VII
THE next week was the busiest she had ever known. All the people that had called on her called again on Ora. Her cook collapsed when told to prepare a dinner for twenty-eight people, and Ida, who would not hearken to a public caterer and his too familiar idiosyncrasies, telegraphed to St. Paul for a chef. What moments she had to spare after consultations with this autocrat, with a temperamental designer of menu cards, and with two high-handed young women whom she had been persuaded by the charitable Mrs. Cameron to engage to decorate her rooms, were spent with certain works on copper and mining that she had procured from the public library.
She looked forward to the evening of her dinner party with a secret excitement that seemed to fork its lightning into every recess of her brain, and electrify it with a sense of the fulness of life—that hinted intoxicatingly of life’s perfections. Not only was she to live the wildest dream of Ida Hook, but she had made up her mind to bring the most important man in Montana to her feet on that triumphant night. That the man was her husband, won the first time without an effort, lost through her own indifference and ignorance, added tenfold to the zest of the game. She knew the impression he must retain of her: crude, obvious in her sex allurement, cheaply dressed, a sort of respectable mining-camp siren; all her fascinations second-rate, and her best points in the eyes of an absent-minded husband her good-natured mothering and admirable cooking.
If she had returned to find him as she had left him, a mere brilliant hard-working student, and automatically attentive to his home partner, no doubt she would have slipped into her original rôle at once, for she was normally amiable, and she had strict ideas of wifely duties, which her insistent vanity and deliberate flirtations never for a moment endangered. They also filled the practical wants ofa nature not derived from artistic ancestors. She had had her “flyer”, and, allowing for social triumphs, returned to Butte to settle down; although it had been with a certain complacency that she had reflected during the homeward journey upon the altered circumstances which would enable her to live like a civilised being in her own apartments and see far less of her husband than formerly.
Her complacency had been treated to a succession of shocks since her return; it had, in fact, finally gasped out its life; although it had left self-confidence behind to sit at the feet of her shrewd clear mind. She found a zest entirely new in bringing to his knees a man who had been her husband when she was too raw and conceited to appreciate him, who had developed into a personage, and who had conquered his mere maleness and put women out of his life: she had consulted a detective agency and convinced herself that her only rival was the mine. Ida was nothing if not practical. Before preparing for her siege she chose to know exactly where she stood. A rival of her sex would have demanded one sort of tactics; a mere mine and the quickened business instinct of a dreaming but outclassing brain, although she did not underrate their peculiar dead walls and buffers, exacted a different and more impersonal assault—at first.
Much that she had failed to understand in her young husband was clear to her now. His silences, his formidable powers of concentration, his habit of thinking out his purposes unto the smallest detail before verbal expression, his tendency to dream, combined with lightning processes of thought, were the indispensable allies of his peculiar gifts: she had talked with too many brilliant and active men during the past year, to say nothing of her daily association with Ora, for whose inherited and progressive intellect she had the highest respect, and her own development had been too positive, rapid, and normal, not to be fully aware that men born with the genius to conquer life were equipped with powerful imaginations that necessarily made them silent thinkers.
She had become intensely proud of her husband since her return, and his neglect, coupled with his scrupulous generosity, had stung her pride and aroused both desire and determination to recapture what she had lost. She had no great faith in her capacity for love; but not onlywas she fascinated by Gregory for the first time but she found him more worthy of her accomplished coquetry than any man she had met in Europe. She was firm in her resolve to repossess her husband, but not merely to satisfy that pride which was the evolution of a more primitive vanity; she felt a certain joyousness, a lilt of the spirit, at the thought of spending her life with him, of being the complete helpmate of such a man; even a disposition to dream, which was so new in her experience that she banished it with a frown. “If I let go like other fool women, I’ll make a grand mess of it,” was her characteristic reflection.
