A Meeting and a Clashing
As they stepped from the cage at the surface Percival became aware of a
group of strangers between him and the open door of the
shaft-house,--people displaying in dress and manner the unmistakable
stamp of New York. For part of a minute, while the pupils of his eyes
were contracting to the light, he saw them but vaguely. Then, as his
sight cleared, he beheld foremost in the group, beaming upon him with
an expression of pleased and surprised recognition, the girl whose face
and voice had for nearly half a year peopled his lover's solitude with
fair visions and made its silence to be all melody.
Had the encounter been anticipated his composure would perhaps have
failed him. Not a few of his waking dreams had sketched this, their
second meeting, and any one of the ways it had pleased him to plan it
would assuredly have found him nervously embarrassed. But so wildly
improbable was this reality that not the daringest of his imagined
happenings had approached it. His thoughts for the moment had been not
of her; then, all at once, she stood before him in the flesh, and he
was cool, almost unmoved. He suspected at once that her father was the
trim, fastidiously dressed man who looked as if he had been abducted
from a morning stroll down the avenue to his club; that the plump,
ruddy, high-bred woman, surveying the West disapprovingly through a
lorgnon, would be her mother. Shepler he knew by sight, with his big
head, massive shoulders, and curiously short, tapering body. Some other
men and a woman were scanning the hoisting machinery with superior
looks.
The girl, before starting toward him, had waited hardly longer than it
took him to eye the group. And then came an awkward two seconds upon
her whose tact in avoiding the awkward was reputed to be more than
common.
With her hand extended she had uttered, "Why, Mr.--" before it flashed
upon her that she did not know the name of the young man she was
greeting.
The "Mister" was threatening to prolong itself into an "r" of
excruciating length and disgraceful finality, an "r" that is terminated
neatly by no one but hardened hotel-clerks. Then a miner saved the day.
"Mr. Bines," he said, coming up hurriedly behind Percival with several
specimens of ore, "you forgot these."
"-r-r-r. Bines, how _do_ you do!" concluded the girl with an eye-flash
of gratitude at the humble instrument that had prevented an undue
hiatus in her salutation. They were apart from the others and for the
moment unnoticed.
The young man took the hand so cordially offered, and because of all
the things he wished and had so long waited to say, he said nothing.
"Isn't it jolly! I am Miss Milbrey," she added in a lower tone, and
then, raising her voice, "Mamma, Mr. Bines--and papa," and there
followed a hurried and but half-acknowledged introduction to the other
members of the party. And, behold! in that moment the young man had
schemed the edifice of all his formless dreams. For six months he had
known the unsurpassable luxury of wanting and of knowing what he
wanted. Now, all at once, he saw this to be a world in which dreams
come more than true.
Shepler and the party were to go through the mine as a matter of
sight-seeing. They were putting on outer clothes from the store-room to
protect them from the dirt and damp.
Presently Percival found himself again at the bottom of the shaft.
During the descent of twelve hundred feet he had reflected upon the
curious and interesting fact that her name should be Milbrey. He felt
dimly that this circumstance should be ranked among the most
interesting of natural phenomena,--that she should have a name, as the
run of mortals, and that it should be one name more than another. When
he discovered further that her Christian name was Avice the phenomenon
became stupendously bewildering. They two were in the last of the party
to descend. On reaching bottom he separated her with promptness and
guile from two solemn young men, copies of each other, and they were
presently alone. In the distance they could see the others following
ghostly lamps. From far off mysterious recesses came the muffled
musical clink of the sledges on the drills. An employee who had come
down with them started to be their guide. Percival sent him back.
"I've just been through; I can find my way again."
"Ver' well," said the man, "with the exception that it don't happen
something,--yes?" And he stayed where he was.
Down one of the cross-cuts they started, stepping aside to let a car of
ore be pushed along to the shaft.
"Do you know," began the girl, "I am so glad to be able to thank you
for what you did that night."
"I'm glad you _are_ able. I was beginning to think I should always have
those thanks owing to me."
"I might have paid them at the time, but it was all so unexpected and
so sudden,--it rattled me, quite."
"I thought you were horribly cool-headed."
"I wasn't."
"Your manner reduced me to a groom who opened your carriage door."
"But grooms don't often pick strange ladies up bodily and bear them out
of a pandemonium of waltzing cab-horses. I'd never noticed before that
cab-horses are so frivolous and hysterical."
