Nathaniel Mar made the mistake of thinking that you can put off to a given date impressing your good judgment on those who share your life.
Trenn and Harry had an affection for their father—that he without difficulty inspired—but in their heart of hearts they were a little ashamed of their love for him, as a species of weakness. They frankly despised hislaissez-allerway of life, and looked upon him as a warning. Their mother had seen to that.
The Mar boys, however, had shown business capacity from their childhood, when instead of buying “peanut brittle” and going to the circus, they saved up their money to invest in hens. They made what their mother called “a pretty penny” by selling fresh eggs to the neighbors. The thriving young tradesmen made even their mother pay for whatever she required, and she “planked down the cash” without a murmur. It was a small price for the holy satisfaction of seeing that her children were early learning the value of money.
Mar got less pleasure out of his sons’ budding business instincts. He was even obviously annoyed when he discovered that Trenn helped Eddie Cox with his lessons, not out of good comradeship, but at the rate of “two bits” for each half-hour’s aid.
“It’s ugly,” said Mar, with unusual spirit. His wife felt obliged to point out that she herself had been engaged in very much the same occupation, when he first met her. The “ugliness” of being paid for helping people with their studies had not oppressed him then.
“You were their teacher,” said her husband.
“And Trenn is Eddie’s teacher while he’s teaching him!” Then as Mar opened his lips, she quickly closed the argument by adding, “Besides,Eddie’sfather has made money and Trenn’s father hasn’t. Eddie Cox will have to buy brains all his life—he may just as well begin now.”
Trenn Mar was not yet nineteen when he was so fortunate as to have two business openings. One was to go down to a ranch in southern California and round up cattle for Karl Siegel, and learn all he could for Trenn Mar. The other, to enter the employment of Messrs. Wilks & Simpson, of the Crœsus Creek Mining Company.
Trenn’s father meant him to take the latter—in fact he had put himself to an uncommon amount of trouble to get his son this opening. But Trenn was all for the cattle business. “Besides, look at what Siegel offers. It’s wonderful! Those men usually expect a young fellow to buy his experience. But Siegel—”
“Yes,” agreed Mar; “it looks better to start with, but that’s not the main thing. You must look ahead.”
Trenn opened his brown eyes. He even grinned. “Why yes, I mean to.”
“With Wilks & Simpson you’ll get the hang of the best managed placer-mining property in California.”
“But that whole blessed country is prospected already. There’s no money in it for me.”
“That’s precisely what there is in it.”
Trenn looked about the room, impatient to be gone. What did his father know about money? Less than many a sharp boy of twelve.
“Sound mining knowledge,” he was saying, “will be very useful. Not only for itself, but because it will bring you into business contact with mining men.”
“What good’ll that do me?” demanded the boy, impatiently. “Wehaven’t got any capital.”
“No,they’llhave the capital. You’ll have something more rare.”
“What?”
“A great property to develop.” Then he told his son the story of the shipwreck, and of those wonderful hours on the farther side of Anvil Rock. Trenn sat and stared. Mar wished he would stop it. It got on his nerves at last, those round, brown eyes, keen, a little hard, fixed in that wide, unwinking gaze.
“So that’s why I say let the cattle business go. Take the small salary that Wilks & Simpson offer, study practical mining, and wait for your chance. In any case, by the time Harry’s left the High School you’ll have some valuable experience to bring into the partnership.”
Trenn got up and crossed the room.
“Yes, that’s the place,” said Mar, excitedly, thinking the boy’s goal was the brown and faded reconnaissance map. But Trenn walked straight past it to the window, and stood looking out, to where the duck-pond used to be, and where now a row of pretentious little pseudo-Spanish “villas” shut out the prospect. And still he didn’t speak.
“What I consider so important, is not the practicalknowledgeper se, though I think it a very real value. Not that so much, as the fact that through associating yourself with that kind of enterprise you are brought into relation with just the men you’ll need to know. If I hadn’t gone to Rock Hill I would never have met Galbraith. The longer I live, the more I realize it’s throughpeople—through having the right sort of human relationships, that work is best forwarded. Here have I lived for nearly twenty years with a secret worth millions, and for lack of knowing the right men—”
“Why did you never tell Charlie Trennor?” the boy turned round to ask.
“Oh, Charlie Trennor! He’s not the sort. But, as a matter of fact, I did once mention the circumstance to the Trennors. Many years ago. But they are men who”—Mar stumbled—“they’ll never do anything very big; they neither one of them have a scintilla of imagination.” And then, in sheer excitement, speaking his mind for once: “There never was a Trennor who had.”
“I expect,” said the boy, doggedly, “there’s a certain amount of Trennor about me. I never noticed thatIhad any imagination to speak of.”
Mar was conscious that his own spirit was contracting in a creeping chill. But he said to himself it was only because he had made the mistake of criticizing his wife (by implication) before her son. It was right and proper that Trenn, on such an occasion, should range himself on the side of his mother’s family. Mar’s conception of loyalty commonly protected him from appearing to pass adverse judgment on the Trennors. But he was excited and overwrought to-day.He, not Trenn. All through the story, that for Mar was of such palpitatingimportance, this well-groomed youth had kept himself so well in hand, that his father, looking at the “correct,” cool face, had somewhat modified the presentment of the narrative, had cut description, emotion, wonder, and come to Hecuba as quickly as might be. And yet now that, with as business-like an air as he could muster, he had revealed his great secret—handed over the long-treasured legacy—something still in the judicial young face that gave the older man a sensation of acute self-consciousness, made him in some inexplicable manner feel “cheap.”
But he would conquer the ridiculous inclination.
It was for Mar an hour of tremendous significance. He had been waiting for it for eighteen years. “After all,” he said, making a fresh start, “you don’t need imagination in this case. You need only to use your eyes—”
Trenn lifted his, and the use he made of them was to look at his father. Didn’t say a single word. Just looked at the heavily-lined face a moment and then allowed his clear, brown eyes to drop till they rested on the toes of his own immaculate boots.
Hardly more than three seconds between the raising and the lowering of the eyes. Not a sound in the room. And yet between the meeting of that look and the losing of it, Nathaniel Mar passed through the most painful crisis of a life made well acquainted with pain.
