Chapter 15

As she drew forth her writing materials in order to put her new and startling resolution into execution, she paused and looked about the familiar little shop with a feeling of estrangement. There was an incongruity between the boldness of the thing she was about to do, and the hard and fast limitations of her lot, which the sight of those humble properties brought sharply home to her. The first pen she took up was stiff and scratchy; the sound of it was like a challenge to the outer world to come and pass judgment upon her. She flung the pen to one side in nervous trepidation, and then she searched until she found one that was soft and pliable, and went whispering over the paper like a fellow-conspirator.

This was what she wrote:

"DEAR MR. DAYTON,

"I want to go into the 'Horn of Plenty' again, and I can't get away to attend to it. I enclose your check, and one of my own for $400. Please buy me what the money will bring. They say it isn't a swindle, and any way I want some. You said to come to you, and that was the same as saying you'd do it, if I asked you to. I don't care what you pay; get what you can for the money.

"Yours truly, "M. BIXBY."

Another morning found Jim so ill that they sent for the doctor. On the same day Inches came in and offered seventy-five cents for the stock. Marietta had not told him that it was sold and she did not propose to do so. In the afternoon the price had "jumped" to ninety cents, but by that time she was too anxious about Jim to care.

For five weeks the "Art Emporium" was closed, and in that time the face of the world had changed for Marietta. She realized the change when she came downstairs and opened the shop again. It was impossible to feel that life was restored to its old basis. There was a change too in her, which was patent to the most casual observer. It was, indeed, a very wan and thin Marietta that at last came forward to meet her customers; her eyes looked alarmingly big, and though nothing could disturb the pose of the beautiful head, there was a droop in the figure, that betokened bodily and mental exhaustion.

A good many customers came in to make Easter purchases,--for the following Sunday was Easter,--and many others to inquire for Jim. As the old, familiar life began to reassert itself, as she began to feel at home again in the old, accustomed surroundings, her mind recurred, in a half-dazed way, to her speculation. She did not herself know much about it, for Dayton had never sent her her certificate. Probably he had come with it when the shop was closed. She supposed she must be too tired to have much courage; that must be why her heart sank at the thought of what she had done. She was sitting by the work-table, her head in her hands, pondering dully. At the sound of the shop-bell she looked up, mechanically, and saw Inches coming in.

"Good morning, Mrs. Jim," he said. "How's your husband?"

"Jim's better, thank you," she replied, and the sound of her own confident words dispelled the clouds.

Inches looked at her narrowly, and then he began pulling the ears of a mounted fox-skin that was lying on the counter, as he remarked casually: "Hope you got rid of your 'H. O. P.' in time."

"In time?" she asked. "In time? What do you mean?"

"Why, before they closed down. You sold out, I hope?"

There was a sudden catch in her breath.

"Yes, I sold out some time ago."

"Glad of that," he declared, with very evident relief, suddenly losing interest in the fox's ears. Inches had none of Dayton's prejudices in regard to woman's "sphere," but he was none the less rejoiced to know that this particular woman, with the tired-looking eyes, had not "got hurt," as he would have put it.

"It's been a bad business all round," he went on, waxing confidential as he was prone to do. "Why, I knew a man that bought twenty thousand shares at a dollar-ten three weeks ago, just before she closed down, and he's never had the sand to sell."

"What could he get to-day?" Marietta asked. Her voice sounded in her ears strange and far away.

"Well, I don't know. I was offered some at six cents, but I don't know anybody that wants it."

Marietta's throat felt parched and dry, and now there was a singing in her ears; but she gave no outward sign.

"Pretty hard on some folks," she remarked.

"I should say so!"

There was a din in her ears all that afternoon, which was perhaps a fortunate circumstance, for it shut out all possibility of thought. It was not until night came that the din stopped, and her brain became clear again,--cruelly, pitilessly clear.

