while the world went about its affairs, attended to its business, read its papers, sent its telegrams and wrote its letters, the little group at antelope was as completely cut off from it as though marooned on a strip of sand in an unknown sea. a second storm had followed the original one, and the end of the first week saw them snowed in deeper than ever, antelope a trickle of roofs and smoke-stacks, in a white, crystal-clear wilderness, solemn in its stillness and loneliness as the primeval world.
the wires were down; the letter-carrier could not break his way in to them. they heard no news and received no mail. confined in a group of rude buildings, crouched in a hollow of the sierra’s flank, they felt for the first time what it was to be outside that circle of busy activity in which their lives had heretofore passed. they were face to face with the nature they thought they had conquered and which now in its quiet grandeur awed them with a sense of their own small helplessness. pressed upon by that enormous silent indifference they drew nearer together, each individual unit gaining in importance from the contrasting immensity without, each character unconsciously declaring itself, emerging from acquired reticences and becoming bolder and more open.
they accepted their captivity in a spirit of gay good humor. the only two members of the party to whom it seemed irksome were bill cannon and the actor, both girding against a confinement which kept them from their several spheres of action. the others abandoned themselves to a childish, almost fantastic enjoyment of a situation unique in their experience. it was soon to end, it would never be repeated. it was an adventure charged with romance, accidental, unsought, as all true adventures are. the world was forgotten for these few days of imprisonment against the mountain’s mighty heart. it did not exist for them. all that was real was their own little party, the whitewashed passages and walls of perley’s, the dining-room with its board floor and homely fare, and the parlor at night with a semicircle of faces round the blazing logs.
on the afternoon of the sixth day dominick made his first appearance down stairs. he achieved the descent with slow painfulness, hobbling between perley and the doctor. the former’s bath-robe had been cast aside for a dignified dark-brown dressing-gown, contributed to his wardrobe by cannon, and which, cut to fit the burly proportions of the bonanza king, hung around the long, lank form of the young man in enveloping folds.
the parlor was empty, save for miss cannon sitting before the fire. dominick had ceased to feel bashfulness and constraint in the presence of this girl, who had been pushed—against his will if not against her own—into the position of his head attendant. the afternoon when they had sat together in his room seemed to have brushed away all his shyness and self-consciousness. he thought now that it would be difficult to retain either in intercourse with a being who was so candid, so spontaneous, so freshly natural. he found himself treating her as if she were a young boy with whom he had been placed on a sudden footing of careless, cheery intimacy. but her outward seeming—what she presented to the eye—was not in the least boyish. her pale, opaque blondness, her fine, rich outlines, her softness of mien, were things as completely and graciously feminine as the most epicurean admirer of women could have wished.
now, at the sight of her bending over the fire, he experienced a sensation of pleasure which vaguely surprised him. he was hardly conscious that all the time he had been dressing and while he came down stairs he had been hoping that she would be there. he sent a quick glance ahead of him, saw her, and looked away. the pain of his feet was violent, and without again regarding her he knew that while he was gaining his chair and his attendants were settling him, she had not turned from her contemplation of the fire. he already knew her well enough to have a comfortable assurance of her invariable quick tact. it was not till the two men were leaving the room that she turned to him and said, as if resuming an interrupted conversation,
“well, how do you like the parlor? speak nicely of it for i feel as if it belonged to me.”
“it’s a first-rate parlor,” he answered, looking about him. “never saw a better one. who’s the gentleman with the wreath of wax flowers round his head?”
“that’s jim granger. he comes from here, you know; and you mustn’t laugh at those flowers, they came off his coffin.”
“my father knew him,” said the young man indifferently. “there were lots of queer stories about jim granger. he killed a man once up at bodie. you’ve a fine fire here, haven’t you?”
“fine. it’s never allowed to go out. what do you think i intend to do this afternoon? i’ve a plan for amusing and instructing you.”
“what is it?” he said somewhat uneasily. “i don’t feel in the least as if i wanted to be instructed.”
she rose and moved to the center-table which was covered with an irregular scattering of books.
