“Was it—_could_ it be?” Bella asked mutely, with wildly beating heart.
Hildegarde, too, was wide-eyed and pale, though even in the dusk, plain
to see the vigorous upstanding figure was not a bent old man’s. Bella
felt the happy blood come flooding back about her heart; only to ebb
again with a suddenness so mighty, that it seemed to withdraw from her,
not gladness only, but volition and all feeling—seemed to want to carry
out life itself upon its backward tide.
For the man had trodden down the flowers in the border, and pushed his
way through the syringa thicket. He stood at the open window, looking in.
“Well, Mr. Louis Cheviot,” said Mrs. Mar, with an affectation of
calmness, “where did _you_ drop from?” And then Hildegarde’s helmeted
figure rose up like some spirit of woman out of another time. But she
stood quite still, and she looked as if she knew she was dreaming.
Cheviot vaulted over the low sill, and came toward her with eyes of
wonder. “What’s all this for? Why are you like that?”—but he had grasped
her hand.
“That absurd thing on her head? It was to show the boys,” explained Mrs.
Mar. “A ball—”
“Are you _sure_ you are you?” Hildegarde found her voice at last.
“Much surer than I am that you are you. I saw your light from the street,
and I felt I couldn’t possibly wait to go round and ring the bell. I
thought I must come and look in and see what you were like, though I must
say I didn’t expect—” He was shaking hands with Mrs. Mar now, but he
glanced over his shoulder at the tall white figure and past it to Bella.
“I believe I’ve succeeded in scaring at least one of the party. How do
you do, Bella? Feel me. I’m not a ghost!”
“My dear boy,” interrupted Mrs. Mar, speaking in her most matter of fact
tone, “sit down and tell us all about it.” She at all events was not too
agitated to put her marker in the book before she closed it, and she took
up her crochet.
Hildegarde was still standing there, but she had taken off the helmet and
held it in her hand. “Are you—are you alone?” she asked.
“Yes, alone.”
“I suppose you’ve heard nothing of Mr. Mar?” said Mrs. Mar, who had never
in her life been heard to refer to that gentleman in any more intimate
fashion.
“Oh, yes, I have.” Cheviot sat down. Hildegarde still stood there. “I was
with him between five and six months.”
“With father! Has he been to the Klondike, too?”
“No; but I’ve been to Golovin.”
“Your last letter, nine months ago, said you were coming by the next
boat,” Mrs. Mar arraigned him.
“Yes, but I hadn’t heard from Hildegarde when I wrote that.”
“What difference did that make?”
“The difference of my following her suggestion to look out for Mr. Mar. I
had to go to Golovin to do it.”
“Is that where he is now?” demanded his wife. “Why on earth hasn’t he
written?”
Cheviot felt in his inner pocket, as he said, “No, Mr. Mar’s at Nome.”
“At Nome!”
“He—he’s not ill?” faltered Hildegarde.
“No, on the contrary, he’s better than he’s been for years.”
“Then what on earth’s he doing at Nome?” demanded Mrs. Mar. “Why didn’t
he go to the place he’s been talking about for all these—”
“He did.”
“Well?” and then, with her peculiar incisiveness, “What’s he got to show
for it all?”
Cheviot did not wonder that Mar would rather not return to face
that particular look in the polished onyx eyes. “I don’t know,”—he
hesitated—“that there’s very much to show—as yet.”
“It oughtn’t to surprise anybody.” The lady turned the highly polished
stones in her head with an added glitter.
“When is he coming home?” asked Hildegarde, with a pitiful lip.
“Perhaps next summer.”
“Perhaps!” echoed the girl.
Even Mrs. Mar stopped crocheting a moment. “Hush, Hildegarde. Let him
tell us.” But she must not be supposed to be over-anxious. “Have you just
come? Have you had anything to eat?”
“Oh, thank you—in the train. First of all, I must give you the letters
he’s sent.” He handed one to Mrs. Mar, and one to Hildegarde. Another he
laid on the table under the lamp. It was addressed to Messrs. Trennor and
Harry Mar. Mother and daughter hurriedly read and exchanged letters.
“Well, Miss Bella, how’s the world treating you?” and Cheviot talked on
in his old half-ironic fashion to the pale girl putting away a heap of
tangled silver thread in a work-box.
