Scene III with an air of cold distrust, that Bella foresaw would mount by

Come and Find Me

[Illustration: Hildegarde]

Come and Find Me

By

Elizabeth Robins

Author of “The Magnetic North,” “The Convert,” etc.

With Illustrations by

E. L. Blumenschein

“I ... had ambition not only to go farther than any one had

been before; but as far as it was possible for man to go....”

CAPTAIN COOK.

“Det er et svært vejarbejde—oppe i det norlige. Med

fjeldovergange—og med de utroligste vanskeligheder at overinde!

Å du store, vakkre verden,—hvad det er for en lykke, det, at

være vejbygger!”

LILLE EYOLF.

New York

The Century Co.

1908

Copyright, 1907, 1908, by

THE CENTURY CO.

_Published, February, 1908_

THE DE VINNE PRESS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Hildegarde _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

“Mar’s eyes looked over the little boy’s head into space” 36

“It was the teacher of arithmetic to the life, only it was

Bella Wayne” 56

“The two girls sat in front of the confident young face

looking out of the silver locket” 100

“‘Brethren,’ he said, ‘the angel of the Lord has been with

me. He has shown me great riches’” 186

“‘I know you’ll do your best for me,’ Hildegarde said,

anxiously” 232

Hildegarde’s mother and Mr. Blumpitty 278

“Nearer, my God, to Thee” 412

“Coolies crawled up the ladder with vast burdens” 426

“‘I suppose you think I have something very valuable here?’” 474

“Hildegarde’s ankle turned more than once, and now she

was almost down” 518

_TO FLORENCE BELL_

CHINSEGUT, HERNANDO COUNTY, FLORIDA

Jan. 20, 1906

MY DEAR F. B.:

I believe it to be commonly the practice of authors to write the

dedication last. But I, being summoned by the laconic imperative of the

Atlantic cable to exchange London for Florida, and being thereby arrested

midway in what I have always thought of as your book, must needs recover

some of the old impulse that you gave me to begin it, before I can go on.

I invoke you as I would a breath of your invigorating Yorkshire, for

I am captive in a land of idleness—myself idlest of all the easy,

time-squandering folk that are making believe to finish my house here

upon the sunburnt hilltop.

This lodge in the wilderness, uplifted like an island above encompassing

seas of green; this wind-swept, sun-steeped place, ought, perhaps (in

spite of latitude and longitude), to give me back without your aid the

picture and the feeling of the North. For the first word I set at the

top of my page, though Indian, would not have been understanded of my

ancient neighbors here. Not the Seminoles, the Alaskans gave us our

name. I and another for whom it means home, pronounced it first to the

rhythm of breakers beating on that wild Bering coast—in the midst of the

pandemonium of the “farthest North” gold boom, we dreamed and planned

the picture I look out upon this morning. It might not seem beautiful to

you, yet, in spite of your wise warning, there have gone into my effort

to make the dream come true the most precious things I had. Into this

Chinsegut, as you know, went, amongst the rest, a great faith.

So that, however reminiscent of people or conditions long since passed

away, however much of the spirit of the past is garnered here as living

influence, or as debris and as ashes, these were for me infinitesimal

affairs by comparison with the hope for the Future that made me turn

deaf ears to your admonishing. For this was to be a place where my

fellow-dreamer and I should not only rest, but having rested, work as

never before. Our best and biggest room was to be called the Workroom.

But some strange spell has hitherto hung over that apartment and all the

house, since even the white remodelers of the slave-built dwelling have

found it easier to play than work here.

As if foreseeing that the added wing, new stable, and the rest, would

take more months a-building than they would need weeks in other climes,

our “workmen,” uneasy perhaps under the misnomer, organized themselves

into a Musical Society. They would lay a brick or rap in a nail, and

then, casting aside trowel or hammer, would catch up fiddle and bow,

horn, or clarinet, trying (since walls had been known to fall at trumpet

blast) whether these could be induced to rise to strains of “Dixie.” One

of the band to whom I owe my not very sound roof, was at least a person

of imagination, as I will make your ladyship admit, if the distractions

here will give me leave to try. These are not solely the growling of

saws, the scraping of planes and of fiddles. I find myself forever

running to and fro like a child in some enchanted playground, wooed by

fifty things at once—but not one of them has aught to do with books or

with any aspect of the art of letters.

My distractions have to do with such toys as the joy of re-discovering

old friends in all three kingdoms, from the forgotten beauty of palms

standing sentinel-like in sand as white as meal, to the blue heron that

goes sailing by to the lake at our feet. Or I am called early to see the

delicate print of a deer’s foot that passed our very gate; or I must

watch the sun caught at setting in the great ilex, and see the light

spilling into the Spanish moss, soaking into the long draperies, till

they seem to hold refulgence in solution. Or I must go and plan the

hedge of roses round an old burying-ground on the place, or listen half

a morning to a mocking-bird, or steal down in the dusk to my beloved

copse and play eavesdropper to the sullen owl who pretends he doesn’t

haunt the magnolia above the spring. Or I must leave my coveted place of

shade on the north veranda and come to watch our friend, Mr. Tarrypin,

creeping heavily by in the hot sun on his way (I grieve to tell you) to

the soup tureen. (“Lawd, yes. Tarrypin? He jes de same es chick’n, Miss

’Lizbess—once he in de pot!”)

Even my interviews with the cook, elsewhere so summarily despatched,

are here a thief of time. For our Peter, who learned his craft of the

Cubans during the late war, is the most beguiling of conversationalists.

In beautiful sky-blue, brass-buttoned clothes showing under a spotless

apron, he stands, interlarding his promise to “do it Spanish style,” with

legends learned of his mother who was born in the negro quarters here

in those more sumptuous days when our hill was crowned with the finest

orange grove in all Hernando. Peter will tell you, chuckling, that our

great twelve by twelve-inch cypress beams that turn the edge of the

white carpenters’ tools, were hand-hewn by his grandfather, and by that

gallant woodman “tied and pinned” to frame the house before the “orange”

days—when all cleared land was cotton field.

But more than by any other creature the spirit of idleness has been

fostered by my four-footed friend, the particular joy of my life here,

Dixie. For I must tell you that one’s love of woods is only whetted by

looking out, as I am told we do, upon two hundred and fifty thousand

acres of virgin forest—the old Seminole hunting-grounds—which swallow up

the white man’s puny clearings so effectually that even a Zeiss glass can

scarcely pick them out. Dixie and I may travel for hours, through tangles

of jessamine-laced live-oak and palmetto, down to dim lakes where the

cypresses stand in water to their “knees” (with all the moss curtains

close-drawn against the sun), and never see a soul. Then, when even in

the open ways of the pine woods we find the warm day quenched in mist, I

let the rein fall slack and trust to that skill of Dixie’s, never baffled

yet, to take me home the shortest way, in spite of night or storm or the

fierce dazzle of tropic lightning.

If we are late, we know “Uncle” Fielding will be looking out for us. Even

if I fail to distinguish his kind, dark face, I see the whites of his

eyes shining, I hear his rich voice lowered to reproach that I should be

abroad so late in the vast Annuttalagga woods that go to the verge of the

world.

But Uncle Fielding has his share in my idleness, for he knows the stories

I like best of all. When I’ve gone to sit within the radiance of the

great open fireplace (less for warmth than for sake of cedar scent and

love of the flaring, singing resin in the pine), Uncle Fielding will come

staggering in under the weight of a single log, and having thrown it

down, will tarry awhile. To my polite hope that he feels at home in his

new cottage, he replies with gentle assurance: “I’ll haf to be mighty ole

and mighty painful befoh I leave this hilltop.” With humility I learn to

see myself as the transient one, the visitor, and Uncle Fielding as the

one who rightly is “at home.” Even for neighborly credit and fair regard

I look to him. For when one of the younger generation, or some mere

new-comer ventures: “They say, in the old days, you knew her brother,”

“_Knew_ him?” says Uncle Fielding loftily, “_I raised him_—” and so

re-establishes our respectability in a land that for so many years has

known us only as little-remembered names.

Can you not see that with the vivid intervention of all this new-old

life—the story you bade me write has in a brief space gone to a distance

so illimitable that beside such a standard of remoteness, Florida is

neighbor to the Pole? I tell you plainly that if this book of yours

is ever to be finished, you must send me something of that influence

that has so often spurred me on before. Once even here, a touch of it,

like your hand on my shoulder, reached me one evening, in spite of

all the hosts of Hernando. Walking about at sunset to count how many

mangoes were growing near the house—I was pursued as far as the great

ilex at the gates by faint intermittent strains of some unearthly

music. I looked up, thinking of those “harps” that Hilda heard and to

whose strains she unsealed the Master Builder’s ears. Again that music!

faint but unmistakable; sad and wild, with its vaguely inciting call.

A little shamefaced for my fancy, I said to one who knew not Hilda: “I

could almost swear I heard harps in the air.” “Yes,” was the answer,

“on the roof,” as though it were the most natural thing on earth that

a carpenter, instead of making us rain-proof, should devise and lash

in place a wind-harp over our heads! I thought how you would have

disapproved that man—and cherished him.

Although the winds that come sweeping over the Mexican Gulf have cast the

great lyre down from my housetop—nevertheless, now that I’ve invoked you,

I seem to hear the air again—even feel on my shoulder that touch of your

hand with which you sent me forth to try if, in the midst of the London

din, we might not make folk pause an instant, and say with upturned

faces: “Harps in the air!” You and I have heard them for many a year, my

friend. I think I never was with you long, but I caught some note of that

far music. Even with the thick of the world between us, I listen for you

to call the tune that “sends me on.”

E. R.

COME AND FIND ME

CHAPTER I

A crisis in the financial world of California kept the men who were

employed in the Palmas Valley Bank of Valdivia hard at work for several

hours after statutory closing time.

Nathaniel Mar never came home in these days without bringing a black

leather bag full of papers, to work over in the dining-room.

He had his big desk in there because Mrs. Mar thought it out of place in

the parlor, though the parlor was the quietest room in the house and the

least used, whereas the dining-room was the most frequented quarter of

the modest establishment, and the very place where both the big desk, and

the big man who sat before it, were most in the way.

For here the family not only ate their meals, but here, in Mrs. Mar’s

rocking-chair, the screams of the infant daughter were drowned in milk

or overcome by sleep; here the two small boys were taught letters and

manners; here, on their mother’s work-table, was reared the ever-renewed

mountain of “mending,” and these the walls that oftener than any others

looked down upon the mistress’s struggles with the “single-handed help”—a

succession of Irish or Scandinavian girls who came, saw, conquered some

of the china, and departed.

This concentration of family life in the dining-room was not peculiar

to the Mars. Valdivia—all California, indeed all the towns of all the

northern and western states, were full of houses where the shut-up

parlors bore dumb witness to a social habit that was become mere

tradition.

The forebears of these people, especially those German, French, or

Spanish, had need of a room where they might receive their friends and

talk to them at their ease. But in their descendants this much chastened

need had taken on the air of an indulgence, and was shrinking out of

sight.

It is true that even the less well-to-do, summoning all their strength,

sometimes gave “parties,” but few houses encouraged the cheerful custom

of having friends “drop in.” And so, no more useless room in any dwelling

than the parlor. Yet so great was the power of this tradition of a lost

hospitality, that people who had almost nothing else over and above the

grimmest necessities, still had their parlor. Discomfort and cramping

of every kind was stoically borne that the sacred precincts might be

preserved inviolate. For what? Nobody ever asked.

So then, in the dining-room, sat Nathaniel Mar even on this fine Sunday

afternoon, when, as a rule, the desk was shut and the owner gone to

potter in the garden. But the exigency was great, and for once even the

Seventh Day had brought no rest. As he sat there, bent over the desk,

the light fell with such harshness on the man’s foreshortened features,

under the unkempt mop of prematurely graying hair, that you would not

easily have believed him to be under forty odd.

He was not yet thirty-five. The deep line that dropped from the side

of each nostril, to lose itself in the heavy, dark mustache, gave to

his face a stricken and weariful air. And he sat crooked, with one high

shoulder more hunched than the other. You saw the reason of that when he

got up to shut out the sounds of pan-banging, and fire-irons rattling,

that came in through the inch of open door opposite the one leading into

the hall. Before rising, Mar had felt for his walking-stick, and any one

who noticed how heavily he bore upon it in limping over the worn carpet,

knew why it was that one of his great shoulders was pushed awry.

He made the same detour in returning to his seat as had carried him to

the kitchen door, carefully cruising round the pitfall presented by a

half-yard or so of extra dilapidation in the yellow-brown carpet. As

you looked closer at what his avoidance made more noticeable, you saw

that a less faded piece had been tacked over a part hopelessly worn and

mended, and how even this newer square had despairingly let go of the

tacks that held it, and been kicked up by some foot less considerate or

more courageous than Mr. Mar’s. The superimposed piece sat now, in a

frayed, rag-baggy condition, gaping with despair, and like some beggar

in extremis by the way, ready to lay hold on the first unwary foot that

passed.

The entire room wore that indescribable air of settled melancholy that no

one thing in it, not even the carpet, seemed quite ugly or uncomfortable

enough to account for. The furniture was heavy and old. Upon the walls,

besides two or three reconnaissance maps, were some inoffensive prints.

A “Signing of the Declaration of Independence” hung high between the two

windows, and underneath, in oval, gilt frames, were companion pictures of

Mar’s mother and of his father, who had been for many years minister to

Valdivia’s first Presbyterian Church.

On the opposite wall a good engraving of Lincoln was flanked, somewhat

incongruously, by a photograph of a buxom young woman with a group of

girls behind her—Mar’s wife in her school-teaching days, with her class.

Besides these, an old view of the Lake of Geneva, a print of Cromwell,

and on the wall behind Mar’s revolving chair, an engraved portrait,

bearing underneath it the inscription: John W. Galbraith, President Rock

Hill Mining Co.

Even if these adornments were of a very mild description, they, at least,

covered several feet of the marbled yellow paper that apparently had been

chosen (and chosen a good while ago) to “go with” the hideous “grained”

woodwork. That it did “go with” that peculiarly perverse soiling and

smearing of inoffensive surfaces, may not be denied. It went far. It

arrived at such a degree of success that all the little room irradiated a

bilious yellowness “clawed” with muddy brown.

The very atmosphere was not left as nature sent it in at the window. It

halted upon the sill and changed color, like one who gets wind of ill

news. The moment it penetrated beyond the holland blinds it turned sick

and overflowed the room in dirty saffron.

It may well be wondered why any creature who was not obliged to should

come here. And yet the defeated-looking man at the window did not lack

high companionship. Sunset and the rain, the call of the winds, clouds

of majesty, and mists of silver, not these alone. Daydreams penetrated

the sullen walls. Here, where the rudest emigrant would not long abide,

fair visions made themselves at home—“exultations, agonies”—a field here

for the unconquerable mind no more unfit than many another for the long

battle men call life.

On this particular July afternoon, Nathaniel Mar had no sooner shut

out one order of disturbance, than another penetrated the room from a

different direction.

“Sigma!” a loud, clear voice was calling from the region of the stairs.

“Sigma,” and again, “Sigma! Have you set the table? Sigma-a-a!”

Nathaniel Mar wrote on.

The door opened suddenly and in came a brisk, rather handsome, dark-eyed

woman, with an infant on her arm. Singularly enough the child seemed to

be as little interrupted in its occupation of sleeping as the father in

his writing. There were certain sounds that both were inured to. Among

others, Mrs. Mar calling “Sigma,” or “Kate,” or “Jane.” But when she

stopped short near the threshold and asked:

“Where is that girl?” Mar, without raising his eyes from his paper, made

a little motion toward the door he had just shut.

“I should think,” he said, quietly, “she was probably breaking up the

kitchen stove.”

Before he finished, Mrs. Mar had opened the other door, and again called

“Sigma!”

“Yes—yes.” In rushed a little white-headed Swede, fourteen to fifteen

years of age, her sleeves tucked up, her coarse gown tucked up, her fair

skin showing vividly a sooty mark across her forehead, which she had

smudged down her nose and finely shaded off into the red of her cheek.

When Sigma was calm and collected she walked the floor as if it were

knee-deep in sand. When she was agitated she did not walk at all. She

plunged. Sigma was agitated now.

“Coom!” she said, lifting a bare elbow toward the kitchen as another

person might point with a finger. “Coom!” and turning heavily she was

about to plunge back into her special domain.

But Mrs. Mar arrested her. “Why haven’t you set the table? Look at the

time.” She pointed.

Sigma paused and thought. Following the index finger she recognized the

clock, looked inquiringly from it to the lady, and then suddenly felt

she understood, a thing of almost exciting infrequency. She scuffled

good-naturedly across the room, picked up the heavy timepiece and was in

the act of handing it to Mrs. Mar.

“Let the clock alone! Put it down, I say. What will she do next?

The table. Table!” She beat upon it briskly with her one free hand.

“_Supper._”

“Oh, soopra!” says the girl, setting down the clock and lurching

hurriedly toward the kitchen.

“Stop! Don’t you understand you have to set the table earlier to-day?

Before—you—go—out. Your evening. Understand? Your friend calls for you at

six.” She indicated the hour on the clock face. “Takes you—heaven knows

where. _She_ doesn’t forget if you do. _Your—evening—out._” As Sigma only

stood and stared dully, Mrs. Mar dropped into the rocking-chair with, “I

foresee this girl will drive me demented.”

Sigma embraced the opportunity to shuffle toward the door again.

“Where you off to now? You can’t go till you’ve set the table. Here!”

Still with the well-inured infant sleeping on her arm, Mrs. Mar,

remarking in a conversational tone that she was “certain she should go

mad,” pulled open the sideboard drawer and took out the tablecloth. “Put

this on. _Straight_, for a change. Then the mats.”

The mistress’s eye falling suddenly upon that deplorable place in the

carpet, she was forcibly reminded of the little copper-toed boots that

had wrought the havoc.

“What are they at now?” she said, half to herself, as she crossed the

room, and, craning her chin over the sleeping child at her breast, she

guided the toe of her shoe under the tacked bit, stroking down the darned

tatters underneath, before she straightened and trod flat the outer

layer. Each time thereafter that she crossed the troubled area her foot,

half-impatient, half-caressing, encouraged the patch to lie still. “What

keeps those children so quiet? Where are they?”

Sigma, hearing the anxious rise in her mistress’s voice, dropped the

corner of the cloth she was twitching and rushed for the mats.

“No, no, finish. Here. Straight. Like this.” A moment’s silence, and then

again, “Where are those children?”

Sigma hurriedly offered her the cruet.

“Idiot. I am asking you about the children. The—chil—dren.

Where—are—they? Don’t you know? Little boys. Trenn, and Harry, and Jack

Galbraith—where gone?”

“Oh, Yack! He—” Sigma, with great action of hip and elbow, splurged over

to the window, and motioned away across an empty lot.

“What, _again_? Here,” Mrs. Mar wheeled upon her husband, “you must hold

the baby a moment. If I lay her down she’ll wake up and scream.”

As Mrs. Mar hastened out through the kitchen you could hear that she

paused an instant to exclaim aghast at something she found there.

Mr. Mar had accepted the charge with a curious tranquillity, making the

infant comfortable in the hollow of his left arm. Then he went on with

his writing.

Sigma returned to the intricate task of setting the table. She did it all

with an excited gravity, as if she were engaged in some spirited game,

putting down plates, knives, and forks with an air of one playing trumps,

and yet not quite sure if it was the right moment for them. When she had

placed the straw mats with mathematical precision, she drew off proudly,

to get the full splendor of effect. When it came to dealing with the

sugar bowl, she glanced at Mar’s bent head, and helped herself to a lump,

became furiously industrious upon the strength of that solatium, and

plunged after spoons and cups. Whenever she made a clatter she stopped

sucking and glanced nervously toward Mar, as if she expected him to rise

and overwhelm her.

He, with unlifted head, wrote steadily on.

The child slept.

Sigma put a worn horsehair chair at head and foot of the table, two high

chairs on one side for the little boys, and an ordinary one on the

other; as she did this last her eye fell on the four cups. She paused

uncertain, till she had noiselessly counted five on her stumpy fingers.

Then, “Oh, Yack maa ha’ en!” she reminded herself, lurched away into the

kitchen and reappeared wiping a cup on a dish towel, one end of which she

had tucked in her apron string. As she was about to deposit the fifth

cup, she glanced at the man bent over the desk, and put her disengaged

hand again in the sugar bowl. Mar turned suddenly in his creaking chair;

Sigma started, and meaning to drop the sugar, dropped the cup instead.

She stared an instant, open-mouthed, as at some unaccountable miracle;

and then, with a howl, flung up her bare arms and fled round the table

on her way to the kitchen, caught her great foot in the carpet-trap and

measured her length on the floor.

“Look here, you must go into the kitchen to do that.” Mar spoke as one

not presuming to deny that it might be a part of her duty to precipitate

herself on her stomach and howl, but questioning only the propriety of

the spot selected. “I can’t have you doing it here,” he said.

Sigma was still “doing it,” so far as howling went, but she was also

scrambling up, with her elbow held over her head, as if she counted on a

thumping. From under her bare forearm her streaming eyes looked out at

Mar. Whether the man’s quiet face in the midst of the uproar astonished,

calmed her—she gaped, letting the rude lamentation die in her throat.

“Men—_Meesis Marr—rr_!” she said under her breath, picking up the cup.

Mrs. Mar’s husband held out his hand for it. “It’s only the handle,” he

said, and set the cup down on the writing-table, that he might change

the position of the fretting child. For his long-suffering daughter was

at last roused to protest.

The little maid-servant wiped her eyes, and, with the air of one who is

willing to let bygones be bygones, shuffled a step nearer to the desk.

“Me—Gif Sigma,” she said, and held out her red arms.

Mar looked up, understood, and handed over the baby. It was curious to

see the practised sureness with which this female barbarian—who caught

her big feet in the carpet and dropped the china—with what skill she

handled that fragile and intricate mechanism, an infant. Mar watched

her as she stood there, swaying her own thick body back and forth like

a human rocking-chair, holding the child in sure comfort, patting it

softly, and crooning to it uncouth words in a foreign tongue. Miss Mar

understood perfectly, and responded by laying her small pink face against

the scullion’s untidy gown and falling back into slumber.

The opening of the front door, and voices in the hall—above all one

voice ordaining that certain persons should go up-stairs and _wait

for her_!—made Sigma pause, listen, and then, still holding close the

pacified infant, she beat a stealthy retreat, shutting the kitchen door

behind her with a softness incredible.

Mrs. Mar, upon her reappearance, was seen to be ushering in by the

shoulder an anxious little boy of eight or nine. As with some force she

conveyed him across the room, his foot caught in the same place where

Sigma had met defeat. But Sigma had not been sustained by Mrs. Mar’s

hand. The lady merely unhooked the boy with an extra shake. Then, with

her free hand, she pulled his chair out from the table, and thrust him

into it.

“Now, you’re to sit right there, and then I’ll know that at least till

supper-time you won’t be getting my children into any more mischief.”

Mar had looked up upon their entrance, seemed about to speak, and then

dropped a discreet head over his work.

“Where’s the baby?” demanded his wife.

“Sigma—”

“This precious protégé of yours,” interrupted the lady, again

straightening the carpet with the toe of her shoe; “this precious protégé

of yours has pulled up a plank out of the sidewalk, dragged it across the

field down to the duck-pond, and there I found him, using it as a raft.”

“_I_ hadn’t used it—not yet.” A world of lost opportunity was heavily

recalled.

“Oh, no, _you_ weren’t using it.”

But the irony was lost.

“Vere wasn’t woom for all of us, so I let Twenn and Hawwy go ve first

voyage. I’m vewwy kind to little boys.”

“Oh, indeed! So kind you preferred to risk other children’s lives while

you looked on.”

“Looked on? Oh, no, ma’am, didn’t you see I was workin’ like anyfing?”

He glanced across at his ally. “It was a steamship, Mr. Mar. I was ve

injine. I’m a most glowious injine—”

“Yes, if you please,” Mrs. Mar broke in. “He’s been propelling the

plank all round the pond with those two poor little innocents on it—the

greatest wonder they weren’t drowned.”

“It was very wrong,” said Mr. Mar, gravely—then, under his breath to his

wife, “but the water isn’t much over a foot at the deepest.”

“Quite enough to drown any wretched baby that might fall in—but, of

course, you defend that boy no matter what he—”

“Not at all—not at all. I don’t approve in the least of his—”

“And our two little boys mud and dirt from their heads to their heels,

looking like a couple of chimney-sweeps—”

“No, ma’am,” said the young gentleman from the horsehair chair, in a

conciliatory tone. “Twenn and Hawwy ain’t black, only just bwown.”

“Brown, indeed! I’ll brown _you_, sir, if you ever do such a thing again

while you’re staying _here_! Harry with his stocking quite torn off one

leg! And Trennor’s only decent breeches—”

“Vere was a nail in vat board,” Jack explained, conversationally, putting

a finger through a jag in his own trouser knee.

“Small matter to _you_, if you do ruin your things.” (Jack began to swing

his muddy feet—it was gloriously true.) “But you’ve got to remember that

other children’s clothes don’t grow on gooseberry bushes.”

“My pants didn’t neever,” returned Jack, sturdily.

“Keep your feet still and your tongue, too.”

“Yes ’m.”

Mrs. Mar was in the act of turning away, after a further slight attention

to the carpet patch, when her eye fell upon the handleless cup on the

desk.

“Did you do that?” she demanded.

Mar cleared his throat, and Mrs. Mar for once, not waiting to hear the

horrid details, sat down in her rocking-chair, despair in her face and

the broken cup in her hand.

“I never saw anything like it. The grate in the kitchen range has just

collapsed, too.”

“Really? That’s bad—”

“It’s worse than bad—it’s awful.”

“We must let the stove people know—”

“How are you going to do that on Sunday?”

“Oh—ah—well, it matters less I suppose on Sunday than if it happened on a

week-day.”

“It won’t matter in the least, of course, to have no hot water to wash

the clothes in, Monday morning. Perhaps _you’ll_ think it matters more

when it comes to eating cold things for I don’t know how long.”

“I think you’ll find I shall be able to put up with—”

“Yes, it’s perfectly true, I always find you readier to put up with

disaster than to struggle against it.”

“How would you propose I should struggle against a broken stove?”

She turned her flushed face from him.

“Didn’t I tell you not to kick the table?” she demanded of Jack.

“Oh! Yes ’m. I forgot.” He curled up the disgraced foot underneath him,

for a reminder that it was to keep still.

“The furniture,” Mrs. Mar went on, looking round the room, “is quite

dilapidated enough without _your_ making it worse.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, I suppose I must go and attend to those children, and the supper.

But don’t let him kick the furniture, Nathaniel, even if he is the son of

your adored Galbraith. The owner of all that Rock Hill Mining property

didn’t trouble himself much about _you_.”

“Yes, he did. He was a very good friend,” and Mar made a slight movement

as of one clearing a space in the air before setting to work again.

His wife, in her progress to the door, halted mechanically in the middle

of the patch, as though the momentary weight of her presence there would

leave behind a subjugating effect. But she murmured absently: “I must

have another hunt for—” Then, turning with sudden animation: “Is it you

who’ve taken away my tack-hammer?” she demanded of Jack.

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, understand,” she went on, precisely as though he had admitted his

responsibility for the disappearance of the tool, “understand you’re to

sit there till supper, and this is the last of your playing about that

dirty duck-pond.”

“I forgot it was Sunday,” he said, penitent.

“Sunday or any other day—never again.”

Jack gasped with incredulity, and then, slowly, “You don’t weally mean

we’re never to go to ve pond for ever and ever!”

“Well, just you try it! And you’ll find yourself going back to school to

spend your holidays with the janitor.”

In the pause that followed this awful threat Jack murmured: “Never go

a-sploring any more!” and then sat as one paralyzed by an awful and

unexpected blow.

Mrs. Mar replaced the handleless cup upon the table, and took up the

corner of the cloth to determine the extent of a damage wrought in the

last washing.

“Everything we possess seems to be giving out at once—like the different

parts of the One Hoss Shay. It’s exactly”—she turned her bright, dark

eyes toward the writing-table, and spoke with a sudden access of

vigor—“exactly as if there was a law that allowed you for months and

years to patch and tinker, to bolster up your rickety furniture, to darn

your old carpets, to reseat your old chairs, to make over the clothes,

to solder the saucepans, and keep things going generally, up to a given

moment. But when that moment comes”—she lifted her finger Sibyl-like in

the air—“every blessed belonging begins to crack, or fray, or creak with

the pangs of approaching dissolution. Are you listening to what I say,

Nathaniel? There isn’t a thing in this house that doesn’t need to be

renewed.” She spoke with a directness that seemed pointedly to include

her husband among the dilapidations. He, half-absent, half-speculative,

looked round upon objects familiar to him from childhood.

“Who’d ever think,” pursued his wife, “who’d ever think that we’d been

married less than eight years? But this is what comes of not furnishing

new when you first set up housekeeping. If you don’t get nice things when

you marry you never get them.”

“Some people,” said Mar, “seem to like old furniture.”

“Let them have it, then!” Her quick gesture presented the entire contents

of the house to the first bidder. “_I_ say for young people to begin life

with the battered belongings of their fathers and mothers is a mistake.”

“Well, my dear,” returned her husband, with some dignity, “it’s a mistake

you had no share in. But,” he added hastily, “we had no choice.”

“No,” she said bitterly, “we’ve had very little choice.”

“We did once,” said Nathaniel Mar.

In the pause she looked down at the patch on the carpet.

“And we ignored it,” he finished.

“Oh, if you are going back upon that old foolishness.” She turned

abruptly and set down the broken cup.

“You didn’t think it so foolish when I first told you about it.”

“Oh, didn’t I!”

“No. It made just all the difference then.”

“What difference, I’d like to know, did it ever make?”

“It made you say ‘Yes’ after you’d said ‘No.’”

“The more fool I,” she said, and left the room.

CHAPTER II

The big man and the little man sat and looked at the patch on the carpet,

till for one of them the ragged place disappeared.

A big tear splashed on the grimy little hand.

But out of the mist, a voice: “Can’t you think of any safer sort of

games?”

The balked navigator sniffed audibly, and with the back of his hand he

made a dirty smear across his wet face. “We don’t any of us seem to care

much about vem, if vey are too safe.”

“H’m,” and with a faint smile Mar resumed his writing.

Jack Galbraith sat quite still, for him, with the disgraced foot tucked

under him. But Mar, without raising his eyes, was conscious as a woman

might have been, of the frequent journey of the small hand across the

eyes, and now and then the more efficacious aid of a sleeve employed to

clear the watery vision.

Presently, “After I ’most dwownded ve childwen, I expect she wouldn’t let

me wead my twavel book. What do you fink, Mr. Mar?”

The gentleman addressed laid down his pen, but still looking at it,

“Well, I don’t know,” he said cautiously.

Whereupon Jack Galbraith gave way openly to tears.

“You’re not going to forget,” said the man, with no great show of

sympathy, “you’re not going to forget that however much a boy’s father

leaves him, America hasn’t got any use for an idle man.”

“It’s Mrs. Mar makes me sit here doin’ nuffin’,” the child indignantly

defended himself.

“Oh, for the moment, yes. But when the time comes to choose what you’re

going to do, Jack—if I’m not at hand to talk it over, think about civil

engineering. It takes a man about, and on more intelligent terms than my

profession—”

“Yes,” Jack threw in upon the ground swell of a heavy sob. “I shouldn’t

like sittin’ countin’ money in a bank,” and while he caught his breath he

looked about drearily, as if already he saw himself an imprisoned cashier.

“Sitting in a bank isn’t the profession I chose, either. I am—I was a

surveyor,” said Nathaniel Mar.

“Oh—h?” inquired the child, in his surprise forgetting to continue the

celebration of his private misfortunes. “Did _you_ use to go all over

everywhere wiv a spy-glass and a chain?”

“Yes, the members of the Scientific Corps are expected to go ’ all over

everywhere.’”

“Clear wound ve world?”

“Well, _we_ didn’t go round—we went the other way, the way that takes you

to the top.”

“Did you get clear to ve vewwy top of ve world?”

“Nobody’s ever been clear to the top.”

“Why hasn’t anybody?”

“Tough job!”

“Was it tough job to go where you went?”

“It wasn’t easy. Some of our work lay quite near enough to the arctic

circle.”

“But I expect you liked it a lot better van—” He paused, looked about,

and felt gloom return upon him. If Mar was thinking so was Jack

Galbraith. Again he dragged his rough sleeve across his hot, little face.

“Ain’t it perferly awful sittin’ still?” he observed.

“Yes, it’s pretty awful,” agreed Mr. Mar, glancing out of the window.

“Was it up vere you found ve parlor bearskin and Mrs. Mar’s white fox?”

“Yes, it was up there.”

“You’re sure if I’m a engineer or a surveyor _I’ll_ be able to go up vere

where you found—”

“Certain to be able to go somewhere.”

“Why can’t I go where you did?” he asked, querulously. As Mr. Mar did not

answer at once, “Isn’t vere any little fing left to be done up vere?”

“Oh, lots! But you see I went there in ’65—going on ten years ago, when

people thought they’d like to have a telegraph line between Asia and

America. So some of us went to survey the Alaskan part of the route (only

it wasn’t called Alaska then) and decide the best course for the line

that was to meet the one coming across from Siberia.” Again Nathaniel Mar

studied the end of his pen.

“Yes,” said Jack, blowing his nose with an air of faintly reviving faith

in life’s possibilities. “Yes, and vere you met ve bear, and Mrs. Mar’s

white—”

“We got some furs and truck, but we didn’t get the telegraph line.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Well, you see, only a few years ago people laughed at the idea of an

Atlantic cable. But while we were hard at work up yonder surveying and

clearing and setting up telegraph poles, didn’t some other fellows prove

the possibility of an Atlantic cable by just going and laying it! So we

were recalled.”

“But you had got pwetty far, anyhow.”

“Yes, we got pretty far.”

“You got to where ve foxes turn white and ve bears—”

“Yes,” said Mar, reflectively, and then there was a pause.

Jack looked at him. “Couldn’t you tell me about when you got vat bear,

or”—in the tone of one grateful for small favors—“or how you found Mrs.

Mar’s white—”

“I don’t seem to remember anything specially interesting about the bears

or the foxes.” His far-off look gave the little boy a sudden feeling of

being abandoned by his one friend. He stood it for a moment, and then

suddenly twisted his lithe body round and buried his face in the crook of

the arm that clutched the chair back. Mar raised his eyes and seemed to

come home from some vast journey.