“before you came down i was looking over these books. there are lots of them. mrs. perley says they’ve been accumulating for years. mining men have left them and some of them have the names of people i know written in them. i thought perhaps you might like to read some of them.”
dominick sent a lazily disparaging glance over the books. he was not much of a reader at the best of times.
“what are they,” he said, “novels?”
“mostly.” she sat down by the table and took up the volume nearest to her. “here’s tale of two cities. that’s a fine one.”
“i’ve read it. yes, it’s splendid. it’s all about the french revolution. the hero’s like a real person and heroes in books hardly ever are, only i’d have liked him better if he’d stopped drinking and married his girl.”
“i thought perhaps you might like me to read to you,” she said, turning a tentative glance on him. “that’s how i was going to amuse and instruct you.”
“i’m sure it would be much more amusing and probably just as instructive if you talked to me.”
“you’ve got to stay down here two hours. how could i talk and be amusing and instructive for two hours? you’d probably have a relapse and i’m quite sure the doctor’d find me in a dead faint on the hearth when he came in.”
“all right. let’s try the books. don’t let’s risk relapses and dead faints.”
“very well, then, that’s understood. we’ll go through the library now. i’ll read the titles and you say if you like any of them.”
“suppose i don’t?”
“you’ll surely have a preference.”
“all right. i’ll try to. go on.”
“here’s foul play, by charles reade. it seems to have been a good deal read. some of the paragraphs are marked with a pencil.”
“i think i’ve read it, but i’m not sure. it sounds like a murder story. no, let’s pass on that.”
“well, here’s mrs. skaggs’ husbands, by bret harte. does that sound as if you’d like it?”
“‘husbands!’ no. we don’t want to read about a woman who has husbands. pass on that, too.”
“the next is very nicely bound and looks quite fresh and new, as if nobody had read it much. it’s called the amazing marriage.”
“oh, pass on that! i had it once and stuck in the third chapter. the last time i went east somebody gave it to me to read on the train. i read three chapters and i was more amazed than anybody in sight. the porter was a fresh coon and i gave it to him as my revenge. i’ll bet it amazed him.”
“you don’t seem to have anything in the nature of a preference, so far. i wonder how this will suit you. notre dame de paris, by victor hugo.”
“i don’t understand french.”
“it’s in english and it’s quite worn out, as if it had been read over and over. several of the pages are falling out.”
“oh, i’ve read that. i just remember. it’s a rattling good story, too. about the hunchback and the gipsy girl who tells fortunes and has a pet goat. the priest, who’s a villain, falls off the steeple and clings to a gutter by his finger nails with his enemy watching him. it’s the finest kind of a story.”
“what a pity that you’ve read it! oh, here’s one that’s evidently been a great favorite. it’s in paper and it’s all thumbed and torn. somebody’s written across the top, ‘of all the damned fool people——’. oh, i beg your pardon, i read it before i realized. the name is wife in name only. it doesn’t seem the kind of title that makes you want to read the book, does it?”
“‘wife in name only!’” he gave a short laugh. “it certainly isn’t the kind of name that would make me want to read a book.”
“nor me,” said a deep voice behind them.
[116]they both turned to see buford, the actor, standing back of the table, his tall, angular figure silhouetted against the pale oblong of the uncurtained window. he was smiling suavely, but at the same time with a sort of uneasy, assumed assurance, which suggested that he was not unused to rebuffs.
“that, certainly,” he said, “is not a name to recommend a book to any man—any man, that is, who has or ever had a wife.”
he advanced into the circle of the firelight, blandly beaming at the young man, who, leaning back in his chair, was eying him with surprised inquiry, never having seen him before. the look did not chill the friendly effusion of the actor who, approaching dominick, said with the full, deep resonance of his remarkable voice,
“congratulations, my dear sir, congratulations. not alone on your recovery, but on the fact that you are here with us at all.” he held out his large hand, the skin chapped and red with the cold, and the long fingers closed with a wrenching grip on dominick’s. “we were not sure, when you arrived among us a few nights ago, that we would have the felicity of seeing you so soon up and around—in fact, we were doubtful whether we would ever see you up and around.”
