Chapter XI: Part II: I (2)

As for Mrs. Gregory Compton all they knew of her in her present stage of development was favourable, although several had a lively remembrance of the rosy black-haired Ida Hook delivering her excellent mother’s laundry work at their back door, and receiving more or less of her “cheek.” But they had heard, at the time, of her lessons with Professor Whalen, and of Ora Blake’s coincident interest. Of her social advantages and triumphs in Europe the press had kept them informed; she returned to Butte, in fact, as one new-born. Moreover, she now owned one of the finest houses in the city for entertaining, they knew that she had elected to shine in Butte rather than in London (that Mecca of so many quick-rich women without position in their own country); and above all she was the wife of Gregory Compton, the man in whom Montana was beginning to feel assured it could take an unequivocal pride, not only for his diabolical cleverness, but because he was as “straight” as the Twentieth Century in the United States of America would permit. Butte felt devoutly grateful to Ida for being and returning, and, with that utter lack of affectation that characterised it, began calling two days after her arrival.

Ida would have been glad to have had Ora’s support and advice during this ordeal--which caused her far more apprehension than ducal week-ends. But she summoned all her acquired knowledge and tact, fortified it with her native and supreme confidence in herself, and made no mistakes. Butte was charmed with the severe rich gowns that set off her haughty head and warmly colored face and the long, flowing, yet stately lines of her beautiful figure; charmed also with a manner that was both simple and dignified. She showed no enthusiasm at being taken up so promptly, neither did she quite accept it as a matter of course. If her talk ranged freely over common acquaintance in London, the Paris dressmakers of the season, the new opera, the plays of the moment in New York, it was without glibness, and she took a firm hold on the older and more important women of the community by confiding to them that she should not make her first venture in the difficult art of entertaining until her friend Mrs. Blake returned to help her through the novitiate. Many of the younger women were the wives of Amalgamated officials and attorneys, or of men in a relationship to that mighty power but one degree further removed; but the men individually were too broad-minded to cherish a personal grudge against Compton, and they were, moreover, quite as eager as their mates to meet his handsome wife.

During the ensuing fortnight Ida dined out every night, went to a bridge party every afternoon, as well as to several luncheons, teas, and dances. She wore a different costume every time she appeared in public; but although there was at the moment nothing in Butte to compare with her gowns she never produced the effect of outshining the other women by anything but her beauty and individual style. In short her success was so immediate and so final that, although she liked these ladies of her native town even better than she had anticipated, her rapid conquest soon lost its novelty, and she wished that Ora would return; not only because she missed her increasingly, but because to entertain in her great house would give her a new and really poignant excitement, and lift her definitely from the ranks of the merely received.

Gregory telephoned every few days, and never twice at the same hour. When she found herself restlessly awaiting the ring of the instrument, she dashed out of the house angrily and took a walk. If she found upon her return that he had called her up, she felt that he had given her the excuse to telephone to him, and she soon learned at what hours she could find him either in his cabin or down in the mine, where he had a booth. She was furious at what she called her raging female vanity, and if she could have found another man to assuage it she would not have hesitated to press him into service at whatever cost to himself. But, as happens more often than not, there was not an unmarried man in Butte old enough to be worthy of a fastidious woman’s notice. She would have yawned in the face of “Brownies”, and, although more than one roving husband would have placed himself at her disposal, she was the last woman to court scandal or even gossip. She longed for the advent of Lord John Mowbray, whose gayety would distract her mind, and whose devotion make her forget that she was a neglected wife. She could throw dust into the eyes of Butte by pretending to be his matrimonial sponsor.

But for the first time she wished that she had children. The great house seemed to demand the patter of small feet, the slamming of doors, a row of naughty faces peering over the banister of the second floor. It was terribly silent. And yet she had felt settled down in that house at once, so long had one of its kind been the object of her unswerving desire; its atmosphere already seemed to hang listless with ennui. She subscribed to both the state and city suffrage fund, for she felt a new sympathy for women who were trying to fill their lives, and sincerely hoped they would invent some game that would make them independent of men.

Seventeen days after her return she was sitting in the library, trying to forget her solitary luncheon in a novel when she heard the front doorbell ring. Her servants were amiable but not too competent, and she waited impatiently and in vain for one of them to answer the summons. She restrained the impulse to open the door herself. This was now an obsolete custom among her new acquaintance; although having the front door shut in one’s face while the colored maid took one’s card to the lady of the stately mansion was hardly an improvement, and this had been her experience a day or two ago. She rang the bell in the library. Still there was no sign of life from the high-priced young women who doubtless were gossipping over the back fence. Ida’s curiosity overcame her. The hour was too early for callers. It might be a cable. She stole to the front door and peered through its curtain of Honiton lace. Then she gave a war whoop which would have horrified her servants--who, careless as they were, stood in awe of her--flung the door open, caught Ora in her arms and almost carried her into the library.

“Good Lord, but I’m glad to see you!” she cried. “I’m just about dead of lonesomeness. Why didn’t you telegraph? I’d have met you if your train didn’t get in till two in the morning.”

