The Terms of Surrender Part 10

"And he has gone now to New York, you tell me," went on Willard.

"East, I said."

"Well, East stands for New York all the time. Is he making a long stay there?"

"He never said a word. Jest, 'So long, Mack,' an', 'So long, Derry.'

That's all thar was to it. Kin I get you a drink? Thar's a chunk of ice somewhar in the outfit."

"No, thanks. Time I got a move on. How about those freight cars of yours? Have I a clear road back through the Gulch?"

"Thar's a half-hour's off spell right now," was the prompt answer, and a minute later the resident manager of El Preco mine was watching Willard descend the canyon in the direction of Bison.

"I'd give a ten-spot ter know jest why that skunk kem nosin' round here," he mused, gazing contemplatively after the slow-moving mustang and its rider. Then he called the youth who had held the horse during Willard's brief visit.

"What sort of an Indian air you, Billy?" he grinned.

"Purty spry, Boss, when the trail's fresh," said the boy.

"Well, hike after old man Willard, an' let me know when he's safe off this yer section."

Within a couple of hours Billy reported that Willard had entered a train bound for Denver, and MacGonigal blew a big breath of relief. It was not that he had the slightest misgiving as to the effect of Willard's ill will against either his partner or himself, but he was intensely anxious that Power should not come in contact with anyone who would remind him of the existence of Mrs. Hugh Marten. Power himself never mentioned her; so his faithful friend and trusted a.s.sociate in business could only hope that the pa.s.sing years, with their multiplicity of fresh interests, were gradually dimming the memory of events which had altered the whole course of his life.

MacGonigal did not think it necessary to tell Willard that Power had brought his mother from San Francisco soon after the mine proved its worth. Mother and son occupied the Dolores ranch. The presence of the gentle, white-haired woman was a positive blessing to Bison; for she contrived to divert no mean percentage of her son's big income into channels of social and philanthropic effort in which she took a close personal interest. A library and reading-room had been established; a technical instruction cla.s.s offered an excellent supplement to the state school; a swimming bath was built close to the mills; two churches were in course of erection; a wideawake theatrical manager at Denver had secured a site for a theater and the township already boasted its ten miles of metaled roadway. In the self-satisfied phrase of the inhabitants, Bison was becoming "quite a place," and everyone testified that it was to Mrs. Power rather than her son that all these civic improvements were due. Men had even ceased to consult Power himself on such matters.

"You run and see my mother about that," he would say, with a quiet smile, when someone had endeavored to arouse his sympathy in behalf of a deserving object. "It's my affair to make the money which she spends.

Get her to O. K. your scheme, and it goes."

In business he was equally unapproachable.

"Put it before MacGonigal," was his regular formula. "I can't do a thing without his say-so. But I warn you he is a terror. If there's a kink in your proposition, he'll find it, as sure as Jake can run his fingers onto a splint."

For all that, the stout manager of mine and mill realized his limitations.

Once, and once only, did MacGonigal act in the belief that Power had referred a point to him for final settlement. A glib agent for mining machinery persuaded him to purchase a new type of drill, which proved absolutely useless when asked to disintegrate the hard granite of Colorado. Power laughed when he heard of its failure.

"You must have thought it was meant for cutting cheese, Mac," he said lightly. But the barbed shaft struck home, and "the terror" bought no more drills without first consulting the man who understood them.

