Cheviot found Hildegarde’s father practically a prisoner.
His board and lodging had been too welcome a source of revenue to the mission for Christianson to feel called upon to smooth the way for his departure, and Mar had been some time in grasping the fact that his plan of hiring a boat and a couple of natives to go up the coast for a “look at the country,” was hopelessly knocked on the head since his interference in the matter of the Yakutat witch. Not a native in the community who felt safe with him since that episode. The lame man was in league with the powers of darkness.
Mar’s pleasure at seeing Cheviot was genuine, but not as unmeasured as you might expect. And when, almost before the first shower of questions and answers had begun to abate, Cheviot flung in information as to when the next ship was leaving St. Michaels, Mar assumed the subject to be of interest only to Cheviot. Pressed further about his own plans, the elder man said evasively they were not very settled, and changed the subject! Cheviot was nonplussed. Was Mar only waiting till they were clear of the Mission House? No, for they were out fishing the whole of the next day, and most of the days following, and still Mar talked of any and everything save of going home. Was he waiting for funds? Surelynot now that Cheviot was at hand. He seemed inexplicably satisfied to sit all day over a trout pool up the river (despite the pestilential mosquito), or in a boat in the bay fishing for tom-cod; and all the evening playing chess in the bare mission parlor, in the midst of a company sufficiently singular. Shady fellows from the Galena camp above White mountain; prospectors expelled from Cook’s Inlet, lousy, filthy-smelling natives come upon one pretext or another, weird missionaries dropped down from places no man but themselves seemed ever to have heard of; a reindeer-herder in the Government service, though a “Scandahoojian,” like the majority at the Golovin Mission, and highly welcome albeit hardly on the score of his piety. For “Hjalmar,” as Christianson called him, was the one who jibed most at the morning and evening prayers, and particularly at the long grace before meat, with its delicate proposals to the Almighty that He should induce those present to save their souls by giving to the Golovin Mission. With the same breath that thanked Him for “dis dy bounty,” the Omnipotent was reminded that if this agreeable state of things was to continue, people must pay not only for the meal, but for the Cause.
Mar listened, or didn’t listen, with an air of respectful quiescence, and ate his meals unabashed. But he commiserated Cheviot, “How this must make you long for your Valdivia luxuries. Well, when do you go back?”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
Mar showed as little gratitude as pleasure.
“You mustn’t think of waiting for me,” he answered shortly.
Cheviot was profoundly perplexed as to what he ought to do. Mar was not a man that any one could comfortably catechize, but to go away and leave him here with public opinion so against him; for Cheviot to present himself to Hildegarde, knowing he had left her father on this inhospitable shore, to all intents and purposes a prisoner—it was not to be thought of.
Mar’s favorite scheme for a good day’s fishing was to row across to the river mouth where some Englishmen, several years before, had made a camp.
In the sheltered hollow a little way up the stream they had built a cabin, so well, that although long deserted it still offered refuge from the drenching rain, or from the unshut eye of the sun, and even from the greater torment of mosquitoes. For Mar had learnt the value of the Esquimau use of a “smudge.” On the way to the cabin he would gather two handfuls of arctic moss, of straw and some aromatic smelling herb, twist all together in two wisps and set one alight on the flat stone that formed the threshold and the other smoldering in a rusty pan upon the sill of the single window, with the result that the mosquitoes fled. In great comfort Mar and Cheviot would proceed to make tea, and eat their sandwiches—at least, Cheviot ate his. He noticed that although his friend never disposed of a third of what he brought, he did not the next time bring any less. Quite suddenly one day it dawned upon Cheviot why. For although the crackers and cheese and sandwiches that were left were always carefully put away in a tin cracker-box, the box on their return was invariably empty.
And Mar never seemed the least surprised.
Was it that he could not bring himself to abandon the poor wretch he had rescued; could that be at the root of his delay? But why did he not take Cheviot into his confidence and get the girl out of the country if she were in hiding hereabouts? Was it conceivable that Mar—
Cheviot got little further in his speculations till the morning when Mar, in the act of making a cast, said under his breath and without moving a muscle, “There’s that fellow again!”
Cheviot turned just in time to see Björk’s head disappear behind a bunch of tall reeds that grew in the hollow by the little fresh water stream below the cabin. “What’s he lurking about like that for?”
“I’m afraid he’s on the track of a poor, wretched girl,” and Mar told the story of the Yakutat witch, but with additions not creditable to Mr. Björk.
