A book of martyrs

by Cornelia A. P. Comer

Forbes, left to his own devices, picked up his valise, then set it down again and looked around him helplessly, wondering if there was a night train by which he could get away from this heaven-forsaken spot.

“If you want to see where you can sleep,” said a voice at his side, “I will show you.” It was the woman. She bent as she spoke to pick up some of his impedimenta, but he hastily forestalled her with a murmur of deprecation.

She turned and looked at him, and as he met her eyes it occurred to him that the indifference of her face was the indifference of the desert—arid and hopeless. The look she gave him was searching and impersonal; he saw no reason for it, nor for the slow, dark color that spread over her face, and there was less than no excuse for the way she set her lips and stretched a peremptory hand, saying, “Give me those,” in tones that could not be disobeyed. To his own astonishment he surrendered them, and followed her meekly up a ladder-like flight of steps to the rough loft over the station. It was unfinished, but partitioned into two rooms. She opened the door of one of these apartments, silently set his luggage inside, and vanished down the stairs.

Forbes sat down on the edge of a broken chair and looked about him.

“Now, in heaven’s name,” he demanded of the barren walls, “what have I let myself in for, and why did I do it?”

To this question there seemed no sufficient answer, and for awhile he sat there fretting with the futile anxiety of a man who knows that his fate pursues him, who hopes that this turning or that may help him to evade it, yet always feels the benumbing certainty that the path he has taken is the shortest road to that he would avoid. When at last—recognizing that his meditations were unprofitable—he rose and went down the stairs, it was supper-time.

The woman was uncommunicative, but he could feel that her eyes were on him. The man—it occurred to Forbes that he had probably been drinking—was talkative. After the meal was over they went outside. Forbes, by way of supporting his pretence of being an artist, took out a pocket sketch-book and made notes of the values of the clouds and the outlines of the hills against the sky in a sort of artistic short-hand. The man Wilson sat down on a bench and began to talk. Between the exciting effects of the whiskey he had taken, the soothing influence of the cigar Forbes proffered him, and a natural talent for communicativeness, he presently went on to tell his own story. Forbes listened attentively. It seemed a part of the melodrama of the whole situation and was as unreal to him as the flaming miracle of the western skies or his own presence here.

“So the upshot of it all was that we just skipped out. She ran away with me.”

It was a curious story. As Forbes listened he became aware that it was one with which he had occasionally met in the newspapers, but never in real life before. It was, apparently, the story of a girl belonging to a family of wealth and possibly of high social traditions—naturally he did not know what importance to attach to Wilson’s boast that his wife belonged “to the top of the heap”—who had eloped with the man who drove her father’s carriage.

The reasons for this revolt against the natural order of her life was obscure; there was, perhaps, too high a temper on her side and too strict a restraint on the part of her guardians. There was necessarily a total absence of knowledge of life; there was also the fact that the coachman was undoubtedly a fine creature to look at; there might have been a momentary yielding on the part of a naturally dramatic temperament to the impulse for the spectacular in her life.