She was dressing for the dinner when she heard him enter the house. The parlour maid for once remembered her instructions, and led him up to his room, which was on the opposite side of the hall from his wife’s and at the extreme end. Her door was ajar, she heard his voice—whose depth and richness were decimated by the telephone—his light foot ascending the stair. For the moment she lost her breath, then with an angry jerk of the shoulders regained her poise, and, in tones careless enough to reassure any husband suddenly overwhelmed with the awkwardness of his position, called out:
“Good evening, Gregory. Hope you’ll find everything you want in your room. Ring if you don’t. See you downstairs.”
“Oh—thanks!” Gregory swallowed an immense sigh of relief. “I’ll be on time.”
Ida, assisted by the “upstairs girl”—she had not yet found a ladies’ maid willing to come to Butte—continued her toilette. Her gown was as nearly Renaissance as she thought her native Northwest would stand at this stage of her social progress. It was “built”—a word more appropriate to woman’s dressA.D.1600 than today—of heavy turquoise-blue brocade, the design outlined here and there with gold thread. The long wrinkled sleeves almost covered her hands, and, like the deep square of the neck, were tipped with fur. Her mass of blue-black hair was closely twisted around her head from brow to the nape of her neck, held above the low forehead by a jewelled stiletto Ora had given her in Genoa, “to remind her of her midnight diversions in the Renaissance palace over which her dim ancestral memories brooded.” This she had dismissedas damn nonsense, but she liked the stiletto with its rudely set stones, and had promised to wear it the first time she got inside one of her near-Renaissance gowns.
The pale subtle blue of the dress made her eyes look light and altogether blue, the thick black underlashes and full white underlids giving them an expression when in repose of cold voluptuousness. Her skin against the dark edge of fur was as white as warm new milk. Her costume and her regal air would have made her noticeable in the proudest assemblage. She was well aware that not only was she a very beautiful woman tonight but a dangerous one. And she might have stepped from one of the tarnished frames in the Palazzo Valdobia.
After the maid had been dismissed, she examined herself even more critically. The coral of lip and cheek, while still eloquent of youth and health, was more delicate than of old; all suggestion of buxomness had disappeared. She looked older than when she had left Butte; the casual observer would have given her thirty years; her cheeks were less full, her mouth had firmer lines; the cold grey-blue eyes more depth, justified their classic setting. Even her profile, released by the finer contour of cheek and thrown into high relief by the severe arrangement of her hair, contributed to the antique harmonies of her head and form.
“You’ll do,” she said to her image, and went down stairs.
Several guests arrived at once and she was standing before her antique English chimneypiece carved in California, chatting with three of them when Gregory entered the room. She nodded amiably as if they had met too recently for formalities. He took the cue and paused to exchange a few words with two men that stood near the door. But Ida had seen the startled opening of his narrow eyes which meant so much in him. She also noted that, as other guests came in, he looked at her again and again. In truth Gregory was startled almost out of his trained stolidity. He had known a certain side of Ida’s cleverness, and believed when he sent her abroad that she would make much of her opportunities, the greatest of which was her constant association with Ora Blake; but that she would return in less than a year looking the great lady, and the handsomest woman he had ever seen, evenhis energetic imagination had failed to consider. Magnetism, as of old, surrounded her like an aura, but to this he was insensible, his own magnetism having been caught and entangled with that of another. He felt very proud of his wife, however, and, with a sudden impulse of loyalty, he crossed the room and stood at her side. He also was prompted to say in a tone pitched to reach other ears:
“By George, you are simply stunning. I haven’t seen this—a—frock—dress—before.”
“Gown, my dear, gown. It only arrived a few days ago. I shall take you to Europe with me next time—”
“Take him soon!” said Mrs. Cameron. “Don’t give him time to wear out before he has begun to live. Our tired business men!”
“Next year!” said Ida, gayly. “He has half-promised and I’ll not let him off.” As she looked into his eyes with bright friendliness, his face relaxed with the smile which, she suddenly remembered, always had won her from anger or indifference. He was openly delighted with her, the more completely as he was both puzzled and relieved to see that those splendid eyes held neither cold anger nor feminine reproach. Moreover, although they softened for an instant before she was obliged to turn away, it was with an expression that made her look merely sweet and womanly, not in the least coquette or siren. Other guests claimed her attention. He heard her give a little hiss, and saw her eyes flash. Then he forgot her. Ora had entered the room.
