A Romance in Transit

"And that it will go to certain charitable institutions, and so be lost, not only to you, but to the family?"

"I know all about it."

"You know it, and yet you would deliberately throw yourself away on a fortune-hunting mechanic – a man whom you have known only since yesterday? It's incredible!"

"It is you who have said it – not I," she retorted; "but I'm not willing to admit that it would be all loss and no gain. There would at least be a brand-new set of sensations, and I'm very sure they wouldn't all be painful."

It was rebellion, pure and simple, and for once in his life Francis Vennor gave place to wrath – plebeian wrath, vociferous and undignified.

"Shame on you!" he cried; "you are a disgrace to the name – it's the blood of that cursed socialist on your mother's side. Sit still and listen to me – " Gertrude, knowing her own temper, was about to run away – "If you marry that infernal upstart, you'll do it at your own expense, do you hear? You sha'n't finger a penny of my money as long as I can keep you out of it. Do you understand?"

"I should be very dull if I didn't understand," she replied, preparing to make good her retreat. "If you are quite through, perhaps you will let me say that you are tilting at a windmill of your own building. So far as I know, Mr. Brockway hasn't the slightest intention of asking me to marry him; and until you took the trouble to demonstrate the possibility, I don't think it ever occurred to me. But after what you've said, I don't think I can ever consent to be married to Cousin Chester – it would be too mercenary, you know;" and with this parting shot she vanished.

In the privacy of her own stateroom she sat at the window to think it all out. It was all very undutiful, doubtless, and she was sorry for her part in the quarrel almost before the words were cold. She could scarcely forgive herself for having allowed her father to carry his assumption to such lengths, but the temptation had proved irresistible. It was such a delicious little farce, and if it might only have stopped short of the angry conclusion – but it had not, and therein lay the sting of it. Whereupon, feeling the sting afresh, she set her face flintwise against the prearranged marriage.

"I sha'n't do it," she said aloud, pressing her hot cheek against the cool glass of the window. "I don't love Chester, and I never shall – not in the way I should. And if I marry him, I shall be just what papa called Mr. Brockway – only he isn't that, or anything of the kind. Poor Mr. Brockway! If he knew what we have been talking about – "

From that point reflection went adrift in pleasanter channels. How good-natured and forgiving Mr. Brockway had been! He must have known that he was purposely ignored at the dinner-table, where he was an invited guest, and yet he had not resented it; and what better proof of gentle breeding than this could he have given? Then, in that crucial moment of danger, how surely his presence of mind and trained energies had forestalled the catastrophe. That was grand – heroic. It was well worth its cost in terror to look on and see him strive with and conquer the great straining monster of iron and steel. After that, one couldn't well listen calmly to such things as her father had said of him.

And, admitting the truth of what had been said about his intellectual shortcomings, was a certain glib familiarity with the modern catch-words of book-talk and art criticism a fair test of intellectuality? Gertrude, with her cheek still touching the cool window-pane, thought not. One might read the reviews and talk superficially of more books than the most painstaking student could ever know, even by sight. In like manner, one might walk through the picture galleries and come away freighted with great names wherewith to awe the untravelled lover of art. It was quite evident that Mr. Brockway had done neither of these things, and yet he was thoughtful and keenly observant; and if he were ignorant of art, he knew and understood nature, which is the mother of all art.

From reinstating the passenger agent in his rights and privileges as a man, she came presently upon the little incident in the cab of the 926. How much or how little did he mean when he said he was happy to his finger-tips? On the lips of the men of her world, such sayings went for naught; they were but the tennis-balls of persiflage, served deftly, and with the intent that they should rebound harmless. But she felt sure that such a definition went wide of Mr. Brockway's meaning; of compliments as such, he seemed to know less than nothing. And then he had said that whatever came between them – no, that was not it – whatever happened to either of them… Ah, well, many things might happen – would doubtless happen; but she would not forget, either.

The familiar sighing of the air-brake began again, and the low thunder of the patient wheels became the diapason beneath the shrill song of the brake-shoes. Then the red eye of a switch-lamp glanced in at Gertrude's window, and the train swung slowly up to the platform at another prairie hamlet. Just before it stopped, she caught a swift glimpse of a man standing with outstretched arms, as if in mute appeal. It was Brockway. He was merely standing in readiness to grasp the hand-rail of the Tadmor when it should reach him; but Gertrude knew it not, and if she had, it would have made no difference. It was the one fortuitous touch needed to open that inner chamber of her heart, closed, hitherto, even to her own consciousness. And when the door was opened she looked within and saw what no woman sees but once in her life, and having once seen, will die unwed in very truth if any man but one call her wife.

Once more the drumming wheels began the overture; the lighted bay-window of the station slipped backward into the night, and the bloodshot eye of another switch-lamp peered in at the window and was gone; but Gertrude neither saw nor heard. The things of time and place were around and about her, but not within. A new song was in her heart, its words inarticulate as yet, but its harmonies singing with the music of the spheres. A little later, when the "Flying Kestrel" was again in mid-flitting, and the separate noises of the train had sunk into the soothing under-roar, she crept into her berth wet-eyed and thankful, and presently went to sleep too happy to harbor anxious thought for the morrow of uncertainties.