Ora laughed and disentangled herself, although she kissed Ida warmly. “I just got in--came here on the way from the station and sent my bags to the house--but I always did hate to be met. How beautiful your house is.”

“It’s all right. But it’s about as cheerful to live alone in as one of those palaces in the Via Garibaldi! My, but I’m glad you’re here. You’re the only person I ever missed, and being a real lady for weeks on end is telling on my plebeian health. I didn’t have any relief even in New York. How’s Mark?”

“Quite well, except for his broken leg.”

“Is he here?”

“Oh, no--I left him in Santa Barbara--that is to say at the Club House at Montecito, the fashionable suburb. He has a jolly circle of friends there, and has no desire to travel any further until he can walk.”

Ida put her hands on Ora’s shoulders and turned her round to the light. “What’s up?” she demanded. “You look fine, as pretty as a picture--but--different, somehow.”

“I’ve left Mark.”

Ida glanced into the hall. The opening of back doors indicated that one of the maids had condescended to remember she was a wage earner. “Let’s go upstairs,” said Ida; and as they crossed the hall she said to the girl who was hastening to the front door with a propitiating smile, “You’re just about ten minutes too late, as usual, and the next time it happens you lose your job. I’m not the sort that sits down and wails over the servant question. This house will be run properly if I have to send East for help. Now put on your hat and run down to Mrs. Blake’s house and bring up her bags, and tell them to send her trunks here.

“Yes, you’re going to stay with me for the present,” she said, as Ora protested. “Don’t say another word about it.”

Ora shrugged her shoulders, and when they were in Ida’s bedroom she took off her hat and coat and wandered about aimlessly for a few moments. Ida was almost breathless with impatience and a curious sense of apprehension that vaguely recalled the strange terror Ora had inspired on the day of their meeting. Ora wore a blue frock, and Ida noticed that the yellow room did not dim her fair radiance. If possible she was holding her head higher than usual, her skin “gleamed” more than ever, there was a curious light in her always brilliant eyes, half defiant, half exultant.

“Do sit down!” said Ida sharply, cutting short Ora’s voluble approval of the room. “There, that’s right,” as Ora flung herself into a chair. “Now, fire away. You’re brimming over with something. Do you mean that you’ve left Mark for good and all?”

“Yes.”

“Told him so?”

Ora nodded.

“Did you tell him about Valdobia, or what? For heaven’s sake open up.”

“No, I--I thought I wouldn’t tell him everything at once. I told him that I meant to spend the rest of my life in Europe, and that it was only fair to himself to divorce me--he can do it easily on the ground of desertion--and marry someone who would make a real home for him--make him happy.”

“Ah! Mark’s the sort women marry but don’t fall in love with. And what did he say when you handed him that?”

“He was rather broken up.”

“Really! And you? I always had an idea that when it came to the point you wouldn’t do it. You have high-falutin’ notions about honor, noblesse oblige, and all the rest of it, to say nothing of being really soft, as I once told you. There’s only one thing that would make you hard--to everyone else--and that’s being in love----”

“That is it!” exclaimed Ora eagerly. “I’ve made up my mind to marry Valdobia. I wasn’t so sure when I left Europe, but you know what separation often does----”

“Yes,” said Ida dryly, “I do. Well, Mark will have to take his medicine, I guess. I’ve never doubted, since Valdobia joined us in Genoa, that he was the man for you. It’s fate, I guess. But tell me what Mark said, after all. Did he consent?”

“There was nothing else to do. He knew I meant it. I broke it to him by degrees. Besides, he knew how it was long before I left for Europe. He had practically given me up. Of course he was fond of me--I had become a habit and made him comfortable, besides being useful to him--but--well, I gave him six years--my youth!” she burst out passionately. “What wouldn’t I give to wipe out those years, be twenty again and free! I tried to make him understand that I was no longer in the least like the bewildered undeveloped girl he had married; and that I bore as little resemblance to the intellectual automaton I made of myself later. I told him that I was awake once for all, and that rather than live again with a man I couldn’t care for I’d be boiled in oil. Then he understood.”

“I should think he might! Of course he asked if there was another man?”

“Yes, but I told him that was neither here nor there; that in any case I should leave him and live in Europe.”

“Poor Mark! Tied by the leg, and lost in the shuffle!”

“You know as well as I do that I have nothing in me for Mark and that if I cared as little for Valdobia it would only be fair to give him a second throw for happiness. When I left him he was quite resigned, and we have agreed to remain the best of friends. I shall leave him my power of attorney as before, and he will continue to manage my affairs.”

“How much more sensible we are in our Twentieth Century! No doubt he will visit you in the Palazzo Valdobia when he takes a whirl at Europe.”

“Why not? But tell me you think I did right, Ida?” Ora’s voice was very sweet and plaintive.

“You did what you were bound to do, I guess, when you met a man that could throw a lariat round the neck of that romantic imagination of yours. Right? I don’t know. I guess I’ve got the same old streak of Puritan Americanism in me, although if other people want to have _liaisons_ and divorces it’s none of my affair. Women will do more and more as they damn please, I guess, men having set them such a good example for a few centuries. But I simply hate the idea of losing you. I want you right here in Butte. Lord, I’ve almost forgotten may slang!”