Deep into the night she lay awake tormenting herself with figures. How hideous, how intolerable they were! They passed and repassed in her brain in the uncompromising search-light of conscience, like malicious, mouthing imps. They were her debts and losses, they stood for disgrace and penury, they menaced the very foundation of her life and happiness.

Doubtless the man who had put many thousands into the "Horn of Plenty," and had lacked the "sand" to sell, would have wondered greatly that a fellow-creature should be suffering agony on account of a few hundred dollars. Yet he, in his keenest pang of disappointment, knew nothing whatever of the awful word "ruin"; while Marietta, staring up into the darkness, was getting that lesson by heart.

The town-clock striking three seemed to pierce her consciousness and relieve the strain. She wished the sofa she was lying upon were not so hard and narrow; perhaps if she were more comfortable she might be able to sleep, and then, in the morning, she might see light. Of course there was light, somewhere, if she could only find it; but who ever found the light, lying on a hard sofa, in pitchy darkness? Perhaps if she were to get up and move about things would seem less intolerable. And with the mere thought of action the tired frame relaxed, the straining eyes were sealed with sleep, the curtain of unconsciousness had fallen upon the troubled stage of her mind.

And when, at dawn, Jim opened frightened eyes, and struggled with a terrible oppression to speak her name, Marietta was still sleeping profoundly.

"Etta!" he gasped. "O, Etta!"

And Marietta heard the whispered name, and thrusting out her hands, as if to tear away a physical bond, broke through the torpor that possessed her, and stood upon her feet. She staggered, white and trembling, to Jim's bedside, and there, in the faint light, she saw that he was dying.

"Etta, Etta," he whispered, "I want you!"

She sank upon her knees beside him, but the hand she folded in her own was already lifeless.

Slowly the light increased in that dingy garret, until the sun shone full upon the face of the Peak, fronting the single window of the chamber in uncompassionate splendor. Occasional sounds of traffic came up from the street below; the day had begun. And still Marietta knelt beside the bed, clasping the hand she loved, with a passionate purpose to prolong the mere moment of possession that was all that was left her now, all it was worth being alive for. He wanted her, he wanted her,--and oh, the years and years that he must wait for her, in that strange, lonely, far-away heaven!

"Jim, Jim," she muttered from time to time, with a dry gasp in her throat, that almost choked her; "Jim, O Jim!"

By-and-by, when the sun was high in the heavens, and all the world was abroad, she got upon her feet, and went about the strange new business that death puts upon the broken-hearted.

The day after the funeral was the third of April, and Marietta knew that all her April bills were lying in the letterbox, the silent menace which had seemed so terrible to her the other day. Well,--that at least was nothing to her now. So much her heart-break had done for her, that all the lesson of ruin she had conned through those horrible black hours, when Jim was dying and she did not know it,--that lesson at least had lost its meaning. Ruin could not hurt Jim now, and she?--she might even find distraction in it,--find relief.

She went down into the dimly lighted shop, where the shades were closely drawn in the door and in the broad show-window. In that strange midday twilight, she gathered up her mail, and then she seated herself in her old place behind the counter, and began the examination of it.

There were all the bills, just as she had anticipated; bills for food and bills for medicine; bills for all those useless odds and ends which made up her stock in trade, which she and Jim had been so proud of a few years ago when they first came to Springtown. She wrote out the various sums in a long column, just to look at them all together, and to feel how little harm they could do her; and in the midst of the dull, lifeless work, she came upon a letter which did not look like a bill. As she drew it from the envelope, two slips of paper fell out of it, two slips of paper which she picked up and read, with but a dazed, bewildered attention. They were the checks she had sent to Dayton a month ago; his own check for $250; hers for $400.

Marietta, in her humble joys and sorrows, had never known the irony of Fate, and hence she could not understand about those checks. The meaning of the letter was blurred as she read it. It was from Dayton. He could not know that Jim was dead, for he said nothing of it. But if there was any one who did not know that Jim was dead, could it be true? Her heart gave a wild leap, and she half rose to her feet. What if she were to run up those stairs, quickly, breathlessly? Oh, what then?