“Something curious did happen to a man I knew up there,” he said, in that

friendly tone Jack knew so well. “A fellow who was knocking round the

Russian Redoubt at St. Michaels, with the rest of the Scientific Corps,

waiting for the revenue cutter that was to take us back to San Francisco.

We got pretty tired waiting—”

“Pwickers in your feet?” Jack interrupted, suddenly. Mar stopped short,

for although Jack had uncovered his face to listen he was engaged in

making the most surprising grimaces. “I’ve got awful pwickers myself,” he

said.

“Prickers?”

“Yes. Oh, oh, my foot’s full of champagne.” Gingerly, and with further

contortions of countenance, he stretched the cramped foot out.

“Champagne?” Mar had echoed. “What do you know about champagne?”

“Once—papa’s birfday. Oh, oh, my foot’s full of it!”

“If it’s gone to sleep you’d better stamp,” recommended his friend

gravely, and Jack applied the remedy with apparent relief after the first

awful shock. He stood cautiously twisting about to restore circulation

while Mar went on: “Yes, we got pretty tired hanging round St. Michaels,

and one day two of the party took a boat and went off to an island to get

birds’ eggs. While they were out a storm came up. An awful storm,” he

assured his inattentive listener, but Jack was still gloomily twirling

about, trying his numb foot, and not taking any stock apparently in a

story that didn’t boast a bear in it, or even a white—

“I never in my life saw anything like it,” Mar went on. “The gale churned

up the sediment of Norton Sound into a boiling, yellow froth. The sleet

gave up trying to come down, and took to shooting horizontally, as

straight as a charge of musketry, and wherever it hit bare flesh—” He

shook his shaggy head at the memory.

“_I_ wouldn’t mind a little fing like vat!” said Jack, loftily.

“Well,”—Mar accepted the implied criticism with meekness,—“what they

minded most was that they couldn’t steer a course. It was going to be

great luck if the boat lived at all in such a sea. She was driven north

first. Neither one of the men knew just where it was they’d got to, but

any kind of land was a pretty good sight. They were almost as glad to get

near it as they were to get away from it.”

“Why didn’t vey like it?” Jack didn’t so much as pause in his twirling to

inquire.

“Well, it wasn’t a very pretty place for landing purposes.”

“Ho!” said the young gentleman with careless superiority, “I don’t mind

where _I_ land! One time I landed wight on top of a earfquake!”

“Ah!” said Mar, gravely, “that was pretty daring; but you may depend it

wasn’t in as bad a place as the one I’m talking about. Horrible steep

cliffs sheer down to the shore. Boulders piled helter-skelter. Couldn’t

see much through the dimness of the sleet and the dazzle of the spray,

still, they saw enough to know it wasn’t the harbor they were hoping for.

But to get the boat out of that boiling surf alive—no, it wasn’t easy.”

Mar caught the first look of keenness that crossed the tear-stained

face—the sudden taut aspect of the slim little body, and he knew

perfectly well that the modest young navigator before him was saying in

his heart, “Ah, now, if _I’d_ been there.” Thus encouraged, Mar went on:

“Things had been bad enough out in the open sea, but here you were being

driven straight on the rocks, and the wind—you don’t know anything yet

about what the wind can do when it tries.”

“What kind of fing?”

“It cut the top off those great waves as clean as you can slice the

peak off a hillock of ice-cream; and the water was hurled at you, not in

spray, but in masses, you know—masses that never broke till they struck

the men or the boat—except when the wind veered, and then the water

masses were flung clean up on the cliffs, as neatly as you could throw

a bottle of soda on our roof here and never see a drop spilled till the

glass burst on the slates.”

Jack nodded and seemed to forget his twirling, though he stood with his

body slightly askew, ready to begin again.

“They’d never have got out of that boiling caldron alive if the wind

hadn’t changed.” Mar wagged his head in a final sort of way, and turned

in his revolving chair to pick up a fallen paper.

“Is vat all? And vey did get home—”

“No, that’s not all, and they didn’t get home. Only one of them got

anywhere.” Mar bent his big body slightly forward and clasped his hands

round the good knee. The other leg was stretched straight out in front of

him, stiff and lifeless looking.

“They kept afloat for several hours,” he went on, “only to be wrecked

after all, a mile or two beyond an ugly looking cape called Nome.”

“Wecked! Were vey weally wecked?”

Mar nodded. In an emergency so great Jack did not scruple to turn his

back on the stool of penitence. He came and planted himself on wide apart

legs, directly in front of Mr. Mar, and stood there waiting. But Mr. Mar

seemed to be thinking less about Jack now, and he stared steadily at the

hole in the carpet.

“What happened to ve little boat?”

“The little boat was rapidly converted into little flinders.”

“Ven how could ve men get away again?”

“That’s what one of the men would have liked somebody to tell him.”

“Weren’t vere any people vere on vat land?”

“Not a soul.”

“Where was ve ovver man?”

“He had been washed out of the boat—he—it was hard to say where the other

man was.”

“Didn’t his fwiend look for him?”

“Not just then. The first thing the friend did was to tear up his shirt.”

“Gwacious! Was he as mad as vat?”

“No, he wasn’t mad, but he wanted some strips to tie round a wound he’d

got.”

“Oh! And when he’d done vat?”

“Then he went up on the tundra.”

“What’s ve—”

“The tundra is the great, rolling plain. They call it ‘the steppes’ in

Siberia. A few inches below the arctic moss that covers it, it’s frozen,

even in summer, as hard as iron. And it never melts. It’s been frozen

like that for millions of years.”

“Why did ve man want to go up on ve—ve—?”

“Well, he seemed to think he’d like to go to sleep. So that’s what he

did. He slept a long time. When he woke up he went down to the beach, and

the first thing he saw was his friend. It looked as if the friend had

been sleepy, too. He was taking his ease down there on the sand, in a

tangle of seaweed. His face was hidden. The other one went down to him,

as fast as his wound would let him, and he called several times. Then he

took hold of his friend’s shoulder and shook him. But the friend never

stirred—he was dead. Up there, above the line of seaweed and driftwood,

either he or the surf had flung his rifle—the butt rather battered, but

nothing a handy man couldn’t put right; only a rifle isn’t much good

without cartridges. By and by, the live man dug a grave for the dead one

up above tide line in the sand; and when he had buried the body, he sat

down and wondered how long it would be before the end would come for

himself. While he sat there tinkering at the rifle, a couple of natives

came down the coast.”

“Cannibals?” In his excitement Jack dropped on the floor like a

small Turk, with his legs curled under him. But he had steadied his

precipitate fall into that position with a hand on his friend’s leg—and,

as ill-luck would have it, not the good leg, but the stiff, forbidding

member that poor Mar dragged about the world with the help of his stout

walking-stick. Now, to touch that leg would have been like touching the

leg of a table, if somehow it hadn’t been more like touching a corpse.

Jack’s friend didn’t seem to mind. But the boy felt the contact the more

keenly for the fact that Mar felt it hardly at all. That was the horror

of a wooden leg—that it couldn’t feel. Jack snatched away his hand as

if it had been burned. But Mar was saying calmly, “Cannibals? Oh, no.

Esquimaux, quite good fellows. They must have seen white men and firearms

before, for they took a deep interest in the rifle. The castaway made

them understand he was hungry. They nodded and pointed back the way they

had come. The white man got up and hobbled away with them.”

“What made him hobble?”

“Oh—a—it’s quite common after a wreck—you’ll notice people often hobble

for a while. Well, they went along the beach, till they came to a place

so rocky it drove them up on the edge of the tundra; and up there the

white man saw across the plain to the nor’ard, a low line of hills

streaked with snow. And there was one bare peak in particular that stood

out very plain. It looked only about eight or nine miles away, and you

could see quite well there was something curious about it. Yes, it was

queer.”

“What was ve matter wiv it?”

“It had a curious-shaped top. Even from the coast it didn’t look natural.

You’d swear it was a monument of some kind. The natives didn’t seem to

know anything about it. There was a river flowing down from the hills

through the tundra to the sea, and all the mouth of it was choked with

driftwood, though there wasn’t a tree in sight and hadn’t been all along.

Beyond the driftwood, a long sand-spit ran out into the sea, and spread

itself right and left, parallel to the coast, and on this sand-spit were

a lot of little driftwood huts, skin boats drawn up, and people in fur

standing round a fire. The two Esquimaux took the white man across in

a boat, and told the other Esquimaux about him. And they gave him some

food, fish. Everybody took so much interest in his rifle that he had to

sit on it. They talked a good deal, but the white man didn’t know what

it was all about. So he ate and slept, and ate and slept, always with

his rifle under his arm. When he got tired of eating and sleeping, the

castaway sat and looked at the sea. Never a sail. And sometimes he would

turn and look at that queer peak over beyond the tundra. He gathered

that these people didn’t live here on this sand-spit—they were only

camping. Kind of Esquimaux summer resort. No, they couldn’t take him to

a white settlement. They knew nothing about any white settlement. Then

he would show them, he said. Let them bring down their best boat, and he

would give his gun to them if they’d take him off there to the southeast,

to St. Michaels. They shook their heads and bustled away. The white man

saw with horror signs of a beginning to break camp. Where were they all

going? Over the hills? No, on up the coast by sea. When?” Mar pantomimed

their answer—placed his two hands palm to palm, laid his head down on

them sideways and shut his eyes, opened them briskly, and took hold of

his stick as if about to start on a journey.

Jack was grinning with delight. “Was _vat_ ve way vey said ‘to-morrow

morning?’”

“Just like that. They were going off the very next day!”

“Not goin’ to leave vat poor man all alone vere, were vey?”

“No, they seemed quite ready to take the castaway and his rifle along.

But”—Mr. Mar looked so grave that Jack came closer still—“to go up yonder

with them to their underground winter home seemed to the castaway almost

as horrible as to be left behind. Well, he had a day anyhow to think it

over. His wound was still pretty painful, but he felt whatever happened,

he ought to go over the tundra to that queer hill and take a look at

the situation from the top. He must have been feverish, or he’d have

realized that he wasn’t fit yet for hard exercise, and that there wasn’t

a ghost of a likelihood of a settlement on the far side, since these

natives knew nothing about it. Then you see, there was the awful danger

that on this last day a rescue party should sail hopelessly by while he

was away, or a whaling schooner pass, that he might have hailed. But no.

He had got it into his head that if he could only reach the top of that

glacier-carved height, all his troubles would be at an end. But he did

have the sense to guard against the natives making off in his absence. He

got one of the boys to come along with him.

“How old was vat boy?”

“Oh—a—about your size, but four or five years older, and very clever at

throwing the bird-dart. No, I’ll tell you about that another time. They

set off across the tundra. It wasn’t easy walking. It wasn’t walking at

all. It was jumping from one moss knoll to another, or wading to the

knees in the spongy hollows. But he’d look up at the peak and say: ‘Once

I’m _there_—’ All the same, he had to call a halt several times. He’d

find a dryish place, and he’d sit down and stare about him. They had

long lost sight of the sand-spit. Even the sea had disappeared. To right

and left, as far as you could see, tundra, tundra, nothing but tundra,

a few pools shining in the hollows, and acres of sedge and moss, and

low-growing ‘scrub-willow.’ Nothing else. Just this featureless plain

till the land met the ocean and the ocean met the arctic ice. Suddenly,

‘What’s that?’ says the white man, and he pointed sou’west. The native

stared. The light plays you queer tricks on the tundra. You often see

lakes and ships and cities that aren’t there. But this didn’t look like

a mirage, it was too simple, too distinct. Just two sticks stuck in the

tundra. They might be one mile away, they might be ten. But there those

sticks stood as clear against the blue sky as a couple of bean poles on a

prairie farm.”

“Vey _weren’t_ bean poles!” said the prescient listener.

“No,” agreed Mar. “The white man decided it must be some driftwood

contrivance of the natives. Only the remarkable thing about it was, that

he hadn’t noticed it before. For a thing like that is apt to strike

you in a country where there wasn’t a tree for a hundred and fifty

miles to the south’ard, and not one between you and the Pole. Well, he

felt he’d know more about those sticks, and he’d know more about a lot

besides, when he’d got to the top of the hill. So they went on; but the

hill was a good way off. The ‘little white patches’ turned out to be

vast fields of rotten snow. You went in up to your waist. The native

jabbered, and seemed to be pointing out that it was better to go the

long way round. There was less snow, and there didn’t seem to be such

a chaos of talus—broken rock, you know—tumbled down from the peak. And

the peak wasn’t a peak. It was more like a queer-shaped, flat stone set

on a rock pedestal. ‘It’s all right,’ the man kept saying to himself,

as they pushed on, ‘I shall feel it was worth it, once I’m on the top.’

And they went on and on. All of a sudden the man looked up, and realized

that the feeling that had been haunting him was justified. The rock up

there was like a giant anvil. So like, it was almost uncanny to think

nature could have carved a stone with such whimsical exactness. ‘Just

wait till I get up there,’ he said again, half-laughing to himself; ‘see

if I don’t hammer out _something_!’ and he forgot his wound and how it

hurt him to walk, and he jumped across a water hole to a higher knoll

and saw that the ground on the other side fell gently down to a shallow

valley. And the valley held a little stream in its lap. The white man

realized when he saw that, how thirsty he was. He hadn’t dared to drink

out of the standing pools on the tundra, and he went as fast as he could

away from the anvil, and down the slope to the running water. He saw a

dash of something white on the edge of the bank, as he hurried down to

the creek, and he knew in the back of his head that it was a little heap

of weather-bleached bones that shone so, off there in the grass. But he

never stopped till he stood by the bed of the stream. He took up the

water in his double hands and drank. It was good water, and he’d never

been so thirsty before in his life. But the water spilled away through

his fingers, and he felt he should never get enough. So he balanced

himself over some stones, and he lay on his stomach, and reached his lips

to the clear water. He drank and drank, with his half-shut eyes fixed on

a spark of mica, that caught the light and was shining like a diamond

under the water. No, it wasn’t mica. He saw plainer now. He leaned over

a little further, and picked the bit of pyrites out of the wet gravel.

The Esquimau boy saw the white man stand up as suddenly as if he’d been

stung. But he held on to the thing he had taken into his palm, and he

lifted his hand, like this, several times, and he turned the thing over

and over, weighing it. One place in the stained, brassy-looking thing had

been scratched, and every time the light caught that new abrasion, it

glinted. The white man took out his knife and cut the substance. It was

gold!”

“_Weal_ gold?” said Jack Galbraith, gathering up his sprawled-out body

with a squirrel-like quickness.

“Real gold,” answered Mar. “‘Any more stuff like this about?’ the white

man asked. The native looked at the nugget, and shrugged indifferently.

The white man dug about in the gravel with his hands and a sharp stone,

and then he sat down and thought, with his eyes on the place where the

nugget had been. The Esquimau boy got out his bird-dart, and went off

a little way after a jack-snipe. The white man knew he ought to make a

miner’s assay.”

“What’s vat?”

“That’s ‘panning.’ If he’d had a round pan like Sigma’s bread pan, he’d

have put some sand and gravel in it, and he would fill it to the brim

with water, and he’d wash the sand and gravel round and round, picking

out all the stones and letting off the water little by little, with a

circular motion—so. And all the lighter sand and stuff would get washed

out; and by and by, if the miner knows his business, any gold that may

have been in that sand, every particle, is left behind in the bottom of

the pan.”

“Gwacious! Vat _would_ be luck!” said Jack, with enthusiasm.

“No, it isn’t luck. It’s skill and specific gravity.”

“Why didn’t ve man twy it?”

“He hadn’t any pan. He hadn’t even a shovel. I’ve seen it done very

cleverly with a shovel. I’ve seen it done with a saucer. He had nothing.

How was he going to find out if there was any more of that stuff there?

Had this one nugget by any chance been dropped? No, that was absurd. Who

could have dropped it? But he looked up the bank where the bones shone,

and out of the coarse grass a skull grinned at him. Not a wolf’s skull,

or a deer’s, as he’d thought. A human being’s—a white man’s, perhaps.

Had the nugget belonged to him? Had he brought it from some valley far

away, and lost his bit of gold as well as his life here under the shadow

of the great stone anvil? The graver the man got down there by the water,

the broader the one on the bank seemed to grin. Suddenly the living man

got up, and ran toward that heap of bones as if he couldn’t rest till

he’d found out what the joke was the dead man was laughing at. He picked

up the skull, and he saw it was a white man’s.”

“How could he see vat?”

“He looked at the teeth. They were splendid. Good as any savage’s—all but

one—one was filled. When he saw that, the castaway knew that probably

this white man, who had been here before him, had dropped that nugget

in the creek—or it had been washed down there after the wolves had torn

the dead man’s clothes. But who could tell! ‘Look here,’ the live man

asked, ‘what _did_ happen?’ But the other wouldn’t say a word, just went

on grinning in that irritating way of his. So the live man picked up two

stones, and got out his big clasp-knife, and he went at that skull with

might and main, sawing at it with the knife (which was no good at all),

and hammering with first one stone and then another, working away like

one possessed.”

“Did he weally fink he could make ve skull tell him somefing?” and Jack

Galbraith laughed aloud at so foolish an adventurer.

“Seemed as if he thought he’d get _some_ satisfaction out of it, from

the way he kept on. By the time the Esquimau boy got back with the

jack-snipe, the white man had hammered away everything from that skull

except the round basin of the cranium—this part, you know. The Esquimau

boy was horrified, and made signs of disapproval.

“‘Just you wait,’ said the white man. He took the bone bowl down to the

bank. He filled it full, and three times he ‘panned’ the gravel of that

creek. _And every time he got gold!_”

“Gwacious!” said Jack, in an excited whisper.

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Mar, “when he saw colors the third time he just poured

the stuff wet into his handkerchief, and told the Esquimau boy he was

ready to go now. As he went up the bank, he passed the bones again. ‘I

wonder if he knew!’ the castaway thought, and as he went on he thought

more and more, and he got solemner and solemner. He said to himself: ‘A

gold mine will do me just about as much good as it did Old Bones, if I

have to stay up here with the Esquimaux. We’ll go back the other way,’

he called to the boy, and the boy didn’t think much of the plan. But the

white man kept looking all round in every direction, to see if there was

the least little trail leading anywhere, or the smallest human sign. Only

those bones shining so white down there on the bank! The castaway went

on, feeling pretty sick and anxious, till he looked straight up and saw

off there against the blue, that great anvil, plainer than ever. The nose

quite sharp and finely cut, the top as flat as our dining-table, and the

waist gouged in exactly as a real anvil is. ‘Well, I won’t give up going

to the top,’ he said out loud, ‘and if there _are_ any settlements—’ It

was a crazy thing to do, but he did it; and when he got to the top he

saw something he wouldn’t have seen in time, if he hadn’t climbed Anvil

Rock.”

“What did he see?” Jack gathered together his sprawled-out body and sat

up.

Mar’s eyes looked over the little boy’s head into space. “No settlements.

Beyond the creek, barren hills to the north. No hope that way. East and

west the tundra stretched to the horizon line level as the ocean. No hope

right or left. He turned round and saw off there to the south the coast

where he’d been wrecked, and the sand-spit the Esquimaux were making

ready to leave, and beyond that, against the horizon—what was that! He

nearly fell off the rock. For a two-masted schooner was lying a couple of

miles off the shore. Two masts! It flashed over him those were the two

poles he’d seen sticking up above the tundra, several hours before. Well,

he got down off that rock double quick, and he nearly killed himself

tearing back to the coast, and signaling the ship. He was only just in

time—they were weighing anchor.”

“Well,” said Jack, with a long breath of relief, “it _was_ a good fing he

climbed vat funny hill!”

“Y—yes,” said Nathaniel Mar. His tone was hardly satisfactory.

“Didn’t he get back to his fwiends all wight?”

“Oh, yes, he got back all right.”

“What did vey say when he told vem about ve gold?”

“He didn’t tell anybody about that just then.”

“Why not?”

“If he had, somebody might have rushed there and cleaned the whole creek

out, before he had a chance.”

“Oh! How soon did he go back?”

“He—he didn’t go.”

Jack sat there wide-eyed. “W—why didn’t he?”

[Illustration: “Mar’s eyes looked over the little boy’s head into

space”]

“Well, you see, he had a pretty bad time with that leg of his.”

“Oh, it was his leg, was it?”

“A—yes—his leg. He kept waiting for the doctors to cure it. Instead of

curing it they kept cutting off little bits of it.”

“Ow! Well—and after vat, when it _did_ get well.”

“It didn’t.”

“And was he lame always, like you?”

“Something like me.”

“Why didn’t _he_ get a store leg, too?”

“He did, I believe—ultimately.”

“And wasn’t it any good?”

“It wasn’t quite the same as the one he’d lost.”

“Oh, no.” Jack realized that, with a creep down his back. He could still

feel the dreadful touch of it on his fingers. “But I suppose he sent

somebody else up after vat gold?”

“N-no.”

“Well, what _did_ he do?”

“He—he got married.”

“Oh—h. And after vat?”

“Then he got a post of some sort—not easy to get, still harder to leave.”

“And—”

“And then he got some children. Oh, he was always getting things, that

fellow! Once it was intermittent fever. Anyhow he had to stay where he

was.”

“Ven who got ve gold?”

“Nobody. Not yet.”

“Ve gold is waitin’ vere now?” Jack jumped to his feet with dancing eyes.

“So—a—so he says.”

“Oh—_oh_!” Then with an air of fiery impatience:

“What you say vat man’s doin’ now?”

“He—well—I understand he’s hanging on to that post.”

“Hangin’ on a post!” Jack colored as Mar laughed, and added hurriedly,

“Just waitin’ to see if vat leg won’t get better, I s’pose.”

“Waiting for—several things.”

Jack came closer. “Oh, _doesn’t_ he mean to never mind his leg, and go

back some day?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he had times of thinking he would go back

_somehow_. After he’s educated his children, and got them off his hands,

and can afford to take risks. Or, if the worst comes to the worst, his

sons will go one day.”

“Or _I_ might go,” said Jack, quickly.

Mar smiled and fell silent. Jack walked away with his hands in his

breeches pockets, and his eyes big with dreams. The opening of the door

made them both start.

“Didn’t I tell you not to get out of that chair till supper?” Mrs. Mar

demanded. She stood there with the butter dish in one hand and the milk

pitcher in the other, snapping her bright eyes at the culprit.

He for his part had turned about sharply, and he fell from the infinite

skies with a bump.

“I—I—” he stammered, backing against the bookcase.

“It’s on the lower shelf,” said Mar, calmly. “The heavy brown book.” Jack

turned again, utterly bewildered, but following the direction indicated

by Mr. Mar’s walking-stick.

“That’s ‘Franklin’s Second Voyage,’ next the dictionary. Yes, that’s what

I want. I think,” he went on to his wife, as Jack stooped to obey him, “I

think I must always keep a small prisoner in here, to hand me things out

of my reach.”

She answered nothing as she set down the butter and the milk, but she

kept her eyes on Jack.

“Oh, yes,” he was saying hurriedly, “vis is Fwanklin.” He carried the

book to his friend.

“Fwanklin!” repeated that gentleman with affectation of scorn, as he

opened the book. “Now, sir, go back to your seat and practice your R’s.

It’s ridiculous for a boy of your age to be talking baby talk.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jack, getting very red as he returned to his place. Mrs.

Mar stood at the sideboard making a dressing for the salad. Every now

and then she looked over her shoulder. But Jack sat impeccable in the

penitential chair, saying softly, but with careful emphasis:

“Awound ve wugged wocks ve wagged wascal wan. Awound ve,”—but his eyes

were too shining to show a mind properly bent upon the course pursued by

that particular wascal.

After supper, while Mrs. Mar was putting Trennor and Harry to bed, Jack

Galbraith looked everywhere he could think of for his book. No, Mr. Mar

hadn’t seen it. “Here, I’ll lend you mine. You’ll understand some of the

chapter about,”—and he turned the pages till he found the place, and he

put in a slip of paper. “There! Franklin didn’t find what he was looking

for, but he’s written the best travel book I know.”

“Oh, fank you, sir.” Jack took the big volume in both arms, and was

making off with it.

“And look here, Jack, about that other fellow—the man who did find

something up there, you and I won’t tell anybody about that.”

“Oh!” He stopped and nodded at Mar over the great book. “All wight. But I

may speak to _you_ about it sometimes—”

“When we’re alone.”

“All wight. Hasn’t he,” Jack lowered his tone to conspirator’s pitch,

“hasn’t he ever told anybody but you?”

“Oh, he’s told one or two. But in confidence, you know. People he can

trust.”

Jack pulled himself up proudly. “I can keep secrets like anyfing.” But

again he lowered his voice, and smiling delightedly, “What do vey say,”

he demanded with lively anticipation, “vose ovvers, when vey hear about

it?”

Mr. Mar did not answer instantly.

Jack drew nearer, still clasping the great book. “Oh, _do_ tell me what

vey say.”

“They—they think he dreamed it.”

“B—b—but,” Jack stuttered with indignation, “doesn’t he show vem ve

nugget, and ve handkerchief wiv ve—”

“No,” said Mar, sadly. “He lost that handkerchief somewhere on the

tundra.”

CHAPTER III

Not for several years had Mar made mention of the far northern experience

which, beside laming him for life, had as yet but one visible effect upon

his circumstances—that of ruining his credit as a man of judgment among

those nearest to him.

People had recognized Nathaniel Mar as one marked out for misfortune,

when, upon his father’s death, he had been obliged to give up his

theological studies, and come back from college, to take the first

thing that offered him a little ready money for the assistance of his

mother. His modest salary as surveyor’s clerk was presently augmented, in

recognition of his good draftsmanship and his surprisingly quick mastery

of the new field. But it was not till the work he did the following

year, over in the Rock Hill district, brought him the friendship of the

prosperous young mine owner Galbraith, that Mar found an opportunity

of following the more scientific side of his new profession. It was

Galbraith who got him the post on the Coast Survey, that led to Mar’s

joining the Russian-American Expedition.

After his return the handsome schoolmistress, who had reluctantly said

“no” to the penniless surveyor, consented to look with favor upon the

Discoverer of Gold in the new territory of Alaska.

But she warmly opposed Mar’s design of going to Rock Hill to share the

great secret with his friend Galbraith. No, indeed! The Rock Hill mining

magnate was in small need of “tips.” It was clearly Mar’s duty to give

the men of Miss Trennor’s family the first chance of joining in this

glorious scheme that was to enrich them all.

When Harriet Trennor called the Trennor brothers “the men of her

family,” she made the most of what was a second cousinship. It was even

the case that she was not on very good terms with those go-ahead young

gentlemen; for the Trennors, in spite of their prosperity, had never,

as she expressed it, “done anything” for her. It had been for the sake

of her old father that they had bestirred themselves sufficiently to

recommend Harriet for the post of assistant superintendent of the Girls’

College of Valdivia. But after providing her with an opportunity to

leave their common birthplace in St. Joseph, Missouri, the Trennors and

their respective wives had, in point of fact, neglected Miss Harriet to

such a degree, that there would be a certain magnificence in her heaping

coals of fire on their heads. She, the poor relation, whom they had so

little regarded, would put it in the way of men merely well-off to become

millionaires. They would learn her worth at last!

Yes, yes, Nathaniel must keep the great secret close, till the Trennors

(who were in New York on their yearly business trip) should have

returned. But the affairs of the brothers took them to Mexico, and their

home coming was further delayed.

While they tarried acute pneumonia appeared upon the Rock Hill scene, and

carried off John Galbraith. Little part in Mar’s grief at the loss of his

best-loved friend was played by the thought that now he could not count

upon his “backing.” Galbraith took with him out of the world something

that to a man of Mar’s temperament meant more. And at that time he looked

upon himself as possessor of a secret that any capitalist in the country

would hold himself lucky to share. It was not till the return of his

wife’s cousins that he found there could be exceptions to this foregone

conclusion.

As enterprising dabblers in real estate and mining, and with the Palmas

Valley Bank behind them, the Trennor brothers were constantly being

approached by people with schemes for making millions. Such persons,

though almost invariably as poor as Mar, were not often, the Trennor

brothers agreed, ready with propositions so fantastic.

Alaska was in those days further away from men’s imaginations than

Patagonia. The few people who had anything to say about the newly

acquired territory, used it only as a club to belabor the then secretary

of state. What had he been thinking of to advise his foolish country

to pay seven millions for the barren rocks and worthless ice-fields

that astute Russia, after one hundred and twenty-six years’ attempt at

occupation, was so ready to abandon!

“Worthless!” retorted Secretary Seward’s friends. “Why, the Seal Islands

alone—”

“Yes, yes, the Seal Islands _are_ alone on the credit side of the

transaction. Seward gave those seven millions for the two little

Pribyloffs, and the value of Alaska may be gaged by the fact that it was

just thrown in.”

Was it to be believed, the Trennors asked, was it _likely_ there was gold

in a place where fellows with such keen noses as the Russians—they shook

their heads. Both of them shook their heads, for the Trennor brothers

always did everything together. Who could believe it had been left for

a man like Mar—besides, that gold should be up there was dead against

the best geologic opinion of the day. The precious metal had never been

found under these conditions. There were reasons, scientific reasons,

as anybody but Mar would know, why gold couldn’t exist in just that

formation (they spoke as if the vast new realm boasted but one). And,

finally, even if there _was_ gold in such a place, how the dickens was it

going to be got out?

It was in the talk about mining facilities that Mar’s own faith suffered

the first of many hurts.

He was obliged to concede that these astute young men were well-informed

as regards the difficulties and disappointments of mining, even in a land

where transport was easy, food cheap, and labor plentiful—a land blessed

by running water and perpetual summer. No less was Mar constrained to

admit that this gold he believed he had found was hidden in a barren

corner of the uttermost North, where not even an occasional tree promised

timber for sluice boxes, where the winter was nine months long, and

where, even in summer, the soil six inches below the surface was welded

with the frost of ages.

They were surprised, the Trennors said, that any one should expect them

to take stock in such a—

Oh, he didn’t (Mar hastened to defend himself), he didn’t at all

expect—it was only that his wife had begged him to come to them first.

And they smiled. They always smiled when Mar’s mad notion was mentioned.

Even after it ceased to be actually mentioned, they had for his mere name

a particular kind of tolerant, distant-cousin-by-marriage smile that said

“poor Mar,” with an accent on the adjective.

The new Mrs. Mar was at first boundlessly indignant with her kinsmen.

“Never mind,” she adjured her husband, with flashing eyes; as soon as he

should be able to travel, they would go up there themselves. She seemed

unobservant of the fact that his spirits were not raised by her kind

proposition. They would have no trouble, she assured him, in finding

worthier partners to join them in the great scheme when once they had

“made sure.”

“Made sure?” said Mar, wincing; “but I _have_ made sure.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Still you did lose the nugget—and the gold dust,

too.”

For the first time Mar changed the subject.

“You haven’t anything _to show_,” she persisted. To which he answered

nothing.

Shortly after they were married, Mar’s mother became very ill. The

following spring she died. Mar’s own health and spirits were a good deal

lowered by the surgical torment he was called on periodically to undergo,

as amputation followed amputation.

Meanwhile, without waiting to “go up there and make sure,” two efforts

on Mrs. Mar’s part to interest moneyed men in her husband’s discovery,

resulted not alone in failing to convince any one else that this was a

fine opportunity for investment, but ultimately in undermining her own

faith.

With the coming of her first child she prepared to cast overboard the

wild hope (she saw now that it _was_ wild) of a fortune up yonder in the

ice-fields, and showed herself wisely ready to make what she could out of

the saner possibilities life presented in Valdivia. Her cousins had been

right. She wouldn’t admit it to them—not yet—but it was a crazy scheme,

that notion of gold in the arctic regions!

Dreamer as he was, Mar missed nothing of the intended effect when she

first ceased to talk about his discovery—ceased to plan all life with

that fact for its corner-stone. Her initial silence hurt him probably

more than the half-veiled taunts of a later time. It was all the

difference between the shrinking of an open wound and the dull beating of

an ancient cicatrice.

Not only, as time went on, did she resent the illusion she had been

under, but, as is common with women of her type, her husband’s greater

significance since motherhood had come to her, made her increasingly

dread that foolish infatuation of his. She foresaw that a continued faith

in the value of his “find” would stand between him and energetic pursuit

of fortune in any other direction. So it was that the North was not

merely for her, as time went on, the type of a shattered dream—it came to

be her and her babies’ rival in this man’s thoughts. This man—who owed

to them all his thoughts, all his faith and energy—he was divided in his

allegiance.

And not in dreams alone might he desert them. He might even conceivably

insist, against all rational advice and plain duty, he might insist on

going back there! The mere idea of his fatuous clinging to the old plan

came to exercise over her an almost uncanny power for misery. Not that he

continued openly to admit his preoccupation. But it was there—she was

sure of that—in his head, more properly in his heart, his refuge, his

darling, his delight. She came to feel for it the hatred, and to have

before it the involuntarily nerve recoil, that lies for some wives in

the thought of another woman. What if she never succeeded in rooting the

fancy out of his brain? How was she at least to make sure of preventing

his squandering time and money in pursuit of it?—now, when she could not

go too, and when his going would mean (as she honestly thought) disaster

to her and to the children and the humiliation of falling back for

cousinly help on those wise young Missourians, who had seen at once the

madness of the scheme.

She patched up the breach with her two kinsmen, and induced them to offer

her husband a small position in their bank.

_That_ would hold him.

But although she succeeded in seeing the cripple made teller—as a first

step, she was firmly convinced, on the road to a partnership—she was not

delivered from her fear. The unspoken dread that he might throw aside

the humble, though precious, “sure thing” for this chimera beckoning

from the North—the dread of it became the main factor in their spiritual

relation. For not only did she never free herself from her grudging love

of the man—and never, therefore, from her shrinking at the prospect of

separation—not only did she conceive of him in the American way as the

property of his family and bound as bondsmen are to serve them to the

end, but in addition to all that, more and more as the years went on, did

she come profoundly to disbelieve in the validity of his story.

“Do you still think you may go back there one day?” she burst out on

one occasion, looking darkly at the reconnaissance map that hung on the

dining-room wall. Mar mumbled something about the satisfaction in the

verifying of an impression.

“Verifying _what_? How do you verify pure fancy?” Then turning suddenly

upon him, “If ever you do go, you’ll only be giving a fantastic reason

for a restless man’s longing to leave his home.”

