Part 20

And then one night, as he and Marie were lying on the cot pretending to sleep, he felt her crying. And taking her in his arms he had tried to unwish all the dark things he had wished, only apparently then it was too late. Something told him it was. It was as though in some dark mansion somewhere—some supernal court or hall of light or darkness—his prayer had been registered and answered, a decision made, and that that decision could not now be unmade. No. Into this shabby little room where they lay and where she was crying had come a final black emissary, scaled, knightly, with immense arms and wings and a glittering sword, all black, and would not leave until all this should go before him. Perhaps he had been a little deranged in his mind at the time, but so it had seemed.

And then, just a few weeks after he had seen the lights and a few days after Marie had cried so, Peter had died—poor weak little thing that he was—and, three days later, Frank. Those terrible hours! For by then he was feeling so strange and sad and mystical about it all that he could neither eat nor sleep nor weep nor work nor think. He had gone about, as indeed had Marie, in a kind of stupor of misery and despair. True, as he now told himself—and then too, really,—he had not loved the children with all the devotion he should have or he would never have had the thoughts he had had—or so he had reasoned afterward. Yet then as now he suffered because of the love he should have given them, _and had not_—and now could not any more, save in memory. He recalled how both boys looked in those last sad days, their pinched little faces and small weak hands! Marie was crushed, and yet dearer for the time being than ever before. But the two children, once gone, had seemed the victims of his own dark thoughts as though his own angry, resentful wishes had slain them. And so, for the time, his mood changed. He wished, if he could, that he might undo it all, go on as before with Marie, have other children to replace these lost ones in her affection—but no. It was apparently not to be, not ever any more.

For, once they were gone, the cords which had held him and Marie together were weaker, not stronger—almost broken, really. For the charm which Marie had originally had for him had mostly been merged in the vivacity and vitality and interest of these two prattling curly-headed boys. Despite the financial burden, the irritation and drain they had been at times, they had also proved a binding chain, a touch of sweetness in the relationship, a hope for the future, a balance which had kept even this uneven scale. With them present he had felt that however black the situation it must endure because of them, their growing interests; with them gone, it was rather plain that some modification of their old state was possible—just how, for the moment, he scarcely dared think or wish. It might be that he could go away and study for awhile now. There was no need of his staying here. The neighborhood was too redolent now of the miseries they had endured. Alone somewhere else, perhaps, he could collect his thoughts, think out a new program. If he went away he might eventually succeed in doing better by Marie. She could return to her parents in Philadelphia for a little while and wait for him, working there at something as she had before until he was ready to send for her. The heavy load of debts could wait until he was better able to pay them. In the meantime, also, he could work and whatever he made over and above his absolute necessities might go to her—or to clearing off these debts.

So he had reasoned.

But it had not worked out so of course. No. In the broken mood in which Marie then was it was not so easy. Plainly, since he had run across her that April day in Philadelphia when he was wiring for the great dry goods store, her whole life had become identified with his, although his had not become merged with hers. No. She was, and would be, as he could so plainly see, then, nothing without him, whereas he—he—Well, it had long since been plain that he would be better off without her—materially, anyhow. But what would she do if he stayed away a long time—or never came back? What become? Had he thought of that then? Yes, he had. He had even thought that once away he might not feel like renewing this situation which had proved so disastrous. And Marie had seemed to sense that, too. She was so sad. True he had not thought of all these things in any bold outright fashion then. Rather they were as sly, evasive shadows skulking in the remote recesses of his brain, things which scarcely dared show their faces to the light, although later, once safely away—they had come forth boldly enough. Only at that time, and later—even now, he could not help feeling that however much Marie might have lacked originally, or then, the fault for their might was his,—that if he himself had not been so dull in the first instance all these black things would not have happened to him or to her. But could she go on without him? Would she? he had asked himself then. And answered that it would be better for him to leave and build himself up in a different world, and then return and help her later. So he fretted and reasoned.

But time had solved all that, too. In spite of the fact that he could not help picturing her back there alone with her parents in Philadelphia, their poor little cottage in Leigh Street in which she and her parents had lived—not a cottage either, but a minute little brick pigeon-hole in one of those long lines of red, treeless, smoky barracks flanking the great mills of what was known as the Reffington District, where her father worked—he had gone. He had asked himself what would she be doing there? What thinking, all alone without him—the babies dead? But he had gone.

He recalled so well the day he left her—she to go to Philadelphia, he to Boston, presumably—the tears, the depression, the unbelievable sadness in her soul and his. Did she suspect? Did she foreknow? She was so gentle, even then, so trustful, so sad. “You will come back to me, dearie, won’t you, soon?” she had said, and so sadly. “We will be happy yet, won’t we?” she had asked between sobs. And he had promised. Oh yes; he had done much promising in his life, before and since. That was one of the darkest things in his nature, his power of promising.

