jim, and supposing you let me have your stock. I can
probably get you fifty cents for it in the course of the day."
She took the certificate from a drawer close at hand, and having signed
it, she gave one lingering farewell look at the green lady and her
golden horn.
"I may as well write a check for the amount now," Dayton said.
"But maybe you can't get it."
"More likely to get a little over. If I do I'll bring it in."
Dayton looked into her face as he spoke, and its beauty struck him as
pathetic. There were lines and shadows there which he had not noticed
before.
"I wish, Mrs. Jim," he said, "that you wouldn't do anything more in
mines; it's an awfully risky business at the best. There isn't one of us
that knows the first thing about it."
She gave him a sceptical look; was he so entirely sincere, after all?
"Some of you know enough about it to make an awful lot of money in it,"
she answered quietly.
"That isn't knowledge," he declared; "it's luck!"
"Comes to the same thing in the end," said Marietta.
If it had not been for those pathetic lines and shadows, Dayton would
have turned on his heel then and there, disgusted with what seemed to
him unfeminine shrewdness. As it was, he said: "Well, then, why not let
me be your broker? I'm on the street half the time, and I could attend
to your business a great deal better than you could."
Marietta did not commit herself to any agreement. She put her check
away, still too regretful about the dreams she had relinquished, to
rejoice in the mere doubling of her money.
Late in the afternoon she was paying a visit to Jim. In spite of the
brilliant sunshine that flooded the little garret, at this hour, the
place seemed dingier and drearier than ever. Jim, too, she thought, was
not looking quite as well as usual; his hand as she took it was hot and
dry. She knelt down beside him and they looked out at the Peak, rising
grand and imposing beyond the low roofs. Marietta was thinking of the
gold, "just round on the other side," but Jim's thoughts had wandered
farther still; or was it, after all, nearer to the sick man with the
wistful light in his eyes?
"I say, Marietta," he said, "I wonder what Heaven's like."
She had never heard him speak like that, and the words went to her heart
like a knife. But she answered, gently:
"I guess we don't know much about it, Jim; only that it'll be Heaven."
"I suppose when we get there, you and I, Springtown will seem very far
away."
"I don't know, Jim," Marietta said, looking still out toward the Peak,
but thinking no longer of the gold on the other side. "I shouldn't like
any of our life together ever to seem very far away."
Just then the sound of the horn rang musically down the street and a
moment later the brake went by. The horses' heads were toward home and
they knew it; the harness jingled and glittered. On the brake were
half-a-dozen well-dressed people laughing and talking gaily; health and
prosperity seemed visibly in attendance upon that little company of
fortunates. They passed like a vision, and again the sound of the horn
came ringing down the street.
Jim turned and looked at Marietta who had been almost as excited as he.
A thousand thoughts had chased themselves through her brain as the brake
went by. She sighed in the energetic manner peculiar to her, and then
she said: "O Jim! If you could only be like that for just one day!"
Perhaps he had had the same thought but her words dispelled it.
"Never mind, Etta," he said. "I wouldn't change with him;" and Marietta
shut away the little speech in her heart to be happy over at her
leisure.
The next day the invalid was not as well as usual and Mrs. Jim spent
half her time running up and down stairs. Inches came in in the course
of the day and offered her sixty cents for her "Horn of Plenty," and she
thought with a pang how fast it was going up. The thought haunted her
all day long, but she could not leave Jim to take any steps toward
retrieving her opportunity, and after that first visit Inches did not
come in again. She took out her big check once or twice in the course of
the day and looked at it resentfully; and as she brooded upon the
matter, it was borne in upon her with peculiar force that she had made a
fatal blunder in exchanging her "chances" for that fixed, inexpansive
sum. Had it not been cowardly in her to yield so easily? Supposing
Dayton himself had lacked courage at the critical moment; where would
his four-in-hand have been to-day? She was sure that no timid speculator
had ever made a fortune; on the contrary, she had often heard it said
that a flash of courage at the right moment was the very essence of
success in speculation. She remembered the expression "essence of
success."
[Illustration: "THEY LOOKED OUT AT THE PEAK."]
By the time evening came the fever of speculation was high in her veins,
and urged on by her own brooding fancies, uncontradicted from without,
unexposed to the light of day, she did an incredible thing.