At moments conceived by her to be critical, she would toss at him the

reproach of his well-known visionariness, and all their old foolish hope

and its utter loss would be held up to scorn in her saying, apropos of

something quite foreign: “That’s like some one I once knew who wanted

people to believe in a miracle. But not without proof, he said. He

_had_ proof—absolute proof—only he’d lost it.” Or, less offensive, but

for Mar no less pointed, the form of skepticism his loss of the nugget

had crystallized for her, “You’ve got to have something to _show_ to a

Missourian.”

This was later not only adopted by her boys as a favorite family gibe,

but introduced into their school, and thence spread abroad as a foolish

and pointless saying sometimes will, no one quite knowing why, till all

of that generation, whatever their origin, would say with a wag of the

head: “You’ve got to _show_ me—I’m from Missouri,” whenever they wished

to announce themselves acute fellows by no means to be taken in.

As to the particular matter that gave rise to the saying, Mrs. Mar’s

strong personal feeling about it was augmented by outside circumstances.

Stories of failure in gold mining were too rife and too well-attested

not to have a significance difficult to disregard. Blameless misfortune

as well as wholesale swindling, were so much the order of the day in the

West, that men of business like the Trennors, when they wanted to promote

some mining scheme, must needs have recourse to the gorgeous East.

New York had plenty of money for “wildcat” schemes. But no place, the

wise would tell you, like conservative old Boston for floating a risky

concern. New Englanders were at that distance which lends enchantment.

For them gold mining is still a form of romance—the mere thought of it

goes to the head like wine.

But Valdivia was neither near enough to the mining centers to catch

the fever, nor yet so far away but what her citizens mightily feared

infection. Had not their townsman, Ben White, lost his head and his

fortune over at Huerfano Creek? Wasn’t there young Andrews for a warning!

No catastrophe of this kind in their little world lost through Mrs. Mar’s

agency any of its ironic usefulness as illustration. She succeeded not

only in making her husband doubt the wisdom of giving up a sure thing in

the bank, to claim an unworkable gold mine, but little by little, as the

rain and the weather wear away the sharp outlines of a stone inscription,

so for Nathaniel Mar the years and the unbelief about him brought a

gradual blurring of the picture, till even to himself its early outlines

were a little dimmed.

To revive its actuality, more than for any other purpose, nearly ten

years after he had told the story to little Jack Galbraith, he told it

again to Mr. Elihu H. Cox. The man listened with such a look in his big,

fishy eyes, in a silence so galling, that Mar interposed hurriedly:

“And there’s one capital thing about it. It’s safe enough. If the gold’s

there, it certainly won’t run away,” and abruptly changed the subject;

though to hear himself saying “if it’s there,” rankled in his memory like

apostasy. He would never tell the story again till his boys were grown

and he told it to them. _They_ would believe him. They, with youth and

four sound legs between them, they would go up there and justify the long

faith.

For fear that he might die before they were old enough to be

indoctrinated, he wrote out as circumstantial an account as he could

between intervals of black despair at finding how dim were certain

details. He grappled with the horror and saw it recede before the

draftsman’s skill and his peerless satisfaction in preparing careful

diagrams and a map to larger scale. There was an effect of mathematical

accuracy about these illustrations of his account that gave him back his

confidence. If there was any trifling difference between these data and

those furnished upon his return, the apparent discrepancy lay in the

essential impressionism of mere words. The compass and the rule can’t

lie. He put the precious document away with his will, in the vault of

the Palmas Valley Bank, but he did not put away the thought of it. On

the contrary, he kept it by him day and night, turning it over in his

mind with the rich comfort of the man who reflects that he will leave to

his children a handsome inheritance and a fund of gratitude. Something

in this case that partook of the nature of a paternal life-insurance—the

kind of thing that had not profited, could not profit the giver, except

as it profited him to feel that for all his appearance of being one of

life’s failures, he yet had insured his children against the meaner

assaults of fortune. For this “policy” that he held for them was “paid

up.” Oh, yes, Nathaniel Mar had paid heavily—not yearly, but daily,

almost hourly, for his lien upon the riches of the North.

The thought of the gold-shotted creek between the Great Stone Anvil and

the arctic circle comforted him not least when he looked at his little

daughter. It was good to know—the knowledge helped him through many a

difficult hour—that Hildegarde would never be forced to join the ever

fuller ranks of the bread-winning women. It would be no hurt to her that,

however great an heiress she might be, she had been frugally brought up.

There was something large and fine and tranquil about the

Scandinavian-looking girl, whom her parents had called by the stately

northern name with more luck than attends many a christening—since it is

well-known Victoria is, like as not, to take on an aspect depressed and

down-trodden; Grace to turn out clumsy and hideous; while Ivy shows a

sturdy independence, and Blanche and Lily grows swarthy as a squaw.

But the fact was that the little Mar girl was named Harriet Hildegarde,

and was even called “Hattie” till she was nearly twelve, when, after

remarking one day, “I don’t look like a Hattie, and I’m not going to be

a Hattie,” she refused thereafter to hear the obnoxious diminutive and

quietly but firmly coerced her family and her schoolmates into saying

“Hildegarde,” if they wanted her to notice them.

Mrs. Mar was grieved to find that her only daughter had no conspicuous

talents, and was not even a girl of spirit—lacked, moreover, the will

to cultivate that affectation of being spirited, which goes in America

by the name of “brightness.” But she was not a bad sort of little girl

after all; she got her lessons, and played games with a certain boyish

gusto, and gardened with a patient devotion that her mother thought

worthy of a better cause. But Mrs. Mar consoled herself for the girl’s

lack of brilliancy by reflecting that Hildegarde was probably going to be

handsome and that men were great donkeys and might never find out that

she was slow.

Hildegarde herself was conscious of her shortcomings—without the

knowledge overwhelming her. Life was going to be very good, even if

she wasn’t at the head of the class, or a shining light at the school

commencements. She had no talent for music, and quite as little for

recitation. It was something to hear her saying, in the famous garden

scene—

“Geh’ falsche gleissnerische Königin

Wie du die Welt so täusch’ ich Dich—”

in a tone of unruffled courtesy and with a brow serene. When the fiery

Madeleine Smulsky took her off with, “This is Hildegarde laying dark

plots—now she’s doing foul murder,” and proceeded to translate her

friend’s large tranquillity into the feverish terms of picturesque

wickedness, the effect was distinctly diverting. Even Hildegarde laughed.

For she got over “minding.” It was when she was quite little that she had

suffered most, and from the scorn of her own family. Her brothers were

both “such very bright boys,” and her mother she knew to be enormously

clever. It had been painful to feel that beside these richly dowered

ones, she was “next door to an idiot.” She made no outward struggle

against the verdict of her family, accepting it as many a young creature

will, without a doubt of its being as just as final. But, fortunately,

hers was a nature too sane and sunny for her to run the risk many

children do of coming nervously to dread, and so making true, a prophecy

having no foundation in necessity. When she discovered that she had

competent hands—hands with which she could perform all manner of pleasant

domestic miracles—that gradually, and because of her, the house was

transformed and the garden made to smile; that, moreover (assuring her

of a hold upon the fine arts, too), she could tell ghost stories that

made her school friends gibber with excitement, the girl felt agreeably

conscious that her destiny after all was maybe larger than the family eye

had been able to discern.

When Hildegarde was sixteen a new pupil appeared at the Valdivia School

for Young Ladies. A little girl hardly twelve, delicate, pretty,

appealing, yet self-sufficing; so backward in some of her studies, and

so advanced in others, that she could not be entered in either the upper

primary or lower academic classes, but was sent to recite arithmetic and

geography with the infants, Latin with the first academic girls, and

French with the second collegiates—young ladies four to six years older

than little Bella Wayne.

She was a boarder, and it was said her parents had put her under the

special care of Miss Gillow, the principal. She even had special dishes

cooked for her, and the fact that these “milk puddings” (as it seemed

they were called) were plainer than the food set before the other

boarders, did nothing to mitigate the offensiveness of the distinction.

Certainly the principal accorded the “new girl” so many privileges that a

strong party sprang up against her.

Hildegarde, even before a certain day of wrath, had found herself

unconsciously absorbed in watching this thin slip of prettiness, who

looked as if a puff of wind would blow her away, who ought to have

carried herself humbly, if not actually depressed, in her capacity of

unclassifiable new-comer, and who yet walked about with her little nose

in the air, as if she despised Valdivia, and especially scorned the

critical young ladies of Valdivia’s celebrated school.

It did not help her good standing that she showed herself indifferent

to an opportunity of joining the Busy Bees. Now, the Busy Bees were a

very popular organization which not only sewed on alternate Saturday

afternoons at the rectory, but danced with an equal regularity, in

various other places, and organized a bazaar once a year in the Masonic

Hall. Besides the gaiety of this function, there was a fine flavor

of philanthropy about the regular application of the proceeds to the

clothing and educating of a little Hindu girl, who was able strangely

soon to write pious letters to the young ladies of Valdivia—letters in

which she seemed to get even with her benefactors by saying that she

never forgot to pray for them. The Bees had had the joy of deciding by

what name their protégé should be christened. As there were three Marys

and six Trennors among them, the little Hindu was called Mary Trennor,

and every properly constituted girl felt pledged for Mary Trennor’s

material and spiritual welfare—that is, every girl in Valdivia whose

fortunate social condition permitted her to aspire to wear the badge

of the Golden Bee. It followed that the new girl was not properly

constituted when she declined the honor. It was even apparent that

her heart was not in the right place. For when Beatrice Trennor most

forbearingly showed the new girl the framed photograph of the Hindu

convert, in order to stimulate interest in the cause, Miss Bella Wayne

turned from it with the observation, “She’s ugly. I shan’t do a single

thing for such a hideous little girl. I don’t think they ought to be

encouraged.”

It was plain, therefore, that she thought too much of good looks, and was

a stony-hearted monster.

“Serves her right,” said primaries, academics and collegiates all with

one voice, when Bella Wayne, having for a week daily put the arithmetic

class to shame, was banished to Miss MacIver’s room to spend two hours in

austere solitude over the lesson of the day.

Hildegarde had got special permission to go for ten minutes after school

hours to visit Madeleine Smulsky (also a boarder), who was in bed with

a violent cold. Coming down-stairs, as Hildegarde passed Miss MacIver’s

room she saw the door cautiously open. A spectacled eye gleamed strangely

low down in the aperture for one of Miss MacIver’s height, and then the

owner of the eye, as if reassured by the look of things outside, opened

the door a little wider, and the apparition stood fully revealed. Miss

MacIver, many inches shorter than anybody had ever seen her before, and

narrowed in proportion, the familiar crochet shawl hanging dowdily over

one shoulder, the stiff-held head ornamented with the front of sandy

curls, a gouty finger held crookedly up, the effect of cold in the nose

faithfully reproduced as the voice twanged out:

“Neow young ladies, observe—” It was the arithmetic teacher to the life,

only it was Bella Wayne, with her perky little nose supporting huge round

spectacles, and her baby mouth pursed in severity repeating the rule,

“One or bore of the decibal divisiods of a unid are galled a decibal

fragtion.”

Hildegarde had stopped, stared, and was seized with uncontrollable

giggles. Madeleine Smulsky, hearing these demonstrations, got up out of

bed and made all haste to thrust her bare toes through the banisters,

and crane a tousled head far enough over the rail to discover what was

happening below. Her ecstatic merriment induced Miss Wayne to come

further into the hall, and reprove her with a supple young finger stiffly

crooked, and speaking not only with a cold in the head, but with that

intolerable click in the nose of the sufferer from chronic catarrh—

“I would lige yeou do observe there is a sbezial beaudy aboud the

laws of bathebadigs—” Again the dreadful noise in the impudent little

nose. Madeleine’s attempt to suppress her laughter brought on a fit of

coughing, which, with a spasmodic suddenness, choked and died in her

throat. For all of a sudden there were three figures in the hall below,

and one of them was the real Miss MacIver, saying to herself in miniature:

“And now, Miss Wayne, you may take off my shawl, and my skirt, and my

glasses.” (Not a syllable about the opulent front.) “And in ten minutes

go and report to the principal.”

[Illustration: “It was the teacher of arithmetic to the life, only it was

Bella Wayne”]

As the real Miss MacIver, six feet of indignation, turned away trembling

with fury, she looked back an instant over her shoulder to say: “You or

I, Biss Wayne, bust leave Valdivia—”

But Bella had already vanished into the room of penitence, and was

feverishly pulling off her strange habiliments. The bare toes of Miss

Smulsky had been hurriedly withdrawn from between the banisters, and any

girl but Hildegarde Mar would have been fleeing down the staircase, “and

so home.” But she walked quietly away, her large deliberateness even a

little emphasized as she went, weighed down by fearful speculation as to

what form of retribution would overtake the wicked, new girl.

Hildegarde went to school the next morning ten minutes earlier than

usual. No one yet in the big school-room, so she wandered restlessly

through the empty halls, wishing she dared go up-stairs and compare

notes with Madeleine. From a window at the back, looking out on a group

of eucalyptus trees and a mass of syringa, she saw little Bella Wayne

sitting very subdued on the topmost of two stone steps; slate on knee and

pencil poised, but eyes fastened on a woodpecker tap-tap-tapping at the

tree.

Hildegarde went out and spoke kindly to the unlucky little girl. “What’s

happened since—?”

“Nothing much,” and Bella put up her chin.

“Are you—are you going away?”

“Me? No.” And with that she dropped her slate and pencil on the step,

dropped her face into her two hands, and wept.

Hildegarde thought she had misheard—it must be that Bella was crying

because she was expelled. After all Hildegarde had expected she would be

expelled. What she had not expected was that she, one of the big girls,

would be so sorry to hear that this was the last she should see of little

Bella Wayne. Hildegarde picked up the broken slate, and tried to think of

something comforting.

“I was _sure_ they’d send me home,” Bella sobbed. “But they w-won’t! Not

even if I d-don’t beg her p-par-don.”

“And you _want_ to be sent home!”

“Of course!” Bella got out a handkerchief three inches square and dabbed

her eyes.

“Was that why you did it?”

“No. It _would_ have been if I’d thought she’d come and catch me.

But—no—I did it because—oh, because there wasn’t any other earthly thing

to do in that room!” she said, with a burst. Then, more collectively:

“Were you ever in Miss MacIver’s room?”

“No. I’ve always been rather afraid of Miss MacIver.”

“Well, wait till you’ve seen her room—and her family! You’ll be ’fraider

than ever. The only pictures she has in there are photographs of a lot

of nightmarey people all just like her. Oh, it was dreadful being shut

up there with millions of MacIvers! I did everything I could think of

to forget ’em. I looked at all her dull books. Then I smelt all her

bottles—_they_ aren’t so dull. Do you know she’s got seventeen on her

wash-stand?”

“Not bottles!”

“Bottles. When I’d smelt them all—some very queer—what else _was_ there

to take your mind off those pictures but to try on her things?”

The three-minute bell began to ring, and Hildegarde went back to the

school-room.

Bella did not reappear among her kind for twenty-four hours. Some said

she’d already gone home. Others said no, she was waiting till her mother

came for her. Certainly Miss MacIver made no sign; but her cold seemed

better.

Upon resuming her place the next day, Bella, still with her nose in the

air, publicly announced that she had begged Miss MacIver’s pardon.

“How did they make you do it?” Hildegarde asked the little girl at recess.

The wicked Miss Wayne was again sitting solitary on the stone steps among

the shrubbery at the back, holding on her knees a new slate, the lower

part covered with neat little figures—the upper elegantly decorated with

dragons.

“_No_body made me,” answered Bella, while she carefully shaded the

scaly coil on the monster’s tail. “The door was a little bit open—Miss

MacIver’s door—and I saw her packing up. Then she looked out and caught

me peeking at her.”

“Heavens!” breathed Hildegarde, so overcome she sat down. “What happened

then?”

“Oh, I went in.”

“She called you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t go in without being made to?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Gracious! How _could_ you, Bella?”

“I thought I’d better. I went in and asked her pardon.”

“What did she say?”

“She just”—the outrageous Bella made the obnoxious clicking in her nose.

“Do you know she’s only got two dresses?”

“Yes, I’ve noticed.”

“But she’s very well off for fronts.”

“Is she?”

Bella nodded. “Got three.”

“You don’t mean to tell me, Bella Wayne, Miss MacIver’s got three false

fronts!”

“Yes, she has. And the weeest little, teenty-weenty trunk, she’s got. But

it’s quite big enough. I could see she hadn’t anything, hardly, to put

in it. Only bottles and fronts. After I’d begged pardon, and was going

out, I suddenly thought she must be pretty poor, even if she did have

such a lot of—do you suppose it’s because she can’t afford hats? Well, I

don’t know. Anyhow I asked her what school she was going to after this.

She said she didn’t know. Then I looked at those nightmarey MacIvers and

asked her if she was going home. She suddenly began to look awfuller than

ever. I saw _she_ was thinking about the MacIvers, too, and it was ’most

more than she could bear. So I ran back and begged her not to go. I said

I did so need her.”

“You needed her?”

“Yes, to—to teach me decimal fractions.” Bella brought out the words a

little shamefaced. Then, hurriedly, as if to forestall misapprehension:

“Oh, I _said_ I knew it wasn’t much of an attraction for her—of course,

it must be perfectly horrid to have a girl like me in the arithmetic

class. But, after all”—Bella paused, and then, with the air of a

discoverer of one of the deeper mysteries of nature—“after all, Miss

MacIver _likes_ hammering those disgusting rules into girls. What

she hates is to think there’s a girl going round without those rules

somewhere inside her. So I just told her that wherever she was going

she wouldn’t find anybody who knew as little about fractions as I did.

I was certain I told her, perfectly certain, that she could show me

all about ’em if only she wasn’t going away. One thing was sure as a

gun—I was never going to let anybody else teach me! She said something

about that. It was the first time she spoke, and she stood like this,

with her flannel petticoat in one hand, and a bottle in the other. But

I just said: ‘Seven people have tried it already, and _you_ know if

they succeeded. There’s only one person in the world that can make me

understand those disgusting rules.’ And I went quite close to her, and

I said: ‘Miss MacIver, cross my heart and hope I may die, if ever I let

anybody else _speak_ to me about fractions!’ So we agreed it was her duty

to stay. But now the awful thing is I’ve _got_ to do these sickening

sums! Isn’t it terrible what a lot of trouble you can make for yourself,

just all in a minute?”

“Well, I hope you’ll stick to your part of the bargain, Bella,” said the

big girl, smiling.

“Got to—got to!” said the luckless one, flourishing her pencil over the

biggest of the dragons. “If I don’t she’ll go away and starve with the

rest of the MacIvers; or drink up all those medicine bottles, and die in

a wink—like that!”

“Look here, shall I just see if you’re going the right way about it?”

“Oh, _thank_ you,”—Bella relinquished the slate with alacrity—“only be

careful not to rub out my dragons. They keep my mind off the MacIvers.”

And that was how the friendship began.

CHAPTER IV

Nathaniel Mar made the mistake of thinking that you can put off to a

given date impressing your good judgment on those who share your life.

Trenn and Harry had an affection for their father—that he without

difficulty inspired—but in their heart of hearts they were a little

ashamed of their love for him, as a species of weakness. They frankly

despised his _laissez-aller_ way of life, and looked upon him as a

warning. Their mother had seen to that.

The Mar boys, however, had shown business capacity from their childhood,

when instead of buying “peanut brittle” and going to the circus, they

saved up their money to invest in hens. They made what their mother

called “a pretty penny” by selling fresh eggs to the neighbors. The

thriving young tradesmen made even their mother pay for whatever she

required, and she “planked down the cash” without a murmur. It was a

small price for the holy satisfaction of seeing that her children were

early learning the value of money.

Mar got less pleasure out of his sons’ budding business instincts. He was

even obviously annoyed when he discovered that Trenn helped Eddie Cox

with his lessons, not out of good comradeship, but at the rate of “two

bits” for each half-hour’s aid.

“It’s ugly,” said Mar, with unusual spirit. His wife felt obliged to

point out that she herself had been engaged in very much the same

occupation, when he first met her. The “ugliness” of being paid for

helping people with their studies had not oppressed him then.

“You were their teacher,” said her husband.

“And Trenn is Eddie’s teacher while he’s teaching him!” Then as Mar

opened his lips, she quickly closed the argument by adding, “Besides,

_Eddie’s_ father has made money and Trenn’s father hasn’t. Eddie Cox will

have to buy brains all his life—he may just as well begin now.”

Trenn Mar was not yet nineteen when he was so fortunate as to have two

business openings. One was to go down to a ranch in southern California

and round up cattle for Karl Siegel, and learn all he could for Trenn

Mar. The other, to enter the employment of Messrs. Wilks & Simpson, of

the Crœsus Creek Mining Company.

Trenn’s father meant him to take the latter—in fact he had put himself to

an uncommon amount of trouble to get his son this opening. But Trenn was

all for the cattle business. “Besides, look at what Siegel offers. It’s

wonderful! Those men usually expect a young fellow to buy his experience.

But Siegel—”

“Yes,” agreed Mar; “it looks better to start with, but that’s not the

main thing. You must look ahead.”

Trenn opened his brown eyes. He even grinned. “Why yes, I mean to.”

“With Wilks & Simpson you’ll get the hang of the best managed

placer-mining property in California.”

“But that whole blessed country is prospected already. There’s no money

in it for me.”

“That’s precisely what there is in it.”

Trenn looked about the room, impatient to be gone. What did his father

know about money? Less than many a sharp boy of twelve.

“Sound mining knowledge,” he was saying, “will be very useful. Not only

for itself, but because it will bring you into business contact with

mining men.”

“What good’ll that do me?” demanded the boy, impatiently. “_We_ haven’t

got any capital.”

“No, _they’ll_ have the capital. You’ll have something more rare.”

“What?”

“A great property to develop.” Then he told his son the story of the

shipwreck, and of those wonderful hours on the farther side of Anvil

Rock. Trenn sat and stared. Mar wished he would stop it. It got on his

nerves at last, those round, brown eyes, keen, a little hard, fixed in

that wide, unwinking gaze.

“So that’s why I say let the cattle business go. Take the small salary

that Wilks & Simpson offer, study practical mining, and wait for your

chance. In any case, by the time Harry’s left the High School you’ll have

some valuable experience to bring into the partnership.”

Trenn got up and crossed the room.

“Yes, that’s the place,” said Mar, excitedly, thinking the boy’s goal was

the brown and faded reconnaissance map. But Trenn walked straight past it

to the window, and stood looking out, to where the duck-pond used to be,

and where now a row of pretentious little pseudo-Spanish “villas” shut

out the prospect. And still he didn’t speak.

“What I consider so important, is not the practical knowledge _per se_,

though I think it a very real value. Not that so much, as the fact that

through associating yourself with that kind of enterprise you are brought

into relation with just the men you’ll need to know. If I hadn’t gone to

Rock Hill I would never have met Galbraith. The longer I live, the more

I realize it’s through _people_—through having the right sort of human

relationships, that work is best forwarded. Here have I lived for nearly

twenty years with a secret worth millions, and for lack of knowing the

right men—”

“Why did you never tell Charlie Trennor?” the boy turned round to ask.

“Oh, Charlie Trennor! He’s not the sort. But, as a matter of fact, I

did once mention the circumstance to the Trennors. Many years ago. But

they are men who”—Mar stumbled—“they’ll never do anything very big; they

neither one of them have a scintilla of imagination.” And then, in sheer

excitement, speaking his mind for once: “There never was a Trennor who

had.”

“I expect,” said the boy, doggedly, “there’s a certain amount of Trennor

about me. I never noticed that _I_ had any imagination to speak of.”

Mar was conscious that his own spirit was contracting in a creeping

chill. But he said to himself it was only because he had made the mistake

of criticizing his wife (by implication) before her son. It was right and

proper that Trenn, on such an occasion, should range himself on the side

of his mother’s family. Mar’s conception of loyalty commonly protected

him from appearing to pass adverse judgment on the Trennors. But he was

excited and overwrought to-day. _He_, not Trenn. All through the story,

that for Mar was of such palpitating importance, this well-groomed

youth had kept himself so well in hand, that his father, looking at

the “correct,” cool face, had somewhat modified the presentment of the

narrative, had cut description, emotion, wonder, and come to Hecuba as

quickly as might be. And yet now that, with as business-like an air

as he could muster, he had revealed his great secret—handed over the

long-treasured legacy—something still in the judicial young face that

gave the older man a sensation of acute self-consciousness, made him in

some inexplicable manner feel “cheap.”

But he would conquer the ridiculous inclination.

It was for Mar an hour of tremendous significance. He had been waiting

for it for eighteen years. “After all,” he said, making a fresh start,

“you don’t need imagination in this case. You need only to use your eyes—”

Trenn lifted his, and the use he made of them was to look at his father.

Didn’t say a single word. Just looked at the heavily-lined face a moment

and then allowed his clear, brown eyes to drop till they rested on the

toes of his own immaculate boots.

Hardly more than three seconds between the raising and the lowering of

the eyes. Not a sound in the room. And yet between the meeting of that

look and the losing of it, Nathaniel Mar passed through the most painful

crisis of a life made well acquainted with pain.

There is a special sting in the skepticism of the young. They should be

full of faith, inclined even to credulity. Fit task for their elders, the

checking of too generous ardor. But for the elder to detect the junior in

thinking him foolishly enthusiastic, childishly gullible—there is, in

that conjuncture, something to the older mind quite specially wounding.

It passes the limit of mere personal humiliation. It takes on the air of

an affront against the seemliness of nature. The elder has betrayed his

class and kind—has laid open to callow derision the dignity of the riper

years.

Mar waited. And little as he looked like it he was praying. “Oh, my boy,

believe me! Have faith that what I say is so. And then I’ll have faith

that all the loss will be won back, through _you_, Trenn. I’ll take heart

again. It all depends on you. We’ll do great things together, Trenn—you

and I—oh, believe, believe!”

But Trennor Mar sat there on the narrow ledge of the window-sill

absolutely silent, with his brown eyes on his shining boots.

“I was wrong,” said his father, humbly. “I have put you off the track by

using the word imagination. It has no place here. I speak to you of fact.”

Trenn got up with the brisk air of one who remembers he has business to

transact, then pausing for a moment with an eye flown already to find his

hat, “I might,” he said obligingly, “I might try to get up there some

vacation, and have a look round.”

He “might.” He might _try_. During some idle interval in the real

business of life. Once on the spot he would condescend to “look round.”

Even his own son could not take the thing seriously.

Well, it began to look as if, after all, they might be right—his wife,

Charlie and Harrington Trennor, Elihu Cox, and now Trenn. Mar, the man

who believed he had a gold mine in the arctic regions, was a sort of

harmless monomaniac. Sitting there in a sudden darkness that was dashed

with self-derision (much was clear in those scorching flashes), Nathaniel

Mar met the grim moment when to his own mind he first admitted doubt.

Groping by and by for comfort, he touched the heart of sorrow with

“Nothing like this can ever happen to me again.”

It was true. In that hour something precious went out of his life. No

one, not even Trenn, had any idea what had happened. But every one saw

that Nathaniel Mar was changed.

* * * * *

Trenn went to work on Karl Siegel’s ranch, and Harry presently announced

that he meant to join him. No, he wasn’t going to finish at the High

School. Trenn had an opportunity to go in with Siegel on a new deal, and

Harry could be made use of, too, if he came _now_. Such an opportunity

might never repeat itself. Mrs. Mar was of the same opinion as the boys,

and Harry was in towering good spirits.

His father wondered dully. Ought he not give his younger son the same

chance he’d given the elder, even if, like Trenn, Harry should fail

utterly to see how great it was?

Mar shrank from a second ordeal, and yet he knew that, vaguely enough, he

had been depending on Harry’s helping him to bear Trenn’s indifference

and unbelief. Had he not for a year now, in any lighter hour, invariably

said to himself: “After all, I have two boys. Perhaps Harry will be the

one”—yes, he must tell Harry, or the boy might reproach him in time to

come.

Trenn’s letter had arrived in the morning. All day Mar revolved in his

head how he would present this other “opening” so that Harry— In the end

he resolved to take the papers out of the safe, and simply turn them over

to his son, as though the father were no longer there to give the story

tongue. Mar took the precious packet home with him the same afternoon.

Harry was out. That evening he was late for supper, and he came in full

of the outfit he’d been buying.

“Buying an outfit already!” his father exclaimed.

“Of course! _I_ don’t mean to let the grass grow—”

“Nor Trenn, apparently. I hadn’t heard that he was financing you.”

“He isn’t. I had a little saved up, and mother gave me the rest.”

Mar stared through his spectacles, and met the bright roving eyes of the

lady.

“_You_ gave him the rest! How were you able to do that?”

“Oh, I have a pittance in the City Bank.”

The rival concern. Even Hildegarde gaped with astonishment at

this revelation. Mrs. Mar had not trusted any one to know of this

nest-egg—savings out of the “house money,” the inadequacy of which had

been so often deplored. She seemed to be torn now between regret that its

existence should have been revealed, and pride that she had wrung it out

of conditions so unpromising.

“Yes,” she said, with a spark of anger in her eye, “and you’ll be kind

enough, Nathaniel, not to break your arm, or get yourself disabled in

any way, for there’s nothing left now for a rainy day. Unless _you_ have

looked ahead as I’ve struggled to—”

He knew that she knew he had not “looked ahead” in her sense of laying by

a secret hoard, but the form of her mandate pricked him.

He glanced at the desk for comfort. He had, after all, “looked ahead” in

another fashion—as Harry would see. But—again he fell back before the

check of an outfit already bought for another purpose. And Harry was

talking all the time that he was eating—telling his mother about his

prospects and about the letter he had written in answer to Trenn’s.

Already he had written! Without an hour’s hesitation, or an instant’s

consultation with his natural adviser. Ah, no, his true “natural adviser”

had obviously been invoked, and had responded by offering him the sinews

of war. Mar, looking down into his plate, or for occasional refreshment

of the spirit into Hildegarde’s soft, young face, was nevertheless

intensely conscious of the vivid alert personality at the other end of

the table. His wife was, as usual, not content to contemplate with idle

tranquillity the fruit of some achievement in the past. Strange contrast

to her daughter’s faculty for extreme stillness, Mrs. Mar presented the

stirring spectacle of a person who was always “getting something done,”

and commonly getting a number of things done at once. If it was only

while the plates were being changed, she would pull out of the yellow

bag suspended at her belt, a postcard, and with an inch length of pencil

would briskly write an order to some tradesman, or she would jump up to

straighten a picture or set the clock on three minutes, or “catch any odd

job on the fly,” as Trenn used disrespectfully to say in private. Even on

this important and exciting occasion, she was not content merely to eat

her supper, listen to Harry’s outpouring, and throw in shrewd responses

from time to time.

Her handsome features wore that look of animation the spectacle of

“getting on” ever inspired in the lady, her eyes glittered like pieces

of highly polished, brown onyx, and while she put food into her mouth

with the right hand, the left, by a common practice, executed five-finger

exercises up and down the cloth, between her plate and the end of the

table. But to-night she broke into a fantasia—the pliant little finger

curled and tossed its tip in air, playing a soundless pæon to celebrate

Harry’s entrance into the business of life.

For Mar, in circumstances like these, to hold wide a different door—had

there ever been a moment less propitious?

“You ought to have shown me the letter before you sent it off,” he said.

“I would, only I knew you’d think I ought to catch the afternoon mail.

There was barely time. And the letter was all right—I’m sure it was. I

told Trenn either he or Siegel had got to pay me from the start. I don’t

ask much, I said, but I’m worth something if I _am_ a raw hand. I wrote

the sort of letter Trenn can show to Siegel. I piled it on about the

interruption to my studies, and about father’s preferring me to stick at

books a year or two more.”

“It was ingenious of you to discover that fact,” said Mar, quietly.

“Oh, they mustn’t think I’m too keen, you know.”

Mrs. Mar nodded as she wound up her silent accompaniment with a chord.

But if she followed the implied course of reasoning, not so the boy’s

father.

“If you’ve written in that vein,” said Mar, slowly, “it seems to me still

more premature to have ordered your outfit.”

“Oh, that’s all O.K.,” said Harry, genially condescending to soothe his

father’s fears. “Of course I’m _going_. Trenn’ll understand. He’s got

a long head, old Trenn has!”—and he exchanged secure smiles with his

mother—“I had to write as I did, don’t you see”—again Harry obligingly

reduced his tactics to simpler terms to meet the slower comprehension of

his father—“just to make Siegel understand he needn’t expect to get me

for nothing. I’m not coming in on the ‘little brother racket.’ No, sir!

Old Siegel’s got to pay me something from the start, or how can I be

supposed to know it’s a good thing? Siegel’s got to _show me_! I’m from

Missouri.” He made the boast with his pleasant boyish laugh, pushed back

his chair, and walked about, hands in pockets, head in air, describing to

his mother how fellows often did better to take their pay in cattle, and

little by little get their own herd, and little by little get land. Often

they ended by buying out those other fellows who started with capital.

She would see! He and Trenn weren’t going to take anything on trust.

“They’ll find they’ve got to _show_ us,” he said, squaring himself before

a lot of imaginary Siegels. “We’re from Missouri!”

Mar, sitting silently by, rose upon that word, and tied up the loose

papers that he had laid out on his writing-table. He returned them to

the office bag, finding himself arrived at wondering what he had better

say if the day ever came when Harry should reproach his father for not

telling him about—

But Mar was borrowing trouble.

Trenn had already told him.

And they had laughed together. “Isn’t it just _like_ him!” Harry had

said, and slapped his knee as one who makes a shrewd observation.

* * * * *

After all there was a kind of rough justice in it. It had been Galbraith

who had made it possible for Mar to go to Alaska. It was fitting that it

should be his son who should share in the benefits.

Mar spent part of the following Saturday afternoon in drafting a letter

to the son of his long dead friend. He took uncommon pains with it and

he copied it several times. It had no need to be long, for Jack would

remember the story. He could not, of course, be expected to interrupt

those postgraduate studies, whatever they were precisely—studies which

twice already had been dropped, as Mar supposed, while Mr. Jack went

cruising about the world in his steam-yacht. But in the nature of things

the completion of his preparation for the business of life must be near

at hand, for young Galbraith, the most energetic and ambitious of men,

was in his twenty-fourth year. Never was such a glutton for work before.

Even when he went off pleasuring in his yacht, he went to places not

renowned for recreation, and his boon companions were geographers and

biologists and such-like gay dogs.

He might, at all events, without prejudice to these final studies,

begin to lay plans either for going himself to Alaska presently, or

for sending some one else. The best course would be for him to come

at once to Valdivia to see his old friend, and to talk things over.

