“‘Mon âmeBrûle—Eh! dis au volcan qu’il étouffe sa flamme,’—
“‘Mon âmeBrûle—Eh! dis au volcan qu’il étouffe sa flamme,’—
“‘Mon âme
Brûle—Eh! dis au volcan qu’il étouffe sa flamme,’—
“How long are they going on like this, I wonder?” she interrupted herself to durchblätter the pages.
“‘Ah! qui n’oublierait tout à cette voix celeste!’”
“‘Ah! qui n’oublierait tout à cette voix celeste!’”
“‘Ah! qui n’oublierait tout à cette voix celeste!’”
And more fingering of the leaves. “Four more solid pages of this sort of thing,” she announced. “Well, ifthe rest of the world has stood it, I suppose we must.” And she went on—
“‘Ta parole est un chant où rien d’humain ne reste—’”
“‘Ta parole est un chant où rien d’humain ne reste—’”
“‘Ta parole est un chant où rien d’humain ne reste—’”
And on, in a measured staccato, exactly as if she were adding up a column of figures, or telling off yards of tape.
“‘Doña Sol.Viens, ô mon jeune amant,Dans mes bras.’”
“‘Doña Sol.Viens, ô mon jeune amant,Dans mes bras.’”
“‘Doña Sol.
Viens, ô mon jeune amant,
Dans mes bras.’”
Bella dropped the silver dragon, and with, “Wait, Mrs. Mar,dearestMrs. Mar!” she seized the book.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“This ismypart!” said Bella, shutting the volume convulsively. “I know it every bit.”
“‘Voilà notre nuit de noces commencée!Je suis bien pâle, dis, pour une fiancée?’”
“‘Voilà notre nuit de noces commencée!Je suis bien pâle, dis, pour une fiancée?’”
“‘Voilà notre nuit de noces commencée!
Je suis bien pâle, dis, pour une fiancée?’”
And on to—
“‘Mort! non pas! nous dormons,Il dort! c’est mon époux, vois-tu, nous nous aimons,Nous sommes couchés là. C’est notre nuit de noce.Ne le réveillez pas, seigneur duc de Mendoce,Il est las. Mon amour, tiens-toi vers moi tourné.Plus près—plus près encore—’”
“‘Mort! non pas! nous dormons,Il dort! c’est mon époux, vois-tu, nous nous aimons,Nous sommes couchés là. C’est notre nuit de noce.Ne le réveillez pas, seigneur duc de Mendoce,Il est las. Mon amour, tiens-toi vers moi tourné.Plus près—plus près encore—’”
“‘Mort! non pas! nous dormons,
Il dort! c’est mon époux, vois-tu, nous nous aimons,
Nous sommes couchés là. C’est notre nuit de noce.
Ne le réveillez pas, seigneur duc de Mendoce,
Il est las. Mon amour, tiens-toi vers moi tourné.
Plus près—plus près encore—’”
Hildegarde, with tears, put out her hand and tookBella’s. No word, just the clasp of hands, till they fell apart to work.
“H’m,” said Mrs. Mar dryly. “I suppose you’ve seen Sarah Bernhardt go on like that.”
“No, oh, no. I don’t like Sarah in this. I do it much better.”
“A good many people seem to be able to put up with the other lady.”
But Bella, smiling, shook her head, as she drew a new strand of silver thread through her needle. “I don’t like seeing her make dear Doña Sol so—so snaky, and so wildly unnatural.”
“Well, if you think Doña Sol’snatural—”
Bella laughed. “You’d think she was nature itself compared to Sarah.”
“People said the same thing about Curly what’s-his-name.”
“Curly?”
“Yes, the Englishman who acted with the red-haired woman.”
“Oh, you mean Kyrle—”
“Curl! Is that how he calls himself? Well, I’m sure I’ve no objection. I liked him. But people went about sayinghewasn’t natural.”
Bella looked up. “Did you think he was?”
“Certainly not. But I’m a person who likesacting. I don’t want them natural.” She wound up in a tone of delicious contempt, “I can see people being natural every day of my life, without paying for it.”
Bella laughed. “Oh, I’msoglad I know you, dear Mrs. Mar!” That lady, unmoved by the tribute, began to do her duty by the notes. Bella never listened tonotes, and by and by her little face took on again the tragic look with which she had declaimed, “La fatalité s’accomplit.”
Bella was a good deal changed in this last year. Hildegarde, looking at her paling beauty, was sometimes stricken with fear. “What should I do without her!”
