No prevision of Hildegarde’s as to Cheviot’s disapproval of her plan
approached the degree to which he fought against her going to the North.
Mrs. Mar, secretly dismayed at her husband’s willingness to stay away
indefinitely, was not ill-content for once to see the “stolid Hildegarde”
stirred to action. It satisfied a need in the mother, that the daughter
had never ministered to before. Hildegarde was the sort of girl who could
take excellent care of herself, and her health was superb. She had no
important concerns such as the boys had to chain them at home. She was
not the mother of a family, nor even president of the Shakspere Society.
The welfare of the Hindus would be wholly unaffected by her departure.
The journey was quite unlike that terrible one involved in going to the
Klondike. It could be made in a comfortable ship; the whole of it by sea.
Her mother would go with her to the steamer, and Hildegarde would stay on
board till her father met her at the Alaskan port.
But they had all reckoned without Cheviot.
He refused to take the idea seriously at first, and when he did—oh, he
was serious enough then!
“The maddest scheme that ever entered a sane head!” Hildegarde had no
conception of what such a journey was like. The ships were the most
uncomfortable in the world. Freight boats, with no accommodation for
women. The food appalling. The company—oh, it didn’t even bear talking
about!
But Cheviot did talk of it, to Bella, when he discovered her complicity,
and so effectually he talked that she withdrew her support.
Hildegarde was speechless with indignation. What spell had he cast that
Bella could “go back” on her word. Truly a thing to depend upon—Bella’s
friendship.
“Oh, please try to understand. I was always frightened at the idea, even
before Louis told me—”
“Why should you be frightened,” said Hildegarde sternly. “It isn’t as if
I were a rescue party and my little journey were to the other side of
the world. I shouldn’t sail from Norway, and I shouldn’t catch up with
anybody in Franz Josef Land.”
“Hildegarde! You’ve never spoken to me like that before in your life.”
“No, I’ve never admitted before that you’d failed me.”
Bella, with flushed face, got up to leave the room. “You think I’m
backing out only because of what Louis says. But I meant to tell you it
would have been terrible to me to be responsible for your going, after
what you said that night Louis came home.”
“What did I say?”
“That this summer, while you’re gone—”
“Well?”
“There will be news.”
“You mean from—”
“Yes,” Bella steeled herself. “As soon as I’d got you out of the way—”
Hildegarde winced; rather dreadful that she should have said that to
Bella—too like what the average male critic would expect. “Did I say
_you_, Bella? I only meant fate.”
“You were sure he would come this summer. Stay and see.”
“It’s only if I’m not here that John Galbraith will come.”
Hildegarde had a final interview with the arch culprit, Cheviot.
“I had no idea you could be like this,” she said, toward the close.
“Then it’s as well you should know.”
It ended in a breach. He came no more to the house. Hildegarde passed him
in the street with lowered eyes.
And Bella had gone home.
* * * * *
The spring went creeping by.
Now June was gone. Even July. Still no news.
“You see,” said Hildegarde dully, “father isn’t coming back.”
August was waning—not even a letter. And from that other more terrible
North, no syllable of the tidings, that to reach those two waiting in
California, must come round by the old world, and all across the new.
“He is dead,” Hildegarde said to herself, and it was not of Nathaniel Mar
that she was thinking.
The boys had generously sent their father both money and advice. He was
recommended to use the sight draft on the Alaska Commercial Company, for
the purpose of buying his home passage by the very next ship.
At last, when the season was drawing to a close—news!
Not that expected—but something no man had looked for.
Gold had been discovered in the sands of the Nome beach.
Men who had been stranded there—arriving too late for a claim on the
creeks—a broken and ragged horde, were now persons of substance and of
cheerful occupation, that of “rocking out” fifty to a hundred dollars a
day upon the beach at Nome. The gold was not here alone, but under the
moss and the coarse grass of the tundra. It clung to the roots when you
pulled up the sedgy growths. It was everywhere. What was the contracted
little valley of the Klondike compared to this!
