University of Virginia Library

1. I

“IT is so good of you to come early,” said Mrs. Porter, as Alice Langham entered the drawing-room. “I want to ask a favor of you. I'm sure you won't mind. I would ask one of the débutantes, except that they're always so cross if one puts them next to men they don't know and who can't help them, and so I thought I'd just ask you, you're so good-natured. You don't mind, do you?”

“I mind being called good-natured,” said Miss Langham, smiling. “Mind what, Mrs. Porter?” she asked.

“He is a friend of George's,” Mrs. Porter explained, vaguely. “He's a cowboy. It seems he was very civil to George when he was out there shooting in New Mexico, or Old Mexico, I don't remember which. He took George to his hut and gave him things to shoot, and all that, and now he is in New York with a letter of introduction.

It's just like George. He may be a most impossible sort of man, but, as I said to Mr. Porter, the people I've asked can't complain, because I don't know anything more about him than they do. He called to-day when I was out and left his card and George's letter of introduction, and as a man had failed me for to-night, I just thought I would kill two birds with one stone, and ask him to fill his place, and he's here. And, oh, yes,” Mrs. Porter added, “I'm going to put him next to you, do you mind?”

“Unless he wears leather leggings and long spurs I shall mind very much,” said Miss Langham.

“Well, that's very nice of you,” purred Mrs. Porter, as she moved away. “He may not be so bad, after all; and I'll put Reginald King on your other side, shall I?” she asked, pausing and glancing back.

The look on Miss Langham's face, which had been one of amusement, changed consciously, and she smiled with polite acquiescence.

“As you please, Mrs. Porter,” she answered. She raised her eyebrows slightly. “I am, as the politicians say, `in the hands of my friends.' ”

“Entirely too much in the hands of my friends,” she repeated, as she turned away. This was the twelfth time during that same winter that she and Mr. King had been placed next to one another at

dinner, and it had passed beyond the point when she could say that it did not matter what people thought as long as she and he understood. It had now reached that stage when she was not quite sure that she understood either him or herself. They had known each other for a very long time; too long, she sometimes thought, for them ever to grow to know each other any better. But there was always the chance that he had another side, one that had not disclosed itself, and which she could not discover in the strict social environment in which they both lived. And she was the surer of this because she had once seen him when he did not know that she was near, and he had been so different that it had puzzled her and made her wonder if she knew the real Reggie King at all.

It was at a dance at a studio, and some French pantomimists gave a little play. When it was over, King sat in the corner talking to one of the Frenchwomen, and while he waited on her he was laughing at her and at her efforts to speak English. He was telling her how to say certain phrases and not telling her correctly, and she suspected this and was accusing him of it, and they were rhapsodizing and exclaiming over certain delightful places and dishes of which they both knew in Paris with the enthusiasm of two children. Miss Langham saw him off his guard for the first time and instead

of a somewhat bored and clever man of the world, he appeared as sincere and interested as a boy. When he joined her, later, the same evening, he was as entertaining as usual, and as polite and attentive as he had been to the Frenchwoman, but he was not greatly interested, and his laugh was modulated and not spontaneous. She had wondered that night, and frequently since then, if, in the event of his asking her to marry him, which was possible, and of her accepting him, which was also possible, whether she would find him, in the closer knowledge of married life, as keen and lighthearted with her as he had been with the French dancer. If he would but treat her more like a comrade and equal, and less like a prime minister conferring with his queen! She wanted something more intimate than the deference that he showed her, and she did not like his taking it as an accepted fact that she was as worldly-wise as himself, even though it were true.

She was a woman and wanted to be loved, in spite of the fact that she had been loved by many men—at least it was so supposed—and had rejected them.

Each had offered her position, or had wanted her because she was fitted to match his own great state, or because he was ambitious, or because she was rich. The man who could love her as she

once believed men could love, and who could give her something else besides approval of her beauty and her mind, had not disclosed himself. She had begun to think that he never would, that he did not exist, that he was an imagination of the play-house and the novel. The men whom she knew were careful to show her that they appreciated how distinguished was her position, and how inaccessible she was to them. They seemed to think that by so humbling themselves, and by emphasizing her position they pleased her best, when it was what she wanted them to forget. Each of them would draw away backward, bowing and protesting that he was unworthy to raise his eyes to such a prize, but that if she would only stoop to him, how happy his life would be. Sometimes they meant it sincerely; sometimes they were gentlemanly adventurers of title, from whom it was a business proposition, and in either case she turned restlessly away and asked herself how long it would be before the man would come who would pick her up on his saddle and gallop off with her, with his arm around her waist and his horse's hoofs clattering beneath them, and echoing the tumult in their hearts.