Ora laughed with something like her old merriment. “Oh, you’ll have me for an escape valve for a while yet. Valdobia’s mother is dying of some lingering horrible disease. It wouldn’t be decent for me to go to Rome, and I should be lonely anywhere else. So, I’ve made up my mind to stay here during the summer at least, and realise a dream I used to indulge in before I ever knew I could fall in love.” Once more she looked straight at Ida, this time with the slow expectant smile of a child. “I’m going to reopen my mine and run it myself--of course I shall have a manager. Mark has written, or telegraphed, to Mr. Compton to find one for me--but I shall live out there and go down every day, and make believe I am doing something, too--at all events realise that it _is_ my mine. Mining has always--that is, always did fascinate me more than anything else on earth. I shall be devoted to Valdobia when I am married to him, but I simply must have that adventure first----”

“For heaven’s sake don’t go dotty like Gregory over a hole in the ground. If you get that bee buzzing round in your skull I pity poor Valdobia. If it were not for his mother I’d cable to him to come out----”

Ora’s face set with a hardness that arrested Ida’s observant eye. “Don’t you do anything of the sort. Mark said once about my father, ‘It was characteristic of him that when he quit he quit for good.’ I am always discovering more and more of my father in me. I’ll live that old dream and it will finish when Valdobia and I both are free. Then I shall wipe it off the slate--consign it to limbo.” She sprang to her feet and stretched out her arms. “I am going to do exactly as I please as long as I am free. Of course I am mad about Valdobia--you know that I wouldn’t marry him if I were not--but I am mad too about liberty and my mine. This is my only chance. And I am a Montanan, born in the Rocky Mountains. I want something of the life that has made my state famous before I become a European. I’ve never had anything of her but Butte. I want the wild mountains--I want, above all, the mine that has given me my freedom. I’m going to wear overalls and go down into the mine every day.”

“A sweet sight you’ll be!” said Ida disgustedly. “And the miners--Oh, they’ll just love the idea of having a woman at their heels! What on earth has got hold of you? It’s the only time I’ve ever known you to get off your base. Why, there’s nothing a woman can do at a mine unless she’s a graduated mining engineer, and nothing then that a man couldn’t do better. You’ll be in the way and you’ll soon be bored to death yourself. If you’re so crazy about Montana why don’t you do some of those great things for her that your father suggested? And how do you reconcile your marriage to an Italian with your devotion to your father’s memory?”

Ora turned away her head. “My father gave me too much of himself to expect me to play the rôle of ministering angel to anything. I intend to invest in Montana the greater part of all that I take out of my mine. If it gives me one of the great fortunes I shall endow my state in some way--as Mark may suggest. But I cannot live here. That is for ever settled. When I go to Europe I shall never return--not even to America. I shall forget my life here, everything connected with it--everything! One side of me is already European. I shall become wholly so.”

“Somehow,” said Ida slowly, and with the sensation of being so close to something that she couldn’t see it, “I don’t get the idea that you’re so mad about Valdobia. Long since I figured that when you did love a man you’d be a sort of white pillar of flame about him. I firmly believe that Valdobia is the man for you, but, well--he fell too quickly. He didn’t make you suffer, never kept you guessing for a minute. The women that turn men’s heads are a good deal like men themselves; they’ve got to be hurt hard and kept on tenterhooks before they are in a condition to accommodate the virus. You are fond of Valdobia, and well you may be, but mad isn’t the right word----”

“Oh, yes it is! It is!” Ora was walking up and down the room. “You must believe that I love him as I never dreamed I could love anybody----”

“Hi!” cried Ida. “Your letter-man! That’s what! You were more nearly in love with him than you are with Valdobia, and because, for some reason or other, you couldn’t get him. Where is he?”

Ora’s eyes looked large and blank. “That! I had quite forgotten it. It was the last of a long line of mental love affairs. Those always evaporate even from the memory when the real man comes along.” She sighed heavily and sat down once more. “I know that I shall be happy with Valdobia, only I am not happy now. That is so far off! And of course I feel badly about poor Mark. But I couldn’t help it. Not to do it would have been worse. And I should go off my head meanwhile if I didn’t have this mine. Do you think I could remain here in Butte and go to dinners and bridge parties? I should scream in their faces. I must have work. Be sure I can find something to do at the mine--I suppose there are a laboratory and assay office. And there will always be the excitement of hoping to find free milling gold--at present what could be more exciting than to drift for that lost vein?”

“It wouldn’t keep me awake nights. But have your own way. I don’t want you down with nerves, and that will happen if you don’t look out.”

“If I don’t get my own way.”

“Exactly. But I wish your way marched with mine. I’ve missed you like fury--Say!--here’s an idea: I’ll go back to Europe with you now if you like, and stay until you marry. There are lots of places we planned to go to and didn’t----”

“Ida, you are a dear! And you longed so for Butte. Why it would be like tearing an author from his unfinished magnum opus. Besides--well--you have a husband----”

“Oh, Lord! Gregory is running the Universe at present. Women don’t exist for him. Shall we go?”

