The Bride's House (13 page)

“Miss Nealie…” Charlie started, and then he was quiet for a long time, looking off toward the mountains. “Miss Nealie, I’d like to ask one more time if you would marry me.”

And there it was, Nealie thought with a start, the answer to her problem. Charlie still wanted her to be his wife. She could marry Charlie Dumas, who wasn’t such a bad sort and had never been anything but nice to her. Charlie would provide for her, give her a home and the baby a name. He wouldn’t know about the baby until it was too late. He might hate her then, blame her for tricking him, but at least she wouldn’t have to give up the child. If Will came back later on, he’d be grateful she’d protected his baby, hadn’t given it away.

Nealie sat there, silent as snow, for so long that Charlie said, “Miss Nealie?”

The girl looked up at the big man and smiled at him, and Charlie smiled back, sighing with gladness. But the girl couldn’t do it. She felt as if someone had handed her a sack of candy, then snatched it away just as she reached for a piece. “You’re a good man, Mr. Dumas,” she said, thinking she ought to tell him she was sensible of the honor he bestowed on her, but this was no magazine story. “But I can’t marry you. I’m what you might call—” She paused to think of the word. “A fallen woman.”

“Don’t call yourself that, Miss Nealie.”

He didn’t understand, and so she blurted it out. “I’m going to have a baby, and I can’t marry the father because he’s already got a wife. I didn’t know it before, but he does.”

Charlie looked at Nealie a long time, and she did not look away, because she had owned up to what she’d done and would not take a talking-down from him. At last, he told her, “I know.”

Nealie stared at him while she considered what he’d said. And then she realized that Mrs. Travers had figured it out and taken things into her own hands. She had gone to Charlie and told him. “You’d marry me anyway?” she asked.

“I’d have married you even if you hadn’t told me, but I’m glad you did.”

“You don’t mind I’m destroyed?”

“Oh, I mind. You can’t put spilt water back in the cup. But that’s the way of it.”

“Will you hate the baby?”

“It’s half yours, isn’t it?”

The girl laughed for the first time in a long while.

“But I got something to ask of you, Miss Nealie … Nealie.”

The girl tensed, waiting for him to continue.

“You got to promise me you’ll never see him again. I don’t blame you for what’s happened, but I don’t want you to make me out a fool. You got to promise me you won’t see him. I don’t even want his name spoke. And the baby, it’ll have to think I’m its father.”

The girl nodded. “He won’t ever come back, and if he does, I won’t have a thing to do with him.” But as she said the words, Nealie knew she didn’t mean them. What if Will returned, all sorrowful, saying he’d had an awful time getting out of his marriage, begging her to forgive him? Could she ever say no to him, turn him down and spend the rest of her life with Charlie Dumas?

“And I want you to try to love me,” he said.

“I care about you, Charlie.”

The big man nodded as if that were good enough. “We’d better talk to the preacher pretty quick. I’m not for waiting. I guess you’re not, either.”

CHAPTER 6

C
HARLIE NEEDED TIME TO MAKE
arrangements, he said, and so the two were not married until late on an afternoon two days later, with only Mrs. Travers standing up with them at the little Presbyterian church. After the ceremony, they went back to the boardinghouse for a special supper with a wedding cake and a bottle of champagne that Charlie had bought at the Hotel de Paris. Then Nealie changed into her green dress. Mrs. Travers had refused to allow Nealie to be married in it and had insisted on loaning her one of her own. “Marry in green, you’re ashamed to be seen,” she’d explained. “But marry in blue, you’ll always be true.” Nealie had taken the superstition seriously and had worn the blue dress, but Charlie said he preferred the green one, so Nealie promised to wear it home to Charlie’s cabin.

“I guess we better get going,” he said, after Mrs. Travers boxed up the remains of the cake and gave it to Nealie. Charlie picked up the dynamite box that contained his wife’s things and held open the door for her. Then the two of them bid Mrs. Travers good-bye and went out.

