"All the same, it"s drawin" mighty close lines on him. You can"t take a man living a free-and-easy life the way he was and wing him all at once and tie him down to a chair without seein" some suffering. Don"t you know it?"
"Does he complain?"
"Not a whimper. Sometimes I wish he would. No, he just waits--but I"m afraid he"ll get lonesome some day and break loose and go back to the game."
In this way the sculptor had come very close to her secret, and she was trembling to deeper confidence, when he said, very gently: "Of course, it does seem a little strange to me that one so young and charming as you are should be married to a man of his type, but I suppose he was a handsome figure before his--accident."
Her eyes glowed. "He was one of the grandest-looking men! I never liked his trade--and I mistrusted him, at first; but when he cut himself out of the whole business--for me--I couldn"t help likin" him; he was so big-hearted and free-handed. We needed his help, all right. Mother was sick, and my brother"s ranch was playing to hard luck. But don"t think I married him for his money--I liked him then, and, besides--well, I _thought_ I was doing the right thing--but now--well, I"m guessing." She ended abruptly, and in the tremor of that final word Moss read her secret. She had never loved her husband. Pity and a kind of loyalty to her word had carried her to his side, and now a sense of duty bound her there.
With sincere sympathy, he said: "We all do wrong at times that good may come out of it. You could not foresee the future--the best of us can _only guess_ at the effect of any action. You did the best you knew at the moment. The question you have to face now has only slight relation to the past. No one can enter wholly into another"s perplexity--I"m not even sure of a single one of my inferences--but if you are thinking of--separation, I would say, meet this crisis as bravely as you met the other. But I don"t believe we should decide any such question selfishly.
I am not of those who always seek the side on which lies personal happiness, because a happiness that is essentially selfish won"t last.
The Captain lives only for you--any one can see that. What he does for you springs from deep affection. What would happen to him--if you left him?"
He paused a moment and watched her subduing her tears; then added: "I won"t say I was unprepared for what you"ve said, for the entire relationship, from our first meeting, seemed too abnormal to be altogether happy. Money will buy a great many desirable things, but it has its limits. At the same time, it is too much to expect of you--If your feeling for him has changed--"
His delicacy, his sympathy for her, was made apparent by the unusual hesitation of his speech, and she would have broken down completely had not Julia Moss called out: "Joe, turn on the lights--it"s getting dark."
Conscious of Bertha"s emotion, he did not immediately do as he was bidden. "I wish you"d talk this over with Julia," he ended gently; "she"s a very wise little woman."
Bertha shook her head. "I didn"t intend to talk it over with you. I don"t know what possessed me. I had no business to say what I did."
He rea.s.sured her. "All you"ve told me and the part I"ve guessed is quite safe. I will not even permit Julia to share your confidence till you are willing to speak to her yourself."
As he slowly lighted the studio Bertha was surprised and a little troubled to find that two or three other visitors had slipped in through the dusk, and were grouped about the tea-table, and that the Captain was again the centre of an eager-eyed group. "They treat him as if he were an Eskimo," she thought bitterly, and rose to join the circle and protect him from their inquisition.
Haney was feeling extremely well, and talked with so much of his old time vigor and slash of epithet that his little audience was quite entranced. He enlarged upon the experiences of a year he had spent in Alaska. "Mining up there in them days made gambling slow business," he said. (He had told Bertha that he had made an attempt to get out of "the trade," but she was content to have him put it on less self-righteous grounds.) He contrived to make his hearers feel very keenly the pitiless, long-drawn ferocity of that sunless winter. He made it plain why men in that far land came together in vile dens to drink and gamble, and Moss glowed with the wonder and delight of those great boys who could rush away to the arctic edge of the world and die with laughing curses on their lips.
"What did you all do it for?" he asked, bluntly. "For money?"
"Partly--but more for the love of doing something hard. No man but a miser punishes himself for love of gold--it"s for love of what the stuff will buy, that men fight the snows."
While Haney talked of these things Bertha"s eyes were musingly turned on the face of the sculptor, and her mind was far from the scenes which Mart so vividly described. This side of his life no longer amused her--on the contrary she shrank from any disclosure of his savage career. She was now as unjust in her criticism as she had been fond in her admiration, and when with darkening brow she cut short his garrulous flow of narrative Julia perceived her displeasure.