Ora shook her head. Her face had turned from white to pale. “No. I must spend these last months of my freedom here in my state. And that lost vein--it pulls me. I _must_ have that life for a few months--for the first and last time. You--you--might spend your week-ends with me.”

Ida scowled and turned away her head. She had no intention of admitting even to Ora that Gregory deliberately avoided her. “Not I. I hate the sight of the De Smet ranch. Go, if you like, but I feel sure you will come in often. And before you go I wish you would do me a favour.”

“Of course I will.”

“Let me give you a dinner. I want to begin that sort of thing and you’ll furnish the excuse besides helping me out.”

“Very well. Have it soon. I want to go to the mine as quickly as possible. I shall begin to send out the furniture for my bungalow tomorrow.”

“A week’s notice will be enough. I’ll write the invitations today. There’s another reason I want to give this dinner. Gregory hasn’t been seen anywhere with me--hates going out. But I shall make him understand that he must come to my first dinner--or people will be talking--and I hate people prying into my affairs. Besides, it will be his duty to you as the wife of his best friend. (He needn’t know you’ve left Mark yet awhile.) I’m not hankering for the rôle of the neglected wife; and I’m sick of making excuses. For all Butte knew I might not have laid eyes on my husband since my return.”

And although she spoke bravely Ora knew that she had not. “We’ll have the dinner,” she said warmly. “And it will be great fun to get it up----”

“Now, come this minute and go to bed. You are to stay with me as long as you are in this camp, and I’m going to tone you up, and make you rest as we used to in Europe every afternoon--hard work in this altitude but it can be done. I’ve got to go to a bridge party now, and you are to sleep. If you feel rested when I get back, I’ll call up two or three of your old friends and ask them to come informally to dinner. So long.”

She closed the door of her best spare room on Ora and walked slowly back to her own, her brows drawn; once more quick with a sensation of profound uneasiness, of being close to something that she could not see. But it was not her habit to ponder for long over the elusive and obscure. “Guess I’m worried about Ora’s health,” she thought impatiently, and rang for her maid.

VI

Two days later Gregory received the following note from his wife:

DEAR GREGORY:

Ora is here, and before going out to the mine has promised to help
me through the ordeal of my first big dinner. Entertaining goes with
this house, and although I am beginning somewhat sooner, perhaps,
than is necessary, I have my reasons. I have asked twenty-four
people, the most important of the older and the younger married
sets. The dinner is to be at eight o’clock Tuesday. I want you to
come. Yow have been very generous, but there is one thing more that
you can do for me and I feel that I have the right to demand it.
If you no longer care for me, that is something I cannot help; nor
you either for that matter. But so far as the world knows, I am
your wife, and if we are never seen together there is bound to be
disagreeable gossip. I don’t want to be gossipped about. It is vulgar
and it complicates life. The Butte women I most wanted to know are
all right, but the town has the usual allowance of fools and scandal
mongers. By showing yourself at my first dinner in your own house
you will muzzle them. You can arrive in time for dinner and take a
late train back to Pony, if there is one. But please come. I am sure
if you think it over you will admit that I am merely proving my new
knowledge of the world in asking for your formal protection.

IDA.

Gregory read this note hastily when he found it in his morning mail-bag in company with many business letters, to which he also gave scant attention: he was in haste to go underground. There was still no sign of the lost vein, and nineteen days of the three weeks’ limit he had set himself were gone. But they broke into it that same afternoon. He barely left the mine until the following morning, but he finally sought his cabin and bed satisfied that the recovered vein of copper pyrite was, like the original, six feet thick and as rich in values. When he awoke he remembered Ida’s note, and although it had provoked a frown of annoyance when he read it, his spirits were now so ebullient that he not only admitted the justice of her demand, but would have granted almost anyone a reasonable request.

Moreover, as he reread the note, its restraint and dignity struck him forcibly, as well as its remote likeness to the Ida Hook he had wooed in Nine Mile Cañon. Certainly she had made the most of her opportunities!

And apparently she had recovered from her first disappointment, or pique--if, indeed, she had felt either--and he assumed that the last year, crowded with exceptional experiences, had made her over into something like a woman of the world. No doubt among her many accomplishments she had acquired self-control. (That she might also have acquired finesse did not occur to him.) He dismissed the fear that she would make a scene--and himself thoroughly uncomfortable. On the whole it would be interesting to see Ida as a bird of paradise. He remembered her in shirtwaists and serviceable skirts, and recalled that he had sometimes thought it a pity she should not have the plumage worthy of her beauty and style.

And if the fates had willed that he must meet Ora Blake again he preferred that the first interview should be in public.

He rang up Pony and in the course of half an hour was connected with Butte.

“Hello!” he said cordially, as he heard his wife’s voice. “Got your letter, but couldn’t find time to answer before. I’ll come to the dinner with pleasure.”

