IV
Down at the "Tough Nut" cabin, we slept soundly, having seen nothing but the driving snow, heard nothing but the storm. But as the dawn light roused me I remembered that the Throne cabins must be seized for debt, and Loco taken down to Windermere, for which there would be scarcely time in the brief autumn day. So without disturbing my friends I brewed a cup of coffee, and made my way on crutches to the stable behind the cabin. I saddled Black Prince, climbed to his back and rode up the drifted trail, which showed the floundering tracks of Rams and Loco bound for Windermere. I found the Throne cabins a heap of smoldering ashes, with a few blowing sparks, and on the slab of rock which had been the door-step lay that poor woman.
She was no less the complete minx than usual. I told her that the moans and wriggles completely spoiled her performance as a swooning lady. She wanted to play at abandoned heroine, but I was a deal too cold and hungry for heroics, and told her pretty roughly to shut up. Then she thought that the rescued damsel always rode with the knight at her bridle, forgetting that real paladins never have game legs. I told her that the walk would do her good, and a mile of floundering through drifts certainly warmed the cat. By the time we reached the "Tough Nut" she was hungry, and after breakfast purred, making eyes at the prospectors, although for a solid year they had been beneath her notice.
If I had only been able to help my friends to the wealth of that gilded ass, poor crooked Rams! The time had come for parting with Shorty and Bobbie Broach, and they refused to snare the little wad in my pocket. They lent and saddled their pony for the woman, and when Black Prince had finished his breakfast we had to hit the trail.
There was plenty for me to think about on that long day's march to Windermere. Loco was on his way to a term of imprisonment, and when he came back his employers would not be pleased with his excessive zeal as their caretaker at the Throne. Rams, of course, would go home to his native land, where there are more fools to be cheated than in any other country of equal size.
And this woman was left on my hands. What could I do with her? She had no relatives, had earned no friends, and could not find employment where there were no employers, and she was destitute, many hundreds of miles out in the wilderness. Had I been wise, I should no doubt have given her the couple of hundred dollars in my pocket to pay her way to the settlements, and there make a fresh start in life. Had I been wise—but, then, I doubt if any really and truly wise man would have much of a story to tell in making a chronicle of his life. Had I been altogether a bad man, I should have used this woman committed to my mercy, had her as mistress until her tongue galled, then turned her loose, the worse for having known me, to take the one trail open to her talents. But had I been altogether bad—should I confess my errors in a book?
Perhaps there were other ways of dealing with this affair, but at the age of twenty-three, I lacked the experience which makes all things clear to the reader. I could see but one way consistent with decency and my honor. And all the way from the Throne to Windermere, and through the day's march from there to Canal Flats, and all the weary trail from thence to the mission, I saw no other course but that of marriage.
The three years since first we met in the train at Winnipeg had enlarged the girl into womanhood, the slattern into a housewife. Shallow she was, innately vulgar, with no heart, no morals, and no mind; but by this time she had learned enough to wash, to mind her manners, restrain a shrill unpleasant voice, limit her temper to only occasional field days, and turn her increase of beauty to account in the ruling of men. To this young animal was given hair as glorious as the sunshine, a skin like transparent milk, suffused with the glow of peaches, and covered with a bloom most rare and lovely, eyes very changeful and bewildering, health, strength, grace of bearing, and the temper of the spring-time between sun and shower. Small blame to me if my five senses worshiped this triumph of nature's artifice, which the creature had for sale for Sarde's position, Rams' money, or any passing storm of her ambition. Those greater women whose souls are not for sale will be the last to judge her.
We Latins are perhaps more womanish than the blond men of the North, having more sympathy, and deeper understanding of women. It was my fate to discern, to see right through them, and I had no illusions concerning Mistress Violet. Her beauty appealed with frightful strength to my manhood. In saying, "With my body I thee worship," I should speak the truth. But, "With my spirit I thee worship," I could say to Rain, and to no other woman I ever knew. Passion I had for many, devotion I had toward all things beautiful, but love for only one woman, and her I might not marry.
I have spent days trying to write this passage, to express in words of clean, just, decisive English the relations between a man and a woman brought together in wedlock, where the woman gave all, but the man gave nothing because he withheld his soul.