There is a special sting in the skepticism of the young. They should be full of faith, inclined even to credulity. Fit task for their elders, the checking of too generous ardor. But for the elder to detect the junior in thinking him foolishly enthusiastic, childishly gullible—there is,in that conjuncture, something to the older mind quite specially wounding. It passes the limit of mere personal humiliation. It takes on the air of an affront against the seemliness of nature. The elder has betrayed his class and kind—has laid open to callow derision the dignity of the riper years.
Mar waited. And little as he looked like it he was praying. “Oh, my boy, believe me! Have faith that what I say is so. And then I’ll have faith that all the loss will be won back, throughyou, Trenn. I’ll take heart again. It all depends on you. We’ll do great things together, Trenn—you and I—oh, believe, believe!”
But Trennor Mar sat there on the narrow ledge of the window-sill absolutely silent, with his brown eyes on his shining boots.
“I was wrong,” said his father, humbly. “I have put you off the track by using the word imagination. It has no place here. I speak to you of fact.”
Trenn got up with the brisk air of one who remembers he has business to transact, then pausing for a moment with an eye flown already to find his hat, “I might,” he said obligingly, “I might try to get up there some vacation, and have a look round.”
He “might.” He mighttry. During some idle interval in the real business of life. Once on the spot he would condescend to “look round.”
Even his own son could not take the thing seriously.
Well, it began to look as if, after all, they might be right—his wife, Charlie and Harrington Trennor, Elihu Cox, and now Trenn. Mar, the man who believed he had a gold mine in the arctic regions, was a sort of harmlessmonomaniac. Sitting there in a sudden darkness that was dashed with self-derision (much was clear in those scorching flashes), Nathaniel Mar met the grim moment when to his own mind he first admitted doubt.
Groping by and by for comfort, he touched the heart of sorrow with “Nothing like this can ever happen to me again.”
It was true. In that hour something precious went out of his life. No one, not even Trenn, had any idea what had happened. But every one saw that Nathaniel Mar was changed.
Trenn went to work on Karl Siegel’s ranch, and Harry presently announced that he meant to join him. No, he wasn’t going to finish at the High School. Trenn had an opportunity to go in with Siegel on a new deal, and Harry could be made use of, too, if he camenow. Such an opportunity might never repeat itself. Mrs. Mar was of the same opinion as the boys, and Harry was in towering good spirits.
His father wondered dully. Ought he not give his younger son the same chance he’d given the elder, even if, like Trenn, Harry should fail utterly to see how great it was?
Mar shrank from a second ordeal, and yet he knew that, vaguely enough, he had been depending on Harry’s helping him to bear Trenn’s indifference and unbelief. Had he not for a year now, in any lighter hour, invariably said to himself: “After all, I have two boys. Perhaps Harry will be the one”—yes, he must tell Harry, or the boy might reproach him in time to come.
Trenn’s letter had arrived in the morning. All dayMar revolved in his head how he would present this other “opening” so that Harry— In the end he resolved to take the papers out of the safe, and simply turn them over to his son, as though the father were no longer there to give the story tongue. Mar took the precious packet home with him the same afternoon. Harry was out. That evening he was late for supper, and he came in full of the outfit he’d been buying.
“Buying an outfit already!” his father exclaimed.
“Of course!Idon’t mean to let the grass grow—”
“Nor Trenn, apparently. I hadn’t heard that he was financing you.”
“He isn’t. I had a little saved up, and mother gave me the rest.”
Mar stared through his spectacles, and met the bright roving eyes of the lady.
“Yougave him the rest! How were you able to do that?”
“Oh, I have a pittance in the City Bank.”
The rival concern. Even Hildegarde gaped with astonishment at this revelation. Mrs. Mar had not trusted any one to know of this nest-egg—savings out of the “house money,” the inadequacy of which had been so often deplored. She seemed to be torn now between regret that its existence should have been revealed, and pride that she had wrung it out of conditions so unpromising.
“Yes,” she said, with a spark of anger in her eye, “and you’ll be kind enough, Nathaniel, not to break your arm, or get yourself disabled in any way, for there’s nothing left now for a rainy day. Unlessyouhave looked ahead as I’ve struggled to—”
He knew that she knew he had not “looked ahead” in her sense of laying by a secret hoard, but the form of her mandate pricked him.
He glanced at the desk for comfort. He had, after all, “looked ahead” in another fashion—as Harry would see. But—again he fell back before the check of an outfit already bought for another purpose. And Harry was talking all the time that he was eating—telling his mother about his prospects and about the letter he had written in answer to Trenn’s.
Already he had written! Without an hour’s hesitation, or an instant’s consultation with his natural adviser. Ah, no, his true “natural adviser” had obviously been invoked, and had responded by offering him the sinews of war. Mar, looking down into his plate, or for occasional refreshment of the spirit into Hildegarde’s soft, young face, was nevertheless intensely conscious of the vivid alert personality at the other end of the table. His wife was, as usual, not content to contemplate with idle tranquillity the fruit of some achievement in the past. Strange contrast to her daughter’s faculty for extreme stillness, Mrs. Mar presented the stirring spectacle of a person who was always “getting something done,” and commonly getting a number of things done at once. If it was only while the plates were being changed, she would pull out of the yellow bag suspended at her belt, a postcard, and with an inch length of pencil would briskly write an order to some tradesman, or she would jump up to straighten a picture or set the clock on three minutes, or “catch any odd job on the fly,” as Trenn used disrespectfully to say in private. Even on this important and exciting occasion, she was not content merely to eather supper, listen to Harry’s outpouring, and throw in shrewd responses from time to time.
Her handsome features wore that look of animation the spectacle of “getting on” ever inspired in the lady, her eyes glittered like pieces of highly polished, brown onyx, and while she put food into her mouth with the right hand, the left, by a common practice, executed five-finger exercises up and down the cloth, between her plate and the end of the table. But to-night she broke into a fantasia—the pliant little finger curled and tossed its tip in air, playing a soundless pæon to celebrate Harry’s entrance into the business of life.
For Mar, in circumstances like these, to hold wide a different door—had there ever been a moment less propitious?
“You ought to have shown me the letter before you sent it off,” he said.
“I would, only I knew you’d think I ought to catch the afternoon mail. There was barely time. And the letter was all right—I’m sure it was. I told Trenn either he or Siegel had got to pay me from the start. I don’t ask much, I said, but I’m worth something if Iama raw hand. I wrote the sort of letter Trenn can show to Siegel. I piled it on about the interruption to my studies, and about father’s preferring me to stick at books a year or two more.”