XII

THE ANCIENTS AND INVALIDS

Brockway was up betimes the following morning, though not of his own free will. Two hours before the "Flying Kestrel" was due in Denver, the porter of the Tadmor awakened him at the command of the irascible gentleman with the hock-bottle shoulders and diaphanous nose. While the passenger agent was sluicing his face in the wash-room some one prodded him from behind, and a thin, high-pitched voice wedged itself into the thunderous silence.

"Mr. ah – Brockway; I understand that you are purposing to take the party to ah – Feather Plume or ah – Silver Feather, or some such place to-day, and I ah – protest! I have no desire to leave Denver until my ticket is made to conform to my stipulations, sir."

Brockway had soap in his eyes, and the porter had carefully hidden the towels; for which cause his reply was brief and to the point.

"Please wait till I get washed and dressed before you begin on me, won't you?"

"Wait? Do you say ah – wait? I have been doing nothing but wait, sir, ever since my ah – stipulations were ignored. It's an outrage, sir, I – "

Brockway had found a towel and was using it vigorously as a counter-irritant.

"For Heaven's sake, go away and let me alone until I can get my clothes on!" he exclaimed. "I promised you yesterday you should have the thirty days that you don't need."

The aggrieved one had his ticket out, but he put it away again in tremulous indignation. "Go away? Did I ah – understand you to tell me to go away, sir? I ah-h-h – " but words failed him, and he shuffled out of the wash-room, cannoning against the little gentleman in the grass-cloth duster and velvet skull-cap in the angle of the vestibule.

"Good-morning, Mr. Brockway," said the comforter, cheerily. "Been having a tilt with Mr. Ticket-limits to begin the day with?"

"Oh, as a matter of course," Brockway replied, flinging the damp towel into a corner, and brushing his hair as one who transmutes wrath into vigorous action.

"Find him a bit trying, don't you? What particular form does his mania take this morning?"

"It's the same old thing. I promised him, yesterday, I'd get the extension on his ticket, and now he says he won't leave Denver till it's done. He 'ah-protests' that I sha'n't go to Silver Plume with the party; wants me to stay in Denver and put in the day telegraphing."

"Of course, you'll do it; you do anything anybody asks you to."

"Oh, I suppose I'll have to – to keep the peace. And if I don't go and 'personally conduct' the others, there'll be the biggest kind of a row. Isn't it enough to wear the patience of a good-natured angel to frazzles?"

"It is, just that. Have a cigar?"

"No, thank you. I don't smoke before breakfast."

"Neither do I, normally; but like most other people, I leave all my good habits at home when I travel. But about Jordan and the thirty-odd; how are you going to dodge the row?"

"The best way I can. There is a good friend of mine on the train – Mr. John Burton, the general agent of the C. & U., in Salt Lake – and perhaps I can get him to go up the canyon for me."

"Think he will do it?"

"I guess so; to oblige me. He'd lose only a day; and he'd make thirty-odd friends for the C. & U., don't you see."

"I must confess that I don't see, from a purely business point of view," was the rejoinder. "We are all ticketed out and back, and we can't change our route if we want to."

Brockway laughed. "The business of passenger soliciting is far-reaching. Some of you – perhaps most of you – will go again next year; and if the general agent of the C. & U. is particularly kind and obliging, you may remember his line."

"Dear me – why, of course! You say your friend is on the train?"

"Yes."

"Very well; you go and see him, and I'll help you out by breaking the news to the thirty-odd."

Brockway struggled into his coat and shook hands with the friendly one. "Mr. Somers, you're my good angel. You've undertaken a thankless task, though."

The womanish face under the band of the skull-cap broke into a smile which was not altogether angelic. "I shall get my pay as I go along; our friend with the bad case of ticket dementia will be carrying the entire responsibility for your absence before I get through."

"Good! pile it on thick," said Brockway, chuckling. "Make 'em understand that I'd give all my old shoes to go – that I'm so angry with Jordan for spoiling my day's pleasure that I can't see straight."

"I'll do it," the little man agreed. "Take a cigar to smoke after breakfast" – and the gray duster and velvet skull-cap disappeared forthwith around the angle in the vestibule.

Not until he was ready to seek Burton did the passenger agent recollect that the Naught-fifty was between the Tadmor and the Ariadne, and that it would be the part of prudence to go around rather than through the President's car. When he did remember it he stepped out into the vestibule of the Tadmor to get a breath of fresh air while he waited for the train to come to a station. Mrs. Dunham was on the Naught-fifty's rear platform, and she nodded, smiled, and beckoned him to come across.

"I'm glad to know that somebody else besides a curious old woman cares enough for this grand scenery to get up early in the morning," she said, pleasantly.

"You mustn't make me ashamed," Brockway rejoined. "I'm afraid I should have been sound asleep this minute if I hadn't been routed out by one of my people."

Mrs. Dunham smiled. "Gertrude was telling me about some of your troubles. Do they get you up early in the morning to ask you foolish questions?"

"They do, indeed" – and Brockway, glad enough to find a sympathetic listener, told the story of the pertinacious human gadfly masquerading under the name of Jordan.