“It’s usually an old woman, here as elsewhere, that’s accused and set upon, but this girl can’t be above seventeen, for she hadn’t been long out of the Bride’s House.”
“The what?”
“Oh, the horrible igloo where they confine the marriageable girls for half a year. They stay in there, in the dark all that time, never seeing the face of man; and they come out cowed, and fat, and pallid; and then they’re for sale as wives. Those that no man takes are looked down upon, and left to shift for themselves and must earn their own living. The Yakutat girl was pounced on instantly by a man she hated for some reason. He took her off, but she escaped and made her way to the mission. Nobody was at home at the time but Björk and me. I saw her come in, and I saw her come flying out of the mission parlor wilder even than she’d entered it,and go tearing down to the village. She found shelter there, for a while, with the woman who had brought her up. But public opinion was all against her; and when it was found that the reason her ‘husband,’ Peddykowchee, didn’t come and get her, was that he was ill, they said she had bewitched him. His younger brother said she’d done the same to him, and then a miserable little baby—oh, it was a ghastly business. ’Sh—” and Mar fished in silence for a full hour, with occasional sharp glances through the alder thicket behind him, down among the reeds by the deserted cabin.
The next day the store left in the cracker-box was found to be untouched.
“She’s seen Björk!” said Mar under his breath. “She’s afraid to come any more.”
“Why don’t you help her to get out of the country?” Cheviot asked, setting alight the smudge on the window-sill.
“I was planning that when you came, but I don’t want to mix you up in any such ticklish business.”
“It’s no more ticklish for me than for you.”
“Oh, I’m blown upon already. The people here have been red hot about it. They haven’t cooled down yet.”
“They never will,” said Cheviot.
“No,” agreed Mar, “but I’ve made the cause mine, you see. After you’re gone—”
“I’m not going till you do.”
“That’s nonsense.”
“If you like,” said Cheviot.
“It’s on account of that letter of Hildegarde’s?”
“Whatever the reason is, I’m going to stay if you are, and you may as well let me in for my share of the fun.”
“Your ‘share!’” repeated Mar reflectively, and stroked his long gray mustache.
“I was arranging to get the girl away,” he went on presently, “when you came. I had bought this boat and made a habit of being out all day.”
“Exactly! All we need is provisions.”
“No, I sent Christianson to St. Michaels for provisions. They’re at the mission now.”
“Of course, we brought them up with us! Then we’ve nothing to do but to get the stuff into the boat.”
“Without exciting suspicion.”
“And pick the girl up somewhere on the coast.”
“—before they realize we’re gone for good.”
“Surely you and I could start off on an excursion together without exciting suspicion. Why, you told them when you first came, you were going up the coast, ‘to have a look at the country,’” he added, remembering Christianson’s phrase.
Mar studied him an instant with uncommon intentness.
“What is it?” laughed Cheviot. “You look as if you couldn’t make up your mind to trust me.”
“No, I’m making up my mind I will.” Again he paused for a moment, and then, “I am too old to do the thing alone,” he said.
“Well, I can manage the boat, anyhow.”
“Oh, the girl can row as well as a man, but I must have a partner.” And sitting there in the deserted cabin Nathaniel Mar, for the last time, told how a hundred and odd miles further up the coast he had panned out gold with a dead man’s help when he himself was young.
And when he had said it, that thing befell him that overtook any enthusiast in talking to Louis Cheviot. Mar saw his story on a sudden in a comic light. Clear now, its relationship to twenty “tall stories,” fit matter for a twitch of the humorous lip, a hitch of the judicial shoulder.
The unconscious Cheviot had choked off many a confidence just by that look of cool amusement.
“I’ve always said,” Mar wound up, preparing hastily to withdraw again into his shell, “I’ve always said it would ‘keep,’ and ithaskept close on thirty years.”
“Well, it won’t keep much longer,” said Cheviot briskly.
“Why not?” A tremor shot through the man with the secret.
“Why? Because it’s in the air.”
Mar clasped and unclasped his big walking-stick as if about to rise.
“Before another year,” Cheviot went on, “the whole of Alaska will swarm with prospectors.”
“Do you think so?”
“Sure. Why, it’s begun. I don’t believe there’s a single Yukon tributary where there isn’t a man wandering about this minute with a shovel and a pan.”
“The Yukon! Well, that’s a good way to the south!”
“Those men that stopped at the mission last night—they were miners.”
“They—they were after galena!” said Mar, almost angrily. “They knew that fairly good ore had been brought down Fish River off and on since ’81.”