Neither said a word as they walked down the street. Nealie had not been to Charlie’s cabin, didn’t even know where it was, and she hoped that it had a wood floor, not dirt, and a cookstove instead of an open fireplace. But she would make do with whatever was there, because she was determined to work out things with Charlie. She’d keep the place spotless, cook Charlie’s meals, scrub his overalls. She owed him. Even if she didn’t love him, she’d be as good a wife as she could.

She glanced at her new husband in his wrinkled clothes and guessed he was not a tidy person. So she would not be surprised to find the place a mess. Well, cleaning it would give her something to do, keep her thoughts away from what might have been. No matter how dirty the cabin was, she would make the best of it. She slid her eyes to Charlie, glancing at him with gratitude, if not love.

A man Nealie didn’t know greeted Charlie, and he introduced her as “Mrs. Dumas.” The girl grew flustered. She cast her eyes down then, not paying attention to where they walked, because she was embarrassed at the marriage and did not care to see anyone she knew, did not want to be congratulated or wondered about. And then Charlie said, “We’re home now,” and the girl looked up, surprised, because they had not gone far, maybe only a block or two. Her husband pointed to the big white house on Taos Street, the bride’s house—the house she’d dreamed of occupying as Will’s bride, not Charlie’s. “What’s this?” she asked.

“Are you surprised?”

“That’s your house?” She thought Charlie had made a poor joke.

“
Our
house,” he said. “I bought it yesterday. You called it a bride’s house once, and you’re a bride, aren’t you?” Charlie led her across the walk and up onto the porch. Then he picked her up and carried her inside the house that Nealie could not help thinking was rightly Will’s.

*   *   *

Nealie hadn’t known Charlie had money. Nobody had. “There’s too many people would try to get it away from me,” Charlie explained. Besides, he’d had simple needs. There was no reason to spend the money until he married Nealie, he told her.

Charlie had made a good strike in Leadville a few years before, had discovered a silver mine and sold out. He’d studied on it later and decided it had been a mistake to sell, he explained to his new wife, but he hadn’t had the cash to develop it, so there was nothing else he could have done. He’d gone back to work as a miner, saying he ought to know a mine before he put his money into it. So after working at the Bobcat for a time, he’d bought shares in it. Then he’d found his own promising prospect near Georgetown, filed a claim, and contacted a big mining company about forming a partnership to develop it. Even if he’d had the money to build the mine by himself, he wouldn’t have, he explained. “I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, like the fellow says. That’s why I invest. I own shares in seven mines. I guess those fellows at the ’Cat would be surprised if they knew they were working for me.”

“Well, if you don’t hurry, you’ll be late, and you’ll get laid off there,” Nealie told him. They were eating breakfast the morning after the wedding, and Charlie had dawdled, smiling shyly at his new wife. Nealie bit her lip and looked away when he caught her eye, blushing, not because she was embarrassed but because she didn’t want him to talk about their wedding night. It was not a thing to be discussed. She’d been willing—after all, she was his wife and grateful to him—and it had gone all right, although Charlie was bumbling and unskilled, not at all like Will. She couldn’t help but think about Will when Charlie thrashed around in bed. But Charlie was kind and did not want to hurt her, and it had not gone badly. “I forgot all about your dinner bucket. I hope you put something in the pantry for it,” she added, jumping up. Charlie had stocked the kitchen before the wedding, moving everything from his cabin into the Bride’s House.

He grabbed her arm. “I quit the mine. You won’t ever have to pack a dinner pail again.”

“Quit? How’ll we live if you don’t bring in wages?” She’d never heard of dividends and did not know that Charlie would get a return on his shares.

“Investments. They pay money. I’ll be an investment man. I always did have a way of picking a winner.” He grinned at Nealie, and she knew he wasn’t talking just about mines. “I’m going to turn the front parlor into an office, so I can study more about the mines, have a place besides the saloon to talk to men who want me to invest. And I can be here near you. If you need anything, all you got to do is yell ‘Charlie.’”