Thus, slowly but effectually, Power contrived to isolate himself from Bison. With an almost uncanny prescience he gave occasional directions in the mine, or suggested some modification in the milling process which invariably resulted in a higher percentage of extraction. For the rest, he devoted his days to the improvement of the stud farm, and his evenings to books. His mother tried vainly to dissipate this recluse trend of thought and habit. On one memorable occasion she invited a friend and her two cheerful and good-looking daughters to visit the ranch for a week. Timidly enough, she had sprung a surprise on her son, warning him of the forthcoming invasion only when it was too late to stop travelers already en route from San Francisco. Then she, like MacGonigal, had to learn her lesson. Derry agreed she had acted quite rightly. He merely expressed a suave doubt that the ladies would enjoy the enforced seclusion of a place like Dolores, but they might appreciate the air. Then he strolled out, and a telegram from Denver apologized for a sudden departure to Chicago. He explained in a letter that he was in need of a number of books, and thought it best to look through the bookstores in person rather than trust to catalogues. He returned two days after the guests had left, and there were no more experiments in that direction. Be sure that an anxious mother had long ago formed a remarkably accurate opinion as to the circ.u.mstances attending Nancy Willard's wedding; but, being a wise woman, she said no word to her son concerning it, and was content to pray that the cloud might lift from off his soul, and that he might yet meet a girl who would make him a good and loving wife. For that is the way of women who are mothers--they find real joy only in the well-being of their offspring. Though this gentle-hearted creature knew that she was risking some of her own belated happiness in bringing about her son's marriage, she was ready to dare that, and more, for his sake. She longed to renew her own youth in fondling his children. She was almost feverishly desirous of seeing him thoroughly established in a bright and cheerful home before the gathering mists shut him out forever from her sight. So she waited, and watched, and wondered what the future had in store for her loved one, and often, in her musings, she tried to imagine what manner of girl Nancy Willard was that she should have inspired such an enduring and hopeless pa.s.sion.

The upheaval, when it came, was due to the simplest of causes. Power had foreseen the tremendous industrial development which lay before Colorado, and indulged his horse-breeding hobby on lines calculated to produce a large income wholly apart from the ever-increasing profits of the mine. The state needed horses, which must be strong of bone, with plenty of lung capacity; yet not too heavy, for mountain tracks and dusty valleys are anathema to the soft Belgian. They must be presentable animals, too, symmetrical, of untarnished lineage, and of a type fitted either for saddle or harness, because Colorado was making money in a hurry. Thus, it chanced that, shortly before Willard's ill-omened visit to Bison, an Eastern agent wrote advising Power to attend a sale in New York. A noted breeder of hackneys, who had imported some of the best sires from England and Russia, and owned several fine Percherons, was breaking up his stud, and the chance thus presented of securing some magnificent stock might not be repeated during another decade.

Power asked his mother to accompany him; but she was afraid of the long journey in the torrid temperature then obtaining. Yielding to his wishes, she telegraphed a second time to her San Francisco friends, and they accepted an invitation joyously and promptly. Moreover, seeing that she was regarding with some misgivings his prospective absence from the ranch for a period which could not well be less than three weeks, he made a great concession.

"If Mrs. Moore and her girls can arrange to stay so long, keep them here until I return," he said, and the pleasure in the worn, lined face fully repaid the effort those words cost him. So they kissed, and parted, and the weary years which have pa.s.sed since that sunlit morning in Colorado have contained no diviner solace for the man than the knowledge that he left his mother well satisfied with her lot, and smiling a farewell without the slightest premonition of evil or sorrow. It is well to part thus from those whom we love; for no man knows what the future may have in store--and horror would have been added to the burden of Power's suffering if recollections of the last hours of companionship with his mother were clouded by an abiding sense of unkindness or unfilial treatment.

So Power hied him to New York, which meant that he pa.s.sed three hot nights and two hotter days in a fast-speeding train. The Rock Island Railroad took him across the rolling prairie to Omaha and Chicago, and, in the city which no steer nor sheep nor hog can visit and live, he entered the palatial Pennsylvania Limited, which, in those unregenerate days, dumped him out early in the morning on the New Jersey sh.o.r.e. Then, for the first time, he saw New York, and saw it from the river, which is the one way to see New York for the first time. Crossing by the ferry to 23d Street, he did not, it is true, secure that wondrous initial glimpse of a city, unequaled, in many respects, by any other, which is vouchsafed to the traveler arriving by sea. But, even twenty-two years ago, the busy Hudson was no mean stream, and when Power's unaccustomed eye turned bewildered from the maze of shipping which thronged that magnificent waterway it found fresh wonders in the far-flung panorama stretching from Grant's Tomb to the Battery. At that time Trinity Church was still a landmark, for New York had hardly begun to climb into the empyrean; so the prospect was pleasing rather than stupefying, as it is today.