Cheviot laughed. “Well, if you imagine they won’t so much as look for gold, let’s smuggle your witch toSt. Michaels and take the first steamer home.I’vehad enough of the North.”
“You say that because you don’t really believe I’ve discovered a second Klondike.”
“Why shouldn’t I believe it? And haven’t I turned my back on the Klondike we all know exists?”
“Those men that came to the mission yesterday,” Mar said hurriedly, “they—they were going to Fish River, weren’t they? Not—not up the coast?”
“No, no, that’s all right,” Cheviot reassured him. “All I meant was that somebody hereabouts had only to whisper ‘Gold!’ for this whole country to swarm.”
“I know—I know. But we’ll have the start, Cheviot.”
Mar pulled himself up by the aid of his stick, and dragged the rude soap box table out of its shady corner, into the light nearer the window, a light but little obscured by the faint smoke wreaths that curled about the pan and sent abroad a slightly pungent breath, agreeably acrid, except to the summer pest. Mar’s excitement found little expression in his face, but, so to speak, came out at his finger tips. He could hardly hold the piece of paper he had pulled from his pocket. Up to ten minutes ago he had felt almost as far from his ancient purpose as though he still sat on the high stool in the inner room of the Valdivia bank. Now, and within the last few seconds more especially, fulfilment seemed breathlessly near. Sitting on one side of the soap box, with Cheviot opposite, Mar traced on the back of an envelop the land-locked inner Bay of Golovin, the outer bay, and from Rocky Point a broken line on up the coast.
“This,” he said, shading a little strip bordering theshore, “this is the sand-spit where I found the Esquimau camp. Here’s the crooked river, with its mouth full of wood. Only six or seven miles to the north is the anvil-shaped mountain.”
The two men, bending low over the soiled envelop, were too absorbed to notice the glitter just above the window-sill; eyes narrowed to evade the smoke; two mere points of light to the right of the rusty pan with its haze of smoldering incense.
Mar’s pencil whispered over the paper in the silence.
Then he spoke. “From this broken range on the north three or four streams come trickling down to the coast. The one on the west here winds round from the north side of the Anvil, and it was just at this point, as I remember—just here,” and the pencil shook as if in doubt, or refusing to commit itself, till Mar planted the point so firmly on the paper it made a dent as well as a mark. “Just here I found the gold.”
When finally Cheviot raised his eyes the glitter was gone from the sill.
While the two in the cabin laid their plans and made a list of provisions and requirements, a man was creeping on hands and knees, through willow scrub and reeds, down to the boat that lay moored in the cove below the cabin.
Christianson sat talking to Hjalmar the herder, of the Government project of introducing reindeer among the Alaskan natives, when the door of the private office was flung wide. They looked round and saw Björk standing there.
On the sallow mask a strange light shining. The hardlips twitched in a recurrent rictus, showing a dog-like gleam of sharp eye-tooth, while the rest of the mouth held rigid. If the tremendous force that locked the lean jaws was lost upon the onlooker, it must have been the insane light in Björk’s eyes that made the reindeer-herder whisper, “He’s got a fit.”
But Christianson had only flung back his long, straight hair, and grasped the rude arms of his big chair.
“Björk,” he said, “iss it a visshun?”
“Ye—h—h!” Björk answered through shut teeth. An instant longer he stood silent, with his hairy hands clenched, and a barely perceptible forward and backward swaying of the tense body. Then, with an effort as of forcing steel to part, he opened his welded lips and said rapidly in Swedish, “Have we not fed the hungry?”
“Aye,” said Christianson.
“Have we not nursed the sick? Have we not preached the Gospel to every creature?”
“Aye, aye,” from Christianson.
“Have we not kept the law?” With each question nearer and nearer Björk brought the black menace of his face.
“Have we not had the faith that moveth mountains? Have we not served in hardship? Have we not waited in poverty till this hour?”
“Tillthis hour?” said Christianson, getting up slowly out of his chair.
Björk arrested his own dreamlike advance with a suddenness that seemed to wake him. He stopped, looked round, and clutched at the back of a chair.
“Shut the door,” he commanded.
His chief obeyed. When Christianson turned roundagain, Björk was staring over the reindeer-herder’s head, piercing the infinite depths of space, while he held tight to every-day existence by the back of a chair.
“Brethren,” he said, “the angel of the Lord has been with me. He has shown me great riches.”