“Oh, I am so glad.” Ida’s tones were crisp and cool. There was none of the husky warmth that Gregory suddenly remembered; nor any of the old common inflection. “Are your evening togs at Mark’s?”

“Yes, will you send for them?”

“I’ll have everything here in one of the spare rooms. The maid will show you up if you are late. It takes me hours to dress.”

“All right. Say--Ida--I wish you’d persuade Mrs. Blake to give up that idea of coming out here. It won’t work. She’ll only be in the way of the men, and if there was a big row on would be one more responsibility for her manager. I suppose she knows I’ve opened up her mine. Besides, it’s no place for a woman anyhow. There are only a few women--miners’ wives--in my camp; none in the others.”

“I’ve told her all that. But--well--you don’t know Ora. Gambling--taking long chances--is in her blood, I guess. You should have seen her at Monte Carlo. You must take in Mrs. Cameron, but I am putting Ora on your left as it is time you two got acquainted. Try to dissuade her. I want her to stay here with me.”

“I’ll do my best. How are you getting on? Butte still panning out?”

“I adore Butte and find nothing to change. It’s too wonderful--to have all your old dreams come true like this! I hope your mine is behaving. I heard a rumour the other day that you had lost your vein----”

“Just found it again!”

Ida noted the exultant ring of his voice, and was about to laugh when she changed her tactics swiftly. “Good! I know just how fine you feel--and that it wasn’t the loss of money that worried you either. Well, the dinner will be a sort of celebration. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.” There was a faint accent of surprise in Gregory’s voice. Ida smiled and returned to her interrupted toilette.

“Just let me get a good chance at him once more,” she thought. “I’ll be eating copper before I get through, but I don’t know him or his sex if he won’t be nibbling off the same chunk.”

VII

The next week was the busiest she had ever known. All the people that had called on her called again on Ora. Her cook collapsed when told to prepare a dinner for twenty-eight people, and Ida, who would not hearken to a public caterer and his too familiar idiosyncrasies, telegraphed to St. Paul for a chef. What moments she had to spare after consultations with this autocrat, with a temperamental designer of menu cards, and with two high-handed young women whom she had been persuaded by the charitable Mrs. Cameron to engage to decorate her rooms, were spent with certain works on copper and mining that she had procured from the public library.

She looked forward to the evening of her dinner party with a secret excitement that seemed to fork its lightning into every recess of her brain, and electrify it with a sense of the fulness of life--that hinted intoxicatingly of life’s perfections. Not only was she to live the wildest dream of Ida Hook, but she had made up her mind to bring the most important man in Montana to her feet on that triumphant night. That the man was her husband, won the first time without an effort, lost through her own indifference and ignorance, added tenfold to the zest of the game. She knew the impression he must retain of her: crude, obvious in her sex allurement, cheaply dressed, a sort of respectable mining-camp siren; all her fascinations second-rate, and her best points in the eyes of an absent-minded husband her good-natured mothering and admirable cooking.

If she had returned to find him as she had left him, a mere brilliant hard-working student, and automatically attentive to his home partner, no doubt she would have slipped into her original rôle at once, for she was normally amiable, and she had strict ideas of wifely duties, which her insistent vanity and deliberate flirtations never for a moment endangered. They also filled the practical wants of a nature not derived from artistic ancestors. She had had her “flyer”, and, allowing for social triumphs, returned to Butte to settle down; although it had been with a certain complacency that she had reflected during the homeward journey upon the altered circumstances which would enable her to live like a civilised being in her own apartments and see far less of her husband than formerly.

Her complacency had been treated to a succession of shocks since her return; it had, in fact, finally gasped out its life; although it had left self-confidence behind to sit at the feet of her shrewd clear mind. She found a zest entirely new in bringing to his knees a man who had been her husband when she was too raw and conceited to appreciate him, who had developed into a personage, and who had conquered his mere maleness and put women out of his life: she had consulted a detective agency and convinced herself that her only rival was the mine. Ida was nothing if not practical. Before preparing for her siege she chose to know exactly where she stood. A rival of her sex would have demanded one sort of tactics; a mere mine and the quickened business instinct of a dreaming but outclassing brain, although she did not underrate their peculiar dead walls and buffers, exacted a different and more impersonal assault--at first.

Much that she had failed to understand in her young husband was clear to her now. His silences, his formidable powers of concentration, his habit of thinking out his purposes unto the smallest detail before verbal expression, his tendency to dream, combined with lightning processes of thought, were the indispensable allies of his peculiar gifts: she had talked with too many brilliant and active men during the past year, to say nothing of her daily association with Ora, for whose inherited and progressive intellect she had the highest respect, and her own development had been too positive, rapid, and normal, not to be fully aware that men born with the genius to conquer life were equipped with powerful imaginations that necessarily made them silent thinkers.