She had known too many great people in the world to feel impressed with her own position at home in America; but she sometimes compared

herself to the Queen in “In a Balcony,” and repeated to herself, with mock seriousness:—

And if it were true, she asked herself, that the man she had imagined was only an ideal and an illusion, was not King the best of the others, the unideal and ever-present others? Every one else seemed to think so. The society they knew put them constantly together and approved. Her people approved. Her own mind approved, and as her heart was not apparently ever to be considered, who could say that it did not approve as well? He was certainly a very charming fellow, a manly, clever companion, and one who bore about him the evidences of distinction and thorough breeding. As far as family went, the Kings were as old as a young country could expect, and Reggie King was, moreover, in spite of his wealth, a man of action and ability. His yacht journeyed from continent to continent, and not merely up the Sound to Newport, and he was as well known and welcome to the consuls along the coasts of Africa and South America as he was at Cowes or Nice. His books of voyages were recognized by geographical

societies and other serious bodies, who had given him permission to put long disarrangements of the alphabet after his name. She liked him because she had grown to be at home with him, because it was good to know that there was some one who would not misunderstand her, and who, should she so indulge herself, would not take advantage of any appeal she might make to his sympathy, who would always be sure to do the tactful thing and the courteous thing, and who, while he might never do a great thing, could not do an unkind one.

Miss Langham had entered the Porters' drawing-room after the greater number of the guests had arrived, and she turned from her hostess to listen to an old gentleman with a passion for golf, a passion in which he had for a long time been endeavoring to interest her. She answered him and his enthusiasm in kind, and with as much apparent interest as she would have shown in a matter of state. It was her principle to be all things to all men, whether they were great artists, great diplomats, or great bores. If a man had been pleading with her to leave the conservatory and run away with him, and another had come up innocently and announced that it was his dance, she would have said: “Oh, is it?” with as much apparent delight as though his coming had been the one bright hope in her life.

She was growing enthusiastic over the delights of golf and unconsciously making a very beautiful picture of herself in her interest and forced vivacity, when she became conscious for the first time of a strange young man who was standing alone before the fireplace looking at her, and frankly listening to all the nonsense she was talking. She guessed that he had been listening for some time, and she also saw, before he turned his eyes quickly away, that he was distinctly amused. Miss Langham stopped gesticulating and lowered her voice, but continued to keep her eyes on the face of the stranger, whose own eyes were wandering around the room, to give her, so she guessed, the idea that he had not been listening, but that she had caught him at it in the moment he had first looked at her. He was a tall, broad-shouldered youth, with a handsome face, tanned and dyed, either by the sun or by exposure to the wind, to a deep ruddy brown, which contrasted strangely with his yellow hair and mustache, and with the pallor of the other faces about him. He was a stranger apparently to every one present, and his bearing suggested, in consequence, that ease of manner which comes to a person who is not only sure of himself, but who has no knowledge of the claims and pretensions to social distinction of those about him. His most attractive feature was his eyes, which seemed to observe

all that was going on, not only what was on the surface, but beneath the surface, and that not rudely or covertly but with the frank, quick look of the trained observer. Miss Langham found it an interesting face to watch, and she did not look away from it. She was acquainted with every one else in the room, and hence she knew this must be the cowboy of whom Mrs. Porter had spoken, and she wondered how any one who had lived the rough life of the West could still retain the look when in formal clothes of one who was in the habit of doing informal things in them.