But the stillness of the closed shop, the strange half-light that came through the drawn shades, her own black dress, recalled her from that swift and cruel hope, and again she set herself to read the letter.

The words all seemed straight enough, if she could only make sense of them. He had but just read her letter, being returned that morning from the East. The letter had come the day he left town, and thinking that it was a receipted bill, he had locked it up, unopened, in his desk. He feared that Mrs. Jim had been anxious about the matter, and he hastened to relieve her mind. While he apologized for his own carelessness, he congratulated her upon her escape.

"He congratulates me, he congratulates me!" she whispered hoarsely; "O my God!"

She did not yet comprehend the letter nor the checks which had fluttered to the floor. It was only the last sentence that she took note of, because of its jarring sense.

Suddenly the meaning of it all broke upon her. Those were her checks! Ruin had evaded her! She could not prove upon it her loyalty to Jim, her loyalty to grief. Fate had shipwrecked her, and now it was decreed that the sun should shine and the sea subside in smiling peace. It was more than she could bear. She flung the letter from her, and, stooping, she picked up the checks and crushed them in her clenched hands. How dared they come back to mock at her! How dared Fate take her all, and toss her what she did not value! How dared--Heaven? Was it Heaven she was defying? Ah! she must not lose her soul, Heaven knew she would not lose her soul--for Jim's sake!

She opened her clenched hands and smoothed out the checks, patiently, meekly; and then she went on with the bills, a strange calm in her mind, different from the calm of the last three days.

And then, for the first time, it struck her that the bills were all made out to Jim.

JAMES BIXBY, to HIRAM ROGERS, Dr. to JAMES WILKINS, Dr. to FIELDS & LYMAN, Dr.

It was his name that would have been disgraced, not hers; his memory would have been stained. She turned white with terror of the danger past.

After a while she put the bills aside, and drew out her folios of pressed flowers. It seemed a hundred years since she had worked upon them. How exquisite they were, those delicate ghosts of flowers;--the regal columbine, the graceful gilia, coreopsis gleaming golden, anemones, pale and soft. How they kept their loveliness when life was past! They were only flower memories, but how fair they were, and how lasting! No frost to blight them, no winds to tear their silken petals any more! Well might they outlast the hand that pressed them!

And soon Marietta found herself doing the old, accustomed work with all the old skill, and with a new grace and delicacy of touch. And when the friends in her old home which she had left for Jim's sake, urged her to come back to them, she answered, no;--she would rather stay in Colorado and do her flower-books;--adding, in a hand that scrawled more than usual with the effort for composure:

"They are my consolation."

XI.

A STROKE IN THE GAME.

The mining boom was off, and Springtown was feeling the reaction as severely as so sanguine and sunny a little place was capable of doing. To one who had witnessed, a year or more previous, the rising of the tide of speculation, whose tossing crest had flung its glittering drops upon the loftiest and firmest rocks of the business community, the streets of the little Rocky Mountain town had something the aspect of the shore at low tide. Such a witness was Harry Wakefield, if, indeed, a man may be said to have "witnessed" a commotion which has swept him off his feet and whirled him about like a piece of driftwood. It was, to be sure, quite in the character of a piece of driftwood that Wakefield had let himself be drawn into the whirlpool, and he could not escape the feeling that, tossed as he was, high and dry upon the shore, he was getting quite as good as he deserved.

"Yes, I'm busted!" he remarked to his friend Chittenden, the stock-broker, as the two men paused before the office-door of the latter. "It was the Race-Horse that finished me up. No, thanks, I won't come in. A burnt child dreads the fire!"

"We're all cool enough now-a-days," Chittenden replied, shrugging his shoulders. "Couldn't get up a blaze to heat a flat-iron!" and he passed in to the office, with the air of a man whose occupation is gone.