She had become intensely proud of her husband since her return, and his neglect, coupled with his scrupulous generosity, had stung her pride and aroused both desire and determination to recapture what she had lost. She had no great faith in her capacity for love; but not only was she fascinated by Gregory for the first time but she found him more worthy of her accomplished coquetry than any man she had met in Europe. She was firm in her resolve to repossess her husband, but not merely to satisfy that pride which was the evolution of a more primitive vanity; she felt a certain joyousness, a lilt of the spirit, at the thought of spending her life with him, of being the complete helpmate of such a man; even a disposition to dream, which was so new in her experience that she banished it with a frown. “If I let go like other fool women, I’ll make a grand mess of it,” was her characteristic reflection.

She was dressing for the dinner when she heard him enter the house. The parlour maid for once remembered her instructions, and led him up to his room, which was on the opposite side of the hall from his wife’s and at the extreme end. Her door was ajar, she heard his voice--whose depth and richness were decimated by the telephone--his light foot ascending the stair. For the moment she lost her breath, then with an angry jerk of the shoulders regained her poise, and, in tones careless enough to reassure any husband suddenly overwhelmed with the awkwardness of his position, called out:

“Good evening, Gregory. Hope you’ll find everything you want in your room. Ring if you don’t. See you downstairs.”

“Oh--thanks!” Gregory swallowed an immense sigh of relief. “I’ll be on time.”

Ida, assisted by the “upstairs girl”--she had not yet found a ladies’ maid willing to come to Butte--continued her toilette. Her gown was as nearly Renaissance as she thought her native Northwest would stand at this stage of her social progress. It was “built”--a word more appropriate to woman’s dress A.D. 1600 than today--of heavy turquoise-blue brocade, the design outlined here and there with gold thread. The long wrinkled sleeves almost covered her hands, and, like the deep square of the neck, were tipped with fur. Her mass of blue-black hair was closely twisted around her head from brow to the nape of her neck, held above the low forehead by a jewelled stiletto Ora had given her in Genoa, “to remind her of her midnight diversions in the Renaissance palace over which her dim ancestral memories brooded.” This she had dismissed as damn nonsense, but she liked the stiletto with its rudely set stones, and had promised to wear it the first time she got inside one of her near-Renaissance gowns.

The pale subtle blue of the dress made her eyes look light and altogether blue, the thick black underlashes and full white underlids giving them an expression when in repose of cold voluptuousness. Her skin against the dark edge of fur was as white as warm new milk. Her costume and her regal air would have made her noticeable in the proudest assemblage. She was well aware that not only was she a very beautiful woman tonight but a dangerous one. And she might have stepped from one of the tarnished frames in the Palazzo Valdobia.

After the maid had been dismissed, she examined herself even more critically. The coral of lip and cheek, while still eloquent of youth and health, was more delicate than of old; all suggestion of buxomness had disappeared. She looked older than when she had left Butte; the casual observer would have given her thirty years; her cheeks were less full, her mouth had firmer lines; the cold grey-blue eyes more depth, justified their classic setting. Even her profile, released by the finer contour of cheek and thrown into high relief by the severe arrangement of her hair, contributed to the antique harmonies of her head and form.

“You’ll do,” she said to her image, and went down stairs.

Several guests arrived at once and she was standing before her antique English chimneypiece carved in California, chatting with three of them when Gregory entered the room. She nodded amiably as if they had met too recently for formalities. He took the cue and paused to exchange a few words with two men that stood near the door. But Ida had seen the startled opening of his narrow eyes which meant so much in him. She also noted that, as other guests came in, he looked at her again and again. In truth Gregory was startled almost out of his trained stolidity. He had known a certain side of Ida’s cleverness, and believed when he sent her abroad that she would make much of her opportunities, the greatest of which was her constant association with Ora Blake; but that she would return in less than a year looking the great lady, and the handsomest woman he had ever seen, even his energetic imagination had failed to consider. Magnetism, as of old, surrounded her like an aura, but to this he was insensible, his own magnetism having been caught and entangled with that of another. He felt very proud of his wife, however, and, with a sudden impulse of loyalty, he crossed the room and stood at her side. He also was prompted to say in a tone pitched to reach other ears:

“By George, you are simply stunning. I haven’t seen this--a--frock--dress--before.”

“Gown, my dear, gown. It only arrived a few days ago. I shall take you to Europe with me next time--”

“Take him soon!” said Mrs. Cameron. “Don’t give him time to wear out before he has begun to live. Our tired business men!”

“Next year!” said Ida, gayly. “He has half-promised and I’ll not let him off.” As she looked into his eyes with bright friendliness, his face relaxed with the smile which, she suddenly remembered, always had won her from anger or indifference. He was openly delighted with her, the more completely as he was both puzzled and relieved to see that those splendid eyes held neither cold anger nor feminine reproach. Moreover, although they softened for an instant before she was obliged to turn away, it was with an expression that made her look merely sweet and womanly, not in the least coquette or siren. Other guests claimed her attention. He heard her give a little hiss, and saw her eyes flash. Then he forgot her. Ora had entered the room.

