BED-ROCK
It took the Colonel a week to raise the money. He did it by selling
the second of his South Park houses. The sale being a hurried one of
property already well on the decline, the house realized less than,
even in the present state of eclipse, it was worth. Five years before
it had been appraised at fifteen thousand dollars. To-day the best
offer he could get was nine.
He placed the money in the bank, the five thousand to stay there till
June had decided more definitely on her movements. The remainder he
would leave on deposit to his own account. June, in Europe, with five
thousand dollars to her fortune, was not beyond the circle of his sense
of responsibility. Some one must have money to give her when she needed
it, as she certainly would. Her habits of economy had long ago been
sloughed off with her faded cotton dresses and her country-made boots.
Rosamund would be able to give her a home, but there must be some one
somewhere upon whom she could make a demand for funds.
There was no need now for the Colonel to study his accounts. He knew
them through and through. There was so little to know. The shut-down
mine in Shasta and his mortgage on the Folsom Street house were all
that was left to him. On the day that the sale of the South Park house
was decided upon he wrote to Rion Gracey, asking him for a position,
any overground position that the owners of the Cresta Plata thought he
would suit. It was a hard letter to write. He was nearly sixty, and he
had never, since his youth, asked any one for anything for himself. But
one must live, “G. T.’s widow” had to be considered, not to mention
June, living in England and having to be dressed as June should always
be dressed.
Two days later the details of the sale were completed and the money
deposited. Late that afternoon the Colonel, clad carefully in the shiny
coat June had caught him brushing, went across town to Folsom Street.
He had done what she had asked and all was ready.
The servant told him she was confined to her room with a bad cold, and
after a few minutes’ wait in the hall, he was conducted up stairs,
and found her lying on a sofa in the great front room, with its lofty
ceiling and tall, heavily draped windows. The sofa was drawn up before
a small fire that sent a fluctuating glow over her face, flushed
with a slight fever, and burnished the loose coil of brown hair that
crowned her head. She had a heavy cold, her voice was hoarse, her words
interrupted at intervals by a cough. She was delighted to see him,
sitting up among the cushions on which she reclined to hold out her
hand, and rallying him on the length of time since his last visit.
“But I’ve been busy,” he said, drawing a chair up to the foot of the
sofa, “busy over your affairs, young woman.”
“My affairs,” she answered, looking puzzled; then with sudden
comprehension, “Oh, the money!”
“That’s it,” he nodded, “the money. Well, it’s all ready and waiting
for you in the bank. When you want it we’ll open an account for you,
or buy a letter of credit with it, or make whatever arrangement seems
best. Anyway, there it is whenever you want to go.”
“Oh, Uncle Jim!” she breathed. “And now what do you think’s happened?”
“What?” he asked with suddenly arrested attention. It was on his
mind that startling things might be expected to happen in the Allen
household at any moment.
“I’m not going!”
“You’re not going? Junie, don’t tell me that!”
The joy in his voice and eyes was transfiguring in its sudden radiance.
He left his chair and sat down on the end of the sofa near her feet,
leaning toward her, pathetically eager to hear.
“I’ve changed my mind,”--a gleam of her old coquetry brightened her
face. “Isn’t that one of the privileges of my sex?”
“What made you change it? Good Lord, dearie, I’m so glad!”
“I’ll tell you all about it. There are several threads to this story.
In the first place Rosamund didn’t like it. She thought it was queer
for me to go to Europe alone and leave father, and just before her
wedding, too. She wouldn’t hear of my not being at the wedding. But the
other reason was more the real one.”
She sat up, her elbow in the cushions, her head on her hand, the
fingers in her loosened hair. Her eyes on the fire were melancholy and
contemplative.
“You remember what I said to you about not being able to live here any
longer? How I couldn’t stand it? Well, father’s going to Virginia City.”
“What difference does that make? He’s been going there for years.”
“Yes, but to live I mean. To take us and make our home there. That’s
the reason I’ve changed my mind. I needn’t go so far as Europe. We’re
all going to leave California and live in Nevada.”
The Colonel was astonished. He was prepared for strange actions
on Allen’s part, but a bodily family removal to Virginia when his
affairs were in so complicated a condition was unlooked for, and
incomprehensible. And why had not Allen spoken to him of it? When in
town they saw each other almost daily on Pine and Montgomery Streets.
“Isn’t it a very sudden decision of your father’s?” he asked. “He had
no idea of it last week. You didn’t know it when you came to see me
that day, did you?”
“I didn’t know of it till two days ago. It’s all happened in a minute.
Father himself didn’t know it. I was still thinking about going away
and arguing with Rosamund about it, when he came and told us he’d
decided to move to Nevada, that he had more business there than here,
and it would be much cheaper having one house in Virginia than for
him to be up there, with us down here in San Francisco. What made it
particularly easy and convenient was that some one wants to buy the
house.”
This was a second shock, but there was illumination in it. The listener
felt now that he was getting to the heart of the matter.
“Buy the house!” he ejaculated. “This house?”
“Yes, this house. I’ve forgotten the man’s name. Some one from
Sacramento wants to buy it just as it stands, with the furniture and
everything. It’s not a very good offer, but property’s gone down here,
as it has all over this side of town, and father says it’s not bad,
considering that it makes it so much easier for us to go.”
He was, for the moment, too astonished to make any comments. She
spoke as though the sale was decided on, the move settled. He knew
that neither of the sisters was aware of the mortgage he held on the
property, and he listened to her in staring silence as she went on:
“So that’s why I’m not going to Europe. Virginia’s far enough away from
San Francisco. I’ll--I’ll--not see them up there or hear about it as
I would down here. And then there was another reason that’s made me
glad to stay. When I thought of leaving you and Rosamund--it was so
hard--too hard! I don’t seem to be one of those independent women who
can go about the world alone far away from the people they love. I’d
leave my roots behind me, deep down in the ground I came from. I don’t
think I could ever pull them up. And if I tried and pulled too hard
they’d break, and then I suppose I’d wither up and die.”
She turned her eyes from the fire to him. She was smiling slightly, her
face singularly sad under the smile. He looked at her and said softly:
“My girl!”
He sat on with her for a space, discussing the move and making plans.
With some embarrassment he told her of the fact that he had written
to Rion Gracey, applying for a position. The thought that he would be
in Virginia called the first real color of life and pleasure into her
face that he had seen there for weeks. He saw that the excitement of
the move, the hope of change from the environment in which she had so
suffered, had had a bracing and cheering effect on her. It was evident
that she had set her heart on going. Despite her cold and general air
of sickly fragility she was more like herself, showed more of her
old vivacity and interest, than she had done since the night of the
Davenport ball.
On his way down the stairs he decided, if Allen was not in, to wait
for him in the sitting-room. But as he reached the stair-foot a faint
film of cigar smoke and the more pungent reek of whisky floated from
the open doorway, and told him that the master of the house was already
there.
Allen was sitting by the table, a decanter and glass near his elbow,
his cigar poised in a waiting hand, as he listened to the descending
footsteps. The Chinaman had told him that Colonel Parrish had called
to see June, and Allen stationed himself by the doorway to catch the
visitor on his way out.
“That you, Jim?” he called, as the footfall neared the end of the
flight. “Glad you came. Drop in here for a minute before you go. I’ve
something I want to talk to you about.”
The Colonel entering, noticed that the other was even more flushed
than he usually was at this hour, and that his glance was evasive, his
manner constrained. He pushed his cigar-case across the table with a
hand that was unsteady, and tried to cover his embarrassment by the
strident jocularity of his greeting. The Colonel, sitting down on the
arm of a heavy leather chair, did not beat about the bush.
“What’s this June’s been telling me,” he said, “about you all moving to
Virginia? Since when have you decided on that?”
“Only a day or two ago. I was going around to see you to-morrow, about
it, if you hadn’t come this afternoon. I’ve about made up my mind
to go. My business is all up there now. There’s no sense living in
Virginia two-thirds of the time and running a house down here.”
“How about Rosamund’s wedding?” the Colonel asked.
“Have it up there. You can have a wedding in Virginia just as well
as you can in San Francisco. I can rent a house--a first-rate house,
furnished and all ready, and give her just as good a send-off as any
girl in California. That’s what I calculate to do. It’ll require money
up there or down here, but that’s an expense that’s got to be.”
“June says you’ve had an offer for this house. Who made it, and what’s
he offered?”
Allen leaned forward to knock off the ash of his cigar on the tray
beside him.
“That’s what I wanted to see you about,” he said slowly. “Yes, I’ve had
an offer. It’s from a man named Spencer from Sacramento. Just come down
here to settle. He’s got a big family, and wants a good sized house and
garden for the kids to play in. Fashionable locality doesn’t count for
much with him. He’s offered twenty-five thousand down for the place as
it stands, furniture and all.”
There was a slight pause and the speaker added:
“It’s what decided me to go to Virginia, get rid of this--and--and--get
some ready money. I’m pretty close to the ragged edge, Jim.”
“I don’t see how it’s going to benefit you,” said the Colonel. “My
mortgage and the interest for two years back, paid in full, doesn’t
leave you much more than your fares to Virginia.”
Allen got up, walked a few steps away, then came back and stood by
the Colonel’s chair. His face was deeply flushed, but it had lost its
embarrassed air. He looked resolute and determined.
“Jim,” he said doggedly, “I’ve got to have that money.”
“Beau Allen,” said the Colonel in the same tone, “by what right do you
dare to say that to me?”
For a silent moment they eyed each other, then the elder man went on:
“Twenty-five years ago you stole my sweetheart. Four years ago you
tried to steal my land and I gave it to you, because you had a wife and
two helpless children; and now you’re trying to steal my house.”
“I’ve got the same right as I had before,” said the other, “I’ve still
got two helpless children.”
“Am I to be robbed to provide for your children?”
“You’re using pretty strong words, Jim, but you’ve had provocation.
You’ve met bad usage at my hands and you’ve given back good. Give it
back once more, for the last time. Give it back for the sake of my two
girls. They’re as helpless now as they ever were, and God knows I’m as
unable to help them.”
“Why should I keep on providing for your children? You’re their father,
younger than I, and as able-bodied. Four years ago I put you on your
feet when I gave you the Parrish Tract. You’ve had your chances, the
best I could give you. I’m on the ragged edge too. I’m sixty years old
and I’ve had to apply for a position.”
