To the Highest Bidder

by Florence Morse Kingsley

Stephen Jarvis, master of fate, and thrilling with the clash of his will upon hers, could hardly have known that the ghost of another man stood between him and the object of this new, urgent desire of his. He would have laughed the shadowy presence to scorn had he known it.

Yet it was this mere shadow of a man which chained Barbara’s thoughts while the April rain softened the landscape to a soft green blur. After all it was but natural that her one pitiful little love story should come back to her now, even to a vision of David Whitcomb’s eager face, his dark impatient eyes, and tossed hair, and the strong clasp of his hand upon hers in the dusk of the summer twilight.

It was Jimmy who had come between them; little motherless Jimmy, then a baby a year old, with big appealing eyes under a fluff of soft yellow hair, and a voice sweeter than any bird’s. All the woman’s heart in her had gone out to the helpless little creature who nestled in her arms at night, and whose eyes and voice followed her as she went about her work by day. This in the days when her father, grown suddenly old and apathetic, had begun to shut himself up in his library, for what purpose Barbara did not guess, at first. When she did know it was too late. The leaves of the book had been long closed and sealed, but the heart within her shivered at the remembrance of what was written there.

“If you really loved me,” David had said hotly, “you would not let anyone or anything come between us.”

She told him that she could not go to him over the bodies of a sick father and a helpless child. And since he had asked this of her, she did not, indeed, love him.

After this stormy scene—the last between them, since David Whitcomb had gone away, no one knew whither, nor indeed cared, since he was young and friendless and poor—Barbara had cried herself to sleep for many successive nights, quietly, so as not to disturb the sleeping child. But one does not weep overlong at night whose brain and hands and feet are employed in the daytime. Only the beggared rich may give themselves to the indolent luxury of grief. After many nights of weeping followed by days of anxiety and uncounted labors, the pain of that parting subsided to a dull aching memory, which wakened once to cry out bitterly when she heard that he had been seen on a ship bound to the Yukon region in the early days of the gold fever. Many perished along the trail that year. It was rumored that David Whitcomb was among the number. No word ever came back to contradict the rumor, which after the lapse of months was accepted as a fact, and so—forgotten.

It was a long time—as youth measures time—since she had thought of David Whitcomb. Now she deliberately travelled back over the years between, and stood looking at her anguished young self, torn between love and duty, and at her one lover, who was not noble enough—she saw this with mournful certainty now—to help her lift and carry her heavy burden. Nevertheless she forgave him—as she had done hundreds of times in the past, excusing him tenderly, as a mother might have done, for his hot young selfishness, which refused to share her heart with a dying man and a helpless little child.

“I am glad,” she said aloud to the shadowy presence of her one lover, “glad that I did not yield.”

But her face was grave and sorrowful as she rose to answer a gentle knock at the kitchen door.

Peg Morrison stood there under the shelter of an ancient green umbrella, his puckered face smiling and healthily pink against the pale green of the outside world.