The postman’s ring. Bella jumped up without ceremony in the middle of Note 2, and ran out to see what had come. Only a paper. It wasn’t the postman. Merely the little boy outrageously late with “The Evening News.”
Bella returned to her dragon—Mrs. Mar read on.
After all, who could be sure but what that paper lying there—how did Bella know but it had a Norwegian telegram in it, saying word had come of the rescue in the arctic of a party of Russians under an American leader? Or no, the leader had done the rescuing—against awful odds. Not Bella alone, but two entire continents were celebrating his name. For this was the intrepid explorer of whom nothing had been heard for nearly four years—who had been given up for dead, by all but Bella Wayne.
And this man—oh, it made the heart beat—this man had discovered the Pole. That was why he’d been so long away. It took four years to discover the Pole. But it was done. The whole civilized world was ringing with his name. And natural enough. It was the greatest achievement since Columbus’ own, and the hero’s name was—
No, no, it wouldn’t be like that at all. He would want Bella to be the first to know. The next ring at the door would be a telegram for her. Or no, he wouldhardly want to break so long a silence in that brusque way. No, he would write her a beautiful long letter—telling her—explaining— No! Far more like him just to appear. Without writing—without telegraphing. Just take the swiftest steamer across the Atlantic, and the fastest train across the Continent, and some evening like this, she, little thinking it the hour that should bring such grace, she would lift up her eyes and there he would be!—standing before her. Not only without a long explanatory letter, without words, her face would be hidden in his breast.
“There!” Mrs. Mar interrupted an alternative soliloquy of Don Carlos, and Bella started. “They’re early! There are the boys, now!”
“I don’t hear them.” But as Hildegarde spoke the words she was conscious of steps on the graveled path, that wound its rather foolish way round this side of the house, leading nowhere. No one ever walked there but Hildegarde herself, cutting or tending flowers. She glanced at Bella, and saw in the wide hazel eyes a light she knew.
On the step came crunching gravel. Bella’s needle arrested half through a stitch, and all Bella’s face saying, “John! John Galbraith!”—and only Hildegarde, through her eyes, hearing. But even Mrs. Mar was under some spell of silence and strained expectation. Now the firm tread paused, and there—there, in front of the low uncurtained window, above the syringas, showed the head and shoulders of a man. Not Trenn, not Harry. Who? Hildegarde held her breath.
“Was it—couldit be?” Bella asked mutely, with wildly beating heart.
Hildegarde, too, was wide-eyed and pale, though even in the dusk, plain to see the vigorous upstanding figure was not a bent old man’s. Bella felt the happy blood come flooding back about her heart; only to ebb again with a suddenness so mighty, that it seemed to withdraw from her, not gladness only, but volition and all feeling—seemed to want to carry out life itself upon its backward tide.
For the man had trodden down the flowers in the border, and pushed his way through the syringa thicket. He stood at the open window, looking in.
“Well, Mr. Louis Cheviot,” said Mrs. Mar, with an affectation of calmness, “where didyoudrop from?” And then Hildegarde’s helmeted figure rose up like some spirit of woman out of another time. But she stood quite still, and she looked as if she knew she was dreaming.
Cheviot vaulted over the low sill, and came toward her with eyes of wonder. “What’s all this for? Why are you like that?”—but he had grasped her hand.
“That absurd thing on her head? It was to show the boys,” explained Mrs. Mar. “A ball—”
“Are yousureyou are you?” Hildegarde found her voice at last.
“Much surer than I am that you are you. I saw your light from the street, and I felt I couldn’t possibly wait to go round and ring the bell. I thought I must come and look in and see what you were like, though I must say I didn’t expect—” He was shaking hands with Mrs. Mar now, but he glanced over his shoulder at the tall white figure and past it to Bella. “I believe I’ve succeeded in scaring at least one of the party. How do you do, Bella? Feel me. I’m not a ghost!”
“My dear boy,” interrupted Mrs. Mar, speaking in her most matter of fact tone, “sit down and tell us all about it.” She at all events was not too agitated to put her marker in the book before she closed it, and she took up her crochet.
Hildegarde was still standing there, but she had taken off the helmet and held it in her hand. “Are you—are you alone?” she asked.
“Yes, alone.”
“I suppose you’ve heard nothing of Mr. Mar?” said Mrs. Mar, who had never in her life been heard to refer to that gentleman in any more intimate fashion.
“Oh, yes, I have.” Cheviot sat down. Hildegarde still stood there. “I was with him between five and six months.”
“With father! Has he been to the Klondike, too?”
“No; but I’ve been to Golovin.”
