A Romance in Transit

"Emily, there's going to be a fracas when we get back to-night. It's my opinion that the President sent his daughter with us to get her out of Fred's reach."

"Then it serves him right," said Mrs. Burton, complacently. "She is not a child; she's old enough to know her own mind."

"That may be, but it doesn't let us out. I wish you'd go back and sit with them awhile."

"And get myself disliked? No, thank you. I may not shine as a star in the chaperonic firmament, but I'm a human being. Think of it; put yourself in Fred's place, if you haven't hopelessly outlived the possibility, and see how you'd like to be duennaed at such a time."

"It isn't a question of likes and – " but at that moment the truants appeared to speak for themselves.

"It's chilly out there in the open car, and we came in to talk and get warm," said Gertrude. "Did you get any pie, Mrs. Burton?"

"No; Mr. Burton wasn't as thoughtful as Fr – as Mr. Brockway."

"Mr. Brockway was twice thoughtful," laughed Gertrude, as the passenger agent drew a pie from under his coat and proceeded to cut it into quarters with his pocket-knife.

Burton said, "Oh, pshaw!" with deprecatory emphasis, but he accepted his allotment and ate it with the others. Afterward, when the talk took flight into the region of badinage, he went away and devoted himself dutifully to the Tadmorians.

When he was gone, the trio made merry with true holiday zest. For Gertrude, the little plunge into the stream of unconventionality was refreshing and keenly exhilarating, and she bore her part joyously, forgetting the day of reckoning, and seeking only to make the most of the few hours of outlawry.

Brockway, too, drank of the cup of levity, but in his inmost parts he stood amazed with sheer joy in the presence of the real Gertrude – of the woman he loved divested of the mask of conventionality. He had loved her well for what he thought she was, and had been content to set her upon a pedestal to be worshipped from afar as the apotheosis of adorable womanhood. But the light of this later revelation individualized her; ideals and abstractions vanished before her living, breathing personality, and Brockway was made to know that she could never again be to him the mere archetype of lovable woman-kind. She was infinitely more. She was the one woman in all the world whose life might be the complement of his; the other half of the broken talisman; the major and truer portion of a mystic circle of which his being was the other segment.

All of which was doubtless very romantic and unmodern in a sensible young man of Brockway's practical and workaday upbringing; but there are more curious seeds lying dormant in the soil of human nature than the analyst has ever yet classified; and ideality and romanticism are but skin-masked in many a man whose outward presentment is merely the abc of modern realism.

So Brockway beheld and rhapsodized in secret, and laughed and chatted openly, and sank deeper and deeper in the pit of perplexity as the train burrowed its way into the heart of the mountains. For, keeping even pace with the gallop of love, pride rode militant. Life without Gertrude would be but a barren waste, said one; and, better a desert and solitude therein than an Eden envenomed by the serpent of inequality, retorted the other. Which proves that class distinctions are buttressed from below no less securely than they are suspended from above; and that feudalism in the subject has become extinct in one form only to flourish quite vigorously in another.

But these were under-thoughts. In his proper person, the passenger agent was doing his best to keep his promise to Gertrude; to make the day a little oasis of care-free enjoyment in the humdrum desert of commonplace.

At Georgetown, Burton proposed the transfer of the entire party to one of the observation-cars for the better viewing of the Loop, and the thing was done forthwith. But at the last moment Gertrude decided to remain in the coach, and Brockway stayed with her, as a matter of course.

"I've seen it twice, and I don't care to hang over the edge of it," she said. "Besides, it's very comfortable in here; don't you think so?"

"I'm not finding any fault," Brockway rejoined. "I wish we might have the coach to ourselves for the rest of the day."

"Do you? I thought you had been enjoying yourself all along."

"So I have, in a way; but I hate and abhor a crowd – I've had to be the nucleus of too many of them, I suppose."

"What do you call a crowd?" she inquired, laughing at the outburst of vindictiveness.

"Three people – sometimes. Half the pleasure of this forenoon has been slain by the knowledge that we'll have to fight for our dinners with the mob at that wretched little table d'hôte at Graymont."

"Can't we escape it?"