Haney apologized, handsomely. "It"s natural for the ould bedraggled eagle in the cage with a club on his wrist to dream of the circles he used to cut and the fish he set claw to. In them days I feared no man"s weight, and no night or stream. "Twas all joyous battle to me, and now, as I sit here on velvet with only to snap me fingers for anything I want, I look back at thim fierce old times with a sneaking kind o" wish to live "em all over again. Bertie knows me weakness. I would talk forever did she lave me go on; but "tis no blame to her--it was a cruel, bad, careless life."
"When I come West," said Moss, sincerely, "we"ll go camping together, and every night by the fire we"ll smoke and you can tell me all about your journeys. I a.s.sure you they are epic to me."
Dr. Brent, a little later, put in a private word to Bertie. "Now you"re going back into the high country and you"ll find it necessary to watch the Captain pretty closely. I suspect he"ll find his heart thumping briskly when he reaches the Springs. He may stand that alt.i.tude all right, but don"t let him go higher. He will be taking chances if he goes above six thousand feet. You"d better have Steel of Denver come down and examine him to see how he stands the first few days. I mention Steel because I know him--I"ve no doubt there are plenty of good men in the Springs."
"What"ll I do if he"s worse?"
"Bring him back here or go to sea level--only beware of high pa.s.ses."
CHAPTER XXIV
THE HANEYS RETURN TO THE PEAKS
The forces that really move most men are the small, concrete, individual experiences of life. The death of a child is of more account to its parents than the fall of a republic. Napoleon did not forget Josephine in his Italian campaigns, and Grant, inflexible commander of a half-million men, never failed, even in the Wilderness, to remember the plain little woman whose fireside fortunes were so closely interwoven with his epoch-making wars.
As Ben Fordyce lost interest in the question of labor and capital and the political struggles of the state (because they were of less account than his own combat with the powers of darkness), so Bertha had little thought of the abstract, the sociologic, in her uneasiness--the strife was individual, the problems personal--and at last, weary of question, of doubt, she yielded once more to the protecting power which lay in Haney"s gold and permitted herself to enjoy its use, its command of men.
There was something like intoxication in this sense of supremacy, this freedom from ceaseless calculation, and to rise above the doubt in which she had been plunged was like suddenly acquiring wings.
She accepted any chance to penetrate the city"s life, determined to secure all that she could of its light and luxury, and in return intrusted Lucius with plans for luncheons and dinners, which he carried out with lavish hand.
Mart seconded all her resolutions with hearty voice. "There"s nothing too good for the Haneys!" he repeatedly chuckled.
In the midst of other gayeties she had the McArdles over to mid-day dinner one Sat.u.r.day, and afterwards took them all, a noisy gang, to the theatre--Patrick Haney as much of a boy as his grandsons, McArdle alone being unhappy as well as uneasy.
She went about the shops, buying with reckless hand treasures for the house in the Springs, and this gave her husband more satisfaction than any other extravagance, for each article seemed a gage of the permanency of his home. In support of her mood he urged her to even larger expenditures. "Buy, buy like a queen," he often commanded, as she mused upon some choice. "Take the best!"
There was instruction as well as a guilty delight in all this conjuring with a magic check-book, and Bertha grew in grace and dignity in her role as hostess. Her circle of acquaintances widened, but the Mosses, her first friends in the city, were not displaced in her affections. To them she continued to play the generous fairy in as many pleasant ways as they would permit. The theatre continued to be her delight, as well as her school of life, and a box-party followed nearly every dinner. She was like a child in the catholicity of her appet.i.te, for she devoured Shakespearian bread, Ibsen roasts, and comic opera cream-puffs with almost equal gusto--and mentally thrived upon the mixture. To the outsider she seemed one of the most fortunate women in the world.
And yet every day made her less tolerant of the crippled old man at her side. She did not pout or sulk or answer him shortly, but she often forgot him--failed to answer him--not out of petulance or disgust, but because her mind was busy with other people. Gradually, without realizing it, she got into the habit of leaving him to amuse himself, as he best could, for she knew he did not specially care for the pursuits which gave her the keenest joy. In consequence of this unintentional neglect he very naturally fell more and more into the hands of the bar-room spongers who loitered about the hotel corridors. He dreaded loneliness, and it was to keep his companions about him that he became a spendthrift in liquors. Sternly and deliberately temperate during his long career as a gambler, he fell at last into drinking to excess, and on one unhappy afternoon returned to Bertha quite plainly drunk.