“The greatest of all the new world gold-fields has been found. A region,
vaster than half a dozen Eastern States, sown broadcast with gold-dust
and nuggets. Easy to reach and easy to work.”
Here was the poor man’s country. If you didn’t want to rock out a fortune
for yourself, you could earn fifteen dollars a day working for others.
“The beach for miles is lined with miners’ tents. Anvil City
(hereafter to be called Nome) is booming.
“Building lots that six months ago were worth nothing, to-day
bring thousands of dollars.
“Where a year ago was only a bare, wind-swept beach on Bering
Sea—one of the most desolate places to be found on earth and
beside which the Yukon country has a fine climate—there is
to-day a city of several thousand people, surrounded by the
richest placer-diggings the world has seen.”
The gold-laden miners returning to Seattle by the last boats of the
autumn, told the reporters with a single voice, “The world has known
nothing like Cape Nome.”
Tongues went trumpeting the mighty news, pens flew to set it down, and
telegraph operators flicked the tidings from one end of the earth to the
other.
The word “Nome,” that had meant nothing for so long to any man but Mar—it
became a syllable of strangest portent; stirring imaginations that had
slept before, heralding hope to despairing thousands, setting in motion a
vast machinery of ships and of strange devices, and of complicated human
lives.
New lines of steamships bought up every craft that could keep afloat;
companies were formed to exploit the last new gold-saving device; men who
had fallen out of the ranks, returned to the struggle saying, “After all,
there’s Nome!”
“And this is the moment Mr. Mar will naturally choose for turning his
back on the North.” It was so that his wife successfully masked her
secret anxiety for his return. It was as if she resented so sorely her
growing uneasiness about him—fought so valiantly against the slow-dawning
consciousness of the share she had in his exile, that she must more than
ever veil secret self-criticism by openly berating him. Above all she
must disguise the impatience with which she awaited his return “this
autumn, at the latest.” “Now,” she would say, “now that even he couldn’t
fail to make a good thing by staying, he—oh, yes, to be sure, _he’ll_
come hustling home!” If only she had been the man!
One of the last boats brought a letter. There _was_ gold in the beach
sand, Mar wrote, but every inch was being worked over and over, and its
richness had been exaggerated. The place was overrun with the penniless
and the desperate. The United States military post established there was
powerless to maintain law and order. Drunkenness, violence, crime, were
the order of the day. The beach was a strange and moving spectacle.
“Spectacle! He goes and looks on!” was Mrs. Mar’s way of disguising her
dismay. He returned the boys’ money, “since it was sent for a purpose so
explicit.” He was “staying in.”
Other letters, brought by the same steamer, told what Mr. Mar had omitted
to mention: that typhoid fever was at work as well as those gold-diggers
on the famous beach.
Men were dying like flies.
* * * * *
The third winter came down, and the impregnable ice walls closed round
“the greatest gold-camp on the globe.”
“Typhoid! Even if he escapes the fever, he will stay up there till he
dies, unless—” Hildegarde was glad she had not yet bought anything for
the coming season. In spite of her brothers’ allowance she would become a
miser—hoarding every coin that came her way. She would make her old gowns
do, even without Bella’s transforming fingers. She thought twice even
about spending car fare. To eke out her resources she would sell Bella’s
beautiful presents, and the first boat that went north in the spring
should carry Hildegarde to her father—or to his grave.
It was gray business waiting for this first summer of the century. What
news might one expect from a man lost four years ago between Norway and
Franz Josef Land? What from that other in the nearer-by North, where men
dug gold and fought typhoid? What fatality was it that made of all hope
and all desire a magnetic needle? Hildegarde remembered how Bella, to
the question, “Why do you suppose there’s this mania among us for the
North?” had answered, “I don’t know, unless it is that we have the South
at home. Perhaps Hudson Bay people and Finlanders dream of the tropics.
