Produced by Donald Lainson
A SAPPHO OF GREEN SPRINGS
By Bret Harte
CONTENTS
A SAPPHO OF GREEN SPRINGS
THE CHATELAINE OF BURNT RIDGE
THROUGH THE SANTA CLARA WHEAT
A MAECENAS OF THE PACIFIC SLOPE
A SAPPHO OF GREEN SPRINGS
CHAPTER I
“Come in,” said the editor.
The door of the editorial room of the “Excelsior Magazine” began to
creak painfully under the hesitating pressure of an uncertain and
unfamiliar hand. This continued until with a start of irritation the
editor faced directly about, throwing his leg over the arm of his chair
with a certain youthful dexterity. With one hand gripping its back,
the other still grasping a proof-slip, and his pencil in his mouth, he
stared at the intruder.
The stranger, despite his hesitating entrance, did not seem in the least
disconcerted. He was a tall man, looking even taller by reason of the
long formless overcoat he wore, known as a “duster,” and by a long
straight beard that depended from his chin, which he combed with two
reflective fingers as he contemplated the editor. The red dust which
still lay in the creases of his garment and in the curves of his soft
felt hat, and left a dusty circle like a precipitated halo around his
feet, proclaimed him, if not a countryman, a recent inland importation
by coach. “Busy?” he said, in a grave but pleasant voice. “I kin wait.
Don't mind ME. Go on.”
The editor indicated a chair with his disengaged hand and plunged again
into his proof-slips. The stranger surveyed the scant furniture and
appointments of the office with a look of grave curiosity, and then,
taking a chair, fixed an earnest, penetrating gaze on the editor's
profile. The editor felt it, and, without looking up, said--
“Well, go on.”
“But you're busy. I kin wait.”
“I shall not be less busy this morning. I can listen.”
“I want you to give me the name of a certain person who writes in your
magazine.”
The editor's eye glanced at the second right-hand drawer of his desk.
It did not contain the names of his contributors, but what in the
traditions of his office was accepted as an equivalent,--a revolver.
He had never yet presented either to an inquirer. But he laid aside his
proofs, and, with a slight darkening of his youthful, discontented face,
said, “What do you want to know for?”
The question was so evidently unexpected that the stranger's face
colored slightly, and he hesitated. The editor meanwhile, without
taking his eyes from the man, mentally ran over the contents of the last
magazine. They had been of a singularly peaceful character. There seemed
to be nothing to justify homicide on his part or the stranger's. Yet
there was no knowing, and his questioner's bucolic appearance by no
means precluded an assault. Indeed, it had been a legend of the office
that a predecessor had suffered vicariously from a geological hammer
covertly introduced into a scientific controversy by an irate professor.
“As we make ourselves responsible for the conduct of the magazine,”
continued the young editor, with mature severity, “we do not give up the
names of our contributors. If you do not agree with their opinions”--
“But I DO,” said the stranger, with his former composure, “and I reckon
that's why I want to know who wrote those verses called 'Underbrush,'
signed 'White Violet,' in your last number. They're pow'ful pretty.”
The editor flushed slightly, and glanced instinctively around for any
unexpected witness of his ludicrous mistake. The fear of ridicule was
uppermost in his mind, and he was more relieved at his mistake not being
overheard than at its groundlessness.
“The verses ARE pretty,” he said, recovering himself, with a critical
air, “and I am glad you like them. But even then, you know, I could not
give you the lady's name without her permission. I will write to her and
ask it, if you like.”
The actual fact was that the verses had been sent to him anonymously
from a remote village in the Coast Range,--the address being the
post-office and the signature initials.
The stranger looked disturbed. “Then she ain't about here anywhere?” he
said, with a vague gesture. “She don't belong to the office?”
The young editor beamed with tolerant superiority: “No, I am sorry to
say.”
“I should like to have got to see her and kinder asked her a
few questions,” continued the stranger, with the same reflective
seriousness. “You see, it wasn't just the rhymin' o' them verses,--and
they kinder sing themselves to ye, don't they?--it wasn't the chyce o'
words,--and I reckon they allus hit the idee in the centre shot every
time,--it wasn't the idees and moral she sort o' drew out o' what she
was tellin',--but it was the straight thing itself,--the truth!”
“The truth?” repeated the editor.
“Yes, sir. I've bin there. I've seen all that she's seen in the
brush--the little flicks and checkers o' light and shadder down in
the brown dust that you wonder how it ever got through the dark of the
woods, and that allus seems to slip away like a snake or a lizard if you
grope. I've heard all that she's heard there--the creepin', the sighin',
and the whisperin' through the bracken and the ground-vines of all that
lives there.”
“You seem to be a poet yourself,” said the editor, with a patronizing
smile.
“I'm a lumberman, up in Mendocino,” returned the stranger, with sublime
naivete. “Got a mill there. You see, sightin' standin' timber and
selectin' from the gen'ral show of the trees in the ground and the lay
of roots hez sorter made me take notice.” He paused. “Then,” he added,
somewhat despondingly, “you don't know who she is?”
“No,” said the editor, reflectively; “not even if it is really a WOMAN
who writes.”
“Eh?”
“Well, you see, 'White Violet' may as well be the nom de plume of a man
as of a woman, especially if adopted for the purpose of mystification.
The handwriting, I remember, WAS more boyish than feminine.”