Hjalmar the herder pulled himself together and shook off his growing nervousness. There was nothing uncanny in this after all. A vision of riches was only too common since the Klondike had crazed men’s brains. Björk saw that even Christianson looked less moved.
“I tell you,” the seer burst out, “this is the answer to all our prayer, the reward of all our work. The angel took me westward up the coast. I see it now!” He unlocked his clutching hands, raised them outstretched on a level with his eyes and with hypnotic slowness moved the right hand east, the left one west.
“A sand-spit,” he said, “where the heathen gather. Beyond—a flat country, where no tree grows. But the river mouth is choked with sea-drift. A strange shaped hill. One of old Thor’s workshops. Wherehehammered the sword of the gods,weshall forge weapons against the ungodly. Weapons of gold. For the river of that country—the angel showed me the sands of it! And the sands, Christianson, the sands were full of gold!”
The herder looked at Christianson and Christianson looked at the herder. The herder shook his head.
Christianson sat down again in his great chair.
“I tell you,” said Björk solemnly, “I see that ‘promised land’ plainer than ever I saw Kwimkuk. Plainer”—he raised his voice—“than I see you two.”
But he saw them very plainly. His look leaped from one face to the other, and rage gathered on his own.
“You sit there like stone. You are deaf. You are like dead men. I—I—” He looked about the room wildly as if he had forgotten where the door was. “I would go alone, but I must have provisions. I must have help with the boat—help with the—”
“Y—yes, yes,” stuttered the old missionary.
“And the angel said, ‘Go first to Christianson.’”
“Yes, yes. Of course, I—”
“‘But tarry not,’ said the voice. ‘If Christianson receive not the good tidings, go take the news to another.’” He seemed now to locate the door. He made two steps in that direction, saying, “Me—I obey the voice.”
“I, too, obey,” said Christianson hurriedly. “I will come Saturday.”
“Saturday!” Björk’s burning impatience blew the end of the week to the end of the world. “I tell youto-morrowwill be too late! It must be to-day. It must be this hour.”
“Why?” demanded the herder, but he, too, was on his feet.
“Ha! You will ask questions! No wonder the angel comes to me.” Again he turned about and rushed at the door. Christianson intercepted him. Björk, with a convulsive movement, flung him off.
“The voice said, ‘This is the hour you have prayed for, but if it passes in idleness, pray no more—pray no more!’” Björk’s voice rang out with a tragic authority. “‘For this is the hour when your feet should be shod with swiftness and your hands be full of cunning.’ It was the voice said so.” Björk’s fingers were on the latch. “Me—I obey.” He opened the door.
“Come, Hjalmar,” said Christianson.
“‘Brethren,’ he said, ‘the angel of the Lord has been with me. He has shown me great riches’”
“‘Brethren,’ he said, ‘the angel of the Lord has been with me. He has shown me great riches’”
Hildegarde’s sense of anxious responsibility had grown with every month that passed after her father sailed out of San Francisco harbor. Bound for—“the Klondike!” people exclaimed with envy, rather than asked in any doubt.
“No—no,” he had said, and then hastily—to keep outsiders off the track—“well, perhaps. Who knows?” Whodidn’tknow! And, after all, why should any man stay at home who wasn’t obliged?
It was natural that no one else should take Mr. Mar’s enterprise as seriously from the start as did his daughter. For she knew how large had been her share in it. She had been the first, the only one, to cheer him on. She it was who had got “the boys” to finance the undertaking. She who had broken the fact to her mother. But for his daughter, Nathaniel Mar would not now be—where was he? How faring? Many a time Hildegarde’s heart contracted sharply, as in silence she framed the question. Her own fault that she couldn’t answer—her fault that half Valdivia could no longer set their clocks by the big, lame man’s passing—her doing that he sat no more of a morning in the warm, sunny room of the San Joaquin, sending out smoke and absorbing news. Others sat there in peace and safety, discussing their absent townsman;and Hildegarde sat at home trying to keep at bay the thought: if anything dreadful should happen to him!
It had eased her a little to write to Cheviot, and beg him to look out for her father. She was tempted to say, “Bring him back safe and there’s nothing I won’t gladly do to prove—” But she had pulled herself up in time, and only promised an unending gratitude.
The steamerPresident, which had taken Mar north, brought on her return trip a brief letter from him, saying merely that the journey was safely accomplished as far as St. Michaels. His family knew they would probably not hear again till the following summer.