I don’t know. But I’ve heard nothing so afflicts a Canadian as hearing
his country called ‘Our Lady of the Snows.’ I think there never was such
a beautiful name. But it may be because I live with orange blossoms all
about me.”
Certainly it was harder waiting without Bella. Together each year they
had hoped for news. Now apart, they feared it.
Oddly enough, what helped Hildegarde through the heavy time was the
establishment of an understanding, half incredulous, wholly unavowed,
between her and her mother. It appeared she had Mrs. Mar on her side—else
why did that lady save up every newspaper reference to the new gold-camp
to read aloud as Hildegarde sat at her sewing. The most transcendent
classic ever penned would be put aside for—
“‘Extracts from the note-book of Mr. McPherson, the third man
to strike pay on the beach.
‘(They are absolutely correct, as I saw his diary and the mint
returns for the gold, which were at the rate $19 an ounce,
yielding him nearly $10,000.)
‘Aug. 11th.—Macomber and Levy: about a mile and a half from
Anvil City. Here I got a nugget weighing $4. The nugget was
found in the sand, about 250 feet from low tide. Jim Dunsmuir
and William Bates told me that they had averaged $40 per day
rocking. They were about eleven miles south of Anvil. Price,
on No. 8 Anvil, Sunday, 20th of August, sluiced out $6,400
in seven hours, with six men. Lindblom took out $18,000 in
eighteen hours, with six men, August 14th.
‘Aug. 29th.—Leidley made a wooden caisson and sunk it about 250
ft. beyond low tide, and got from fifteen to fifty cents per
shovel. I did not see this experiment, but I believe firmly
that the richest part of the beach is beyond low tide.
‘There will be more money come out from Nome than came from the
Klondike.’”
“Here’s a column headed—
“‘A REGION RICHER THAN PIPE-DREAMS
“‘Nome defies all theories and every precedent. Its greatest
mines have been found, and its greatest fortunes have been made
by men who knew nothing of mining. Gold has been discovered by
lawyers and doctors, dry-goods’ clerks, plow-boys, barbers,
fiddlers and politicians, in a thousand places where old
miners would have sworn, and did swear, it was impossible.
Millions of dollars in glittering dust and nuggets have been
thawed out of frozen rubble and moss, and washed from ocean
beaches and other unheard-of depositories by young divinity
students, country printers, piano professors and didapper
dandies, whom nobody ever suspected of knowing grindstones from
thousand-dollar quartz, or iron pyrites from free gold.’”
Mrs. Mar read on, intoxicating herself. “Here’s a woman who was up there
in the summer when the beach gold was found. She’s brought home $15,000,
and a claim she refused to take $38,000 for.”
But if there was anything about typhoid in the paper Hildegarde had
to find it out for herself. Little by little she knew that however
deterred her mother had been by Cheviot’s onslaught the spring before,
she was either consciously or unconsciously coming to look favorably on
Hildegarde’s old plan.
What the inexperience of the girl could not guess was that Mr. Mar’s
absence had taught his wife several things. And that lady had no
inclination to gather another year’s harvest of the bitter fruit. If
Hildegarde could get him to come home, Hildegarde ought to be supported
in spite of Cheviot and the boys. But real confidence between them was
so little easy, that the girl said nothing to her mother of her plan to
raise money by selling the beautiful necklace and the other things that
Bella had from time to time brought home to her from abroad. Hildegarde
would go to a man she could trust—“the family jeweler,” as they called
the individual whose high office had been to restore the pins to brooches
that Mrs. Mar’s energetic fingers had wrenched off, and to mend Mr. Mar’s
grandfather’s watch-chain when it broke, as it used, two or three times
every year.
To the family jeweler, then, Hildegarde took her box of treasures. “What
are they worth?”
The little man screwed a glass in his eye, and examined rare stones and
renaissance enamel with an omniscient air.
“I know you’ll do your best for me,” Hildegarde said anxiously.
“Of course—certainly, Miss Mar. Not very new, are they?”
“New! Oh, no—they’re so old they’re very valuable.”
