But Valdivia was neither near enough to the mining centers to catch the fever, nor yet so far away but what her citizens mightily feared infection. Had not their townsman, Ben White, lost his head and his fortune over at Huerfano Creek? Wasn’t there young Andrews for a warning!
No catastrophe of this kind in their little world lost through Mrs. Mar’s agency any of its ironic usefulness as illustration. She succeeded not only in making her husband doubt the wisdom of giving up a sure thing in the bank, to claim an unworkable gold mine, but little by little, as the rain and the weather wear away the sharp outlines of a stone inscription, so for Nathaniel Mar the years and the unbelief about him brought a gradual blurring of the picture, till even to himself its early outlines were a little dimmed.
To revive its actuality, more than for any other purpose, nearly ten years after he had told the story to little Jack Galbraith, he told it again to Mr. Elihu H. Cox. The man listened with such a look in his big, fishy eyes, in a silence so galling, that Mar interposed hurriedly: “And there’s one capital thing about it. It’s safe enough. If the gold’s there, it certainly won’t run away,” and abruptly changed the subject; though to hear himself saying “if it’s there,” rankled in his memory like apostasy. He would never tell the story again till his boys were grown and he told it to them. They would believe him. They, with youth and four sound legs between them, they would go up there and justify the long faith.
For fear that he might die before they were old enough to be indoctrinated, he wrote out as circumstantial an account as he could between intervals of black despair at finding how dim were certain details. He grappled with the horror and saw it recede before the draftsman’s skill and his peerless satisfaction in preparing careful diagrams and a map to larger scale. There was an effect of mathematical accuracy about these illustrations of his account that gave him back his confidence. If there was any trifling difference between these data and those furnished upon his return, the apparent discrepancy lay in the essential impressionism of mere words. The compass and the rule can’t lie. He put the precious document away with his will, in the vault of the Palmas Valley Bank, but he did not put away the thought of it. On the contrary, he kept it by him day and night, turning it over in his mind with the rich comfort of the man who reflects that he will leave to his children a handsome inheritance and a fund of gratitude. Something in this case that partook of the nature of a paternal life-insurance—the kind of thing that had not profited, could not profit the giver, except as it profited him to feel that for all his appearance of being one of life’s failures, he yet had insured his children against the meaner assaults of fortune. For this “policy” that he held for them was “paid up.” Oh, yes, Nathaniel Mar had paid heavily—not yearly, but daily, almost hourly, for his lien upon the riches of the North.
The thought of the gold-shotted creek between the Great Stone Anvil and the arctic circle comforted him not least when he looked at his little daughter. It was good to know—the knowledge helped him through many a difficult hour—that Hildegarde would never be forced to join the ever fuller ranks of the bread-winning women. It would be no hurt to her that, however great an heiress she might be, she had been frugally brought up.
There was something large and fine and tranquil about the Scandinavian-looking girl, whom her parents had called by the stately northern name with more luck than attends many a christening—since it is well-known Victoria is, like as not, to take on an aspect depressed and down-trodden; Grace to turn out clumsy and hideous; while Ivy shows a sturdy independence, and Blanche and Lily grows swarthy as a squaw.
But the fact was that the little Mar girl was named Harriet Hildegarde, and was even called “Hattie” till she was nearly twelve, when, after remarking one day, “I don’t look like a Hattie, and I’m not going to be a Hattie,” she refused thereafter to hear the obnoxious diminutive and quietly but firmly coerced her family and her schoolmates into saying “Hildegarde,” if they wanted her to notice them.
Mrs. Mar was grieved to find that her only daughter had no conspicuous talents, and was not even a girl of spirit—lacked, moreover, the will to cultivate that affectation of being spirited, which goes in America by the name of “brightness.” But she was not a bad sort of little girl after all; she got her lessons, and played games with a certain boyish gusto, and gardened with a patient devotion that her mother thought worthy of a better cause. But Mrs. Mar consoled herself for the girl’s lack of brilliancy by reflecting that Hildegarde was probably going to be handsome and that men were great donkeys and might never find out that she was slow.
Hildegarde herself was conscious of her shortcomings—without the knowledge overwhelming her. Life was going to be very good, even if she wasn’t at the head of the class, or a shining light at the school commencements. She had no talent for music, and quite as little for recitation. It was something to hear her saying, in the famous garden scene—
“Geh’ falsche gleissnerische Königin