"And grooms know where to look for their pay."
They were interrupting nervously, and bestowing furtive side-looks upon
each other.
"If I'd not seen you," said the girl, "glanced at you--before--that
evening, I shouldn't have remembered so well; doubtless I'd not have
recognised you to-day."
"I didn't know you did glance at me, and yet I watched you every moment
of the evening. You didn't know that, did you?"
She laughed.
"Of course I knew it. A woman has to note such things without letting
it be seen that she sees."
"And I'd have sworn you never once so much as looked my way."
"Don't we do it well, though?"
"And in spite of all the time I gave to a study of your face I lost the
detail of it. I could keep only the effect of its expression and the
few tones of your voice I heard. You know I took those on a record so I
could make 'em play over any time I wanted to listen. Do you know, that
has all been very sweet to me, my helping you and the memory of it,--so
vague and sweet."
"Aren't you afraid we're losing the others?"
She halted and looked back.
"No; I'm afraid we won't lose them; come on; you can't turn back now.
And you don't want to hear anything about mines; it wouldn't be at all
good for you, I'm sure. Quick, down this way, or you'll hear Pangburn
telling some one what a stope is, and think what a thing that would be
to carry in your head."
"Really, a stope sounds like something that would 'get you' in the
night! I'm afraid!"
Half in his spirit she fled with him down a dimly lighted incline where
men were working at the rocky wall with sledge and drill. There was
that in his manner which compelled her quite as literally as when at
their first meeting he had picked her up in his arms.
As they walked single-file through the narrowing of a drift, she
wondered about him. He was Western, plainly. An employee in the mine,
probably a manager or director or whatever it was they called those in
authority in mines. Plainly, too, he was a man of action and a man who
engaged all her instinctive liking. Something in him at once coerced
her friendliest confidence. These were the admissions she made to
herself. She divined him, moreover, to be a blend of boldness and
timidity. He was bold to the point of telling her things
unconventionally, of beguiling her into remote underground passages
away from the party; yet she understood; she knew at once that he was a
determined but unspoiled gentleman; that under no provocation could he
make a mistake. In any situation of loneliness she would have felt safe
with him--"as with a brother"--she thought. Then, feeling her cheeks
burn, she turned back and said:
"I must tell you he was my brother--that man--that night."
He was sorry and glad all at once. The sorrow being the lesser and more
conventional emotion, he started upon an awkward expression of it,
which she interrupted.
"Never mind saying that, thank you. Tell me something about yourself,
now. I really would like to know you. What do you see and hear and do
in this strange life?"
"There's not much variety," he answered, with a convincing droop of
depression. "For six months I've been seeing you and hearing
you--seeing you and hearing you; not much variety in that--nothing
worth telling you about."
Despite her natural caution, intensified by training, she felt herself
thrill to the very evident sincerity of his tones, so that she had to
affect mirth to seem at ease.
"Dear, dear, what painful monotony; and how many men have said it since
these rocks were made; and now you say it,--well, I admit--"
"But there's nothing new under the sun, you know."
"No; not even a new excuse for plagiarism, is there?"
"Well, you see as long as the same old thing keeps true the same old
way of telling it will be more or less depended upon. After a few
hundred years of experiment, you know, they hit on the fewest words
that tell the most, and everybody uses them because no one can improve
them. Maybe the prehistoric cave-gentleman, who proposed to his loved
one with a war club just back of her left ear, had some variation of
the formula suiting his simple needs, after he'd gotten her home and
brought her to and she said it was 'all so sudden;' and a man can work
in little variations of his own to-day. For example--"
"I'm sure we'd best be returning."
"For example, I could say, you know, that for keeping the mind active
and the heart working overtime the memory of you surpasses any tonic
advertised in the backs of the magazines. Or, that--"
"I think that's enough; I see you _could_ vary the formula, in case--"
"--_have_ varied it--but don't forget I prefer the original unvaried.
After all, there are certain things that you can't tell in too few
words. Now, you--"
"You stubborn person. Really, I know all about myself. I asked you to
tell me about yourself."
"And I began at once to tell you everything about myself--everything of
interest--which is yourself."
"I see your sense of values is gone, poor man. I shall question you.
Now you are a miner, and I like men of action, men who do things; I've
often wondered about you, and seriously, I'm glad to find you here
doing something. I remembered you kindly, with real gratitude, indeed.