Mar thought it advisable to enclose in his letter a sketch of the most

interesting section of the Alaskan coast. He could have drawn it with

his eyes shut, now, but he got up, hobbled round the desk, and took

down the reconnaissance map from between the pictures of his father and

mother. At the same moment, and while he was in the act, Mrs. Mar came

in, with that air, especially her own, of one arriving in the nick of

time to save the country. Her errand, however, was the one Saturday

afternoon invariably brought, the conveying here of the week’s mending

for Hildegarde’s attention; the fastening of the book-rest on the table’s

edge, the propping up of some volume in the French or German tongue, and

the laying ready at one side of a stump of lead-pencil for the marking of

pregnant passages. In front of these Mrs. Mar would establish herself in

the rocking-chair, with her knitting, or crochet, or some other form of

occupation not requiring eyes.

“Hildegarde! Hildegarde!”

“Yes, mama,” came in through the open window from the garden.

“I’m ready!” When wasn’t Mrs. Mar “ready!” But she announced the fact

with a flourish of knitting-needle, as she rocked back and forth and

scrutinized her husband. “I’m glad,” she said, briskly, “to see you

taking down that old eye-sore.” Her eyes pecked at the faded map. “It’s

high time it was thrown away.”

Her husband paused in his halting progress back to the writing-table.

“Time it was thrown away?”

“Yes. Isn’t that what you’ve got it down for?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do with it, then?”

Mar seemed not to hear. He turned his back on the rocking-chair, and

propped the map up in front of him, against the mucilage pot, very much

as his wife had propped Eckermann for his regular Saturday conversation

with Gœthe.

But Mrs. Mar was never inclined to let her observations go by ignored. “I

can hardly suppose you want to have it lumbering up the place here any

longer.” As still he took no notice, “It certainly isn’t decorative.” A

pause long enough for him to defend it, if he’d been going to. “Perhaps

you’ll tell me what’s the good of keeping it.”

“Perhaps you’ll tell me what’s the harm.”

She could, easily, but she forbore.

She only agitated the rocking-chair yet more violently, clashed her

knitting-needles as she turned the stocking in her quick, competent

hands, and with a glance at the clock said briskly, as the door opened:

“Come, come, Hildegarde. You’re nearly three minutes behind time.”

The girl carried her bowl of roses over to her father’s open window, and

set it carefully down. Hildegarde was the one person in the world Mrs.

Mar never seemed to fluster. As the girl’s eye fell on the big envelop

addressed in Mar’s bold writing, “Oh!” she said, pausing, “have you been

hearing again?”

“Hearing what?” came sharply from the swaying figure on the other side of

the room.

“You’ll read it to me after we’ve done our German, won’t you?” whispered

the girl, caressingly, as she leaned a moment on the back of Mar’s chair.

“Read it to you? Why should I?” he said, nervously, as he laid a piece of

blotting-paper over his letter.

“You always do,” she pleaded. But if Mr. Mar imagined that his daughter

was begging to hear the letter he himself had just written, Mrs. Mar

made no such mistake. She was well aware whose communications had power

to stir the “stolid” Hildegarde.

“You never told me,” the lady arraigned her husband’s back, “that you’d

been hearing again from young Galbraith.”

Hildegarde, under the electric shock of the spoken name, seemed to feel

called upon to make some show of indifference. She inspected the pile

of mending with an air of complete absorption in the extent of the

damage. Her mother was saying: “I haven’t heard anything about that

gentleman”—(oh, wealth of ironic condemnation the accomplished speaker

could throw into the innocent words “that gentleman!”)—“not since

the letter he wrote from the barbarous place you didn’t know how to

pronounce, and couldn’t so much as find on the map!”

“Haven’t you?” said her husband. “Well, you soon may.”

The girl’s lowered eyelids fluttered, but the prospect of soon hearing

something on this theme left Mrs. Mar collected enough to say: “No

earthly use to darn that.”

“N-no,” agreed the girl.

“Lay a piece under. Match the stripe and cut out the fray. There’s some

like it in the ottoman.”

Hildegarde went and kneeled down before the big deal “store-box.” Its

lid, stuffed and neatly covered, made a sightly receptacle for endless

oddments.

Mrs. Mar, as she clicked her needles and oscillated her entire frame,

kept her eye on the place where she was going to dash into Eckermann the

instant Hildegarde was settled to her sewing. But true to the sacred

principle of doing something while she was waiting, Mrs. Mar thus

delayed, saw it to be a timely moment to put Jack Galbraith in his proper

place. It was not the sort of thing you could do thoroughly once, and be

done with. Like house-cleaning, it required to be seen to periodically.

“Well, what’s the _epoche-machende_ news this time?” As her husband made

no haste to answer, “He’s always ‘going to break the record,’ that young

gentleman! I never knew anybody with so many big words in his mouth.”

The stricture was deserved enough to gall Jack’s friend, who moved

uneasily in his revolving chair. But he kept his eyes on the map he was

drawing and he kept his lips close shut.

“I see precious little result so far,” she was beginning again.

“The result,” interrupted Mar, “will be judged when he’s finished his

life-work, not while he’s still preparing for it.”

“Preparing! Bless me, isn’t he old enough to have _done_ something, if he

was ever going to?”

“If he were going into business, yes. Science is a longer story.”

“One excuse is as good as another, I suppose, when a man wants to please

himself. It’s like Galbraith to call his fecklessness by a highfalutin

name. ‘Science,’ ‘Investigation,’ ‘Anthropology.’ Humph! But it does

_sound_ better, I agree, than saying he likes satisfying a low curiosity

about savages. It isn’t even as if he wanted to convert them. Not

he! Likes them best as they are: filthy and degraded. ‘Philology?’

Tomfoolology!”

It was more even than the tranquil Hildegarde could bear. “Hasn’t he

done something wonderful about ocean currents, papa? Didn’t you say that

was the real reason why he went that last time to—?”

“Yes. It was a piece of work that brought him recognition very creditable

to so young a student.”

“_Whose_ recognition?” Not hers, the critic of the rocking-chair seemed

to say. But Mar took no notice. “And where’s that book he was boasting

about six months ago? The one that was going to shed such valuable new

light on the—the—Jugginses of No Man’s Land. So far as I can see by the

feeble light of the female intellect, the Jugginses still sit in the

dark. Haven’t you found that roll of seersucker yet, Hildegarde? Upon my

soul!”—faster flew the needles, harder rocked the chair—“compared with

you a snail is a cross between an acrobat and a hurricane.”

The girl only laughed. “Here’s the horrid stripey stuff, hiding at

the very bottom!” She laid the roll aside, and with a neat precision

proceeded to put back all the things she had taken out, for Hildegarde

knew, if not properly packed, the ottoman would overflow.

“Now, make haste,” urged her mother, “if anything so alien is possible to

you. I’m certainly not going to read to you while you’re fussing about on

the other side of the room.” Then, not deterred in her unswerving attempt

to improve the shining hour, Mrs. Mar flung a quick look at the bent back

of her husband, and proceeded to put in the time in clearing up one of

his multitudinous misapprehensions.

“What _I_ can’t forgive Jack Galbraith is his ingratitude to you.”

Again Mar moved a little in his creaking chair, but halted this side

speech. Hildegarde, busily repacking, turned her blonde head toward her

mother, saying: “Ingratitude! Why, he’s perfectly devoted to papa! That’s

why I like Mr. Galbraith.”

“Devoted, is he? Well, he’s got odd ways of showing it. When he was a

troublesome, inquisitive little pest, he used to reveal his devotion by

coming twice every year to turn our house upside down, and get our boys

into every conceivable mischief. Glad enough to plant himself here then,

when nobody else would be bothered with him. But his devotion to your

father doesn’t carry him the length of coming to see him nowadays. Why,

it’s fourteen years since Jack Galbraith darkened these doors, and—”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were to darken them very soon,” said

Mr. Mar.

“What!” said Mrs. Mar, so surprised she allowed the rocking-chair to slow

down.

Hildegarde stood transfixed, with the top of the ottoman arrested, half

shut.

“Yes,” said Mr. Mar, steadily, and in complete good faith, as he slipped

the diagram into the envelop. “I’m expecting him out here this spring.”

“Jack is coming!” Hildegarde said to her heart. “Wonderful Jack is

coming! Dear Jack! Dear, _dear_ Jack! Oh, the beautiful world!”

“Indeed!” said Mrs. Mar, beginning slowly to rock again, “and what’s he

coming for _this_ time?”

“Perhaps, as Hildegarde is fantastic enough to think, he may be coming to

see me,” Mar answered.

His wife’s laugh had a tang of shrewdness. “You’ll find he has business

of some sort to attend to in California, if he _does_ come!”

“Just now you were complaining that he didn’t attend to business

anywhere.”

“My complaint—no, my regret—is, that gratitude isn’t in the Galbraith

blood.”

“You have no good reason for saying that.” He spoke with uncommon

emphasis.

But Mrs. Mar’s spirit rose to meet him. “I have the excellent reason that

I know enough about the father as well as the son to form an opinion. I

don’t forget how your ‘greatest friend’ died, leaving you his executor

and leaving you nothing else. Not a penny piece out of all that money.”

“I don’t see why my friends should leave me money—”

“No, nor why you should get it any other way! Don’t let me hurry you,

Hildegarde, but if you’ve quite finished mooning about in the corner

there, I’d like to mention that it’s exactly twelve and a half minutes

since I called you in to your German, and there’s the Missionary Society

at half past four, and choir practice at seven, and before we can turn

round Mrs. Cox will be here about electing the new secretary to the

Shakspere Club, and if I’d known you were going to squander my time like

this I’d have stopped to make Harry his last Washington pie before—”

“Yes, mama. Now I’m settled.”

Hildegarde took the seat opposite her mother and silently applied the

seersucker patch. While Mr. Mar, behind the screen of a much-hunched

shoulder, copied with infinite care the “eye-sore” map, Mrs. Mar knitting

all the while at lightning speed, rolled out the German uninterruptedly,

till a ring at the bell was followed by sounds of Mrs. Cox being shown

into the parlor.

Mrs. Mar had known no one so well in Valdivia all these years as Mrs.

Elihu Cox. Mrs. Elihu was considered “a very bright woman,” and it was

no doubt so, since even Mrs. Mar did not demur at her renown. They met

seldom, outside of church, the Shakspere Club, or the Mission Society,

yet each had admitted things to the other that neither had admitted to

any one else. Even to-day, when there was definite business to arrange,

they talked of other matters than the vacant secretaryship. They

presented each other with views upon domestic service, education, and

husbands.

“I left Mr. Cox supremely happy,” said his spouse, in that tone of

humorous scorn by which many women try to readjust the balance between

the sexes. “Yes, supremely happy, clearing out his desk. He does it once

a month. Nothing Mr. Cox does brings him so near absolute bliss, except

wandering about the place with a hammer and nails.”

Both women smiled at the inveterate childishness of the lords of creation.

And then, on a sudden, Mrs. Cox was grave. One might laugh at the odd

ways of men with any woman. It is the universal bond that binds the

sex together; the fine lady feels it no less when she condoles with

her washer-woman upon a stay-at-home husband,—“Yes, yes, a man in the

house all day is dreadfully in the way,”—and their identity of sentiment

bridges the difference in fortune. But Mrs. Mar was one with whom you

might not only laugh over the foibles of the opposite sex, you might even

be grave with her on the same ground—a rarer privilege to the educated

woman.

“That monthly orgy, that’s such unalloyed delight to Mr. Cox, used to be

a time of great interest to me, too,” admitted Mrs. Cox.

“Really!” The president of the Valdivia Shakspere Society could hardly

believe it of her friend.

“Yes. You see, there’s always a great clearance made—a general getting

rid of all sorts of accumulations. I used to watch every time when he

came to the lower left-hand drawer—” Mrs. Cox smiled faintly as one

pitiful of some long-past pain.

“Well, what was the matter with the lower left-hand drawer?”

“That was where he kept a faded photograph of Ellie Brezee. I used to

watch to see if _that_ time he was going to throw it away. He never did.”

“Who was Ellie Brezee?”

“A sister of Colonel George Brezee—the one that died. That was before you

came to California. Mr. Cox was engaged to Ellie when he was nineteen.

But, thank goodness, my concern about it is among the things that I’m

done with. I don’t any longer sit at home, now, with the tail of my

eye on the lower left-hand drawer while Ellie Brezee comes out for her

monthly airing.”

“Oh, you disposed of Ellie?”

“No, oh, no.”

“He finally threw the picture away himself?”

“No. Only now, I know he never will.”

They were silent a moment. “I never _said_ anything, of course; and he

never made any secret about it. I didn’t think it any disloyalty to me

that he should keep it. At the same time”—she dropped her voice—“the pain

the sight of that faded face was to me for years—you think it supremely

silly, I suppose. But then _your_ husband doesn’t hoard up the memory

of some girl that’s been dead and buried for twenty years, so you can’t

understand.”

“Yes, I can understand,” Mrs. Mar answered, with an eye that saw through

the wall the reconnaissance map of Norton Sound.

CHAPTER V

Jack Galbraith replied to Mr. Mar’s letter by return of post. He

apologized for not writing more at length, but he was up to his eyes

in proof-correcting. He was seeing through the press—(“Yes, yes, but

all that was singularly irrelevant”)—book about his experiences (“Hum!

hum!”), “extreme northern Siberia.” (“_Siberia_, forsooth!”); no white

man had ever been there before. (“And to think he _might_ have spent that

time in Alaska!”) He was “making a genuine contribution to science”—oh,

yes, quite so—“most travelers too imperfectly equipped.” (“He couldn’t

have had my letter when he wrote this.”) The implication was, of course,

that Galbraith’s own equipment left nothing to be desired. He even

touched airily upon his claims to be considered geographer as well as

navigator, electrician, geologist, philologist, biologist, and the

Lord knows what, beside. Yes, Jack had a large way of envisaging human

endeavor, especially his own. But certainly their letters had crossed.

Hum! he had “covered areas in science never before exploited by a single

man.” The result Mar should presently see. For Galbraith would leave

word that a copy of the great work should be sent to his old friend.

It would be two years before he himself could see the thing in book

form. (“What’s this?”) “Off again, to join an expedition!” And wasn’t

it strange? He was going to the arctic as Mar was recommending. Not

precisely to Norton Bay, but (“Then he _had_ got the letter!”) “with the

Swedish explorer Nordenskjöld to see if by good luck” they could find the

North Pole. And why shouldn’t they “come home via Norton Bay?” he asked,

with irresponsible arrogance, adding, characteristically: “I’ll mention

it to the Swede. Perhaps we’ll crawl over the crown of the world and

coast down the shore of Alaska till we come up against your Anvil Rock.

If we do, I promise to go and see after the gold-mine for you. Thank you

for saying I’m to have my share—but thank you most of all for telling me

such a mighty fine story when I was a kid. It had a great deal to do with

the shaping of my ambition, and the direction of my multifarious studies.”

* * * * *

And this was Galbraith’s good-by.

These events had taken place nearly two years before Bella Wayne began

her meteoric career at the Valdivia School for Young Ladies.

If Hildegarde had recovered somewhat from her disappointment at Jack’s

failure to visit California, her father had not ceased silently to

lament, and secretly to contemn Galbraith’s wounding flippancy in his

choice of a route to Alaska.

When Madeleine Smulsky’s family took her away to live in Wyoming,

Hildegarde would have been even more desolate but for her espousal

of Bella Wayne’s cause, and consequent preoccupation with that not

altogether satisfactory protégée.

For Miss Bella had “ways” that were distinctly rasping. She was

abominably selfish, and her big family of brothers and sisters had

spoiled her from the day she could toddle.

She was, besides, the uncomfortable kind of little girl in whose eyes

you always saw reflected whatever was amiss with you. You might have on

a hat of ravishing beauty, but if your belt had worked up and your skirt

had worked down, Bella’s glance ignored your highly satisfactory top

and fastened on your middle. Not until after she had known Bella Wayne

for some months did Hildegarde begin to divine her own shortcomings in

the matter of dress. No gulf of years, or respect for high standing in

the school, deterred Bella from letting Miss Mar know that she could

never, never wear with success a checked shirt-waist. Why not? Because.

And for the same excellent reason, Miss Mar must have her things made

plainer. No puffing; no shirring. “_I_ can wear ‘fluffery,’ but you

can’t. You’re much too like an old goddess or Boadicea, or some whacking

person like that,” which was tepid and discreet in comparison with many

of her deliverances. She would ask you a highly inconvenient question as

soon as wink, and her own frankness was a thing to make you cold down

your back. An eye that nothing escaped, the keenest of little noses for

a secret, a ruthless finger for any sensitive spot—that was Bella Wayne

at twelve. It was the second time that she was being so kindly helped by

Miss Hildegarde, and yet more than at the reduction of “those disgusting

fractions” Bella looked at her new friend, bent so low over the slate

that her sole ornament, a silver locket, swung against the dado of

dragons, without whose scaly support Bella could never hope to bring her

mind down to mathematics for a moment. She reflected that she had never

seen Miss Mar without that locket. Was there anything inside it? Her

fingers itched to open it and see. It was suspended round the smooth neck

on a narrow velvet ribbon. Bella, supposed to be following the course of

reasoning by which it was to be demonstrated that “since 100 pounds of

coal cost $0.33 per hundredweight, 385 pounds (which are equal to 3.85

times 100 pounds) will cost 3.85 times $0.33,” she was in reality making

mental calculation of a quite different character, as she studied the

little black velvet bowknot that rested on the milk-white nape of Miss

Mar’s neck, just underneath a flaxen ring of hair. One end of the bow was

longer than the other.

“Five times three are fifteen. Five and carry one—see, Bella?”

“Yes.” What Bella saw, with that look of luminous intelligence, was that

the silver locket was sliding into Miss Mar’s lap.

“Eight times three—oh!” But before Hildegarde could close her fingers on

the fallen trinket, Bella had snatched it up and carried it away behind

the syringas.

“Give me back my locket!” called Hildegarde. “Give it back this minute!”

Bella made off to a remoter fastness. Hildegarde pursued her. But

Hildegarde never could catch anybody, and Bella was already the champion

runner of the school. “Bella, I never show that to anybody. I won’t

forgive you if you open it.”

“Oh, I _must_ see why you say that!” Bella stopped and tried the

fastening. Hildegarde rushed at her, but Bella fled at each approach. At

last the big girl stopped breathless, and tried moral suasion. The little

girl only laughed, and standing just out of reach had the effrontery to

open the locket and make unseemly comment upon what she found within.

“My gracious! _Isn’t_ he a sweet? Where does he live? Does he go to

church? I’m sure _I’ve_ never seen this bee-yew-tiful young man before.

Girls, do you want to look at Miss Mar’s sweetheart. Come and see this

darling duck!” She summoned the laughing group that had been looking on.

But Bella only pretended to show them. Every time anybody came near,

she covered the face with her thumb. But Hildegarde, lacking the small

satisfaction of knowing that, worn out with the race and scarlet with

indignation, breathless, outraged, pursued the fleet little villain from

group to group, and after the bell rang, from garden to hall. In vain.

When Bella appeared at the breaking up of school that day, and restored

the locket, Miss Mar received it in a lofty silence, refusing even to

look at a little girl so ill-mannered and ungrateful.

But the next day Bella, much subdued by one of her recurrent attacks of

homesickness, red-eyed, a little pinched-looking and woebegone, begged

pardon so prettily, that Miss Mar’s heart was melted.

“And I didn’t really show it to the others. Ask anybody. I wouldn’t

do _that_. Oh, no!” And then betraying the true ground of this pious

self-control, “Is it your brother?”

“No.” Hildegarde bent her head over the slate.

“Who is it?”

“A friend of my father’s.”

“Do you love him dreadfully?”

“Of _course_ not. I never saw him.”

“What makes you wear his picture?”

“I only put it in the locket because I hadn’t anything else the right

size. That’s all.”

“Then why did you make such a fuss when I—”

“Because I thought it very rude of you to look into somebody else’s

locket without permission. And it _might_ have been something that

mattered.”

There was that in the unconverted look on the little face which made

Hildegarde hot to her ear-tips.

But Bella said not a word, only smiled with that returning interest in

life that so readily revives in the breast of the shrewd observer. And

without a “please” or a “will you?” Bella handed the big girl her slate,

with its two days’ accumulation of fractions and of dragons. Hildegarde’s

sensibilities were once more so outraged that for a moment she hesitated

to accept the task so coolly put upon her.

“I believe you’re a little monster,” said Miss Mar, in her slow way. “I

don’t see why I should trouble myself about you or your arithmetic.”

“I know why,” returned Bella, unmoved.

“Why?”

“Because you’re the nicest of all the big girls.”

Hildegarde tried to conceal the fact that she was somewhat softened by

this tribute. “I’m not really the nicest,” she said, trying to be modest.

“Well, perhaps you’re not the nicest, but you’ve got the longest

eyelashes. It’s a good thing they aren’t as light as your hair, isn’t

it?”

“Well, I don’t know. Fives into—”

“Yes, you do, you know you’d cry your eyes out if your winkers were as

nearly white as your hair is. What do you do to make your eyelashes so

long?”

“Nothing. Now pay attention. You reduce thirty-three and a third to

thirds and—”

“Did your mother keep them cut when you were a baby?”

“No, silly.”

“I believe she did.” The next day Miss Bella appeared without eyelashes.

Every individual hair snipped close to the lid.

“I mean to have mine just like Miss Mar’s,” she told the group gathered

about Hildegarde’s desk. “Hers are so immense they _trail_. I’m sure they

must get awfully in the way sometimes.”

“Then I wonder you run such a risk. You’d better have left yours as they

were.”

“Oh, if mine grow out as long as that, of course I shall plait them and

tie them up with blue ribbons.”

But it was not always admiration to which she treated her patron.

She was once twitted quite groundlessly with feeling herself obliged to

“mind” Miss Mar.

“Yes,” she said, laughing a little wickedly. “I _must_, you see. She’s

so massive. Just look at her shoulders. Look at her hips. Even her hair

is massive. See what wobs it goes into.” This conversation took place

in the cloak-room. “Everything about her is so big, it scares a little

person like me. Look at that hat. You’d know it must belong to Miss Mar.

If it was anybody else’s it would be a parasol. But you can tell it’s a

hat because it’s got an elastic instead of a stick. And just look at the

size of that elastic. Why, it’s as broad as my garter.”

Now and then she would startle Hildegarde’s self-possession by an

outburst of torrential affection. And so it came about that in spite of

Bella’s blithe impertinence, Hildegarde even in those early days thought

of her with sympathy as a lonely little being who was in reality very

grateful for a big girl’s friendship. She would follow at Hildegarde’s

heels like a pet dog, walk with her down to the gate every day after

school, and invent one ingenious pretext after another to keep Hildegarde

standing there a moment longer. Sometimes, when at last she said

“good-by,” there was not regret alone but tears as well in Bella’s pretty

eyes.

“It must have been a little girl at boarding-school that found out

Friday was an unlucky day,” she announced on one occasion. “It’s the

miserablest, blackest day of the week. Yes it is, Miss Mar. It’s just

hellish.”

“Why, Bella Wayne! What _awful_ language.”

“Well, you have to get hold of awful language when you’re thinking of an

awful thing. All to-night, and all to-morrow, and all to-morrow night,

and all Sunday, and all Sunday night, to live through before I see you

again!” The small face worked with suppressed emotion, the small mind

with suppressed arithmetic. Both eventually found outward expression.

“Sixty-six hours!” she said, while two tears rolled out of her eyes.

“Sixty-six hours till you’re back here again. I don’t honestly think I

can bear it this time. I shall die. I know I shall. I feel very strange

already. Would you care if I died? W-would you come to the funeral?” She

choked. “W-what would you wear? You’d look p-perfectly bee-yew-tiful in

black. _Do_ wear black. Oh, I _wish_ I was dead. It would be so nice to

see how you look in black.”

Hildegarde was touched to find how wildly delighted the homesick little

girl was at the idea of being invited to spend Saturday afternoon at

the Mars—a little anxious, too, was Miss Mar, lest the occasion should

not come up to such ecstatic expectation. Not that the Mar house was

at all the forlorn and dingy place it had been in the days when Mrs.

Mar struggled alone, with a scant income and three babies. The general

impression was that the Mar boys already contributed generously to the

family resources. But the fact was that their mother was ingeniously

making the very most of what “the boys” added to the common purse. The

amount was as yet quite trifling—“of necessity,” she would have added,

for they were both young men who looked ahead. But it was really to

Hildegarde that the little house owed its air of immaculate freshness and

good taste. If she couldn’t play or sing, she could paint—bookshelves,

the floors, even the woodwork. Several years ago she proved that she

could paper a room. She managed to cover the old furniture with charming

chintz “for a song,” and she made curtains out of nothing at all. No one

could arrange flowers better or grow them half so well. When she was

given money for her clothes, she often spent it on something for the

house. Not fully realizing her genius for domestic affairs, she told

herself the reason she did all this was to make the house pretty “for

when Jack comes back.” He might arrive quite suddenly. He did everything

without warning. I may come home from school any day to find him here!

Oh, it lent a wonderful zest to life to remember that.

Bella was pleased to like Miss Mar’s garden immensely, but even more

she liked Miss Mar’s room, with its white curtains and dimity-covered

toilet-table, and the scant and simple furniture that looked so nice and

fresh since Hildegarde had herself enameled it. When the little visitor

looked round with that quick-glancing admiration and said: “Oh, it’s much

prettier than mine at home.”

“What’s yours like?” asked Miss Mar, politely.

“Oh, it’s all pink silk, and I’m sick of it. What made you think of

having everything white?”

“This, I believe,” said her hostess, nodding at the climbing white rose

that looked in at the window. “But it’s partly that I like things that

wash and that don’t fade.”

“Well, I simply love your house. I’d no _idea_ it would be like this.”

“Why, what did you think it would be like?”

“Oh—a—kind of—no, I shan’t say. You’d misunderstand.”

Hildegarde felt it prudent not to insist. If you did, with this young

person, you were exposed to the most mortifying results.

“Who are these?” Bella demanded, inspecting the pictures.

“My brothers. That’s Trenn and this is Harry.”

“Will they be at tea?”

“No, they’re on a ranch in Tulare County.”

“Why, _we’ve_ got a ranch in Tulare County.” She was still looking

round as if expecting to find something that as yet escaped her eye.

“Where’s—where—a—Show me your—your ribbons and things.”

“I haven’t got any. We can’t afford ribbons in this family.”

“Let me see your collars and ties, then.” Hildegarde opened her top

drawer. In the course of turning over collars and handkerchiefs and

little boxes the silver locket came to light.

“Why don’t you wear it any more?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

Bella leaned her head with its halo of short, brown curls against her

friend, and very softly she beguiled her: “Please, Miss Mar, show me that

friend of your father’s again.”

Hildegarde hesitated a moment and then she opened the locket. Jack

Galbraith’s face smiled out upon the big girl and the little girl.

“Did you say you hadn’t ever seen him?”

“No, he hasn’t been here for sixteen years. Not since he was a little

boy. And he might have been here always, because he was an orphan and his

father was my father’s greatest friend. But some relations of his that

nobody had ever heard of before, they discovered him when he was nine,

and made him come to New York and live with them. But he didn’t like it.

At least—_I_ don’t know—mother thinks _they_ didn’t like it.”

“Why does she think that?”

“Because they let him go away to school. And he spent his vacations

canoeing, climbing mountains, and doing all sorts of queer things rather

than live with his relations. Then he went to Harvard, and then he went

abroad and studied. He’s always studying.”

“Gracious! what makes him do that?”

“Oh, he wants to find out about everything. And he’s doing it. He’s

written a book with things in it nobody ever heard of before. Father says

it’s a work of genius. Mr. Galbraith was coming here two years ago, when

he’d finished the book, only just then—”

“I didn’t think,” Bella interrupted with a sigh, “I didn’t think from his

picture he was so awful old.”

“He isn’t. He’s barely twenty-five.”

But Bella shook her head. “If a person’s over twenty he might just as

well be a hundred.”

“Yes, ordinary people. But it doesn’t matter _how_ old a genius is.

Father’s awfully excited about Mr. Galbraith just now, for he’s been away

a year and a half on an arctic expedition and we’re expecting him back

next summer. We may be hearing from him any day after the middle of June.

Father and I often talk about it when we’re alone together.”

“Why don’t you talk about it when there’s anybody there?”

“Oh, mother’s always so down on Mr. Galbraith.”

“What’s she down on him for?”

“Just because he wants to discover the North Pole.”

“Well, don’t you think yourself that’s rather—”

“No, I don’t.”

“To be wasting two whole years in just hunting round for the Pole? What’s

the good of the Pole, anyway?”

Hildegarde smiled a smile of superiority.

“My geography”—Bella invoked authority that even a big girl must

respect—“my geography says—”

“You’re too young to understand. It’s not the Pole. It’s the glory.”

“What glory?”

“Nobody’s ever yet got there.”

“Why should anybody? Lots of nicer places.”

“A great many people have tried. A good many have died trying—”

“Well, that’s a good reason for not bothering about it any more.”

“Oh, you’re just like—” But filial respect restrained Miss Mar. “I agree

with Mr. Galbraith. He thinks there’s nothing in the world half so

interesting to do.”

“He _must_ be silly.”

“No, he isn’t! He’s splendid—” But Hildegarde snapped the locket to, and

hid it under her best handkerchiefs.

The following Saturday, when Bella asked again to see the locket, Miss

Mar declined to bring it out. Bella begged in vain. She discovered that

her big, gentle friend could be immovable.

To Hildegarde’s dismay, Bella presently dissolved in tears. “Then may I

s-see the work of g-genius?”

“Yes, you may look at his book all you like.” She even let Bella take it

away with her to tide her over Sunday. But Mr. Galbraith’s “Winter among

the Samoyedes” had small success with Miss Wayne. “They make me sick,

those people! I can’t think how anybody likes hearing about their dirty

ways,” and she even cast reflections on Jack for wasting his time over

such “horrors.” However, there was another side to it. “What a relief

it’ll be to him to be with _us_ after the Samoyedes!”

“With _us_!” Hildegarde smiled inwardly.

Sitting by the rose-framed window one Saturday afternoon, talking as

usual about Mr. Galbraith and how soon he might be expected back from the

Pole, Bella suddenly burst out: “I’m tired to death of saying ‘Miss Mar.’

I _do_ wish you’d let me call you ‘Hildegarde.’”

The big girl’s breath was taken away. For the gulf between twelve

and sixteen is a thing hardly passable in that stronghold of class

distinction, a girls’ school. It was rare, indeed, that one of Miss Mar’s

ripe age stooped to help a little girl over a difficulty in her lessons.

It required something of the missionary spirit to take such pity upon

homesickness, as occasionally to give the afflicted one the great treat

of visiting a big girl on Saturday afternoon—but really to go to the

length proposed—

“I shan’t believe you really love me,” the little girl rushed on, “unless

you say yes. Oh, do say yes. _Everything_ depends on it. I’ll promise

always to say ‘Miss Mar’ before people. But if you’ll let me call you

Hildegarde when we’re alone, I’ll _know_ you’re my best friend. And then

I’ll tell you a secret. I’ll tell you two. _Tremendous_ secrets!”

It was finally arranged.

“Now for the tremendous secrets,” said Hildegarde, smiling.

But Bella was portentously grave, even agitated. “Well,” she said,

bracing herself, “my father’s an Englishman. Don’t tell anybody. Cross

your heart and hope you may die if ever you tell the girls.”

“All right. Cross my heart and hope I may die. But how in the world—?”

“It isn’t my fault, you see. And _I’m_ an American all right. I’ve

always wanted to explain to you ever since you were so angelic about

my fractions; it’s because my father’s an Englishman I have to eat milk

pudding. Over there”—Bella flicked a small hand across the American

continent and over the Atlantic deep, to indicate an inconsiderable

island where the natives persist in strange customs—“over there they all

do it. Of course, the minute I’m of age I shall insist on pie.” They

discussed the matter in all its bearings.

“Now about the other secret.”

“Well”—even the daring Bella caught her breath and paused. “No, not

to-day. I’ll keep the tremendousest one for another time. But _do_ get

out the silver locket, _dear_ Hildegarde, and let’s look at it.”

Ultimately she prevailed. The next time Bella came she found a delightful

surprise. The low table was cleared of everything but bowls of roses; and

against the white wall great ferns printed plain their tall and splendid

plumes—leaving free a little space in the middle where, on a gilt nail,

hung the open locket.

Bella was delighted with the whole scheme. “It only wants one thing to

make it perfect. No, I won’t tell you what it is. I’ll bring it next

Saturday.”

“It” proved to be a paper of Chinese joss-sticks, and a little bronze

perforated holder. “We must each burn one to him every week,” she said,

setting up her contribution below the dangling locket.

“I don’t quite know if we ought,” Hildegarde said. “Joss-sticks are

prayers you know—at least the Chinese think so.”

“Well, of course they’re prayers. That’s why I brought them.”

While the two joss-sticks sent up into the rose-perfumed air faint

spirals of an alien fragrance, the two girls sat in front of the

confident young face looking out of the silver locket, and talked

endlessly about the owner.

Hildegarde found it subtly intoxicating to have so keen an auditor—a

sharer even (to the humble extent possible for extreme youth) in the

great pivotal romance of existence.

And then Bella had such wonderful inspirations. It was she who saw

the larger fitness in Mr. Mar’s habit of going fishing on Saturday

afternoons. What was that but an arrangement of the gods that he should

be so effectually out of the way, that Hildegarde might with safety

borrow from his desk the Galbraith letters. Sitting close together on

a square of Japanese matting, in front of the rose table, an anxious

ear listening for Mrs. Mar’s return from the missionary meeting, the

dark head leaned against the fair, while the two girls read and re-read

those precious documents, in an atmosphere charged with incense and a

palpitating joy. One day, arrived regretfully at the end of the letter

they liked best, Bella bent and kissed the signature. Hildegarde’s

heart gave a great jump. The daring of that deed was well-nigh impious.

Hildegarde, when all by herself, had done the same, but that was

different.

“Now you know my other secret,” said Bella, very pink—“the tremendousest

one of all.” When the first shock had died away, Hildegarde was left with

a pitiful tenderness before the disarming frankness of such a confession.

Poor little Bella! Why, Jack didn’t even know of her existence. He never

would, till in some rare idle hour of the glorious future, Hildegarde

should tell him of a little homesick girl she had befriended once at

school.

But Bella could be depended on to break in upon such gracious forecasting

of the future, with a suddenness that made the picture dance, “Which of

us two do you suppose Jack’ll fall in love with?”