Life was easier when Bella was there. To her one might say, “Will he come back by the first boat in June, or shall we only have letters, do you think?” And say it in one form or another so often that, but for reasons unavowed, the speculation would have wearied friendship.
But Bella was full of sympathy and tonic suggestion, always prepared to pore over northern maps, always ready to discuss probable conditions “up there.”
What a friend was Bella! “I’vetalkedof a standard,” Hildegarde thought humbly, “but she lives up to it—in these days.” It was a shame ever to remember the lapses long ago.
And how intelligent she was! How curiously well informed! But Bella was always surprising you.
“I keep thinking about him in the night. I lie awake wondering if he’s cold,” Hildegarde confessed, and Bella, why, to look at her face you’d think she knew all about that lying awake and wondering—did the same herself. “Father does so love a fire. Don’t you rememberwhen all of us would be baking he used to draw closer to the hearth?”
“That was only because he lived so much indoors. He’ll bequitewarm in that beautiful furry sleeping-bag. He’ll probably sleep better than he’s done since he was a child. They all do.”
“Who do?”
“Oh—a—people who—go to the Klondike.”
Another time, “I am haunted by the certainty that he didn’t take enough provisions. Trenn says that in intense cold people eat a great deal more than—”
“That’s true,” said Bella sagely, “but it’ll be all right. People are very good to one another in such out-of-the-way places. They always share with anybody who runs short.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, that’s what the accounts all say.”
“What accounts?”
“Oh, in the—the papers.”
“I never see any such accounts. It’s all horrors—freezing and starving to death. Besides, father will be the one to do the sharing and then have to go without. Oh,whydid I help him to—”
“Don’t be absurd,” Bella said, almost angrily. “In any casehe’snot gone beyond the reach of supply depots.” Neither met the other’s eye.
“But suppose his money gives out—it will give out if it’s true they charge two dollars for a potato. He never could keep any money in his pockets. Oh, it’s all very well for you,yourfather isn’t sitting on an iceberg starving to death.”
A queer look came into Bella’s little face. It wasthere, now and then, and gone like a ghost, leaving a troubled tenderness behind.
“It’s not as if he were near a settlement, as the Klondikers are to Dawson City,” Hildegarde went on, yearning for reassurance. “The place father was going to is quite uninhabited, except by a few Esquimaux. Often I can hardly eat for thinking—thinking”—her voice caught—“maybe he is hungry.”
“That’s impossible. He’s much too sensible and clever.”
“What good is it to be sensible and clever if you’ve got nothing to eat?”
“But being sensible and clever will help him to find things to eat.”
“How do you make that out?”
“Oh, as far south as that—”
As farsouth? Was she out of her mind?
“There are plenty of ptarmigan and rabbits and things, where Mr. Mar is.”
“Are there? But he’s lame. How can he go shooting—”
“Other people can, especially the natives, and you may be sure your father will have his share. Besides, he’ll fish. Mr. Mar’ll like that part of it.”
“Howcanyou be so heartless!”
“What do you mean?”
“How is my father to fish in rivers frozen hard as iron?”
“Through holes in the ice, of course!” Bella defended the idea warmly. “You’ll see,” she spoke as if she’d personally tested the efficacy of the device; “you’ll see they’ll get fish all winter that way.”
“Howdoyou know? Now don’t say you get it out of the newspapers, for I never see these things, and I look for nothing else.”
“No, I found that in a book.”
“What book?”
It turned out to be a two-year-old volume upon Arctic Exploration. On the fly-leaf Bella’s name and the date, 1896. A whole year before Cheviot went to the Klondike, or Mr. Mar to Alaska. The year that—
The light that had glimmered broke in a flood.
“Let us read it together, Bella,” said Hildegarde softly.
“No, there’s a newer one I’ve just sent for. We’ll read that if you like.”
They finished it at the Waynes’ country place. “I wish,” said Hildegarde, “we had another book about—”
“There are plenty more.” Bella unlocked a little chest. It was full of nothing but books, and the books were about nothing but arctic life and exploration. For nearly two years, Bella had been buying and reading everything she could hear of published on the subject in America or Europe.
Hildegarde hung above the store. “We must go through them all together. It is the most fascinating reading in the world.”
“It is the most horrible in the world. The most ghastly, it makes you ill. But, yes; I agree with you one can’tnot know.”