As she drew forth her writing materials in order to put her new and
startling resolution into execution, she paused and looked about the
familiar little shop with a feeling of estrangement. There was an
incongruity between the boldness of the thing she was about to do, and
the hard and fast limitations of her lot, which the sight of those
humble properties brought sharply home to her. The first pen she took up
was stiff and scratchy; the sound of it was like a challenge to the
outer world to come and pass judgment upon her. She flung the pen to one
side in nervous trepidation, and then she searched until she found one
that was soft and pliable, and went whispering over the paper like a
fellow-conspirator.
This was what she wrote:
"DEAR MR. DAYTON,
"I want to go into the 'Horn of Plenty' again, and I can't get away
to attend to it. I enclose your check, and one of my own for $400.
Please buy me what the money will bring. They say it isn't a
swindle, and any way I want some. You said to come to you, and
that was the same as saying you'd do it, if I asked you to. I don't
care what you pay; get what you can for the money.
"Yours truly,
"M. BIXBY."
Another morning found Jim so ill that they sent for the doctor. On the
same day Inches came in and offered seventy-five cents for the stock.
Marietta had not told him that it was sold and she did not propose to do
so. In the afternoon the price had "jumped" to ninety cents, but by that
time she was too anxious about Jim to care.
For five weeks the "Art Emporium" was closed, and in that time the face
of the world had changed for Marietta. She realized the change when she
came downstairs and opened the shop again. It was impossible to feel
that life was restored to its old basis. There was a change too in her,
which was patent to the most casual observer. It was, indeed, a very wan
and thin Marietta that at last came forward to meet her customers; her
eyes looked alarmingly big, and though nothing could disturb the pose of
the beautiful head, there was a droop in the figure, that betokened
bodily and mental exhaustion.
A good many customers came in to make Easter purchases,--for the
following Sunday was Easter,--and many others to inquire for Jim. As the
old, familiar life began to reassert itself, as she began to feel at
home again in the old, accustomed surroundings, her mind recurred, in a
half-dazed way, to her speculation. She did not herself know much about
it, for Dayton had never sent her her certificate. Probably he had come
with it when the shop was closed. She supposed she must be too tired to
have much courage; that must be why her heart sank at the thought of
what she had done. She was sitting by the work-table, her head in her
hands, pondering dully. At the sound of the shop-bell she looked up,
mechanically, and saw Inches coming in.
"Good morning, Mrs. Jim," he said. "How's your husband?"
"Jim's better, thank you," she replied, and the sound of her own
confident words dispelled the clouds.
Inches looked at her narrowly, and then he began pulling the ears of a
mounted fox-skin that was lying on the counter, as he remarked casually:
"Hope you got rid of your 'H. O. P.' in time."
"In time?" she asked. "In time? What do you mean?"
"Why, before they closed down. You sold out, I hope?"
There was a sudden catch in her breath.
"Yes, I sold out some time ago."
"Glad of that," he declared, with very evident relief, suddenly losing
interest in the fox's ears. Inches had none of Dayton's prejudices in
regard to woman's "sphere," but he was none the less rejoiced to know
that this particular woman, with the tired-looking eyes, had not "got
hurt," as he would have put it.
"It's been a bad business all round," he went on, waxing confidential as
he was prone to do. "Why, I knew a man that bought twenty thousand
shares at a dollar-ten three weeks ago, just before she closed down, and
he's never had the sand to sell."
"What could he get to-day?" Marietta asked. Her voice sounded in her
ears strange and far away.
"Well, I don't know. I was offered some at six cents, but I don't know
anybody that wants it."
Marietta's throat felt parched and dry, and now there was a singing in
her ears; but she gave no outward sign.
"Pretty hard on some folks," she remarked.
"I should say so!"
There was a din in her ears all that afternoon, which was perhaps a
fortunate circumstance, for it shut out all possibility of thought. It
was not until night came that the din stopped, and her brain became
clear again,--cruelly, pitilessly clear.
Deep into the night she lay awake tormenting herself with figures. How
hideous, how intolerable they were! They passed and repassed in her
brain in the uncompromising search-light of conscience, like malicious,
mouthing imps. They were her debts and losses, they stood for disgrace
and penury, they menaced the very foundation of her life and happiness.