“Listen to me, Jim,” with desperate urgence. “Let me have this money
till after Rosamund’s marriage. Let me have fifteen thousand dollars of
it. So help me God, I’ll invest the rest in your name in any securities
you mention. Don’t you see I’ve got to have money till after that? I
can’t let Harrower know we’re bust. _You_ think he doesn’t care. But I
tell you he does. What’s going to happen to Rosamund if he throws her
over at the last moment?”
The Colonel was silent, looking at the ash tray from beneath
down-drawn, bushy brows. Allen close at his elbow continued with
fevered intensity:
“Rosamund’s wrapped up, body and soul, in that man. What’s she going to
do if he backs out? And you know him; you’ve seen the kind he is, daft
about his family and his ancient, honorable name. Even if he doesn’t
want money with her do you think he, with his ancestors’ portraits
hanging on the walls, wants to marry a girl whose father’s a busted
mining speculator--in debt all round, who hasn’t got the means to buy
his daughter a decent dress to get married in? Look at June! Are the
futures of both my daughters going to be ruined because I’m broke?
Good God, Parrish, you care for them! You can’t now, when you see what
June’s been brought to, stand in the way of Rosamund’s happiness.”
The Colonel sat looking at the ash tray for a frowning moment, then he
said:
“What have you done with the spring? If there had been no mineral on
the land the spring would have brought you an income for years.”
“I sold the land with the spring on it, after the Crown Point collapse.
Blake, the hotel man in San José, bought it, and is building a hotel up
there now. That’s the past. I’m not defending it, nor my life between
then and now. I’m talking of my children. Put me, and what I am, out of
the question. It’s my two girls that count just now.”
The Colonel rose, and walking to the fireplace, stood there with his
elbow on the mantel-piece, looking down at the small fire that glowed
in the grate. Allen by the table watched him with anxious, waiting eyes.
“I’ve got chances in Virginia,” he said. “Living on the spot there’s
a different proposition from running back and forth like this.
The Maybough properties that I’m interested in are looking pretty
promising. Inside of a year, if they turn out as we expect, I may be
able to pay you the whole sum back.”
The Colonel gave a suppressed sound, short and scornful, but did not
raise his head. The other went on.
“Fifteen thousand will carry us to Virginia and over the wedding.
Harrower’s to be back in the spring and they’ll be married as soon
as he comes. Spencer wants the house in January or February. That
will just about fit in. We can go to Virginia as soon as the sale’s
completed and have everything ready and in shape by the time Harrower
gets here. And it will be better for June, too, better to get her out
of all this. She feels pretty bad, poor little girl! One of the reasons
that makes me so keen about selling the place and leaving is to get her
away from all this talk about Barclay and that Gracey girl.”
The Colonel, without raising his eyes, said:
“You’ll want the whole twenty-five thousand.”
“No--no--” said Allen with undisguised eagerness, hope illuminating
his face, “fifteen will do, though of course twenty would be better.
Fifteen ought to carry us well along into the summer, and by that
time the Maybough should be paying. There’ll be the wedding and the
trousseau. Of course twenty would be better, but if you’ll let me have
the fifteen I can do it. I’ll invest the other ten any way you may say
and--”
He stopped as the Colonel turned from the fire with a short laugh.
“Sell the house,” he said, “and take it all.”
“What?--” Allen did not quite dare to believe it.
“Sell the house. See Spencer as soon as you can, and I’ll give you
satisfaction of the mortgage.”
“Jim!” the other ejaculated, and held out a shaking hand.
But the Colonel brushed by it and passed into the hall, where his hat
and coat hung. Allen followed him, trying to talk, but he stopped the
feeble words of gratitude. Standing under the hall lamp, the light
falling on his white hair, he said,
“There’s no thanks between you and me. If it wasn’t for your daughters
I’d see you standing on the corner begging for nickels and not drop
one in your tin cup. And you know it. You know, too, what I feel about
them, and why I feel it. You know I’d do it again if I had the money.
But I haven’t. There’s not much more to be got out of me. You’ve about
sucked me dry.”
The night was clear and he walked home, slowly and lingeringly by a
circuitous route of cross-streets. At first he paced onward in an
absorbed reverie, his eyes down, striking the cracks in the pavement
with the tip of his cane. Presently he looked up above the housetops,
at the widths of sky sown with great, calm stars. It was early night;
only the larger stars were visible. Once or twice as he walked on
looking up, he laughed, a short, dry laugh, at himself and the follies
he had committed.
When he reached his own room in the Traveler’s Hotel he found Rion’s
answer to his letter. Standing under the feeble light that fell from
the sitting-room chandelier he read it. It was short, for Rion was
but a poor correspondent. The position of assistant secretary of the
Cresta Plata would be vacant on January first. The Gracey boys would be
flattered if one of James Parrish’s reputation and position would care
to fill it. The salary would be five hundred dollars a month.
The Colonel turned the letter over, eying it. The heaviness of his
spirit was lightened. Through the few lines he seemed to feel the
strong grip of the mining man’s hand, to meet the searching look of his
keen, honest eyes. They would all be together in Virginia--not such a
bad beginning for a new life at sixty.
END OF BOOK II
BOOK III
THE DESERT
CHAPTER I
NEVADA
The mountain wall of the Sierra bounds California on its eastern side.
It is a rampart, towering and impregnable, between the garden and the
desert. From its crest, brooded over by cloud, glittering with crusted
snows, the traveler can look over crag and precipice, mounting files
of pines and ravines swimming in unfathomable shadow, to where, vast,
pale, far-flung in its dreamy adolescence, lies California, the garden.
On the other side--gaunt, hostile, gray--is Nevada, the desert.
In other lands nature and man have ended their struggle for supremacy.
Man has conquered and nature, after long years of service, is glad
to work for him, to quicken the seed he sows, to swell the fruit on
the branch, and ripen the heads of grain. She laps him round with
comfort, whispers her secrets to him, reveals herself in sweet, sylvan
intercourse. And he, cosily content, knows her as his loving slave, no
more rebellious, happy to serve.
But in Nevada, nature is still unconquered, savage and supreme. It
is the primordial world, with man a shivering stranger amid its grim
aloofness. When the voice of God went out into the darkness and
said, “Let there be light,” the startled life, cowering in caves and
beneath rocks, may have looked out on such a land--an unwatered waste,
treeless, flowerless, held in an immemorial silence.
Man as we know him has no place here. He is a speck moving between the
dome of sky and the floor of earth. Nature scorns him, has watched him
die and whitened his bones in a few blazing weeks. The seed he plants
withers in its kernel, the earth he turns up, frosted with alkali,
drops apart in livid flakes. The rare rivers by which he pitches his
tent are sucked into the soil, as though grudging him the few drops
with which he cools his burning throat. An outcast from a later age he
is an intruder here. These solemn wastes and eternal hills have not yet
learned to call him master.
When the pioneers trailed across it, Nevada was to them only “the
desert,” a place where the horrors of heat and thirst culminated.
They knew it as a sterile, gray expanse, breaking here and there into
parched bareness, and with lines of lilac-blue or reddish-purple hills
seeming to march with them as they moved. From high places they saw
it outspread like a map, its surface stippled with sage and the long
green ribbon of a tree-fringed river looping across its grim aridity.
At evening it took on limpid, gem-like colors. The hills turned
transparent sapphire and amethyst, the sky burned a thin, clear red. An
unbroken stillness lay upon it and struck chill on the hearts of the
little bands who, oppressed by its vast indifference, cowered beneath
its remote, unfamiliar stars.
As they passed across it they mined a little; here and there they
scraped the surface, clustered round a stream-bed for a day or two and
sent the water circling in their pans. But California, the land of
promise, was their goal. With the western sun in their eyes they looked
at the mountain wall and spoke of the Eldorado beyond where the gold
lay yellow in the sluice box, and flecked with glittering flakes the
prospector’s pan.
That was in forty-nine. Ten years later they were hurrying backward
over the mountains to the streams that drain Mount Davidson. Nevada had
its wealth too, a hidden, rock-ribbed wealth, jealously buried. They
tore it out, built a city of tents and shacks as they delved, and in
ten years more were gone again, dispersed over the far West like the
embers of a fire which a wind scatters.
Then once again the barren state drew them back. Deep in the roots of
Mount Davidson one of the greatest ore-bodies in the world lay buried.
This time they gathered in their might. Miner, engineer, assayer,
stock-jobber, manipulator, manager and millionaire poured over the
mountain wall, bringing in their train the birds of prey that follow
in the wake of the mining army. The city of tents and cabins grew into
a city of streets and buildings and spread, climbing the mountain side
in terraces. A railroad crawled perilously to it, looping over the
mountain flanks. In a cleared nook by a river the smoke of its mills
blackened the sky.
Isolated from the rest of the world, encircled by desolation, the town
seethed and boiled with an abnormal activity, a volcano of life in the
midst of a dead land. About it the desert brooded, pressing in upon
it, watching and waiting. To it the little city was an outside thing,
hostile, alien, unwelcome. It scorned the pigmy passions of its men and
women, had no sympathy with the extravagances of their money madness.
When they had been brushed away like an ant-hill by a passing foot, it
would sweep over their town, obliterate their traces, reclaim its own.
And once again the silence of a landscape where there is neither ripple
of water nor murmur of leaf would resettle in crystal quietude.
Confined within their own walls, with no outlet for the pressure
under which they lived, the inhabitants of Virginia burned with a
wild activity and energy. The conditions of life were so unusual, so
fiercely stimulating to effort and achievement, that average human
beings were lifted from their places and became creatures of dauntless
initiative. They conquered the unconquerable, accomplished triumphs of
daring and ingenuity where under ordinary circumstances they would have
recoiled before insuperable obstacles. They were outside themselves,
larger for good or evil than they had ever been before or would be
again. Nature had dared them to her vanquishing and they had risen to
the challenge.
