CHAPTER FIVE
ZENITH gradually absorbed Frances Benson. As the months wore on the great world beyond the blue barriers of the mountains became merely a remembered dream of unimportant movements and inconsequent events; and this village, lying in a gash in the hillside was, as far as her interests were concerned, the universe.
The change was so slow and imperceptible as to be unsuspected and unanalysed by herself; but gradually the mountain road before her door became to her as one of the great highways. Always before she had lived in large cities where crowds meet and jostle and travel hither and thither in a series of erratic movements, their progress as purposeless and aimless to the onlooker as that of black ants crawling hurriedly to and fro. Or, to express it as it had appeared to her, a city had seemed like a page covered with undecipherable characters; but here the page was clear to her, the meaning was plain; she was learning to read, and the key to the hieroglyphics was interest. Her understanding had become illumined through sympathy.
Sooner or later, during the day or week, this world that she was beginning to know passed before her doors. Old Campbell trudged up the hill, his wire in his hand, his Bible under his arm, to seek the high solitudes his spirit craved for the pondering of the mysteries and the exercise of his gift.
There pretty Myrtle Swanstrom strolled with one or more of her many admirers; Alexander Herries passed up and down gathering gossip, with Angel dancing at his side, her evil cat tucked under one arm or a puppy trotting on unstable legs at her heels. Sometimes the ladies of the Aid Society passed in groups of two or three, their heads together; and, very lately, tramping down the hill in the morning and back again at night, the dejected figure of Silas Evans, his dinner pail swinging listlessly from his hand. He was a great raw-boned fellow, with a stoop to his shoulders, and an honest kindly face; but daily his tall form became more gaunt, his shoulders more bowed, and his gentle, confiding eyes were glazed with gloom.
Frances, who daily watched him come and go, longed to speak to him, to lighten by word or smile his deepening melancholy; but Evans apparently never saw her standing in her cabin door or on the little bridge over the rushing stream. His mind held but one picture, and dwelt upon it unceasingly—a genre picture framed by a window-sash; three charming little heads above a sill of blooming plants, watching the road anxiously for his home-coming—the home denied him by his own action.
He lived over and over again the last scene between his wife and himself. Things had not been going well between them for a long time; he was disturbed and unhappy because of their dissensions, but his simple mind had never harboured the thought of a final break, and it had come suddenly like an earthquake shock. With no hint of the tempest brewing, he had come home one evening from his day's work in the mines to find himself in the very heart of the storm.
As usual upon his entrance to the house, the children had swarmed about him, and he, lifting the baby to his shoulder, had glanced apprehensively over its head into the kitchen where his wife stood busily occupied over the stove; but she had neither called to him nor in any way noticed his arrival, maintaining an aggressive and effectual unconsciousness of his presence.
At last, her preliminary preparations completed, she came into the dining-room and spread a stiffly starched cloth on the table, her eyes indifferent, her manner preoccupied, although Evans could not fail to notice that down one cheek, which was ostentatiously held toward him, ran a deep scarlet line like a scratch from eye to chin. Then, slamming down a number of dishes, she announced supper, shortly bidding the children take their places. Save for the clamour of the little ones, the meal progressed in silence.
Still in silence, so far as her husband was concerned, Mrs. Evans cleared away the supper things and sent the children to bed. Then placing a student lamp in the centre of the table and seating herself where the light fell strongest she sewed silently and energetically, imparting to the room an atmosphere of storm, herself its electric centre, the quick jerk of her arm and the flash of her needle in the lamplight giving the impression of occasional lightning.
She still preserved a careful unconsciousness of the furtive and placating glances of Evans, who forlornly smoked his pipe on the opposite side of the student lamp, his feet stretched out to the open grate stove; but by the token of the cheek with the scar on it being still carefully turned toward him, it might be inferred that her abstraction was more a matter of art than an expression of nature.
Finally, the man blundered, as man ever must in a match game of finesse between the sexes, and lost the trick.
After opening his mouth two or three times and shutting it again over his pipe, he said in tones which strove to be full of an off-hand confidential interest—suggestive of a camaraderie extending even to the heart of the storm centre: "What's the matter with your cheek, Effie?"
She snapped the thread viciously, cast the white muslin down on the table, threw her scissors and thimble into the heap, and faced about with blazing eyes.
"Why, your sister done it—that's what's the matter."