“thanks, very kind of you. oh, i’m all right now.” dominick pressed the hand in return and then, bending a little forward, sent a glance of imploring query round the stranger’s shoulder at rose.
she caught the eye, read its behest, and presented the new-comer:
“mr. ryan, this is mr. buford who is snowed in here with us. mr. buford came here the same day as you, only he came on the murphysville stage.”
buford sat down between them on one of the horsehair chairs that were sociably arranged round the table. the firelight threw into prominence the bony angles of his thin face and glazed the backward sweep of his hair, dark-brown, and worn combed away from his forehead, where a pair of heavy, flexible eyebrows moved up and down like an animated commentary on the conversation. when anything surprising was said they went up, anything puzzling or painful they were drawn down. he rested one hand on his knee, the fingers turned in, and, sitting bolt upright, buttoned tight into his worn frock-coat, turned a glance of somewhat deprecating amiability upon the invalid.
“you had a pretty close call, a-pretty-close-call,” he said. “if the operator at rocky bar hadn’t had the sense to wire up here, that would have been the end of your life story.”
dominick had heard this from every member of the snowed-in party. repetition was not making it any more agreeable, and there was an effect of abrupt ungraciousness in his short answer which was merely a word of comment.
“didn’t the people at the rocky bar hotel try to dissuade you from starting?” said buford. “they must have known it was dangerous. they must have been worried about you or they wouldn’t have telegraphed up.”
“oh, i believe they did.” the young man tried to hide the annoyance the questions gave him under a dry brevity of speech. “they did all that they ought to have done. i’ll see them again on my way down.”
“and yet you persisted!” the actor turned to rose with whom, as he sat beside her at table, he had become quite friendly. “the blind confidence of youth, miss cannon, isn’t it a grand, inspiring thing?”
dominick shifted his aching feet under the rug. he was becoming exceedingly irritated and impatient, and wondered how much longer he would be able to respond politely to the conversational assiduities of the stranger.
“now,” continued buford, “kindly satisfy my curiosity on one point. why, when you were told of the danger of the enterprise, did you start?”
“perhaps i liked the danger, wanted it to tone me up. i’m a bank clerk, mr. buford, and my life’s monotonous. danger’s a change.”
he raised his voice and spoke with sudden rude defiance. buford looked quickly at him, while his eyebrows went up nearly to his hair.
“a bank clerk, oh!” he said with a falling inflection of disappointment, much chagrined to discover that the child of millions occupied such a humble niche. “i—i—was not aware of that.”
“an assistant cashier,” continued dominick in the same key of exasperation, “and i managed to get a holiday at this season because my father was one of the founders of the bank and they allow me certain privileges. if you would like to know anything else ask me and i’ll answer as well as i know how.”
his manner and tone so plainly indicated his resentment of the other’s curiosity that the actor flushed and shrank. he was evidently well-meaning and sensitive, and the young man’s rudeness hurt rather than angered him. for a moment nothing was said, buford making no response other than to clear his throat, while he stretched out one arm and pulled down his cuff with a jerking movement. there was constraint in the air, and rose, feeling that he had been treated with unnecessary harshness, sought to palliate it by lifting the book on her lap and saying to him,
“this is the book we were talking about when you came in, mr. buford, wife in name only. have you read it?”
she handed him the ragged volume, and holding it off he eyed it with a scrutiny all the more marked by the way he drew his heavy brows down till they hung like bushy eaves over his eyes.
“no, my dear young lady. i have not. nor do i feel disposed to do so. ‘wife in name only!’ that tells a whole story without reading a word. were you going to read it?”
“no; mr. ryan and i were just looking over them. we were thinking about reading one of them aloud. this one happened to be on the pile.”
“to me,” continued buford, “the name is repelling because it suggests sorrows of my own.”
there was a pause. he evidently expected a question which undoubtedly was not going to come from dominick, who sat fallen together in the arm-chair looking at him with moody ill-humor. there was more hope from rose, who gazed at the floor but said nothing. buford was forced to repeat with an unctuous depth of tone, “suggests sorrows of my own,” and fasten his glance on her, so that, as she raised her eyes, they encountered the commanding encouragement of his.
“sorrows of your own?” she repeated timidly, but with the expected questioning inflection.