But had he kept that?

However much in after months and years he told himself that he wanted to, that he must, that it was only fair, decent, right, still he had not gone back. No. Other things had come up with the passing of the days, weeks, months, years, other forces, other interests. Some plan, person, desire had always intervened, interfered, warned, counseled, delayed. Were there such counselors? There had been times during the first year when he had written her and sent her a little money—money he had needed badly enough himself. Later there was that long period in which he felt that she must be getting along well enough, being with her parents and at work, and he had not written. A second woman had already appeared on the scene by then as a friend. And then—

The months and years since then in which he had not done so! After his college course—which he took up after he left Marie, working his way—he had left Boston and gone to K—— to begin a career as an assistant plant manager and a developer of ideas of his own, selling the rights to such things as he invented to the great company with which he was connected. And then it was that by degrees the idea of a complete independence and a much greater life had occurred to him. He found himself so strong, so interesting to others. Why not be free, once and for all? Why not grow greater? Why not go forward and work out all the things about which he had dreamed? The thing from which he had extricated himself was too confining, too narrow. It would not do to return. The old shell could not now contain him. Despite her tenderness, Marie was not significant enough. So—He had already seen so much that he could do, be, new faces, a new world, women of a higher social level.

But even so, the pathetic little letters which still followed from time to time—not addressed to him in his new world (she did not know where he was), but to him in the old one—saying how dearly she loved him, how she still awaited his return, that she knew he was having a hard time, that she prayed always, and that all would come out right yet, that they would be able to be together yet!—she was working, saving, praying for him! True, he had the excuse that for the first four years he had not really made anything much, but still he might have done something for her,—might he not have?—gone back, persuaded her to let him go, made her comfortable, brought her somewhat nearer him even? Instead he had feared, feared, reasoned, argued.

Yes, the then devil of his nature, his ambition, had held him completely. He was seeing too clearly the wonder of what he might be, and soon, what he was already becoming. Everything as he argued then and saw now would have had to be pushed aside for Marie, whereas what he really desired was that his great career, his greater days, his fame, the thing he was sure to be now—should push everything aside. And so—Perhaps he had become sharper, colder, harder, than he had ever been, quite ready to sacrifice everything and everybody, or nearly, until he should be the great success he meant to be. But long before this he might have done so much. And he had not—had not until very recently decided to revisit this older, sweeter world.

But in the meantime, as he had long since learned, how the tragedy of her life had been completed. All at once in those earlier years all letters had ceased, and time slipping by—ten years really—he had begun to grow curious. Writing back to a neighbor of hers in Philadelphia in a disguised hand and on nameless paper, he had learned that nearly two years before her father had died and that she and her mother and brother had moved away, the writer could not say where. Then, five years later, when he was becoming truly prosperous, he had learned, through a detective agency, that she and her mother and her ne’er-do-well brother had moved back into this very neighborhood—this old neighborhood of his and hers!—or, rather, a little farther out near the graveyard where their two boys were buried. The simplicity of her! The untutored homing instinct!

But once here, according to what he had learned recently, she and her mother had not prospered at all. They had occupied the most minute of apartments farther out, and had finally been compelled to work in a laundry in their efforts to get along—and he was already so well-to-do, wealthy, really! Indeed three years before his detectives had arrived, her mother had died, and two years after that, she herself, of pneumonia, as had their children. Was it a message from her that had made him worry at that time? Was that why, only six months since, although married and rich and with two daughters by this later marriage, he had not been able to rest until he had found this out, returned here now to see? Did ghosts still stalk the world?

Yes, to-day he had come back here, but only to realize once and for all now how futile this errand was, how cruel he had been, how dreary her latter days must have been in this poor, out-of-the-way corner where once, for a while at least, she had been happy—he and she.

“Been happy!”

“By God,” he suddenly exclaimed, a passion of self-reproach and memory overcoming him, “I can’t stand this! It was not right, not fair. I should not have waited so long. I should have acted long, long since. The cruelty—the evil! There is something cruel and evil in it all, in all wealth, all ambition, in love of fame—too cruel. I must get out! I must think no more—see no more.”

And hurrying to the door and down the squeaking stairs, he walked swiftly back to the costly car that was waiting for him a few blocks below the bridge—that car which was so representative of the realm of so-called power and success of which he was now the master—that realm which, for so long, had taken its meaningless lustre from all that had here preceded it—the misery, the loneliness, the shadow, the despair. And in it he was whirled swiftly and gloomily away.

IX

PHANTOM GOLD

You would have to have seen it to have gathered a true impression—the stubby roughness of the country, the rocks, the poverty of the soil, the poorness of the houses, barns, agricultural implements, horses and cattle and even human beings, in consequence—especially human beings, for why should they, any more than any other product of the soil, flourish where all else was so poor?