"Not without going hungry."

"I think Mr. and Mrs. Burton are going to escape it."

"What makes you think that?"

"This," said Gertrude, pointing to a well-filled lunch-basket under the seat.

"Praised be Allah!" Brockway exclaimed, fervently. "You can trust Burton to look out for the small personal comforts. And he never so much as hinted at this when I was grumbling about the dinner awhile ago. I've a mind to punish him."

"How?"

"By confiscating the basket. We could run away by ourselves and have a quiet little picnic dinner while they wrestle with the mob."

But Gertrude demurred. "That would be too callously villanous," she objected. "Can't we divide with them?"

"And go away by ourselves with the spoils?"

"Yes, if you like."

"I do like. I know a place, and the way to get there. Are you good for a climb?"

Brockway possessed himself of the basket, spread a newspaper on the opposite seat, and began to make a very fair and equitable division of the eatables.

"I'm good for anything," she said; then she pulled off her gloves and helped him divide the luncheon.

When the train stopped at Graymont, Burton went forward to get the luncheon. The coach was empty when he reached it, and the looted basket bore witness to the designs of the two young people. The general agent wagged his head dubiously, and when he had seen the last of the Tadmorians securely wedged into his place at the crowded table in the hotel dining-room, he failed not to lay the burden of gloomy prophecy once more upon the shoulders of the small person who, as he more than half suspected, was responsible for Brockway's presence.

By that time the subjects of the prophecy were well out of sight and hearing in the narrow ravine in which the great canyon has its beginnings. They walked the ties to the end of the track, and beyond that point picked their way over the rough ground until they came to a trail leading up the northern acclivity. Here Brockway took Gertrude's arm and together they began the ascent.

"Don't forget what I told you", he cautioned; "you are not to look back until I give the word."

"Should I turn into a pillar of salt if I did?" she asked.

"Possibly."

"Then I'll not do it; it would be rather awkward for both of us."

A hundred feet or more above the level of the railway track they came to a small plateau, and in the midst of it, Brockway stopped suddenly and spun her around with her face to the southward. No uninspired pen may set down in unmalleable phrase a description of what she saw; nor can any tide-gauge of language, spoken or written, measure the great wave of emotion which swept over her, choking the flood-gates of expression. From the moment the ascending train enters the canyon at Golden until it pauses opposite the hotel at Graymont, the scenery is rugged and inspiring, but it belittles itself by its very nearness. But from the plateau where they were standing, the vista expands as if by magic. The mighty mountain at whose foot the train pauses becomes but a foothill, and just beyond it, in indescribable grandeur and majesty, rises the huge, snow-clad bulk of Gray's Peak, stupendous, awe-inspiring, dazzling the eye with its unspotted mantle of shimmering white, and slaying the sense of proportion with its immeasurable vastness.

Gertrude caught her breath, and Brockway stood uncovered beside her, silent and watchful. When her eyes began to fill with tears, he broke the spell.

"Forgive me," he said, quickly; "it was almost cruel not to prepare you, but I wanted to see if it would appeal to you as it does to me."

"It is unspeakable," she said, softly. "Shall we stop here?"

"No." He took her arm again and together they climbed higher on the mountain-side; silently, as befitted time and place, but each with a heartful of thoughts too large for speech.

XXII

ON THE SPUR-TRACK

At the precise moment when Gertrude and Brockway, pausing in their breath-cutting scramble up the bowlder-strewn mountain-side, were casting about for a suitable place in which to eat their luncheon, President Vennor and his guests were rising from the table after a rather early midday meal in car Naught-fifty. When the ladies had gone to their staterooms, the President sent Quatremain upon a wholly unnecessary errand to the post-office, and drew up a chair to smoke a cigar with Fleetwell.

It was not for nothing that he banished the secretary. The forenoon train from Clear Creek Canyon had arrived without bringing Gertrude; and the wires, which he had waited upon with increasing disquietude, still remained churlishly silent. A crisis in Gertrude's affair seemed imminent, and, as a last resort, Mr. Vennor had resolved to admonish Fleetwell, to the end that the collegian's wooing might be judiciously accelerated.