“Your last letter, nine months ago, said you were coming by the next boat,” Mrs. Mar arraigned him.
“Yes, but I hadn’t heard from Hildegarde when I wrote that.”
“What difference did that make?”
“The difference of my following her suggestion to look out for Mr. Mar. I had to go to Golovin to do it.”
“Is that where he is now?” demanded his wife. “Why on earth hasn’t he written?”
Cheviot felt in his inner pocket, as he said, “No, Mr. Mar’s at Nome.”
“At Nome!”
“He—he’s not ill?” faltered Hildegarde.
“No, on the contrary, he’s better than he’s been for years.”
“Then what on earth’s he doing at Nome?” demanded Mrs. Mar. “Why didn’t he go to the place he’s been talking about for all these—”
“He did.”
“Well?” and then, with her peculiar incisiveness, “What’s he got to show for it all?”
Cheviot did not wonder that Mar would rather not return to face that particular look in the polished onyx eyes. “I don’t know,”—he hesitated—“that there’s very much to show—as yet.”
“It oughtn’t to surprise anybody.” The lady turned the highly polished stones in her head with an added glitter.
“When is he coming home?” asked Hildegarde, with a pitiful lip.
“Perhaps next summer.”
“Perhaps!” echoed the girl.
Even Mrs. Mar stopped crocheting a moment. “Hush, Hildegarde. Let him tell us.” But she must not be supposed to be over-anxious. “Have you just come? Have you had anything to eat?”
“Oh, thank you—in the train. First of all, I must give you the letters he’s sent.” He handed one to Mrs. Mar, and one to Hildegarde. Another he laid on the table under the lamp. It was addressed to Messrs. Trennor and Harry Mar. Mother and daughter hurriedly read and exchanged letters.
“Well, Miss Bella, how’s the world treating you?” and Cheviot talked on in his old half-ironic fashion to the pale girl putting away a heap of tangled silver thread in a work-box.
Mrs. Mar’s eye, grown even harder and brighter in the last moments, fell upon the envelop under the lamp. She did not scruple to tear it open. But there was little enlightenment even in the epistle to “the boys.”
“He says you’ll give us the particulars.” Mrs. Mar flung the notice at Cheviot as if plainly to advertise her intention to hold him responsible if those same particulars were not reassuring.
Cheviot told briefly how he had found Mr. Mar at the mission, how an eavesdropper had overheard their private talk, and how Mr. Mar reached his journey’s end only to find that the thirty-year-old secret had been filched from him, and other men (who hadn’t known it but three days), how they had gathered in the harvest.
“Not all—surely father gotsomething?”
“By the time he reached Anvil Creek he found it staked from end to end.”
Mrs. Mar was plying the crochet-needle with a rapidity superhuman. “Of course he’d be too late,” she said, with a deadly quietness. “Give him thirty years’ start, and he’ll be too late.”
“It was an outrage that a handful of men shouldhave been able to gobble the entire creek,” said Cheviot hurriedly. “The laws will be changed, beyond a doubt. They’re monstrous. Every miner has been able to take out a power of attorney, and he could locate for his entire family, for all his friends—even for people who don’t exist.”
“And those missionaries took it all!”
“Not the missionaries. They were chivvied out of the game by a reindeer herder they’d let into the secret. It’s too long a story to tell you now, but the herder gave the missionaries the slip, and got word to some friends of his. The rascals formed a district and elected a recorder. By the time we got there, there wasn’t an inch left for the man who’d discovered the gold.”
In the pause Hildegarde hunted wildly in her mind for something to say—something that would prevent her mother from speaking—but the girl’s tongue could find no word, her mind refused to act.
Fortunately, the story had reduced even Mrs. Mar to silence.
“In the end Christianson and Björk didn’t fare much better than Mr. Mar, though I believe they got something. But the herder and his friends are millionaires.”
It was more than one of the company could bear. Mrs. Mar got up and left the room.
Cheviot met Hildegarde’s eyes. There was that in his face that gave her the sense of leaning on him in spirit—of being in close alliance with him.
“Poor, poor father!” she said, in a half whisper. “Does he take it dreadfully to heart?”
“Well, you can imagine it wasn’t an easy thing to bear.”
“No, but why isn’t he here—we’ll all help him to bear it.”
Cheviot looked at the door through which Mrs. Mar had disappeared. His eyes said plain as print, “Will she?”
“But father must come home!” Hildegarde broke in on the eloquent silence, as though upon some speech of Cheviot’s. “What is he thinking of—he doesn’t mean—”
Her agitation was so great she hardly noticed that Bella had finished putting the things away in the work-box, and was leaving the room. The moment she had shut the door, “He can’t face it,” said Cheviot.