“It was ingenious of you to discover that fact,” said Mar, quietly.
“Oh, they mustn’t think I’m too keen, you know.”
Mrs. Mar nodded as she wound up her silent accompaniment with a chord. But if she followed the implied course of reasoning, not so the boy’s father.
“If you’ve written in that vein,” said Mar, slowly, “it seems to me still more premature to have ordered your outfit.”
“Oh, that’s all O.K.,” said Harry, genially condescending to soothe his father’s fears. “Of course I’mgoing. Trenn’ll understand. He’s got a long head, old Trenn has!”—and he exchanged secure smiles with his mother—“I had to write as I did, don’t you see”—again Harry obligingly reduced his tactics to simpler terms to meet the slower comprehension of his father—“just to make Siegel understand he needn’t expect to get me for nothing. I’m not coming in on the ‘little brother racket.’ No, sir! Old Siegel’s got to pay me something from the start, or how can I be supposed to know it’s a good thing? Siegel’s got toshow me! I’m from Missouri.” He made the boast with his pleasant boyish laugh, pushed back his chair, and walked about, hands in pockets, head in air, describing to his mother how fellows often did better to take their pay in cattle, and little by little get their own herd, and little by little get land. Often they ended by buying out those other fellows who started with capital. She would see! He and Trenn weren’t going to take anything on trust. “They’ll find they’ve got toshowus,” he said, squaring himself before a lot of imaginary Siegels. “We’re from Missouri!”
Mar, sitting silently by, rose upon that word, and tied up the loose papers that he had laid out on his writing-table. He returned them to the office bag, finding himself arrived at wondering what he had better say if the day ever came when Harry should reproach his father for not telling him about—
But Mar was borrowing trouble.
Trenn had already told him.
And they had laughed together. “Isn’t it justlikehim!” Harry had said, and slapped his knee as one who makes a shrewd observation.
After all there was a kind of rough justice in it. It had been Galbraith who had made it possible for Mar to go to Alaska. It was fitting that it should be his son who should share in the benefits.
Mar spent part of the following Saturday afternoon in drafting a letter to the son of his long dead friend. He took uncommon pains with it and he copied it several times. It had no need to be long, for Jack would remember the story. He could not, of course, be expected to interrupt those postgraduate studies, whatever they were precisely—studies which twice already had been dropped, as Mar supposed, while Mr. Jack went cruising about the world in his steam-yacht. But in the nature of things the completion of his preparation for the business of life must be near at hand, for young Galbraith, the most energetic and ambitious of men, was in his twenty-fourth year. Never was such a glutton for work before. Even when he went off pleasuring in his yacht, he went to places not renowned for recreation, and his boon companions were geographers and biologists and such-like gay dogs.
He might, at all events, without prejudice to these final studies, begin to lay plans either for going himself to Alaska presently, or for sending some one else. The best course would be for him to come at once to Valdivia to see his old friend, and to talk things over. Mar thought it advisable to enclose in his letter a sketch of the most interesting section of the Alaskan coast. He could havedrawn it with his eyes shut, now, but he got up, hobbled round the desk, and took down the reconnaissance map from between the pictures of his father and mother. At the same moment, and while he was in the act, Mrs. Mar came in, with that air, especially her own, of one arriving in the nick of time to save the country. Her errand, however, was the one Saturday afternoon invariably brought, the conveying here of the week’s mending for Hildegarde’s attention; the fastening of the book-rest on the table’s edge, the propping up of some volume in the French or German tongue, and the laying ready at one side of a stump of lead-pencil for the marking of pregnant passages. In front of these Mrs. Mar would establish herself in the rocking-chair, with her knitting, or crochet, or some other form of occupation not requiring eyes.
“Hildegarde! Hildegarde!”
“Yes, mama,” came in through the open window from the garden.
“I’m ready!” When wasn’t Mrs. Mar “ready!” But she announced the fact with a flourish of knitting-needle, as she rocked back and forth and scrutinized her husband. “I’m glad,” she said, briskly, “to see you taking down that old eye-sore.” Her eyes pecked at the faded map. “It’s high time it was thrown away.”
Her husband paused in his halting progress back to the writing-table. “Time it was thrown away?”
“Yes. Isn’t that what you’ve got it down for?”
“No.”
“What are you going to do with it, then?”
Mar seemed not to hear. He turned his back on the rocking-chair, and propped the map up in front of him,against the mucilage pot, very much as his wife had propped Eckermann for his regular Saturday conversation with Gœthe.
But Mrs. Mar was never inclined to let her observations go by ignored. “I can hardly suppose you want to have it lumbering up the place here any longer.” As still he took no notice, “It certainly isn’t decorative.” A pause long enough for him to defend it, if he’d been going to. “Perhaps you’ll tell me what’s the good of keeping it.”
“Perhaps you’ll tell me what’s the harm.”
She could, easily, but she forbore.
She only agitated the rocking-chair yet more violently, clashed her knitting-needles as she turned the stocking in her quick, competent hands, and with a glance at the clock said briskly, as the door opened: “Come, come, Hildegarde. You’re nearly three minutes behind time.”
The girl carried her bowl of roses over to her father’s open window, and set it carefully down. Hildegarde was the one person in the world Mrs. Mar never seemed to fluster. As the girl’s eye fell on the big envelop addressed in Mar’s bold writing, “Oh!” she said, pausing, “have you been hearing again?”
“Hearing what?” came sharply from the swaying figure on the other side of the room.
“You’ll read it to me after we’ve done our German, won’t you?” whispered the girl, caressingly, as she leaned a moment on the back of Mar’s chair.
“Read it to you? Why should I?” he said, nervously, as he laid a piece of blotting-paper over his letter.
“You always do,” she pleaded. But if Mr. Mar imagined that his daughter was begging to hear the letterhe himself had just written, Mrs. Mar made no such mistake. She was well aware whose communications had power to stir the “stolid” Hildegarde.
“You never told me,” the lady arraigned her husband’s back, “that you’d been hearing again from young Galbraith.”
Hildegarde, under the electric shock of the spoken name, seemed to feel called upon to make some show of indifference. She inspected the pile of mending with an air of complete absorption in the extent of the damage. Her mother was saying: “I haven’t heard anything about that gentleman”—(oh, wealth of ironic condemnation the accomplished speaker could throw into the innocent words “that gentleman!”)—“not since the letter he wrote from the barbarous place you didn’t know how to pronounce, and couldn’t so much as find on the map!”
