“At first we had a real good time. We lived in a miner’s cottage, but that seemed sort of jolly. I’d been used to hard work all my life, so I didn’t mind that, and 243I wanted him to have as nice a home as any man could on the same money. So I cleaned and contrived and baked and brewed and fixed up. I wanted him to be pleased with me and proud among the other men. But pretty soon I found I didn’t care to make acquaintances, because I was ashamed of the way Jim did. He kept putting all his money into the mine, sending good money after bad, and let me keep house on nothing, and then was in a worse and worse temper because the mine didn’t pan out and things weren’t more comfortable at home. I began to wake up in the night and lie there in a cold sweat, clean scairt. I haven’t told you that we were looking for an addition to the family. That’s one reason I was so scairt. But I shut my teeth, and said I to myself, ‘This baby’s going to have a chance if his mother can give it to him by not getting excited or letting things prey on her mind.’ So I kept a hold on myself and didn’t let anything count except guarding that baby. I seemed to care more about it than all the rest of the world put together. Oh, I can’t begin to tell you how much more than for all the rest of the world put together. I don’t know that a man would understand.”
“Yes, he would; of course he would,” spoke Gerald, gently reverent, yet a little impatient; then he qualified his assertion: “He could imagine, I mean to say, how you would have felt that way.”
“Well, that matter was going to be put safely through, no matter what. The first mistake I made was not making friends with my women neighbors, so that everybody in Elsinore supposed that Jim’s wife was the same stripe as he,–or that’s what I thought they supposed,–and when I needed friends I couldn’t think of any to turn to except 244those at home. The other mistake I made was not to write them at home and tell them the truth and then wait for them to send me money to come. But I guess my mind stopped working when the shock came.”
Aurora appeared to brace herself, while decently considering how to minimize to her audience the brutality of her next revelation.
“Jim cleared out one night while I was asleep, taking every cent we’d got and every last thing he could hope to turn into a cent,” she said, hardening her voice and lips. Gerald was given a moment in which to visualize the situation, before she went on: “I guess, as I said before, that I wasn’t in my right mind for a spell; all I could think of was getting home to my own folks, and I was going to do it somehow, though I hadn’t a cent. I hadn’t even my wedding-ring. I’d put it off because my finger had grown fatter, and he’d taken even that to go and try his luck somewhere else.–What do you think of it?” she mechanically added.
She was pale, remembering these things. Gerald drew in a long, unsteady breath, oppressed.
“I was going to get home somehow,” Aurora repeated, “and I wasn’t going to waste time waiting for anything. And how was I going to do it? I don’t suppose I really thought; I followed instinct like an animal. I hid in a freight-car going East–”
A definite difficulty here stopped Aurora. While she felt for words in which to clothe what followed, the images in her mind made her eyes, which were not seeing the things actually before them, more descriptive of the anguish of remembered scenes than her words were likely to be.
245“I’m going to skip all that, Gerald.” With a gesture, she suddenly rolled up a part of her story and threw it aside. “But when I came to see and understand rightly again, weeks after, in a hospital at Denver, I cried, oh! how I cried, and didn’t care what became of me. Because I’d lost him; they hadn’t succeeded in saving him. He had lived, mind you,” she emphasized with pride–“he had lived a little while, he was all right, perfect in every way–a son.”
His due of tears was not withheld from the wee frustrated god. Aurora gave up talking, so as to have her cry in quietness.