Her gown, of some soft imponderable fabric that gave the impression of depth in colour, was the peculiar flaming blue of the night sky of Montana. Gregory was reminded instantly of the night they had sat on the steps of the School of Mines, with the pulsing sky so close above them. The upper part of the gown was cut in points that curved above her slight bust, the spaces between filled with snow-white chiffon which appeared to be folded softly about the body. She wore her pearls, but at the base of her slender throat was a closely fitting string of Montana sapphires, of the same hot almost angry blue. Her little head with its masses of soft ashen hair seemed to sway on the long stem-like neck, her stellar eyes blazed. Her costume extinguished every other blue in the room.

“Really!” said Mrs. Cameron, whose black eyes under her coronet of iron grey hair were snapping, “these two dear friends should have had a consultation over their costumes for tonight.” She had never liked Ora, and although, as the leader of Butte society, she made a point of speaking well of all whom she did not feel obliged to ignore, she had taken a deep liking to Ida; moreover, always a handsome woman herself, she felt both sympathetic and indignant. This was Ida’s night, and she scented treachery.

She had addressed her remark to Gregory, but although he looked at her politely he would not have heard thunder crashing on the roof. He wondered if he were standing erect; he had a confused impression that that wonderful blue gown was burning alcohol whose fumes were in his head and whose flames swirled through all his senses. And the woman within those curling blue flames was so much more beautiful than his memory of her that he forgot not only his recent tribute to Ida, but her bare existence until she tapped him sharply on the arm.

“Dinner has been announced,” she said. “You are to take in Mrs. Cameron.” Ida was smiling again; she had dismissed anger and annoyance; nothing was to dim the radiance of her spirits tonight. She and Ora would be at opposite ends of the table, and she could keep the length of the drawing-room between them when they returned.

Gregory’s face never betrayed him, particularly when he kept his eyelids down, and, as he shook hands with Ora in the dining-room he told her he was glad to see her again as casually as if his hand had not tingled to crush hers. He talked with Mrs. Cameron, however, as long as possible, but when her attention was claimed by the man on her right, he was obliged to turn to Ora. By this time his blood was still. Eating is commonplace work, and talking the inevitable platitudes of a dinner’s earlier courses will steady the most riotous pulses.

Ora smiled impersonally; her eyes might have beheld the husband of her friend for the first time.

“I am so glad to be able to ask you something about my mine,” she said. “Ida tells me that you have reopened it.”

“Yes, they are already through the fault and driving for the vein. There happened to be a good man here looking for a job when I got Mark’s telegram, a young engineer from the East, named Raymond. The miners are good capable men, too, and as Osborne and Douglas installed a compressor, the work should be pretty quick. I fancy you’ll recover the vein in a week or two.”

“I wonder if I shall? Mark thinks you infallible, but it seems too good to be true.”

“The vein is there, about a hundred feet down, but how rich it is I do not venture to predict.”

“Well, never mind,” Ora smiled happily. “I shall have the fun of looking for it, and I want to be with the men when they find it.”

“Oh--Ah--It really would be better for you to give up that idea of going out there to stay----”

“I thought I would give to you the opportunity to say that at once! Do go on and relieve your mind.”

“It is neither safe nor desirable,” he said sulkily. “I may have a row on my hands any minute. Your men and my men are a decent lot, but the Apex have employed a lot of scum so ignorant that there is no knowing what they may do in a crisis--in the hope of currying favour with their superiors. They would merely be made scapegoats or--canned--I beg pardon, fired--but they don’t know that, and they’re as hard a lot as Europe ever kicked on to our dump heap. Better stay here for the present.”

“I’ve sent out all the furniture for the bungalow, and Custer and a Chinaman to put it in order. I suppose my engineer can camp in the other cottage until it is finished. That is quite close to mine, I understand.”

“Oh, of course--but why not stay at my ranch house----”

“That is too far from the scene of operations. Please don’t bother about me. I should hate to think I was on your mind--you have enough! I shall be well protected, and I’ve even bought an automatic. I suppose being a born Westerner I should call it a gun. But it’s such a little one. I shall carry it always----”

“Yes, promise that.”

“I’ve even had a little bag made, like those they wore years ago, to fasten to my belt, and I shall keep it in that.”

“Very well.” He dismissed the subject. “I--ah--there’s something I heard today, but perhaps I should not speak of it. Only Mark is such an old friend of mine----”

“I suppose you saw Mr. Luning and he told you that we are to separate.”

“Yes, that is it.”

“I intend to live in Europe: I suppose you think that a callous reason.”

“It’s as good as most reasons for divorce in this country. When is Mark coming back?”

“Not for two months. Nothing will be done until then. I want to have my mining experience first and I shall leave Montana as soon as the papers are served.”

“Ah!”

Her partner claimed her at the moment and, his own still being occupied, he observed her furtively. He thought that she too looked older, but not because advantages had improved her; rather--he groped for the words that would give definiteness to his impression--as if some experience had saddened her. She had a softer expression. The blood rushed to his head and he almost choked with jealousy, his intuitions carrying him straight to the truth. “By God! She has loved some man,” he thought. Then he set his teeth. So much the better.

But when she turned to him again, he said impulsively, although his tones were light:

“You never did fit this Western life of ours. Of course you have found a more civilised mate in Europe?”