Hildegarde, almost paralyzed by the presumption this implied, barely

managed to bring out, “You’re much too little to think of—”

“I shan’t be little always.”

“You’ll always be more than twelve years younger than Mr. Galbraith.”

Hildegarde always said Mr. Galbraith when she wanted to keep the intruder

at a distance.

But Bella advanced as bold as brass. “_Anyhow_ I think he’ll fall in love

with me.”

“Of course a person so modest would be likely to appeal to any gentleman.”

“No, it’s not my being modest he’ll mind about. It’s other things.”

“What other things?”

“Well—you—of course you’ve got your eyelashes, and you’re in the full

bloom of womanhood. But _I’m_ in the first blush of youth. I think he’ll

like that best.”

[Illustration: “The two girls sat in front of the confident young face

looking out of the silver locket”]

It was the second Saturday in June, and school was breaking up next week.

Mrs. Mar had finished off the Braut von Messina in the dining-room,

and barely begun with the Hindu Mission on the other side of the city.

Hildegarde had retired to her room to watch, not for Bella’s coming

(the window did not command the front), but for Mr. Mar’s going down

the garden with rod and creel. What made him so dilatory to-day? While

Hildegarde wondered, Bella came flying in, shut the door with agitated

care, faced about with cheeks of crimson, hat over one ear and the

whisper, “Hildegarde, I’ve seen him! I’ve seen him! Oh, Hildegarde, he’s

here!” Wherewith she precipitated herself upon her friend’s neck and

hugged her breathlessly.

“Who, who?”

“Why, ‘he.’ _He’s_ here! The only man I ever loved!”

Hildegarde took the dancing dervish by the shoulders. “You don’t mean—”

“Yes, yes, I do. He came in just before me. He’s perfectly glorious.

Just to look at him makes you feel—makes you think you’ve got windmills

shut up inside you. Everything goes whirling round. And when he asked”

(Bella lowered her pipe to a masculine depth): “‘Is Mr. Mar at home?’

it sounded so beautiful, I thought for a moment he was talking poetry.

Oh, Hildegarde! _Hildegarde!_” Again she sunk her ecstacy to whispering

as she followed her friend out into the hall. Together they hung over

the banisters. The visitor was talking more poetry apparently in the

dining-room. The two girls stayed suspended there an eternity. At last

with thumping hearts, upon Bella’s suggestion, they went down into the

entry. “We’ll pretend to be putting on our overshoes. I’ll have Mrs.

Mar’s!” whispered Bella, excitedly, ignoring the fact that the continued

fine weather and dusty streets lent an air of eccentricity to the

proceeding. She stopped after drawing on one big overshoe and shuffled

softly to the dining-room door. She put her eye to the keyhole. No use.

Notwithstanding Hildegarde’s whispered remonstrance, she glued her ear to

the aperture. The door was suddenly opened and Miss Bella fell sideways

into the arms of an astonished young man, who said: “Hello, what’s this?”

Hildegarde, drowned in sympathetic confusion, helped Bella to regain her

equilibrium, while she muttered the explanation “Overshoes!”

“This is my daughter Hildegarde, Mr. Cheviot,” said Mr. Mar, “and this is

our little friend, Bella Wayne.”

“_Ch-Cheviot!_” stuttered the little friend.

The young man with the laughing eyes said: “Anything wrong with the

name?” and having shaken hands with “my daughter Hildegarde,” he departed.

“Did you say his name was Cheviot?” Hildegarde asked her father.

“Yes. The new recruit at the bank. Seems to be an intelligent sort of

fellow.”

* * * * *

With ease and celerity Miss Bella transferred her affections from a

faded photograph, a packet of letters, and a book of travels, to a real

live young man with a square jaw that looked as if he meant business,

but with a ready laugh, too, as if the business were not without its

diverting aspect. Then he had rough brown hair that “fitted” him. Bella

would have told you this was a rarity, most people’s beginning too far

back from the forehead, or growing too much away from the ears, leaving

them with a bare and naked look. Or it grew in a peak. Or it didn’t grow

low enough on the neck and was like a badly made wig, that had slipped

forward. Or worse than anything, it forgot where to stop and grew down

into the collar like Professor Altberg’s, prompting the irreverent Bella

to whisper to her neighbor (while the grave instructor was sitting with

head bent over a Latin exercise): “How far do you think it goes? Do you

suppose he’s hairy _all_ down his back?”

However that might be, Cheviot’s hair fitted him. Moreover, he had, in

Bella’s estimation, a fascinating, if somewhat mocking air toward little

girls, and he helped one little girl gallantly through the dismal Sundays

by the simple process of sitting in church where she could watch him.

Once in a while in coming out, Bella would catch his eye, and he would

laugh and give her a nod. On the rare occasions of his encountering Miss

Bella at the Mars’, he never failed to stop and mimic her first greeting,

“I’m ‘Ch-Cheviot,’ you know. Now what’s the matter with that name?” which

was vastly entertaining, not to say “taking.”

* * * * *

John Galbraith came back to America that autumn, but he stayed in the

East.

Bella didn’t much care what he did now, for she was thirteen, and in

spite of the ugliness of their Hindu protégée Miss Wayne had joined the

Busy Bees. That was because Hildegarde had told her that Louis Cheviot

went to their dances. Bella saw at once the fitness of her doing the

same. The result was that she seldom waltzed less than twice with the

new hero, who, it must be admitted, was a better batsman than dancer.

But nobody could help “getting through” with Bella as a partner, for

she danced divinely. Cheviot should have been better pleased to get her

for his partner, but it was plain that he was unduly preoccupied about

“my daughter Hildegarde.” Several of the young men were. Bella told

herself with a consciousness of native worth, that she had never minded

in the least before. But this was different. She made up her mind that

if “Ch-Cheviot” goaded her much further by this display of misplaced

devotion, she would just take the misguided young man aside some day and

talk to him “as a friend.”

She would tell him about Jack Galbraith.

CHAPTER VI

Bella Wayne’s father had been in the royal navy. His health had given

way about the same time as his patience on the vexed question of

non-promotion. He retired from the service, went with his American wife

and family to California on a visit, became enamoured of the climate,

bought a place, and settled there. The three youngest of his seven

children were born in Tulare County, but for him “home” was still

England, however ungrateful. They all went back every second year to

visit his father in Staffordshire, and when Bella’s two sisters found

English husbands, there were three reasons for the recurrent visit to

the old country. The eldest son, Tom Wayne, had made a fortune on the

New York Stock Exchange and married a girl belonging to one of the old

Knickerbocker families. Tom’s country house on Staten Island proved

highly convenient as a half-way station between England and California.

Mrs. Tom was a very charming person, and a certain portion of Bella’s

satisfaction in going abroad lay in the chance it presented of making a

visit to Staten Island, on the way over and back. Nevertheless, as she

never failed to tell Hildegarde on her return, there was no place to

be compared to California, no friend and no “in-law” who could make up

to her for being away from Hildegarde, and she might have added, from

the neighborhood of that obdurate creature with the cold blue eyes and

the colder heart, Louis Cheviot. Those who thought about it at all were

surprised that the friendship of the two girls was not more interrupted

upon Hildegarde’s graduating from the school, when Bella was less than

fifteen. But not upon community of tasks, rather upon something essential

in the nature of each had their alliance been founded—kept vital by wants

in each that the other could supply, excesses in each that the other

helped to modify. They themselves thought their relation had its deeper

roots in a conviction of the peculiar sanctity of girls’ friendships;

a creed to which Hildegarde’s fidelity effected Miss Bella’s actual

adhesion only by degrees and with notable backslidings.

But even in early days, Bella felt it was highly distinguished to stand

in this relation to one who thought and talked about it as Hildegarde

did. Hadn’t she said in that soft, deliberate way of hers, that it was

capable of being one of the most beautiful things in all the beautiful

world? It was something, she said, no man knew anything about. Why,

they presumed to doubt its possibility even! Ah, they should have known

Hildegarde Mar and Bella Wayne. Men believed that all girls were, at

heart, jealous of all other girls. They thought meanly of the sex. They

pointed to David and Jonathan, to Orestes and Pylades, to instances

innumerable of men’s faithfulness to men. But what bard or legend

celebrates woman’s friendship as toward woman? Well, you see, all the

chroniclers since the beginning of the world have been of the scoffer’s

sex. That was why women’s friendships had never been celebrated—though

men said the real reason was—oh, they spoke blasphemies!—and they hadn’t

known Hildegarde and Bella. It was Hildegarde’s theme, but Bella agreed

to every word. Yes, yes, _their_ friendship would show the world!

For qualities alien to her own, Hildegarde came to look upon her little

friend with an adoring admiration. Bella’s wit and Bella’s originality,

Bella’s entire “mode of being,” were at once tonic and delight. Then,

too, behind her provoking charm was a finished daintiness, which with

her became elevated into a special quality, distinctive, all-pervading,

a certain strangeness of fragility—a physical fineness like the peculiar

fineness of a flower—a something suggesting evanescence, and having the

subtle pathos of the thing that may not, cannot bide.

It would have been hard to say which was of most use to the other in

making clearer the riddle of life, or more radiant the beauty of the

world, or more wonder-waking, the mystery of a young girl’s heart. They

read, and walked, and talked, and worked, together, paying their vaunted

friendship a finer tribute than words, however honestly uttered; for they

grew in each other’s company.

The younger, too, was cured of certain of her more inadmissible “ways,”

while the elder learned from Butterfly Bella many a thing besides the art

of making the most of her beauty.

Not that Hildegarde despised this last. She had none of the comfort of

knowing it was part of her largeness of nature, that she should take more

easily to beautifying her home than to making the best of herself. Indeed

to the end of time, she required guidance in matters of dress. And who so

well qualified as Miss Bella to give advice. She went further: with her

own ingenious little hands she made the most becoming of “shirt-waists,”

trimmed heavenly hats, and firmly forbade fripperies.

“No, no, they’re not for the massive.” She applauded her friend for

not wearing trinkets—she didn’t like to see her even with her maternal

grandmother’s emerald brooch. “No, I don’t like you in ‘didoes’

of any sort. They’re too insignificant for you. You ought to wear

ropes of pearls, or a tiara of diamonds, or better still, something

barbaric—what’s one little lady-like emerald set in a filigree of diamond

chips? Why, it can’t even be seen—on you. Of course the emerald’s a

pretty little stone, and the old setting’s nice. It would shine out on

me, but—well, it’s simply _lost_, you know, on your heroic neck.”

Hildegarde deplored her size, she carried it even with a sense of

humiliation just as she bore with her lack of elegant accomplishments.

It was pretty terrible to have to put up with being such a great

lump—especially with the ethereal Bella always by to point the advantage

of the opposite. Still, there was no blinking the facts. “You’re right, I

believe, didoes of any sort _are_ rather wasted on me,” Hildegarde would

say meekly, “I must have felt that when I hardly ever wore them—though I

liked them. It takes you, Bella, to explain things.”

Nothing was ever allowed to come in the way of their spending their

Saturday afternoons together, and if, as time went on, less was heard

about Jack from Hildegarde, it was only because so very much more was

heard about Cheviot from Bella.

It was a difficult moment when two girls with such lofty ideas of

friendship met for the first time after Cheviot had said to Hildegarde

at a dance: “When are you going to begin to care for me?” She had been so

taken by surprise that she had only smiled and said: “I don’t know,” but

she thought hardly less of Bella at the moment than she thought of Jack.

So the next time that Bella remarked by the way: “Isn’t he perfectly

fascinating?” Hildegarde had hesitated, and she—yes—she was actually

getting red. Bella stared, “Why, are _you_ coming to—to—”

“No; _oh_, no! Only—”

“Only what?”

“It’s dreadfully hard, but I haven’t forgotten our compact. So I suppose

I’ve got to tell you what—what he said to me last night.”

Bella received the information with a half-hysterical pretense of

carrying it off gaily. “Well, what’s there new in that? As if every

soul in Valdivia hasn’t known for perfect ages that he cares about you

frightfully. I don’t mind _you_. Because you’re Hildegarde, and any man

who didn’t love you must—well, there must be something pretty wrong about

him. I shall give him a whole year—maybe even two, to go on like that,

and then when I’m sixteen, or seventeen at the latest, I won’t have it

any longer.”

Hildegarde, enormously relieved, laughed and kissed her. “Oh, you nice,

funny child!”

“Only promise me again, cross your heart and hope you may die, if you

ever keep anything from me about Louis Cheviot.”

Hildegarde complied and life went on as before—only that Hildegarde

showed herself less ready to fall in with Bella’s ecstasies. An instinct

to forestall a possible jealousy made her cavil from time to time.

“Don’t you think his shoulders are too broad for his height?”

“No, I don’t, and look how splendidly he carries them. You have to see

him beside a huge man, like Mr. Mar, before you realize—”

“Yes, yes; _that’s_ true,” Hildegarde hastened to heal the wound.

“And, anyhow, I don’t think it’s kind of you to run Louis down. I am

always very nice about Jack.”

The end of it was that Cheviot came more and more to the Mar house, and

seemed so diverted when he found the lively Bella there, that Hildegarde

gave herself up without reserve to the three-cornered friendship.

He took the girls boating and organized parties to the Tule Lands, and

was altogether a most invaluable ally in the agreeable pursuit of being a

young lady in her first season.

Still, when Bella praised him absolutely without moderation, “Y-yes,”

Hildegarde would respond, “he is _nice_, only—”

“Only what?” says Miss Bella, instantly on the defensive.

“Well, you know I prefer big men.”

“Of course you do. It’s being so massive yourself. But he’s exactly the

right size for me.”

“Oh, yes, and he’s quite the nicest of all the Valdivia boys.”

“Well, that’s going pretty far,” says Bella, with an edge in her voice.

Then the other, with that recurrent though only half-conscious need to

show that after all, she, Hildegarde, wasn’t dazzled—not being in Bella’s

state, _she_ could see blemishes—the older girl would add: “And yet

somehow for all his niceness, and making us always have a good time when

he’s there, to my thinking there’s something terribly unromantic about

Louis Cheviot.”

“Now you only say that,” retorts Miss Bella, with sparkling eyes,

“because he’s in a bank.”

“No—no,” vaguely, “but I don’t believe he’s got any soul.”

“Just because he isn’t hunting the North Pole!”

“No. That isn’t the reason. I assure you it isn’t.”

“Then it _can_ only be because he likes to laugh at everything.”

“He _is_ pretty frivolous,” said Hildegarde, “and he ridicules

friendship. But no, it’s not that, either. It’s because he’s kind of

chilling. To _me_.”

“Chilling to you?” Bella beamed. “Oh, do tell me about that.”

“Sometimes he’s positively rude.”

“To _you_?” Bella could have danced.

“To anybody.”

“Oh, but _when_ was he positively rude to you? How black-hearted of you,

Hildegarde, not to tell me that before! You might have known I’d simply

_love_ hearing about that.”

Hildegarde laughed. “Why, I haven’t seen you since Thursday.”

“Was it at your birthday party?”

“Yes, at the birthday party.”

“Well, well, how did he do it? What did he say?”

“It was after we’d all been reading the poem that came with Eddie Cox’s

present. Louis made fun of it.”

“That was only being rude to Eddie.” Bella’s face fell.

“Wait till you hear. I defended it, of course, and said: ‘It isn’t as

easy as it looks to make birthday odes.’ ‘It certainly doesn’t _look_

difficult—to make _that_ kind,’ he said. ‘Then why,’ I said, just to

stand up for Eddie, ‘why have you never written a poem about my airy

tread?’ And Louis said: ‘Well, there may be another reason, but no girl

who stands five foot ten in her stockings and weighs a hundred and fifty

pounds need ask it.’ _That’s_ the kind of thing.”

It was an incident Miss Bella loved to recall. No man could be really in

love with a girl he had said _that_ to.

But some months later, Hildegarde was obliged, according to the code, to

report that Cheviot had been “going on” again.

Bella insisted on having all the “horrid details.”

“It was last night at the taffy pulling. You know how we’d all been

laughing at his stories of Miss Monk meeting the Carters’ black cow—”

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, I was laughing so I couldn’t stop, and it was so warm in that room

the candy was melting. You remember he said—”

“Oh, yes,” said Bella, with feeling, “_I_ remember. He said you must come

and pull with him.”

“—out in the porch where the candy and I would cool off.”

“And you went.”

“And he made more jokes on the way out. I begged him not to talk any

more, for I’d got into a silly mood and everything he said made me laugh.

‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘I labor under the fatal disadvantage of the

funny man, but I could make you serious you know.’ And then—then—he had

the impertinence—to kiss me.”

“Oh, Hildegarde!”

“Yes. It was dreadfully grotesque, too—our hands were stuck together by

that great yellow rope of taffy, and I could only stammer and get redder.

But I did say I was not going to forgive him. Nobody had ever been so

rude to me before. Then he got awfully serious and said all kinds of

things—”

“_What_ kind?”

“And at last he asked me what was wrong with Ch-Cheviot—your old joke,

you know.”

Bella clenched her hands. Sacrilege! to present _her_ joke to another

girl! She had always imagined that would be just how he would propose

to her. He would say: “Bella, my beautiful, what’s the matter with

Ch-Cheviot?”

“Well, go on.”

“If I didn’t like him enough he said, what sort of man _was_ I going to

like? And I thought it only fair to give him some idea, so I tried to

soften it by laughing a little—I’d forgiven him by then, you know, for

he’d said _such_ things—”

“What things?”

“Oh, sorry kind of things, and he looked so—so—well, I’d forgiven him.

But I told him plainly that if it ever is a question of the sort of man I

am to care for, it won’t be some one who is just nice and makes me have

a good time. It will be some great, gloomy creature who makes me cry—and

lifts me to the stars. I was laughing, but I meant it—and I said: ‘I’d

worship _that_ kind of man.’”

“What did he say then?”

“Well, he looked sort of down I thought, so I said: ‘You wouldn’t let me

worship you, even if I could.’ ‘I’d let you love me,’ he said.”

“Oh-h. What else?”

“We went in after that.”

“And he was just as funny as ever,” said Bella, clutching at frail

comfort.

“Oh, quite,” agreed Hildegarde.

It was small consolation to Miss Bella that Cheviot was singular in his

obduracy. Before she was eighteen she was uncommonly well accustomed to

seeing the stoutest masculine defenses go down before her. The two Mar

boys had long been her devoted slaves. And Bella had flirted with both

of them impartially, taking what she felt was only a becoming share in

the interest all Valdivia felt in those go-ahead young men, whenever they

came home for a visit. They were pointed to as models. Look how they “got

on”—they did it visibly—while you looked they seemed to have to restrain

themselves from rising out of your sight. They kept Miss Bella supplied

with candy and flowers and they corresponded with her when she went

abroad. Secretly dreading the fascinations of the Britisher, they asked

in scoffing postscripts how the effete nations were getting on. Bella’s

view of all this was that, provided the young men were “nice,” a girl

could hardly have too many of them contending for her favor. It was what

they were there for. Each time she came home, she brought the Mar boys

a scarf-pin apiece, and pleased them still more by invariably demanding

a cent in return. “I can’t _give_ you a thing with a point. Something

dreadful would happen! you must buy them.” That looked, they felt, as if

she were “taking it seriously”—but which was she taking?

The year that Bella was eighteen, after a summer in England, she arrived

at Staten Island just in time to celebrate her birthday. She was full of

joy at getting back.

The conscious approval that she bestowed on the greater splendor of the

American autumn had been generously extended to the profusion of fine

fruit that greets one here at breakfast, to the individual bathrooms,

even to the spacious, drawered, behooked, and shelved clothes-closets

so agreeably numerous in the American house. The same satisfaction with

which she had noted these things consciously revisited her as she trod

the wide, shallow steps of the staircase, that in its descent halted

leisurely upon two broad landings, having each a large unglazed window

opening upon the hall below. The observant young eyes paid a flitting

tribute to the beautiful woodwork of the balusters and the great tall

doors of the rooms she passed, deciding as she went, there’s nothing

nicer than a new American house, unless it’s an old (and a very old)

English one. Even then, to _live_ in, give her the American.

Like so many of the first generation born in “the States,” this child

of an old-world father was more American in tastes and spirit than

any daughter of the Revolution. But, partly as a matter of physical

inheritance, partly, perhaps, because of her frequent visits to England,

she bore about her still a good deal of the peculiar stamp of a certain

type of English girl. As she came trailing slowly down the wide staircase

of Tom Wayne’s country house on Staten Island, the practised eye would

have little difficulty in detecting a difference between the figure on

the stair and the typical “American beauty,” a something less sumptuous

and more distinguished. Her head held not quite so high, and yet in her

carriage something indefinably more aloof. The longer waist, not quite

so ruthlessly stayed and belted, giving an effect of greater ease; the

longer neck, the shoulders a little more sloping, the eyes less eager

and yet with more vision in them—something in the whole, gracious as the

aspect was, a little reluctant and more than a little elusive. The Paquin

gown Bella had brought back and wore to-night for the first time, was

long, and straight, and plainer than prescribed by the New York fashion

of the moment—a gauze, discreetly iridescent, showing over a white satin

petticoat shifting lights of pink, and pearl, and silver, a gown that

shimmered as the wearer walked, and clothed her in glancing light and

soft-hued shadows.

Bella knew that she was very early, and she came down slowly, drawing a

long glove up her slim, bare arm. When she reached the square window on

the lower landing, she stopped, laid the other glove on the sill, and

proceeded to button the one she had on. A slight noise in the hall below

made her lean her arms on the broad, polished sill of the opening, and

look down.

A man stood by a table facing her, but with eyes bent upon the books he

was turning over—a man rather over medium height, sunburnt, with a lean,

clean-shaven face, fair hair, and clean cut mouth and chin. That was all

she had time to take in before he raised his eyes.

“Oh!” ejaculated Bella, involuntarily, and then after meeting a moment

longer the wide, unwinking, upward look, “How do you do!” she said.

“How do you do,” echoed the sunburnt man, and he did not bow nor move;

just stood looking at the picture up there on the wall.

Miss Bella was not as a rule easily embarrassed, but she was conscious

now of feeling a little at a loss.

“I don’t know exactly why I am in such a hurry to say ‘how do you do,’

that I can’t wait till I come down. But I do know you, don’t I?”

“Of course you know me”; but that time he smiled, and Bella said to

herself, how _could_ I have forgotten anybody so—so—

She picked up her glove with the intention of running down. But, I expect

I look rather nice here in the window, she reflected, and instead of

going down instantly she said: “It’s some time since I was here before.”

“Yes, it’s a long time,” he answered. His tone pleased her.

“And I run about the world such a lot, I can’t be expected to remember

everybody’s name just all at once, can I?”

“Oh, the name doesn’t matter.”

“Does that mean you aren’t quite sure of mine?”

“I haven’t the faintest notion of it.”

“Then how do you know—what made you say, ‘Of course I knew you’?”

“Because I was sure you did.”

“Why should I remember you, any more than you should remember me? Are you

somebody very special?”

“_Very_ special.”

“Who?”

“Oh, you’ll hear.”

“How shall I hear?”

“I’ll tell you myself.”

“Well, go on.”

“I can’t, now.”

“Why not?”

“You—you’re too far off.”

“When I come down, you’ll tell me?”

“_Will_ you?—will you ever come down?” He was smiling.

“Why shouldn’t I?” she said, bewildered.

“I never saw it tried before.”

“Never saw me try to come down-stairs!”

“Never, yet.”

Had he been here that time she sprained her ankle? “Do you imagine I’m

lame?”

“On the contrary, I’m ready to believe you have wings. Please fly down.”

“What a very odd person you are! I can’t think how I came to forget—”

He made no answer. Just stood there leaning against the heavy table,

half-smiling and never turning away his eyes.

She caught up her glove and ran down several steps, but just before she

reached the open place where the stair turned abruptly, and the solid

wall gave way to a procession of slender pillars, she stopped, overcome

by a sudden rush of shyness. Behind that last yard of sheltering wall

she waited breathless, while you might count seven, and then turned on a

noiseless foot and fled up-stairs, bending low as she passed the square

windows, so that not even the top of her brown head should be visible to

that very odd man waiting for her down there in the hall.

She reappeared ten minutes later with the first batch of guests, and

while they were speaking to their hostess, the sunburnt man made his way

to Bella, and held out his hand.

“It took you a long time,” he said. “How did you manage it?”

“Manage what?”

“Getting down. You’re the cleverest picture I ever saw on any wall. How

long do they give you?”

“Out of the frame?” she said, catching up his fancy with a laugh. “Oh,

only long enough to find out what you’ve done to make you the special

person you say you are.”

“It’s not what I _have_ done, but what I shall do.”

“Well, I’m very much disappointed. I thought you must be distinguished,

and now I see you’re only conceited.”

He smiled—he was rather wonderful when he smiled.

“Of course, I know perfectly well we’ve met before,” Bella went on, “but

I don’t remember who you are.”

“I’ll tell you some day.”

“Some day? How absurd. Why not now?”

“Because the surprise might be too great.”

She opened her eyes yet wider and laughed as a girl will in recognition

of a point she sees as yet only with the eye of faith. “Didn’t you

promise you’d tell me if I came down?”

“But you haven’t come down. You are still far out of reach.”

“It’s ridiculous of you not to tell me your name.”

“My name wouldn’t mean anything to you—not yet. You wouldn’t know it.”

“What!” She drew back.

“But we have met,” he reassured her hurriedly.

“I felt we must have, but where was it?”

“I can’t quite remember, either. It may have been when you were Queen in

Babylon and I was a Christian slave.”

She drew nearer with lit face. “Oh, do you believe in all those

delightful things?”

“I believe—” he began on a different and lower note and then he stopped

suddenly. Bella’s upturned face silently begged him to go on with his

profession of faith.

But just then, Bella’s brother, having passed a boring guest on to his

wife, came between the two who stood so oblivious of the rest of the

company. The apparition of Tom Wayne brought Bella back to the every-day

world, and to a half-frightened self-criticism, in view of the long

flight she had taken from it in the last few seconds.

Her brother laid an affectionate hand on the shoulder of the sunburnt

man, and said, laughing, to Bella: “You must be careful with this person.

He’s the most desperate flirt.”

Bella winced inwardly, but she disguised the little hurt with smiling

mockery. “Really! I should _never_ have thought it!”

“Oh, yes, goes off with first one heart and then another. And he goes so

far! That’s the worst of him.”

“Where does he go?”

“Lord knows! Let’s see, what God-forgotten place was the last book about?”

“Oh, you write books? Then you _are_ distinguished—”

“You aren’t telling me you didn’t know who it was?” exclaimed her

brother.

“Well, I thought I did, and I’ve been behaving as if I did.”

There was a general movement to the dining-room, but Tom paused long

enough to say with mock formality: “Miss Wayne, Mr. John Galbraith.”

“_Oh!_” ejaculated the girl, growing pink with excitement. “Are you

Hildegarde’s Jack?”

The sunburnt man looked mystified a moment, and then with sudden daring,

“Is your name Hildegarde?” he said.

This was on the twenty-fourth of September. Six days later she began a

letter to her friend.

“Oh, Hildegarde! Hildegarde! You’re quite right. He’s the most

wonderful person in the world, and I hope you don’t mind, but

we are engaged to be married—Jack Galbraith and I! It turns

out that he’s an old friend of Marion’s family, and after she

married my brother, when Jack came to see them last winter, Tom

liked him awfully—of course everybody does that—and since then

they’ve all three been great friends.

“And one of the first things he asked me when he heard Tom

came from near Valdivia, was all about you—I mean your father.

He says such beautiful things about your father, and how kind

he was when Jack was a poor, forlorn, little boy. But oh,

Hildegarde! he’s the most glorious person now you ever saw in

your life. The old faded photograph isn’t a bit like him. I am

sending you a new one, and that isn’t like him, either. But I

am going to get a silver frame for it and I shall be dreadfully

hurt if you don’t put it on the altar-table, with the old

locket and the roses—if you’re really glad of our happiness

you’ll even burn a joss now and then for our sake. I’m

miserable when I think how little good any photograph of such

a person is! You can’t imagine what it’s like when he smiles.

All the whole earth smiles, too. I adore him when he smiles—and

when he doesn’t. I adore him every minute, except when he talks

about Franz Josef Land, or something disgusting like that. But

then he doesn’t do it much—never, except when Mr. Borisoff is

here. Mr. Borisoff is a man I can’t stop to tell you about,

only I don’t like him, and I shall let Jack know some day that

I don’t think he is a good influence.

“But I began to say that you mustn’t think Jack is the least

solemn as his letters used to sound and as the pictures make

out. In fact, he began our acquaintance by flirting quite

desperately, but he says it wasn’t flirting at all. He meant

all those things! He says they were a profession of faith

upon a miraculous revelation (that’s me—I’m the miraculous

revelation!), and it only sounded flirtatious because I didn’t

realize, as he did, that we had been waiting for one another.

“He’s waited a good deal longer than I have, poor Jack! He’s

more than twelve years older than I am; do you remember how you

used to throw that in my face? But it doesn’t matter the least

in the world. Besides, you’d never think he was so old—he’s

such a darling; and he talks like a poet, and a painter, and

an archangel, all rolled into one. I am so wildly happy I

can’t write a proper letter, only I do want you to know that

your mother is mistaken, as we always thought. Jack is a

saint—simply a saint. When my father behaved quite horridly,

and said he couldn’t have me marrying a man who went away

for two or three years on long, scientific expeditions, Jack

said he wouldn’t do it any more, though I think it cost him

something to say that. He was quite silent for hours afterward,

and didn’t even notice I’d done my hair differently. And that

horrid Mr. Borisoff was in such a rage. He didn’t say anything,

but oh! he looked. But now he’s gone away, thank goodness, and

I shall try to make Jack not ever see him again. Then another

thing, just to show you what a perfect angel Jack is. My mother

said I was delicate and too young, and things like that, and

she got father to agree that I was only eighteen and was the

weakling of the family, and they made up their wicked old

minds that I mustn’t be married right away as Jack and I had

arranged. And what do you think? Jack said he would wait for

me? A whole year! I cried when they settled that, but wasn’t

he a seraph? Fathers and mothers are very selfish; I shall not

treat my daughters like that.

“How Jack and I will ever get through a year of waiting is more

than either of us know. I am not coming home till the first

week in December, and Jack’s coming to us for Christmas. And

then you’ll see him! I hope you are pleased that I’m going to

marry the man we’ve talked so much about. It seems like another

bond, doesn’t it? How is Louis Cheviot? I can forgive him now

for always liking you best. I can’t imagine how I ever looked

at him. Oh, Hildegarde, Jack is a perfect—well, I never heard

the word that was beautiful enough to describe him.

“Good-by, I hear him now out in the garden. Jack is the most

perfect whistler.

“Your loving and devoted

“BELLA.”

CHAPTER VII

December did not bring Galbraith—nor even Bella.

“Jack found he couldn’t leave that odious Mr. Borisoff to settle up some

business all alone, but my brother Tom has got mama to consent to stay

over Christmas with me in New York at Marion’s. So Jack and I shan’t die,

as we fully intended to if we were separated.”

Just as the girl and her mother, early in the new year, were at last

going home, a cable came from England to say that Bella’s sister, Mrs.

Hilton, had been badly hurt in a carriage accident.

The cable was couched in the most alarming terms—there seemed to be every

prospect of three little children being left motherless. Bella and her

mother took the first ship that sailed.

“If we have to stay any time, Jack says he will come over.”

They did stay, and Jack was as good as his word. Mrs. Hilton did not die,

but she lay for months in a critical condition, and her mother mounted

guard over the new baby and the three other little people.

Bella meanwhile was amusing herself right royally.

“I’ve been presented and I’m having a perfect, rapturous time.

“And now it’s decided we don’t have to wait quite a whole

year—we are going to be married before we come back to America,

some time in the summer. Just think of it, Hildegarde! You and

I not to meet again till I’m married! Oh, do write and say

you’ll love me just as much as ever.”

Then for a time no more long letters, but a shower of happy little

notes, that descended with tolerable regularity. After that, the wedding

invitation! Ten days’ interval and then two communications by the same

mail. The first:

“DEAREST HILDEGARDE:

“Mother and I are just back from a week-end at Tryston. It

was rather dull. All the men were immensely distinguished and

at least eighty. I was glad to get back to town. Hengler’s

Circus has been turned into a skating-rink. We all went

to a delightful party there last week. The wife of the

Governor-General of Canada skated most wonderfully. I wish I

could. Jack didn’t take his eyes off her. Mr. Borisoff has come

to London. I hate Mr. Borisoff as much as ever, if not worse.

“I haven’t time for more if I’m to catch this post. But

I can’t have you thinking I forget you in my happiness.

Besides, I shall be happier when Mr. Borisoff goes back to his

fellow-barbarians, and leaves me and Jack alone. The next, I

promise, shall be a great, long letter. You’ll see! I do love

you, Hildegarde.

“From your loving

“BELLA.

“P. S. I wish you were here.”

It struck Hildegarde it was the first time she had said that since Jack

had appeared on the scene.

The other letter was without date or beginning.

“Jack and I have quarreled. Oh, if you were here!

“BELLA.”

Immediately after, a mysterious cable, that told simply the date of

Bella’s homeward sailing. Had the quarrel frightened her lover and so

hastened on the marriage? But no, for while Bella was still upon the

sea came a formal notice that the marriage was “postponed.” It had been

mailed some days before the cable was sent.

* * * * *

Hildegarde’s first feeling upon Bella’s return was that since the writing

of that final note from London, and the dispatching of the postponement

notice, the trouble, whatever it had been, was patched up. Impossible to

think there was a cloud in her sky. Not matured at all; only a little

thinner and, save for that, exactly the same Bella—“unthinking, idle,

wild, and young.”

But as the minutes went by and she ran from one familiar thing to another

in garden and house, with greeting and gay comment, spinning out the time

till she and Hildegarde should be alone together, the older girl began to

have her doubts. Was Bella as happy as she pretended, flitting about with

all her “dear Mars?”

Nothing possible to gather from her eagerness to be assured that so far

from being forgotten, she was more than ever an object of interest and

devotion. Nothing new Bella’s little weakness for wanting everybody to

be visibly enlivened by her return from “abroad,” bringing her adorable

frocks (for Bella’s American mama had come into money, and Bella was

helping her to come out of a certain portion), bringing remembrances for

everybody, bringing a whiff of foreign airs, and a touch of something

exciting, exotic, into the lives of stay-at-home folk. Bella had always

been one of those who, however much adored, would like to be adored yet a

little more. She couldn’t bear that any one within reach of her influence

should escape caring about her, and she cast a net uncommon wide. It was

meant to enmesh even Hildegarde’s mother, partly because that lady was so

little lavish in bestowing her affection, but mostly because if you were

much in the Mar house it mattered enormously upon what terms you were

with Mrs. Mar. But, as ill-luck would have it, Bella never thought of the

lady once she was away from her. Though she had brought back scarf-pins

for the boys, and a silver-mounted blackthorn for Mr. Mar, and a quite

wonderful necklace for Hildegarde, there was nothing—nothing at all for

Mrs. Mar—and it was serious.