A hot wind already hissed with furnace-breath over the fourteen miles of serried streets that lined the opposite sh.o.r.e; for, in the long years which have sped since Power first crossed the Hudson, New York has neither lengthened nor broadened. Even mighty Gotham cannot achieve the impossible; so, in the interim, several new cities have been superimposed on the older one which spread its beauties before his bewildered vision. The _Paris_--who of the middle generation does not remember the _Paris_, with her invariable list to starboard, after an ocean crossing?--was creeping slowly upstream, and Power was amused by the discovery that the big ship, like himself, moved with a limp. The _City of Rome_, whose yacht-like lines suggested the poetry of motion, but, as is the mode on Parna.s.sus, adhered strictly to suggestion, lay at anchor near the Jersey sh.o.r.e, and when the ferry churned around her graceful stem, the grim walls of the Palisades completed a picture which admits of few peers. Disillusionment came later; but the spell of that thrilling first impression was never wholly lost. Driving through 23d Street, on his way to the Waldorf Hotel, Power could not help comparing this important thoroughfare with Market Street, San Francisco, and State Street, Chicago, and the architectural stock of the metropolis experienced a sudden slump. Nor did it wholly recover lost points when his carriage entered Madison Square, with its newly erected campanile, almost a replica of the stately Giralda tower in Seville, its glimpses of Broadway, south and north, its stolid Fifth Avenue Hotel, and its chastely elegant, though still towerless, white Metropolitan building.

Even the Waldorf, then less than a fourth of the Waldorf-Astoria, though notable already among the public palaces of the world, failed to strike his imagination with the appeal of the Palace Hotel, San Francisco; the truth being that New York, first in the field by a couple of centuries, had not yet begun, like Milton's eagle, to mew her mighty youth.

It would a.s.suredly be interesting to those who knew and loved the queen city of the Atlantic nearly a quarter of a century ago if Power's revised and corrected opinions might be quoted now. But the chronicle of a man's life ought to be accurate before it is picturesque, and the truth is that the heat-wave which was then withering the whole Eastern seaboard kept this visitor from breezy Colorado pent within the marble halls of the Waldorf Hotel, save when urgent need drove him forth. That particular scourge of high temperature was destined to become historical. The thermometer soared up beyond 100 degrees Fahrenheit; hundreds of people were stricken daily by heat apoplexy; the hospitals were crammed to their utmost capacity; the asphalt pavement, where it existed, showed ruts like a muddy road in the country; and it is easy to understand why a man who had cheerfully endured 110 degrees and 115 degrees in the dry heat of the nearer Rockies should gasp for air here like a fish out of water.

Worst of all, the horse sale was postponed. The owner of the stud and his prospective patrons alike had flown to sea and mountain for relief.

As inquiry showed that the horse-breeder himself had gone to Newport, Power made haste to secure a stateroom on one of the Fall River line of steamboats, and it was on this quest that the _Puritan Maiden_, a vessel on which folk would travel merely for the sake of describing her to their friends, brought him to the chief summer resort of fashionable life in America.

He had not the slightest notion that Mrs. Hugh Marten was disporting herself daily on that particular stretch of Rhode Island beach. For all that he knew, she might as well have been at Trouville or Brighton.