“Oh, but that’s madness. He must be told that we—that I—hemustcome home. Why, it’s the most dreadful thing I ever heard of in my life, his bearing it all alone.” Her tears were falling. “Tell me—there’s nothing in the letters—Louis,”—she leaned forward—“you and I always tell each other the truth, don’t we?”
“I’m afraid we do,” he said, with his old look.
“Then tell mewhat’s in father’s mind. What has he said to you?”
“That he will stay up there till—somehow—he has either made his pile, or made his exit.”
The girl laid her head down beside the shining helmet on the table, and wept convulsively.
“I had to tell you.” Cheviot had come close to her, and his voice was half indignant, half miserable.
Blindly she put out a hand and grasped his arm. “Thank you—you—you have been good. His letter tome says that you—that you—Louis!” Suddenly she lifted her wet face, “Iam‘unendingly grateful.’”
“Well, I hope you’ll get over it.” He drew his arm out of her grasp, and walked about the room.
Hildegarde followed him with tear-wet eyes that grew more and more bewildered. “I can’t understand how you’re here. I thought navigation wouldn’t be open for a month.”
“Nearer two.”
“Then, how—how—”
“I came out with dogs over the ice.”
She stared incredulous. “Howdid you come?”
“Round the coast of Norton Bay, down across the Yukon, and over to the Kuskoquim, and then by the old Russian route to Kadiak Island.”
“How in the world did you know the way?”
“Part of the time I had native guides.”
“Wasn’t it a very terrible journey?”
“I don’t know that I’d do it again.”
“And when you got down to Kadiak Island?”
“I waited a week for the boat.”
“They run in winter!”
“Yes. Kadiak comes in for a swing eastward of the warm Japanese current. The boats ply regularly to Sitka.”
“It must have taken you a long time to do all that first part on your own two feet.”
He didn’t answer.
“When did you see father last?”
“On the morning of the 8th of December, when I cracked my whip over my dog-team and turned my back on Nome.”
“Heavens! Why, that’s—”
“Over three months ago.” Most men would have paused a moment for contemplation of their prowess or at least of their hardships, but Cheviot was ready to put his achievement at once and for ever behind him—ready, not only to imagine the general interest somewhere else, but to lead the way thither. “To be exact, it was three months and sixteen days ago; but your father was all right when I left him, and he had supplies.”
“Has he any friends?”
“He’s got a dog he’s very thick with, and he’s got a comfortable tent.”
“A tent, in that climate!”
“It’s all anybody has. No lumber for cabins; little even for sluices, hardly enough for rockers—to rock out the dust, you know. Wood is dearer than gold.”
“A tent!”
“I assure you there was only one thing he was really in want of.”
“What was that?”
“Some way to get word to you. He knew you’d be anxious. He wants you not to take his failure to heart. He thinks a great deal about that, because he says you helped—”
“Yes, yes.”
“He wanted me to make it quite clear to you that in spite of everything he wasn’t sorry he’d tried it. And you mustn’t be sorry either. You must write to him, Hildegarde, and reassure him.”
She nodded and turned away her face, but she put up her hand like one who cannot bear much more.
“He wasafraidyou were fretting about him. I never saw him more awfully pleased and glad than when I made up my mind to come out over the ice.”
“That appalling journey! You did it for him?”
“No, I didn’t.”
He waited, as if for a sign, and then, speaking almost surlily, “I did it for myself,” he said. “I’d been away long enough.”
“Yes,” said Hildegarde, “yes, indeed.”
“I couldn’t bear it any longer, sitting there in the dark and cold, and the”—she raised her eyes—“the—oh, it’s not such a bad place as people make out; if you aren’t eating your heart out to know—”
“What’s father doing?” she asked hastily.
“Waiting to hear from you. Waiting, like everybody else, for the ice to go out.”
“What will he do when the ice goes out?”
“He’s got some claims,” Cheviot lowered his voice to say. “He doesn’t want anybody but you to know, for fear there’s nothing in them. But as soon as the frost is enough out of the ground to yield to pick and shovel, he means to rock out a few tons of gravel andsee.”
“Do it himself!”—then, as Cheviot did not answer at once, “It’s simply dreadful! It’s—I can’t bear it.” She hid her face.
“Don’t, Hildegarde. I wish you wouldn’t cry.”
“Are you going back there?”
“No, oh, no; I’m not even going back to the Klondike.”