"Mary Ellen!" in surprise.
"Yes, Mary Ellen," she mimicked. "I seen her last week over here to Zenith, comin' in to prayer-meeting—why don't she go to prayer-meeting in Mount Tabor, where she belongs—in that pink organdie and new grey feather boa, and it made me sick. Do I get any pink organdies or grey feather boas? An' her livin' in the house that my father's money bought, an' never payin' a cent of rent, an' us owin' at the store like we do. It's more'n I can bear. When I go to get my meat an' vegetables in the morning I got to stand around an' wait while Mis' Thomas, an' Mis' Nitschkan, an' Mis' Ames an' all the rest gets waited on—me that's always held my head up with the best, an' had a right to, too."
The storm had burst. The thunder that had muttered and the lightning that had flashed on the horizon were now booming and striking all about him. Her words fell on him like a shower of hail, stinging, biting into his brain.
He leaned his elbows on his knees and sank his head into his great horny hands.
"Aw, you can groan if you want to," cried the woman, stung to frenzy in her tenderest spot, her indomitable pride; "but I've bore it as long as I'm goin' to, an' to-day I took the law into my own hands. I stopped at my house, bought with my money, and asked Mary Ellen for the rent, an' she wouldn't give me no satisfaction, an' scratched my face into the bargain."
Evans's head sank a little lower.
"Was there many around that seen the scrap?" he asked, his eyes on the carpet.
"Don't be afraid," she mocked; "there wasn't no scrap. Your sister's beauty's safe."
He looked at her unbelievingly, cogitatively, questioningly; but she refused to gratify his curiosity.
"Of course she'd liked a scrap—nothin' better; but not with me, not with a McKenzie. Sile Evans," she continued passionately, "you know what your folks was, an' you know what mine was. Now, when I got some birth an' breedin' on my side, an' wasn't born no poor rat like you an' your sister, why don't you let me have some say?"
"I guess you've had enough say for one night," he said heavily, rising to wind the clock. "I guess I'll go to bed now."
She threw herself before the door.
"Sile Evans, I've known from the first that that lease wasn't goin' to be no good, an' I begged an' begged you not to take it. The first time I put my eyes on that Brown you leased from, I knew what he was—shifty-faced fox, with his jaws smeared with butter—but nothin' would do but that you'd got to sign up with him. An' where are you now?"
At her words, the smouldering spark in Silas Evans's eyes blazed.
"Where am I now?" he cried. "By God! where am I now? I've drove in two hundred feet, and I've struck one of the best payin' streaks in the camp. I could be making two hundred dollars, three hundred dollars, five hundred dollars a month, if the trammers wasn't kept busy in another part of the mine. If I could get my ore hauled to another mill, where the charges ain't so high as at the Company's mill; if I didn't have to buy all my supplies from the Company; if Brown hadn't said so easy when we made the contract that the roy'lty would run from twenty-five to fifty per cent., an' then charged me fifty the minute we struck the vein—where am I now, you ask? Why, I'd be all right—on the top of the heap—if Brown only panned out one-half per cent. honest! I don't care what you say, no matter how you put it, I ain't got nothin' to blame myself with. My judgment was all right. Ain't the ore there?"
His bluster was in reality a plea, not only for the justification of his business acumen, but to retain that intangible bond of a happy marriage—the wife's respect for her husband.
Mrs. Evans, however, did not soften. In her eyes was the clear, implacable glitter of the woman whose affection is measured largely by her ambition, and her words were the poisoned arrows of one who has discovered a latent gift for sarcasm and has no intention of wrapping her talent in a napkin.
"Oh, yes; your judgment was all right," she jeered. "Ketch a man ever sayin' that he's in the wrong! Oh, of course, it was all right for you to sign up Brown's lease; any fool miner in the camp ought to have known the minute he put eyes on Brown that he might as well sell himself to the devil as sign one of his contracts. It just meant you were tying yourself up to find ore for Mr. Brown, an' then when you done your stint you was to be froze out."
The arrows poisoned, the eyes stabbed; but Evans strove unequally to cope with her on her own ground—that of sarcasm.
"Well, since you're so smart," he demanded, "what have you got to suggest that's any better? I suppose you'd want me to throw up my lease to-morrow; then, what have I got before me? A job at day's wages an' two or three years of debt-payin'. That is," a lump rose in his throat, "pervided you an' the kids don't get sick, nor need no clothes, nor want nothin' to eat but beans an' sow-belly. Aw"—his voice breaking—"what's the use of talkin'?"
