X
SHE heard her husband’s voice as he entered the house, and hastily changed her walking suit for one of the soft tea gowns she wore when they were alone. This was a simple thing of a Copenhagen-blue silk, with a guimpe of fine white net, and trimmed about the neck and half sleeves with the newest and softest of the year’s laces. She noticed with some satisfaction that her neck, below the collar line, was very white; and she suddenly covered the rest of it with powder, then rubbed the puff over her face. It was ordinary “baby powder” for the bath, for she never had indulged in toilet accessories, but it answered its purpose, if only to demonstrate what she might have been had she safeguarded the gifts of nature. And the dull blue gown was suddenly becoming.
Her husband, who had spent the intervening time in the library, ran upstairs whistling in spite of his girth—he was the lightest dancer in Butte—and knocked on her door before going to his own room.
“Say,” he said, as he chucked her under the chin, and kissed her maritally, “but you look all right. Run down stairs and hold your breath until I’ve made myself beautiful. I’ve got big news for you.”
She rustled softly down the stair, wondering what the news might be, but not unduly interested. Mark was always excited over his new cases. Perhaps he had been retained by Amalgamated. She hoped so. He deserved it, for he worked harder than anyone knew. And she liked him sincerely, quite without mitigation now that the years had taught him the folly of being in love with her.
And he certainly had given her a pretty home. The house was not large enough to be pointed out by the conductor of the “Seeing Butte Car,” but it had been designed by a first rate architect, and had a certain air of spaciousness within. Mrs. Stratton had furnished a flat in Paris two years before her husband’s death, her excusebeing that the interior of the Butte house got on her nerves, and there was no other way to take in household goods free of duty. Ora had shipped them when the news of her father’s death and their own poverty came, knowing that she would get a better price for the furniture in Butte, where someone always was building, than in Paris.
Before it arrived she had made up her mind to marry Mark Blake, and although it was several years before they had a house she kept it in storage. In consequence her little drawing-room with its gay light formal French furniture was unique in Butte, city of substantial and tasteful (sometimes) but quite unindividual homes. Mark was thankful that he was light of foot, less the bull in the china shop than he looked, and would have preferred red walls, an oriental divan and Persian rugs. He felt more at home in the library, a really large room lined from floor to ceiling not only with Ora’s but Judge Stratton’s books, which Mark had bought for a song at the auction; and further embellished with deep leather chairs and several superb pieces of carved Italian furniture. Ora spent the greater part of her allowance on books, and many hours of her day in this room. But tonight she deliberately went into the frivolous French parlour, turned on all the lights, and sat down to await her husband’s reappearance.
Mark, who had taken kindly to the idea of dressing for dinner, came running downstairs in a few moments.
“In the doll’s house?” he called out, as he saw the illumination in the drawing-room. “Oh, come on into a real room and mix me a cocktail.”
“It isn’t good for you to drink cocktails so long before eating; Huldah, who receives ‘The People’s War Cry’ on Monday, informed me that dinner would be half an hour late.”
“I wish you’d chuck that wooden-faced leaden-footed apology for a servant. This is the third time——”
“And get a worse? Butte rains efficient servants! Please sit down. I—feellike this room tonight. You may smoke.”
“Thanks. I believe this is the first time you have given me permission. But I’m bound to say the room suits you.”
Ora sat in achaise-longueof the XVmeSiècle, a piece of furniture whose awkward grace gives a woman’s arts full scope. Much exercise had preserved the natural suppleness of Ora’s body and she had ancestral memories of all arts and wiles. Mark seated himself on the edge of a stiff little sofa covered with faded Aubusson tapestry, and hunched his shoulders.
“If the French women furnish their rooms like this I don’t believe all that’s said about them,” he commented wisely. “Men like to be comfortable even when they’re looking at a pretty woman.”
“Mama let me choose the furniture for this room, and I wasn’t thinking much about your sex at the time. I—I think it expressed a side of me that I wasn’t conscious of then.”
“It’s a pretty room all right.” Mark lit the consolatory cigarette. “But not to sit in. What struck you tonight?”
“Oh, I’d been thinking of Paris.”
Mark’s face was large and round and bland; it was only when he drew his brows together that one saw how small and sharp his eyes were.
“H’m. I’ve wondered sometimes if you weren’t hankering after Europe. I suppose it gets into the blood.”
“Oh, yes, it gets into the blood!” Ora spoke lightly, but she was astonished at his insight.
“I’ve never been able to send you—not as you were used to going—I don’t see you doing anything on the cheap——”
“Oh, my dear Mark, you are goodness itself. I’ve thought very little about it, really.”
“Suppose you found yourself suddenly rich, would you light out and leave me?”