Her gown, of some soft imponderable fabric that gave the impression of depth in colour, was the peculiar flaming blue of the night sky of Montana. Gregory was reminded instantly of the night they had sat on the steps of the School of Mines, with the pulsing sky so close above them. The upper part of the gown was cut in points that curved above her slight bust, the spaces between filled with snow-white chiffon which appeared to be folded softly about the body. She wore her pearls, but at the base of her slender throat was a closely fitting string of Montana sapphires, of the same hot almost angry blue. Her little head with its masses of soft ashen hair seemed to sway on the long stem-like neck, her stellar eyes blazed. Her costume extinguished every other blue in the room.
“Really!” said Mrs. Cameron, whose black eyes underher coronet of iron grey hair were snapping, “these two dear friends should have had a consultation over their costumes for tonight.” She had never liked Ora, and although, as the leader of Butte society, she made a point of speaking well of all whom she did not feel obliged to ignore, she had taken a deep liking to Ida; moreover, always a handsome woman herself, she felt both sympathetic and indignant. This was Ida’s night, and she scented treachery.
She had addressed her remark to Gregory, but although he looked at her politely he would not have heard thunder crashing on the roof. He wondered if he were standing erect; he had a confused impression that that wonderful blue gown was burning alcohol whose fumes were in his head and whose flames swirled through all his senses. And the woman within those curling blue flames was so much more beautiful than his memory of her that he forgot not only his recent tribute to Ida, but her bare existence until she tapped him sharply on the arm.
“Dinner has been announced,” she said. “You are to take in Mrs. Cameron.” Ida was smiling again; she had dismissed anger and annoyance; nothing was to dim the radiance of her spirits tonight. She and Ora would be at opposite ends of the table, and she could keep the length of the drawing-room between them when they returned.
Gregory’s face never betrayed him, particularly when he kept his eyelids down, and, as he shook hands with Ora in the dining-room he told her he was glad to see her again as casually as if his hand had not tingled to crush hers. He talked with Mrs. Cameron, however, as long as possible, but when her attention was claimed by the man on her right, he was obliged to turn to Ora. By this time his blood was still. Eating is commonplace work, and talking the inevitable platitudes of a dinner’s earlier courses will steady the most riotous pulses.
Ora smiled impersonally; her eyes might have beheld the husband of her friend for the first time.
“I am so glad to be able to ask you something about my mine,” she said. “Ida tells me that you have reopened it.”
“Yes, they are already through the fault and driving for the vein. There happened to be a good man here looking for a job when I got Mark’s telegram, a young engineerfrom the East, named Raymond. The miners are good capable men, too, and as Osborne and Douglas installed a compressor, the work should be pretty quick. I fancy you’ll recover the vein in a week or two.”
“I wonder if I shall? Mark thinks you infallible, but it seems too good to be true.”
“The vein is there, about a hundred feet down, but how rich it is I do not venture to predict.”
“Well, never mind,” Ora smiled happily. “I shall have the fun of looking for it, and I want to be with the men when they find it.”
“Oh—Ah—It really would be better for you to give up that idea of going out there to stay——”
“I thought I would give to you the opportunity to say that at once! Do go on and relieve your mind.”
“It is neither safe nor desirable,” he said sulkily. “I may have a row on my hands any minute. Your men and my men are a decent lot, but the Apex have employed a lot of scum so ignorant that there is no knowing what they may do in a crisis—in the hope of currying favour with their superiors. They would merely be made scapegoats or—canned—I beg pardon, fired—but they don’t know that, and they’re as hard a lot as Europe ever kicked on to our dump heap. Better stay here for the present.”