In the spring of 1874 the ferment incident to the opening of the great
ore-body that has gone down in history as the “Big Bonanza,” began to
bubble toward boiling point. Month by month stocks had steadily risen,
and month by month the huge treasure chamber, filled with silver as a
nut is with kernel, developed in ever-increasing richness. The city
was packed close as a hive with bees with twenty-five thousand souls
all quivering to the increasing momentum of the excitement. The mines
were a dynamo whence electric vibrations spread into the world outside.
The dwellers in huts among the sage were shaken by them. They thrilled
along the Pacific slope. In New York and London men felt them and their
pulses quickened. The Bonanza times were nearly at the flood.
The city grew with astonishing rapidity, breathlessly climbed the side
of Mount Davidson in ascending tiers of streets. There was no time for
grading or paving. Two stories in the front meant four in the back, the
kitchens of B Street looked over the shingled roofs of the shops on C
Street. It was a gray town, clinging to a desolate mountain side, in
a gray country. At its base, appearing to force it up the slope, were
the hoisting works of the mines, dotted so close along the lode they
nearly touched. Every mine in this line was a mighty name in the world
of finance. New York, London and Paris waited each morning to hear
news from the town in the wilderness. And as the ant-hill swarmed and
trembled with the fury of its concentrated life, the desert looked on,
serene, incurious, still.
CHAPTER II
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES
The Allen girls moved to Virginia City in April. Their father had gone
there early in the year and taken a house which would be a proper
and fitting place from which to marry Rosamund. He had found what he
thought suitable in the mansion, as they called it in Virginia, of
one Murchison, a mining superintendent, who, in the heyday of sudden
riches, had built him a comfortable home and then died.
The Murchison mansion had come on the market just at the right moment,
Allen told people. Men wondered where his money came from, as the
current talk among his kind was that “the bottom had fallen out of
the Barranca, and Allen was bust.” He himself spread the story that
successful speculations had once again set him on his feet. That
something had done so was proved by his renting of the Murchison
mansion, a furnished house in the Virginia City of that period being an
expensive luxury.
It stood at the south end of B Street, perched high on the top of two
sloping terraces which were bulkheaded by a wooden wall, surmounted
by an ornamental balustrade. Small fruit trees and flowering shrubs
clothed the terraces in a thin, flickering foliage, just showing its
first, faint tips of green when the girls arrived. A long flight of
steps ran up to a balcony which rounded out about the front door, and
upon which one seemed to be mounted high in the air, looking down over
a dropping series of flat and peaked roofs to where the dark red walls
and tall chimneys of the hoisting works clustered about the city’s
feet. Beyond this unrolled the wild, bare landscape, undulating line of
mountain beyond mountain, cut clear as cameos against the blue Nevada
sky.
The vivid green streak made by the Carson River gleamed to the right.
At the limit of sight, fitted into a gap between the hills, was the
Carson desert, a patch of stark, yellow sand.
The girls were not surprised at the style of the house. They knew
vaguely that their father’s affairs were not as satisfactory as they
had been, but of their truly desperate nature they had no suspicion.
There were delays in the sale of the Folsom Street property, and it
was not till March that the new tenant appeared from Sacramento to
take possession. In response to their father’s orders they obediently
gathered together their belongings, closed the house, and made the move
to Virginia without assistance from him.
Events had fallen together in an unexpected way, but one that in the
end spared June those glimpses of her lover’s happiness that she had
told the Colonel would be unbearable. It is true that she had to see
the carriages drive to Jerry’s marriage and hear the sound of his
wedding bells. But before that event circumstances had developed which
made radical changes in the plans of bride and groom. Black Dan had
discovered that Jerry’s business had dwindled to nothing, his private
fortune vanished in the Crown Point collapse. The bonanza king, with
his rapidly accumulating millions, had a sturdy, American objection
to an idle man, especially when that man was to be the husband of
his only child, and was known to be of a light and pleasure-loving
temperament. A position was made for Jerry on the Cresta Plata, with
duties sufficiently exacting to keep him continually occupied, and with
the added attraction of an exceedingly generous salary.
Mercedes sulked when she heard it. She did not want to live in
Virginia. She had thought she might go there from time to time, flit
through it, a disturbing vision of beauty to miners and millionaires,
but to take up her residence there was a different matter. She wanted
to occupy the fine house her father had given her in San Francisco,
entertain royally and be a queen of society, with Jerry as a necessary
satellite circling about. She complained to Black Dan, even cried a
little, and for the first time in her life found him obdurate.
The doting father was troubled about the future of his child. He
disliked the marriage she was making, but knew that to protest against
it was hopeless. He mistrusted Jerry, whose record he had often heard
canvassed, and whose style, as a charmer of women, he despised. He
wanted the pair under his eye. He wanted to keep his hand tight on his
son-in-law. He did not believe that the man loved Mercedes, and he took
a bitter satisfaction in bringing him to Virginia and setting him to
work.
“Rion and I can watch him,” he thought to himself. “We’ll keep his nose
to the grindstone, and if he shows any symptoms of lifting it we’ll
hold it closer.”
Black Dan said little of his uneasiness to any one save his brother.
The two men had the same opinion of Jerry, and though neither expressed
it to the other, each felt cold doubts as to the happiness of the
marriage.
Early in January, after a honeymoon of less than a week, Jerry was
summoned to his new duties. He and Mercedes were installed in a house
on B Street which had been hired and hastily refitted for them. Here in
the heart of a biting Nevada winter their married life began. Neither
bride nor groom guessed that it was being surreptitiously watched by
three pairs of interested eyes. To the observation of the suspicious
and inimical Graceys that of Colonel Parrish was added. He too had come
to Virginia on the first of January to assume his position as assistant
secretary of the Cresta Plata. He and Rion had settled themselves in
comfortable quarters on the floor over Caswell’s drug store, where
their rooms gave on a balustraded wooden veranda which looked out on
the turmoil of C Street.
It was not from Jerry, but from Mercedes that the first signs of
discontent came. She had hated Virginia from the first glimpse of
it. The cold, bleak town, buffeted by furious winds, clinging to its
bare mountain side, revolted her. Her little soul shrank before the
loneliness of the silent desert. She was essentially a Southron, a
lover of sunshine, bright colors, and gaiety. Moreover, for the first
time in her life, she felt neglected. In Virginia City in 1874 there
were more engrossing interests than the allurement of women. It was
a man’s town, where the softer sex was in the background, save as a
diversion and spectacular luxury. Mercedes was often lonely. Jerry had
flung himself into the speculative fever of the time with fury. Even
Black Dan was preoccupied and abrupt. Making millions is, after all,
the most absorbing pastime that man may know.
Finally a delicacy of the throat developed, and Mercedes looked pale
and thin, and began to cough. It was April, she had been married four
months, and she wanted to go; she wanted San Francisco and sunshine,
and the amusements for which she lived.
Jerry did not protest. The dream of passion was at an end. The Mercedes
he had come to know in the intimacy of married life was so different
a being from the Mercedes who had beguiled him in the summer, that
he was not sorry to have her leave him. His pride was hurt and he
felt angry and bitter against her, but he had no poignant regrets.
Neither had loved. The ignoble instincts that had drawn them together
were satiated. Her woman’s spite had worked itself out. His lust for
her wealth, his desire for her possession, were satisfied. They were
willing to part.
She left in April, it being understood that Jerry was to “go below” to
see her every two weeks. The story that her health had been impaired by
a climate which had proved too severe for many before her, was given
out as the reason for her departure. Black Dan even was made to believe
it. He also believed her assurances that she would return in the
summer. He thought the few tears she shed were grief at parting with a
husband whom he supposed she loved. He determined to watch Jerry closer
than ever, and for this purpose moved into the house on B Street, where
the husband was now left alone.
Thus it fell out for June that she was spared the sight of Jerry as
a joyous bridegroom. Almost simultaneously with the Allens’ move to
Virginia, Mercedes left it. June and Rosamund were arranging the
Murchison mansion on B Street when Mrs. Jerome Barclay was beginning
those extensive purchases in San Francisco which were to render her
home on Van Ness Avenue a truly “palatial residence.”
June saw her old lover often. The contracted size of the town made it
impossible for her to avoid him. More than once they encountered each
other in the houses of friends, and were forced to interchange the
little dead phrases of society. Both were shaken by these accidental
meetings. June dreaded and shrank from the sight of his face and the
sound of his voice; but Jerry went away from her presence, stirred and
uplifted, his mind full of the thought of her, his sense of her charm
reawakened.
His life, crowded with the strenuous business of men, was empty of what
had been for years its main interest and preoccupation. The vain man,
confident of his attractions, had been played with and scornfully cast
aside. The bitterness of his marriage was as wormwood to him. He felt
sore toward Mercedes, whose indifference toward him had roused in him
the angry amaze that a spoiled child feels toward the stranger who is
proof against its blandishments. He felt himself wronged, and in a way,
trapped. They made him work like a day laborer for his salary, and his
wife had left him. That was what he’d got by marrying! Lupé, poor, dead
Lupé, would not have treated him so! And June--what a fool he’d been!
He forgot that June had no money, and for that reason he had put her
resolutely aside. He forgot that last year he had avoided her and tried
to banish all thought of her. In his longing for the adulation and
tenderness upon which he had lived her image came nearer and nearer,
grew more and more disturbing and sweet.
Early in May Rosamund left for a week’s visit to San Francisco to
accomplish the major part of her trousseau-buying. June, left in the
Murchison mansion to “keep house”--a duty which she performed but
ill--found many empty hours on her hands. She had made few friends in
the new town. The apathy which had fallen on her at the time of Jerry’s
engagement had not lifted, and the coming loss of Rosamund weighed
heavier every day. In the tumult around her her life was quiet and
colorless. She told the Colonel that he was the only constant visitor
she had.
“If you’ve another as regular as I am,” he had answered, “I’ll have to
look into it.”
Then he had added, in what he fondly thought was a light, unmeaning
tone, “Don’t even see much of Rion?”
“Rion?” June had replied with the arched eyebrows of surprised query.
“I don’t see him at all.”
After that there was nothing more to be said, except of course for the
Colonel to go to Rion and ask him why he had not called on Miss Allen,
and for Rion, red and embarrassed, to answer that he did not suppose
Miss Allen would care to see him, but if she did he would go.
There was one house to which she did pay constant visits. This was
Mitty Sullivan’s, on the north side of town, near the Cresta Plata
hoisting works.