“Haven’t you?” said her husband. “Well, you soon may.”
The girl’s lowered eyelids fluttered, but the prospect of soon hearing something on this theme left Mrs. Mar collected enough to say: “No earthly use to darn that.”
“N-no,” agreed the girl.
“Lay a piece under. Match the stripe and cut out the fray. There’s some like it in the ottoman.”
Hildegarde went and kneeled down before the big deal “store-box.” Its lid, stuffed and neatly covered, made a sightly receptacle for endless oddments.
Mrs. Mar, as she clicked her needles and oscillated her entire frame, kept her eye on the place where she was going to dash into Eckermann the instant Hildegarde was settled to her sewing. But true to the sacred principleof doing something while she was waiting, Mrs. Mar thus delayed, saw it to be a timely moment to put Jack Galbraith in his proper place. It was not the sort of thing you could do thoroughly once, and be done with. Like house-cleaning, it required to be seen to periodically. “Well, what’s theepoche-machendenews this time?” As her husband made no haste to answer, “He’s always ‘going to break the record,’ that young gentleman! I never knew anybody with so many big words in his mouth.”
The stricture was deserved enough to gall Jack’s friend, who moved uneasily in his revolving chair. But he kept his eyes on the map he was drawing and he kept his lips close shut.
“I see precious little result so far,” she was beginning again.
“The result,” interrupted Mar, “will be judged when he’s finished his life-work, not while he’s still preparing for it.”
“Preparing! Bless me, isn’t he old enough to havedonesomething, if he was ever going to?”
“If he were going into business, yes. Science is a longer story.”
“One excuse is as good as another, I suppose, when a man wants to please himself. It’s like Galbraith to call his fecklessness by a highfalutin name. ‘Science,’ ‘Investigation,’ ‘Anthropology.’ Humph! But it doessoundbetter, I agree, than saying he likes satisfying a low curiosity about savages. It isn’t even as if he wanted to convert them. Not he! Likes them best as they are: filthy and degraded. ‘Philology?’ Tomfoolology!”
It was more even than the tranquil Hildegarde couldbear. “Hasn’t he done something wonderful about ocean currents, papa? Didn’t you say that was the real reason why he went that last time to—?”
“Yes. It was a piece of work that brought him recognition very creditable to so young a student.”
“Whoserecognition?” Not hers, the critic of the rocking-chair seemed to say. But Mar took no notice. “And where’s that book he was boasting about six months ago? The one that was going to shed such valuable new light on the—the—Jugginses of No Man’s Land. So far as I can see by the feeble light of the female intellect, the Jugginses still sit in the dark. Haven’t you found that roll of seersucker yet, Hildegarde? Upon my soul!”—faster flew the needles, harder rocked the chair—“compared with you a snail is a cross between an acrobat and a hurricane.”
The girl only laughed. “Here’s the horrid stripey stuff, hiding at the very bottom!” She laid the roll aside, and with a neat precision proceeded to put back all the things she had taken out, for Hildegarde knew, if not properly packed, the ottoman would overflow.
“Now, make haste,” urged her mother, “if anything so alien is possible to you. I’m certainly not going to read to you while you’re fussing about on the other side of the room.” Then, not deterred in her unswerving attempt to improve the shining hour, Mrs. Mar flung a quick look at the bent back of her husband, and proceeded to put in the time in clearing up one of his multitudinous misapprehensions.
“WhatIcan’t forgive Jack Galbraith is his ingratitude to you.”
Again Mar moved a little in his creaking chair, buthalted this side speech. Hildegarde, busily repacking, turned her blonde head toward her mother, saying: “Ingratitude! Why, he’s perfectly devoted to papa! That’s why I like Mr. Galbraith.”
“Devoted, is he? Well, he’s got odd ways of showing it. When he was a troublesome, inquisitive little pest, he used to reveal his devotion by coming twice every year to turn our house upside down, and get our boys into every conceivable mischief. Glad enough to plant himself here then, when nobody else would be bothered with him. But his devotion to your father doesn’t carry him the length of coming to see him nowadays. Why, it’s fourteen years since Jack Galbraith darkened these doors, and—”
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were to darken them very soon,” said Mr. Mar.
“What!” said Mrs. Mar, so surprised she allowed the rocking-chair to slow down.
Hildegarde stood transfixed, with the top of the ottoman arrested, half shut.
“Yes,” said Mr. Mar, steadily, and in complete good faith, as he slipped the diagram into the envelop. “I’m expecting him out here this spring.”
“Jack is coming!” Hildegarde said to her heart. “Wonderful Jack is coming! Dear Jack! Dear,dearJack! Oh, the beautiful world!”
“Indeed!” said Mrs. Mar, beginning slowly to rock again, “and what’s he coming forthistime?”
“Perhaps, as Hildegarde is fantastic enough to think, he may be coming to see me,” Mar answered.
His wife’s laugh had a tang of shrewdness. “You’ll find he has business of some sort to attend to in California, if hedoescome!”
“Just now you were complaining that he didn’t attend to business anywhere.”
“My complaint—no, my regret—is, that gratitude isn’t in the Galbraith blood.”
“You have no good reason for saying that.” He spoke with uncommon emphasis.
But Mrs. Mar’s spirit rose to meet him. “I have the excellent reason that I know enough about the father as well as the son to form an opinion. I don’t forget how your ‘greatest friend’ died, leaving you his executor and leaving you nothing else. Not a penny piece out of all that money.”
“I don’t see why my friends should leave me money—”
“No, nor why you should get it any other way! Don’t let me hurry you, Hildegarde, but if you’ve quite finished mooning about in the corner there, I’d like to mention that it’s exactly twelve and a half minutes since I called you in to your German, and there’s the Missionary Society at half past four, and choir practice at seven, and before we can turn round Mrs. Cox will be here about electing the new secretary to the Shakspere Club, and if I’d known you were going to squander my time like this I’d have stopped to make Harry his last Washington pie before—”
“Yes, mama. Now I’m settled.”