You didn't seem like a New York man either, and I decided you weren't.
Honestly, I am glad to find you here at your work in your miner's
clothes. You mustn't think we forget how to value men that work."
On the point of saying thoughtlessly, "But I'm not working here--I own
the mine," he checked himself. Instead he began a defence of the man
who doesn't work, but who could if he had to. "For example," he
continued, "here we are at a place that you must be carried over;
otherwise you'd have to wade through a foot of water or go around that
long way we've come. I've rubber boots on, and so I pick you up this
way--" He held her lightly on his arm and she steadied herself with a
hand between his shoulders.
"And staggering painfully under my burden, I wade out to the middle of
this subterranean lake." He stopped.
"You see, I've learned to do things. I could pick you from that
slippery street and put you in your carriage, and I can pick you up now
without wasting words about it--"
"But you're wasting time--hurry, please--and, anyway, you're a miner
and used to such things."
He remained standing.
"But I'm _not_ wasting time, and I'm not a miner in the sense you mean.
I own this mine, and I suppose for the most part I'm the sort of man
you seem to have gotten tired of; the man who doesn't have to do
anything. Even now I'm this close to work only because my grandfather
wanted me to look over the properties my father left."
"But, hurry, please, and set me down."
"Not until I warn you that I'm just as apt to do things as the kind of
man you thought I was. This is twice I've picked you up now. Look out
for me;--next time I may not put you down at all."
She gave a low little laugh, denoting unruffled serenity. She was
glorying secretly in his strength, and she knew his boldness and
timidity were still justly balanced. And there was the rather
astonishing bit of news he had just given her. That needed a lot of
consideration.
With slow, sure-footed steps he reached the farther side of the water
and put her on her feet.
"There, I thought I'd reveal the distressing truth about myself while I
had you at my mercy."
"I might have suspected, but I gave the name no thought. Bines, to be
sure. You are the son of the Bines who died some months ago. I heard
Mr. Shepler and my father talking about some of your mining properties.
Mr. Shepler thought the 'One Girl' was such a funny name for your
father to give a mine."
Now they neared the foot of the shaft where the rest of the party
seemed to await them. As they came up Percival felt himself raked by a
broadside from the maternal lorgnon that left him all but disabled. The
father glowered at him and asked questions in the high key we are apt
to adopt in addressing foreigners, in the instinctive fallacy that any
language can be understood by any one if it be spoken loudly enough.
The mother's manner was a crushing rebuke to the young man for his
audacity. The father's manner was meant to intimate that natives of the
region in which they were then adventuring were not worthy of rebuke,
save such general rebukes as may be conveyed by displaying one's
natural superiority of manner. The other members of the party,
excepting Shepler, who talked with Pangburn at a little distance, took
cue from the Milbreys and aggressively ignored the abductor of an only
daughter. They talked over, around, and through him, as only may those
mortals whom it hath pleased heaven to have born within certain areas
on Manhattan Island.
The young man felt like a social outcast until he caught a glance from
Miss Milbrey. That young woman was still friendly, which he could
understand, and highly amused, which he could not understand. While the
temperature was at its lowest the first load ascended, including Miss
Milbrey and her parents, a chatty blonde, and an uncomfortable little
man who, despite his being twelve hundred feet toward the centre
thereof, had three times referred bitterly to the fact that he was "out
of the world." "I shall see you soon above ground, shall I not?" Miss
Milbrey had asked, at which her mother shot Percival a parting volley
from her rapid-fire lorgnon, while her father turned upon him a back
whose sidelines were really admirable, considering his age and feeding
habits. The behaviour of these people appeared to intensify the
amusement of their child. The two solemn young men who remained
continued to chat before Percival as they would have chatted before the
valet of either. He began to sound the spiritual anguish of a pariah.
Also to feel truculent and, in his own phrase, "Westy." With him
"Westy" meant that you were as good as any one else "and a shade better
than a whole lot if it came to a show-down." He was not a little
mortified to find how easy it was for him to fall back upon that old
cushion of provincial arrogance. It was all right for Uncle Peter, but
for himself,--well, it proved that he was less finely Eastern than he
had imagined.
As the cage came down for another ascent, he let the two solemn young
men go up with Shepler and Pangburn, and went to search for Uncle
Peter.
"There, thank God, is a man!" he reflected.