"This use," she replied defiantly, "that I told you, an' I told you true, that I've bore all I'm a-goin' to! I've begged an' I've plead with you about that lease; there ain't been a day that I ain't begged you to throw it up an' go round to the Mont d'Or. Walt Garvin's wantin' a foreman there; but no, you're so set that you can't see no way but your own. An' besides all that, you won't take no hand in helpin' me to get my rent out of Mary Ellen, or in puttin' her out of my house, 'cause she comes whinin' to you, makin' a poor mouth an' gettin' on your soft side, like any woman that tells her troubles to a man can get around him. It's the las' straw, I tell you—the las' straw!
"Now," she announced determinedly, "I'm a-goin' to take matters into my own hands an' pervide for my kids as they've a right to be pervided for. I don't care whether it shames you before the whole camp or whether it don't."
He turned and looked at her. "What do you mean?" he growled.
"I mean this: I ain't a-goin' to see everything go to rack an' ruin as long as I got a shoulder to put to the wheel. I seen old Johnson who drives the hack to the station and back three times a day. He's so crippled with rheumatism that he wants to go an' live with his sister near some springs, where he can boil out. Well, I closed with him, an' I'm to drive the passengers up and down to the station, after this." She folded her arms challengingly upon her chest.
Then she saw fully, for the first time perhaps, the slow, struggling, mighty wrath of the gentle. Like the Biblical demon, his anger seemed to rend Silas and tear at his throat. His hands clenched, his mouth became granite, his chest heaved convulsively, his words were 6traincd and hoarse.
"If you do," he said at last, "if you do, I leave this house and you for good."
For a moment his wife stood before him frightened to her soul, white-faced but unyielding; then: "I sure will," she said, and left the room.
Throughout the long night Evans sat stiff and rigid in a chair by the table, gazing before him with unseeing eyes. He was the victim of what is known in the vernacular as a cut-throat lease. Hard-working, steady-going, thoroughly dependable, a first-class miner, he had held excellent positions until he was overcome by the dream that haunts every man—that of being his own master—and the longing that possesses every miner, to lease some undeveloped part of a good mine and realise his bonanza hopes.
But now his dream mocked him, his hopes deserted him, and through the weary hours he battled with his Apollyon, the dreadful spectre of failure. When the grey dawn broke through the windows he was still sitting at the table. The lamp was low, now and then flaring uncertainly, and the open stove held only the cold, dead ashes of last night's fire.
He arose to his feet, looking around him dazedly for a moment, and then his face set as hard as the rock he mined. Pausing only to seize his hat and coat, he strode from the house without one farewell glance behind him.
After a day or two at the Thorn House, he had taken the one-room cabin above that of Frances, and renewed his pre-marital experience of "baching," to the intense excitement of the village.
Zenith, it should be said, never narrowly confined itself to the proverbial nine days' wonder; regarding such definitely proscribed limitations as artificial and effete. One topic was always made to last until the next arose. To put it vulgarly, the art of spreading a small bit of butter over a large slice of bread was thoroughly understood and demonstrated; and there was no flagging of interest, no haphazard discussion of the matter in hand, for Zenith fully grasped the artistic value of a great writer's dictum, that there is always something new to be said about even a stone.
Such humdrum topics as the last accident in the mines, the national crisis, or a newly discovered system for beating faro bank were dropped for the time, and the village joyously abandoned itself to the discussion of the Evans problem. Public opinion at first fluctuated, wavered, but finally veered steadily in the direction of Mrs. Evans, although, let it be said, households became divided on the subject; but, nevertheless, the dejection of Evans's appearance, his rough refusal to discuss the subject, the seclusion he obstinately maintained, lost him the support of the camp.
He had always been a popular man in the village, one who had unconsciously commanded respect, because he was steady-going and square; but he had not heeded the gratuitous advice of the legion who now claimed to have warned him against the unscrupulous Brown and his cut-throat lease, and consequently he reaped the somewhat barren sympathy bestowed upon the unsuccessful. This world's darlings are those who openly defy her and carry their point by reckless, spectacular daring; and Mrs. Evans, without half the personal popularity of her husband, yet succeeded in capturing her audience by sheer pluck and bravado.