“You are all wrong,” she said gaily. “My only love at present is my mine. My mine! You should understand if anybody can.”

“Oh, yes, I understand that magnet. But I naturally thought----”

“What everybody else will think when the news is out. But I am astonished that you should jump at anything so commonplace.” Her heart was hammering under the concentrated intensity of his gaze; and as if he realised suddenly that he might be betraying himself he said sarcastically:

“As there are--I was told today--no less than six divorces pending in this set which my wife has the honour to entertain tonight, and as all are to intermarry, so to speak, when liberated, my conclusion in your case was probably due to the force of suggestion.”

“Well, I forgive you if you promise to believe none of the absurd stories you are sure to hear. I am in love with freedom. Now tell me what you think of Ida? Isn’t she wonderful?”

Gregory looked down the table at his wife sitting between the two most important men in Butte and entertaining both with animated dignity. She met his eyes and smiled brilliantly. She knew that he was proud of her; she had accomplished the second manœuvre in her flank attack: her first had been to put him at his ease.

“Yes,” he said to Ora. “She is. It is almost beyond belief. And she is your handiwork!” The two might have been life-long intimates, and Ida a mere kinswoman of both, so little did the oddity of this discussion occur to Gregory at least.

“And in a way my present to you.” Ora spoke with a charming graciousness. “Mark had given me a tremendous idea of your abilities. The day I met Ida I saw her possibilities, and I made up my mind then and there that when the world claimed you your wife should be not only an inspiration but equipped to render you the practical and social help that every rising man needs. Isn’t it splendid to think that she will always sit at the head of your table?”

Gregory was staring hard at her again. “You did that deliberately?” he asked.

“Yes. Deliberately. Ida is so clever that she was bound to develop with your rising fortunes, particularly if you sent her to Europe. But it would have taken longer. I couldn’t wait. My father inspired me with the deepest admiration and respect for our Western men. I had made up my mind that you were born into the front rank, and I wanted, as a Western woman, and my father’s daughter, to do something to help you. Tell me that you are satisfied and that you are as proud of Ida as she is of you--that--that--you simply adore her.” She did not flinch, and looked him straight in the eyes, her own full of young, almost gushing, enthusiasm. Her heart had almost stopped beating.

“I certainly am proud of her, and grateful to you. No doubt she will be very helpful if I am forced into politics to conserve my interests.” His tones were flat. He had come to his senses, and he was too loyal to hint that he no longer loved his wife: but Ora’s face was suddenly flooded with a lovely colour, and her eyes looked like grey mist through which the sun was bursting. She asked him,

“Aren’t you going to stay with us for a few days! We’d love to have you?”

“I take the 6.10 for Pony in the morning. If I disappear before the others it will be to snatch a few hours’ sleep in that gorgeous four-poster in my room. After living in two rooms for so long I am oppressed with all this magnificence----”

“Two rooms!” Ora’s voice rang out like an excited child’s. Gregory, marvelling at the quick transitions of her sex, thought he had never seen anyone look so happy. The gentle melancholy that had roused his jealousy was obliterated. “Two rooms!”

“There is another shack just beyond where my Chinaman cooks for me, and bunks, but I have only a bedroom and office--and a bathroom of sorts. Even my secretary sleeps at the ranch house.”

“You dear innocent millionaire. No doubt the proletariat, reading of your sudden wealth, and cursing you, pictures you wallowing in luxury. Well, you shall come and sit sometimes in my comfortable living-room. It is time you relearned the a, b, c, of comfort--before you relapse into the pioneer.”

“Your bungalow looks as if it could be made very homelike.” He spoke with unconscious wistfulness, and she raised friendly and impersonal eyes to his.

“You shall see. I have what the French call the gift of installation, and I have sent out nice things. I shall make tea for you when you come to the surface at the end of the afternoon shift, and you shall sit in the deepest of my chairs.”

“It sounds like heaven,” said Gregory, who despised tea.

Professor Becke, who had taken her in, and Mrs. Cameron simultaneously addressed their temporary partners, and Gregory was now to listen to an account, both spirited and kindly, of the admiration his wife had excited in her native town. Mrs. Cameron suspected the breach, in spite of the clever acting of both, and made up her mind to do what she could to bridge it. She had not an inkling of the cause, for, like Ida, she knew nothing of that fateful hour on the steps of the School of Mines; but as there was no gossip abroad about either Gregory or his wife, she inferred that it was one of those misunderstandings that so often separate young couples, always prone to take themselves too seriously. She knew that Gregory would value her praise; he not only had been fond of her as a schoolboy, when he spent an occasional Saturday with her son, but he knew that her experience of the world was very wide. She was a woman whom long years of wealth had enabled to travel extensively, she visited intimately at some of the greatest country homes in Europe, and she had her own position in New York. She subtly made Gregory feel prouder still of Ida, and then said teasingly:

“It is well that you have her devotion. I know of three men that are quite off their heads about her----”

“Ah? Who are they?” A sultan may weary of his sultana, but his sultana she is all the same.