The new Mrs. Mar was at first boundlessly indignant with her kinsmen. “Never mind,” she adjured her husband, with flashing eyes; as soon as he should be able to travel, they would go up there themselves. She seemed unobservant of the fact that his spirits were not raised by her kind proposition. They would have no trouble, she assured him, in finding worthier partners to join them in the great scheme when once they had “made sure.”
“Made sure?” said Mar, wincing; “but I have made sure.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Still you did lose the nugget—and the gold dust, too.”
For the first time Mar changed the subject.
“You haven’t anything to show,” she persisted. To which he answered nothing.
Shortly after they were married, Mar’s mother became very ill. The following spring she died. Mar’s own health and spirits were a good deal lowered by the surgical torment he was called on periodically to undergo, as amputation followed amputation.
Meanwhile, without waiting to “go up there and make sure,” two efforts on Mrs. Mar’s part to interest moneyed men in her husband’s discovery, resulted not alone in failing to convince any one else that this was a fine opportunity for investment, but ultimately in undermining her own faith.
With the coming of her first child she prepared to cast overboard the wild hope (she saw now that it was wild) of a fortune up yonder in the ice-fields, and showed herself wisely ready to make what she could out of the saner possibilities life presented in Valdivia. Her cousins had been right. She wouldn’t admit it to them—not yet—but it was a crazy scheme, that notion of gold in the arctic regions!
Dreamer as he was, Mar missed nothing of the intended effect when she first ceased to talk about his discovery—ceased to plan all life with that fact for its corner-stone. Her initial silence hurt him probably more than the half-veiled taunts of a later time. It was all the difference between the shrinking of an open wound and the dull beating of an ancient cicatrice.
Not only, as time went on, did she resent the illusion she had been under, but, as is common with women of her type, her husband’s greater significance since motherhood had come to her, made her increasingly dread that foolish infatuation of his. She foresaw that a continued faith in the value of his “find” would stand between him and energetic pursuit of fortune in any other direction. So it was that the North was not merely for her, as time went on, the type of a shattered dream—it came to be her and her babies’ rival in this man’s thoughts. This man—who owed to them all his thoughts, all his faith and energy—he was divided in his allegiance.