Daily, when she drove to and from the station, women left their washtubs and their baking to gather over the front gates; men congregated in groups at the Post Office or in front of "Johnson's"—the village saloon and gambling house. Mrs. Evans, apparently oblivious to this attention, was perched high up on the front seat of a long three-seated wagon drawn by two strong, shaggy horses. Her foot was on the brake as they clattered down the mountain road—a big, bold cliff on one side and a sheer fall of a thousand feet on the other. Her attitude was nonchalant, her expression one of gay decision. Arriving at the station, she would back her horses up to the platform, direct the men lounging there how to load the luggage on the boot of the vehicle, point out seats to the passengers, and then with a slap of the lines on the horses' backs urge them up the two-mile drive to the village, conversing on the topics of the day and the gossip of the mines as they drove along.
It was to be expected, then, that this subject which so completely absorbed the intellectual faculties of Zenith should come up for discussion one evening when Andrew Campbell, Ethel, and Herries had gathered in Frances's cabin.
The day had been mild, but the evening had grown chilly, and the red coals shining through the bars of the stove diffused not only a grateful warmth through the room, but imparted to it a cosey brightness.
The two old men occupied respectively the arm and the rocking chairs on opposite sides of the table, while Ethel, her blue cape and bonnet thrown aside, her fair hair twisted in a loose knot on the nape of her neck, moved restlessly about, her rapid speech and changing face indicating the vivacious impulses of her emotional nature. Frances herself, a composed figure, sat sewing in the radiance of the lamp-light.
Herries, his head bent, was tinkering at a lamp which Frances insisted was out of order.
"Did ye know that Evans is sick of a bad cold?" he asked, bringing forth his first item from his budget of gossip, as the peddler who knows his business draws forth the wares from his pack. He unrolls the goods with a quick jerk, then gathers it up in his hands, that the fabric may catch the light on its surfaces. His eyes are upon yours. If you show interest, he explains, cajoles. If he reads genuine indifference, he shrugs his shoulders and produces a more tempting vanity.
"Sick in bed," Herries repeated with unction. "Fool! He's helpless as a baby. He can't 'bach' any more than Campbell here."
Frances looked up quickly. "I was wondering why I had not seen him for a day or two. What a pity! I wish," wistfully, "that something could be done; but if you try to help in such cases you're more likely to blunder instead, and do more harm than good."
"Aye," said Campbell suddenly, "unless the Word comes, ye must do nothing. It is hard to learn the lesson to wait, wait, until we are led."
"Poor Evans!" Herries twisted his mouth. "He's so used to being managed; he's no idea how to take care of himself. He's been swaddled too long."
"Ain't he got the nice, kind eyes, though?" said Ethel, straightening her bowed figure, which had been bent over the stove. At the request of Frances, she was preparing coffee and setting out some little cakes. "Kind of patient, dumb eyes, just like a dog's that gets a licking every now and then."
Herries gave one of his loud, discordant peals of laughter. "That's it," slapping his knee. "You hit the nail on the head that time, Ethel; you hit the nail on the head. And if you'll notice, Evans's kind always marry the little, spitfire devils of women, who keep a whip handy and don't scruple to use it."
"Oh, Mis' Evans ain't so worse, now," remonstrated Ethel vaguely, beginning to pour the strong, steaming coffee into the cups on the table. "Here's your coffee, Mr. Campbell—oh!" looking earnestly at the quaint, motionless little figure that, with cheek resting on hand, sat staring at the fire. "Don't pay no attention to him," her voice hushed to tenderness and caution; "just let him be."
Herries laid his knife and the various sections of the lamp carefully on the table and took the cup of coffee from her.
"Have ye heard that 'Shock' O'Brien has married the Black Pearl?" he asked Ethel, speaking with casual indifference, but with a sly, avid glance from under his brows, to make sure that she fully appreciated the importance of this next bit of news. "The boys thought he must have been drunk when he did it, but Dan Mayhew saw them in Denver the other day and he says that Shock's plumb crazy about her and that they're coming here to live."
"Is that so?" said Ethel, with a gratifying interest. "My! I've heard of her good and plenty. We was talkin' of Shock marryin' her over at the Garvins' to-day. Walt knows her; he says she's a dream, but kind of queer-like."
"I bet Walt knows her," chuckled Herries.
"I bet," agreed Ethel.
Struck by something in their tones, the Missionary lifted her eyes. "Why do you say that?" she asked.