“Yes. H’m. Yes.”
“I need all you can possibly get me for them, Mr. Simonson.”
“I’ll examine them thoroughly, Miss Mar, and let you know.”
As she went out, there was Bella coming down the street. Acting on an
impulse, Hildegarde turned off the main thoroughfare, pretending not to
see. But it made her heart sore to think, “Bella in Valdivia, and not
with us! I not even to know!”
Miss Wayne went into the familiar Simonson’s. “Was that Miss Mar who was
here a moment ago?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, is it broken? That’s the necklace I got for her in Rome.”
“No, not broken. I suppose you don’t remember what you gave for it?”
Miss Bella put on her most beguiling air, and took the old man into her
confidence. She would buy the things herself and pay him a commission,
and he was not to say but what a San Francisco dealer had made the
two-hundred-dollar offer.
[Illustration: “‘I know you’ll do your best for me,’ Hildegarde said,
anxiously”]
When she got back to her hotel she telephoned to Cheviot.
The next day that young gentleman had an interview with Hildegarde’s
brothers down at the ranch. They were even boisterously of Cheviot’s
opinion. They would simply refuse their consent to their sister’s
undertaking such a journey. But to Cheviot’s anxious sense they spoke too
airily. Too certain they could prevent the abomination.
“Don’t antagonize her, you know,” warned Cheviot. “Make her see the
reasonableness of our—of your objection.” And the boys agreed.
Even before Cheviot had made money in the Klondike, and come home to be
made a partner in the bank; the Mar boys had looked upon him, not only as
a probable, but as a highly desirable brother-in-law.
They soothed his natural indignation at Hildegarde’s foolishness, and
they told him they’d meet him at the bank after giving her a talking to.
They were late for the appointment, and the moment they appeared in the
room behind the public offices, Cheviot saw they had not prospered.
“Hildegarde’s the most pig-headed creature in the universe!”—and a few
more illuminating details.
“But why didn’t you tell her—”
“Told her everything. Water on a duck’s back.”
“But what did she say?”
“‘Women have done it before.’”
“It’s not true!” cried Cheviot, jumping up. “The world has never seen
anything comparable to what this year’s rush to Nome will be. The mob
that will be going—”
“She quotes the Klondike, ‘That was worse,’ she says, ‘yet there were
women among the men who got there, lived there, and came home.’ Damn it!
it’s true, you know!”
“It isn’t true. The Klondike was a totally different proposition. The
people who got to the Klondike the year of the rush were all picked
men—a few women, yes, I admit, a few women—God help them. But the mob—a
rascally crew enough, lots of them—but they were men of some means, men
of brawn and muscle and mighty purpose or, simply, they didn’t survive.
If they weren’t like that, they turned back as thousands did, from
Juneau, from Skagway, from Dyea—or they fell out a little further on.
Didn’t I see them on the Dalton trail and the Chilcoot Pass, glad to
lie down and die? I tell you, only the hardiest attempted it, and only
the toughest survived. _That’s_ the sort of pioneer that peopled the
Klondike. Nome’s another story. Nome’s accessible by sea. Any wastrel
who can raise the paltry price of his passage can reach the American
gold-fields. Any family disgrace can be got rid of cheap by shipping him
to Nome. Any creature who’s failed at everything else under the sun has
this last chance left. Be sure he’ll go to Nome—_with Hildegarde_! Good
God! Drunkards, sharpers, men—and women, too (oh, yes, that sort!), and
people hovering on the border line of crime or well beyond it—_they’ll_
fill the north-bound ships. Hildegarde alone with such a crew!” Cheviot
jumped to his feet. “I’d infinitely rather a sister of mine were
struggling with a pack on her back over the Chilcoot Pass along with the
Klondike men of ’97, than see her shut up on board a ship with the horde
that will go to Nome.”
He walked up and down the little inner office, his eyes bright with
anger and with fear. And he added terrors not to be put before the girl
herself, but for the mother, if Hildegarde should be obdurate. “Make her
understand that Nome this summer will be the dump-heap of the world.”