It was old Judge Blow who first discovered that “Jack,” or zinc, was the real riches of Taney, if it could be said to have had any before “Jack” was discovered. Months before the boom began he had stood beside a smelter in far-off K—— one late winter afternoon and examined with a great deal of care the ore which the men were smelting, marveling at its resemblance to certain rocks or boulders known as “slug lumps” in his home county.

“What is this stuff?” he asked of one of the bare-armed men who came out from the blazing furnace after a time to wipe his dripping face.

“Zinc,” returned the other, as he passed his huge, soiled palm over his forehead.

“We have stuff down in our county that looks like that,” said the judge as he turned the dull-looking lump over and considered for a while. “I’m sure of it—any amount.” Then he became suddenly silent, for a thought struck him.

“Well, if it’s really ‘Jack,’” said the workman, using the trade or mining name for it, “there’s money in it, all right. This here comes from St. Francis.”

The old judge thought of this for a little while and quietly turned away. He knew where St. Francis was. If this was so valuable that they could ship it all the way from southeast B——, why not from Taney? Had he not many holdings in Taney?

The result was that before long a marked if secret change began to manifest itself in Taney and regions adjacent thereto. Following the private manipulations and goings to and fro of the judge one or two shrewd prospectors appeared, and then after a time the whole land was rife with them. But before that came to pass many a farmer who had remained in ignorance of the value of his holdings was rifled of them.

Old Bursay Queeder, farmer and local ne’er-do-well in the agricultural line, had lived on his particular estate or farm for forty years, and at the time that Judge Blow was thus mysteriously proceeding to and fro and here and there upon the earth, did not know that the rocks against which his pair of extra large feet were being regularly and bitterly stubbed contained the very wealth of which he had been idly and rather wistfully dreaming all his life. Indeed, the earth was a very mysterious thing to Bursay, containing, as it did, everything he really did not know. This collection of seventy acres, for instance—which individually and collectively had wrung more sweat from his brow and more curses from his lips than anything else ever had—contained, unknown to him, the possibility of the fulfilment of all his dreams. But he was old now and a little queer in the head at times, having notions in regard to the Bible, when the world would come to an end, and the like, although still able to contend with nature, if not with man. Each day in the spring and summer and even fall seasons he could be seen on some portion or other of his barren acres, his stubby beard and sparse hair standing out roughly, his fingers like a bird’s claws clutching his plough handles, turning the thin and meagre furrows of his fields and rattling the stony soil, which had long ceased to yield him even a modicum of profit. It was a bare living now which he expected, and a bare living which he received. The house, or cabin, which he occupied with his wife and son and daughter, was dilapidated beyond the use or even need of care. The fences were all decayed save for those which had been built of these same impediments of the soil which he had always considered a queer kind of stone, useless to man or beast—a “hendrance,” as he would have said. His barn was a mere accumulation of patchboards, shielding an old wagon and some few scraps of machinery. And the alleged corn crib was so aged and lopsided that it was ready to fall. Weeds and desolation, bony horses and as bony children, stony fields and thin trees, and withal solitude and occasional want—such was the world of his care and his ruling.

Mrs. Queeder was a fitting mate for the life to which he was doomed. It had come to that pass with her that the monotony of deprivation was accepted with indifference. The absence or remoteness of even a single modest school, meeting house or town hall, to say nothing of convenient neighbors, had left her and hers all but isolated. She was irascible, cantankerous, peculiar; her voice was shrill and her appearance desolate. Queeder, whom she understood or misunderstood thoroughly, was a source of comfort in one way—she could “nag at him,” as he said, and if they quarreled frequently it was in a fitting and harmonious way. Amid such a rattletrap of fields and fences bickering was to be expected.

“Why don’t yuh take them thar slug lumps an’ make a fence over thar?” she asked of Queeder for something like the thousandth time in ten years, referring to as many as thirty-five piles of the best and almost pure zinc lying along the edges of the nearest field, and piled there by Bursay,—this time because two bony cows had invaded one of their corn patches. The “slug lumps” to which she referred could not have been worth less than $2,000.

For as many as the thousandth time he had replied:

“Well, fer the land sakes, hain’t I never got nuthin’ else tuh do? Yuh’d think them thar blame-ding rocks wuz wuth more nor anythin’ else. I do well enough ez ’tis to git ’em outen the sile, I say, ‘thout tryin’ tuh make fences outen ’em.”

“So yuh say—yuh lazy, good-fer-nuthin’ ole tobacco-chewin’ ——,” here a long list of expletives which was usually succeeded by a stove lid or poker or a fair-sized stick of wood, propelled by one party or the other, and which was as deftly dodged. Love and family affection, you see, due to unbroken and unbreakable propinquity, as it were.