These were booming days for Mitty. Her husband’s fortune was mounting
in leaps too vast and rapid to be easily calculated. The Gracey boys’
belief in their superintendent had not been misplaced. The brawny,
half-educated Irishman had risen to a commanding position, and was
respectfully alluded to as having “the best nose for ore in the two
states.” He was already very rich, having for the past four years
successfully speculated on “inside information.” His great gains made
even the princely salary he received on the Cresta Plata seem small. He
was in the thick of the whirlpool now and Mitty was with him. She had a
baby, a girl, and she saw it, backed by the fortune that she and Barney
were making, going to Europe and marrying “a lord.” For Mitty’s horizon
had widened with astonishing rapidity since the days when she waited on
table at the Foleys hotel.
On one of the afternoons of Rosamund’s absence June walked across town
for a chat and a cup of tea with her old-time friend. From B Street and
its neat house-fronts and gardens she descended to the never-ending
movement of the street below. This--the main stem of the mining
city--for ever seething with a turbulent current of life, was the once
famous C Street, a thoroughfare unique in the history of American towns.
The day shift would not be up for hours yet. When its time was up the
mines would vomit forth thousands of men, who, penned all day in the
dark, stifling heat of the underground city, would pour into the garish
brilliancy of the overground one for the diversions of the night. Here,
in the gusto of their liberation, they would range till daylight,
restless eddies of life, passing up one street and down the other,
never silent, never still, pressing vaguely on through the noise and
glare, with the encircling blackness hanging round their little piece
of the animated, outside world, like an inky curtain.
At all hours the street was crowded. Now it stretched up its mile or
two of uneven length like a gray cañon, filled to both walls with a
human river. Under the arcade formed by a continuous line of roofs
that jutted from the second-story windows across the sidewalk, an
endless throng passed up and down. They collected in groups before shop
windows, overflowed the sidewalk and encroached on the middle of the
roadway, congested in a close packed, swaying mass of heads in front of
the bulletin boards where the stock quotations were pasted up, gathered
in talkative knots at corners.
The street, in the mud of which playing cards, bits of orange peel,
fragments of theatrical posters, scraps of silk and ribbon were
imbedded like the pattern in a carpet, was as full as the sidewalk.
The day of the overland freighters was past, but ore wagons still
drove sixteen-mule teams, the driver guiding by a single rope, the
mules bending their necks under the picturesque arches of their bells.
Between these, busy managers flashed by in their buggies, stopping here
and there to lean from their seats for a moment’s converse with a knot
of men. In more fashionable equipages, brought up from San Francisco
and drawn by sleek-skinned, long-tailed horses, the wives of suddenly
enriched superintendents lolled back gorgeously, their beruffled
silk skirts floating out over the wheel, the light flashing on their
diamonds.
Over all this movement of life there was an unceasing swell of sound,
a combination of many notes and keys, more noticeable by reason of the
outlying rim of silence. Thousands of voices blended into a single
sonorous hum, through which broke the jingling of pianos from the open
doors of saloons, the click of billiard balls, the cries of the drivers
to their mules, the raucous voices of street hawkers selling wares at
populous corners, and the sweet, broken melody of the bells. Beneath
this--a continuous level undertone--was the murmur of machinery, with
the faint throb of the engines beating through it like the sound of the
steady, unagitated pulse-beats of a laboring Titan.
June pressed through the throng, walking rapidly toward the upper
end of C Street. Here, looking down on the dark red walls and tall
chimneys of the Cresta Plata, stood the pretty, one-story cottage
where Mitty Sullivan lived. It was surrounded by a square of garden,
in which lilacs were budding and apple-trees showed a delicate hoar
of young blossom. Mitty’s prosperity revealed itself in many ways.
She had a nurse for the baby as well as a “hired girl.” She was
exceedingly anxious to spend money and very ignorant of how to do
it. She had passed the stage--a recognized station in the ascending
career of the western wife--where her husband had presented her with
diamond ear-rings. The silver, crystal, and Britannia metal in the
superintendent’s cottage were astonishing; only to be rivaled in
extravagance by the dresses which hung in Mitty’s own wardrobe and
which had been ordered--regardless of cost--from the best dressmakers
in San Francisco.
She greeted June with affection and drew her into the parlor, recently
furnished with a set of blue and gold brocade furniture, the windows
draped with lambrequins to match. There was a brilliant moquette carpet
on the floor and the walls were hung with oil paintings, which Barney
had bought on a recent visit to the coast. A quantity of growing plants
in the windows added a touch of beauty to the glaring, over-furnished
room.
Mitty herself had grown into a blooming matron, a trifle coarse, for
she was fond of “a good table” and saw to it that her hired girl
knew how to produce one, and already menaced by the embonpoint which
is so deadly a foe to Californian beauty. The baby girl on her arm
was a rosily healthy infant, with Barney’s red hair and her mother’s
freshness of color. Twenty years later she would bring her share of
the Bonanza fortune, which her father was then accumulating, to the
restoration of the old New York family into which she was to marry. Her
sister--yet unborn--was to do the same charitable act by the castle
and estates of an English earl, who in return would make her a countess.
The greetings over, the baby was placed by the table in her high
chair and given a string of spools and a rubber rabbit to play with,
while Mitty, comfortably settling herself in an arm-chair, inquired
if June had noticed the stock quotations on her way down. The hired
girl, who was setting down the tea tray, listened with open attention
for the answer. Both mistress and maid were “plunging” according to
their means, and when June confessed that she had passed the bulletins
without reading the figures, the two speculators looked at each other
in open dismay.
“It’s so long to wait till Barney comes home,” Mitty complained. “I
thought of course you’d read them as you passed.”
June was contrite, but could remember nothing.
“And I wanted to know so much! They say that Peruvian’s getting soft.
They were saying so this morning anyway. You didn’t even hear anything
as you came along? I believe you’re the only woman in Virginia who
doesn’t speculate.”
June had not even heard. The knowing volubility of Mitty on the
fluctuations of stocks in which she was as well versed as Barney
himself, seemed little short of miraculous to the only woman in
Virginia who didn’t speculate.
The servant, who had been eagerly listening to the conversation, now
broke in.
“I’ll run up and have a squint round, Mrs. Sullivan. Maybe I can pick
up more than Miss Allen.”
Mitty tried to be dignified and give the proposition a deliberate
consideration. But her consent came with a promptitude it was difficult
to suppress. As the woman whisked out through the kitchen door she said
in a tone intended to excuse her lack of discipline:
“That girl’s got all her money in Peruvian, and hearing it was ‘soft’
has sort of upset her. Last week she told me she was thirty thousand
dollars ahead. She only came to live with us because Barney being one
of the big superintendents, she thought she’d get points, and as she’s
an A 1 girl I’ve got to humor her.”
They chatted over their tea, Mitty regaling her guest with the gossip
of the day, of which she was full. They had been talking some time when
the conversation turned on Mercedes and Jerry. It was the first time
the subject had come up between them. Mitty knew part at least of her
friend’s story, and she had tried to spare her, but she hated Mercedes,
who had treated her with scornful indifference, and she hated Jerry
because Barney did. She was glad now to give her candid opinion to the
woman they had combined to hurt.
“They said it was her health that was bad, and that was why she had to
quit and go below. Health!” with a compressing of the corners of her
mouth and a glance of sidelong meaning. “Her health’s all right; it was
her temper.”
“Temper!” said June faintly. “Uncle Jim said her throat was delicate
and she had a cough.”
“Cough!” snorted Mitty. “We all have coughs, but we don’t leave our
husbands and go cavorting down to San Francisco to throw round money
and pick up some other man. She didn’t care for him. That was all that
was the matter. It’s a simple disease and a lot of ’em get it.”
June silently stirred her tea. Every word pierced her, but she wanted
to hear them. She had heard nothing of the separation, except the
generally accepted story of Mercedes’ delicate health. Instinct told
her that Mitty, the woman, had looked deeper and would know more
of what had really been the case. Without speaking she raised her
eyes from the cup and fixed them on the baby, who in an excess of
affection was licking the face of the rubber rabbit. Mitty went on with
complacent volubility:
“Barney thought maybe it was a baby. He’s a simple, innocent sort of
man, Barney Sullivan. But I said to him, ‘Don’t you fear, there won’t
be any babies in that house! The Lord ain’t goin’ to make such a break
as to give that woman a baby.’ I guess not,” said Mitty, folding her
arms and looking grimly round the room as if challenging an unseen
audience to contradict her.
June returned to the stirring of her tea while her hostess continued,
“No. She just hated Virginia. Nobody was standing round here to kiss
her boots and do the doormat act. And she didn’t like Jerry well enough
for him to make her stand it. You have to like a man a good deal to
stay here in winter,”--in the tone of one who is forced to admit a
melancholy fact. “If you don’t, you’re liable to pretend to get sick
and have to go below for a spell. I’ve seen many of ’em go that way.”
“Didn’t Jerry try to stop her?” said June in a low voice.
“Try to stop her?”--with angry contempt--“not much! He didn’t _care_.
Why, June Allen, he was glad, downright _glad_, I believe, to have her
go. He don’t care for anything under the canopy but Jerry Barclay.”
“He cared when he married her.” June’s voice was lower still and shook.
Her friend noticed it and determined to sow seed, now she had the
opportunity.
“Next to himself Jerry Barclay cares for money. That’s what he was
after, and he didn’t get it the way he expected. He’s got the smoothest
tongue any man ever had in his head, and he’s used it right along to
get money with. How long was Mrs. Newbury dead when he got engaged
to Mercedes Gracey? And do you suppose he’d have ever asked her if
they hadn’t struck one of the biggest ore-bodies in Virginia on the
fifteen-hundred-foot level of the Cresta Plata? But they’ve got him
by the leg up here now,”--with an exultant laugh--“the whole three of
’em’s on to him. They give him a big salary and don’t they make him
work for it--oh, my! There ain’t no drones in the Gracey boys’ hive,
you can bet, and Jerry Barclay’s got to hustle for every cent he earns.
No San Francisco and good times for him! If Mercedes was to cry and do
the loving wife act to Black Dan and say she couldn’t live without her
husband I wouldn’t bet but what she’d get him. But she ain’t done it.