Hildegarde took the seat opposite her mother and silently applied the seersucker patch. While Mr. Mar, behind the screen of a much-hunched shoulder, copied with infinite care the “eye-sore” map, Mrs. Mar knitting all the while at lightning speed, rolled out the German uninterruptedly, till a ring at the bell was followed by sounds of Mrs. Cox being shown into the parlor.
Mrs. Mar had known no one so well in Valdivia all these years as Mrs. Elihu Cox. Mrs. Elihu was considered “a very bright woman,” and it was no doubt so, since even Mrs. Mar did not demur at her renown. They met seldom, outside of church, the Shakspere Club, or the Mission Society, yet each had admitted things to the other that neither had admitted to any one else. Even to-day, when there was definite business to arrange, they talked of other matters than the vacant secretaryship. They presented each other with views upon domestic service, education, and husbands.
“I left Mr. Cox supremely happy,” said his spouse, in that tone of humorous scorn by which many women try to readjust the balance between the sexes. “Yes, supremely happy, clearing out his desk. He does it once a month. Nothing Mr. Cox does brings him so near absolute bliss, except wandering about the place with a hammer and nails.”
Both women smiled at the inveterate childishness of the lords of creation.
And then, on a sudden, Mrs. Cox was grave. One might laugh at the odd ways of men with any woman. It is the universal bond that binds the sex together; the fine lady feels it no less when she condoles with her washer-woman upon a stay-at-home husband,—“Yes, yes, a man in the house all day is dreadfully in the way,”—and their identity of sentiment bridges the difference in fortune. But Mrs. Mar was one with whom you might not only laugh over the foibles of the opposite sex, you might even be grave with her on the same ground—a rarer privilege to the educated woman.
“That monthly orgy, that’s such unalloyed delight toMr. Cox, used to be a time of great interest to me, too,” admitted Mrs. Cox.
“Really!” The president of the Valdivia Shakspere Society could hardly believe it of her friend.
“Yes. You see, there’s always a great clearance made—a general getting rid of all sorts of accumulations. I used to watch every time when he came to the lower left-hand drawer—” Mrs. Cox smiled faintly as one pitiful of some long-past pain.
“Well, what was the matter with the lower left-hand drawer?”
“That was where he kept a faded photograph of Ellie Brezee. I used to watch to see ifthattime he was going to throw it away. He never did.”
“Who was Ellie Brezee?”
“A sister of Colonel George Brezee—the one that died. That was before you came to California. Mr. Cox was engaged to Ellie when he was nineteen. But, thank goodness, my concern about it is among the things that I’m done with. I don’t any longer sit at home, now, with the tail of my eye on the lower left-hand drawer while Ellie Brezee comes out for her monthly airing.”
“Oh, you disposed of Ellie?”
“No, oh, no.”
“He finally threw the picture away himself?”
“No. Only now, I know he never will.”
They were silent a moment. “I neversaidanything, of course; and he never made any secret about it. I didn’t think it any disloyalty to me that he should keep it. At the same time”—she dropped her voice—“the pain the sight of that faded face was to me for years—you think it supremely silly, I suppose. But thenyourhusband doesn’t hoard up the memory of some girl that’s been dead and buried for twenty years, so you can’t understand.”
“Yes, I can understand,” Mrs. Mar answered, with an eye that saw through the wall the reconnaissance map of Norton Sound.
Jack Galbraith replied to Mr. Mar’s letter by return of post. He apologized for not writing more at length, but he was up to his eyes in proof-correcting. He was seeing through the press—(“Yes, yes, but all that was singularly irrelevant”)—book about his experiences (“Hum! hum!”), “extreme northern Siberia.” (“Siberia, forsooth!”); no white man had ever been there before. (“And to think hemighthave spent that time in Alaska!”) He was “making a genuine contribution to science”—oh, yes, quite so—“most travelers too imperfectly equipped.” (“He couldn’t have had my letter when he wrote this.”) The implication was, of course, that Galbraith’s own equipment left nothing to be desired. He even touched airily upon his claims to be considered geographer as well as navigator, electrician, geologist, philologist, biologist, and the Lord knows what, beside. Yes, Jack had a large way of envisaging human endeavor, especially his own. But certainly their letters had crossed. Hum! he had “covered areas in science never before exploited by a single man.” The result Mar should presently see. For Galbraith would leave word that a copy of the great work should be sent to his old friend. It would be two years before he himself couldsee the thing in book form. (“What’s this?”) “Off again, to join an expedition!” And wasn’t it strange? He was going to the arctic as Mar was recommending. Not precisely to Norton Bay, but (“Then hehadgot the letter!”) “with the Swedish explorer Nordenskjöld to see if by good luck” they could find the North Pole. And why shouldn’t they “come home via Norton Bay?” he asked, with irresponsible arrogance, adding, characteristically: “I’ll mention it to the Swede. Perhaps we’ll crawl over the crown of the world and coast down the shore of Alaska till we come up against your Anvil Rock. If we do, I promise to go and see after the gold-mine for you. Thank you for saying I’m to have my share—but thank you most of all for telling me such a mighty fine story when I was a kid. It had a great deal to do with the shaping of my ambition, and the direction of my multifarious studies.”
And this was Galbraith’s good-by.
These events had taken place nearly two years before Bella Wayne began her meteoric career at the Valdivia School for Young Ladies.
If Hildegarde had recovered somewhat from her disappointment at Jack’s failure to visit California, her father had not ceased silently to lament, and secretly to contemn Galbraith’s wounding flippancy in his choice of a route to Alaska.
When Madeleine Smulsky’s family took her away to live in Wyoming, Hildegarde would have been even more desolate but for her espousal of Bella Wayne’s cause, and consequent preoccupation with that not altogether satisfactory protégée.
For Miss Bella had “ways” that were distinctly rasping. She was abominably selfish, and her big family of brothers and sisters had spoiled her from the day she could toddle.