Indeed, had anyone dared the lightning of his glance by mentioning her, and if he were compelled to hazard a guess as to her possible whereabouts, he would certainly have said that, to the best of his belief, she was in Europe. Such was the fact; but there are facts in every life which a.s.sume the guise of sheer incredibility when a.n.a.lyzed, say, in the doubtful atmosphere of a law-court. In the dark days to come, during those silent watches of the night when a man looks back along the tortuous ways of the past, John Darien Power could only lift impotent hands to Heaven and plead in anguish that he might at least have been spared an ordeal which he not only did not seek, but would have fled to the uttermost parts of the earth to have avoided. Such moments of introspection were few and far between, it is true. His was too self-contained a nature that he should rail against the Omnipotent for having tested him beyond endurance. He made a great fight, and he failed, and he paid an indemnity which is not to be measured by any other scale than that alone which records the n.o.blest effort.

To his own thinking, the tragedy of his life began that day in Bison when the sympathetic storekeeper told him of Nancy Willard's marriage.

But he was wrong in that belief. A man may lose the woman he loves, and recover from the blow, but he peers into abysmal depths when he meets her as another man's wife, and finds that love, though sorely wounded, is not dead. It is then that certain major fiends, unknown to the generality, come forth from their lairs--and there must have been a rare awakening of crafty ghouls on the day Power reached Newport.

CHAPTER VI

THE MEETING

When Power arrived at New England's chief summer resort on a glorious July morning twenty-two years ago, man had succeeded in adding only a garish fringe to a quietly beautiful robe devised by Nature. Some few pretentious houses had been built; but local residences in the ma.s.s made up an architectural hotch-potch utterly at variance with sylvan solitudes and breezy cliffs. Rhode Island, which lends its name to the entire state, is slightly larger than Manhattan. A long southwesterly spur shields from the mighty rages of the Atlantic the little bay on which the old town of Newport stands; but the climate has the bracing freshness which is almost invariably a.s.sociated with the northern half of that great ocean. If the bare rudiments of artistry existed among the idle rich who overran the island during the '80's, it should have protected a charming blend of seash.o.r.e and gra.s.sy downs from the Italian palaces, Rhenish castles, Swiss chalets, and don-jon keeps which the freakish conceits of plutocrats placed cheek by jowl along the coast.

Nowadays these excrescences are either swallowed in forests of well grown trees or have become so beautified by creepers that they have lost much of their bizarre effect; while magnificent avenues, carefully laid out and well shaded, run through a new city of delightful villas and resplendent gardens. But Power's first stroll from the portals of the Ocean House revealed a medley in which bad taste ran riot. The Casino, a miserable-looking structure, was saved from dismal mediocrity by its splendid lawns alone; the surf-bathers' friends were protected from the fierce sun by a long, low shanty built of rough planks; the roads were unkempt, and ankle-deep in mud or dust; broken-down shacks alternated with mansions; a white marble replica of some old Florentine house, stuck bleakly on one k.n.o.b of a promontory, was scowled at by a heavy-jowled fortress c.u.mbering its neighbor.

He found these things irritating. They were less in harmony with their environment than the corrugated iron roofs of Bison. His gorge rose at them. They satisfied no esthetic sense. In a word, he resolved to get through his business with the horse-fancying judge as speedily as might be, and escape to the unspoiled wilderness of Maine.

Were it not for one of those minor accidents which at times can exert such irresistible influence on the course of future events, he would certainly have left Newport without ever being aware of Mrs. Marten's presence there. He ascertained that the judge had gone off early in the morning on a yachting excursion up Narragansett Bay, having arranged to lunch at a friend's house at Pawtucket; so, perforce, he had to wait in Newport another day.