She don’t want him, Junie. That’s what’s the matter in that shebang.
Neither one of ’em wants the other.”
“Why did she marry him?” said June. “Why did she--”
The baby here interrupted by giving vent to a loud exclamation, and
at the same time disdainfully casting her rubber rabbit on the floor.
Then she leaned over the arm of her high chair, staring with motionless
intentness at the discarded rabbit, as if expecting to see it get up
and walk away.
“That’s the thing that gets me,” said Mitty thoughtfully. “Why _did_
she marry him? She could have got a better man than Jerry, though I
suppose he was about the best in sight at the time. But she’s like the
baby here--always cryin’ and stretchin’ out for toys she can’t reach.
Then you give her the toy and she looks it all over and suddenly gives
a sort er disgusted snort, and throws it on the floor. She ain’t got no
more use for it, and the first thing you know she’ll be stretchin’ out
for another one.”
June made no answer to this and Mitty, big with her subject, for her
dislike of Mercedes was an absorbing sentiment, went on:
“She treated him like dirt. Barney was up there one night while they
were at dinner. He was just in the room in front with the curtains
down between and they didn’t know he was there. He said he could
hear her pickin’ at Jerry because he’d been half an hour late for
dinner. He said she kep’ on pickin’ and pickin’ and Jerry not saying a
word. Barney says to me when he got home, ‘Jerry’s paid high for his
position.’ And I says to him when he told me, ‘That woman’s goin’ to
make every one pay high for anything they get out er her. She’s not
givin’ things away free gratis.’”
The baby’s contemplation of the fallen rabbit had by this time lost its
charm. She threw herself back in her chair and raised her voice in a
wail distinctly suggestive of weariness of spirit and _ennui_. Mitty
lifted her, a formless, weeping bundle, from her chair, and June’s
offer of the rabbit was met by an angrily repulsing hand and a writhing
movement of irritated disgust.
“She’s tired, poor lamb!” said Mitty, rocking her gently to and fro and
slapping on her back with a comforting, maternal hand. “We try to keep
her awake till Barney gets in. He just thinks there’s nothing in the
world like his baby.”
The dusk was beginning to subdue the brilliancy of sunset, and June,
buttoning herself into her jacket, bade mother and child good night.
Mitty’s cheerful good-bys followed her down the passageway, the baby’s
now lusty cries drowning the last messages which usually delay feminine
farewells.
Once outside, she walked rapidly toward home, avoiding the crowds on
C Street, and flitting, a small, dark figure, through less frequented
byways. Tumult was in her heart, also the sense of dread that had been
with her ever since she came to Virginia and knew her old lover was so
near.
Since his marriage she had tried with desperate persistence to uproot
him from her thoughts. She not only had begun to realize his baseness
of character, but the realization was becoming not a matter of words,
but a living force which was beginning to chill the feeling that for so
long had held her in its grasp. The first symptom of a decline in love,
the comprehension and dislike of the faults of the being loved, had
begun to stir in her.
Now Mitty’s unexpected revelation had upset this more normal and
serener frame of mind. She felt herself suddenly swept backward toward
a point that she had hoped was far behind. An elation rose in her that
frightened her and filled her with shame. Jerry sordid, throwing her
from him for the lust of money, was a bearable thought. It was Jerry
loving and beloved that had been too bitter to be borne. And Mitty had
said there was no love on either side--he was glad to have his wife go.
A turmoil of many feelings battled in her and the two strongest and
most violently opposed were fear and joy. As she stole homeward through
the darkening streets fear became stronger than joy. The future loomed
suddenly sinister. Her loneliness stretched darkly menacing before her.
Rosamund would soon be gone--gone so far, never again to be reached
with an outstretched hand or a calling voice. And Jerry would be there,
close to her, Jerry who did not love his wife, and was glad to have her
go.
CHAPTER III
SMOLDERING EMBERS
Rosamund’s marriage was set for the end of May. There had been great
preparations for the event, which was to be the most brilliant one
of its kind that had ever taken place in the town or state. A costly
trousseau had been ordered from San Francisco. It was understood that
the wedding breakfast was to come from the same place and be the most
sumptuous and elaborate ever given in Virginia. Men heard these rumors
with surprise and once more wondered where Allen was getting the money
“to splurge with.” Even the astute Graceys were puzzled. Only the
Colonel was non-committal and looked on quietly.
“Rosamund’s going to have the finest send-off I can give her,” Allen
said to him a week before the wedding. “It’s the best I can do for her.
It’s a good thing Harrower’s only here for a few days.”
The Colonel felt like adding it was an extremely good thing, as
otherwise Harrower might be called upon to pay for the splendor of his
own nuptials. Twenty-five thousand dollars would not go far with a man,
who, with debts pressing on every side, was spending money as Allen
was in giving Rosamund a fine “send-off.”
A week before the day set Harrower arrived and took up his residence
at the International Hotel. It was a feverish, over-crowded week, full
of bustle and fussy excitement. There were people constantly at the
Murchison mansion and Allen was constantly out of it. Had Harrower
been more versed in the ways of the American parent he would have
realized that his future father-in-law was avoiding him. But the young
man, who thought everything in the place curious and more or less
incomprehensible, regarded his behavior as merely another evidence of
the American father’s habit of letting his children manage their own
affairs. He did not like Allen and wanted as quickly as possible to get
through the spectacular marriage, and take Rosamund away to the peace
of his ancestral acres and the simple country life they both loved.
To June this last week was a whirl of days and nights, reeling by over
a dragging, ceaseless sense of pain. To both girls the separation was
bitter, but Rosamund, passing into the arms of an adored husband, for
the first time in a life of unselfishness, did not enter into her
sister’s feelings. She spoke often of the visit June was to pay them
next winter. Lionel was as anxious as Rosamund for her to come. The
bride and groom were to travel on the continent for part of the summer
and then visit his people, introducing Rosamund to her new relations.
But by November they would be settled in Monk’s Court--that was
Lionel’s home--and then June was to come. Rosamund even hinted at a
cousin of Lionel’s, a “very decent chap” Lionel had said, who was rich
and single and “just the right sort for June.”
There were six months between now and then, six short months to
Rosamund beginning a brilliant new life with her lover; and six long
months to June alone in the mining city, surrounded by the gray desert.
The wedding day came and the excitement quieted down to the sudden hush
of that solemn moment when the voice of a priest proclaims a man and
a woman one. The ceremony was performed in the house, Lionel, after
some qualms, having agreed to it. June stood beside her sister in the
alcove of the bay-window and listened to the words which pledged her to
a man of another country and to a life in a distant land. Rosamund was
pale as she turned from the clergyman to greet the guests that pressed
round her. It was a sacred moment to her, the giving of herself in
its fullest and deepest significance to the man she loved, till death
should part them.
It was beyond doubt a very brilliant wedding. The house, hung with
flowers--every blossom sent up from San Francisco wrapped in cotton
wool--lost its bare, half-furnished look and became a bower. The
costumes of the women--many imported from Paris--were in all cases
costly and in some beautiful. The men, who squeezed past one another
on the stairway and drank champagne in corners, stood for more wealth
than the whole of the far West had known till the discovery of the
Cresta Plata and the Big Bonanza. The millions that the arid state
was pouring out in a silver stream were well represented in the
Murchison mansion that afternoon.
[Illustration: ROSAMUND]
The breakfast seemed to June a never-ending procession of raised
champagne glasses and toasts. She had a vision of the Colonel’s white
head bent toward Rosamund over the low-bowled, thin-stemmed glass in
which the golden bubbles rose, and of the husky note in his voice as he
wished her joy. She saw her father, with reddened face and bloodshot
eyes, rise to his feet, and with the southern fervency of phrase, which
he had never lost, bid his daughter God-speed and farewell, the glass
shaking in his hand. Harrower stood up beside his bride, her listening
face fair and spiritual between the drooping folds of her veil, and
said a few words of thanks, halting and simple, but a man’s words
nevertheless.
Then the time came for the bride to go up stairs for the change of
dress. The guests made a path for her, and June followed the tall
figure with its long, glimmering train.
They said little as Rosamund took off her wedding finery and donned her
traveling dress. But at the door of the room they clasped each other in
a dumb embrace, neither daring to speak. As she descended Rosamund drew
her veil down to hide her tears. Her lips were quivering, her heart
was rent with the pain of the parting. June came behind her, calm and
dry-eyed, the bleak sense of depression that she had felt for weeks
closing round her black and heavy. Part of herself--the strong, brave
part--seemed to be torn away from her with the going of the sister,
upon whom she had always leaned.
She stood on the balcony and waved her hand as the carriages drove away
toward the station. Most of the guests went with them to see the bride
and groom off. A stream of people poured down the stairs, laughing,
chattering, calling back good-bys to June, as she stood by the door,
pale but resolutely smiling. She noticed the three tall figures of the
Colonel and the Gracey brothers as they crossed the street together,
the Colonel turning to wave his hand to her. Her father had gone before
them. Finally everybody had left, and she turned slowly back into the
deserted house.
How empty is was! Her footsteps echoed in it. She passed into the
parlor, into which, from the broad bay-window the afternoon light
poured coldly. Linen had been stretched over the carpet, and on this
white and shining expanse the broken heads of roses and torn leaves lay
here and there. The flowers in the recess where the bride and groom
had stood were already fading, and the air was heavy with their dying
sweetness.
She looked into the dining-room at the expanse of the rifled table,
where the mounds of fruit had been broken down by eager hands and
the champagne bubbles rose languidly in the half-filled glasses.
There were no servants about and the perfect silence of the house was
more noticeable in this scene of domestic disorder. She had ascended
the stairs and was looking out of a back window when she saw its
explanation. From the kitchen entrance the servants, headed by the chef
brought up from San Francisco for the wedding, stealthily emerged.
Struggling into their coats and hastily jamming on their hats they ran
in straggling line in the direction of the depot, intent, as the rest
of the world, on seeing the bride depart. Last of all the Chinaman
issued forth, and setting his soft felt wide-awake on his carefully
uprolled queue, stole with soft-footed haste after them.