Mrs. Mar opened the door behind them. “It must be hours since you made that miserable meal in the train,” she said. “Come in here and have some supper.”
Cheviot would have declined but that he knew he must some time submit to a tête-à-tête. Best get it over.
After the dining-room door shut behind her mother and Cheviot, Hildegarde still sat there. The only movement about the white figure under the lamp was the salt water that welled up constantly and constantly overflowed the wide, sad eyes. The handle of the other door turned softly—a girl’s face looked in.
“Bella”—the motionless figure rose out of the chair and the one at the threshold came swiftly in. “Bella”—the voice was muffled—“my father—my father doesn’t mean ever to come home.”
The incoming figure stopped. “Do the letters say that?” Bella asked, awestruck.
“No, Louis says so.”
“Well, I think it was very heartless of him.”
“No, it wasn’t. I made him. It would have been infinitely worse to be always waiting.”
“To be always waitingisperhaps the worst,” said Bella, with lowered eyes.
“Yes, worst of all.”
Bella roused herself and came nearer to her friend. “But for Mr. Mar—why, it’s impossible—don’t you believe it, dear. It’s absurd to think—”
“He’ll never come back. You’ll see he’ll never come back, unless—”
“Unless?”
“Unless”—Hildegarde cleared her tear-veiled voice—“unless some one goes and brings him home.”
“Louis Cheviot?”
“Don’t you see, he’s failed. He’s been enormouslykind;—he’s been wonderful, but he couldn’t get my father to come home.”
“Are you thinking one of the boys might?”
Hildegarde shook her head. “They couldn’t make him.”
“Who could?”
She looked round the room with eyes that again were filling. But they came back to Bella’s face. “Father would do it forme,” she said; “don’t you know he would?”
“Well,” said the other, staring, “if not for you, for no one.”
“Yes, yes, he’d do it for me!” Hildegarde moved about the room with a restlessness unusual in her. She went to each window in turn, pulled down the blinds and drew the curtains; and still she moved about the room. Excitement had drunk her tears. Her face was full of light.
Bella did not stir, but no look or move of Hildegarde’s escaped her. She fixed her eyes on the gleaming dragons that crawled at the hem of Hildegarde’s skirt. The voices in the next room were audible, but not the words.
Across the street the tireless female had again struck up her favorite march.
“You’d have to go alone,” Bella said presently.
“Yes, I’d have to go alone.”
“It’s an awful journey.”
“I suppose so.”
“Yes, and the people—the roughest sort of people.”
“I wouldn’t be afraid—at least, not much.”
“Ishouldn’t dare to.”
“No, no, you’re younger. And besides, even if I were the younger, I’m the one who could do it.” Not often that Hildegarde laid herself open to a charge of arrogance. “Yes,” she said, with rising excitement, “Icould do it, only”—and the high look fell—“it costs a great deal.” She stood quite still looking down upon Brunhild’s shield, that showed on the dark carpet like a tiny circular pool of gleaming water. Still that maddening piano over the way! “The boys wouldn’t help me,” Hildegarde thought out loud, “they’ve already—they’ll be disgusted enough as it is.” She sat down, still with her eyes on the shield, as if she didn’t dare lose sight of it a moment. “Of course mother wouldn’t dream—” After a little pause, “And Louis would say I was mad. But I must think—I must think!” She leaned her tilted chin on her hand, and still like one hypnotized she stared at the metal disk shining there in the shadow. “I must find a way. Father shall not be left up there another winter.”
Nothing more, till Bella brought out quite low the words, “I could get you the money.”
“Bella!” Hildegarde dropped her hand and sat back. “Would you?”
Instead of answering, “I wouldn’t dare to go myself,” Bella said.
“Oh,youcouldn’t possibly.” (Had Bella really meant that she might lend—) “Even if there were any need of it,youcouldn’t go.” Hildegarde’s lips only were saying words, her mind was already faring away on an immense and wonderful journey, that she—shewas competent to undertake. “You aren’t the kind, anyway,” she wound up bluntly, coming back.
“Nobody would think you were the kind either—nobody but me.”
“Yes, yes. You’ve always understood that I wasn’t a bit like what people thought,” and, indeed, few who supposed they knew Hildegarde Mar but would have been surprised at the look in her face to-night, for once betraying not alone a passionate partizanship with her father’s stranded and embittered existence, but the glow that even the thought of “going to the rescue” may light in a generous heart, and reflect in the quietest face.
“You could do anything you meant to,” said Bella, marveling a little at the new beauty in her friend, “anything. But this—you’d have to be very brave to go on such a—”
“No, I wouldn’t. Ilongto go.”