But to proceed: The hot and rainy seasons had come and gone in monotonous succession during a period of years, and the lumps still lay in the field. Dode, the eldest child and only son—a huge, hulking, rugged and yet bony ignoramus, who had not inherited an especially delicate or agreeable disposition from his harried parents—might have removed them had he not been a “consarned lazy houn’,” his father said, or like his father, as his mother said, and Jane, the daughter, might have helped, but these two partook of the same depressed indifference which characterized the father. And why not, pray? They had worked long, had had little, seen less and hoped for no particular outlet for their lives in the future, having sense enough to know that if fate had been more kind there might have been. Useless contention with an unyielding soil had done its best at hardening their spirits.

“I don’t see no use ploughin’ the south patch,” Dode had now remarked for the third time this spring. “The blamed thing don’t grow nuthin’.”

“Ef yuh only half ’tended it instid o’ settin’ out thar under them thar junipers pickin’ yer teeth an’ meditatin’, mebbe ’twould,” squeaked Mrs. Queeder, always petulant or angry or waspish—a nature soured by long and hopeless and useless contention.

“No use shakin’ up a lot uv rocks, ez I see,” returned Dode, wearily and aimlessly slapping at a fly. “The hull place ain’t wuth a hill o’ beans,” and from one point of view he was right.

“Why don’t yuh git off’n hit then?” suggested Queeder in a tantalizing voice, with no particular desire to defend the farm, merely with an idle wish to vary the monotony. “Ef hit’s good enough tuh s’port yuh, hit’s good enough to work on, I say.”

“S’port!” sniffed the undutiful Dode, wearily, and yet humorously and scornfully. “I ain’t seed much s’port, ez I kin remember. Mebbe ye’re thinkin’ uv all the fine schoolin’ I’ve had, er the places I’ve been.” He slapped at another fly.

Old Queeder felt the sneer, but as he saw it it was scarcely his fault. He had worked. At the same time he felt the futility of quarreling with Dode, who was younger and stronger and no longer, owing to many family quarrels, bearing him any filial respect. As a matter of fact it was the other way about. From having endured many cuffs and blows in his youth Dode was now much the more powerful physically, and in any contest could easily outdo his father; and Queeder, from at first having ruled and seen his word law, was now compelled to take second, even third and fourth, place, and by contention and all but useless snarling gain the very little consideration that he received.

But in spite of all this they lived together indifferently. And day after day—once Judge Blow had returned to Taney—time was bringing nearer and nearer the tide of mining and the amazing boom that went with it. Indeed every day, like a gathering storm cloud, it might have been noted by the sensitive as approaching closer and closer, only these unwitting holders were not sensitive. They had not the slightest inkling as yet of all that was to be. Here in this roadless, townless region how was one to know. Prospectors passed to the north and the south of them; but as yet none had ever come directly to this wonderful patch upon which Queeder and his family rested. It was in too out-of-the-way a place—a briary, woodsy, rocky corner.

Then one sunny June morning—

“Hi, thar!” called Cal Arnold, their next neighbor, who lived some three miles further on, who now halted his rickety wagon and bony horses along the road opposite the field in which Queeder was working. “Hyur the news?” He spoke briskly, shifting his cud of tobacco and eyeing Queeder with the chirpiness of one who brings diverting information.

“No; what?” asked Queeder, ceasing his “cultivating” with a worn one-share plough and coming over and leaning on his zinc fence, rubbing a hand through his sparse hair the while.

“Ol’ Dunk Porter down here to Newton’s sold his farm,” replied Cal, shrewdly and jubilantly, as though he were relating the tale of a great battle or the suspected approach of the end of the world. “An’ he got three thousan’ dollars fer it.” He rolled the sum deliciously under his tongue.

“Yuh don’t say!” said Queeder quietly but with profound and amazed astonishment. “Three thousan’?” He stirred as one who hears of the impossible being accomplished and knows it can’t be true. “Whut fer?”

“They ’low now ez how thar’s min’l onto it,” went on the farmer wisely. “They ’low ez how now this hyur hull kentry round hyur is thick an’ spilin’ with it. Hit’s uvrywhar. They tell me ez how these hyur slug lumps”—and he flicked at one of the large piles of hitherto worthless zinc against which Queeder was leaning—“is this hyur min’l—er ‘Jack,’ ez they call hit—an’ that hit’s wuth two cents a pound when it’s swelted” (“smelted,” he meant) “an’ even more. I see yuh got quite a bit uv hit. So’ve I. Thar’s a lot layin’ down around my place. I allus ’lowed ez how ’twant wuth much o’ anythin,’ but they say ’tis. I hyur from some o’ the boys ’at’s been to K—— that when hit’s fixed up, swelted and like o’ that, that hit’s good fer lots of things.”