They read the books together. Even the honest-hearted Hildegarde, who began with her father agonizingly present in her mind, abandoned him presently to his probably less terrible fate, and pushed forward withstrange men on their farther journey; fitting each new fortune or mischance to the One on the other side of the world, never mentioned either by her or Bella. Though Hildegarde kept her oath not to speak Galbraith’s name, she felt a strange new excitement now in saying “He” as for her father, yet thinking of the One who had gone farther afield even than Cheviot, and much, much farther than Mr. Mar. Each girl played with the ruse. It gave to reading and speculation a subtilty—a spirit—that never flagged.
And now spring was here. Although still far too early for such forecasting, both felt the need of returning to Valdivia, to be within easier reach of papers, of telegrams, and of returning travelers. For all the world knew when once the spring was come up yonder, the summer followed hard. How natural it was to be looking forward to something great and wonderful that was to happen in June! Hildegarde and her father had done that as long ago as when the girl was in her early teens and Jack Galbraith expected back from his first arctic enterprise. What more natural than that Hildegarde and Bella should be doing very much the same to-day. To call their expectation by Mar’s name, merely gave it manageability. For, apart from Bella’s interdiction, the word “Galbraith” was, in this, like a hot iron. If it were to be touched in safety, some shield must come between you and the too ardent metal. “Galbraith” would scorch. But wrap “Mar” about the forbidden name, and you could use it to significant ends.
Summer and Mr. Mar! Oh, Mr. Mar served well as symbol of that mightier issue, that both dared hope for out of this year’s opening of the ice gates of the North.
And yet the month of wonder, June, went by without a word or a sign coming down from the top of the world.
July brought a letter from the Klondike—Cheviot’s second. He had done well, and he was coming home. Hildegarde might look to see him by the next boat. No word of Mar; plain he hadn’t had Hildegarde’s news when he wrote. Not the next boat, however, nor the next, brought Cheviot, nor any word of Mr. Mar.
“I don’t know how I should get through this time but for you, Bella.” Hildegarde and she were seldom apart.
Not till mid-August came the sign from Mar, a letter written from a queer-sounding place in early June, a letter strangely short and non-committal. He had reached St. Michaels too late the previous autumn to go any further than Golovin Bay, before navigation closed. He would push on as soon as travel was practicable. He was well. He sent his love. And no more that summer. No more up to the time the boats stopped running in the autumn.
Cheviot had not come after all. And silence, like the silence of the grave, wrapt the fate of that Other, on the far side of the world.
“I shall burn a joss to those who travel by land or by sea, by snow or by ice,” said Bella, one day in December, and she lit the stick of incense on the flower altar, whence no heathen smoke of prayer had risen for a couple of years now. But more prayers than ever before had been offered up in the little white room. And what need of a face on the wall above the roses? The picture was not really shut away in a drawer. Vivid in each girl’s mind, it was borne about as faithfully, as in theold days, when on Hildegarde’s breast in a setting of silver it hung on a velvet string.
Now and then Bella remembered Cheviot, and when she remembered him, she spoke of him. Sometimes she spoke of him when she was thinking of him little enough. As on the night when she wasn’t well, and Hildegarde, sleeping on the sofa in her friend’s room, had waked in misery over a dream she’d had. Bella was lying wide-eyed in the dark, “A dream about—?”
“Yes,” Hildegarde said hurriedly, “a snow-storm in the night, in the wind; a slipping down into blackness. I thought I saw him fall, and I knew it was the end.”
“They go by contraries. Your father’s quite well and happy.” Hildegarde had not said the dream concerned her father, but she offered no correction.
“Still,” Bella went on, “for the moment it makes one feel—I’ll tell you! we must have a little light to comfort us.”
“No, no; it will hurt my eyes,” Hildegarde was surreptitiously crying. But Bella was already up, and before Hildegarde could forestall her, she had opened the door across the hall leading into the opposite room, and there she was striking a light. Hildegarde followed her, still a little dazed by the vivid horror of the dream, and when her eyes fell upon her own little white bed, she flung herself down there, and buried her face in the cool pillow.
“You aren’t crying, are you, Hildegarde, over a silly dream? Look here, I’m lighting a joss for Mr. Mar.”
A little silence.
“I’ve lit another,” said Bella’s hurried voice, still over there by the table, “one for Louis.” Hildegarde,with face half-hidden, imagined rather than saw, that three slender smoke feathers were curling above the flowers, drowning the meeker fragrance of the roses.
She lay there feeling the oppression of the dream fading, and a waking oppression take its place. Yes, they “went by contraries.” Galbraith hadn’t fallen and been swallowed in the gaping maw of a crevasse; but when he came back, what was going to happen? He belonged to Bella. But he had left Bella. And he had belonged first of all to Hildegarde. What would befall friendship in that coming wrench!