“We’d go together. It would be great fun being your cicerone.”
“No chance! I’m going to be a rich man inside the next ten years, and here I stick. And I don’t see myself travelling on a woman’s money, either. But I suppose you’d be like all the rest if you could afford it?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Of course I look forward to spending a year in Europe once more—I’d hardly be human if I didn’t. But I can wait for you.”
“I’ve always admired your philosophy,” he said grimly. “And now I’ve got a chance to put it to a real test. I believeyou are in a way, if not to be rich, at least to make a pretty good haul.”
“What do you mean?” Ora sat up straight.
“Your father made a good many wild-cat investments when he first came out here, and the one he apparently thought the worst, for I found no mention of it among his papers, was the Oro Fino Primo mine, which he bought from a couple of sharks in the year you were born—that’s where you got your name, I guess. One of the men was a well known prospector and the Judge thought he was safe. The ore assayed about eighty dollars a ton, so he took over the claim, paid the Lord knows how much to the prospector, who promptly lit out, had it patented, and set a small crew to work under a manager. They found nothing but low grade ore, which in those days roused about as much enthusiasm as country rock. The mine had been salted, of course. It was some time before your father would give up, and he spent more than the necessary amount of money to perfect the patent; always hoping. When he was finally convinced there was nothing in it he quit. And it was characteristic of your father that when he quit he quit for good. He simply dismissed the thing from his mind. Well, times have changed since then. New processes and more railroads have caused fortunes to be made out of low grade ore when there is enough of it. Some people would rather have a big lode of low grade ore than a pockety vein of rich quartz. As you know, abandoned mines are being leased all over the state, and abandoned prospect holes investigated. Well, there you are. This morning two mining engineers from New York came into my office with a tale of woe. They came out here to look about, and after considerable travel within a reasonable distance of railroads found an old prospect hole with a shaft sunk about fifty feet. It looked abandoned all right, but as the dump was still there and they liked the looks of it they went to the De Smet ranch house—the hole is just over the border of Greg’s ranch—and made inquiries. Oakley, who is a monomaniac on the subject of intensive farming and doesn’t know a mine from a gopher hole, told them that the adjacent land belonged to no one but the government. So they staked their claim, recorded it in Virginia City, retimbered the shaft and sank it twenty feet deeper. They began to take outore that looked good for fifteen dollars a ton. Then along comes an old prospector and tells them the story of the mine. They leave their two miners on the job and post up to Helena to have the records examined in the Land Office. There, sure enough, they find that the mine was duly patented by Judge Stratton, and all of the government requirements complied with. So they come to me. They want a bond and lease for three years—which means they may have the privilege of buying at the end of the lease—and offer you ten per cent. on the net proceeds. I haven’t given them my answer yet, for I’m going to take Greg out there next Sunday and have a look at it. There was a sort of suppressed get-rich-quickishness in their manner, and their offer was not what you would call munificent. Greg is a born geologist, to say nothing of his training. I don’t mean so much in the School of Mines, but he was always gophering about with old prospectors, and ran away into the mountains several times when his father was alive. Never showed up all summer. He’s at ore now every spare moment he gets, and is as good an assayer as there is in the state. If there’s mineral on his own ranch he’ll find it, and if there isn’t he’ll find it elsewhere. So, I do nothing till he’s looked the property over. But in any case I think I can promise you a good lump of money.”
Ora’s breath was short. Her face had been scarlet for a few moments but now showed quite pale under the tan and powder. When her husband finished, however, and she replied, “How jolly,” her voice was quite steady.
“And shall you fly off and leave me if it pans out?”
“Of course not. What do you take me for?”
“To tell you the truth it will mean a good deal to me if you stay until the fall. I’ve a client coming out here from New York whom I am trying to persuade to buy the old Iron Hat mine. There’s a fortune in it for anyone with money enough to spend rebuilding the old works and putting in new machinery and timbers; and a big rake-off for me, if I put the deal through. Well, this client figures to bring his wife and daughter, and you could help me a lot—persuade them they’d have the time of their lives if they spent several months of every year out here for a while—he’s a domestic sort of man. After that take a flyer if you like. You deserve it.”
“How nice of you! Here is dinner at last.” Ora felt almost physically sick, so dazzling had been the sudden prospect of deliverance, followed by the certainty, even before her husband asked for the diplomatic assistance she so often had given him, that she could not take advantage of it. Noblesse oblige! For the moment she hated her watchword.
She mixed a cocktail with steady hand. “I’ll indulge in a perfect orgie of clothes!” she said gaily. “And import a chef. By the way,” she added, as she seated herself at the table and straightened the knives and forks beside her plate, “what do you think I let myself in for today?”
“Not been speculating? There’s a quart of Worcestershire in this soup.”
