"So that was settled reasonably, and Angus went on showing what to do with your mine instead of selling it to a shark, and the baby fatted up, being stall-fed, and Ellabelle got out into the world again, with more money than ever to spend, but fewer things to buy, because in Wallace she couldn't think of any more. Trust her, though! First the International Hotel wasn't good enough. Angus said they'd have a mansion, the biggest in Wallace, only without slippery hardwood floors, because he felt brittle after his accident. Ellabelle says Wallace itself ain't big enough for the mansion that ought to be a home to his only son. She was learning how to get to Angus without seeming to. He thought there might be something in that, still he didn't like to trust the child away from him, and he had to stick there for a while.
"So Ellabelle's health broke down. Yes, sir, she got to be a total wreck. Of course the fool doctor in Wallace couldn't find it out. She tried him and he told her she was strong as a horse and ought to be doing a tub of washing that very minute. Which was no way to talk to the wife of a rich mining man, so he lost quite a piece of money by it. Ellabelle then went to Spokane and consulted a specialist. That's the difference. You only see a doctor, but a specialist you consult. This one confirmed her fears about herself in a very gentlemanly way and reaped his reward on the spot. Ellabelle's came after she had convinced Angus that even if she did have such a good appetite it wasn't a normal one, but it was, in fact, one of her worst symptoms and threatened her with a complete nervous breakdown. After about a year of this, when Angus had horned his way into a few more mines—he said he might as well have a bunch of them since he couldn't be there on the spot anyway—they went to New York City. Angus had never been there except to pass from a Clyde liner to Jersey City, and they do say that when he heard the rates, exclusive of board, at the one Ellabelle had picked out from reading the papers, he timidly asked her if they hadn't ought to go to the other hotel. She told him there wasn't any other—not for them. She told him further it was part of her mission to broaden his horizon, and she firmly meant to do it if God would only vouchsafe her a remnant of her once magnificent vitality.
"She didn't have to work so hard either. Angus begun to get a broader horizon in just a few days, corrupting every waiter he came in contact with, and there was a report round the hotel the summer I was there that a hat-boy had actually tried to reason with him, thinking he was a foreigner making mistakes with his money by giving up a dollar bill every time for having his hat snatched from him. As a matter of fact, Angus can't believe to this day that dollar bills are money. He feels apologetic when he gives 'em away. All the same I never believed that report about the hat-boy till someone explained to me that he wasn't allowed to keep his loot, not only having clothes made special without pockets but being searched to the hide every night like them poor unfortunate Zulus that toil in the diamond mines of Africa. Of course I could see then that this boy had become merely enraged like a wild-cat at having a dollar crowded onto him for some one else every time a head waiter grovelled Angus out of the restaurant.
"The novelty of that life wore off after about a year, even with side trips to resorts where the prices were sufficiently outrageous to charm Ellabelle. She'd begun right off to broaden her own horizon. After only one week in New York she put her diamond napkin pincher to doing other work, and after six months she dressed about as well as them prominent society ladies that drift round the corridors of this hotel waiting for parties that never seem on time, and looking none too austere while they wait.
"So Ellabelle, having in the meantime taken up art and literature and gone to lectures where the professor would show sights and scenes in foreign lands with his magic lantern, begun to feel the call of the Old World. She'd got far beyond 'Lucile'—though 'Peck's Bad Boy' was still the favourite of Angus when he got time for any serious reading—- and was coming to loathe the crudities of our so-called American civilization. So she said. She begun to let out to Angus that they wasn't doing right by the little one, bringing him up in a hole like New York City where he'd catch the American accent—though God knows where she ever noticed that danger there!—and it was only fair to the child to get him to England or Paris or some such place where he could have decent advantages. I gather that Angus let out a holler at first so that Ellabelle had to consult another specialist and have little Angus consult one, too. They both said: 'Certainly, don't delay another day if you value the child's life or your own,' and of course Angus had to give in. I reckon that was the last real fight he ever put up till the time I'm going to tell you about.
"They went to England and bought a castle that had never known the profane touch of a plumber, having been built in the time of the first earl or something, and after that they had to get another castle in France, account of little Angus having a weak throat that Ellabelle got another gentlemanly specialist to find out about him; and so it went, with Ellabelle hovering on the very edge of a nervous breakdown, and taking up art and literature at different spots where fashion gathered, going to Italy and India's coral strand to study the dead past, and so forth, and learning to address her inferiors in a refined and hostile manner, with little Angus having a maid and a governess and something new the matter with him every time Ellabelle felt the need of a change.
"At first Angus used to make two trips back every year, then he cut them down to one, and at last he'd only come every two or three years, having his hirelings come to him instead. He'd branched out a lot, even at that distance, getting into copper and such, and being president of banks and trusts here and there and equitable cooperative companies and all such things that help to keep the lower classes trimmed proper. For a whole lot of years I didn't see either of 'em. I sort of lost track of the outfit, except as I'd see the name of Angus heading a new board of directors after the reorganization, or renting the north half of Scotland for the sage-hen and coyote shooting, or whatever the game is there. Of course it took genius to do this with Angus, and I've never denied that Ellabelle has it. I bet there wasn't a day in all them years that Angus didn't believe himself to be a stubborn, domineering brute, riding roughshod over the poor little wreck of a woman. If he didn't it wasn't for want of his wife accusing him of it in so many words—and perhaps a few more.
"I guess she got to feeling so sure of herself she let her work coarsen up. Anyway, when little Angus come to be eighteen his pa shocked her one day by saying he must go back home to some good college. 'You mean England,' says Ellabelle, they being at the time on some other foreign domains.
"'I do not,' says Angus, 'nor Sweden nor Japan nor East Africa. I mean the United States.' 'You're jesting,' says she. 'You wrong me cruelly,' says Angus. 'The lad's eighteen and threatening to be a foreigner. Should he stay here longer it would set in his blood.' 'Remember his weak throat,' says Ellabelle. 'I did,' says Angus. 'To save you trouble I sent for a specialist to look him over. He says the lad has never a flaw in his throat. We'll go soon.'
"Of course it was dirty work on the part of Angus, getting to the specialist first, but she saw she had to take it. She knew it was like the time they agreed on his name—she could see the Scotch blood leaping in his veins. So she gave in with never a mutter that Angus could hear. That's part of the genius of Ellabelle, knowing when she can and when she positively cannot, and making no foolish struggle in the latter event.