Nothing can be more full of the note of human desolation than an
occupied house suddenly vacated. June passed from room to room feeling
the silence as part of the depression that weighed on her. Through the
windows she could see the wild, morose landscape, beginning to take on
the hectic strangeness of tint that marked its sunset aspect. Its weird
hostility was suddenly intensified. It combined with the silence to
augment her sense of loneliness to the point of the unendurable. She
ran down the stairs and out on to the curve of balcony which extended
from the front door.
Some children were playing in the street below, and their voices came
to her with a note of cheer. Leaning listlessly against the balustrade
she looked up the street, wondering when her father would be back. She
had ceased to note his comings and goings, but this evening she watched
for his return as she might have done in her childhood. There was no
sign of him, and might not be for hours. After the train left he would
probably range about the town, whose night aspect he loved.
She turned her head in the opposite direction, and her eyes became
suddenly fixed and her body stiffened. A man was coming down the
street, swinging lightly forward, looking over the tops of the houses
toward the reddening peak of the Sugar Loaf. There was only one man
in Virginia with that natural elegance of form, that carriage full of
distinction and grace.
For the first moment he did not see her, and in that moment June felt
none of the secret elation that had been hers in the past at sudden
sight of him. Instead, a thrill of repugnance passed through her,
to be followed by a shrinking dread. She moved softly back from the
balustrade, intending to slip into the hallway, when he turned his head
and saw her.
The old pleasure leaped into his face. She saw that he pronounced her
name. He flung a cautious look about him and then crossed the road.
With his hand on the gate he gazed up and said, with something of
secrecy in his air and voice:
“Have they all gone?”
June’s affirmative was low. Her repugnance had vanished. Her desire to
retreat had been paralyzed by the first sound of his voice.
“And they’ve left you all alone?”
The tone was soft with the caressing quality that to Jerry was second
nature when an attractive woman listened.
“Yes, they went to the station to see them off. I didn’t want to go, so
I stayed,” she returned stammeringly.
Jerry opened the gate.
“Can I come up?” he said in the lowest tone that would reach her ear.
“I hate to think of you all by yourself up there, and Rosamund gone.”
June looked at him and murmured an affirmative that he could not have
heard, but he put his foot on the lowest step. She dropped her eyes to
her hands resting on the balustrade, while the beating of her heart
increased with his ascending footfall. When he had reached her side she
was trembling. In those few sentences from the bottom of the stairs
he seemed suddenly to have obliterated the past year. The words were
ordinary enough, but his eyes, his tone, his manner as he now stood
beside her, were those of the old Jerry, before Mercedes had stolen him
away.
She raised her eyes to his and immediately dropped them. The soft
scrutiny of his gaze--the privileged gaze that travels over and dwells
on a loved face, with no one to challenge its right--increased her
flushed distress. Jerry, too, was moved. For both of them the moment
was fraught with danger, and he knew it better than she.
“You’re all tired out,” he said, with his tender tone slightly hoarse.
“Let’s go in and sit down.”
She led the way through the hall, now beginning to grow dim with the
first evening shadows, into the long, bare parlor. There was a sofa
drawn up against the wall and on this she sat, while Jerry placed a
small gilded chair close in front of her.
“How deserted it looks!” he said, gazing about the room. “I suppose
everybody was here? I saw a perfect mob of people going down to the
station.”
“Yes, everybody went, even the servants. They stole away without
telling me. They didn’t even wait to clear the things off the table.
That’s why it’s so quiet.”
Both spoke rapidly to hide their agitation. The woman’s was more
apparent than the man’s. She kept her eyes down and Jerry watched
her as she spoke. It was the first time for over a year that he had
had a chance to scrutinize her at will. She had changed greatly. Her
freshness was gone, her face looked smaller than ever and to-day was
almost haggard. But Jerry had had his fill of beauty. She loved him
still, and she was the one woman of the three he had loved. Ever since
Mercedes had left him he had been telling himself this, and the thought
had been taking fiery possession of him, growing more dominant each day.
“Rosamund’s made a fine marriage, hasn’t she?” he went on, with more
fluency. “Some day she’ll be Lady Rosamund, and won’t she be a stunning
Lady Rosamund? She’s made for it. Do you remember the time when I was
up at Foleys and you had the garden there? What a lot has happened in
these last four years.”
“Yes, a lot,” June assented. A broken rose-bud lay on the sofa beside
her. She picked it up and began to open its leaves.
“And who’d have supposed then that Rosamund was going to live in
England, and some day be Lady Rosamund?” There was a slight pause,
and he added in a lower voice, as if speaking to himself: “Who’d have
supposed any of the things were going to happen that did?”
June pressed apart the rose petals in silence.
“Who’d have supposed I would have done the things that I have done?”
he said, speaking in the same low voice, but now it was suddenly full
of significance.
He was looking directly at her. His eyes called hers, and with the
rose-bud still in her hand, she looked into them for a long motionless
moment. It was a look of revelation. He saw her will, like a trapped
bird, fluttering and struggling in his grasp.
“You’re just the same, June,” he said on a rising breath.
“No, no,” she faltered, “I’ve changed in every way. You don’t know how
I’ve changed. I’m quite a different person.”
“But you haven’t lost faith in me?” he said, leaning nearer to her.
She drew back, pressing her shoulders against the sofa, and gazing at
him with a sort of suspended apprehension. He did not seem to notice
her shrinking and went on impetuously:
“You understand if there were mistakes and errors and--and--and--
miserable misunderstandings, that I was led into them. I was a blind
fool. Mercedes never cared for me. She told me so three months after we
were married. She left me of her own free will. She was glad to go, and
I--well, I’ll tell _you_ the truth, June--I wasn’t sorry.”
His face was full of angry confession. He had had no intention of
talking to her in this way, but now he suddenly wanted to reinstate
himself in her good opinion and be soothed by her sympathy. She stopped
him.
“Don’t talk about it. It’s done. If you made a mistake, it’s done, and
that’s the end. Oh, Jerry, don’t talk about it.”
She rose to her feet; the room was getting dim. Outside the royal dyes
of sunset had faded from the sky and the twilight was softly settling.
“I’ll have to light the gas,” she stammered. “The servants haven’t come
in yet. This half-light makes me blue.”
Jerry stood aside as she went to the mantel and from among the embanked
flowers drew the matchbox. The chandelier hung just above his head
draped with garlands of smilax. It was high and as June came forward
with the lighted match, he stretched out his hand to take it from her.
They were close together under the chandelier as their hands touched.
Each felt the tremulous cold of the other’s fingers and the match
dropped, a red spark, between them.
With suddenly-caught breath Jerry stretched his arms out to clasp her
but she drew back, her hands outspread before her, crying,
“Don’t, Jerry, don’t! Oh, please don’t!”
She backed away from him and he followed her, not speaking, his face
set, his arms ready to enfold her. She was stopped in her recoil by
the sofa, and standing against it she looked at him, with agonized
pleading, whispering,
“Don’t, Jerry. Oh, please go. Please go and leave me! You loved me
once.”
He stopped, stood looking at her for a moment of stricken irresolution,
then turned without a word and left the room.
June fell on the sofa, her face in her hands. She heard his step in the
passage, then sharp on every stair as he ran down to the street. In the
darkening room she sat trembling, her face hidden, alone in the empty
house.
CHAPTER IV
A WOMAN’S “NO”
Rion Gracey called on June as the Colonel had suggested, called again
the week after, and in a short time formed a habit of dropping in
every Sunday evening. He generally found the Colonel there, and in the
first stages of reopening the friendship the elder man had been very
convenient in relieving the meetings of the constraint which was bound
to hover over them. But as the spring Sundays passed and the constraint
wore away, Rion did not so thoroughly appreciate the presence of his
friend. With surprise at his own subtility--for the mining man was of
those who go forcefully over obstacles, not around them--he discovered
what evenings the Colonel did not dine with June and began to make his
appearance then.
He generally found her alone. She had made no effort to enlarge her
acquaintance, and after the wedding her father was constantly in San
Francisco or at more congenial haunts in the town. It raised agitating
hopes in Rion to see that she was openly and unaffectedly glad to see
him. There was a confidence, a something of trust and reliance in her
manner that--for him--had not been there before. He thought she had
never been so winning as she was on these lonely evenings, when her
face lighted at the sight of him, and her smile was full of a soft
welcome, touched with girlish shyness.
Women like to think that the beloved member of their sex plays so
filling and absorbing a part in the life of the enslaved man, that all
other matters are crowded from his mind. The interests of business
dwindle to the vanishing point, the claims of friendship have no place
in a heart out of which all else has been pushed. Love, while it lasts,
holds him in a spell, and then, if only then, the woman is a reigning
goddess.
Rion Gracey was not of this order of man. He had loved June since his
meeting with her at Foleys, but he had led a life so full of work and
business, so preoccupied with a man’s large affairs, that there were
periods of weeks when he never thought of her. Yet she had been and was
the only woman he had ever truly cared for and ardently desired. Before
his meeting with her women had been merely incidents in his onward
career. When, during the summer at Foleys, he had come to know her, he
had realized how different was the place she would have taken in his
life from the transitory interests which were all he had so far known.
Then, for the first time, he understood what a genuine passion means to
a genuine man.
When she had refused to marry him he had left her sore and angry. But
the crowded life in which he was so prominent a figure soon filled with
vital interests every moment of his days. His wound was not healed,
but he forgot its ache. He rigorously pushed the thought of her from
his mind. She was not for him, and to think of her was weakness. Then
he heard a rumor that Barclay was an admirer of hers, and he shut his
mouth and tried harder than ever not to think.
But time passed and June did not marry. Jerry, given his freedom,
married Mercedes. Rion, a man to whom small gossip was dull, a thing
to give no heed to as one walked forward, heard none of the talk of
Jerry’s change of heart. It filtered slowly into Virginia, which was
across the mountains in another state, and occupied in a big way
with big matters. Even Barney Sullivan, who was well primed with San
Francisco gossip after Mitty’s return from visits, “down below,” did
not mention to his chief anything of Miss Allen and Jerry Barclay.
When he heard she was coming to Virginia the love-obsession that the
woman likes to believe in, came near taking possession of him. For a
day or two he was shaken out of the current of his every-day life and
found it hard to attend to his work. The thought of seeing her again
filled this self-contained and masterful man with tremors such as a
girl might feel at the coming of her lover. The first time he saw her
on C Street he found it difficult to collect his thoughts for hours
afterward.