No great surprise to Bella after all, this admission that Hildegarde, the reticent, the cold, was really burning with all sorts of eagerness that had never been suffered expression.
But there was something more here to-night. Like many another, Hildegarde could have gone through hardship and suffering for the sake of any one she loved, but the look on her face as she sat there under the light, revealed the fact that this journey Bella shrank from even thinking of, that Hildegarde herself had called “appalling,” made yet its own strange appeal to the girl, apart from love of her father, independent of the joy of service.
“You think if I did it, it would be because I’m brave and a good daughter, and things like that. No, it’s none of those things. It’s because, while other people have been going to New York and to Mexico, to Londonand to Paris, and—and—the farthest places, while they traveled north, south, east, west, I’ve sat here in this little house in Valdivia, and sewed and planted a garden and heard everybody else saying good-by, and listened to that woman over the way playing ‘Partant pour la Syrie,’ and have still stayed here, and sewed, and gardened, and onlyheardabout the world. I’ve done it long enough! I’m going to the North, too!” Hildegarde stood up with eyes that looked straight forward into space. A movement from the other seemed to bring the would-be traveler back. “If anybody will help me,” she said, turning her eyes on Bella’s face.
The younger girl was on her feet. In the silence the two moved toward each other. Bella lifted her arms and threw them about Hildegarde’s neck. “I’ve told you I’ll help you.”
“I love you very much already, but if you’d do that for me—” The shining eyes pieced out the broken phrase.
Bella turned her graceful little head toward the dining-room door. Cheviot had raised his voice. But they couldn’t hear the words.
“There’s only one thing”—Bella spoke in a whisper—“just think a moment; all those hundreds of miles with a dog team over the ice, in an arctic winter. If anybody else had done such a thing we should never have heard the last of it. The world wouldn’t be long in having another book on heroism in high latitudes. But we all knowthatman”—she moved her head in the direction of the voice—“we’ll never hear of it again. He’s done that gigantic journey just for you,”—Hildegarde disengaged herself—“and to be with you again.And here you are planning to go away. It isn’t my business, but I think you’ll be making a terrible mistake, Hildegarde, if you—”
Her friend turned from her with unusual abruptness.
“He’s nicer than ever,” Bella persisted. “He’s charming. I always said so.”
“And I always said”—Hildegarde stopped and looked at Bella with an odd intentness. “You’re a nicer girl than you used to be.”
“Thank you,” said the other, smiling faintly, but she saw that she had failed.
“And I don’t mean because you’re willing to help me in this.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’d be only one thing that could prevent my letting you lend me the money.”
“Well, you certainly needn’t worry about paying it back.”
“It would take two or three years, but that could be managed now that Trenn and Harry want to give me an allowance. It isn’t that.”
Bella waited wondering.
“It is that I couldn’t take a great, great help from you, and go so far away, carrying anything in my heart that—that I’d kept hid—anything that concerned you.”
A quick fear leapt into Bella’s face.
“For one mightn’t come back, you know,” the other added.
“There’s only one thing we’ve never straightened out,” said Bella, “and that’smytangle.”
“I have my share in the thing, I mean. But as I said,you couldn’t do now—what you did—when you were little.”
“Oh!” Bella drew a sharp breath of relief. “When I was little I know I was a beast.”
“You told Louis Cheviot about the altar, and the patron saint; about—”
“Yes,” said Bella hastily. “It was pretty mean of me, but I was only twelve.”
“It wasn’t only when you were twelve.” Gratitude, common prudence, should have bridled Hildegarde’s tongue, but there was something of the judgment day about this hour. Hearts must needs be opened and secrets known. “It was after,” she went on, driven by this new necessity to leave nothing hidden if she was to take Bella’s help, “it was six years after—when you were eighteen. You had gone away knowing quite well how—how I was feeling about—You knew how I was feeling. Yet you could write pretty heartlessly, considering all things. That gay letter about your engagement. You could write with that insincere air of expecting me to be as happy as you were.”
“You surely see it would have been unpardonable of me to have sympathized with you. Ihadto assume you didn’t care. You would have done the same.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
Bella looked at her. “That’s true,” she said, quite low. “You would have shown that you were sorry for me, even in the middle of being happy yourself. You could have done it and not hurt. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. The nearest I could come to it was just to pretend I thought you’d got over it—that you didn’t care any longer.”
They looked at each other a moment without speaking. Bella with quivering face glided forward.