She was, besides, the uncomfortable kind of little girl in whose eyes you always saw reflected whatever was amiss with you. You might have on a hat of ravishing beauty, but if your belt had worked up and your skirt had worked down, Bella’s glance ignored your highly satisfactory top and fastened on your middle. Not until after she had known Bella Wayne for some months did Hildegarde begin to divine her own shortcomings in the matter of dress. No gulf of years, or respect for high standing in the school, deterred Bella from letting Miss Mar know that she could never, never wear with success a checked shirt-waist. Why not? Because. And for the same excellent reason, Miss Mar must have her things made plainer. No puffing; no shirring. “Ican wear ‘fluffery,’ but you can’t. You’re much too like an old goddess or Boadicea, or some whacking person like that,” which was tepid and discreet in comparison with many of her deliverances. She would ask you a highly inconvenient question as soon as wink, and her own frankness was a thing to make you cold down your back. An eye that nothing escaped, the keenest of little noses for a secret, a ruthless finger for any sensitive spot—that was Bella Wayne at twelve. It was the second time that she was being so kindly helped by Miss Hildegarde, and yet more than at the reduction of “those disgusting fractions” Bella looked at her new friend, bent so low over the slate that her sole ornament, a silver locket, swung against the dado of dragons, without whose scaly supportBella could never hope to bring her mind down to mathematics for a moment. She reflected that she had never seen Miss Mar without that locket. Was there anything inside it? Her fingers itched to open it and see. It was suspended round the smooth neck on a narrow velvet ribbon. Bella, supposed to be following the course of reasoning by which it was to be demonstrated that “since 100 pounds of coal cost $0.33 per hundredweight, 385 pounds (which are equal to 3.85 times 100 pounds) will cost 3.85 times $0.33,” she was in reality making mental calculation of a quite different character, as she studied the little black velvet bowknot that rested on the milk-white nape of Miss Mar’s neck, just underneath a flaxen ring of hair. One end of the bow was longer than the other.
“Five times three are fifteen. Five and carry one—see, Bella?”
“Yes.” What Bella saw, with that look of luminous intelligence, was that the silver locket was sliding into Miss Mar’s lap.
“Eight times three—oh!” But before Hildegarde could close her fingers on the fallen trinket, Bella had snatched it up and carried it away behind the syringas.
“Give me back my locket!” called Hildegarde. “Give it back this minute!”
Bella made off to a remoter fastness. Hildegarde pursued her. But Hildegarde never could catch anybody, and Bella was already the champion runner of the school. “Bella, I never show that to anybody. I won’t forgive you if you open it.”
“Oh, Imustsee why you say that!” Bella stopped and tried the fastening. Hildegarde rushed at her, butBella fled at each approach. At last the big girl stopped breathless, and tried moral suasion. The little girl only laughed, and standing just out of reach had the effrontery to open the locket and make unseemly comment upon what she found within.
“My gracious!Isn’the a sweet? Where does he live? Does he go to church? I’m sureI’venever seen this bee-yew-tiful young man before. Girls, do you want to look at Miss Mar’s sweetheart. Come and see this darling duck!” She summoned the laughing group that had been looking on.
But Bella only pretended to show them. Every time anybody came near, she covered the face with her thumb. But Hildegarde, lacking the small satisfaction of knowing that, worn out with the race and scarlet with indignation, breathless, outraged, pursued the fleet little villain from group to group, and after the bell rang, from garden to hall. In vain.
When Bella appeared at the breaking up of school that day, and restored the locket, Miss Mar received it in a lofty silence, refusing even to look at a little girl so ill-mannered and ungrateful.
But the next day Bella, much subdued by one of her recurrent attacks of homesickness, red-eyed, a little pinched-looking and woebegone, begged pardon so prettily, that Miss Mar’s heart was melted.
“And I didn’t really show it to the others. Ask anybody. I wouldn’t dothat. Oh, no!” And then betraying the true ground of this pious self-control, “Is it your brother?”
“No.” Hildegarde bent her head over the slate.
“Who is it?”
“A friend of my father’s.”
“Do you love him dreadfully?”
“Ofcoursenot. I never saw him.”
“What makes you wear his picture?”
“I only put it in the locket because I hadn’t anything else the right size. That’s all.”
“Then why did you make such a fuss when I—”
“Because I thought it very rude of you to look into somebody else’s locket without permission. And itmighthave been something that mattered.”
There was that in the unconverted look on the little face which made Hildegarde hot to her ear-tips.
But Bella said not a word, only smiled with that returning interest in life that so readily revives in the breast of the shrewd observer. And without a “please” or a “will you?” Bella handed the big girl her slate, with its two days’ accumulation of fractions and of dragons. Hildegarde’s sensibilities were once more so outraged that for a moment she hesitated to accept the task so coolly put upon her.
“I believe you’re a little monster,” said Miss Mar, in her slow way. “I don’t see why I should trouble myself about you or your arithmetic.”
“I know why,” returned Bella, unmoved.
“Why?”
“Because you’re the nicest of all the big girls.”
Hildegarde tried to conceal the fact that she was somewhat softened by this tribute. “I’m not really the nicest,” she said, trying to be modest.
“Well, perhaps you’re not the nicest, but you’ve got the longest eyelashes. It’s a good thing they aren’t as light as your hair, isn’t it?”
“Well, I don’t know. Fives into—”
“Yes, you do, you know you’d cry your eyes out if your winkers were as nearly white as your hair is. What do you do to make your eyelashes so long?”
“Nothing. Now pay attention. You reduce thirty-three and a third to thirds and—”
“Did your mother keep them cut when you were a baby?”
“No, silly.”
“I believe she did.” The next day Miss Bella appeared without eyelashes. Every individual hair snipped close to the lid.
“I mean to have mine just like Miss Mar’s,” she told the group gathered about Hildegarde’s desk. “Hers are so immense theytrail. I’m sure they must get awfully in the way sometimes.”
“Then I wonder you run such a risk. You’d better have left yours as they were.”
“Oh, if mine grow out as long as that, of course I shall plait them and tie them up with blue ribbons.”
But it was not always admiration to which she treated her patron.
She was once twitted quite groundlessly with feeling herself obliged to “mind” Miss Mar.
“Yes,” she said, laughing a little wickedly. “Imust, you see. She’s so massive. Just look at her shoulders. Look at her hips. Even her hair is massive. See what wobs it goes into.” This conversation took place in the cloak-room. “Everything about her is so big, it scares a little person like me. Look at that hat. You’d know it must belong to Miss Mar. If it was anybody else’s it would be a parasol. But you can tell it’s a hat becauseit’s got an elastic instead of a stick. And just look at the size of that elastic. Why, it’s as broad as my garter.”