Mrs. Mar’s eye, grown even harder and brighter in the last moments, fell
upon the envelop under the lamp. She did not scruple to tear it open. But
there was little enlightenment even in the epistle to “the boys.”
“He says you’ll give us the particulars.” Mrs. Mar flung the notice at
Cheviot as if plainly to advertise her intention to hold him responsible
if those same particulars were not reassuring.
Cheviot told briefly how he had found Mr. Mar at the mission, how an
eavesdropper had overheard their private talk, and how Mr. Mar reached
his journey’s end only to find that the thirty-year-old secret had been
filched from him, and other men (who hadn’t known it but three days), how
they had gathered in the harvest.
“Not all—surely father got _something_?”
“By the time he reached Anvil Creek he found it staked from end to end.”
Mrs. Mar was plying the crochet-needle with a rapidity superhuman. “Of
course he’d be too late,” she said, with a deadly quietness. “Give him
thirty years’ start, and he’ll be too late.”
“It was an outrage that a handful of men should have been able to gobble
the entire creek,” said Cheviot hurriedly. “The laws will be changed,
beyond a doubt. They’re monstrous. Every miner has been able to take out
a power of attorney, and he could locate for his entire family, for all
his friends—even for people who don’t exist.”
“And those missionaries took it all!”
“Not the missionaries. They were chivvied out of the game by a reindeer
herder they’d let into the secret. It’s too long a story to tell you
now, but the herder gave the missionaries the slip, and got word to some
friends of his. The rascals formed a district and elected a recorder.
By the time we got there, there wasn’t an inch left for the man who’d
discovered the gold.”
In the pause Hildegarde hunted wildly in her mind for something to
say—something that would prevent her mother from speaking—but the girl’s
tongue could find no word, her mind refused to act.
Fortunately, the story had reduced even Mrs. Mar to silence.
“In the end Christianson and Björk didn’t fare much better than Mr. Mar,
though I believe they got something. But the herder and his friends are
millionaires.”
It was more than one of the company could bear. Mrs. Mar got up and left
the room.
Cheviot met Hildegarde’s eyes. There was that in his face that gave her
the sense of leaning on him in spirit—of being in close alliance with him.
“Poor, poor father!” she said, in a half whisper. “Does he take it
dreadfully to heart?”
“Well, you can imagine it wasn’t an easy thing to bear.”
“No, but why isn’t he here—we’ll all help him to bear it.”
Cheviot looked at the door through which Mrs. Mar had disappeared. His
eyes said plain as print, “Will she?”
“But father must come home!” Hildegarde broke in on the eloquent silence,
as though upon some speech of Cheviot’s. “What is he thinking of—he
doesn’t mean—”
Her agitation was so great she hardly noticed that Bella had finished
putting the things away in the work-box, and was leaving the room. The
moment she had shut the door, “He can’t face it,” said Cheviot.
“Oh, but that’s madness. He must be told that we—that I—he _must_ come
home. Why, it’s the most dreadful thing I ever heard of in my life, his
bearing it all alone.” Her tears were falling. “Tell me—there’s nothing
in the letters—Louis,”—she leaned forward—“you and I always tell each
other the truth, don’t we?”
“I’m afraid we do,” he said, with his old look.
“Then tell me _what’s in father’s mind_. What has he said to you?”
“That he will stay up there till—somehow—he has either made his pile, or
made his exit.”
The girl laid her head down beside the shining helmet on the table, and
wept convulsively.
“I had to tell you.” Cheviot had come close to her, and his voice was
half indignant, half miserable.
Blindly she put out a hand and grasped his arm. “Thank you—you—you have
been good. His letter to me says that you—that you—Louis!” Suddenly she
lifted her wet face, “I _am_ ‘unendingly grateful.’”
“Well, I hope you’ll get over it.” He drew his arm out of her grasp, and
walked about the room.
Hildegarde followed him with tear-wet eyes that grew more and more
bewildered. “I can’t understand how you’re here. I thought navigation
wouldn’t be open for a month.”
“Nearer two.”
“Then, how—how—”
“I came out with dogs over the ice.”
She stared incredulous. “_How_ did you come?”
“Round the coast of Norton Bay, down across the Yukon, and over to the
Kuskoquim, and then by the old Russian route to Kadiak Island.”
“How in the world did you know the way?”
“Part of the time I had native guides.”