"I guess Walt knows most of her kind in several States," Herries still chuckled.
Frances turned her puzzled gaze on Ethel. "I shouldn't wonder," nodded the girl, with indifferent placidity.
"Do you mean?" asked the Missionary.
"Oh, Walt's easy, you know," explained Ethel. "He's known everywhere for a kind of mark. Anybody can get money out of him."
"Any woman, you mean," corrected Herries. "Men haven't found it so easy."
Frances dropped her sewing in her lap and sat staring meditatively before her, the puzzled expression deepening in her eyes.
"Goodness! You ought to see the box of things Lutie got out from New York this morning!" Ethel's eyes dilated, her cheek flushed. "Oh, say, but they were great! There was a white cloth cloak to wear in the evening, she said—well"—with one long gasp—"it was the grandest thing you ever saw in your life. Why," rising from her chair and using her spoon to indicate effects, "it reached clear to the bottom of her skirt and laid on the ground about two inches behind. It was made to wear with a trail, you know, an' it had first a eight-inch border of Russian sable, an' then the cloth was cut away an' it had an insertion of lace set in this wide"—measuring above her wrist—"an' on each side of that, silver and gold trimming; an' the sleeves was like great long wings. Then there was a hat"
"It has come." Andrew Campbell's shrunken figure had straightened, his voice rang out deep and musical and exultant, and Ethel stopped short in the full tide of her rapid speech. Her whole face changed. Her eyes became rapt, ecstatic, her lips parted, her lithe figure bent forward as if to listen the better. She was a neophyte, awaiting a revelation.
"I hae puzzled long over the vairse, 'There shall be no more sea.'" The mellow voice echoed through the room, and each word as he spoke it seemed invested with a new and luminous meaning. "I hae wondered long about it, but now, even now, as I sat here, this vanished away, and I found myself in my ain country, and Ruth was with me. Ye ken," turning to Frances with gentle courtesy, "that being no longer in the flesh, she has progressed greatly, and she said that it meant this: that the sea divides the land and is ever a barrier to be crossed, and so it stands as a sign of separation; but, at last, love shall blot it out and there shall be no more parting."
Ethel gazed at him with the tenderest, most awed admiration. "Ain't that grand!" with a catch in her voice. "You certainly are right in the Kingdom of Heaven, Mr. Campbell. Oh," standing with upraised eyes and clasping her hands on her heart, "I wisht we was all there!"
"I hae studied and studied over it," he repeated earnestly, "and waited for Ruth; but it was long before she came. It is sometimes very long before she comes," with a kind of patient pathos. "I tried also to discuss it with Mrs. Landvetter, but," shaking his head pityingly, "the meesteries are withheld from her."
"You bet they are," grinned Herries.
"It must be the whole secret—love," murmured the Missionary, and in her gaze was something of the awe that touched Ethel's face.
Campbell looked at her with surprise in his strangely clear eyes. "Must be? Is!" strongly. "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels—though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains—though I give my body to be burned" he muttered.
Frances continued to look at him, the mystic light that shone always in his eyes kindling in hers.
"Oh, I wish I knew what to do!" she cried. "Why isn't the right word given to me to help Mr. and Mrs. Evans. For the last two Sundays I've tried to preach love and forgiveness, hoping it would melt their hearts; but there they both sat, like two stones, and I knew, I felt, that I was hardening them instead of reaching them."
Herries bent forward and gazed intently at her, his keen face outlined against the lamp-light, the sweep of white hair against the high, narrow brow, the delicately cut, aquiline nose, the crooked mouth with the scornful corners—and Frances, meeting his glance, felt a swift and fleeting impulse of recoil.
"Melt their hearts!" he scoffed. He bent nearer still, holding her with his satirical, piercing eyes. "Why don't you try your woman's wits? " he asked. "The same that you used when you conquered the hosts of the Egyptians, as Campbell says."
She shrank back visibly now, and lifted one hand, palm outward, before her eyes. "Oh, don't remind me of that!" There was pain in her voice.
He laughed again. "Why not? What were your wits given you for but to use. That's where you're strong, when you use the methods that come natural to you. You'll never learn to handle any others properly, no matter how hard you try. And you'll never bring Evans and his wife together by preaching love and forgiveness. Pish!" He twisted his mouth awry. "Use your wits!"
Frances sat late that night, thinking.