Mrs. Porter presented her cowboy simply as “Mr. Clay, of whom I spoke to you,” with a significant raising of the eyebrows, and the cowboy made way for King, who took Miss Langham in. He looked frankly pleased, however, when he found himself next to her again, but did not take advantage of it throughout the first part of the dinner, during which time he talked to the young married woman on his right, and Miss Langham and King continued where they had left off at their last meeting. They knew each other well enough to joke of the way in which they were thrown into each other's society, and, as she said, they tried to make the best of it. But while she spoke, Miss Langham was continually conscious of the presence of her neighbor, who piqued her interest and her

curiosity in different ways. He seemed to be at his ease, and yet from the manner in which he glanced up and down the table and listened to snatches of talk on either side of him he had the appearance of one to whom it was all new, and who was seeing it for the first time.

There was a jolly group at one end of the long table, and they wished to emphasize the fact by laughing a little more hysterically at their remarks than the humor of those witticisms seemed to justify. A daughter-in-law of Mrs. Porter was their leader in this, and at one point she stopped in the middle of a story and waving her hand at the double row of faces turned in her direction, which had been attracted by the loudness of her voice, cried, gayly,{sic} “Don't listen. This is for private circulation. It is not a jeune-fille story.” The débutantes at the table continued talking again in steady, even tones, as though they had not heard the remark or the first of the story, and the men next to them appeared equally unconscious. But the cowboy, Miss Langham noted out of the corner of her eye, after a look of polite surprise, beamed with amusement and continued to stare up and down the table as though he had discovered a new trait in a peculiar and interesting animal. For some reason, she could not tell why, she felt annoyed with herself and with her friends, and resented the

attitude which the new-comer assumed toward them.

“Mrs. Porter tells me that you know her son George?” she said. He did not answer her at once, but bowed his head in assent, with a look of interrogation, as though, so it seemed to her, he had expected her, when she did speak, to say something less conventional.

“Yes,” he replied, after a pause, “he joined us at Ayutla. It was the terminus of the Jalisco and Mexican Railroad then. He came out over the road and went in from there with an outfit after mountain lions. I believe he had very good sport.”

“That is a very wonderful road, I am told,” said King, bending forward and introducing himself into the conversation with a nod of the head toward Clay; “quite a remarkable feat of engineering.”

“It will open up the country, I believe,” assented the other, indifferently.

“I know something of it,” continued King, “because I met the men who were putting it through at Pariqua, when we touched there in the yacht. They shipped most of their plant to that port, and we saw a good deal of them. They were a very jolly lot, and they gave me a most interesting account of their work and its difficulties.”

Clay was looking at the other closely, as though

he was trying to find something back of what he was saying, but as his glance seemed only to embarrass King he smiled freely again in assent, and gave him his full attention.

“There are no men to-day, Miss Langham,” King exclaimed, suddenly, turning toward her, “to my mind, who lead as picturesque lives as do civil engineers. And there are no men whose work is as little appreciated.”

“Really?” said Miss Langham, encouragingly.

“Now those men I met,” continued King, settling himself with his side to the table, “were all young fellows of thirty or thereabouts, but they were leading the lives of pioneers and martyrs—at least that's what I'd call it. They were marching through an almost unknown part of Mexico, fighting Nature at every step and carrying civilization with them. They were doing better work than soldiers, because soldiers destroy things, and these chaps were creating, and making the way straight. They had no banners either, nor brass bands. They fought mountains and rivers, and they were attacked on every side by fever and the lack of food and severe exposure. They had to sit down around a camp-fire at night and calculate whether they were to tunnel a mountain, or turn the bed of a river or bridge it. And they knew all the time that whatever they decided to do out there in the wilderness

meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's country, who would some day hold them to account for them. They dragged their chains through miles and miles of jungle, and over flat alkali beds and cactus, and they reared bridges across roaring canons. We know nothing about them and we care less. When their work is done we ride over the road in an observation-car and look down thousands and thousands of feet into the depths they have bridged, and we never give them a thought. They are the bravest soldiers of the present day, and they are the least recognized. I have forgotten their names, and you never heard them. But it seems to me the civil engineer, for all that, is the chief civilizer of our century.”

Miss Langham was looking ahead of her with her eyes half-closed, as though she were going over in her mind the situation King had described.

“I never thought of that,” she said. “It sounds very fine. As you say, the reward is so inglorious. But that is what makes it fine.”

The cowboy was looking down at the table and pulling at a flower in the centre-piece. He had ceased to smile. Miss Langham turned on him somewhat sharply, resenting his silence, and said, with a slight challenge in her voice:—

“Do you agree, Mr. Clay,” she asked, “or do

you prefer the chocolate-cream soldiers, in red coats and gold lace?”