“Wasn’t it a very terrible journey?”
“I don’t know that I’d do it again.”
“And when you got down to Kadiak Island?”
“I waited a week for the boat.”
“They run in winter!”
“Yes. Kadiak comes in for a swing eastward of the warm Japanese current.
The boats ply regularly to Sitka.”
“It must have taken you a long time to do all that first part on your own
two feet.”
He didn’t answer.
“When did you see father last?”
“On the morning of the 8th of December, when I cracked my whip over my
dog-team and turned my back on Nome.”
“Heavens! Why, that’s—”
“Over three months ago.” Most men would have paused a moment for
contemplation of their prowess or at least of their hardships, but
Cheviot was ready to put his achievement at once and for ever behind
him—ready, not only to imagine the general interest somewhere else, but
to lead the way thither. “To be exact, it was three months and sixteen
days ago; but your father was all right when I left him, and he had
supplies.”
“Has he any friends?”
“He’s got a dog he’s very thick with, and he’s got a comfortable tent.”
“A tent, in that climate!”
“It’s all anybody has. No lumber for cabins; little even for sluices,
hardly enough for rockers—to rock out the dust, you know. Wood is dearer
than gold.”
“_A tent!_”
“I assure you there was only one thing he was really in want of.”
“What was that?”
“Some way to get word to you. He knew you’d be anxious. He wants you not
to take his failure to heart. He thinks a great deal about that, because
he says you helped—”
“Yes, yes.”
“He wanted me to make it quite clear to you that in spite of everything
he wasn’t sorry he’d tried it. And you mustn’t be sorry either. You must
write to him, Hildegarde, and reassure him.”
She nodded and turned away her face, but she put up her hand like one who
cannot bear much more.
“He was _afraid_ you were fretting about him. I never saw him more
awfully pleased and glad than when I made up my mind to come out over the
ice.”
“That appalling journey! You did it for him?”
“No, I didn’t.”
He waited, as if for a sign, and then, speaking almost surlily, “I did it
for myself,” he said. “I’d been away long enough.”
“Yes,” said Hildegarde, “yes, indeed.”
“I couldn’t bear it any longer, sitting there in the dark and cold, and
the”—she raised her eyes—“the—oh, it’s not such a bad place as people
make out; if you aren’t eating your heart out to know—”
“What’s father doing?” she asked hastily.
“Waiting to hear from you. Waiting, like everybody else, for the ice to
go out.”
“What will he do when the ice goes out?”
“He’s got some claims,” Cheviot lowered his voice to say. “He doesn’t
want anybody but you to know, for fear there’s nothing in them. But
as soon as the frost is enough out of the ground to yield to pick and
shovel, he means to rock out a few tons of gravel and _see_.”
“Do it himself!”—then, as Cheviot did not answer at once, “It’s simply
dreadful! It’s—I can’t bear it.” She hid her face.
“Don’t, Hildegarde. I wish you wouldn’t cry.”
“Are you going back there?”
“No, oh, no; I’m not even going back to the Klondike.”
Mrs. Mar opened the door behind them. “It must be hours since you made
that miserable meal in the train,” she said. “Come in here and have some
supper.”
Cheviot would have declined but that he knew he must some time submit to
a tête-à-tête. Best get it over.
After the dining-room door shut behind her mother and Cheviot, Hildegarde
still sat there. The only movement about the white figure under the lamp
was the salt water that welled up constantly and constantly overflowed
the wide, sad eyes. The handle of the other door turned softly—a girl’s
face looked in.
“Bella”—the motionless figure rose out of the chair and the one at the
threshold came swiftly in. “Bella”—the voice was muffled—“my father—my
father doesn’t mean ever to come home.”
The incoming figure stopped. “Do the letters say that?” Bella asked,
awestruck.
“No, Louis says so.”
“Well, I think it was very heartless of him.”
“No, it wasn’t. I made him. It would have been infinitely worse to be
always waiting.”
“To be always waiting _is_ perhaps the worst,” said Bella, with lowered
eyes.
“Yes, worst of all.”
Bella roused herself and came nearer to her friend. “But for Mr. Mar—why,
it’s impossible—don’t you believe it, dear. It’s absurd to think—”
“He’ll never come back. You’ll see he’ll never come back, unless—”
“Unless?”