“I’ll certainly treat you to a chef. No, not speculating—I wonder if it mightn’t be that? I called on your friend’s wife——”
“Good girl! She’s not your sort, but she’s Greg’s wife——”
“I thought she was quite terrible at first, but I soon became interested. She’s clever in her way, ignorant as she is, and has individuality. Before I knew it I had offered to take a hand in her education——”
“Good lord! What sort of a hand?”
“Oh, just showing her my portfolios, giving her some idea of art. It sounds very elemental, but one must begin somewhere. She knows so little that it will be like teaching a child a b c.”
“I’m afraid it will bore you.”
“No, I like the idea. It is something new, and change is good for the soul. I have an idea that I shall continue to find her as interesting as I intend she shall find the ‘lessons’.”
“She’ll get more than lessons on art. She’ll get a good tone down, and she needs that all right. Poor old Greg! He deserved the best and he got Ida Hook. I tried to head him off but I might as well have tried to head off a stampede to a new gold diggings. He ought to have married a lady, that’s what.”
Ora glanced up quickly, then, thankful that her husband was intent upon his carving, dropped her eyes. It was the first time he had ever hinted at the differences of class. In his boyhood there had been a mighty gulf between hismother and the haughty Mrs. Stratton who employed her in what was then the finest house in Butte. But he was too thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the West, in which he had spent his life, to recognise any difference in class save that which was determined by income. As soon as his own abilities, industry, and the turn of Fortune’s wheel, placed him in a position to offer support to the two dainty women that had been his ideals from boyhood, he knew himself to be their equal, without exhausting himself in analysis.
As for Ora, the West was quick in her blood, in spite of her heritage and education. Her father had assumed the virtue of democracy when he settled in Montana. In the course of a few years a genuine liking and enthusiasm for his adopted state, as well as daily associations, transformed him into as typical a Westerner as the West ever turned out of her ruthless crucible. He even wore a Stetson hat when he visited New York. His wife’s “airs” had inspired him with an increasing disgust which was one of the most honest emotions of his life, and the text of his repeated warnings to his daughter, whom he was forced to leave to the daily guidance of his legal wife (Ora’s continued presence in Butte, would, in truth, have caused him much embarrassment), had been to cherish her Western birthright as the most precious of her possessions.
“Remember this is the twentieth century,” he had written to her not long before his death. “There is no society in the world today that cannot be invaded by a combination of money, brains, and a certain social talent—common enough. The modern man, particularly in the United States, makes himself. His ancestors count for nothing, if he doesn’t. If he does they may be a good asset, for they (possibly) have given him breeding ready-made, moral fibre, and a brain of better composition than the average man of the people can expect. But that is only by the way. The two most potent factors in the world today are money and the waxing, rising, imperishable democratic spirit. That was reborn out here in the West, and the West is invading and absorbing the East. The old un-American social standards of the East are expiring in the present generation, which resort to every absurdity to maintain them; its self-consciousness betraying its recognition of the inevitable. Twenty years hence this class will be, ifstill clinging to its spar, as much of a national joke as the Western women were when they first flashed their diamonds in Peacock Alley. That phase, you may notice, is so dead that the comic papers have forgotten it. The phase was inevitable, but our women are now so accustomed to their money that they are not to be distinguished from wealthy women anywhere except that their natural hospitality and independence make them seem more sure of themselves. Of course the innately vulgar are to be found everywhere, and nowhere more abundantly than in New York.
“Twenty years from now, the West will have overrun the East; it will have helped itself with both hands to all the older civilisation has to give, and it will have made New York as democratic as Butte—or London! So don’t let yourself grow up with any old-fashioned nonsense in your head. I want you to start out in life modern to the core, unhampered by any of the obsolete notions that make your mother and most of our relations a sort of premature has-beens. When your time comes to marry, select a Western man who either has made his own fortune or has the ability to make it. Don’t give a thought to his origin if his education is good, and his manners good enough. You can supply the frills. I wouldn’t have you marry a man that lacked the fundamentals of education at least, but better that than one whose brain is so full of old-fashioned ideas that it has no room for those that are born every minute. And I hope you will settle here in this state and do something for it, either through the abilities of the man you marry or with your own. It isn’t only the men that build up a new state. And if you marry a foreigner never let me see nor hear from you again. They are all very well in their way, but it is not our way.”