“I’ve sent out all the furniture for the bungalow, and Custer and a Chinaman to put it in order. I suppose my engineer can camp in the other cottage until it is finished. That is quite close to mine, I understand.”
“Oh, of course—but why not stay at my ranch house——”
“That is too far from the scene of operations. Please don’t bother about me. I should hate to think I was on your mind—you have enough! I shall be well protected, and I’ve even bought an automatic. I suppose being a born Westerner I should call it a gun. But it’s such a little one. I shall carry it always——”
“Yes, promise that.”
“I’ve even had a little bag made, like those they wore years ago, to fasten to my belt, and I shall keep it in that.”
“Very well.” He dismissed the subject. “I—ah—there’s something I heard today, but perhaps I should not speak of it. Only Mark is such an old friend of mine——”
“I suppose you saw Mr. Luning and he told you that we are to separate.”
“Yes, that is it.”
“I intend to live in Europe: I suppose you think that a callous reason.”
“It’s as good as most reasons for divorce in this country. When is Mark coming back?”
“Not for two months. Nothing will be done until then. I want to have my mining experience first and I shall leave Montana as soon as the papers are served.”
“Ah!”
Her partner claimed her at the moment and, his own still being occupied, he observed her furtively. He thought that she too looked older, but not because advantages had improved her; rather—he groped for the words that would give definiteness to his impression—as if some experience had saddened her. She had a softer expression. The blood rushed to his head and he almost choked with jealousy, his intuitions carrying him straight to the truth. “By God! She has loved some man,” he thought. Then he set his teeth. So much the better.
But when she turned to him again, he said impulsively, although his tones were light:
“You never did fit this Western life of ours. Of course you have found a more civilised mate in Europe?”
“You are all wrong,” she said gaily. “My only love at present is my mine. My mine! You should understand if anybody can.”
“Oh, yes, I understand that magnet. But I naturally thought——”
“What everybody else will think when the news is out. But I am astonished that you should jump at anything so commonplace.” Her heart was hammering under the concentrated intensity of his gaze; and as if he realised suddenly that he might be betraying himself he said sarcastically:
“As there are—I was told today—no less than six divorces pending in this set which my wife has the honour to entertain tonight, and as all are to intermarry, so to speak, when liberated, my conclusion in your case was probably due to the force of suggestion.”
“Well, I forgive you if you promise to believe none of the absurd stories you are sure to hear. I am in lovewith freedom. Now tell me what you think of Ida? Isn’t she wonderful?”
Gregory looked down the table at his wife sitting between the two most important men in Butte and entertaining both with animated dignity. She met his eyes and smiled brilliantly. She knew that he was proud of her; she had accomplished the second manœuvre in her flank attack: her first had been to put him at his ease.
“Yes,” he said to Ora. “She is. It is almost beyond belief. And she is your handiwork!” The two might have been life-long intimates, and Ida a mere kinswoman of both, so little did the oddity of this discussion occur to Gregory at least.
“And in a way my present to you.” Ora spoke with a charming graciousness. “Mark had given me a tremendous idea of your abilities. The day I met Ida I saw her possibilities, and I made up my mind then and there that when the world claimed you your wife should be not only an inspiration but equipped to render you the practical and social help that every rising man needs. Isn’t it splendid to think that she will always sit at the head of your table?”
Gregory was staring hard at her again. “You did that deliberately?” he asked.
“Yes. Deliberately. Ida is so clever that she was bound to develop with your rising fortunes, particularly if you sent her to Europe. But it would have taken longer. I couldn’t wait. My father inspired me with the deepest admiration and respect for our Western men. I had made up my mind that you were born into the front rank, and I wanted, as a Western woman, and my father’s daughter, to do something to help you. Tell me that you are satisfied and that you are as proud of Ida as she is of you—that—that—you simply adore her.” She did not flinch, and looked him straight in the eyes, her own full of young, almost gushing, enthusiasm. Her heart had almost stopped beating.
