“Damn him!” was my thought. He seemed always, at every blow my life sustained, to be in a position to make my humiliation more soul-searing.
Deliberately I read the whole account through a second time. I knew with profound conviction that every line was true—I could piece together the whole story step by step. But following that awful downfall, there under the white-bowled lights of the library, my conscience cried out that I had failed again-failed, as a mother, more miserably than ever Augusta could have wished or prophesied. I was bowed down with shame.
“Don’t let anyone know,” my heart immediately rebelled. “The Tabor pride does not admit defeat.”
Gathering up the paper quietly and folding its pink sheets along their original creases, I took it to the desk and nonchalantly handed the death-blow back to the girl who had brought it to me.
“Thank you very much for the paper,” I said. “But that story’s all a pack of lies. She’s not my daughter—that young woman. I know Silver is in a convent.”
Turning on my heel, I walked out, erect and dignified, my miner’s boots clacking with the conviction of my statement.
So passed Silver from my life. I don’t know which was sadder or more humiliating—Silver’s going or Lillie’s. From the viewpoint of the world, I suppose it was Lillie’s. But from my own, I was devoted to Silver and believed in her, and her going was the hardest to bear. I knew she had told me the lie about the convent to protect me from hurt. But in the end, the hurt was much greater.
I have never admitted my hurt, even to intimates. Before the world, I have always preserved the outline of her fabrication. Silver is alive today. She is in a convent.
The winter dragged miserably in and I was even poorer. My boots wore out and I hit upon the scheme of wrapping my legs in gunny sack, like puttees, held with twine; a habit I have always held to. Only dreams and memories were left to sustain the poverty and dreariness of my life. Now I was completely down.
But catastrophes never come singly and it was also that winter that the Matchless was again to be foreclosed. During a quarter of a century, the leases, the legal battles, the disappointments, the troubles and the finances of that mine had been one long series of involved ramifications. Each time the clouds would seems to have a silver lining, it would prove only a figment of my imagination or a mirage of the Cloud City (Leadville’s nickname). A silver mine in the Cloud City should certainly have some lining!