“Oh, I don't know,” the young man answered, with some slight hesitation. “It's a trade for each of them. The engineer's work is all the more absorbing, I imagine, when the difficulties are greatest. He has the fun of overcoming them.”

“You see nothing in it then,” she asked, “but a source of amusement?”

“Oh, yes, a good deal more,” he replied. “A livelihood, for one thing. I—I have been an engineer all my life. I built that road Mr. King is talking about.”

An hour later, when Mrs. Porter made the move to go, Miss Langham rose with a protesting sigh. “I am so sorry,” she said, “it has been most interesting. I never met two men who had visited so many inaccessible places and come out whole. You have quite inspired Mr. King, he was never so amusing. But I should like to hear the end of that adventure; won't you tell it to me in the other room?”

Clay bowed. “If I haven't thought of something more interesting in the meantime,” he said.

“What I can't understand,” said King, as he moved up into Miss Langham's place, “is how you had time to learn so much of the rest of the world.

You don't act like a man who had spent his life in the brush.”

“How do you mean?” asked Clay, smiling—“that I don't use the wrong forks?”

“No,” laughed King, “but you told us that this was your first visit East, and yet you're talking about England and Vienna and Voisin's. How is it you've been there, while you have never been in New York?”

“Well, that's partly due to accident and partly to design,” Clay answered. “You see I've worked for English and German and French companies, as well as for those in the States, and I go abroad to make reports and to receive instructions. And then I'm what you call a self-made man; that is, I've never been to college. I've always had to educate myself, and whenever I did get a holiday it seemed to me that I ought to put it to the best advantage, and to spend it where civilization was the furthest advanced—advanced, at least, in years. When I settle down and become an expert, and demand large sums for just looking at the work other fellows have done, then I hope to live in New York, but until then I go where the art galleries are biggest and where they have got the science of enjoying themselves down to the very finest point. I have enough rough work eight months of the year to make me appreciate that. So whenever I get

a few months to myself I take the Royal Mail to London, and from there to Paris or Vienna. I think I like Vienna the best. The directors are generally important people in their own cities, and they ask one about, and so, though I hope I am a good American, it happens that I've more friends on the Continent than in the United States.”

“And how does this strike you?” asked King, with a movement of his shoulder toward the men about the dismantled table.

“Oh, I don't know,” laughed Clay. “You've lived abroad yourself; how does it strike you?”

Clay was the first man to enter the drawing-room. He walked directly away from the others and over to Miss Langham, and, taking her fan out of her hands as though to assure himself of some hold upon her, seated himself with his back to every one else.

“You have come to finish that story?” she said, smiling.

Miss Langham was a careful young person, and would not have encouraged a man she knew even as well as she knew King, to talk to her through dinner, and after it as well. She fully recognized that because she was conspicuous certain innocent pleasures were denied her which other girls could enjoy without attracting attention or comment. But Clay interested her beyond her usual self, and the

look in his eyes was a tribute which she had no wish to put away from her.

“I've thought of something more interesting to talk about,” said Clay. “I'm going to talk about you. You see I've known you a long time.”

“Since eight o'clock?” asked Miss Langham.

“Oh, no, since your coming out, four years ago.”

“It's not polite to remember so far back,” she said. “Were you one of those who assisted at that important function? There were so many there I don't remember.”

“No, I only read about it. I remember it very well; I had ridden over twelve miles for the mail that day, and I stopped half-way back to the ranch and camped out in the shade of a rock and read all the papers and magazines through at one sitting, until the sun went down and I couldn't see the print. One of the papers had an account of your coming out in it, and a picture of you, and I wrote East to the photographer for the original. It knocked about the West for three months and then reached me at Laredo, on the border between Texas and Mexico, and I have had it with me ever since.”

Miss Langham looked at Clay for a moment in silent dismay and with a perplexed smile.

“Where is it now?” she asked at last.

“In my trunk at the hotel.”

“Oh,” she said, slowly. She was still in doubt as to how to treat this act of unconventionality. “Not in your watch?” she said, to cover up the pause. “That would have been more in keeping with the rest of the story.”