“Go back to bed, Bella; you’ll be worse.”
“You must come, too.”
Hildegarde made no answer.
“You can’t lie there with all these flowers in the room. I didn’t know you hadn’t set them out. The doors can’t be left open either.”
“The windows can.”
“I shan’t go unless you come, too.”
Hildegarde forced herself to get up. Bella put out the comforting light. But some things show plainer in the dark. Those symbols on the altar, they were only tendrils of smoke by day, or in the glare of gas. Now they were sparks of fire puncturing the blackness of the scented room. One fiery eye to watch over the fortunes of Nathaniel Mar, one to shine for Cheviot, and an unnamed third to pierce the darkness that shrouded the fate of that Other. Even when the two girls turned their backs, and groped their way to Bella’s room clinging hold of each other in the dark, the third spark not only shone before their inner vision still, it pricked each bosom with its point of fire.
What would happen when he came back?
Each wondered, and each held faster to the other with fear in the bottom of her heart.
Meanwhile, life outwardly went on pretty much the same. With Trenn and Harry, Eddie Cox and other swains, the girls went to parties and picnics, to concerts, and the theater, and did all the usual things. The one unusual thing those days brought was the Charles Trennor fancy ball. It was going to be a great affair, and Valdivia conversation for weeks had begun by some such statement as, “I’m going as the Goddess of Liberty. What shall you be?”
Of course Trenn and Harry were coming up for the great occasion, and their costumes called for endless consultation with that great authority, Bella. They had, moreover, told their sister she might on this occasion be as glorious as ever she liked, and they would “foot the bill.” Hildegarde deeply appreciated such generosity, but what was more to the point, did Bella?
She only said: “Yes, Hildegarde’s going to be glorious. But I don’t think it’s the kind of glory you can buy.”
Even before the Mar boys had come forward in this magnificent way, Bella had decided that Hildegarde must go as Brunhild. Her gown was to be white cloth, embroidered with silver dragons—strictly adapted from an ancient Norse design. She was to wear silver sandals on her feet; on one bare arm would be a buckler, a spear in her right hand, and on her fair hair a silver helmet.
Bella was going as Amy Robsart, and that was easy enough. It was those dragons of Hildegarde’s that tookthe time; and, as Bella had said, they wouldn’t have been easy to buy. She and Hildegarde were embroidering them every spare minute, day and night. Even now, though almost, they were not quite done, which was a pity. Trenn and Harry were coming up from Siegel’s again this evening—the excuse, the necessary inspection of Brunhild, at Bella’s express invitation. For this had been the one costume not ready in time for the “dress-rehearsal” two nights before, when Bella and “the boys” had put on their Elizabethan finery, and peacocked about in great spirits.
“I want your brothers to be what they call ‘knocked silly’ when they first see you, Hildegarde. You must be all dressed and ready, and we can turn up the bottom of the skirt and work at that last dragon while we’re waiting.”
In pursuance of this plan, the two girls had gone up-stairs directly after supper, though it was hardly probable the boys could get there before half-past nine.
Mrs. Mar sat waiting for them in the parlor, on that side of the center table where the book rest supported an open volume. She rocked while she waited, and she crocheted while she rocked. At times she glanced at the clock—not once at the open book. Not for her own edification was the volume there, but for the enlargement of Hildegarde’s literary horizon, while she and Bella stitched at silver dragons. But this latest choice in standard works had not pleased any one. Victor Hugo was much too fond of fiery love-scenes to prosper with Mrs. Mar, but the miserable man had become a classic, and after all, Hildegarde was old enough not to be infected. Bella—she read everything, the minx!Although Hildegarde was in her twenty-fifth year, Mrs. Mar knew her so little, she felt no assurance that the girl would keep up her languages, or read “the best things” in any tongue, without her mother’s dragging her by main force across the flowery fields of belles lettres—as though over stubble and through brake.