The change in her, the loss of what good looks she had once possessed,
did not diminish or alter his feeling. If he had been asked if he
thought her pretty he would have honestly said he did not know, he had
never thought about it. He did not know how old she was, nor could he
cite any special points of beauty that his eye, as a lover, had noted.
Her only physical attribute that had impressed him was her smallness,
and this he had noticed because in walking with her, her head only came
to a little above his shoulder, and he was sometimes forced to bend
down to hear her.
He had been wondering what to do when the Colonel asked him to call.
Unless the suggestion had come from some one in authority he never
would have dared to go, for he was a lover at once proud and shy, not
of the kind who batter and browbeat a woman into acquiescence. Her
first meeting with him, dominated as it was by mutual embarrassment, at
least showed him that she was not displeased to see him. Since then the
meetings had been frequent, her pleasure at his coming open for any one
to see, and Rion’s hopes, in the beginning but faint, had waxed high
and exultant.
To June, he and the Colonel were the only two figures of an intimate
interest in her life. He seemed to fill its emptiness, to cheer its
isolation. She looked forward to his coming, hardly knowing why, except
that a sense of comfort and strength came with him. He was often in
her thoughts, and she found herself storing up small incidents in her
daily life to tell him, for no reason but that his unspoken sympathy
was pleasant. She felt the consciousness--so sweet to women--that all
which concerned her was of moment to him. Now and then the Colonel’s
past assertions that the girl who married Rion Gracey would be happy,
rose in her mind. She began to understand that it might be so, and what
it would mean, this strong man’s love and protection guarding a woman
against the storm and struggle of the world, with which she personally
was so unfitted to cope.
One evening, a month after the wedding, he found her sitting on the
balcony reading. It had been warm weather for a day or two and the
windows and doors of the lower floor were thrown open, showing the
receding vista of dimly-lighted rooms and passages. She was dressed in
white and had a book he had given her lying open across her knees. As
the gate clicked to his opening hand she started and looked down, then
leaned forward, her face flushing, her lips parting with a smile of
greeting. It was a look that might have planted hope in any man’s heart.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said, gazing down on him as he ascended.
“I was just wondering if you would. When you want a thing very much it
never seems to happen. But now you’ve happened, so I never can say that
again.”
“Yes, I’ve happened,” he answered with the phlegmatic air with which he
hid his shyness. “Are you all alone again?”
“Yes, quite alone. But I’ve been reading the book you gave me and it’s
made me forget all about it. I’ve nearly finished it. It’s a splendid
book.”
“I’ll get you another to-morrow,” he said, leaning with his back
against the railing and looking at her with a fond intentness of which
he was unconscious. She was pretty to-night in her white dress and with
her cheeks flushed with pleasure at his coming. Rion, who did not
notice looks, noticed this, and it stirred his heart.
“Let’s go in,” he said. “There’s a sort of chill in the air. You
mustn’t catch cold. If you got sick you’d have to be sent down to San
Francisco. There’s no proper person here to take care of you.”
She rose and stood in front of him, half turned to go.
“Wouldn’t that be dreadful!” she said with careless lightness. “I
wouldn’t go. Uncle Jim would have to give up his work on the Cresta
Plata and take care of me.”
“We wouldn’t want you to go,” he answered, as he followed her into the
hall. “Anyway, I’d want to keep you here.”
She did not appear to notice the change of pronoun, nor the fact that
his voice had dropped on the last sentence. With her white dress
sweeping spectrally before him he followed her into the dim parlor.
Something in the intimacy of the still, soft dusk, and the sudden
wakening into imperious dominance of his feeling for her, made him
move away from her and about the room. Through the open door of the
dining-room he saw the white square of the table glimmering in the
twilight, with one place set, the crumpled napkin on the cloth, the
single wine glass, its lower half dark with wine, a scattering of
crimson cherries dotting the glaze of a plate.
“Did you dine alone, too?” he asked.
“Yes, father’s dining in town to-night and you or Black Dan sent the
Colonel into Empire till to-morrow.”
She looked round at him over her shoulder, the lighted match in
her hand sending a glow over her face, which was half-plaintive,
half-laughing.
“It’s very mean of you to send the Colonel away on nights when he dines
with me.”
“Well, honestly, I never thought about it,” stammered Rion, trying to
look contrite, but glad in his heart that the Colonel was, for this
evening at least, well out of the way. “And, anyway, it was Dan who
sent him. He thinks there are certain things nobody can do as well as
Parrish.”
“Of course he’s right about that,” she answered. “But he ought to
remember that one of the things the Colonel does best is to be company
for me.”
The gas was lit and she was adjusting the shade of a lamp on a side
table. As she spoke she looked over the bright chimney at him, with the
smile that held in it so much of melancholy.
“It’s pretty dreary for you here, isn’t it?” he said.
Her lips suddenly trembled and she bit the under one. For a moment her
control was shaken, and to hide it she bent over the lamp, pretending
to arrange the wick. The pause was heavy till she said in her usual
tone:
“Well, lately it _has_ been rather lonely. It’s hard to get used to
Rosamund’s not being here.”
She crossed the room to the sofa and sat down in the corner of it, Rion
taking a chair near her. As she patted her skirt into satisfactory
folds, she said, her eyes fixed on her arranging hand,
“It takes a person a long time to get used to some one they care for
going so far off. I sometimes wonder if they ever do.”
He looked at her, murmuring some casual response, his mind not on his
words. Against the sheer white of her dress a locket she wore suspended
round her neck by a narrow black velvet, caught and lost the light as
her breast rose and fell. He was conscious of its regular gleam, of the
darkness of her hand against the white folds of her skirt, of the slim
smallness of her figure reclining in the angle of the sofa.
Another pause fell between them, this time uncomfortable with a sense
of extreme constraint; June’s hand ceased moving and joined its
companion in her lap. She raised her eyes timidly and met his, intent,
motionless, fixed deeply upon her. The locket rose brightly into the
light on a sharply caught breath.
“Why did Black Dan send the Colonel into Empire?” she faltered.
“Do you remember what I asked you more than two years ago in San
Francisco?” was his answer.
She tried to temporize and said nervously,
“Two years back is a long way to remember.”
“I asked you to marry me, and you said no. Do you remember?”
She nodded.
“I’m going to ask you the same thing again.”
“Oh, Rion!” she murmured in an imploring undertone.
“I can only say the same things I said then. I’m not a smooth talker,
like some of the men you’ve known. I want you for my wife, and I’ll do
everything I can to make you happy. That’s about the whole thing.”
She rose with some broken words he did not catch and passed round
behind the sofa, where she stood, her hand resting on the back, her
face averted. He rose, too, but made no attempt to approach her.
“I don’t know much about women,” he continued. “I don’t know how to
talk to them. You’re the only one of them I’ve ever felt this way to;
and I’m pretty sure I’ll never feel so to any other. I love you. I’ve
tried to stop it and I can’t. It’s stronger than I am.”
She made no reply, and after waiting a moment, he said, his voice
slightly hoarse:
“Well, say something to me.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she murmured, her face turned away.
He made a step toward the sofa, and as she heard him, she drew back
as if frightened. He stopped instantly, regarding her with a sudden
frowning fixity of suspicion and anger.
“Don’t you care for me, June?” he said.
“Yes, yes, of course--so much, so much more than I used to. But, Rion--”
She turned and looked at him, one of her hands raised as if to ward him
off. He started forward to seize the hand, but she quickly drew it back
and clasped it round the locket.
“Not that way,” she faltered, “not the way you want.”
“Are you going to say no to me again?”
“Oh, Rion!” she pleaded.
“Do you care for me? Answer. Don’t beat about the bush.”
“I care for you immensely. I’ve always cared for you, but lately it’s
been something quite different, something much deeper. You’ve been so
kind to me.”
“Never mind about my kindness, do you love me?”
“I--but--no--not--” she stammered a series of disconnected words, and
came to a stop.
He took a step nearer to her and said in an authoritative voice,
“Answer me. Will you be my wife?”
“I can’t,” she said, in the lowest tone he could hear.
“You can’t? Then it’s no again?”
“It’s not exactly no. Or if it is, it’s not the same kind of no it was
before.”
“What do you mean by that? There’s only one kind of no in a matter like
this.”
“Well, this is a different kind. It must be a different kind. It
mustn’t be a no that makes us strangers as it did before.”
He gave a suppressed exclamation, angry and violent, and turned to the
table for his hat.
“A man’s not a fool or a child,” he said, “to be spoken to like that.”
She followed his movements, saw him stretch his hand for the hat, and
cried,
“Oh, don’t go--don’t go this way--don’t be angry with me--let me
explain.”
He turned and looked at her with a face grown cold and hard.
“What is there to explain? I want you to be my wife. You don’t want to.
That’s the whole matter.”
“Oh, no it isn’t. It’s not like it was the other time. I didn’t care
then, but I do now, more than you think, much more. Everything’s
different. I can’t bear to have you go. I can’t bear to lose you.”
“Is that the reason you’ve looked so pleased whenever I came? Was that
the reason you told me just now that you wanted me to come so much you
didn’t think I would? I’ve been a fool, no doubt, but it seems to me
that a smarter man than I might have thought you meant it.”
She flushed deeply, up to her hair.
“I did mean it,” she said in a low voice.
Hope sprang to his face and he came close to her:
“Then if you meant it, say you love me, say you’ll marry me. That’s the
only thing I want you to say to me.”
She shrank away again and without waiting for her answer, he
turned--the light gone from his face--and reached for his hat.
“Don’t go; don’t go,” she begged. “There are things I want to say to
you,”--but this time he did not let false hopes beguile him.
“Good-by,” he said gruffly, and walked to the door.
As he passed her she slipped round the sofa and came after him:
“It mustn’t be good-by. Say good night. I won’t let you say good-by.”
“It’s good-by this time, young woman,” he said grimly. “Good-by for
keeps.”
She laid her hand on his arm and that stopped him. With an air of
enforced patience he stood, his face turned from her, waiting. For a
moment she did not speak, and he said:
“Come, what is it? If it’s that I’m to dangle round as I’ve been doing
for the past two months, let’s not waste time over that; I’m not that
kind of a man. There’s too much for me to do to waste my time and
thoughts hanging round a girl who’s only fooling with me.”