Bella never realized the awful omission till, having dispensed the other

gifts, she stood with the rest of the family in the garden, not even

asking where Mrs. Mar was, till looking up, she saw that lady at her

bedroom window carefully trying on a new pair of gloves. “Everything

depends on the way they’re put on the first time.” Bella could hear her

saying it, and she looked up smiling and waving her hand, as much as to

say, “Oh, please hurry down! _You’re_ the person I’m pining most of all

to see again.” But, of herself, Miss Bella was silently asking, “What

_am_ I to do! What will happen if she should see she’s the only one I’ve

forgotten?” Bella’s brain worked feverishly. Glancing down, her eye fell

on a gold pencil she was wearing on a chain. Surreptitiously detaching

this latest gift of her mother’s, Bella slipped it in her pocket, talking

all the time; telling Mr. Mar what it felt like to see sunshine, real

Californian sunshine again; offering up to public scorn the English

girl who had disapproved of the unappreciative Californians for rooting

arum lilies out of their gardens, and throwing them away in sheaves,

which Bella admitted was what they did with the “pest.” “Just like your

American extravagance,” the English girl had said.

Oh, it was so perfectly heavenly to be at home again! Bella beamed in her

old conscienceless way at poor Trenn, who found a heady tonic—a hope new

born, in hearing the adored one call the Mar house “home.”

But even while he was savoring the sweetness of that thought, there was

the distracting creature linking her arm in Harry’s, and saying: “Come

away a moment and tell me something I want to know.”

What could a boy like Harry possibly tell Bella that she could want to

know!

Harry’s own huge satisfaction in the incident was cruelly damped upon

Bella’s saying: “Does your mother still love stumps?”

“Stumps! Love s-stumps!” he muttered, in amazement.

“Yes. You haven’t forgotten how she always kept her pencils till they

were so little nobody else could have held on to them.”

“Oh, that kind. Yes. Stumps! I see.”

“Well, does she dote on them as much as ever? Does she pick them out of

the fender, when Mr. Mar has thrown his away? Does she still say: ‘Well,

_I’m_ not so well off that I can put a thing in the fire that’s only

half-used?’ Does she do that the same as ever, or are you all too rich

now?”

Harry laughed. “Oh, we’ll never be so rich that mother won’t use a pencil

to its last grasp.”

“Well, then, I’ve got the very thing for her! A nice gold one—pencil, you

know. But rather a stump, too. See?—just her size!”

Harry looked doubtfully down upon the somewhat massive pencil-case which

Bella had drawn from her pocket and was telescoping in and out. “That’s

an awfully fine one, but I can’t quite imagine mother giving up her—”

“Well, look here,” interrupted Bella, “Mrs. Mar’s a person you can’t take

risks with. Do you mind going up-stairs and showing her this? Just ask

her what she thinks of it—as though I’d brought it to you, you know.”

Harry departed on the errand, while Bella returned to the others, but her

emissary was back directly with a doubtful face, and Mrs. Mar following

not far behind.

“Well?” Bella demanded in an undertone.

“Oh—a—I asked her if she didn’t think it was an awfully fine one, and all

she said was: ‘The Lord was very good. He had delivered her many years

ago from gold pencils.’”

“What on earth does she mean?”

“Haven’t the ghost—’Sh!”

“Oh, how do you do, dear Mrs. Mar!” Bella flew to embrace the lady, who

received the advance with self-possession, but not without a glint of

pleasure.

Harry still stood with the intended tribute in his hand. Mrs. Mar’s eye

fell upon it critically.

“Is it true—a—you don’t think much of gold pencils?” hazarded Bella.

“Oh, if you’re a person of leisure—”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“It’s a pursuit in itself, keeping a gold pencil going.”

“Oh, no. Look. This one goes beautifully.” Bella took it from Harry and

shot it in and out.

“That’s just its wiliness. Wait till you _need_ it.”

“Really this one’s very good. It’s warranted—”

“_I’ll_ warrant it’ll always be wanting a new lead. Especially at the

moment when you can’t possibly stop to niggle about with fitting one

in. Then you’ll put the thing away till you can take an afternoon off

just to get your handsome gold pencil into working order again. And when

you’ve done that and gone thoroughly into the subject, you’ll find there

isn’t a store on the Pacific coast that keeps your size leads. No lead

in any store will ever fit your pencil. Then you’ll write to New York to

a manufactory. Then you’ll wait a month, maybe two. Then, by the time

you’ve got them, you’ll find the pencil has forgotten how to assimilate

leads. It will break them off short and spit them out. If you try to

discipline the pencil, it’ll turn sulky and refuse to open. Or it stays

open and refuses to shut.”

“I assure you, Mrs. Mar, _this_ one—”

“And I assure you, Miss Bella Wayne, that even if you’re under the

special favor of Providence, and none of these things happen, you’ll

still find you can never get the work out of a twenty-dollar gold pencil

that you can out of a five-cent cedar.”

Bella was catching Harry’s eye and trying not to laugh.

“And remember what I tell you,” Mrs. Mar wound up, “you’ll have to treat

that gold pencil as you treat Mrs. Harrington Trennor, with reverence and

awe. If you don’t you’ll be sorry. If you lean on it, it will collapse.

If you do anything but admire it, it will teach you better.” Bella

opened her lips—Mrs. Mar stopped her with, “Unless you come to my way of

thinking, you’ll use that pencil in fear and trembling till the merciful

grave offers you a refuge from your slavery. As I told Harry”—she

buttoned the last button on her new gloves (why hadn’t Bella brought

her anything as sensible as gloves!) and she drew down her cuff with

a business-like air—“the Lord has delivered me from many snares; gold

pencils among the rest!” And she marched off toward the gate.

“Oh, mother,” said Hildegarde, at her side, “how could you! That dear

little Bella brought the beautiful gold pencil for you all the way from

Europe.”

“Do you suppose I didn’t guess that? Good-by!” She looked back and nodded

to Bella. “I’ve got to go to the missionary meeting now, but I’ll see you

at supper.”

“Oh, and you’ll tell me the rest then?” asked the wicked Bella, with an

innocent look.

“The rest!” Mrs. Mar glanced sharply over her shoulder as she laid her

hand on the latch of the gate. “There is no rest for anybody who depends

on a contrivance like that. Whenever I see a person with a gold pencil, I

know it won’t be long before she’s asking me to lend her my wooden stump.

As a rule she likes my wooden stump so well she walks off with it.”

As Mrs. Mar vanished round the corner, Bella gave way to suppressed

chuckles. Impossible to think she had a care in the world greater than a

rejected gold pencil.

“Yes, Hildegarde. I’m coming directly; only Trenn hasn’t given me a spray

of lemon verbena yet, to console me for the scandalous way his mother

treats me. Don’t you remember you _always_ give me lemon verbena when

we’re in the garden?” She showed no impatience when Trenn prolonged the

time-honored process—not a bit of it, went on laughing and chattering

there in the sunshine and telling how they thought in England that the

American girl was only keeping up the transatlantic reputation for

“telling tall stories,” when Bella had said that verbena at home was a

tree, and grew to the second-story window. Then having undone in half an

hour any good of peace regained by the “Mar boys” through her absence and

engagement, Miss Bella found her way up-stairs.

Her vivacity fell visibly from the moment she crossed the threshold of

Hildegarde’s familiar little room. But she commented favorably upon the

new home-worked counterpane, and then, as though without seeing it,

walked past the familiar old altar-table, with its ferny background and

the roses ranged below. There was the big silver locket hung above, like

some peasant’s votive offering at a foreign shrine, and down there in

front of the massed roses was that other picture, that had been new only

a year ago, when Bella’s happiness was born.

She went straight to the window and stood quite silent, looking down upon

Hildegarde’s flower borders. Then without turning round, “Will you do

something for me?”

“What?”

“Take that picture away. The locket, too.”

“Oh, Bella! Is it as bad as that?”

“You’ll put them out of sight?”

“Yes, yes; of course I will.”

“_Now!_” She might as well have said: I won’t turn round until they’re

gone.

Hildegarde opened a drawer. “I’ll put them in here till things come right

again.”

“Things aren’t ever coming right.”

“Bella!”

Not till she heard the drawer shut did the girl turn from the window, and

Hildegarde could see that the small face was quivering.

“Bella, dear!” Her friend swept to her on a sudden wave of pity. “It will

all come right.”

But the younger girl drew back. Although her tears were brimming she

spoke with a certain half-choked hardness: “I’ve hurried mother back as

fast as boats and trains could bring us; just to be with you again, but

not to hear you say that. I wanted to be with you just because you will

know better. Hildegarde—I—I’d like to stay with you awhile. May I?”

“I want nothing so much—we all want you.”

“Trenn, too?” she actually laughed through her tears. What a queer

creature.

“Trenn, too. Only”—Hildegarde glanced from the empty place on the

altar-table, to the shut drawer—“only you’ll be kind enough not to break

Trenn’s heart as well.”

“As well as my own?”

Hildegarde’s face grew hard with the words, “As well as Jack Galbraith’s.”

Bella, too, was grave enough now; “I haven’t broken his heart. But—I’ve

got a crack in my own. Only”—she lifted her pretty eyes with an air

almost of panic—“only nobody else is to know. You”—she came nearer and

laid a nervous hand on Hildegarde’s firm arm—“you must help me to keep

everybody from knowing.”

“Dear,” was all Hildegarde’s answer, but she leaned her cheek against

Bella’s thin face.

“And there’s another thing,” the younger girl went on a little

feverishly, still clinging to Hildegarde’s arm, “I hate talking about it.”

“Of course. Just at first, it must be—”

“No, it isn’t ‘of course’ and it’s not only at first. It’s for always.

Most girls talk their love affairs to tatters. I’ve noticed that. I want

you to help me to—to keep my—” Her voice went out upon a sudden flood of

tears. Hildegarde drew her into the window-seat and sat down beside her.

They were silent for a time, until Bella laid her wet face down on her

friend’s shoulder with, “Mind, Hildegarde! We aren’t to talk about it.

Not even you and I. John Galbraith is too—too—” She raised her head, drew

her small hand across her eyes, and then sprang up and faced the window,

as if some enemy without had challenged her. “It may be that I _don’t_

understand what a great man he is, as Mr. Borisoff says. But, at least, I

know he’s not the sort of person to be chattered over.”

Hildegarde remembered with a sting how for years she had “chattered”

with Galbraith for her theme. And she hadn’t little Bella’s excuse.

Yes, it was always like this. She was for ever stumbling upon something

dignified and fine in Butterfly Bella.

The pretty tear-stained face was lifted to the sunlight, and the childish

red mouth, so used to laughter, was pitifully grave, as Bella, staring up

into the square of sky over Hildegarde’s head said: “He is up there!”

“Jack!” Hildegarde exclaimed in a half-whisper.

“John Galbraith,” said Bella. “He is way up there, and I won’t be the one

to pull him down.”

“Oh-h. I was half afraid you meant he was dead.”

“As good as dead.”

Fear took fresh hold on the older girl. He is going to marry some one

else, Hildegarde said to herself. Yes, yes; as she looked at poor Bella’s

face, she was sure of it. And now the slim little figure had sunk on its

knees. She leaned against her friend for support. But she looked out

across Hildegarde’s shoulder, searching space through tears. Hildegarde

held tight the childish-looking hands, and asked the last question she

was ever to put about the common hero of their girlhood. “Where is he?”

she said.

“He’s gone off with Mr. Borisoff somewhere.”

“You mean you don’t know where?”

“Somewhere in the arctic.” She hid her face in Hildegarde’s lap.

They sat so a long, long time.

* * * * *

In spite of her year’s absence, Bella found nothing much changed in the

Valdivia situation, except that the Mar boys had “got on” more than ever,

and that their father’s form of progress seemed still more strikingly to

consist in “getting on” in years.

It was a long time since his wife had given him the credit for doing more

than his share at the bank with a view to promotion to be head cashier,

or even a “silent partner.” Each time a vacancy occurred some one else

had stepped into it; Louis Cheviot had been the last. But Mrs. Mar

learned through the years that the reason her husband accepted increased

tasks was that he was born to bear burdens, as the sparks to fly upward.

If any extra work was “going,” so to speak, it gravitated unerringly to

Nathaniel Mar. As to the question of his reward, what would be gained by

giving a better position to a man who in any crisis could be depended

on to do all the work of a higher office, and never ask for increased

emolument? The only person who ever hinted such a thing to the Trennors

had been Cousin Harriet. The Trennor Brothers’ success (which was

proverbial in Valdivia) had long extended to avoidance of Cousin Harriet.

Certainly Mr. Mar’s life-long ill-luck brought out more clearly the fact

of his boys’ early prosperity. Not that it was enormous as yet, though

quite sufficient to have enabled them to marry, had they so chosen.

Mrs. Mar’s satisfaction in her sons was checkered by the fact that each

of these otherwise reasonable and enterprising young men clung to his

boyish infatuation for Bella Wayne, long after their boyhood had gone

the way of the years. It certainly did seem as though not till one or

both were cut out by her marrying some one else, would either Trenn or

Harry look at any of the girls Mrs. Mar considered more desirable. Not

that the boys’ mother had been able wholly to escape the general Mar

devotion to the disturber of their peace, but as the seasons passed, and

Bella rejected one swain after another, it became increasingly vexatious

to Mrs. Mar that her sons should not realize and amend the stupidity

of caring about a girl who was more and more under suspicion of being

handicapped by a silly passion for a mad fool who had given up the

substance for the shadow, and had met his due reward—being now these many

months lost in the arctic ice.

* * * * *

Hildegarde’s theory that since the unhappy issue of the love affair,

Bella had greater need of her friend than ever before, and Hildegarde’s

own consequent inaccessibility to others was the cause of some

restiveness on Cheviot’s part. His old friendliness for Bella had

vanished. He spoke of her with a humorous disparagement that did him

ill-service with Hildegarde. But he was grave enough sometimes.

“I never get a word alone with you, nowadays,” he said one night, as he

sat smoking on the steps of the porch at Hildegarde’s feet, while Bella

walked about the garden with Trenn. Hildegarde made some perfunctory

answer, and they sat silent for a time.

The light wind brought up waves of fragrance from the tangle of roses

under Hildegarde’s window, and the little path stretched away to

indefiniteness in the starlight, till it was lost long before it reached

the garden’s end. The limits of the narrow inclosure, so sharply drawn

by day, were nobly enlarged, lost even, at this hour, in the dim reaches

of green turned silver and black, as the moon came over the tops of the

conifers.

Down by the arbor vitæ hedge growing things that Hildegarde had planted

sent their souls to her across the lawn, piercing the heavier air of

roses with arrowy shafts of spicy sweetness.

On such a night no one is alone. Where two go down a darkling walk,

or sit on the steps in the dusk, others gather round them. Invisible

presences—the singers, the beautiful ones, the stern doers of great

deeds—join us common folk, and give us a share in their glory or their

steadfast pain. Hopes of our own, that look too large by day—too dim and

inaccessible, they come walking in our garden at such an hour, beckoning

us or looking, smiling, on. Living men, rumored to be far away, suddenly

stand before us. Women who have been long aloof draw near. All the

barriers go down. Even the dead come home.

John Galbraith was down there, where Bella’s white gown shone among the

trees, and John Galbraith was sitting between those other two on the

steps.

And Cheviot knew it.

Hildegarde was reminded of the visible presence by his saying, in a low

voice, that he understood the reason of his ill-success with her.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Bella told me. Years ago. When she was so little you thought she—”

“Told you what?”

“That you had been in love with John Galbraith since you were sixteen.”

“But you must see that’s absurd. I’ve never even seen him!”

“I wish to God you had! Then you might get over it.”

Hildegarde roused herself to say with equal emphasis, “You are really

talking the greatest foolishness—”

“Haven’t you got his picture in your room this moment?”

“I have the picture he—had taken for Bella.”

“Before he ever met Bella you had a picture of Galbraith. You used to

wear it. Bella said—”

“You seem to forget you’re talking about what happened when I was a

little school-girl, and about an old—a very old friend of my family. We

all have pictures of Mr. Galbraith—and, why, there’s one of you there,

too.”

“On the altar?”

(Oh, Bella! Bella! How could you!) “The one on the flower-table was put

there because Bella asked me to. It’s not there any more. And while it

was, I looked upon it as the future husband of my dearest friend.”

But the description of Bella sounded suddenly ironic. It hurt. For

Cheviot was the man who all along had laughed at girls’ friendships, and

all along he had known that Bella was capable of—

“It isn’t that I couldn’t forgive you for not being in love with me,”

he said. “But for being in love with a photograph and a packet of

letters—_no!_ that wasn’t easy. At the same time I knew well enough that

if your life hadn’t been so narrow, you wouldn’t have been so at the

mercy of this one romantic figure in it. If you’d been able to travel,

or even to go to the university—if you’d had _any_ other door open, you

wouldn’t have looked so long out of that one window.”

A scrap of one of Mrs. Browning’s letters flew across her mind—the dearer

somehow for being a little incoherent, not fitted together at all, yet

finely consequent to the inner spirit—those words: “The pleasantest place

in the house is the leaning out of the window.”

Ah, it was very true of the Mar house.

“And your mother,” Cheviot went on, “always ready to puncture any

home-blown bubble with the needle of her wit; mercilessly critical, for

fear her children should have too low standards; ready to flay anybody

alive in the cause of education. Never letting you rest satisfied for

a moment with the attainable—you must always be reaching out—reaching

out—and when you reached out you touched Galbraith.”

How strangely well he knew—this man. It was odd, but she could never

again think him obtuse, at any rate. That comfort was gone.

“I was even sorry for you while the engagement lasted,” the low voice

went on, unmindful of the uneasy stir of the figure sitting above him in

the dusk. He took the half-smoked cigar from his lips and laid it by the

pillar. Over the edge of the porch the tip shone red. “I saw how hard it

was for you; you had been weaving romances round Galbraith for years—you

had looked upon him for so long as your special property—” Hildegarde

drew back into the deeper shadow. But by his own suffering urged to win

a companion in pain, he persisted: “And you thought if it had been _you_

he had met, it would have been you that he—” Hildegarde’s skirts rustled

as if she were getting up—“Look here, I’ve told you before you’ve got a

genius for truth—I’m treating you on that basis.” She said nothing, but

she sat still. “There was a moment,” Cheviot’s voice was unnaturally low,

“last spring, when I knew I was gaining ground with you. It was the

day I came back from Mexico. I came here straight from the station, and

you—you—” She heard him strike his hands suddenly together in the dusk,

and a curious excitement took hold of her. “When I went home, I found the

invitation to Bella’s wedding. It had been lying there for days. Then I

understood. You had had all those days and nights to get accustomed to

realizing it was the end of the old—where are you going? Can’t you even

bear to have me speak of it this once!”

The white figure was still again.

“Oh, I understood!” He picked up the cigar again. “I felt just the same

as you did. I knew the ghost that had stood so long between us was

suddenly gone. He had moved out of the way, and you could see that I was

there. For those next days you were—you were—I was full of hope. Then

came word that Bella had broken her engagement.”

“No, that the marriage was postponed.”

He waited a moment, seemed about to speak, and then, instead of saying

anything, with a sharp movement he threw his half-smoked cigar across the

whitening silver of the path into the inky blotch the shrubbery made.

Hildegarde’s eyes followed the flying red light till, against a tree

trunk, it fell in a splash of sparks, and was swallowed up in shadow.

“I shan’t forget,” Cheviot went on, still on that low restrained note,

“the look in your face as you said: ‘I never thought they were suited to

one another. It would never have done.’”

“_Did_ I say that?”

“Yes, and I looked up and I saw the ghost was there again, and presently

I saw he wasn’t a ghost any longer, but a real man. An active expectation

on your part—”

“No, no.” The voice was less denial than beseeching.

“Yes, a _plan_.”

The hands that were gripping the wicker chair pulled her quickly to her

feet. “Bella!” she called to the white flicker by the dial. “It’s getting

late!”

Cheviot stood up, too. “On your honor, Hildegarde—” Was it the moonlight

blanched her, or was she indeed so white? His heart smote him—but, “On

your honor can you deny it?” he demanded.

“No,” she said, with sudden passion; “I don’t deny it.” And while her

words should have steeled him, her voice brought a lump to his throat.

“You mean,” he asked, huskily, “to wait till John Galbraith comes back?”

“I know it’s quite mad—but there! A thing can take you like that. You

_can’t_ change.”

CHAPTER VIII

With the precision of clockwork, every day of his life but Sundays,

Nathaniel Mar walked down the main street of Valdivia to the bank. People

who lived out of sight of the City Hall timepiece, set their watches by

the appearance of the lame man with the stick. He never varied the route,

any more than he altered his time, and both had been exactly the same for

twenty-eight years.

The other bank cashiers (few of them over thirty) said that, in their

opinion, Mr. Mar had hung on quite long enough. They did not hesitate to

add that his post would have fallen to a younger man years ago had Mar

not been “a sort of relation.” Even so it was pretty steep that an old

codger of sixty should be blocking up the way like that. A bank was no

place for the superannuated, unless, of course, a man was a director.

So acute was the hearing of the old codger (who was not yet sixty) that

sotto-voce observations of this sort had, from time to time, reached his

ears.

He saw all about him men, younger than himself, turned out of positions

they had occupied, with usefulness and integrity, for years, and for

no other reason than to make way for some “boy” in his early twenties.

Men of his own standing had from time to time in the past decade raged

hopelessly against this tendency in a nation, where the great god,

Efficiency, demands the fine flower of each man’s life, and looks with

disfavor upon lined faces and whitening hair, even when the capacity for

service is unimpaired. It is part of the doctrine of “_show me_.” There

being any good, or any force not capable of being “shown”—well, it was

doubtful. Best not take chances.

Mar had sympathized with his contemporaries for being elbowed out of

their places, but he had smiled at one or two who had suffered the common

fate of the American clerk, in spite of having dyed their hair, and worn

jaunty pince-nez instead of “good honest spectacles.” Nevertheless,

Mar’s own secret uneasiness—not being assuaged by hair dye or dissipated

by pince-nez—took the form of making him the more ready to be the

Trennor Brothers’ pack-horse, unconsciously the more eager to oblige any

and everybody at the bank, to “show” from Monday morning to Saturday

afternoon how indispensable he was. He knew they could get no one to do

what he did with the same care and assiduity for the same salary. His

astonishment was, therefore, hardly less than his chagrin, when he found

upon his desk, one morning, a letter from the firm “terminating their

long and pleasant connection upon the usual notice.”

In the bitterness of that hour he felt that nothing he ever had suffered

before had mattered so vitally. As long as a man has work he can bear

trouble and disappointment—life without work—it was something not to be

faced. For the work, little by little, had devoured everything else,

narrowed down his friendships, cut off his recreations, produced a

brain-fag that made him unfit even for reading anything but newspapers.

He set instantly about finding another post. The story of the days that

followed—the writing to and interviewing whippersnapper young managers of

flourishing concerns, and of being more or less cavalierly “turned down,”

as the slang phrase went—it would make a book of itself; a tragic and

significant book to boot, and one essentially “American.”

The Mar boys behaved very well. _They_, at least, were not surprised.

They had, in point of fact, expected the occurrence long before.

What they had not expected was that the old man “would take it so mighty

hard.” Why, he could scarcely be more cut up if he were alone in the

world—dependent entirely upon his own exertions—instead of having two

fine go-ahead sons, who were getting on in life so rapidly that it really

wasn’t a matter of vital importance whether the old man did anything or

not; for they had every intention of being good to their father.

They told him so. And he had not shown himself grateful. And _still_ they

meant to be “good” to him. They were “mighty nice young men.”

* * * * *

Nathaniel Mar saw clearly by the time the “notice” was up, that he lagged

superfluous. There was no opening for him anywhere.

The first morning that he had no right to go down to the bank was one of

the most difficult he had known. He went out just the same, at precisely

the same moment, and came in at the usual time. No one knew where he had

spent those hours, but he looked tired and ill when he sat down to the

midday meal. After it was over, he said he thought he would “go up and

lie down.” He had never done such a thing before in his life, at that

hour of the day. The following mornings he spent at his writing-table

in the dining-room, and although there were no screaming children there

now, and the room was bright and pretty, he sat miserably, day after day,

turning over old letters and papers, till in despair he would get up and

take down a book to read. But his thoughts were all “down at the bank.”

Mrs. Mar dashed in and out, called brisk directions to the Chinaman,

who presided now in the kitchen, and when there was nothing else to do,

she would fly at the sewing-machine. This appeared to be the kind of

mechanism which was worked with the whole human body. The hands traveling

briskly along with the moving seam, head going like a mandarin’s, knees

up, knees down, Mrs. Mar pedaled and buzzed away.

Her husband seldom spoke. Having retired within himself directly after

the breakfast things were cleared away, he seemed to be averse from

making the smallest movement while his wife was in the room. He sat

there intensely still, even turning the leaf of his book only at long

intervals, surreptitiously, without a sound. It was as though, by a

death-like stillness, he should prove that he was not there. He was

really down at the bank—his motionlessness seemed to say.

As if Mrs. Mar divined this mental ruse of his, and felt a need to unmask

it, she would look at him sideways, and “What are you doing?” she would

ask briskly.

“Reading.”

“That old Franklin again? Why, you’ve read it three or four times

already!” No answer. “Why don’t you get something up-to-date from the

library?” Still no response. “Content just to sit _and sit_!” she

would comment inwardly. Then aloud, “Don’t they want a manager up at

Smithson’s?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you try for the secretaryship of the New Pickwick?”

“Monty Fellowes has got it.”

“Ah, well, I suppose Monty Fellowes went the length of asking for it.”

Nathaniel Mar had also gone that length, though the post was beneath a

man of his powers. But he could not tell over again at home the tale of

his failures. Better she should think he hadn’t tried.

But, oh, the very look of him sat upon her spirit, and still she looked.

“You’ll be ill if you stay in the house so much. Remember you’ve had a

walk twice a day for going on thirty years.” No answer. His immobility

made it a positive necessity for her to get up and poke the fire

vigorously, or do something with might and main. That was a thing _he_

had never tried in his life—to do something with might and main! And that

was why he was stranded like this now. A man of only fifty-eight! Why,

she herself—Harriet T. Mar—was fifty-nine. And just see how _she_ took

hold of existence—very much as she gripped the poker. Oh, it was a trial

living in the same house, and all day long in the same room with a “logy”

man! He was more sodden with failure every day he lived. Misfortune

acted upon him like an opiate. Ha! If she—Harriet T. Mar—were _ninety_,

misfortune would sting her into action. At the mere thought she sprang up

and stung her husband, or the imperturbable Mongol in the kitchen, or

the gentle Hildegarde. But truth to tell, though that girl _looked_ such

a tender, simple creature, it was as little rewarding to wrestle with

Hildegarde as with Mar, or the stolid Chinaman.

Indeed, the more the mother bustled the quieter grew the girl—not at

first consciously as a form of protest, but by a process of natural

reaction that was largely responsible for Hildegarde’s seeming calm to

the verge of insensibility.

Mrs. Mar never wholly realized how much to the mother’s exuberant energy

the daughter owed her impassive air. These influences playing about

sensitive people produce a curious rhythm in family life. Nathaniel Mar’s

supineness made his wife seize the reins and ceaselessly whip up the

horses of their car. Mrs. Mar’s frantic urging of the pace, the dust and

noise and whip-cracking of her progress, produced not merely a yearning

for peace in Hildegarde’s mind, but a positive physical need to simulate

it. People talk much of the value of good example, forgetting that we are

sometimes shown there is nothing so salutary as a bad example, since out

of example is wrought not merely the impulse toward imitation, but often

a passionate realization of the advantage of “another way.”

There was always in the Mar house one person with an eye upon the

clock—why need you wear a watch?

No need for you to spur on a servant, or make example of a tardy errand

boy. There was always Mrs. Mar to do these things with a swingeing

efficacy. Those who live with the Mrs. Mars of the world do not realize

that they owe their own reputation for sweetness largely to the caustic

temper of some one else. Under Mrs. Mar’s roof you may “cultivate

kindness” and not suffer for it. Away from her drastic influence, you

yourself will have to apportion grace and discipline more evenly.

So various is life that we have sometimes a chance of learning from

people’s vices what their virtues could never so deeply have impressed.

Something of this the “slow” girl arrived at.

The day Mrs. Mar and Hildegarde went off to spend a week down at the

ranch with the Waynes, the two came into the dining-room to say good-by

to Mr. Mar. It was to be “a house-party,” and Cheviot and Mr. Mar had

been asked, too. Cheviot had accepted—“from Saturday night till Monday

morning”—but Mar had declined to go for any length of time whatever.

“A body would think he had affairs too important to leave! Well, good-by,

Nathaniel. Don’t let hot cinders fall on the new hearth-rug. Take care of

yourself, and I _hope_ you’ll have some news for me when I come home.”

Upon their return the following week, he was found sitting in exactly the

same place, in the precise attitude, and one might almost think with the

same old book on his knee open at the self-same page.

“Upon my soul!” ejaculated Mrs. Mar, stopping short on the threshold,

while Hildegarde went forward to kiss her father. “No need to ask if

you’ve found anything to do! You haven’t even remembered to put on a

little coal.” She fell upon the poker and punished the flagging fire.

“Have you been sitting there like that ever since I went away?”

Mar drew himself out from Hildegarde’s embrace, took firm hold on his

walking-stick and rose to his feet. He looked huge, as he towered above

the two women, and rather wonderful, as both of them had often thought of

late. Even the flippant Bella had said, “He’s more and more like Moses

and the Prophets.”

“As to sitting here”—he looked down sternly on his wife—“you may as well

understand, Harriet, that this is the house I propose to sit in till I

go out lying down. Only not in this room. I agree with you as to the

unfitness of that.” He limped over to the kitchen door, opened it, and

said, “John, will you light a fire in the young gentlemen’s bedroom.”

Mrs. Mar stared a moment, and then went up-stairs to take off her things.

It was no secret between her and Hildegarde that “after all” they stood

a little in awe of the head of the house. The girl, however, knowing

herself a privileged character, attempted to smooth things over with a

little jest. She linked her arm in his, and told how her mother, on the

way down in the train, had produced the book rest and a minute pencil

from her traveling-bag, had fastened the rest on the back of the seat in

front of her, to the surprise and inconvenience of the occupants, had set

up the French biography, put on her spectacles, got out her crochet and

read her “Lucien Pérey” and crocheted for dear life (or for the Hindus

rather) every minute of the time that she was being rushed along by the

express to Fern Lea; “and Louis Cheviot leaned over and whispered in my

ear, ‘Your mother’s losing time with her feet.’”

But Mar’s faint smile was pretty grim. “Your mother has all the virtues,

my dear, but she’s a woman of an implacable industry.”

With the help of John Chinaman and the grocer’s boy, that very afternoon

Mr. Mar got his big desk established in “the spare chamber” that had been

Trenn’s and Harry’s room, and still was theirs when one or other of them

was in town,—which was often enough whenever Bella was staying at the

Mars’.

But whether it was that uncomfortable as the old quarters had been, it

disturbed Mar to change them after thirty years, certainly, in spite

of his pronouncement to his wife, he did not “sit” at home as much

after this. He made a habit of going down town after breakfast, to the

San Joaquin Hotel “to read the papers,” really to smoke in peace, and

exchange views on the political situation, or the Cuban atrocities, with

chance travelers or old habitués.

Then came the day when Spanish incompetence and cruelty found a rival

excitement. In a remote region of British North America gold had been

discovered. The veterans in the San Joaquin reading-room pooh-poohed the

notion—all but Nathaniel Mar.

From the beginning he took the Klondike seriously. Not long before

everybody was doing the same. Instead of quickly exhausting itself the

excitement grew. Had diamonds been discovered in Dakota, the matter would

have been a nine days’ wonder, and then died as the easily accessible

fields were reached and appropriated. Paradox as it might appear, it was

owing to the forbidding circumstances under which those pioneers of ’97

found their treasure, that made the appeal “Klondike” so irresistible to

the marvel-loving fancy of the world. The papers overflowed with accounts

of the awful hardship and the huge reward—combination irresistible since

history began. And if any Missourian said “show me!” he _was_ shown. The

actual nuggets and the veritable dust, displayed in a bank window, made

would-be miners of men as they passed, or as they meant to pass and stood

riveted, staring, seeing there a type of what they might attain unto, if

only they had much courage and a little money for an outfit. Who lacked

the first? Who could not, for so alluring a purpose, collect the second?

The trains to the ports of San Francisco, Seattle, Victoria, were

crammed; the north-bound ships overflowed. Unenterprising, indeed, any

store on the Pacific coast that did not advertise some essential to a

Klondike outfit. People talked with as much earnestness of the science of

life under arctic conditions as they before had discussed Spanish misrule

in the South. Even for the vast majority who had no hope of being able

to join the rush, the great problem of transportation and the value of

evaporated food stuffs, obscured many an issue nearer home.

The one man that he was on fairly intimate terms with, yet to whom Mar

had not mentioned the new craze, was Cheviot. It was the kind of thing he

would be certain to scoff at. People at the San Joaquin had noticed that

scoffing at the Klondike annoyed Mr. Mar, and they wondered a little. Mar

had quite made up his mind not to give Cheviot’s skepticism a chance for

expression. If you were unwary you might easily think, “So sympathetic

and understanding a young man can’t help taking fire over this burning

question.” And then Cheviot would show you how easily he could help it.

Watch him playing with his little nephews and nieces and you’d say, “So

kind to children, he will be kind to the childishness in me.” And behold

he wasn’t. He was an “awfully good fellow,” but he expected a man to be

grown up—and few are.

Mar’s anticipation of what would be Cheviot’s views about the new

craze were very much Hildegarde’s own. Her astonishment was therefore

well-nigh speechless, when, on the occasion of his next visit, after ten

minutes’ general conversation in the garden, Cheviot said, “By the way,

Hildegarde, I’ve come to tell you I’m going to the Klondike.”

“You!” and she stared at him in silence till she could reassure herself

by saying, “Nonsense!”

“It may be nonsense, but I’m going.”

“You _can’t_ be in earnest!”

“Quite.”

