But whatever the reasons, the result was the same. She had married this man and gone away with him, and they had drifted westward. And when they had gone so far west that coachmen of his stamp were no longer in demand, he took to railroading, and from brakeman became engineer; and finally, being maimed in an accident in which he had stood by his engine while the fireman jumped—breaking his neck thereby—he had picked up enough knowledge of telegraphy to qualify him for this post among the mountains. He and his handsome wife lived here and shared the everlasting solitude of the spot together, and occasionally fed stray travellers like this one who had dropped down on them to-day.
“He drinks over-freely and he swears profusely,” mused Forbes, scrutinizing him, “but he is too big to be cruel, and he still worships her beauty as she, perhaps, once worshipped his; and he still feels an uncouth pride in all that she gave up for his sake.”
It had never occurred to him before to wonder what the after-life of a girl who eloped with her father’s servant might be like. He speculated upon it now. By just what process does a woman so utterly déclassée adjust herself to her altered position? Would she make it a point to forget, or would every reminder of lives, such as her own had been, be a turning of the knife in her wound? Would not a saving recollection of the little refinements of life cling longer to a weak nature than to a strong one under such circumstances?
This woman apparently gave tongue to no vain regrets, for her husband was exulting in the “grit” with which she had taken the fortunes of their life. “No whine about her,” was his way of expressing his conviction that the courage of the thoroughbred was in her.
“No, sir; there’s no whine about her. Un she’s never been sorry, un, s’help me, she sha’n’t never be,” concluded Wilson. There were maudlin tears in his eyes.
“Few men can say that of their wives,” said Forbes’s smooth, sympathetic voice. “You are indeed fortunate.”
While her husband was repeating the oft-told tale of their conjugal happiness, Ellen Wilson had done her after-supper work, and, slipping out of the door, climbed the short, rocky spur to the north of the station. Beyond the summit, completely out of sight and hearing, there was a little hollow that knew her well, but never had it seen her as it saw her now, when, throwing herself down, her face to the earth, she shed the most scalding tears of all her wretched years.
They were such little things this stranger had done—things so slight, so involuntary, so unconscious that they did not deserve the name of courtesies, but they were enough to open the flood-gates of an embittered heart. There was a world where all the men were deferential and all the women’s lives were wrapped about with the fine, small courtesies of life—formal, but not meaningless. It had been her world once and now was so no longer.
Good or bad, she knew little and cared less, this man had come from that lost world of hers, as she was made aware by a thousand small signs, whose very existence she had forgotten; and silently, fiercely she claimed him as an equal.
“I—I too was—” Slow tears drowned the rest.