“I was not fooling,” she said humbly; “I meant it all.”
“Evidently we didn’t both mean the same thing.”
“No, but now that we understand, don’t go off this way saying it’s to
be good-by for keeps. I shall be so lonely without you. I trust in you
so. I lean on you--”
“Lean on the Colonel,” he interrupted, almost brutally. “He’s a more
reliable staff than I am.”
“But we can still be friends,” she urged, not appearing to notice his
harshness.
“No, we’ll not be friends.”
Looking down at her he forgot his sternness and his voice grew suddenly
roughened with feelings he could not disguise.
“I can’t be your friend, June Allen. There may be men who can be the
friend of the women they feel to as I do to you, but I’m not that kind.
I can be your husband, only that. There’s to be no play at friendship
where I’m concerned, no taking your hand to shake when I want to take
you in my arms and keep you there, where no other man in the world can
lay his finger on you or think of you as something he can try to win.
You must belong to me, want to belong to me, come to me of your own
free will, or else we must be strangers.”
He took her hand, lifted it from his arm and with a short “Good-by”
turned and left the room.
June stood under the chandelier listening to his retreating footsteps
as they passed along the hall and then down the outside stairs. She
remained motionless, looking down, her ear strained to catch the
diminishing footfalls as they reached the end of the steps and were
deadened in the dust of the street. He was leaving her never to come
back, disappearing from her life and the place he had of late taken in
it, into the night and the distance. As she listened her heart momently
grew heavier, the sense of empty desertion about her became suddenly
overwhelming.
“Everybody I care for is going away from me,” she whispered to herself.
“Soon there won’t be anybody left.”
CHAPTER V
“HER FEET GO DOWN TO DEATH”
Jerry was in a bad temper. For some days he had been disturbed by
rumors of Rion Gracey’s attentions to June. In the long twilights of
the summer evenings Rion had been constantly seen mounting the steps
of the Murchison mansion. The single state of the Gracey boys had long
been a matter of comment, and, as their riches grew it was regarded
with increasing wonderment. Black Dan’s heart may have been buried in
the grave of his child-wife, but Rion had never paid any attention to
any woman. Therefore, when it was known of men that he was a frequent
visitor at the Allens’, the little world in which he was a marked man
began to whisper.
Jerry did not at first hear these rumors. He was not only kept busy
from morning till night but he was entirely preoccupied in his own
affairs. His feminine love of intrigue for its own sake was overpowered
by such respect and honest tenderness as he still possessed for June.
After his interview with her he determined not to see her again. June
was not like Lupé Newbury and his feeling for her was different. He
said to himself with a sense of magnanimity that no unhappiness should
ever come to her from him, and in order to be on the safe side he
would keep away from her.
As had been the case with Jerry all his life, there was method in his
morality. He had gained at least one thing by his marriage and that was
his connection with the all-powerful Graceys. Though he disliked both
men, who, he knew, regarded him with secret contempt, their patronage
was too valuable to be jeopardized. June’s happiness and honor were
precious things, but no more so than his own connection with the owners
of the Cresta Plata. So he stayed away from her, feeling himself a
paladin of virtue, and sentimentally thinking of her alone in the
Murchison mansion, dreaming of him.
This agreeable arrangement of the situation was suddenly disrupted by
the stories of Rion’s attentions. Jerry’s high thoughts of renunciation
were swept away in a flood of jealous indignation. At first he refused
to believe it. He was absolutely confident of June’s constant and
long-suffering affection for him. That she should marry some one else
he had deemed impossible. But one of the Gracey boys--it did not much
matter which--the owners of one of the richest mines on the Comstock,
was a very different matter. Money loomed the largest thing on Jerry’s
horizon. He did not believe it could take a less prominent place on
that of other people--of June especially, whose father he knew to
be financially embarrassed. The thought of her--his own especial
property--triumphantly marrying a millionaire, leaving him, as it
were, stranded, having lost everything and been “done” on every side,
infuriated him. The jealousy that had possession of him was fierce,
the jealousy of the man whose love is of the destructive, demolishing
kind.
On the day he had risen up in a bad temper he had heard what amounted
to confirmation of the rumor. One of the office clerks in the Cresta
Plata had told him that Rion’s infatuation for the young woman was
leading him into lovers’ extravagances. A man who had always been
indifferent to his dress, he was now getting all his clothes from San
Francisco. He had books, flowers, and candies sent up for her all the
time. He was with her constantly.
“Rion Gracey’s never looked at a woman before,” was the young man’s
final comment, “and that’s the kind that it takes most hold on. He’s
got it bad and can’t hide it. It’s out on him for any one to see, like
the measles.”
Jerry’s jealousy and alarm boiled past the point of prudence. He made
up his mind to get off early that afternoon and go to see June, and,
as he expressed it in his own thoughts, “have it out with her.” He had
no idea what he intended to say, but he was going to find out what her
attitude was to Rion, and, if need be, accuse her of her perfidy.
He had perfected his plan of escape from the office when Black Dan
informed him that he was considering the purchase of a new horse and
would be obliged if Jerry--a notable judge of horseflesh--would take
it for a spin along the grade road and report his opinion of it. Black
Dan’s requests in this way were exceedingly like commands. But no one,
from Barney Sullivan, the smartest superintendent in Virginia, to the
youngest miner working on the ore-breasts, had ever dared to question
them. With his face red with rage Jerry bowed his head in acquiescence,
and that afternoon at the hour when he had hoped to be confronting June
in her own parlor he was flying along the road toward Carson, cursing
to himself as he held the reins over the back of Black Dan’s new horse.
The afternoon was magnificent, held in a diamond-like transparence and
blazing with sun. The mountain air tempered its heat. As Jerry flew
along that remarkable road which curves, like an aërial terrace, round
the out-flung buttresses of Mount Davidson, the Sierra, a lingering
enameling of snow on its summits, spread before him. Rising high in
tumbled majesty, mosaics of snow set in between ravines of swimming
shadow, it looked unsubstantially enormous and unreal like scenery
in dreams. Between it and Mount Davidson vast, airy gulfs of space
fell away that seemed filled, as a glass might be with water, with a
crystal stillness. The whole panorama, clarified by thin air, and with
clear washes of shade laid upon it, was like a picture in its still,
impersonal serenity.
Jerry, in his rage, let the horse have its head and they sped forward,
past the outlying cabins that made a scattering along the approach to
the town, past the timbered openings of the lone prospector’s tunnels,
to where the ledge of road rimmed the barren mountain flank. They were
flying forward at an exhilarating pace when he noticed a woman’s figure
some distance in front walking on the narrow edge of path and moving
forward at a brisk rate of speed. As he overhauled it his glance began
to fasten on it with growing eagerness. The woman heard the thud of the
flying hoofs behind her, and drew aside, as close to the outer edge
as she dared, looking with eyes that blinked in the sunlight at the
approaching buggy. Jerry’s face flushed with a sudden realizing of the
completely unexpected. It was June.
She did not recognize him at first, and drew back, as the horse, in a
swirl of dust and spume flakes, came to a stop beside her. Then she saw
who it was and with a low-toned “Jerry!” stood staring at him.
“Yes, it’s I,” he said hurriedly, leaning forward. “Get in and I’ll
take you for a spin.”
She drew away, shaking her head. The spirited horse, excited by its
run, began to bite at the bit, arch its neck and back prancingly. Jerry
had to withdraw his attention from the girl, and, swearing in a soft
undertone, bestow it on the animal.
“Come, June,” he said, trying to speak coaxingly, “there’s no harm in
driving for half an hour with me. This is a new horse I’m trying for
Black Dan and it’s a perfect stunner.”
She murmured a refusal, backing away from the wheels. The horse paused
for a moment in its curvetings and Jerry had an opportunity to look at
her and say in his most compelling tone:
“I only want you to drive up a mile or two with me. It’s a glorious
afternoon, and it’s worth something to ride behind a horse like this.
I’m not going to say anything to you you won’t like to hear. You
needn’t be afraid. You and I are too old friends not to trust each
other.”
She wavered.
“Come, get in,” he said, his voice soft and making an urgent upward
movement with his chin, that seemed to draw her into the buggy as his
hand might. She put her foot on the step and the next moment was beside
him. The horse leaped forward and the road began to flash by like a
yellow ribbon.
For some moments they were silent, Jerry with his eyes on the road
ahead. They whirled round one of the projecting spurs of the mountain
and, seeing the long curve before them clear of vehicles, he turned and
looked at her. His eyes as they met hers were hard and angry.
“I’ve been hearing things about you!” he said.
“Things! What things?”
“I fancy you know.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she answered uneasily. “What sort of
things?”
“The last sort of things in the world I want to hear.”
She looked away making no answer and he said:
“I’ve heard that Rion Gracey is in love with you.”
“Oh, is that it?” she commented in a low voice.
Her manner irritated him. She did not seem to realize the seriousness
of the charge.
“Yes--that’s it,” he replied, continuing to regard her with a look of
pugnacious ill-humor.
She again made no reply and he persisted angrily:
“Is he?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not fair. You’ve no right to ask.”
“No right to ask!” he exclaimed in enraged amazement. “No right to ask!
My God, that’s a remark for you to make to me!”
He turned his face to the horse, his mouth set, his lips compressing
words that he dared not utter. It was evidently all true. The thought
that she might be already engaged to Rion entered his mind, carrying
with it a sensation of appalling blankness. With a flash of revealing
truth he saw that his life, with June completely gone from it, would be
for ever savorless and without meaning. He had not realized before how
much he cared for her.
For a space there was silence. They sped round another buttress and saw
an unobstructed semicircle of road before them. Without looking at her
he said abruptly:
“Are you going to marry him?”
“No,” she answered.
“No?” he almost shouted, this time turning to stare at her.
She turned her face away repeating the negative.
“Why not?”
“I--I--don’t--oh, Jerry, don’t question me this way. It’s not fair.”
“But he _has_ asked you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve refused him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t got that sort of feeling for him. I admire him. I respect
him above all men. I can’t tell you how much he was to me, how I leaned
on him, depended on him, but--”