She stood, watering-pot in hand, her big eyes wider than ever he had seen

them, and a look on her face certainly disturbed, even annoyed.

It wasn’t very nice, this feeling as if the bottom were dropping out of

existence. He had no right to make her feel like that.

Very neatly he switched off the head of a withered flower with his stick,

and began, “The Klondike—”

“It’s rather horrid of you,” Hildegarde interrupted, “but of course I

know—you—you’re only seeing how I’d take it—”

“I shan’t be here to see how you’ll take it.”

She set down the watering can. “You surely won’t dream of doing anything

so foolish—so—so—dangerous.”

He didn’t answer, and she walked beside him down the path to the lower

gate. When they got beyond the group of conifers, she stopped. “You

simply mustn’t.”

“Why do you say that? You don’t care where I go.”

“You know quite well I do.”

He didn’t even look at her, and he shook his head. Then, after a little

pause, “Who knows, you might even come to feel differently about

things—if—if—”

“Do you mean”—Hildegarde drew herself up—“if you came home a millionaire?”

“If I didn’t come home at all.”

“What?”

“At least for a long time, like—”

“I certainly hope”—nervously she forestalled the utterance of that

other name—“that you won’t do anything so disappointing to all your

old friends. It’s the kind of fortune-hunting expedition for the

ne’er-do-well. It isn’t for a man like you.”

“Well, I’ve thought it over,” he said, “and I’ve come to the conclusion

that I’m best out of Valdivia for a time. You see, Hildegarde, you’re too

used to me.”

“I’m _not_ ‘too used.’”

“Too certain of me—yes, you are. I’ve been uncommon helpless in the

matter. I’ve got nothing of the actor in me. I can’t be near you, and

inspire you with the smallest doubt as to how things are with me. The one

thing I can do is _not_ to be near. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

She wrinkled up her white forehead with a harassed attempt to keep her

wits about her, and not be betrayed into rash professions. “You can go

away from Valdivia for a while, if that idea is so attractive, without

going to the horrible Klondike.”

“Yes, I could go to Pasadena or some seaside resort, so that I could come

running back, as I did last year from Monterey, on the first hint that

you might be missing me a little. No, all that’s been tried. It doesn’t

work. I must go to some place where I _can’t_ take the first train back;

where I won’t live through the day expecting a letter from you. It isn’t

easy in these times for anybody to be really ‘out of reach.’ When we all

know that we’ve only to go to the nearest telegraph office for news, we

can’t know what it would be like utterly to lose some one—unless death

teaches us. The nearest approach to the sort of thing I mean—this side of

Kingdom Come—is the Klondike.”

“Oh, Klondike, Klondike! I’m sick of the very sound of those two

syllables. There’s something uncanny about them. People have gone mad

since they heard the ugly word, but not you!”—to give her words more than

common emphasis, to insure winning the day, she laid her hand on his arm,

and said again, with soft deliberation—“Not you, Louis.”

“You’d like me to stay here and suffer. Yes, I know that.” Her hand

dropped from his sleeve. “But I shan’t stay here,” he went on unmoved,

“and pretty soon I shan’t suffer—so much.”

From that old, recurrent touch of hardness in his voice and air, she

once again recoiled. “Well, I’ve said all I mean to say. You must please

yourself.”

“Pleasure is of course what one expects in the Klondike.”

They walked in absolute silence back to the porch. Hildegarde went in

at once, saying “good-night” over her shoulder, and quite sure that as

usual he would follow her. But he stayed behind for fully twenty minutes,

talking with Mr. Mar, who was smoking out there in the dusk. Hildegarde

turned up the electric light in the parlor, and moved about the room,

picking up and putting down one book after another. How many of them he

had given her—that provoking person who stayed so long talking to her

father! By and by she heard her own name called. Was that her father? How

curious his voice sounded!

“Yes,” she answered, but made no great haste. When at last she reached

her father’s side, she couldn’t see where Cheviot was. She looked round

in the dim light, and a little sharply, “Has he gone?” she said. As the

words fell on the quiet air, she heard the gate shut. The sound jarred.

It gave her a sensation as of a being abandoned. The house was very quiet

to-night.

“Gone? Yes. Where’s your mother, Hildegarde?” Mar asked with unheard-of

briskness.

“She’s over at the Coxes’.”

“Ah!” A moment’s pause, and then, “To think of Cheviot! Cheviot of all

men! Weren’t you surprised?”

“You aren’t talking about the Klondike?”

“What else should I be talking of?” he demanded unreasonably, for after

all there were other topics.

“Do you think he really means it?” Hildegarde asked.

“_Means_ it?—with a year’s leave granted, and his ticket in his pocket?

He’s been getting ready all this week. That’s why we haven’t seen him.

Sails Wednesday.”

“Not—not really!”

“Off to ’Frisco to-morrow,” said her father, still in that odd brisk

voice—“four days to see about his outfit. He—it’s a queer world!—he said

Trenn had been into the bank this afternoon, and offered to grubstake

him. But Cheviot’s got money. So anything he finds will be his own.

Trenn! H’m! _Trenn!_” he repeated, as though he couldn’t get over it.

Then it seemed to dawn upon him that Hildegarde had been unprepared for

something else than her brother’s part in the affair. “I thought Cheviot

said he’d been talking to you about it—had said good-by.”

“I—I didn’t believe he was in earnest.”

“Why not?” demanded her father a little harshly, and then, perceiving

that her incredulity might have other grounds than disapproval of the

enterprise in itself, he said more gently: “He talks very sensibly about

it, my dear. A man can’t save much at the bank—he may go on for thirty

years and find—Cheviot has seen what that may come to. He gives himself

a nine months’ holiday, with the chance of its turning out the most

profitable nine months of his life. _I_ didn’t discourage him.”

Hildegarde sat down on the step. “Oh, you didn’t discourage him,” she

repeated dully. Behind her own sense of being wronged in some way, as

well as disappointed, she was conscious of an unwonted excitement in her

father.

He, sitting there in the dusk, puffing out great clouds of smoke, was

oblivious of everything except that the old pride of discovery had awaked

in him, and the fever of his youth came back.

“Even Cheviot! And think of _Trenn_!” That Trenn should be looking

about for some one to send to the North on this errand—it touched the

topmost pinnacle of the fabulous. And yet, why not? The country was

aflame. Thousands starting off on an uncertainty to try for the thing he,

Nathaniel Mar, had been certain of.

“Hildegarde, where is your mother?”

“I told you, at the Coxes’.”

“Oh, at the Coxes’.”

“Why, father?”

“Would you like to know the reason I didn’t discourage Cheviot from going

to the—”

“Yes, father,” said the girl dully.

“Then come nearer.”

She moved toward him. Feeling a little dreary, she came quite close. She

laid her head against the one strong knee.

In a vigorous undertone, the voice with new life in it told why Nathaniel

Mar didn’t blame any young man—there was more treasure in the North

than even the Klondiker dreamed. Mar had known it all along—and then

the story. In spite of the girl’s listlessness when he began, he could

feel directly that the thing was taking hold of her. She was intensely

still; that was because she was being “held,” and small wonder! It was a

better story than he had realized. It took hold of him even, who knew it

so well. Before he got to the end, his voice was shaking, and he leaned

forward thirsting to see an answering excitement in the young face at his

knee. But the darkness shrouded it, and he went on. He wished she would

speak or move. Always so still, that girl! Now he was telling her of his

home-coming from that barren coast in the North—explaining, excusing

what, by this new lurid light of the Klondike, seemed inexcusable—his

never going back. He tried to reconstruct for her the obstacles—huge,

insurmountable; the long illness, and the new wife; the post at the bank;

the children, poverty, skepticism and the obscuring dust of the years.

And lo! as he disturbed these ashes, he saw afresh the agonies they

hid—remembered with a growing chill, what had befallen before whenever he

told this story; saw the tolerant smile of the smug young bankers; saw

the dull embarrassment in Elihu Cox’s eye; heard Mrs. Mar leading the

family chorus, “You’ve got to _show_ me!”

Even Hildegarde might ask—he hastened to forestall the dreaded word.

“There was nothing to _show_,” he said, “absolutely nothing to prove it

wasn’t a dream.” And she made no sign that for her either it was more

than fantasy.

He wondered miserably why he had told her. “Of course it was all long

before anybody had heard of the Klondike,” he said, and he drew a heavy

breath. “The theory was, that geologically speaking, gold couldn’t exist

up there, and even people who weren’t geologists agreed it couldn’t be

got out if it _was_ there”—all the confidential earnestness had vanished

out of the voice, and he paused like one very weary. “Nobody believed—”

He tried to go on, and to speak as usual, but memory, master of the show,

brought up Trenn—Trenn with the look he had worn the day his father had

told him the great secret. Mar drew back into the deeper shadow. But the

critical boy face found his father out, and stung him in the dark.

He was an old fool. What had possessed him to rake it all up again. Oh,

yes, he said bitterly in his heart, there was one member of his family

who hadn’t yet smiled and said, “_Show me._ I’m from Missouri.” It was

Hildegarde’s turn.

“Well, my girl,” he ended miserably, “that’s the story that nobody

believed.”

Hildegarde lifted her head and put up her two hands, feeling in the dark

for his. But Mar shrank back. Not from Hildegarde herself could he in

that hour take mere sympathy, craving hopelessly as he did with the long

thirst of years a thing more precious than pity—the thing that he once

had had and had no more.

Like a man who utters his own epitaph, “I lost faith myself,” he said.

“But I have found it, father!” and there was joy as well as the sound of

tears in the thrilling young voice.

“Found—what did you say, Hildegarde?”

“That I believe the gold’s there, waiting!”

“Ah—h—h!” He bent over her with a sound that was almost a sob. “Then I—I

believe it, too!”

CHAPTER IX

Louis Cheviot was one of those who reached the Klondike in the autumn of

’97.

A lucky chance brought him the opportunity of going shares in a lay on

Bonanza, with a man whose fitness for “pardnership” Cheviot had tested

coming over the awful Pass and shooting the Hootalinqua Rapids.

The two had washed out ten thousand dollars apiece by the end of June.

They had the prospect of making an even better thing of it the next year.

Cheviot left his partner to carry on the development of the lease, and

for himself, turned his bronzed face homeward.

He was as certain now as before he had garnered this experience that for

wild life, _qua_ wild life, he had no taste. That it should be so was

partly, strange as it may sound, a result of the cool and balanced mixing

of the elements in him. He had no physical sluggishness to be sloughed

off by harsh impacts, no mental inertia to be hammered into action by

hard necessity, no crust of chrysalis that must be broken before the

winged life might emerge, no essential wildness of spirit that needed

training, no excess of ungoverned ardor that needed cooling in the

northern frosts.

And so it was that he was coming home with little gain but bullion, since

he had gone forth with smaller need than most of the lesson learnt in

chastening the body, or the lightening revelation of some crashing danger.

He could endure hardship with reasonable patience for some reasonable

end, but the gains of civilization were in his eyes too excellent to be

even temporarily abandoned without a sense of heavy deprivation, which

affected him like a loss of common dignity.

Even though he hadn’t one he loved the idea of home. He loved his friends

and all the friendlier aspect of the earth, gardens, ordered communities

of his kind, and all man’s device for socializing life and regulating the

unruliness of nature.

And there was Hildegarde—who had not answered either of his two letters.

Why was that? He felt a contraction of the heart as he refused to allow

himself to formulate surmise; yet if any one had come and said to him,

“Galbraith’s in Valdivia,” he would have felt it no surprise.

Some friends of his were going out by the Yukon River route. He knew

it to be unlikely that he should return to this part of the world. As

well see that more western aspect of it, too, since he might do so in

congenial company.

It was really the company that decided him—that was responsible for a

circumstance that changed the entire course of his own and several other

lives. Instead of going back as he had come, by the shorter way, he found

himself, at the end of July, with seventeen hundred miles of river behind

him waiting at the mouth of the Yukon for the San Francisco steamer.

He heard with surprise that there was a letter for him at the

post-office. The more strange, if true, since his coming to St. Michaels

was less than mere chance—it had been unlikely in the extreme.

However, upon demand, an envelop appeared in the window of the little

post-office. Before ever it reached the hand of the man waiting without,

he recognized Hildegarde’s writing. He tore it open to read a hurried

resumé of what she said she had already written him at length, to Dyea

and to Dawson, and now repeated, on the bare possibility of his taking

the American route home. For her father was just setting out by that same

route to the far North, and by the same ship that carried her letter.

His plan of campaign was not generally known, and all she could say with

certainty was that he would be at St. Michaels some time in August.

And she greatly hoped that if Cheviot should be passing that way, or

even if he found that he could arrange to go there without too great

personal cost, Hildegarde hoped, and even begged, that he would look

out for her father. She “quite approved,” Cheviot read with incredulous

eyes—(Hildegarde! who had thought the expedition mad for a man young

and sound as an oak)—she quite approved her father’s going. At the same

time she did not forget that he was no longer young, and being so lame

was at a disadvantage. “Good Lord! I should say so!” The upshot was that

she “lived upon the hope” that Cheviot would bring her news of Mr. Mar.

The ideal thing would be that they should come home together. If Cheviot

brought that about she would be “unendingly grateful.”

No syllable about Galbraith.

Cheviot went straight to the Alaska Commercial Company’s hotel and looked

through the names registered since the season opened. Not a Mar among

them. So the ship that brought the letter had not brought Mr. Mar—for

this was the only conceivable place he could have stayed in. It was no

small personal relief to Cheviot to conclude that wiser counsels had

prevailed.

The same afternoon it was noised about the office that a steamer had just

been sighted. After all, Mar might only be delayed! While most of the

population rushed down to the beach, Cheviot scribbled a hasty note and

handed it to the clerk.

“If a man of that name should come in on this ship—” he began.

“He hasn’t gone back yet,” interrupted the clerk, studying the

superscription.

“You don’t mean he’s here already?”

“Well, he _was_.”

“When? It can’t be the person I mean?”

“Lame man, about sixty? Yes, yes, remember him perfectly. Couldn’t quite

make him out, for he didn’t seem to care a tinker’s curse about getting

to the Klondike. The boys set him down finally as a sort of a missionary,

because” (with a laugh) “he seemed so ready to go the wrong way.”

“Which way?”

“Up the coast to Golovin Bay.” No, he hadn’t come back. A trader from

Kwimkuk, who had been down for supplies, said Mar was staying up there

at the Swedish Mission. That was all the clerk knew. He was turning the

pages back to the entries of the previous summer. “That’s the man!” And

there was Mar’s unmistakable signature staring Cheviot in the face.

“But that’s ’97,” he said bewildered. He pulled out Hildegarde’s letter,

and looked again at the date. It was a year old.

Shortie Hinkson stopped sweeping out the office to say: “One o’ them

missionary fellers come down here from Golovin Sat’day. No, he ain’t gone

back yit. I seen him only a while ago goin’ by the A.C. office.”

When a few minutes later, among the crowd down by the old Block House,

the missionary was run to earth, Cheviot found him a great tow-headed

Swede, looking as if he had been not so much cut out of wood as hacked

out, and with a very dull implement at that. Close at his elbow, and

appealed to now and then for verification of some statement, was a thin

little dark man, with glittering black eyes and a turn for silence.

The tall missionary was bargaining about some “canned stuff” with the

great A.C. Company’s agent, Captain Seilberg. This magnate, leaning

against one of the mounted cannon the Russians had left behind in ’67,

was looking through a spy-glass at the ship discernible on the far

horizon, while between ejaculatory oaths he “did business” with the

rugged Lutheran. Waiting for a chance to introduce himself, Cheviot

wondered aside to a bystander why those two talked English to each other.

“Oh, Seilberg’s a Norwegian.”

“No, a Dane,” put in another, overhearing.

“I thought,” said Cheviot, “they could all understand one another after a

fashion—all Scandinavians.”

“Scanda who? Well, anyway, they’re too thick on the ground in Alaska for

us to bother about fine distinctions.”

“Yes,” agreed the customs officer, as Cheviot pressed forward to speak

to the missionary, “so far as we’re concerned they’re all Scandahoojians

together.”

Certainly Mr. Christianson knew Mr. Mar. Mr. Mar was still at the Mission

House up at Kwimkuk. How to get there? The big missionary turned to his

silent companion, who still stood gloomily by. Mr. Björk and he wouldn’t

mind taking back a passenger in their boat. They were going just as soon

as they’d settled matters with Captain Seilberg.

“Vell, _I_ von’t keep you,” says the great man cavalierly, shutting up

the spy-glass with a snap. “Dat’s not de _Trush_, Got dammer!” and he

turned testily away. Mr. Christianson followed with words about rebate on

“damaged cans.” Mr. Björk followed Mr. Christianson, deaf to Cheviot’s

questions about Mar, eyes fixed in abstraction on the red-brown scoriæ

under foot.

* * * * *

The two “Scandahoojians” and their passenger left St. Michaels the next

day in the little sail-boat _St. Olaf_, managed with no small skill

by Mr. Björk. It was the rugged Christianson, however, who issued the

orders, and strangely enough, considering his aspect, supplied the social

element and the information. If you saw Christianson alone, you would

have thought him one of the grimmest works of God, but seeing him beside

Björk you would find him almost genial.

What chiefly occupied Cheviot, as the _St. Olaf_ sped through the windy

drizzle, was a growing wonder as to how Hildegarde’s father had come

to be stranded up here all these months, and how a man accustomed to

creature comforts, a cripple, and close on sixty—how had he endured the

conditions of life at “Golovin!” What _were_ the conditions at Golovin?

Curious to know, for Hildegarde would ask—afraid to know, for Hildegarde

must be answered, he kept seeing in flashes and as through the eyes of a

girl, all the probable harshness of the old man’s adventure.

Cheviot’s questions about Golovin were interrupted by Mr. Christianson

somewhat narrowly—eliciting an account of how the mission prospered; what

the native population was; how many were converts; and other matters not

strictly to the point Cheviot had in mind.

“Yes, _oh_, yes! Dere is great acti-_vitty_. You can see in our reports.

Ve make great progress. Ve bring de true light to many who sat in

darkness. But ve arre poore—meezerabble poore. Nobody knows, what haf not

lief dere, how harrd de life. Eh, Björk?”

Björk, sheet in hand, gloomily assented, without the aid of speech.

Cheviot caught his glancing eye. “Are you—a—a—at the mission, too?”

The dark man studied the course and held on his silent way.

“Oh, yes. Mr. Björk ees von of os. He is not long dere—but he understand.

Ve haf great need of vorkers. So he come.”

“You mean you sent home for Mr. Björk?”

Mr. Christianson stared a moment. “Send home? Oh, it is far to Sveden.

Heaven is nearer.”

It was Cheviot’s turn for mystification.

“Vhen ve need helpers,” Mr. Christianson explained, “ve pray for dem. God

send os Mr. Björk.”

He spoke with a curious matter-of-factness.

“Oh,” said Cheviot, “and—a—how did Mr. Björk know where to find you?”

“He see Kwimkuk in a visshun. He see de Mission House and he see me, too.

Eh, Björk.”

The helper nodded with preternatural gravity.

“Where were you,” said Cheviot, “when you had the vision?”

“On board a whaler. Dat’s where Björk was,” proudly Christianson answered

for him. “On de whaler up in Grantley Harbor, vhile I am down dere at

Kwimkuk praying for help.”

“But how could he leave his ship?”

“Leedle boat,” said Christianson, laconic for once.

“Oh, the captain let him off?”

Christianson shook his pale locks. “You do not know vhat dey are—dose

whaling captains.”

“You don’t mean”—in his astonishment Cheviot addressed the dumb navigator

again, as if given such a theme even he must at last find tongue—“you

don’t mean you,” and then he halted, for there is something about the

impact of the word “deserted” that men shy from, “you don’t mean you left

the ship without leave?” Björk’s face never changed.

But not so Christianson’s. He regarded his acolyte with a somber

enthusiasm. “It was yoost like Björk. Say noddind. Yoost follow de call.

Dat’s Björk!”

“Pretty big risk, I should have thought.”

At which, somewhat to Cheviot’s surprise, Björk gave a sharp little nod

and Christianson showed his long yellow teeth in a rather horrible smile.

Cheviot felt egged on to say, “Don’t they shoot deserters up here?”

“_Yes!_” said Björk, speaking for the first time.

“If dey find dem,” amended Christianson.

Björk’s little eyes glittered. His thin lips moved faintly, as if they,

too, would have smiled had they ever learned the trick of it.

“And you came straight to Kwimkuk?” persisted Cheviot.

“No, he land oop by Sinook,” Christianson said. “He see dat not de place

he vas shown in de visshun, and dose whaler fellows after him de next

day. Björk hide in de scrub villow, and creep along vid hands and knees.

After two days he come to a native camp. Next morning he see out dere dat

_Seagull_ comin’. But he haf anodder visshun. He know now he haf to get a

squaw to hide him in de bottom ob a kyak, and take him like dat down de

coast to Golovin. Terrible long journey! I am down dere on de shore, when

de squaw beach de boat. I see Björk crawl out de hole in de middle, half

dead, and look round. Look all round. Den I hear him say in Svedish, ‘Dis

de place!’ and I say, ‘Vad Plads?’ leedle surprised, and he come right

away up to me, and he say ‘De Lord sent me.’ So I see he vas de man I

pray for.”

“Oh! And when he isn’t managing a boat—up at the mission, what does Mr.

Björk do?”

“Oh, he help,” said Christianson, with unshakable satisfaction in the

answer to his prayer. “Better as anybody he can preach.”

“_Preach?_” echoed Cheviot, not believing his ears.

“Yes, Björk not talk _mooch_, except vhen he is in de pulpit or vhen he

haf a refelation.”

Well, they were odd Hausgenossen for Hildegarde’s father! “How long had

Mr. Mar been with them,” Cheviot asked. Ten or eleven months. He had got

to St. Michaels too late last year to reach the Klondike. He just had

time to go and take a look at Golovin Bay, when the winter overtook him

at Kwimkuk. So he stayed there.

But this summer? Well, he was taken ill just about the time the ice went

out of the bay—no, no, he was all right now. Mrs. Christianson had nursed

him. Christianson didn’t know what Mar’s plans were—doubted if anybody

did; though he was laying in supplies for some sort of excursion. He once

had an idea of going all the way to Teller Station to see the Government

reindeer. That was Mar’s stuff, there, in the boat. Of course it was

little use now to go to the Klondike. Besides, what incentive had a man

of that age to face the hardships of prospecting in the arctic? It was no

matter if such a man had not great fortune. He wouldn’t know how to use

it. He had not, Mr. Christianson was sorry to say it, but Mr. Mar had not

the true light.

From which Cheviot gathered that Mr. Mar had not contributed all he might

to the cause of Righteousness. But it was a relief to know that he had

not been in straits. “He seem to haf blenty to bay his bills”—so why had

he come up there, caring neither for money nor for missions? Here Cheviot

caught the momentary gleam in Björk’s little eyes. A question in them,

but unspoken, like all else that went on in the close-cropped bullet

head. Cheviot became aware that his old friend had somehow succeeded in

making himself an object of intense curiosity to these queer folk.

They liked Mr. Mar, though—Christianson tried to catch Björk’s eye, but

the dark one declined confederacy—though Mr. Mar had done something a

little while ago that made a great deal of trouble.

“Hein? Veil, it vas like dis. Von of our great deeficoolty is de

vitchcraftiness of de natives. Not a season go by vidout dey have to tie

up some von.” He pursed his wrinkled lips and slowly shook his colorless

locks.

“Oh!” said Cheviot, feeling his way. “How long do they keep them tied up?”

“Till dey confesses, or till dey dies.”

There was need then of the missionary in this savage place, where

Hildegarde’s father had had to spend a year of his life.

“And if they confess, it’s all right, is it?” asked Cheviot.

“If dey confess, and if dey go and get a piece of de fur, or vhatever it

is, dat dey’ve cut off de clo’es of de person dey been vitching, and if

dey give it back, and promise ‘never again.’”

“And then they’re forgiven?”

“Yes. Sometimes dey’re stoned, sometimes dey’re yoost spit at and den let

to vander avay—but dey’re forgiven.”

“Oh, like that? Well, I wonder they trouble to confess.”

“Dey like it better dan to be dead.”

“Dead?”

“Burnt.”

“Really? They went as far as that? But now, you mission people, I

suppose, have put a stop to such goings on!”

“Ve are not greater at Kwimkuk dan Saul at Endor.”

Cheviot stared.

“But Mr. Mar,” the missionary went on, “he vill be viser dan de Prophets.

He tink dere are no more any vitches. Not even vhen he see dat Yakutat

girl dey call Omilik—not even vhen he see vhat she have done. But von

day Mr. Mar hear some noise, and he go down to de beach, and he see

de girl tied to de tall stone ve fastens our boats to. He see dey

been beating her, and now dey pile up de driftwood round, and he, not

understanding”—the missionary explained, with an air of forbearance—“he,

not understanding, he try to interfere. Dey very mad of course. Dey send

for me. I tell Mr. Mar I _know_ dis girl have vitched a baby and two men.

De vomen all know it—everybody but Mr. Mar know it quite vell. Mr. Mar

get very excited and say he not believe it. Dey bring de baby; he say,

‘Dat a sick baby, anyhow.’ He not understand at all. Dey go on vid making

de fire. Mr. Mar yoost goin’ to do someting foolish, vhen de girl cry

out, ‘I confess. Yes, yes, I do all dem tings!’ ‘Dere, you _see_!’ I tell

Mr. Mar. So dey make de vitch go and bring de little pieces vhat she cut

off de baby coat, and off de men’s clo’es for to vitch dem vid. Dey all

holla vhen dey see dose tings. All but Mr. Mar. He say de natives dey all

done dat; dey all steals pieces off everybody in the settlemint; cause

dey so ’fraid anybody get sick, dey be called vitches; and if dey not got

any pieces to give up, dey know dey shall be burnt. ‘So dey all keeps

plenty ’gainst de evil day,’ says Mr. Mar.

“He mek so great foos, I tell dem yoost to tie de girl so she not wriggle

out, and leave her dere like dey done Chuchuk last year. So dey does dat.

Ve all goes avay.

“Von day and night. Two day and night. Tree day and night. Dat girl yoost

de same. Dey cooms to me and says, ‘Somebody gif dat vitch to eat.’ I say

nobody vill do a ting like dat. Dey say dey sure. Next night dey vatch.

Dey see Mr. Mar go down vid bread and vater. You can tink dey are mad. It

is good I am dere. I say, ‘Vait! I vill talk vid Mr. Mar.’ I do dat.”

His faded white-lashed eyes grew sterner still as he recalled the

interview.

“Well, what happened?”

“It vas for me a moment of great responsibeeleetee. De more ve talk, de

more I see it ees for Mr. Mar a matter of sentiment. _No_! of _nairves_!

For os it ees a matter of religion. Ve live vid dose people. Ve teach

dem. Ve feed dem in time of famine. Ve nurse dem ven dey are sick. But

ven dey do vat the Yakutat voman haf done—”

His low, booming voice went out across the surf, leaving behind a trail

of menace like the deadened roll of a distant gun.

“What then?”

Cheviot’s eyes were held by the fiery look on the rugged face. Impossible

to doubt the burning sincerity that gave its ugliness that moment of

almost uncanny power.

“Mr. Mar see it no good to say dere is no more any vitches vid dat

Yakutat voman at our door. So he say ve shall not be crool even to a

vitch. Den I tell him, ‘A man also or a voman dat haf a familiar spirit

or dat is a vizard shall surely be put to death; dey shall stone dem vid

stones; dere blood shall be upon dem. For all dat do dese tings are an

abomination unto de Lord.’”

After a silence, “What did he say to that?” Cheviot asked.

“Hein—hn—hn!” Christianson shook back the square cut hanks of tow that

fell from under his hat. “Not even Mr. Mar,” he said, with an air of

triumph, “not even Mr. Mar talk back to Moses!”

But the good man’s satisfaction seemed short-lived. He was grave enough

as he went on, “Big storm in de night. Next day no vitch dere.” He waved

a great bony hand toward Kamchatka.

“Vitch gone off vid de vind.”

Then, lowering his voice as though out there in the sea hollows listeners

might be lurking, he bent forward: “If dey vas to know Mr. Mar go down in

de storm, and cut de raw hide for let dat vitch go!—” Again, with grim

foreboding, he shook the hanks of tow.

“Ve all like your friend, but ve sorry see any yentleman tink he know

better as de Bible.”

CHAPTER X

Cheviot found Hildegarde’s father practically a prisoner.

His board and lodging had been too welcome a source of revenue to the

mission for Christianson to feel called upon to smooth the way for his

departure, and Mar had been some time in grasping the fact that his

plan of hiring a boat and a couple of natives to go up the coast for

a “look at the country,” was hopelessly knocked on the head since his

interference in the matter of the Yakutat witch. Not a native in the

community who felt safe with him since that episode. The lame man was in

league with the powers of darkness.

Mar’s pleasure at seeing Cheviot was genuine, but not as unmeasured as

you might expect. And when, almost before the first shower of questions

and answers had begun to abate, Cheviot flung in information as to when

the next ship was leaving St. Michaels, Mar assumed the subject to be of

interest only to Cheviot. Pressed further about his own plans, the elder

man said evasively they were not very settled, and changed the subject!

Cheviot was nonplussed. Was Mar only waiting till they were clear of

the Mission House? No, for they were out fishing the whole of the next

day, and most of the days following, and still Mar talked of any and

everything save of going home. Was he waiting for funds? Surely not now

that Cheviot was at hand. He seemed inexplicably satisfied to sit all

day over a trout pool up the river (despite the pestilential mosquito),

or in a boat in the bay fishing for tom-cod; and all the evening

playing chess in the bare mission parlor, in the midst of a company

sufficiently singular. Shady fellows from the Galena camp above White

mountain; prospectors expelled from Cook’s Inlet, lousy, filthy-smelling

natives come upon one pretext or another, weird missionaries dropped

down from places no man but themselves seemed ever to have heard of; a

reindeer-herder in the Government service, though a “Scandahoojian,”

like the majority at the Golovin Mission, and highly welcome albeit

hardly on the score of his piety. For “Hjalmar,” as Christianson called

him, was the one who jibed most at the morning and evening prayers, and

particularly at the long grace before meat, with its delicate proposals

to the Almighty that He should induce those present to save their souls

by giving to the Golovin Mission. With the same breath that thanked Him

for “dis dy bounty,” the Omnipotent was reminded that if this agreeable

state of things was to continue, people must pay not only for the meal,

but for the Cause.

Mar listened, or didn’t listen, with an air of respectful quiescence, and

ate his meals unabashed. But he commiserated Cheviot, “How this must make

you long for your Valdivia luxuries. Well, when do you go back?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

Mar showed as little gratitude as pleasure.

“You mustn’t think of waiting for me,” he answered shortly.

Cheviot was profoundly perplexed as to what he ought to do. Mar was

not a man that any one could comfortably catechize, but to go away

and leave him here with public opinion so against him; for Cheviot to

present himself to Hildegarde, knowing he had left her father on this

inhospitable shore, to all intents and purposes a prisoner—it was not to

be thought of.

Mar’s favorite scheme for a good day’s fishing was to row across to the

river mouth where some Englishmen, several years before, had made a camp.

In the sheltered hollow a little way up the stream they had built a

cabin, so well, that although long deserted it still offered refuge from

the drenching rain, or from the unshut eye of the sun, and even from

the greater torment of mosquitoes. For Mar had learnt the value of the

Esquimau use of a “smudge.” On the way to the cabin he would gather two

handfuls of arctic moss, of straw and some aromatic smelling herb, twist

all together in two wisps and set one alight on the flat stone that

formed the threshold and the other smoldering in a rusty pan upon the

sill of the single window, with the result that the mosquitoes fled. In

great comfort Mar and Cheviot would proceed to make tea, and eat their

sandwiches—at least, Cheviot ate his. He noticed that although his friend

never disposed of a third of what he brought, he did not the next time

bring any less. Quite suddenly one day it dawned upon Cheviot why. For

although the crackers and cheese and sandwiches that were left were

always carefully put away in a tin cracker-box, the box on their return

was invariably empty.

And Mar never seemed the least surprised.

Was it that he could not bring himself to abandon the poor wretch he had

rescued; could that be at the root of his delay? But why did he not take

Cheviot into his confidence and get the girl out of the country if she

were in hiding hereabouts? Was it conceivable that Mar—

Cheviot got little further in his speculations till the morning when Mar,

in the act of making a cast, said under his breath and without moving a

muscle, “There’s that fellow again!”

Cheviot turned just in time to see Björk’s head disappear behind a bunch

of tall reeds that grew in the hollow by the little fresh water stream

below the cabin. “What’s he lurking about like that for?”

“I’m afraid he’s on the track of a poor, wretched girl,” and Mar told

the story of the Yakutat witch, but with additions not creditable to Mr.

Björk.

“It’s usually an old woman, here as elsewhere, that’s accused and set

upon, but this girl can’t be above seventeen, for she hadn’t been long

out of the Bride’s House.”

“The what?”

“Oh, the horrible igloo where they confine the marriageable girls for

half a year. They stay in there, in the dark all that time, never seeing

the face of man; and they come out cowed, and fat, and pallid; and then

they’re for sale as wives. Those that no man takes are looked down upon,

and left to shift for themselves and must earn their own living. The

Yakutat girl was pounced on instantly by a man she hated for some reason.

He took her off, but she escaped and made her way to the mission. Nobody

was at home at the time but Björk and me. I saw her come in, and I saw

her come flying out of the mission parlor wilder even than she’d entered

it, and go tearing down to the village. She found shelter there, for

a while, with the woman who had brought her up. But public opinion was

all against her; and when it was found that the reason her ‘husband,’

Peddykowchee, didn’t come and get her, was that he was ill, they said

she had bewitched him. His younger brother said she’d done the same to

him, and then a miserable little baby—oh, it was a ghastly business.

’Sh—” and Mar fished in silence for a full hour, with occasional sharp

glances through the alder thicket behind him, down among the reeds by the

deserted cabin.

The next day the store left in the cracker-box was found to be untouched.

“She’s seen Björk!” said Mar under his breath. “She’s afraid to come any

more.”

“Why don’t you help her to get out of the country?” Cheviot asked,

setting alight the smudge on the window-sill.

“I was planning that when you came, but I don’t want to mix you up in any

such ticklish business.”

“It’s no more ticklish for me than for you.”

“Oh, I’m blown upon already. The people here have been red hot about it.

They haven’t cooled down yet.”

“They never will,” said Cheviot.