Listening to Mrs. Mar’s reading of a classic was an experience of some singularity. For if she macerated descriptive bits with a chin-chopper despatch, to get them out of the way (not disguising the fact that she considered these passages in the light of the salutary self-torture that no disciplined life should evade, any more than vaccination or a visit to the dentist), she did far deadlier things to scenes of sentiment or passion. These she approached with a sturdy determination not to give in to their nonsense, to make them at all eventssoundlike sanity by sheer force of her own impregnable common-sense—a force so little to be withstood, that it could purge the most poetic page ever written. It made even Victor Hugo sound as reasonable as the washing list. If you didn’t inwardly curse or secretly weep, you must have laughed to see how effectually she could clip fancy’s wings, slam the door on sentiment, bring high passion down to a sneaking shame, and effectually punish a great reputation. In short, listening to Mrs. Mar reading romance was so sure a way, not only to strip it bare of its traditional glory, but to rob it of every chance of “going home,” that Hildegarde, as soon as she got wind of what was the next work to be attacked, hastened to borrow it of Bella, devoured it alone, and so got a first impression that could more or less hold its own against the maternal onslaught. It is but fairto say that to any comedy passage Mrs. Mar gave excellent effect, and, by way of appreciation, a grim smile peculiarly her own; while for a spirited encounter between wits sharp and merciless, she had open approval.
“That’s something like!” she would say. “Old Dumas” (or whoever it might be), “he can do it when he likes!” and the great one was patted on the back: “Thisman’s going to live.”
Bella had known that Mrs. Mar would sit in the half-light till even she could see no longer. But Hildegarde was not suffered to make her entrance in the dusk. Bella ran in first and “lit up.” She did not stop to draw the blinds, she was in too great a hurry; besides, it was nice to let in the mild and beautiful night. “Now, Hildegarde! Look, Mrs. Mar,” and Bella ushered in a living page from an old Icelandic Saga; “isn’t she glorious?”
Mrs. Mar pecked at the regal figure with her hard, bright eyes, “White doesn’t make her any slimmer,” she said.
“Oh, it wouldn’t do for Brunhild to be a mean, little, narrow creature.”
“That helmet, too! It makes her look ten feet high.”
“She wants to look high!—and‘mighty!’ and she does. No, no, stop Hildegarde, youmustn’ttake it off.”
“Just till we hear the boys coming. It—it’s—” Hildegarde contracted her broad brows under the helmet’s weight.
But Bella flew to the rescue. “Don’t, don’t! Hands off! What does it matter if itisheavy? You must get used to it. You’ve got to be a heroine!” she wound up severely, “so don’t expect to be comfortable!” andBella pulled a chair under the drop-light. “Sit here where Trenn and Harry can see you the minute they open the door. Now we can go on with the last dragon while we’re waiting.”
Mrs. Mar cleared her throat, “‘Acte Cinquième. La Noce.’” And the two girls, raising their eyes from the work, saw through the open window, in front of them, not the close-massed syringa underneath, nor the soft Californian night above, but “une terrasse du palais d’Aragon,” in the town of Saragossa, four hundred years ago. And no sense visited them of any jarring contrast between the picture of the world in the yellow-backed book, and the picture of life as they knew it best. Thanks to the poet that lives in most young hearts, even Victor Hugo’s gallant vision of a civilization that was old before California was discovered, brought no envious sense of the difference between then and now—rather a naïve surprise that those others so far away, so long ago, should have understood so well.
Older, more self-critical, they might have lost this sense of comradeship—might have gone over to the gray majority that insists only the past is picturesque, or that if any grace remains unto this day, it must needs be far removed from places we know well, precariously surviving under other skies, speaking an alien tongue. Those who would persuade us there is no scene in our every-day life but what is sordid, barren, or at best (and worst) meanly commonplace—stuff unfit for poetry or even for noble feeling—what do the carpers by such comment on our times but confess an intellect abject, slavish, blind. To find the beauty and the dignity that lie in the difficult familiar days that we ourselves arebattling through, to detect high courage in the common speech, to get glimpses of the deathless face of romance as we go about the common streets, is merely to know life as it is, and yet to walk the modern world as gloriously companioned as any Viking or Hidalgo of the past.
So true is early youth’s apprehension of these things, that not even Mrs. Mar could make wide enough for envy or embarrassment the gulf in the two girls’ minds between an Old World bandit chief, and a New World soldier of fortune. The transition, that to the sophisticated seems grotesque, between the Hernani of 1519 and the modern American pursuing perilous ways to the Pole—this feat was accomplished without misgiving, although in Saragossa, “on entend des fanfares éloignées,” and in Valdivia an indefatigable woman, on the other side of the street, was strumming the old tune, renamed, “The Boulanger March”; and now Mrs. Mar was beginning Scene III with an air of cold distrust, that Bella foresaw would mount by well-known degrees to a climax of scorn.
The lady turned the page.