She was both startled and disgusted by this sign of weakness, and he was not so blinded by the mist of his potations but that he perceived the shrinking reluctance of her touch as she aided Lucius in lifting him into the bed. His inert, lumpish form was at the moment hideously repulsive to her, and physical contact with him a dreaded thing. What was left if he lost that self-control which had made him admirable? She had always been able to qualify his other shortcomings by saying, "Well, anyhow, he don"t drink." She could boast of this no longer.
It was a most miserable night for her. At dinner she was forced to lie about him (for the first time), and she did it so badly that Joe Moss divined her trouble and came generously to her aid with a long and amusing story about Whistler.
The play to which she took her guests did not help her to laughter, for it set forth with diabolic skill the life of a woman who loathed her husband, dreaded maternity, and hated herself--a baffling, marvellously intricate and searching play--meat for well people, not for those mentally ill at ease or morally unstable. Of a truth, Bertha saw but half of it and comprehended less, for she could not forget the leaden hands and flushed face of the man she called husband--and whom she had left in his bed to sleep away his hours of intoxication. She pitied him now--but in a new fashion. Her compa.s.sion was mixed with contempt, and that showed more clearly than any other feeling could the depth to which Marshall Haney had sunk.
When she came home at midnight she listened at his door, but did not enter, for Lucius--skilled in all such matters--reported the Captain to be "all right."
She went to her own room in a more darkly tragic mood than she had ever known before. Her punishment, her time for trouble, had begun. "I reckon I"m due to pay for my fun," she said to herself, "but not in the way I"ve been figuring on." Haney seemed at the moment a complete physical ruin, and the change which his helplessness wrought in her was most radical.
His deeply penitent mood next morning hurt and repelled her almost as much as his maudlin jocularity of the night before. She would have preferred a brazen levity to this humble confession. ""Twas me boast,"
he sadly a.s.serted, "that no man ever caught me with me eyes full of sand and me tongue twisted--and now look at me! "Tis what comes of having nothing to do but trade lies with a lot of flat-bottomed loafers in a gaudy bar-room. But don"t worry, darlin", right here old Mart pulls up.
You"ll not see anny more of this. Forget it, dear-heart--won"t you now?"
She promised, of course, but the chasm between them was widened, and a fear of his again yielding to temptation cut short her stay in the city, for Lucius warningly explained: "The Captain is settling into a corner of the bar-room with a gang of sponging blackguards around him, and every day makes it less easy for him to break away. I"d advise going home," he ended, quietly. "The Springs is a safer place for him now."
The hyenas were beginning to prowl around the disabled lion, and this the faithful servant knew even better than the wife.
"All right, home we go," she replied, and the thought of "home" was both sweet and perilous.
Haney met her decision with pathetic, instant joy. "I"m ready, I was only waitin"," he said. "After all, your own shack is better than a pearl palace in anny town, and it"s gettin" hot besides."
Bertha parted from the Mosses with keen sorrow. Joe had come to be like an elder brother to her--a brother and a teacher, and, next to Ben Fordyce, was more often in her thought than any other human being. She had lost part of her awe of him, but her affection had deepened as she came to understand the essential manliness and simplicity of his character. He redeemed the artist-world from the shame men like Humiston had put upon it.
As she entered for the last time the studio in which she had spent so many happy hours and from whose atmosphere of work and high endeavor she had derived so much mental and moral development she was sad, and this sadness lent a beauty to her face that it had never before attained. She looked older, too; and contrasting her with the girl who had first looked in at his door, Moss could scarcely believe that less than half a year had affected this change in her. He was too keen an observer not to know that part of this was due to a refining taste in hats and gowns, but beneath all these superficial traits she had grown swiftly in the expression of security and power.
He greeted her as usual with a frank nod and (his hands being free from clay) advanced to shake hands. "Don"t tell me you"ve come to say good-bye."
"That"s what," she curtly said. "It"s up to me to take the Captain home.
He"s getting into bad habits lying around this hotel."