As Wakefield turned down the street, his eye fell upon a stock-board across the way, a board upon which had once been jotted down from day to day, a record of his varying fortunes. He remembered how, a few months ago, that same board showed white with Lame Gulch quotations. He reflected that, while the price set against each stock had made but a modest showing, running from ten cents up into the second dollar, a man of sense,--supposing such a phenomenon to have weathered the "boom,"--would have been impressed with the fact that the valuation thus placed upon the infant camp aggregated something like twenty millions of dollars. The absurdity of the whole thing struck Wakefield with added force, as he read the solitary announcement which now graced the board,--namely:

"To exchange: 1000 Race-Horse for a bull-terrier pup."

"Kind o' funny; ain't it?" said a voice close beside him.

It was Dicky Simmons, a youth of seedy aspect, but a cheerful countenance, who had come up with him, and was engaged in the perusal of the same announcement.

"Hullo, Simmons! Where do you hail from?"

"From Barnaby's ranch. I'm trying my hand at agriculture until this thing's blown over!"

"Think it's going to?"

"Oh, yes! When the tide's dead low it's sure to turn!" and the old hopeful look glistened in the boy's face.

"That's the case in Nature," Wakefield objected. "Nature hadn't anything to do with the boom. It was contrary to all the laws."

"Oh, I guess Nature has a hand in most things," Dicky replied with cheerful assurance. "Anyhow she's made a big deal up at Lame Gulch, and those of us who've got the sand to hold on will find that she's in the management."

"Think so?"

"Sure of it!"

"Hope you're right. Anyhow, though, I'd try the old girl on agriculture for a while, if I were you. How's Barnaby doing, by the way?"

"Holding on by the skin of his teeth."

"What's wrong there?"

"Can't collect;" was the laconic reply.

The two companions in adversity were walking toward the post-office, moved, perhaps, by the subtle attraction which that institution exercises over the man who is "down on his luck." There was no mail due, yet they turned, with one accord, in at the door, and repaired to their respective boxes. As Wakefield looked up from the inspection of his empty one, he saw Simmons, with an open letter or circular in his hand. Catching Wakefield's eye he laughed.

"Well?" Wakefield queried.

"You know, Wake," said Dicky, in a confidential tone. "The thing's too funny to be serious. Here's the Trailing Arbutus (you're not in that, I believe), capitalization a million and a half shares, calls a meeting of stockholders to consider how to raise money to get the mine out of the hands of a receiver. Now, guess how much money they want!"

"How much?"

"_Five hundred dollars!_ Five hundred dollars on a million and a half shares! I say, Wake, they couldn't be funnier if they tried!"

Agreeable as Dicky's company usually was, Wakefield was glad when the boy hailed the Barnaby milk-cart, and betook himself and his insistent brightness under its canvas shelter. The white covered wagon went rattling out of town, and Wakefield, somewhat to his surprise, found himself striding after it.

"Anyhow, he's hit it off better than I have," he said to himself; and as he perceived how rapidly the cart was disappearing, he had a sense of being distanced, and he involuntarily quickened his pace.

The street he was following was one that he strongly approved of, because it had the originality to cut diagonally across the rectangular plan of the town. The houses on either hand were small and unpretentious, but tidy little homesteads, and he did not like to think of the mortgages with which, according to Chittenden, the "boom" had weighted more than one modest roof. In the strong sense of general disaster which he was struggling under, those mortgages seemed almost visible to the eye. He was glad when he had left the town behind him, and was marching on between stretches of uncultivated prairie and bare reddish hillocks. They, at least, stood for what they were,--and see, how the wildflowers had thrust themselves up through the harsh gritty sand; that great tract of yellow vetches, for instance, that had brought up out of the earth a glory of gold that might well put all Lame Gulch to the blush! Over yonder stood the Range, not beautiful, in the uncompromising noon light, but strong and steadfast, with an almost moral vigor in its outlines.