Doubtless the man who had put many thousands into the "Horn of Plenty,"
and had lacked the "sand" to sell, would have wondered greatly that a
fellow-creature should be suffering agony on account of a few hundred
dollars. Yet he, in his keenest pang of disappointment, knew nothing
whatever of the awful word "ruin"; while Marietta, staring up into the
darkness, was getting that lesson by heart.
The town-clock striking three seemed to pierce her consciousness and
relieve the strain. She wished the sofa she was lying upon were not so
hard and narrow; perhaps if she were more comfortable she might be able
to sleep, and then, in the morning, she might see light. Of course there
was light, somewhere, if she could only find it; but who ever found the
light, lying on a hard sofa, in pitchy darkness? Perhaps if she were to
get up and move about things would seem less intolerable. And with the
mere thought of action the tired frame relaxed, the straining eyes were
sealed with sleep, the curtain of unconsciousness had fallen upon the
troubled stage of her mind.
And when, at dawn, Jim opened frightened eyes, and struggled with a
terrible oppression to speak her name, Marietta was still sleeping
profoundly.
"Etta!" he gasped. "O, Etta!"
And Marietta heard the whispered name, and thrusting out her hands, as
if to tear away a physical bond, broke through the torpor that possessed
her, and stood upon her feet. She staggered, white and trembling, to
Jim's bedside, and there, in the faint light, she saw that he was dying.
"Etta, Etta," he whispered, "I want you!"
She sank upon her knees beside him, but the hand she folded in her own
was already lifeless.
Slowly the light increased in that dingy garret, until the sun shone
full upon the face of the Peak, fronting the single window of the
chamber in uncompassionate splendor. Occasional sounds of traffic came
up from the street below; the day had begun. And still Marietta knelt
beside the bed, clasping the hand she loved, with a passionate purpose
to prolong the mere moment of possession that was all that was left her
now, all it was worth being alive for. He wanted her, he wanted
her,--and oh, the years and years that he must wait for her, in that
strange, lonely, far-away heaven!
"Jim, Jim," she muttered from time to time, with a dry gasp in her
throat, that almost choked her; "Jim, O Jim!"
By-and-by, when the sun was high in the heavens, and all the world was
abroad, she got upon her feet, and went about the strange new business
that death puts upon the broken-hearted.
The day after the funeral was the third of April, and Marietta knew that
all her April bills were lying in the letterbox, the silent menace which
had seemed so terrible to her the other day. Well,--that at least was
nothing to her now. So much her heart-break had done for her, that all
the lesson of ruin she had conned through those horrible black hours,
when Jim was dying and she did not know it,--that lesson at least had
lost its meaning. Ruin could not hurt Jim now, and she?--she might even
find distraction in it,--find relief.
She went down into the dimly lighted shop, where the shades were closely
drawn in the door and in the broad show-window. In that strange midday
twilight, she gathered up her mail, and then she seated herself in her
old place behind the counter, and began the examination of it.
There were all the bills, just as she had anticipated; bills for food
and bills for medicine; bills for all those useless odds and ends which
made up her stock in trade, which she and Jim had been so proud of a few
years ago when they first came to Springtown. She wrote out the various
sums in a long column, just to look at them all together, and to feel
how little harm they could do her; and in the midst of the dull,
lifeless work, she came upon a letter which did not look like a bill. As
she drew it from the envelope, two slips of paper fell out of it, two
slips of paper which she picked up and read, with but a dazed,
bewildered attention. They were the checks she had sent to Dayton a
month ago; his own check for $250; hers for $400.
Marietta, in her humble joys and sorrows, had never known the irony of
Fate, and hence she could not understand about those checks. The meaning
of the letter was blurred as she read it. It was from Dayton. He could
not know that Jim was dead, for he said nothing of it. But if there was
any one who did not know that Jim was dead, could it be true? Her heart
gave a wild leap, and she half rose to her feet. What if she were to run
up those stairs, quickly, breathlessly? Oh, what then?
But the stillness of the closed shop, the strange half-light that came
through the drawn shades, her own black dress, recalled her from that
swift and cruel hope, and again she set herself to read the letter.