Now and then she would startle Hildegarde’s self-possession by an outburst of torrential affection. And so it came about that in spite of Bella’s blithe impertinence, Hildegarde even in those early days thought of her with sympathy as a lonely little being who was in reality very grateful for a big girl’s friendship. She would follow at Hildegarde’s heels like a pet dog, walk with her down to the gate every day after school, and invent one ingenious pretext after another to keep Hildegarde standing there a moment longer. Sometimes, when at last she said “good-by,” there was not regret alone but tears as well in Bella’s pretty eyes.
“It must have been a little girl at boarding-school that found out Friday was an unlucky day,” she announced on one occasion. “It’s the miserablest, blackest day of the week. Yes it is, Miss Mar. It’s just hellish.”
“Why, Bella Wayne! Whatawfullanguage.”
“Well, you have to get hold of awful language when you’re thinking of an awful thing. All to-night, and all to-morrow, and all to-morrow night, and all Sunday, and all Sunday night, to live through before I see you again!” The small face worked with suppressed emotion, the small mind with suppressed arithmetic. Both eventually found outward expression. “Sixty-six hours!” she said, while two tears rolled out of her eyes. “Sixty-six hours till you’re back here again. I don’t honestly think I can bear it this time. I shall die. I know I shall. I feel very strange already. Would you care if I died? W-would you come to the funeral?”She choked. “W-what would you wear? You’d look p-perfectly bee-yew-tiful in black.Dowear black. Oh, IwishI was dead. It would be so nice to see how you look in black.”
Hildegarde was touched to find how wildly delighted the homesick little girl was at the idea of being invited to spend Saturday afternoon at the Mars—a little anxious, too, was Miss Mar, lest the occasion should not come up to such ecstatic expectation. Not that the Mar house was at all the forlorn and dingy place it had been in the days when Mrs. Mar struggled alone, with a scant income and three babies. The general impression was that the Mar boys already contributed generously to the family resources. But the fact was that their mother was ingeniously making the very most of what “the boys” added to the common purse. The amount was as yet quite trifling—“of necessity,” she would have added, for they were both young men who looked ahead. But it was really to Hildegarde that the little house owed its air of immaculate freshness and good taste. If she couldn’t play or sing, she could paint—bookshelves, the floors, even the woodwork. Several years ago she proved that she could paper a room. She managed to cover the old furniture with charming chintz “for a song,” and she made curtains out of nothing at all. No one could arrange flowers better or grow them half so well. When she was given money for her clothes, she often spent it on something for the house. Not fully realizing her genius for domestic affairs, she told herself the reason she did all this was to make the house pretty “for when Jack comes back.” He might arrive quite suddenly. He did everything without warning. I may come home from schoolany day to find him here! Oh, it lent a wonderful zest to life to remember that.
Bella was pleased to like Miss Mar’s garden immensely, but even more she liked Miss Mar’s room, with its white curtains and dimity-covered toilet-table, and the scant and simple furniture that looked so nice and fresh since Hildegarde had herself enameled it. When the little visitor looked round with that quick-glancing admiration and said: “Oh, it’s much prettier than mine at home.”
“What’s yours like?” asked Miss Mar, politely.
“Oh, it’s all pink silk, and I’m sick of it. What made you think of having everything white?”
“This, I believe,” said her hostess, nodding at the climbing white rose that looked in at the window. “But it’s partly that I like things that wash and that don’t fade.”
“Well, I simply love your house. I’d noideait would be like this.”
“Why, what did you think it would be like?”
“Oh—a—kind of—no, I shan’t say. You’d misunderstand.”
Hildegarde felt it prudent not to insist. If you did, with this young person, you were exposed to the most mortifying results.
“Who are these?” Bella demanded, inspecting the pictures.
“My brothers. That’s Trenn and this is Harry.”
“Will they be at tea?”
“No, they’re on a ranch in Tulare County.”
“Why,we’vegot a ranch in Tulare County.” She was still looking round as if expecting to find somethingthat as yet escaped her eye. “Where’s—where—a—Show me your—your ribbons and things.”
“I haven’t got any. We can’t afford ribbons in this family.”
“Let me see your collars and ties, then.” Hildegarde opened her top drawer. In the course of turning over collars and handkerchiefs and little boxes the silver locket came to light.
“Why don’t you wear it any more?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
Bella leaned her head with its halo of short, brown curls against her friend, and very softly she beguiled her: “Please, Miss Mar, show me that friend of your father’s again.”
Hildegarde hesitated a moment and then she opened the locket. Jack Galbraith’s face smiled out upon the big girl and the little girl.
“Did you say you hadn’t ever seen him?”
“No, he hasn’t been here for sixteen years. Not since he was a little boy. And he might have been here always, because he was an orphan and his father was my father’s greatest friend. But some relations of his that nobody had ever heard of before, they discovered him when he was nine, and made him come to New York and live with them. But he didn’t like it. At least—Idon’t know—mother thinkstheydidn’t like it.”
“Why does she think that?”
“Because they let him go away to school. And he spent his vacations canoeing, climbing mountains, and doing all sorts of queer things rather than live with his relations. Then he went to Harvard, and then he went abroad and studied. He’s always studying.”
“Gracious! what makes him do that?”
“Oh, he wants to find out about everything. And he’s doing it. He’s written a book with things in it nobody ever heard of before. Father says it’s a work of genius. Mr. Galbraith was coming here two years ago, when he’d finished the book, only just then—”
“I didn’t think,” Bella interrupted with a sigh, “I didn’t think from his picture he was so awful old.”
“He isn’t. He’s barely twenty-five.”
But Bella shook her head. “If a person’s over twenty he might just as well be a hundred.”
“Yes, ordinary people. But it doesn’t matterhowold a genius is. Father’s awfully excited about Mr. Galbraith just now, for he’s been away a year and a half on an arctic expedition and we’re expecting him back next summer. We may be hearing from him any day after the middle of June. Father and I often talk about it when we’re alone together.”
“Why don’t you talk about it when there’s anybody there?”
“Oh, mother’s always so down on Mr. Galbraith.”
“What’s she down on him for?”
“Just because he wants to discover the North Pole.”
“Well, don’t you think yourself that’s rather—”
“No, I don’t.”
“To be wasting two whole years in just hunting round for the Pole? What’s the good of the Pole, anyway?”
Hildegarde smiled a smile of superiority.
“My geography”—Bella invoked authority that even a big girl must respect—“my geography says—”
“You’re too young to understand. It’s not the Pole. It’s the glory.”
“What glory?”
“Nobody’s ever yet got there.”