“I did,” said Trenn, distractedly. “I gave her my opinion of what they
were like—those other women she quoted who had gone. It wasn’t even news
to her!”
“What! She accepted that?”
Trenn looked profoundly humiliated. Any nice girl would have pretended
she couldn’t credit such a state of things, even if she’d heard them
hinted. But Hildegarde had said gravely, “Yes, I know what you mean,
miserable women have done it for horrible ends. It’s that that makes me
ashamed to hesitate. Can’t a girl venture as much for a good end as those
others for—”
“Oh, Hildegarde’s mad!” said Trenn, with a flush on his handsome face.
“Nevertheless, she’ll go,” said Harry.
“But Mrs. Mar! What’s she about?”
Cheviot went to see.
* * * * *
“You surely don’t mean to let her go?”
“My good man, I’d like nothing better than to go myself.”
“Then why don’t you?” demanded Cheviot rudely.
Another woman might have pointed out that she was in her sixty-second
year. No one would have expected such an excuse from Mrs. Mar. There
was something in her face Cheviot had never seen there before, as with
obvious unwillingness she brought out the answer, “Hildegarde can do
this errand best. At least, as far as concerns her father. Of course”—she
recovered some of her native elasticity—“if _I_ went I’d get a claim,
too. You’d see! I’d come home with a fortune. I doubt if Hildegarde does,
though she has more in her than I’ve sometimes thought. Hildegarde won’t
come to any harm.”
Cheviot, too outraged for the moment to speak, got up and looked blindly
for his hat. When he found that, he had also found his tongue. “The only
comfort I can see in the miserable affair is that she’ll find two hundred
dollars isn’t nearly enough. There isn’t a place on the globe where
living costs as much as it does at Nome.”
“She’s been saving up her allowance for a year.”
Cheviot threw down his hat. “I tell you it would be mad for an
able-bodied man to go with less than a thousand dollars margin.”
“Hildegarde can’t raise anything like that. But she’ll have enough to get
her there, and something over.”
Cheviot looked at her. “You mean she’s ready to go without even enough
for her return expenses?”
“She says she can leave the question of returning.”
“She knows we—her brothers will send out funds to get her back!” groaned
Cheviot, beginning to walk up and down. “And she, _Hildegarde_, is
willing to embarrass her father by being a charge on him?”
“She won’t stay long. And Nome lots are selling for thousands. Her father
has at least the land his tent stands on.”
Cheviot struck his hands together in that startling if infrequent way
of his. It made even Mrs. Mar rather nervous. “Go and argue with her
yourself,” said the lady, with raised voice and a red spot glowing on
either cheek. “I shouldn’t be able to move her. I never have been able to
move Hildegarde. That’s the worst of these quiet people.”
“You say that, and yet you aren’t really opposing her.”
“Me? No,” said Mrs. Mar, fixing him with unflinching eyes. “I’m making up
the deficit.”
Cheviot had never before longed to murder a fellow creature. “You
realize, of course,” he said quietly, “she isn’t even sure of finding her
father alive.” Angry as he was, when he saw the look that thrust brought
to Mrs. Mar’s face, he was sorry he had presented it so mercilessly.
“What she’ll probably find,” he hurried on to say, “is that Mr. Mar has
gone to the Casa da Paga. That was his plan. Or the Fox River—or God
knows where.”
“If she goes as far as Nome, she’ll be able to go still further,” said
Hildegarde’s mother, though her voice wasn’t as steady as her words
implied.
“I understand you, then, at last!” Cheviot stopped before her with
anger-lit eyes. “You are ready to see a young girl—”
“Not every girl.”
“A girl like Hildegarde.”
“Precisely, one like Hildegarde. She can do it.”
“Poor Hildegarde!” burst from his lips, and the implication, “to have
a mother like you,” would have pierced many a maternal breast. But it
glanced off Mrs. Mar’s armor and fell pointless.