“Unless”—Hildegarde cleared her tear-veiled voice—“unless some one goes
and brings him home.”
“Louis Cheviot?”
“Don’t you see, he’s failed. He’s been enormously kind;—he’s been
wonderful, but he couldn’t get my father to come home.”
“Are you thinking one of the boys might?”
Hildegarde shook her head. “They couldn’t make him.”
“Who could?”
She looked round the room with eyes that again were filling. But they
came back to Bella’s face. “Father would do it for _me_,” she said;
“don’t you know he would?”
“Well,” said the other, staring, “if not for you, for no one.”
“Yes, yes, he’d do it for me!” Hildegarde moved about the room with a
restlessness unusual in her. She went to each window in turn, pulled down
the blinds and drew the curtains; and still she moved about the room.
Excitement had drunk her tears. Her face was full of light.
Bella did not stir, but no look or move of Hildegarde’s escaped her.
She fixed her eyes on the gleaming dragons that crawled at the hem of
Hildegarde’s skirt. The voices in the next room were audible, but not the
words.
Across the street the tireless female had again struck up her favorite
march.
“You’d have to go alone,” Bella said presently.
“Yes, I’d have to go alone.”
“It’s an awful journey.”
“I suppose so.”
“Yes, and the people—the roughest sort of people.”
“I wouldn’t be afraid—at least, not much.”
“_I_ shouldn’t dare to.”
“No, no, you’re younger. And besides, even if I were the younger, I’m the
one who could do it.” Not often that Hildegarde laid herself open to a
charge of arrogance. “Yes,” she said, with rising excitement, “_I_ could
do it, only”—and the high look fell—“it costs a great deal.” She stood
quite still looking down upon Brunhild’s shield, that showed on the dark
carpet like a tiny circular pool of gleaming water. Still that maddening
piano over the way! “The boys wouldn’t help me,” Hildegarde thought out
loud, “they’ve already—they’ll be disgusted enough as it is.” She sat
down, still with her eyes on the shield, as if she didn’t dare lose
sight of it a moment. “Of course mother wouldn’t dream—” After a little
pause, “And Louis would say I was mad. But I must think—I must think!”
She leaned her tilted chin on her hand, and still like one hypnotized she
stared at the metal disk shining there in the shadow. “I must find a way.
Father shall not be left up there another winter.”
Nothing more, till Bella brought out quite low the words, “I could get
you the money.”
“_Bella!_” Hildegarde dropped her hand and sat back. “Would you?”
Instead of answering, “I wouldn’t dare to go myself,” Bella said.
“Oh, _you_ couldn’t possibly.” (Had Bella really meant that she
might lend—) “Even if there were any need of it, _you_ couldn’t go.”
Hildegarde’s lips only were saying words, her mind was already faring
away on an immense and wonderful journey, that she—_she_ was competent to
undertake. “You aren’t the kind, anyway,” she wound up bluntly, coming
back.
“Nobody would think you were the kind either—nobody but me.”
“Yes, yes. You’ve always understood that I wasn’t a bit like what people
thought,” and, indeed, few who supposed they knew Hildegarde Mar but
would have been surprised at the look in her face to-night, for once
betraying not alone a passionate partizanship with her father’s stranded
and embittered existence, but the glow that even the thought of “going to
the rescue” may light in a generous heart, and reflect in the quietest
face.
“You could do anything you meant to,” said Bella, marveling a little at
the new beauty in her friend, “anything. But this—you’d have to be very
brave to go on such a—”
“No, I wouldn’t. I _long_ to go.”
No great surprise to Bella after all, this admission that Hildegarde, the
reticent, the cold, was really burning with all sorts of eagerness that
had never been suffered expression.
But there was something more here to-night. Like many another, Hildegarde
could have gone through hardship and suffering for the sake of any one
she loved, but the look on her face as she sat there under the light,
revealed the fact that this journey Bella shrank from even thinking of,
that Hildegarde herself had called “appalling,” made yet its own strange
appeal to the girl, apart from love of her father, independent of the joy
of service.
“You think if I did it, it would be because I’m brave and a good
daughter, and things like that. No, it’s none of those things. It’s
because, while other people have been going to New York and to Mexico, to
London and to Paris, and—and—the farthest places, while they traveled
north, south, east, west, I’ve sat here in this little house in Valdivia,
and sewed and planted a garden and heard everybody else saying good-by,
and listened to that woman over the way playing ‘Partant pour la Syrie,’
and have still stayed here, and sewed, and gardened, and only _heard_
about the world. I’ve done it long enough! I’m going to the North, too!”