The young man smiled grimly, and pulling out his watch pried back the lid and turned it to her so that she could see a photograph inside. The face in the watch was that of a young girl in the dress of a fashion of several years ago. It was a lovely, frank face, looking out of the picture into the world kindly and questioningly, and without fear.

“Was I once like that?” she said, lightly. “Well, go on.”

“Well,” he said, with a little sigh of relief, “I became greatly interested in Miss Alice Langham, and in her comings out and goings in, and in her gowns. Thanks to our having a press in the States that makes a specialty of personalities, I was able to follow you pretty closely, for, wherever I go, I have my papers sent after me. I can get along without a compass or a medicine-chest, but I can't do without the newspapers and the magazines. There was a time when I thought you were going to marry that Austrian chap, and I didn't approve of that. I knew things about him in Vienna. And

then I read of your engagement to others—well—several others; some of them I thought worthy, and others not. Once I even thought of writing you about it, and once I saw you in Paris. You were passing on a coach. The man with me told me it was you, and I wanted to follow the coach in a fiacre, but he said he knew at what hotel you were stopping, and so I let you go, but you were not at that hotel, or at any other—at least, I couldn't find you.”

“What would you have done—?” asked Miss Langham. “Never mind,” she interrupted, “go on.”

“Well, that's all,” said Clay, smiling. “That's all, at least, that concerns you. That is the romance of this poor young man.”

“But not the only one,” she said, for the sake of saying something.

“Perhaps not,” answered Clay, “but the only one that counts. I always knew I was going to meet you some day. And now I have met you.”

“Well, and now that you have met me,” said Miss Langham, looking at him in some amusement, “are you sorry?”

“No—” said Clay, but so slowly and with such consideration that Miss Langham laughed and held her head a little higher. “Not sorry to meet you, but to meet you in such surroundings.”

“What fault do you find with my surroundings?”

“Well, these people,” answered Clay, “they are so foolish, so futile. You shouldn't be here. There must be something else better than this. You can't make me believe that you choose it. In Europe you could have a salon, or you could influence statesmen. There surely must be something here for you to turn to as well. Something better than golf-sticks and salted almonds.”

“What do you know of me?” said Miss Langham, steadily. “Only what you have read of me in impertinent paragraphs. How do you know I am fitted for anything else but just this? You never spoke with me before to-night.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” said Clay, quickly. “Time is made for ordinary people. When people who amount to anything meet they don't have to waste months in finding each other out. It is only the doubtful ones who have to be tested again and again. When I was a kid in the diamond mines in Kimberley, I have seen the experts pick out a perfect diamond from the heap at the first glance, and without a moment's hesitation. It was the cheap stones they spent most of the afternoon over. Suppose I have only seen you to-night for the first time; suppose I shall not

see you again, which is quite likely, for I sail to morrow for South America—what of that? I am just as sure of what you are as though I had known you for years.”

Miss Langham looked at him for a moment in silence. Her beauty was so great that she could take her time to speak. She was not afraid of losing any one's attention.

“And have you come out of the West, knowing me so well, just to tell me that I am wasting myself?” she said. “Is that all?”

“That is all,” answered Clay. “You know the things I would like to tell you,” he added, looking at her closely.

“I think I like to be told the other things best,” she said, “they are the easier to believe.”

“You have to believe whatever I tell you,” said Clay, smiling. The girl pressed her hands together in her lap, and looked at him curiously. The people about them were moving and making their farewells, and they brought her back to the present with a start.

“I'm sorry you're going away,” she said. “It has been so odd. You come suddenly up out of the wilderness, and set me to thinking and try to trouble me with questions about myself, and then steal away again without stopping to help me to settle them. Is it fair?” She rose and put out

her hand, and he took it and held it for a moment, while they stood looking at one another.

“I am coming back,” he said, “and I will find that you have settled them for yourself.”

“Good-by,” she said, in so low a tone that the people standing near them could not hear. “You haven't asked me for it, you know, but—I think I shall let you keep that picture.”

“Thank you,” said Clay, smiling, “I meant to.”

“You can keep it,” she continued, turning back, “because it is not my picture. It is a picture of a girl who ceased to exist four years ago, and whom you have never met. Good-night.”