“Hildegarde Mar”—with an air of defending her daughter from Cheviot’s low
opinion of her—“is a person of considerable dignity of character.”
“Do you think it necessary to tell me that?”
“Singularly enough, yes. And to add that I who know her best, have never
yet seen her show any sign of not being able to take proper care of
herself.”
“Under ordinary conditions. But, as I told the boys—”
“A woman who can’t take care of herself under conditions out of the
ordinary, can’t take care of herself at all.”
Again Cheviot opened his lips, but Mrs. Mar, grasping the arms of her
rocking-chair, indoctrinated the purblind man. “The truth is, that a
girl in good health, who hasn’t been kept in cotton, and who hasn’t been
seared by men’s going on as you’re doing, is far abler to cope with life
than—than—” She pulled herself up an instant, seeming to feel that after
all man is hardly worthy to know the whole truth upon these high themes.
But she thought extremely well of Cheviot, or she would never have
permitted him to speak to her as he had done. And he loved Hildegarde.
“The truth is,” she went on, “Hildegarde is quite right about this.
There’s no reason why she _shouldn’t_ go half as strong as the reason why
she should.”
“The reason! You think it’s on account of Mr. Mar. It isn’t. Bella will
tell you Hildegarde _wants_ to go on this degrading journey. She said
everybody had traveled about and seen the world but her. She had never
been farther than Seattle to see Madeleine Somebody.”
“That’s true.”
“You see! Hildegarde is full of curiosity about—things.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, why indeed! But the fact opened my eyes to how much—how little Mr.
Mar’s welfare has to do with her crazy scheme.”
“It hasn’t opened your eyes very wide, Louis.” Mrs. Mar shook her head
with the air of one looking back over a long road painfully traversed.
“Nobody shrinks more from a fuss and a falling-out than Hildegarde. This
winter, without Bella, and without you, and without—It hasn’t been easy
for Hildegarde. She would have given in about Nome long ago, but for—”
Mrs. Mar suddenly leaned forward again, and speaking hurriedly, “Somehow
or other Hildegarde _knows_. I believe she’s known all along.”
“Knows what?”
“What her father meant to do.”
“About not coming home?”
“Yes.”
“She knows that because I told her.”
“You knew it!”
“Yes.”
“And yet”—she gripped the arms of the rocking-chair, and her eyes
shone—“you come here to get me to prevent the only step being taken—”
“No! Only to protest against Hildegarde’s taking it. Good heavens!”—he
was losing his self-control—“Hildegarde is—”
“Well and strong, and no such fool as you seem to think.”
He set his square jaw. “A little young for such a—”
“Twenty-six.”
“You forget or don’t know she’s also—attractive.”
“Attractive!” Mrs. Mar repeated with a weight of contemptuous meaning.
“Since what you imply is so little a credit to your sex, I may be allowed
to say she has shot at a mark with her brothers, and if it’s necessary,
she can carry a revolver.”
“Good God! And you’re her mother!”
Mrs. Mar sprang to her feet. “Yes, I’m her mother, and that I didn’t
myself suggest her going to get her father to come home, is only that I’m
under the spell of the old foolishness about women. The fact is, that
we’re much better able to look out for ourselves than men are—yes, stare
as much as you like! It’s so. You’re all _babies_, I tell you, and if the
women didn’t look after you, you’d be _dead_ babies!”
Cheviot snatched up his hat a second time and walked to the door. Mrs.
Mar, seeing him going off like that with never another word, and with
that fixed wretchedness on his face, quickly crossed the room and took
hold of his arm, as his hand was on the door knob. “Hildegarde is only
going to do in a more open way what women are always doing,” she said.
Cheviot turned angrily, but so astonished was he to see tears on her face
that he stood speechless.
“Some woman said it in a magazine the other day,” she went on, “but every
woman who’s good for anything is doing it.”
“Going to Nome!”
“Going out to the battlefield in the evening to look after the wounded.”