He had lost sight of the milk-cart altogether, and was plodding on, simply because there seemed to be nothing better to do with himself. He presently came opposite a low, conical hill which he recognized as "Mt. Washington,"--a hill whose elevation above sea-level was said to be precisely that of New England's loftiest peak. Wakefield reflected that he was never likely to reach that classic altitude with less exertion than to-day, and that on the whole it would be rather pleasant than otherwise to find himself at that particular height. There was a barbed-wire fence intervening, and it pleased him to take it "on the fly." He had undoubtedly been going down-hill of late, but his legs, at least, had held their own, he assured himself, with some satisfaction, as he alighted, right side up, within the enclosure. He thought, with a whimsical turn, of Pheidippides, the youth who used his legs to such good purpose; who "ran like fire,"--shouted, "Rejoice, we conquer!"--then "died in the shout for his meed." How simple life once was, according to Browning and the rest! What a muddle it was to-day, according to Harry Wakefield! And all because a girl had refused him! He had been trying all along not to think of Dorothy Ray, but by the time he had reached the summit of the hill,--that little round of red sand, where only a single yellow cactus had had the courage to precede him,--he knew that his hour of reckoning had come. He had gambled, yes; but it was for her sake he had gambled; he had lost, yes, but it was she he had lost.

He flung himself down on the bare red hilltop, and with his chin in his hands, gazed across irrigated meadows and parched foothills to the grim slope of the mountains. And stretched there, with his elbows digging into the sandy soil, his mind bracing itself against the everlasting hills, he let the past draw near.

There was an atmosphere about that past, a play of light and shadow, a mist of poetry and romance, that made the Colorado landscape in the searching noon light seem typical of the life he had led there:--a crude, prosaic, _metallic_ sort of life. And after the first shrinking from the past, his mind began to feel deliciously at home in it.

How he had loved Dorothy Ray! How the thought of her had pervaded his life, as the sunshine pervades a landscape! Yet not like the sunshine; for sunshine is fructifying, and his life had been singularly fruitless. There was no shirking the truth, that the year he had spent reading law in her father's office, the year he had discovered that his old friend and playmate was the girl of his choice, had been a wasted year. In all that did not directly concern her he had dawdled, and Dorothy knew and resented it.

He remembered how, on one occasion, she had openly preferred Aleck Dorr to himself; Aleck Dorr, with his ugly face and boorish manners, who was cutting a dash with a newly acquired fortune.

"Dorothy," Wakefield asked abruptly, the next time he got speech of her,--it was at the Assembly and she had only vouchsafed him two dances,--"Dorothy, what do you like about that boor?"

"In the first place he isn't a boor," she answered. "He's as gentlemanlike as possible."

"Supposing he is, then! That's a recommendation most of us possess."

She gave him a scrutinizing, almost wistful look. How dear she was, standing there in the brilliant gas-light, fresh and natural in her ball-dress and sparkling jewels as she had been when her hair hung down in a big braid over her gingham frock.

"You gentlemanlike? That's something you could never be, Harry,--because you are a gentleman. But that's all you are," she added, with a sudden impatience that checked his rising elation.

"I don't see that there was any call for snubbing," he retorted angrily. He was often angry with Dorothy; that was part of the old good-fellowship he had used to value so much, but which seemed so insufficient now.

"Snubbing? I thought I made you a very pretty compliment," she answered, with a little caressing tone that he found illogically comforting.

"You haven't told me why you like this gentlemanlike boor," he persisted.

"I should think anybody might see that! I like him because he amounts to something; because he has made a fortune, if you insist. It takes a _man_ to do that!"

Upon which, before Wakefield had succeeded in framing a suitable retort, Dorr came up, with a ponderous joke, and claimed a promised waltz.

Well! Dorr need not be in such thundering spirits! He had no chance with her at any rate!

And only a few months later it turned out that he, Harry Wakefield, had as little chance as Dorr.