“Dearest, dearest”—she took Hildegarde’s hand, she caught it to her breast. “You aren’t going to let him—the Other—spoiltwolives!”
“At least I’m ready to risk what’s sure to happen.”
“What’s sure to happen?”
“His coming while I’m away.” Hildegarde flung out the words with a passion Bella had never seen in her before. “Yes, that’s what will happen. I shall have waited for him at home here all my lifetillthis summer. And this summer, while I’m gone, he’ll come to Valdivia. You’ll see! He’ll come.”
No prevision of Hildegarde’s as to Cheviot’s disapproval of her plan approached the degree to which he fought against her going to the North.
Mrs. Mar, secretly dismayed at her husband’s willingness to stay away indefinitely, was not ill-content for once to see the “stolid Hildegarde” stirred to action. It satisfied a need in the mother, that the daughter had never ministered to before. Hildegarde was the sort of girl who could take excellent care of herself, and her health was superb. She had no important concerns such as the boys had to chain them at home. She was not the mother of a family, nor even president of the Shakspere Society. The welfare of the Hindus would be wholly unaffected by her departure. The journey was quite unlike that terrible one involved in going to the Klondike. It could be made in a comfortable ship; the whole of it by sea. Her mother would go with her to the steamer, and Hildegarde would stay on board till her father met her at the Alaskan port.
But they had all reckoned without Cheviot.
He refused to take the idea seriously at first, and when he did—oh, he was serious enough then!
“The maddest scheme that ever entered a sane head!” Hildegarde had no conception of what such a journeywas like. The ships were the most uncomfortable in the world. Freight boats, with no accommodation for women. The food appalling. The company—oh, it didn’t even bear talking about!
But Cheviot did talk of it, to Bella, when he discovered her complicity, and so effectually he talked that she withdrew her support.
Hildegarde was speechless with indignation. What spell had he cast that Bella could “go back” on her word. Truly a thing to depend upon—Bella’s friendship.
“Oh, please try to understand. I was always frightened at the idea, even before Louis told me—”
“Why should you be frightened,” said Hildegarde sternly. “It isn’t as if I were a rescue party and my little journey were to the other side of the world. I shouldn’t sail from Norway, and I shouldn’t catch up with anybody in Franz Josef Land.”
“Hildegarde! You’ve never spoken to me like that before in your life.”
“No, I’ve never admitted before that you’d failed me.”
Bella, with flushed face, got up to leave the room. “You think I’m backing out only because of what Louis says. But I meant to tell you it would have been terrible to me to be responsible for your going, after what you said that night Louis came home.”
“What did I say?”
“That this summer, while you’re gone—”
“Well?”
“There will be news.”
“You mean from—”
“Yes,” Bella steeled herself. “As soon as I’d got you out of the way—”
Hildegarde winced; rather dreadful that she should have said that to Bella—too like what the average male critic would expect. “Did I sayyou, Bella? I only meant fate.”
“You were sure he would come this summer. Stay and see.”
“It’s only if I’m not here that John Galbraith will come.”
Hildegarde had a final interview with the arch culprit, Cheviot.
“I had no idea you could be like this,” she said, toward the close.
“Then it’s as well you should know.”
It ended in a breach. He came no more to the house. Hildegarde passed him in the street with lowered eyes.
And Bella had gone home.
The spring went creeping by.
Now June was gone. Even July. Still no news.
“You see,” said Hildegarde dully, “father isn’t coming back.”
August was waning—not even a letter. And from that other more terrible North, no syllable of the tidings, that to reach those two waiting in California, must come round by the old world, and all across the new.
“He is dead,” Hildegarde said to herself, and it was not of Nathaniel Mar that she was thinking.
The boys had generously sent their father both money and advice. He was recommended to use the sight drafton the Alaska Commercial Company, for the purpose of buying his home passage by the very next ship.
At last, when the season was drawing to a close—news!
Not that expected—but something no man had looked for.
Gold had been discovered in the sands of the Nome beach.
Men who had been stranded there—arriving too late for a claim on the creeks—a broken and ragged horde, were now persons of substance and of cheerful occupation, that of “rocking out” fifty to a hundred dollars a day upon the beach at Nome. The gold was not here alone, but under the moss and the coarse grass of the tundra. It clung to the roots when you pulled up the sedgy growths. It was everywhere. What was the contracted little valley of the Klondike compared to this!
“The greatest of all the new world gold-fields has been found. A region, vaster than half a dozen Eastern States, sown broadcast with gold-dust and nuggets. Easy to reach and easy to work.”