Mr. Langham and Hope, his younger daughter, had been to the theatre. The performance had been one which delighted Miss Hope, and which satisfied her father because he loved to hear her laugh. Mr. Langham was the slave of his own good fortune. By instinct and education he was a man of leisure and culture, but the wealth he had inherited was like an unruly child that needed his constant watching, and in keeping it well in hand he had become a man of business, with time for nothing else.

Alice Langham, on her return from Mrs. Porter's dinner, found him in his study engaged with a game of solitaire, while Hope was kneeling on

a chair beside him with her elbows on the table. Mr. Langham had been troubled with insomnia of late, and so it often happened that when Alice returned from a ball she would find him sitting with a novel, or his game of solitaire, and Hope, who had crept downstairs from her bed, dozing in front of the open fire and keeping him silent company. The father and the younger daughter were very close to one another, and had grown especially so since his wife had died and his son and heir had gone to college. This fourth member of the family was a great bond of sympathy and interest between them, and his triumphs and escapades at Yale were the chief subjects of their conversation. It was told by the directors of a great Western railroad, who had come to New York to discuss an important question with Mr. Langham, that they had been ushered downstairs one night into his basement, where they had found the President of the Board and his daughter Hope working out a game of football on the billiard table. They had chalked it off into what corresponded to five-yard lines, and they were hurling twenty-two chess-men across it in “flying wedges” and practising the several tricks which young Langham had intrusted to his sister under an oath of secrecy. The sight filled the directors with the horrible fear that business troubles had turned the President's mind, but after they had sat for half an hour perched on the high chairs around the table, while Hope excitedly explained the game to them, they decided that he was wiser than they knew, and each left the house regretting he had no son worthy enough to bring “that young girl” into the Far West.

“You are home early,” said Mr. Langham, as Alice stood above him pulling at her gloves. “I thought you said you were going on to some dance.”

“I was tired,” his daughter answered.

“Well, when I'm out,” commented Hope, “I won't come home at eleven o'clock. Alice always was a quitter.”

“A what?” asked the older sister.

“Tell us what you had for dinner,” said Hope. “I know it isn't nice to ask,” she added, hastily, “but I always like to know.”

“I don't remember,” Miss Langham answered, smiling at her father, “except that he was very much sunburned and had most perplexing eyes.”

“Oh, of course,” assented Hope, “I suppose you mean by that that you talked with some man all through dinner. Well, I think there is a time for everything.”

“Father,” interrupted Miss Langham, “do you know many engineers—I mean do you come in

contact with them through the railroads and mines you have an interest in? I am rather curious about them,” she said, lightly. “They seem to be a most picturesque lot of young men.”

“Engineers? Of course,” said Mr. Langham, vaguely, with the ten of spades held doubtfully in air. “Sometimes we have to depend upon them altogether. We decide from what the engineering experts tell us whether we will invest in a thing or not.”

“I don't think I mean the big men of the profession,” said his daughter, doubtfully. “I mean those who do the rough work. The men who dig the mines and lay out the railroads. Do you know any of them?”

“Some of them,” said Mr. Langham, leaning back and shuffling the cards for a new game. “Why?”

“Did you ever hear of a Mr. Robert Clay?”

Mr. Langham smiled as he placed the cards one above the other in even rows. “Very often,” he said. “He sails to-morrow to open up the largest iron deposits in South America. He goes for the Valencia Mining Company. Valencia is the capital of Olancho, one of those little republics down there.”

“Do you—are you interested in that company?” asked Miss Langham, seating herself before the

fire and holding out her hands toward it. “Does Mr. Clay know that you are?”

“Yes—I am interested in it,” Mr. Langham replied, studying the cards before him, “but I don't think Clay knows it—nobody knows it yet, except the president and the other officers.” He lifted a card and put it down again in some indecision. “It's generally supposed to be operated by a company, but all the stock is owned by one man. As a matter of fact, my dear children,” exclaimed Mr. Langham, as he placed a deuce of clubs upon a deuce of spades with a smile of content, “the Valencia Mining Company is your beloved father.”

“Oh,” said Miss Langham, as she looked steadily into the fire.

Hope tapped her lips gently with the back of her hand to hide the fact that she was sleepy, and nudged her father's elbow. “You shouldn't have put the deuce there,” she said, “you should have used it to build with on the ace.”