“Oh my,” Nealie said. She hadn’t thought about Charlie being around all day and didn’t know if she liked the idea. She thought of Will coming to the door and Charlie, not her, opening it. “Oh my.”

“Fact is, you need help hanging up a picture or carrying in kindling, you just yell ‘Charlie.’” He thought about that a moment. “But you don’t need to worry about the kindling, because we’ll find us a hired girl.”

“But I’m a hired girl.”

“Not anymore. You’re Mrs. Charlie Dumas. You’re a lady now.”

*   *   *

And a lady, Charlie told her after she ground more beans for coffee and brewed a second batch, had to decorate her house—the Bride’s House; they decided that would be its formal name. It had not come furnished. Mrs. Travers had loaned Charlie some of her dishes and cookware so that they could eat for a few days, while Charlie had moved a cot from his cabin into the upstairs bedroom. The only other furniture was the crate Charlie had set up in the dining room for a table and two stools.

Now as they sat there over breakfast, Nealie looked around the dining room and announced, “I want yellow wallpaper in this room, yellow and gold. Could we do that, Charlie? Could we?”

“Any color you want. We could make every room a different color. What would you say to that?”

Nealie clapped her hands. “Blue for the bedroom. Red for the parlor.” Then she added, “Gray for the front parlor,” because she remembered Will saying once that he liked a room papered in gray.

But Charlie shook his head. “Green for my office, green like your dress. And we’ll have to buy a bed and a table, a desk, everything. What do you say we go to Denver for it?”

“Today? Could we go today?”

Charlie shrugged. “’Course we could. I’m not on shift anymore.”

*   *   *

The train ride to Denver was far different from Nealie’s trip to Georgetown in the spring. She was not a runaway girl, but the wife of a mining investor. She said that over and over to herself, “Mining investor, mining investor,” so that she could remark on it in an offhand way if someone asked her about Charlie.

She was repeating it in her mind at the depot when Charlie left her to buy tickets and a clerk from the hardware store greeted her. “Hello, Miss Nealie.”

“It’s not Miss Nealie anymore. I’m Mrs. Charlie Dumas now. My husband’s a mining investor,” she replied. She liked the way she said it, not bragging but firmly, so that the man knew her husband was important.

“You mean old Charlie that works at the Bobcat?”

“The same, only he doesn’t set charges anymore. He’s a mining investor.”

The man only laughed. “Well, who in Georgetown isn’t?”

As she waited for Charlie, Nealie looked around the station. She loved the bustle of the depot—Will had, too, when she’d taken him there—loved wondering about the people, why they had come to Georgetown or were leaving it. Somebody might even be wondering about her, so she stood with her back straight, her head a little too high, not catching anyone’s eye, until Charlie claimed her, and they boarded the train. Nealie had ridden a train only once before, on her trip from Missouri to Georgetown, and she had been so frightened someone would come after her and drag her back home that she’d paid no attention to the scenery, but now she stared out the window, asking Charlie a thousand questions about the mines they passed, the towns.

“That’s Red Elephant,” he told her. “I got a share or two in that mine.” The name sounded familiar, and then Nealie remembered that Mrs. Travers had gone to Red Elephant on the Fourth of July, the night that she and Will … Nealie wondered if Will would always sneak into her mind like that.

She didn’t want to think about him now, however. So she chatted about the freight wagons on the roads up the mountainsides, guessing at what they carried. She tried to see through the windows of the houses and speculated about the people who lived in them, thinking that someday people would stare at the Bride’s House and wonder about her. She marveled at how fast the train ran. It seemed she had just settled down for the trip when they arrived in Denver and they climbed down the steps into a huge station.

“I’ve been here before,” she said, trying to sound sure of herself. “I stopped here before I went to Georgetown, after I left Missouri.”

“Missouri? I didn’t know you came from Missouri.”

“And I’m never going back, so don’t you think about it.”

“Who said I’d send you back? I wouldn’t go back where I came from, but there’s no reason. I got no family myself.”