“You aren’t changed much, are you?” she asked irrelevantly, striving to throw the conversation upon a more personal basis.
“A little less flesh, perhaps, and a little more muscle. How did you mean?”
But she shrugged her shoulders and peered I through the dim light at the Indian girl, who had lighted the fire and was frying great chunks of moose meat, alternated with thin ribbons of bacon.
“Did you stop in Dawson long?” The man was whittling a stave of birchwood into a rude axe-handle, and asked the question without raising his head.
“Oh, a few days,” she answered, following the girl with her eyes, and hardly hearing. “What were you saying? In Dawson? A month, in fact, and glad to get away. The arctic male is elemental, you know, and somewhat strenuous in his feelings.”
“Bound to be when he gets right down to the soil. He leaves convention with the spring bed at borne. But you were wise in your choice of time for leaving. You’ll be out of the country before mosquito season, which is a blessing your lack of experience will not permit you to appreciate.”
“I suppose not. But tell me about yourself, about your life. What kind of neighbors have you? Or have you any?”
While she queried she watched the girl grinding coffee in the corner of a flower sack upon the hearthstone. With a steadiness and skill which predicated nerves as primitive as the method, she crushed the imprisoned berries with a heavy fragment of quartz. David Payne noted his visitor’s gaze, and the shadow of a smile drifted over his lips.
“I did have some,” he replied. “Missourian chaps, and a couple of Cornishmen, but they went down to Eldorado to work at wages for a grubstake.”
Mrs. Sayther cast a look of speculative regard upon the girl. “But of course there are plenty of Indians about?”
“Every mother’s son of them down to Dawson long ago. Not a native in the whole country, barring Winapie here, and she’s a Koyokuk lass,—comes from a thousand miles or so down the river.”
Mrs. Sayther felt suddenly faint; and though the smile of interest in no wise waned, the face of the man seemed to draw away to a telescopic distance, and the tiered logs of the cabin to whirl drunkenly about. But she was bidden draw up to the table, and during the meal discovered time and space in which to find herself. She talked little, and that principally about the land and weather, while the man wandered off into a long description of the difference between the shallow summer diggings of the Lower Country and the deep winter diggings of the Upper Country.
“You do not ask why I came north?” she asked. “Surely you know.” They had moved back from the table, and David Payne had returned to his axe-handle. “Did you get my letter?”
“A last one? No, I don’t think so. Most probably it’s trailing around the Birch Creek Country or lying in some trader’s shack on the Lower River. The way they run the mails in here is shameful. No order, no system, no—”
“Don’t be wooden, Dave! Help me!” She spoke sharply now, with an assumption of authority which rested upon the past. “Why don’t you ask me about myself? About those we knew in the old times? Have you no longer any interest in the world? Do you know that my husband is dead?”
“Indeed, I am sorry. How long—”
“David!” She was ready to cry with vexation, but the reproach she threw into her voice eased her.
“Did you get any of my letters? You must have got some of them, though you never answered.”
“Well, I didn’t get the last one, announcing, evidently, the death of your husband, and most likely others went astray; but I did get some. I—er—read them aloud to Winapie as a warning—that is, you know, to impress upon her the wickedness of her white sisters. And I—er—think she profited by it. Don’t you?”
She disregarded the sting, and went on. “In the last letter, which you did not receive, I told, as you have guessed, of Colonel Sayther’s death. That was a year ago. I also said that if you did not come out to me, I would go in to you. And as I had often promised, I came.”
“I know of no promise.”
“In the earlier letters?”
“Yes, you promised, but as I neither asked nor answered, it was unratified. So I do not know of any such promise. But I do know of another, which you, too, may remember. It was very long ago.” He dropped the axe-handle to the floor and raised his head. “It was so very long ago, yet I remember it distinctly, the day, the time, every detail. We were in a rose garden, you and I,—your mother’s rose garden. All things were budding, blossoming, and the sap of spring was in our blood. And I drew you over—it was the first—and kissed you full on the lips. Don’t you remember?”
“Don’t go over it, Dave, don’t! I know every shameful line of it. How often have I wept! If you only knew how I have suffered—”
“You promised me then—ay, and a thousand times in the sweet days that followed. Each look of your eyes, each touch of your hand, each syllable that fell from your lips, was a promise. And then—how shall I say?—there came a man. He was old—old enough to have begotten you—and not nice to look upon, but as the world goes, clean. He had done no wrong, followed the letter of the law, was respectable. Further, and to the point, he possessed some several paltry mines,—a score; it does not matter: and he owned a few miles of lands, and engineered deals, and clipped coupons. He—”
“But there were other things,” she interrupted, “I told you. Pressure—money matters—want—my people—trouble. You understood the whole sordid situation. I could not help it. It was not my will. I was sacrificed, or I sacrificed, have it as you wish. But, my God! Dave, I gave you up! You never did me justice. Think what I have gone through!”
“It was not your will? Pressure? Under high heaven there was no thing to will you to this man’s bed or that.”
“But I cared for you all the time,” she pleaded.
“I was unused to your way of measuring love. I am still unused. I do not understand.”
“But now! now!”
“We were speaking of this man you saw fit to marry. What manner of man was he? Wherein did he charm your soul? What potent virtues were his? True, he had a golden grip,—an almighty golden grip. He knew the odds. He was versed in cent per cent. He had a narrow wit and excellent judgment of the viler parts, whereby he transferred this man’s money to his pockets, and that man’s money, and the next man’s. And the law smiled. In that it did not condemn, our Christian ethics approved. By social measure he was not a bad man. But by your measure, Karen, by mine, by ours of the rose garden, what was he?”
“Remember, he is dead.”
“The fact is not altered thereby. What was he? A great, gross, material creature, deaf to song, blind to beauty, dead to the spirit. He was fat with laziness, and flabby-cheeked, and the round of his belly witnessed his gluttony—”
“But he is dead. It is we who are now—now! now! Don’t you hear? As you say, I have been inconstant. I have sinned. Good. But should not you, too, cry peccavi? If I have broken promises, have not you? Your love of the rose garden