Hildegarde stood up with eyes that looked straight forward into space. A
movement from the other seemed to bring the would-be traveler back. “If
anybody will help me,” she said, turning her eyes on Bella’s face.
The younger girl was on her feet. In the silence the two moved toward
each other. Bella lifted her arms and threw them about Hildegarde’s neck.
“I’ve told you I’ll help you.”
“I love you very much already, but if you’d do that for me—” The shining
eyes pieced out the broken phrase.
Bella turned her graceful little head toward the dining-room door.
Cheviot had raised his voice. But they couldn’t hear the words.
“There’s only one thing”—Bella spoke in a whisper—“just think a moment;
all those hundreds of miles with a dog team over the ice, in an arctic
winter. If anybody else had done such a thing we should never have heard
the last of it. The world wouldn’t be long in having another book on
heroism in high latitudes. But we all know _that_ man”—she moved her head
in the direction of the voice—“we’ll never hear of it again. He’s done
that gigantic journey just for you,”—Hildegarde disengaged herself—“and
to be with you again. And here you are planning to go away. It isn’t my
business, but I think you’ll be making a terrible mistake, Hildegarde, if
you—”
Her friend turned from her with unusual abruptness.
“He’s nicer than ever,” Bella persisted. “He’s charming. I always said
so.”
“And I always said”—Hildegarde stopped and looked at Bella with an odd
intentness. “You’re a nicer girl than you used to be.”
“Thank you,” said the other, smiling faintly, but she saw that she had
failed.
“And I don’t mean because you’re willing to help me in this.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’d be only one thing that could prevent my letting you lend me the
money.”
“Well, you certainly needn’t worry about paying it back.”
“It would take two or three years, but that could be managed now that
Trenn and Harry want to give me an allowance. It isn’t that.”
Bella waited wondering.
“It is that I couldn’t take a great, great help from you, and go so far
away, carrying anything in my heart that—that I’d kept hid—anything that
concerned you.”
A quick fear leapt into Bella’s face.
“For one mightn’t come back, you know,” the other added.
“There’s only one thing we’ve never straightened out,” said Bella, “and
that’s _my_ tangle.”
“I have my share in the thing, I mean. But as I said, you couldn’t do
now—what you did—when you were little.”
“Oh!” Bella drew a sharp breath of relief. “When I was little I know I
was a beast.”
“You told Louis Cheviot about the altar, and the patron saint; about—”
“Yes,” said Bella hastily. “It was pretty mean of me, but I was only
twelve.”
“It wasn’t only when you were twelve.” Gratitude, common prudence, should
have bridled Hildegarde’s tongue, but there was something of the judgment
day about this hour. Hearts must needs be opened and secrets known. “It
was after,” she went on, driven by this new necessity to leave nothing
hidden if she was to take Bella’s help, “it was six years after—when you
were eighteen. You had gone away knowing quite well how—how I was feeling
about—You knew how I was feeling. Yet you could write pretty heartlessly,
considering all things. That gay letter about your engagement. You could
write with that insincere air of expecting me to be as happy as you were.”
“You surely see it would have been unpardonable of me to have sympathized
with you. I _had_ to assume you didn’t care. You would have done the
same.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
Bella looked at her. “That’s true,” she said, quite low. “You would have
shown that you were sorry for me, even in the middle of being happy
yourself. You could have done it and not hurt. But I couldn’t. I didn’t
know how. The nearest I could come to it was just to pretend I thought
you’d got over it—that you didn’t care any longer.”
They looked at each other a moment without speaking. Bella with quivering
face glided forward.
“Dearest, dearest”—she took Hildegarde’s hand, she caught it to her
breast. “You aren’t going to let him—the Other—spoil _two_ lives!”
“At least I’m ready to risk what’s sure to happen.”
“What’s sure to happen?”
“His coming while I’m away.” Hildegarde flung out the words with a
passion Bella had never seen in her before. “Yes, that’s what will
happen. I shall have waited for him at home here all my life _till_ this
summer. And this summer, while I’m gone, he’ll come to Valdivia. You’ll
see! He’ll come.”