“yes, my dear miss cannon,” returned the actor with a melancholy which was full of a rich, dark enjoyment. “my wife is one in name only.”
there was another pause, and neither of the listeners showing any intention of breaking it, buford remarked,
“that sorrow is mine.”
“what sorrow?” said dominick bruskly.
“the sorrow of a deserted man,” returned the actor with now, for the first time, something of the dignity of real feeling in his manner.
“oh,” the monosyllable was extremely non-committal, but it had an air of finality as though dominick intended to say no more.
“has she—er—left you?” said the girl in a low and rather awe-stricken voice.
the actor inclined his head in an acquiescent bow:
“she has.”
again there was a pause. unless buford chose to be more biographical, the conversation appeared to have come to a deadlock. neither of the listeners could at this stage break into his reserve with questions and yet to switch off on a new subject was not to be thought of at a moment of such emotional intensity. the actor evidently felt this, for he said suddenly, with a relapse into a lighter tone and letting his eyebrows escape from an overshadowing closeness to his eyes,
“but why should i trouble you with the sorrows that have cast their shadow on me? why should my matrimonial troubles be allowed to darken the brightness of two young lives which have not yet known the joys and the perils of the wedded state?”
the pause that followed this remark was the most portentous that had yet fallen on the trio. rose cast a surreptitious glance at the dark figure of young ryan, lying back in the shadows of the arm-chair. as she looked he stirred and said with the abrupt, hard dryness which had marked his manner since buford’s entrance,
“don’t take too much for granted, mr. buford. i’ve known some of the joys and perils of the wedded state myself.”
the actor stared at him in open-eyed surprise.
“do i rightly understand,” he said, “that you are a married man?”
“you do,” returned dominick.
“really now, i never would have guessed it! pardon me for not having given you the full dues of your position. your wife, i take it, has no knowledge of the risk she recently ran of losing her husband?”
“i hope not.”
“well,” he replied with a manner of sudden cheery playfulness, “we’ll take good care that she doesn’t learn. when the wires are up we’ll concoct a telegram that shall be a masterpiece of diplomatic lying. lucky young man to have a loving wife at home. of all of us you are the one who can best realize the meaning of the line, ‘’tis sweet to know there is an eye to mark our coming and——’”
dominick threw the rug off and rose to his feet.
“if you can get perley to help me i’ll go up stairs again. i’m tired and i’ll go back to my room.”
he tried to step forward, but the pain of his unhealed foot was unbearable, and he caught the edge of the table and held it, his face paling with sudden anguish. the actor, startled by the abruptness of his uprising, approached him with a vague proffer of assistance and was arrested by his sharp command:
“go and get perley! he’s in the bar probably. i can’t stand this way for long. hurry up!”
buford ran out of the room, and rose somewhat timidly drew near the young man, braced against the table, his eyes down-bent, his face hard in the struggle with sudden and unfamiliar pain.
“can’t i help you?” she said. “perley may not be there. mr. buford and i can get you up stairs.”
“oh, no,” he answered, his words short but his tone more conciliatory. “it’s nothing to bother about. i’d have wrung that man’s neck if i’d had to listen to him five minutes longer.”
here perley and buford entered, and the former, offering his support to the invalid, led him hobbling out of the door and into the hall. the actor looked after them for a moment and then came back to the fire where miss cannon was standing, thoughtfully regarding the burning logs.
“i’ve no doubt,” he said, “that young mr. ryan is an estimable gentleman, but he certainly appears to be possessed by a very impatient and ugly temper.”
buford had found miss cannon one of the most amiable and charming ladies he had ever met, and it was therefore a good deal of a surprise to have her turn upon him a face of cold, reproving disagreement, and remark in a voice that matched it:
“i don’t agree with you at all, mr. buford, and you seem quite to forget that mr. ryan has been very sick and is still in great pain.”
buford was exceedingly abashed. he would not have offended miss cannon for anything in the world, and it seemed to him that a being so compact of graciousness and consideration would be the first to censure an exhibition of ill-humor such as young ryan had just made. he stammered an apologetic sentence and it did not add to his comfort to see that she was not entirely mollified by it and to feel that she exhaled a slight, disapproving coldness that put him at a great distance and made him feel mortified and ill at ease.