Ora, who had worshipped her father and admired him above all men, never forgot a word he uttered, and knew his letters by heart. Possibly it was the memory of this last of his admonitions which had enabled her to sustain the shock of a proposal from the son of her mother’s old seamstress and of a miner who had died in his overalls underground. It is doubtful if she would have been conscious of the shock had it not been for Mrs. Stratton’s lamentations. That lady from her sofa in one of the humbler Blocks, had sent wail after wail in the directionof the impertinent aspirant. Ora, during the brief period in which she made her decision, heard so much about the “bluest blood of the South,” and the titled foreigners whom she apparently could have had for the accepting when she was supposed to belong to the Millionaire Sisterhood, that she began to ponder upon the violent contrasts embodied in Mark with something like rapture. After the marriage was accomplished, Mrs. Stratton had the grace to wail in solitude, and shortly after moved on to a world where only the archangels are titled and never have been known to marry. Ora had not given the matter another thought. Mark had been carefully brought up by a refined little woman, his vicious tendencies had been negligible, and he was too keen to graduate from the High School and make his start in life to waste time in even the milder forms of dissipation. When he married he adapted himself imperceptibly to the new social world he entered; if not a Beau Brummel, nor an Admirable Crichton, he never would disgrace his aristocratic wife; and, unlike Judge Stratton, he wore a silk hat in New York.
His last remark apparently had been a mere vapour from his subconscious mind, for he went on as soon as he had taken the edge from his appetite, “Perhaps Ida Hook can be made into one. I’ve seen waitresses and chambermaids metamorphosed by a million or two so that their own husbands wouldn’t recognise them if they stayed away too long. But it takes time, and Ida has an opinion of herself that would make an English duchess feel like a slag dump. Say—do you know it was through me Greg met her? It was that week you were out on the Kelley ranch. I met two or three of the old crowd on the street and nothing would do but that I should go to their picnic for the sake of old times. Greg was in town and I persuaded him to come along. Didn’t want to, but I talked him over. Guess there’s no escaping our fate. Possibly I couldn’t have corralled him if it hadn’t been for reaction—he’d been whooping it up on The Flat. Well, I wished afterward that I’d left him to play the wheel and all the rest of it for a while longer. Greg never loses his head—that is to say he never did till he met Ida Hook. The sporting life never took a hold on him, for while he went in for it with the deep deliberation that was born in him, it’s just that deliberation that saves him from going too far. He cutsloose the minute he figured out beforehand to cut loose, and all the king’s horses—or all the other attractions—couldn’t make him put in another second. A girl shot herself one night out at the Five Mile House because he suddenly said good-bye and turned on his heel. She knew he meant it. He never even turned round when he heard her drop——”
“What a brute!”
“Greg? Not he. I’ve known him to sit up all night with a sick dog——”
“I hate people that are kind to animals and cruel to one another.”
“Greg isn’t cruel. He said he was going and he went; that’s all. It’s his way. Girls of that kind are trash, anyhow, and when a woman goes into the sporting life she knows enough to take sporting chances.”
“You are as bad as he.”
Mark stared at her in open-eyed amazement. He never had seen her really roused before. “Don’t you bother your dear little head,” he said soothingly. “Angels like you don’t know anything about that sort of life—and don’t need to.”
Ora’s anger vanished in laughter. “Well, suppose you give me a hint about his wife. I really am interested, and delighted at the prospect of being of some use in the world.”
“You’re all right! Ida—well, I guess you’ll do a lot for her, by just having her round. She’s no fool—and she certainly is a looker. If you tone her down and polish her up I’ll feel it’s a sort of favour to myself. Greg’ll be one of the richest men in this country some day,—if he has to walk over a few thousand fellow citizens to get there—and I don’t want to see him queered by a woman. Seen that before.”
“I intend to do my best, but for her sake, not his——”
“Say!” It was patent that Mark had an inspiration. “Why not take Ida with you to Europe? I don’t like the idea of a dainty little thing like you” (Ora was five feet six) “travelling alone, and a husky girl like Ida could take care of you while putting on a few coats of European polish. Greg can afford it; he must have cleared a good many thousands on his ranch during the last two years, besides what I’ve turned over for him; and he can livehere with me and get all the comforts of home. I’ll let you off for six months. What do you say?”
Ora was looking at him with pink cheeks and bright eyes. “You are sure you won’t mind?”
“I’ll miss you like fun, of course; especially when you look as pretty as you do this minute, but I think it would be a good thing for you and better for Ida—and I’ll fire this cook.”
“Will Mr. Compton give his consent?”
“No one on God’s earth would take chances on what Gregory Compton would do until he had done it, but I don’t mind throwing a guess that he could live without Ida for six months and not ask me to dry his tears. And there isn’t a mean bone in his body.”
“It would interest me immensely to take Mrs. Compton abroad. Now hurry if you expect to get a seat at one of the bridge tables. It is late——”
“I rather thought I’d like to stay and talk to you——”
“How polite of you! But I’m tired out and going straight to bed. So toddle along.”