Deserted by Edward Bellamy (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

was what this devoted youth said.

"I 'm sure I don't know to what you refer, sir," she replied freezingly.

He was terrified at the distant accent of her voice. It appeared to come from somewhere beyond the fixed stars, and brought the chill of the interstellar spaces with it. He forgot in an instant all about his pique, vexation, and wounded pride, and was in a panic of anxiety to bring her back. In a moment more he knew that she would rise from her chair and remark that it was getting cold and she must go in. If he allowed her to depart in that mood, he might lose her forever. He could think of but one way of convincing her instantaneously of his devotion; and so what should he do but take the most inopportune occasion in the entire course of their acquaintance to make his declaration. He was like a general whose plan of battle has been completely deranged by an utterly unexpected repulse in a preliminary movement, compelling him to hurry forward his last reserves in a desperate attempt to restore the battle.

"What have I done, Miss Dwyer? Don't you know that I love you? Won't you be my wife?"

"No, sir," she said flatly, her taste outraged and her sensibilities set on edge by the stupid, blundering, hammer-and-tongs onset which from first to last he had made. She loved him, and had meant to accept him, but if she had loved him ten times as much she couldn't have helped refusing him just then, under those circumstances,--not if she died for it. As she spoke, she rose and disappeared within the car. It is certainly to be hoped that the noise of the wheels, which out on the platform was considerable, prevented the recording angel from getting the full force of Lombard's ejaculation.

It is bad enough to be refused when the delicacy and respectfulness of the lady's manner make "No" sound so much like "Yes" that the rejected lover can almost persuade himself that his ears have deceived him. It is bad enough to be refused when she does it so timidly and shrinkingly and deprecatingly that it might be supposed she were the rejected party. It is bad enough to be refused when she expresses the hope that you will always be friends, and shows a disposition to make profuse amends in general agreeableness for the consummate favor which she is forced to decline you. Not to put too fine a point upon it, it is bad enough to be refused anyhow you can arrange the circumstances, but to be refused as Lombard had been, with a petulance as wounding to his dignity as was the refusal itself to his affections, is to take a bitter pill with an asafotida coating.

In the limp and demoralized condition in which he was left, the only clear sentiment in his mind was that he did not want to meet her again just at present. So he sat for an hour or more longer out on the platform, and had become as thoroughly chilled without as he was within when at dusk the train stopped at a little three-house station for supper. Then he went into one of the forward day-cars, not intending to return to the sleeping-car till Miss Dwyer should have retired. When the train reached Ogden the next morning, instead of going on East he would take the same train back to San Francisco, and that would be the end of his romance. His engagement in New York had been a myth, and with Miss Dwyer's "No, sir," the only business with the East that had brought him on this trip was at an end.

About an hour after leaving the supper-station, the train suddenly stopped in the midst of the desert. Something about the engine had become disarranged, which it would take some time to put right. Glad to improve an opportunity to stretch their legs, many of the passengers left the cars and were strolling about, curiously examining the sagebrush and the alkali, and admiring the ghostly plain as it spread, bare, level, and white as an icebound polar sea, to the feet of the far-off mountains.

Lombard had also left the car, and was walking about, his hands in his overcoat pockets, trying to clear his mind of the wreckage that obstructed its working; for Miss Dwyer's refusal had come upon him as a sudden squall that carries away the masts and sails of a vessel and transforms it in a moment from a gallant bounding ship to a mere hulk drifting in an entangled mass of debris. Of course she had a perfect right to suit herself about the kind of a man she took for a husband, but he certainly had not thought she was such an utter coquette. If ever a woman gave a man reason to think himself as good as engaged, she had given him that reason, and yet she refused him as coolly as she would have declined a second plate of soup. There must be some truth, after all, in the rant of the poets about the heartlessness and fickleness of women, although he had always been used to consider it the merest bosh. Suddenly he heard the train moving. He was perhaps fifty yards off, and, grumbling anathemas at the stupidity of the conductor, started to run for the last car. He was not quite desperate enough to fancy being left alone on the Nevada desert with night coming on. He would have caught the train without difficulty, if his foot had not happened to catch in a tough clump of sage, throwing him violently to the ground. As he gathered himself up, the train was a hundred yards off, and moving rapidly. To overtake it was out of the question.