Here was the poor man’s country. If you didn’t want to rock out a fortune for yourself, you could earn fifteen dollars a day working for others.
“The beach for miles is lined with miners’ tents. Anvil City (hereafter to be called Nome) is booming.“Building lots that six months ago were worth nothing, to-day bring thousands of dollars.“Where a year ago was only a bare, wind-swept beach on Bering Sea—one of the most desolate places to be found on earth and beside which the Yukon country hasa fine climate—there is to-day a city of several thousand people, surrounded by the richest placer-diggings the world has seen.”
“The beach for miles is lined with miners’ tents. Anvil City (hereafter to be called Nome) is booming.
“Building lots that six months ago were worth nothing, to-day bring thousands of dollars.
“Where a year ago was only a bare, wind-swept beach on Bering Sea—one of the most desolate places to be found on earth and beside which the Yukon country hasa fine climate—there is to-day a city of several thousand people, surrounded by the richest placer-diggings the world has seen.”
The gold-laden miners returning to Seattle by the last boats of the autumn, told the reporters with a single voice, “The world has known nothing like Cape Nome.”
Tongues went trumpeting the mighty news, pens flew to set it down, and telegraph operators flicked the tidings from one end of the earth to the other.
The word “Nome,” that had meant nothing for so long to any man but Mar—it became a syllable of strangest portent; stirring imaginations that had slept before, heralding hope to despairing thousands, setting in motion a vast machinery of ships and of strange devices, and of complicated human lives.
New lines of steamships bought up every craft that could keep afloat; companies were formed to exploit the last new gold-saving device; men who had fallen out of the ranks, returned to the struggle saying, “After all, there’s Nome!”
“And this is the moment Mr. Mar will naturally choose for turning his back on the North.” It was so that his wife successfully masked her secret anxiety for his return. It was as if she resented so sorely her growing uneasiness about him—fought so valiantly against the slow-dawning consciousness of the share she had in his exile, that she must more than ever veil secret self-criticism by openly berating him. Above all she must disguise the impatience with which she awaited his return “this autumn, at the latest.” “Now,” she would say, “now that even he couldn’t fail to make a goodthing by staying, he—oh, yes, to be sure,he’llcome hustling home!” If only she had been the man!
One of the last boats brought a letter. Therewasgold in the beach sand, Mar wrote, but every inch was being worked over and over, and its richness had been exaggerated. The place was overrun with the penniless and the desperate. The United States military post established there was powerless to maintain law and order. Drunkenness, violence, crime, were the order of the day. The beach was a strange and moving spectacle.
“Spectacle! He goes and looks on!” was Mrs. Mar’s way of disguising her dismay. He returned the boys’ money, “since it was sent for a purpose so explicit.” He was “staying in.”
Other letters, brought by the same steamer, told what Mr. Mar had omitted to mention: that typhoid fever was at work as well as those gold-diggers on the famous beach.
Men were dying like flies.
The third winter came down, and the impregnable ice walls closed round “the greatest gold-camp on the globe.”
“Typhoid! Even if he escapes the fever, he will stay up there till he dies, unless—” Hildegarde was glad she had not yet bought anything for the coming season. In spite of her brothers’ allowance she would become a miser—hoarding every coin that came her way. She would make her old gowns do, even without Bella’s transforming fingers. She thought twice even about spending car fare. To eke out her resources she would sell Bella’s beautiful presents, and the first boat thatwent north in the spring should carry Hildegarde to her father—or to his grave.
It was gray business waiting for this first summer of the century. What news might one expect from a man lost four years ago between Norway and Franz Josef Land? What from that other in the nearer-by North, where men dug gold and fought typhoid? What fatality was it that made of all hope and all desire a magnetic needle? Hildegarde remembered how Bella, to the question, “Why do you suppose there’s this mania among us for the North?” had answered, “I don’t know, unless it is that we have the South at home. Perhaps Hudson Bay people and Finlanders dream of the tropics. I don’t know. But I’ve heard nothing so afflicts a Canadian as hearing his country called ‘Our Lady of the Snows.’ I think there never was such a beautiful name. But it may be because I live with orange blossoms all about me.”
Certainly it was harder waiting without Bella. Together each year they had hoped for news. Now apart, they feared it.
Oddly enough, what helped Hildegarde through the heavy time was the establishment of an understanding, half incredulous, wholly unavowed, between her and her mother. It appeared she had Mrs. Mar on her side—else why did that lady save up every newspaper reference to the new gold-camp to read aloud as Hildegarde sat at her sewing. The most transcendent classic ever penned would be put aside for—