“I certainly am proud of her, and grateful to you. No doubt she will be very helpful if I am forced into politics to conserve my interests.” His tones were flat. He had come to his senses, and he was too loyal to hint that he no longer loved his wife: but Ora’s face was suddenly flooded with a lovely colour, and her eyes looked like grey mist through which the sun was bursting. She asked him,
“Aren’t you going to stay with us for a few days! We’d love to have you?”
“I take the 6.10 for Pony in the morning. If I disappear before the others it will be to snatch a few hours’ sleep in that gorgeous four-poster in my room. After living in two rooms for so long I am oppressed with all this magnificence——”
“Two rooms!” Ora’s voice rang out like an excited child’s. Gregory, marvelling at the quick transitions of her sex, thought he had never seen anyone look so happy. The gentle melancholy that had roused his jealousy was obliterated. “Two rooms!”
“There is another shack just beyond where my Chinaman cooks for me, and bunks, but I have only a bedroom and office—and a bathroom of sorts. Even my secretary sleeps at the ranch house.”
“You dear innocent millionaire. No doubt the proletariat, reading of your sudden wealth, and cursing you, pictures you wallowing in luxury. Well, you shall come and sit sometimes in my comfortable living-room. It is time you relearned the a, b, c, of comfort—before you relapse into the pioneer.”
“Your bungalow looks as if it could be made very homelike.” He spoke with unconscious wistfulness, and she raised friendly and impersonal eyes to his.
“You shall see. I have what the French call the gift of installation, and I have sent out nice things. I shall make tea for you when you come to the surface at the end of the afternoon shift, and you shall sit in the deepest of my chairs.”
“It sounds like heaven,” said Gregory, who despised tea.
Professor Becke, who had taken her in, and Mrs. Cameron simultaneously addressed their temporary partners, and Gregory was now to listen to an account, both spirited and kindly, of the admiration his wife had excited in her native town. Mrs. Cameron suspected the breach, in spite of the clever acting of both, and made up her mind to do what she could to bridge it. She had not an inkling of the cause, for, like Ida, she knew nothing of that fateful hour on the steps of the School of Mines; but as there was no gossip abroad about either Gregory or his wife, she inferred that it was one of those misunderstandings that sooften separate young couples, always prone to take themselves too seriously. She knew that Gregory would value her praise; he not only had been fond of her as a schoolboy, when he spent an occasional Saturday with her son, but he knew that her experience of the world was very wide. She was a woman whom long years of wealth had enabled to travel extensively, she visited intimately at some of the greatest country homes in Europe, and she had her own position in New York. She subtly made Gregory feel prouder still of Ida, and then said teasingly:
“It is well that you have her devotion. I know of three men that are quite off their heads about her——”
“Ah? Who are they?” A sultan may weary of his sultana, but his sultana she is all the same.
“That I’ll not tell you. Even your wife could not, I fancy. I’ve never seen a woman treat men with a more careless impartiality. What a relief—with all these divorces pending. Merely a shuffling of cards, too, I understand. It is disgusting. I asked your wife as a personal favour to me to invite none of them tonight. Butte either has long orgies of respectability or goes quite off her head.”
“My wife is singularly indifferent to men for a beautiful woman,” replied Gregory, comfortably ignorant of his beautiful wife’s depredations abroad. “Nor is she likely to countenance divorce. She has a good deal of her old New England mother in her.” He had a haughty contempt for explanations as a rule, but his quick instinct had caught the significance of his companion’s remarks; knowing that Ida must wish to stand well with this amiable but rigid arbiter of Butte’s court of last resort, he added:
“I am sorry not to be in Butte oftener, and give her what little assistance a man may, but it is all I can do to leave the mine for a few hours every week or two.”
“That is the fate of too many of our American women married to our too busy American men. But—well—Gregory—I have married sons and daughters, and I am an old friend of yours. Young wives must not be neglected, and resentment eats like a cancer until women are old enough to be philosophical. Just think that over.” And before he could answer Ida gave the signal and the men were left alone.