At dinner he was allotted a seat at a large round table reserved for unattached males like himself. The company was a curiously mixed one, but pleasant withal. A Norwegian from San Francisco, who sold j.a.panese curios, a globe-trotting Briton, a Southerner from Alabama, a man from Plainville, New Jersey, and a Mexican who spoke no English, made up, with Power himself, a genuinely cosmopolitan board, and Power soon discovered that he was the only person present who could understand the Mexican. Mere politeness insisted that he should lend his aid as interpreter when a negro waiter asked the olive-skinned senor what he would like to eat; but the "Greaser," as he was dubbed instantly, proved to be a jovial soul, who laughed when any of the other men laughed, insisted on having the joke translated, and roared again when it was explained to him, so that each quip earned a double recognition, while he never failed to pay his own score by some joyous anecdote or amusing repartee. Thus, Power was forced into the role of "good fellow" in a way which he would not have believed possible a few hours earlier. In spite of himself, the merry mood of other years came uppermost, and, when the party broke up at midnight, after a long and lively sitting on a moonlit veranda, he retired to his room with a certain feeling of marvel and agreeable surprise at the change which one evening of enforced relaxation had effected in his outlook on life. He decided that these chance companions had done him a world of good, that his misanthropic att.i.tude was a false one, and that a week or two at Newport might send him back to Colorado a better man. Applying to a state of mind a metaphor drawn from material things, he felt as an Englishman feels who leaves his own dripping and fog-bound island on a January afternoon and wakes next morning amid the roses and sunshine of the Riviera. The glitter on land and sea may bear a close resemblance to spangles and gilt paper on the stage; but it is cheering to eyes which have not seen the sun for weeks, and when, in such conditions, John Bull sits down to luncheon under the awnings of a cafe facing the blue Mediterranean, he is unquestionably quite a different being from the m.u.f.fled-up person who hurried on board the steamer at Dover.

Power had contrived to withdraw himself so completely from the more genial side of existence at Bison that he rediscovered it with a fresh zest. Next day he was no longer alone. The man from Birmingham, Alabama, and the Englishman shared his love of horses, and the three visited the judge, who stabled some of his cattle on the island, and had photographs and pedigrees galore wherewith to describe the stock on his New York farm.

So Power stayed two days, and yet a third, and he was laughing with the rest at some quaint bit of Spanish humor which he had translated for the benefit of the company at dinner on the third evening, when he became aware that a lady, entering with a large party, for whose use a table had been specially decorated, was standing stock-still and looking at him. He lifted his eyes, and met the astonished gaze of Mrs. Marten.

"Derry!" she gasped.

"Nancy!" said he, wholly off his guard, and flushing violently in an absurd consciousness of having committed some fault. She had caught him, as it were, in a boisterous moment utterly at variance with the three years of self-imposed monasticism which followed her marriage. Yet, with the speed of thought, he saw the futility of such reasoning. The girl-wife knew nothing of his sufferings. She was greeting him with all the warmth of undiminished friendship, and could not possibly understand that he had endured tortures for her sake. So he regained his wits almost at once, and was on his feet, bowing.

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Marten," he went on. "Your presence here took me completely unawares. You are the last person breathing I expected to see in Newport."

She laughed delightedly, with no hint of flurry or confusion beyond that first natural outburst.

"It would sound much nicer if you said what I am going to say to you,"

she cried, "that you are one of the few persons breathing whom I am really delighted to see in Newport. But I can't stop and talk now. I'll ask Mrs. Van Ralten to forgive me if I slip away from her party for ten minutes after dinner. Mind, you wait for me on the veranda. I'm simply dying to hear some news of dear old Bison! How is Mac? Oh, my! I really must go. But don't you dare escape afterward!"

Forgetful of all else, he allowed his startled eyes to follow her as she ran to her place at the neighboring table. She was dressed in some confection of white tulle and silver; a circlet of diamonds sparkled in her thick brown hair; a big ruby formed a clasp in front for an aigrette of osprey plumes; her robes and bearing were those of a princess. Were it not for the warranty of his senses, he would never have pictured the girl of the Dolores ranch in this fine lady. Even now he stood as one in a trance, half incredulous of the evidence of eyes and ears, and seemingly afraid lest he might awake and come back to the commonplaces of an existence in which the Nancy Willard of his dreams had no part.

The Englishman, Dacre by name, knew something of the world and its denizens, and he had seen the blood rush to his friend's face and ebb away again until the brown skin was sallow.

"Sit down, old chap," he said quietly. "I was just thinking of ordering some wine for the public benefit. Do you drink fizz?"