“Why should anybody? Lots of nicer places.”
“A great many people have tried. A good many have died trying—”
“Well, that’s a good reason for not bothering about it any more.”
“Oh, you’re just like—” But filial respect restrained Miss Mar. “I agree with Mr. Galbraith. He thinks there’s nothing in the world half so interesting to do.”
“Hemustbe silly.”
“No, he isn’t! He’s splendid—” But Hildegarde snapped the locket to, and hid it under her best handkerchiefs.
The following Saturday, when Bella asked again to see the locket, Miss Mar declined to bring it out. Bella begged in vain. She discovered that her big, gentle friend could be immovable.
To Hildegarde’s dismay, Bella presently dissolved in tears. “Then may I s-see the work of g-genius?”
“Yes, you may look at his book all you like.” She even let Bella take it away with her to tide her over Sunday. But Mr. Galbraith’s “Winter among the Samoyedes” had small success with Miss Wayne. “They make me sick, those people! I can’t think how anybody likes hearing about their dirty ways,” and she even cast reflections on Jack for wasting his time over such “horrors.” However, there was another side to it. “What a relief it’ll be to him to be withusafter the Samoyedes!”
“Withus!” Hildegarde smiled inwardly.
Sitting by the rose-framed window one Saturdayafternoon, talking as usual about Mr. Galbraith and how soon he might be expected back from the Pole, Bella suddenly burst out: “I’m tired to death of saying ‘Miss Mar.’ Idowish you’d let me call you ‘Hildegarde.’”
The big girl’s breath was taken away. For the gulf between twelve and sixteen is a thing hardly passable in that stronghold of class distinction, a girls’ school. It was rare, indeed, that one of Miss Mar’s ripe age stooped to help a little girl over a difficulty in her lessons. It required something of the missionary spirit to take such pity upon homesickness, as occasionally to give the afflicted one the great treat of visiting a big girl on Saturday afternoon—but really to go to the length proposed—
“I shan’t believe you really love me,” the little girl rushed on, “unless you say yes. Oh, do say yes.Everythingdepends on it. I’ll promise always to say ‘Miss Mar’ before people. But if you’ll let me call you Hildegarde when we’re alone, I’llknowyou’re my best friend. And then I’ll tell you a secret. I’ll tell you two.Tremendoussecrets!”
It was finally arranged.
“Now for the tremendous secrets,” said Hildegarde, smiling.
But Bella was portentously grave, even agitated. “Well,” she said, bracing herself, “my father’s an Englishman. Don’t tell anybody. Cross your heart and hope you may die if ever you tell the girls.”
“All right. Cross my heart and hope I may die. But how in the world—?”
“It isn’t my fault, you see. AndI’man American all right. I’ve always wanted to explain to you eversince you were so angelic about my fractions; it’s because my father’s an Englishman I have to eat milk pudding. Over there”—Bella flicked a small hand across the American continent and over the Atlantic deep, to indicate an inconsiderable island where the natives persist in strange customs—“over there they all do it. Of course, the minute I’m of age I shall insist on pie.” They discussed the matter in all its bearings.
“Now about the other secret.”
“Well”—even the daring Bella caught her breath and paused. “No, not to-day. I’ll keep the tremendousest one for another time. Butdoget out the silver locket,dearHildegarde, and let’s look at it.”
Ultimately she prevailed. The next time Bella came she found a delightful surprise. The low table was cleared of everything but bowls of roses; and against the white wall great ferns printed plain their tall and splendid plumes—leaving free a little space in the middle where, on a gilt nail, hung the open locket.
Bella was delighted with the whole scheme. “It only wants one thing to make it perfect. No, I won’t tell you what it is. I’ll bring it next Saturday.”
“It” proved to be a paper of Chinese joss-sticks, and a little bronze perforated holder. “We must each burn one to him every week,” she said, setting up her contribution below the dangling locket.
“I don’t quite know if we ought,” Hildegarde said. “Joss-sticks are prayers you know—at least the Chinese think so.”
“Well, of course they’re prayers. That’s why I brought them.”
While the two joss-sticks sent up into the rose-perfumedair faint spirals of an alien fragrance, the two girls sat in front of the confident young face looking out of the silver locket, and talked endlessly about the owner.
Hildegarde found it subtly intoxicating to have so keen an auditor—a sharer even (to the humble extent possible for extreme youth) in the great pivotal romance of existence.
And then Bella had such wonderful inspirations. It was she who saw the larger fitness in Mr. Mar’s habit of going fishing on Saturday afternoons. What was that but an arrangement of the gods that he should be so effectually out of the way, that Hildegarde might with safety borrow from his desk the Galbraith letters. Sitting close together on a square of Japanese matting, in front of the rose table, an anxious ear listening for Mrs. Mar’s return from the missionary meeting, the dark head leaned against the fair, while the two girls read and re-read those precious documents, in an atmosphere charged with incense and a palpitating joy. One day, arrived regretfully at the end of the letter they liked best, Bella bent and kissed the signature. Hildegarde’s heart gave a great jump. The daring of that deed was well-nigh impious. Hildegarde, when all by herself, had done the same, but that was different.
“Now you know my other secret,” said Bella, very pink—“the tremendousest one of all.” When the first shock had died away, Hildegarde was left with a pitiful tenderness before the disarming frankness of such a confession. Poor little Bella! Why, Jack didn’t even know of her existence. He never would, till in some rare idle hour of the glorious future, Hildegarde should tell him of a little homesick girl she had befriended once at school.
But Bella could be depended on to break in upon such gracious forecasting of the future, with a suddenness that made the picture dance, “Which of us two do you suppose Jack’ll fall in love with?”
Hildegarde, almost paralyzed by the presumption this implied, barely managed to bring out, “You’re much too little to think of—”
“I shan’t be little always.”
“You’ll always be more than twelve years younger than Mr. Galbraith.” Hildegarde always said Mr. Galbraith when she wanted to keep the intruder at a distance.
But Bella advanced as bold as brass. “AnyhowI think he’ll fall in love with me.”
“Of course a person so modest would be likely to appeal to any gentleman.”
“No, it’s not my being modest he’ll mind about. It’s other things.”
“What other things?”
“Well—you—of course you’ve got your eyelashes, and you’re in the full bloom of womanhood. ButI’min the first blush of youth. I think he’ll like that best.”