“No,” agreed Mar, “but I’ve made the cause mine, you see. After you’re

gone—”

“I’m not going till you do.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“If you like,” said Cheviot.

“It’s on account of that letter of Hildegarde’s?”

“Whatever the reason is, I’m going to stay if you are, and you may as

well let me in for my share of the fun.”

“Your ‘share!’” repeated Mar reflectively, and stroked his long gray

mustache.

“I was arranging to get the girl away,” he went on presently, “when you

came. I had bought this boat and made a habit of being out all day.”

“Exactly! All we need is provisions.”

“No, I sent Christianson to St. Michaels for provisions. They’re at the

mission now.”

“Of course, we brought them up with us! Then we’ve nothing to do but to

get the stuff into the boat.”

“Without exciting suspicion.”

“And pick the girl up somewhere on the coast.”

“—before they realize we’re gone for good.”

“Surely you and I could start off on an excursion together without

exciting suspicion. Why, you told them when you first came, you were

going up the coast, ‘to have a look at the country,’” he added,

remembering Christianson’s phrase.

Mar studied him an instant with uncommon intentness.

“What is it?” laughed Cheviot. “You look as if you couldn’t make up your

mind to trust me.”

“No, I’m making up my mind I will.” Again he paused for a moment, and

then, “I am too old to do the thing alone,” he said.

“Well, I can manage the boat, anyhow.”

“Oh, the girl can row as well as a man, but I must have a partner.” And

sitting there in the deserted cabin Nathaniel Mar, for the last time,

told how a hundred and odd miles further up the coast he had panned out

gold with a dead man’s help when he himself was young.

And when he had said it, that thing befell him that overtook any

enthusiast in talking to Louis Cheviot. Mar saw his story on a sudden in

a comic light. Clear now, its relationship to twenty “tall stories,” fit

matter for a twitch of the humorous lip, a hitch of the judicial shoulder.

The unconscious Cheviot had choked off many a confidence just by that

look of cool amusement.

“I’ve always said,” Mar wound up, preparing hastily to withdraw again

into his shell, “I’ve always said it would ‘keep,’ and it _has_ kept

close on thirty years.”

“Well, it won’t keep much longer,” said Cheviot briskly.

“Why not?” A tremor shot through the man with the secret.

“Why? Because it’s in the air.”

Mar clasped and unclasped his big walking-stick as if about to rise.

“Before another year,” Cheviot went on, “the whole of Alaska will swarm

with prospectors.”

“Do you think so?”

“Sure. Why, it’s begun. I don’t believe there’s a single Yukon tributary

where there isn’t a man wandering about this minute with a shovel and a

pan.”

“The Yukon! Well, that’s a good way to the south!”

“Those men that stopped at the mission last night—they were miners.”

“They—they were after galena!” said Mar, almost angrily. “They knew that

fairly good ore had been brought down Fish River off and on since ’81.”

Cheviot laughed. “Well, if you imagine they won’t so much as look for

gold, let’s smuggle your witch to St. Michaels and take the first

steamer home. _I’ve_ had enough of the North.”

“You say that because you don’t really believe I’ve discovered a second

Klondike.”

“Why shouldn’t I believe it? And haven’t I turned my back on the Klondike

we all know exists?”

“Those men that came to the mission yesterday,” Mar said hurriedly,

“they—they were going to Fish River, weren’t they? Not—not up the coast?”

“No, no, that’s all right,” Cheviot reassured him. “All I meant was that

somebody hereabouts had only to whisper ‘Gold!’ for this whole country to

swarm.”

“I know—I know. But we’ll have the start, Cheviot.”

Mar pulled himself up by the aid of his stick, and dragged the rude soap

box table out of its shady corner, into the light nearer the window, a

light but little obscured by the faint smoke wreaths that curled about

the pan and sent abroad a slightly pungent breath, agreeably acrid,

except to the summer pest. Mar’s excitement found little expression

in his face, but, so to speak, came out at his finger tips. He could

hardly hold the piece of paper he had pulled from his pocket. Up to ten

minutes ago he had felt almost as far from his ancient purpose as though

he still sat on the high stool in the inner room of the Valdivia bank.

Now, and within the last few seconds more especially, fulfilment seemed

breathlessly near. Sitting on one side of the soap box, with Cheviot

opposite, Mar traced on the back of an envelop the land-locked inner Bay

of Golovin, the outer bay, and from Rocky Point a broken line on up the

coast.

“This,” he said, shading a little strip bordering the shore, “this is

the sand-spit where I found the Esquimau camp. Here’s the crooked river,

with its mouth full of wood. Only six or seven miles to the north is the

anvil-shaped mountain.”

The two men, bending low over the soiled envelop, were too absorbed to

notice the glitter just above the window-sill; eyes narrowed to evade the

smoke; two mere points of light to the right of the rusty pan with its

haze of smoldering incense.

Mar’s pencil whispered over the paper in the silence.

Then he spoke. “From this broken range on the north three or four streams

come trickling down to the coast. The one on the west here winds round

from the north side of the Anvil, and it was just at this point, as I

remember—just here,” and the pencil shook as if in doubt, or refusing to

commit itself, till Mar planted the point so firmly on the paper it made

a dent as well as a mark. “_Just here I found the gold._”

When finally Cheviot raised his eyes the glitter was gone from the sill.

* * * * *

While the two in the cabin laid their plans and made a list of provisions

and requirements, a man was creeping on hands and knees, through willow

scrub and reeds, down to the boat that lay moored in the cove below the

cabin.

Christianson sat talking to Hjalmar the herder, of the Government project

of introducing reindeer among the Alaskan natives, when the door of the

private office was flung wide. They looked round and saw Björk standing

there.

On the sallow mask a strange light shining. The hard lips twitched in a

recurrent rictus, showing a dog-like gleam of sharp eye-tooth, while the

rest of the mouth held rigid. If the tremendous force that locked the

lean jaws was lost upon the onlooker, it must have been the insane light

in Björk’s eyes that made the reindeer-herder whisper, “He’s got a fit.”

But Christianson had only flung back his long, straight hair, and grasped

the rude arms of his big chair.

“Björk,” he said, “iss it a visshun?”

“Ye—h—h!” Björk answered through shut teeth. An instant longer he stood

silent, with his hairy hands clenched, and a barely perceptible forward

and backward swaying of the tense body. Then, with an effort as of

forcing steel to part, he opened his welded lips and said rapidly in

Swedish, “Have we not fed the hungry?”

“Aye,” said Christianson.

“Have we not nursed the sick? Have we not preached the Gospel to every

creature?”

“Aye, aye,” from Christianson.

“Have we not kept the law?” With each question nearer and nearer Björk

brought the black menace of his face.

“Have we not had the faith that moveth mountains? Have we not served in

hardship? Have we not waited in poverty till this hour?”

“_Till_ this hour?” said Christianson, getting up slowly out of his chair.

Björk arrested his own dreamlike advance with a suddenness that seemed to

wake him. He stopped, looked round, and clutched at the back of a chair.

“Shut the door,” he commanded.

His chief obeyed. When Christianson turned round again, Björk was

staring over the reindeer-herder’s head, piercing the infinite depths of

space, while he held tight to every-day existence by the back of a chair.

“Brethren,” he said, “the angel of the Lord has been with me. He has

shown me great riches.”

Hjalmar the herder pulled himself together and shook off his growing

nervousness. There was nothing uncanny in this after all. A vision of

riches was only too common since the Klondike had crazed men’s brains.

Björk saw that even Christianson looked less moved.

“I tell you,” the seer burst out, “this is the answer to all our prayer,

the reward of all our work. The angel took me westward up the coast. I

see it now!” He unlocked his clutching hands, raised them outstretched

on a level with his eyes and with hypnotic slowness moved the right hand

east, the left one west.

“A sand-spit,” he said, “where the heathen gather. Beyond—a flat country,

where no tree grows. But the river mouth is choked with sea-drift. A

strange shaped hill. One of old Thor’s workshops. Where _he_ hammered the

sword of the gods, _we_ shall forge weapons against the ungodly. Weapons

of gold. For the river of that country—the angel showed me the sands of

it! And the sands, Christianson, the sands were full of gold!”

The herder looked at Christianson and Christianson looked at the herder.

The herder shook his head.

Christianson sat down again in his great chair.

“I tell you,” said Björk solemnly, “I see that ‘promised land’ plainer

than ever I saw Kwimkuk. Plainer”—he raised his voice—“than I see you

two.”

But he saw them very plainly. His look leaped from one face to the other,

and rage gathered on his own.

“You sit there like stone. You are deaf. You are like dead men. I—I—” He

looked about the room wildly as if he had forgotten where the door was.

“I would go alone, but I must have provisions. I must have help with the

boat—help with the—”

“Y—yes, yes,” stuttered the old missionary.

“And the angel said, ‘Go first to Christianson.’”

“Yes, yes. Of course, I—”

“‘But tarry not,’ said the voice. ‘If Christianson receive not the good

tidings, go take the news to another.’” He seemed now to locate the door.

He made two steps in that direction, saying, “Me—I obey the voice.”

“I, too, obey,” said Christianson hurriedly. “I will come Saturday.”

“_Saturday!_” Björk’s burning impatience blew the end of the week to the

end of the world. “I tell you _to-morrow_ will be too late! It must be

to-day. It must be this hour.”

“Why?” demanded the herder, but he, too, was on his feet.

“Ha! You will ask questions! No wonder the angel comes to me.” Again he

turned about and rushed at the door. Christianson intercepted him. Björk,

with a convulsive movement, flung him off.

“The voice said, ‘This is the hour you have prayed for, but if it passes

in idleness, pray no more—_pray no more_!’” Björk’s voice rang out with

a tragic authority. “‘For this is the hour when your feet should be shod

with swiftness and your hands be full of cunning.’ It was the voice said

so.” Björk’s fingers were on the latch. “Me—I obey.” He opened the door.

“Come, Hjalmar,” said Christianson.

[Illustration: “‘Brethren,’ he said, ‘the angel of the Lord has been with

me. He has shown me great riches’”]

CHAPTER XI

Hildegarde’s sense of anxious responsibility had grown with every month

that passed after her father sailed out of San Francisco harbor. Bound

for—“the Klondike!” people exclaimed with envy, rather than asked in any

doubt.

“No—no,” he had said, and then hastily—to keep outsiders off the

track—“well, perhaps. Who knows?” Who _didn’t_ know! And, after all, why

should any man stay at home who wasn’t obliged?

It was natural that no one else should take Mr. Mar’s enterprise as

seriously from the start as did his daughter. For she knew how large had

been her share in it. She had been the first, the only one, to cheer him

on. She it was who had got “the boys” to finance the undertaking. She who

had broken the fact to her mother. But for his daughter, Nathaniel Mar

would not now be—where was he? How faring? Many a time Hildegarde’s heart

contracted sharply, as in silence she framed the question. Her own fault

that she couldn’t answer—her fault that half Valdivia could no longer

set their clocks by the big, lame man’s passing—her doing that he sat no

more of a morning in the warm, sunny room of the San Joaquin, sending

out smoke and absorbing news. Others sat there in peace and safety,

discussing their absent townsman; and Hildegarde sat at home trying to

keep at bay the thought: if anything dreadful should happen to him!

It had eased her a little to write to Cheviot, and beg him to look out

for her father. She was tempted to say, “Bring him back safe and there’s

nothing I won’t gladly do to prove—” But she had pulled herself up in

time, and only promised an unending gratitude.

The steamer _President_, which had taken Mar north, brought on her return

trip a brief letter from him, saying merely that the journey was safely

accomplished as far as St. Michaels. His family knew they would probably

not hear again till the following summer.

Life was easier when Bella was there. To her one might say, “Will he come

back by the first boat in June, or shall we only have letters, do you

think?” And say it in one form or another so often that, but for reasons

unavowed, the speculation would have wearied friendship.

But Bella was full of sympathy and tonic suggestion, always prepared to

pore over northern maps, always ready to discuss probable conditions “up

there.”

What a friend was Bella! “I’ve _talked_ of a standard,” Hildegarde

thought humbly, “but she lives up to it—in these days.” It was a shame

ever to remember the lapses long ago.

And how intelligent she was! How curiously well informed! But Bella was

always surprising you.

“I keep thinking about him in the night. I lie awake wondering if he’s

cold,” Hildegarde confessed, and Bella, why, to look at her face you’d

think she knew all about that lying awake and wondering—did the same

herself. “Father does so love a fire. Don’t you remember when all of us

would be baking he used to draw closer to the hearth?”

“That was only because he lived so much indoors. He’ll be _quite_ warm in

that beautiful furry sleeping-bag. He’ll probably sleep better than he’s

done since he was a child. They all do.”

“Who do?”

“Oh—a—people who—go to the Klondike.”

Another time, “I am haunted by the certainty that he didn’t take enough

provisions. Trenn says that in intense cold people eat a great deal more

than—”

“That’s true,” said Bella sagely, “but it’ll be all right. People are

very good to one another in such out-of-the-way places. They always share

with anybody who runs short.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, that’s what the accounts all say.”

“What accounts?”

“Oh, in the—the papers.”

“I never see any such accounts. It’s all horrors—freezing and starving to

death. Besides, father will be the one to do the sharing and then have to

go without. Oh, _why_ did I help him to—”

“Don’t be absurd,” Bella said, almost angrily. “In any case _he’s_ not

gone beyond the reach of supply depots.” Neither met the other’s eye.

“But suppose his money gives out—it will give out if it’s true they

charge two dollars for a potato. He never could keep any money in his

pockets. Oh, it’s all very well for you, _your_ father isn’t sitting on

an iceberg starving to death.”

A queer look came into Bella’s little face. It was there, now and then,

and gone like a ghost, leaving a troubled tenderness behind.

“It’s not as if he were near a settlement, as the Klondikers are to

Dawson City,” Hildegarde went on, yearning for reassurance. “The place

father was going to is quite uninhabited, except by a few Esquimaux.

Often I can hardly eat for thinking—thinking”—her voice caught—“maybe he

is hungry.”

“That’s impossible. He’s much too sensible and clever.”

“What good is it to be sensible and clever if you’ve got nothing to eat?”

“But being sensible and clever will help him to find things to eat.”

“How do you make that out?”

“Oh, as far south as that—”

As far _south_? Was she out of her mind?

“There are plenty of ptarmigan and rabbits and things, where Mr. Mar is.”

“Are there? But he’s lame. How can he go shooting—”

“Other people can, especially the natives, and you may be sure your

father will have his share. Besides, he’ll fish. Mr. Mar’ll like that

part of it.”

“How _can_ you be so heartless!”

“What do you mean?”

“How is my father to fish in rivers frozen hard as iron?”

“Through holes in the ice, of course!” Bella defended the idea warmly.

“You’ll see,” she spoke as if she’d personally tested the efficacy of the

device; “you’ll see they’ll get fish all winter that way.”

“How _do_ you know? Now don’t say you get it out of the newspapers, for I

never see these things, and I look for nothing else.”

“No, I found that in a book.”

“What book?”

It turned out to be a two-year-old volume upon Arctic Exploration. On the

fly-leaf Bella’s name and the date, 1896. A whole year before Cheviot

went to the Klondike, or Mr. Mar to Alaska. The year that—

The light that had glimmered broke in a flood.

“Let us read it together, Bella,” said Hildegarde softly.

“No, there’s a newer one I’ve just sent for. We’ll read that if you like.”

They finished it at the Waynes’ country place. “I wish,” said Hildegarde,

“we had another book about—”

“There are plenty more.” Bella unlocked a little chest. It was full of

nothing but books, and the books were about nothing but arctic life and

exploration. For nearly two years, Bella had been buying and reading

everything she could hear of published on the subject in America or

Europe.

Hildegarde hung above the store. “We must go through them all together.

It is the most fascinating reading in the world.”

“It is the most horrible in the world. The most ghastly, it makes you

ill. But, yes; I agree with you one can’t _not know_.”

They read the books together. Even the honest-hearted Hildegarde, who

began with her father agonizingly present in her mind, abandoned him

presently to his probably less terrible fate, and pushed forward with

strange men on their farther journey; fitting each new fortune or

mischance to the One on the other side of the world, never mentioned

either by her or Bella. Though Hildegarde kept her oath not to speak

Galbraith’s name, she felt a strange new excitement now in saying “He” as

for her father, yet thinking of the One who had gone farther afield even

than Cheviot, and much, much farther than Mr. Mar. Each girl played with

the ruse. It gave to reading and speculation a subtilty—a spirit—that

never flagged.

And now spring was here. Although still far too early for such

forecasting, both felt the need of returning to Valdivia, to be within

easier reach of papers, of telegrams, and of returning travelers. For

all the world knew when once the spring was come up yonder, the summer

followed hard. How natural it was to be looking forward to something

great and wonderful that was to happen in June! Hildegarde and her father

had done that as long ago as when the girl was in her early teens and

Jack Galbraith expected back from his first arctic enterprise. What more

natural than that Hildegarde and Bella should be doing very much the

same to-day. To call their expectation by Mar’s name, merely gave it

manageability. For, apart from Bella’s interdiction, the word “Galbraith”

was, in this, like a hot iron. If it were to be touched in safety, some

shield must come between you and the too ardent metal. “Galbraith” would

scorch. But wrap “Mar” about the forbidden name, and you could use it to

significant ends.

Summer and Mr. Mar! Oh, Mr. Mar served well as symbol of that mightier

issue, that both dared hope for out of this year’s opening of the ice

gates of the North.

And yet the month of wonder, June, went by without a word or a sign

coming down from the top of the world.

July brought a letter from the Klondike—Cheviot’s second. He had done

well, and he was coming home. Hildegarde might look to see him by the

next boat. No word of Mar; plain he hadn’t had Hildegarde’s news when he

wrote. Not the next boat, however, nor the next, brought Cheviot, nor any

word of Mr. Mar.

“I don’t know how I should get through this time but for you, Bella.”

Hildegarde and she were seldom apart.

Not till mid-August came the sign from Mar, a letter written from

a queer-sounding place in early June, a letter strangely short and

non-committal. He had reached St. Michaels too late the previous autumn

to go any further than Golovin Bay, before navigation closed. He would

push on as soon as travel was practicable. He was well. He sent his love.

And no more that summer. No more up to the time the boats stopped running

in the autumn.

Cheviot had not come after all. And silence, like the silence of the

grave, wrapt the fate of that Other, on the far side of the world.

“I shall burn a joss to those who travel by land or by sea, by snow or by

ice,” said Bella, one day in December, and she lit the stick of incense

on the flower altar, whence no heathen smoke of prayer had risen for a

couple of years now. But more prayers than ever before had been offered

up in the little white room. And what need of a face on the wall above

the roses? The picture was not really shut away in a drawer. Vivid in

each girl’s mind, it was borne about as faithfully, as in the old days,

when on Hildegarde’s breast in a setting of silver it hung on a velvet

string.

Now and then Bella remembered Cheviot, and when she remembered him, she

spoke of him. Sometimes she spoke of him when she was thinking of him

little enough. As on the night when she wasn’t well, and Hildegarde,

sleeping on the sofa in her friend’s room, had waked in misery over a

dream she’d had. Bella was lying wide-eyed in the dark, “A dream about—?”

“Yes,” Hildegarde said hurriedly, “a snow-storm in the night, in the

wind; a slipping down into blackness. I thought I saw him fall, and I

knew it was the end.”

“They go by contraries. Your father’s quite well and happy.” Hildegarde

had not said the dream concerned her father, but she offered no

correction.

“Still,” Bella went on, “for the moment it makes one feel—I’ll tell you!

we must have a little light to comfort us.”

“No, no; it will hurt my eyes,” Hildegarde was surreptitiously crying.

But Bella was already up, and before Hildegarde could forestall her, she

had opened the door across the hall leading into the opposite room, and

there she was striking a light. Hildegarde followed her, still a little

dazed by the vivid horror of the dream, and when her eyes fell upon her

own little white bed, she flung herself down there, and buried her face

in the cool pillow.

“You aren’t crying, are you, Hildegarde, over a silly dream? Look here,

I’m lighting a joss for Mr. Mar.”

A little silence.

“I’ve lit another,” said Bella’s hurried voice, still over there by the

table, “one for Louis.” Hildegarde, with face half-hidden, imagined

rather than saw, that three slender smoke feathers were curling above the

flowers, drowning the meeker fragrance of the roses.

She lay there feeling the oppression of the dream fading, and a waking

oppression take its place. Yes, they “went by contraries.” Galbraith

hadn’t fallen and been swallowed in the gaping maw of a crevasse; but

when he came back, what was going to happen? He belonged to Bella. But

he had left Bella. And he had belonged first of all to Hildegarde. What

would befall friendship in that coming wrench!

“Go back to bed, Bella; you’ll be worse.”

“You must come, too.”

Hildegarde made no answer.

“You can’t lie there with all these flowers in the room. I didn’t know

you hadn’t set them out. The doors can’t be left open either.”

“The windows can.”

“I shan’t go unless you come, too.”

Hildegarde forced herself to get up. Bella put out the comforting light.

But some things show plainer in the dark. Those symbols on the altar,

they were only tendrils of smoke by day, or in the glare of gas. Now

they were sparks of fire puncturing the blackness of the scented room.

One fiery eye to watch over the fortunes of Nathaniel Mar, one to shine

for Cheviot, and an unnamed third to pierce the darkness that shrouded

the fate of that Other. Even when the two girls turned their backs, and

groped their way to Bella’s room clinging hold of each other in the

dark, the third spark not only shone before their inner vision still, it

pricked each bosom with its point of fire.

What would happen when he came back?

Each wondered, and each held faster to the other with fear in the bottom

of her heart.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, life outwardly went on pretty much the same. With Trenn and

Harry, Eddie Cox and other swains, the girls went to parties and picnics,

to concerts, and the theater, and did all the usual things. The one

unusual thing those days brought was the Charles Trennor fancy ball. It

was going to be a great affair, and Valdivia conversation for weeks had

begun by some such statement as, “I’m going as the Goddess of Liberty.

What shall you be?”

Of course Trenn and Harry were coming up for the great occasion, and

their costumes called for endless consultation with that great authority,

Bella. They had, moreover, told their sister she might on this occasion

be as glorious as ever she liked, and they would “foot the bill.”

Hildegarde deeply appreciated such generosity, but what was more to the

point, did Bella?

She only said: “Yes, Hildegarde’s going to be glorious. But I don’t think

it’s the kind of glory you can buy.”

Even before the Mar boys had come forward in this magnificent way, Bella

had decided that Hildegarde must go as Brunhild. Her gown was to be white

cloth, embroidered with silver dragons—strictly adapted from an ancient

Norse design. She was to wear silver sandals on her feet; on one bare arm

would be a buckler, a spear in her right hand, and on her fair hair a

silver helmet.

Bella was going as Amy Robsart, and that was easy enough. It was those

dragons of Hildegarde’s that took the time; and, as Bella had said, they

wouldn’t have been easy to buy. She and Hildegarde were embroidering

them every spare minute, day and night. Even now, though almost, they

were not quite done, which was a pity. Trenn and Harry were coming up

from Siegel’s again this evening—the excuse, the necessary inspection

of Brunhild, at Bella’s express invitation. For this had been the one

costume not ready in time for the “dress-rehearsal” two nights before,

when Bella and “the boys” had put on their Elizabethan finery, and

peacocked about in great spirits.

“I want your brothers to be what they call ‘knocked silly’ when they

first see you, Hildegarde. You must be all dressed and ready, and we can

turn up the bottom of the skirt and work at that last dragon while we’re

waiting.”

In pursuance of this plan, the two girls had gone up-stairs directly

after supper, though it was hardly probable the boys could get there

before half-past nine.

Mrs. Mar sat waiting for them in the parlor, on that side of the center

table where the book rest supported an open volume. She rocked while she

waited, and she crocheted while she rocked. At times she glanced at the

clock—not once at the open book. Not for her own edification was the

volume there, but for the enlargement of Hildegarde’s literary horizon,

while she and Bella stitched at silver dragons. But this latest choice

in standard works had not pleased any one. Victor Hugo was much too fond

of fiery love-scenes to prosper with Mrs. Mar, but the miserable man

had become a classic, and after all, Hildegarde was old enough not to

be infected. Bella—she read everything, the minx! Although Hildegarde

was in her twenty-fifth year, Mrs. Mar knew her so little, she felt no

assurance that the girl would keep up her languages, or read “the best

things” in any tongue, without her mother’s dragging her by main force

across the flowery fields of belles lettres—as though over stubble and

through brake.

Listening to Mrs. Mar’s reading of a classic was an experience of some

singularity. For if she macerated descriptive bits with a chin-chopper

despatch, to get them out of the way (not disguising the fact that she

considered these passages in the light of the salutary self-torture that

no disciplined life should evade, any more than vaccination or a visit

to the dentist), she did far deadlier things to scenes of sentiment or

passion. These she approached with a sturdy determination not to give

in to their nonsense, to make them at all events _sound_ like sanity by

sheer force of her own impregnable common-sense—a force so little to be

withstood, that it could purge the most poetic page ever written. It

made even Victor Hugo sound as reasonable as the washing list. If you

didn’t inwardly curse or secretly weep, you must have laughed to see how

effectually she could clip fancy’s wings, slam the door on sentiment,

bring high passion down to a sneaking shame, and effectually punish a

great reputation. In short, listening to Mrs. Mar reading romance was so

sure a way, not only to strip it bare of its traditional glory, but to

rob it of every chance of “going home,” that Hildegarde, as soon as she

got wind of what was the next work to be attacked, hastened to borrow it

of Bella, devoured it alone, and so got a first impression that could

more or less hold its own against the maternal onslaught. It is but

fair to say that to any comedy passage Mrs. Mar gave excellent effect,

and, by way of appreciation, a grim smile peculiarly her own; while for

a spirited encounter between wits sharp and merciless, she had open

approval.

“That’s something like!” she would say. “Old Dumas” (or whoever it might

be), “he can do it when he likes!” and the great one was patted on the

back: “_This_ man’s going to live.”

Bella had known that Mrs. Mar would sit in the half-light till even she

could see no longer. But Hildegarde was not suffered to make her entrance

in the dusk. Bella ran in first and “lit up.” She did not stop to draw

the blinds, she was in too great a hurry; besides, it was nice to let

in the mild and beautiful night. “Now, Hildegarde! Look, Mrs. Mar,” and

Bella ushered in a living page from an old Icelandic Saga; “isn’t she

glorious?”

Mrs. Mar pecked at the regal figure with her hard, bright eyes, “White

doesn’t make her any slimmer,” she said.

“Oh, it wouldn’t do for Brunhild to be a mean, little, narrow creature.”

“That helmet, too! It makes her look ten feet high.”

“She wants to look high!—_and_ ‘mighty!’ and she does. No, no, stop

Hildegarde, you _mustn’t_ take it off.”

“Just till we hear the boys coming. It—it’s—” Hildegarde contracted her

broad brows under the helmet’s weight.

But Bella flew to the rescue. “Don’t, don’t! Hands off! What does it

matter if it _is_ heavy? You must get used to it. You’ve got to be a

heroine!” she wound up severely, “so don’t expect to be comfortable!”

and Bella pulled a chair under the drop-light. “Sit here where Trenn and

Harry can see you the minute they open the door. Now we can go on with

the last dragon while we’re waiting.”

Mrs. Mar cleared her throat, “‘Acte Cinquième. La Noce.’” And the two

girls, raising their eyes from the work, saw through the open window,

in front of them, not the close-massed syringa underneath, nor the

soft Californian night above, but “une terrasse du palais d’Aragon,”

in the town of Saragossa, four hundred years ago. And no sense visited

them of any jarring contrast between the picture of the world in the

yellow-backed book, and the picture of life as they knew it best. Thanks

to the poet that lives in most young hearts, even Victor Hugo’s gallant

vision of a civilization that was old before California was discovered,

brought no envious sense of the difference between then and now—rather a

naïve surprise that those others so far away, so long ago, should have

understood so well.

Older, more self-critical, they might have lost this sense of

comradeship—might have gone over to the gray majority that insists only

the past is picturesque, or that if any grace remains unto this day,

it must needs be far removed from places we know well, precariously

surviving under other skies, speaking an alien tongue. Those who would

persuade us there is no scene in our every-day life but what is sordid,

barren, or at best (and worst) meanly commonplace—stuff unfit for poetry

or even for noble feeling—what do the carpers by such comment on our

times but confess an intellect abject, slavish, blind. To find the beauty

and the dignity that lie in the difficult familiar days that we ourselves

are battling through, to detect high courage in the common speech, to

get glimpses of the deathless face of romance as we go about the common

streets, is merely to know life as it is, and yet to walk the modern

world as gloriously companioned as any Viking or Hidalgo of the past.

So true is early youth’s apprehension of these things, that not even Mrs.

Mar could make wide enough for envy or embarrassment the gulf in the two

girls’ minds between an Old World bandit chief, and a New World soldier

of fortune. The transition, that to the sophisticated seems grotesque,

between the Hernani of 1519 and the modern American pursuing perilous

ways to the Pole—this feat was accomplished without misgiving, although

in Saragossa, “on entend des fanfares éloignées,” and in Valdivia an

indefatigable woman, on the other side of the street, was strumming the

old tune, renamed, “The Boulanger March”; and now Mrs. Mar was beginning

Scene III with an air of cold distrust, that Bella foresaw would mount by

well-known degrees to a climax of scorn.

The lady turned the page.

“‘Mon âme

Brûle—Eh! dis au volcan qu’il étouffe sa flamme,’—

“How long are they going on like this, I wonder?” she interrupted herself

to durchblätter the pages.

“‘Ah! qui n’oublierait tout à cette voix celeste!’”

And more fingering of the leaves. “Four more solid pages of this sort of

thing,” she announced. “Well, if the rest of the world has stood it, I

suppose we must.” And she went on—

“‘Ta parole est un chant où rien d’humain ne reste—’”

And on, in a measured staccato, exactly as if she were adding up a column

of figures, or telling off yards of tape.

“‘Doña Sol.

Viens, ô mon jeune amant,

Dans mes bras.’”

Bella dropped the silver dragon, and with, “Wait, Mrs. Mar, _dearest_

Mrs. Mar!” she seized the book.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“This is _my_ part!” said Bella, shutting the volume convulsively. “I

know it every bit.”

“‘Voilà notre nuit de noces commencée!

Je suis bien pâle, dis, pour une fiancée?’”

And on to—

“‘Mort! non pas! nous dormons,

Il dort! c’est mon époux, vois-tu, nous nous aimons,

Nous sommes couchés là. C’est notre nuit de noce.

Ne le réveillez pas, seigneur duc de Mendoce,

Il est las. Mon amour, tiens-toi vers moi tourné.

Plus près—plus près encore—’”

Hildegarde, with tears, put out her hand and took Bella’s. No word, just

the clasp of hands, till they fell apart to work.

“H’m,” said Mrs. Mar dryly. “I suppose you’ve seen Sarah Bernhardt go on

like that.”

“No, oh, no. I don’t like Sarah in this. I do it much better.”

“A good many people seem to be able to put up with the other lady.”

But Bella, smiling, shook her head, as she drew a new strand of silver

thread through her needle. “I don’t like seeing her make dear Doña Sol

so—so snaky, and so wildly unnatural.”

“Well, if you think Doña Sol’s _natural_—”

Bella laughed. “You’d think she was nature itself compared to Sarah.”

“People said the same thing about Curly what’s-his-name.”

“Curly?”

“Yes, the Englishman who acted with the red-haired woman.”

“Oh, you mean Kyrle—”

“Curl! Is that how he calls himself? Well, I’m sure I’ve no objection. I

liked him. But people went about saying _he_ wasn’t natural.”

Bella looked up. “Did you think he was?”

“Certainly not. But I’m a person who likes _acting_. I don’t want them

natural.” She wound up in a tone of delicious contempt, “I can see people

being natural every day of my life, without paying for it.”

Bella laughed. “Oh, I’m _so_ glad I know you, dear Mrs. Mar!” That lady,

unmoved by the tribute, began to do her duty by the notes. Bella never

listened to notes, and by and by her little face took on again the

tragic look with which she had declaimed, “La fatalité s’accomplit.”

Bella was a good deal changed in this last year. Hildegarde, looking at

her paling beauty, was sometimes stricken with fear. “What should I do

without her!”

The postman’s ring. Bella jumped up without ceremony in the middle of

Note 2, and ran out to see what had come. Only a paper. It wasn’t the

postman. Merely the little boy outrageously late with “The Evening News.”

Bella returned to her dragon—Mrs. Mar read on.

After all, who could be sure but what that paper lying there—how did

Bella know but it had a Norwegian telegram in it, saying word had come of

the rescue in the arctic of a party of Russians under an American leader?

Or no, the leader had done the rescuing—against awful odds. Not Bella

alone, but two entire continents were celebrating his name. For this was

the intrepid explorer of whom nothing had been heard for nearly four

years—who had been given up for dead, by all but Bella Wayne.

And this man—oh, it made the heart beat—this man had discovered the Pole.

That was why he’d been so long away. It took four years to discover the

Pole. But it was done. The whole civilized world was ringing with his

name. And natural enough. It was the greatest achievement since Columbus’

own, and the hero’s name was—

No, no, it wouldn’t be like that at all. He would want Bella to be the

first to know. The next ring at the door would be a telegram for her. Or

no, he would hardly want to break so long a silence in that brusque way.

No, he would write her a beautiful long letter—telling her—explaining—

No! Far more like him just to appear. Without writing—without

telegraphing. Just take the swiftest steamer across the Atlantic, and

the fastest train across the Continent, and some evening like this, she,

little thinking it the hour that should bring such grace, she would lift

up her eyes and there he would be!—standing before her. Not only without

a long explanatory letter, without words, her face would be hidden in his

breast.

“There!” Mrs. Mar interrupted an alternative soliloquy of Don Carlos, and

Bella started. “They’re early! There are the boys, now!”

“I don’t hear them.” But as Hildegarde spoke the words she was conscious

of steps on the graveled path, that wound its rather foolish way round

this side of the house, leading nowhere. No one ever walked there but

Hildegarde herself, cutting or tending flowers. She glanced at Bella, and

saw in the wide hazel eyes a light she knew.

On the step came crunching gravel. Bella’s needle arrested half through

a stitch, and all Bella’s face saying, “John! John Galbraith!”—and only

Hildegarde, through her eyes, hearing. But even Mrs. Mar was under some

spell of silence and strained expectation. Now the firm tread paused, and

there—there, in front of the low uncurtained window, above the syringas,

showed the head and shoulders of a man. Not Trenn, not Harry. Who?

Hildegarde held her breath.