"Stop! ho! stop!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. But there was no one on the rear platform to see him, and the closed windows and the rattle of the wheels were sufficient to render a much louder noise than he could make inaudible to the dozing passengers. And now the engineer pulled out the throttle-valve to make up for lost time, and the clatter of the train faded into a distant roar, and its lights began to twinkle into indistinctness.

"Damnation!"

A voice fell like a falling star: "Gentlemen do not use profane language in ladies' company."

He first looked up in the air, as on the whole the likeliest quarter for a voice to come from in this desert, then around. Just on the other side of the track stood Miss Dwyer, smiling, with a somewhat constrained attempt at self-possession. Lombard was a good deal taken aback, but in his surprise he did not forget that this was the young lady who had refused him that afternoon.

"I beg your pardon," he replied, with a stiff bow; "I did not suppose that there were any ladies within hearing."

"I got out of the car supposing there was plenty of time to get a specimen of sagebrush to carry home," she explained; "but when the cars started, although I was but a little way off, I could not regain the platform;" which, considering that she wore a tie-back of the then prevalent fashion, was not surprising.

"Indeed!" replied Lombard, with the same formal manner.

"But won't the train come back for us?" she asked, in a more anxious voice.

"That will depend on whether we are missed. Nobody will miss me. Mrs. Eustis, if she hasn't gone to bed, may miss you."

"But she has. She went to bed before I left the car, and is asleep by this time."

"That 's unfortunate," was his brief reply, as he lit a cigar and began to smoke and contemplate the stars.

His services, so far as he could do anything for her, she should, as a lady, command, but if she thought that he was going to do the agreeable after what had happened a few hours ago, she was mightily mistaken.

There was a silence, and then she said, hesitatingly, "What are we going to do?"

He glanced at her. Her attitude and the troubled expression of her face, as well as her voice, indicated that the logic of the situation was overthrowing the jaunty self-possession which she had at first affected. The desert was staring her out of countenance. How his heart yearned toward her! If she had only given him a right to take care of her, how he would comfort her! what prodigies would he be capable of to succor her! But this rising impulse of tenderness was turned to choking bitterness by the memory of that scornful "No, sir." So he replied coldly, "I 'm not in the habit of being left behind in deserts, and I don't know what it is customary to do in such cases. I see nothing except to wait for the next train, which will come along some time within twenty-four hours."

There was another long silence, after which she said in a timid voice, "Had n't we better walk to the next station?"

At the suggestion of walking he glanced at her close-fitting dress, and a sardonic grin slightly twitched the corners of his mouth as he dryly answered, "It is thirty miles one way and twenty the other to the first station."

Several minutes passed before she spoke again, and then she said, with an accent almost like that of a child in trouble and about to cry, "I 'm cold."

The strong, unceasing wind, blowing from snowy mountain-caverns across a plain on which there was not the slightest barrier of hill or tree to check its violence, was indeed bitterly cold, and Lombard himself felt chilled to the marrow of his bones. He took off his overcoat and offered it to her.

"No," said she, "you are as cold as I am."

"You will please take it," he replied, in a peremptory manner; and she took it.

"At this rate we shall freeze to death before midnight," he added, as if in soliloquy. "I must see if I can't contrive to make some sort of a shelter with this sagebrush."

He began by tearing up a large number of bushes by the roots. Seeing what he was doing, Miss Dwyer was glad to warm her stiffened muscles by taking hold and helping; which she did with a vigor that shortly reduced her gloves to shreds and filled her fingers with scratches from the rough twigs. Lombard next chose an unusually high and thick clump of brush, and cleared a small space three feet across in the centre of it, scattering twigs on the uncovered earth to keep off its chill.

"Now, Miss Dwyer, if you will step inside this spot, I think I can build up the bushes around us so as to make a sort of booth which may save us from freezing."

She silently did as he directed, and he proceeded to pile the brush which they had torn up on the tops of the bushes left standing around the spot where they were, thus making a circular wall about three feet high. Over the top he managed to draw together two or three bushes, and the improvised wigwam was complete.

The moonlight penetrated the loose roof sufficiently to reveal to each other the faces and figures of the two occupants as they sat in opposite corners, as far apart as possible, she cold and miserable, he cold and sulky, and both silent. And, as if to mock him, the idea kept recurring to his mind how romantic and delightful, in spite of the cold and discomfort, the situation