“No,” returned the stranger doggedly, “it wasn't no MAN. There's ideas
and words there that only come from a woman: baby-talk to the birds, you
know, and a kind of fearsome keer of bugs and creepin' things that don't
come to a man who wears boots and trousers. Well,” he added, with a
return to his previous air of resigned disappointment, “I suppose you
don't even know what she's like?”
“No,” responded the editor, cheerfully. Then, following an idea
suggested by the odd mingling of sentiment and shrewd perception in
the man before him, he added: “Probably not at all like anything you
imagine. She may be a mother with three or four children; or an old maid
who keeps a boarding-house; or a wrinkled school-mistress; or a chit
of a school-girl. I've had some fair verses from a red-haired girl of
fourteen at the Seminary,” he concluded with professional coolness.
The stranger regarded him with the naive wonder of an inexperienced
man. Having paid this tribute to his superior knowledge, he regained his
previous air of grave perception. “I reckon she ain't none of them. But
I'm keepin' you from your work. Good-by. My name's Bowers--Jim Bowers,
of Mendocino. If you're up my way, give me a call. And if you do write
to this yer 'White Violet,' and she's willin', send me her address.”
He shook the editor's hand warmly--even in its literal significance
of imparting a good deal of his own earnest caloric to the editor's
fingers--and left the room. His footfall echoed along the passage and
died out, and with it, I fear, all impression of his visit from the
editor's mind, as he plunged again into the silent task before him.
Presently he was conscious of a melodious humming and a light leisurely
step at the entrance of the hall. They continued on in an easy harmony
and unaffected as the passage of a bird. Both were pleasant and both
familiar to the editor. They belonged to Jack Hamlin, by vocation a
gambler, by taste a musician, on his way from his apartments on
the upper floor, where he had just risen, to drop into his friend's
editorial room and glance over the exchanges, as was his habit before
breakfast.
The door opened lightly. The editor was conscious of a faint odor of
scented soap, a sensation of freshness and cleanliness, the impression
of a soft hand like a woman's on his shoulder and, like a woman's,
momentarily and playfully caressing, the passage of a graceful shadow
across his desk, and the next moment Jack Hamlin was ostentatiously
dusting a chair with an open newspaper preparatory to sitting down.
“You ought to ship that office-boy of yours, if he can't keep things
cleaner,” he said, suspending his melody to eye grimly the dust which
Mr. Bowers had shaken from his departing feet.
The editor did not look up until he had finished revising a difficult
paragraph. By that time Mr. Hamlin had comfortably settled himself on
a cane sofa, and, possibly out of deference to his surroundings, had
subdued his song to a peculiarly low, soft, and heartbreaking whistle as
he unfolded a newspaper. Clean and faultless in his appearance, he had
the rare gift of being able to get up at two in the afternoon with
much of the dewy freshness and all of the moral superiority of an early
riser.
“You ought to have been here just now, Jack,” said the editor.
“Not a row, old man, eh?” inquired Jack, with a faint accession of
interest.
“No,” said the editor, smiling. Then he related the incidents of the
previous interview, with a certain humorous exaggeration which was part
of his nature. But Jack did not smile.
“You ought to have booted him out of the ranch on sight,” he said. “What
right had he to come here prying into a lady's affairs?--at least a lady
as far as HE knows. Of course she's some old blowzy with frumpled hair
trying to rope in a greenhorn with a string of words and phrases,”
concluded Jack, carelessly, who had an equally cynical distrust of the
sex and of literature.
“That's about what I told him,” said the editor.
“That's just what you SHOULDN'T have told him,” returned Jack. “You
ought to have stuck up for that woman as if she'd been your own mother.
Lord! you fellows don't know how to run a magazine. You ought to let ME
sit on that chair and tackle your customers.”
“What would you have done, Jack?” asked the editor, much amused to
find that his hitherto invincible hero was not above the ordinary human
weakness of offering advice as to editorial conduct.
“Done?” reflected Jack. “Well, first, sonny, I shouldn't keep a revolver
in a drawer that I had to OPEN to get at.”
“But what would you have said?”
“I should simply have asked him what was the price of lumber at
Mendocino,” said Jack, sweetly, “and when he told me, I should have said
that the samples he was offering out of his own head wouldn't suit. You
see, you don't want any trifling in such matters. You write well enough,
my boy,” continued he, turning over his paper, “but what you're lacking
in is editorial dignity. But go on with your work. Don't mind me.”
Thus admonished, the editor again bent over his desk, and his friend
softly took up his suspended song. The editor had not proceeded far in
his corrections when Jack's voice again broke the silence.
“Where are those d----d verses, anyway?”
Without looking up, the editor waved his pencil towards an uncut copy of
the “Excelsior Magazine” lying on the table.
“You don't suppose I'm going to READ them, do you?” said Jack,
aggrievedly. “Why don't you say what they're about? That's your business
as editor.”
But that functionary, now wholly lost and wandering in the non-sequitur
of an involved passage in the proof before him, only waved an impatient
remonstrance with his pencil and knit his brows. Jack, with a sigh, took
up the magazine.
A long silence followed, broken only by the hurried rustling of sheets
of copy and an occasional exasperated start from the editor. The sun
was already beginning to slant a dusty beam across his desk; Jack's
whistling had long since ceased. Presently, with an exclamation of
relief, the editor laid aside the last proof-sheet and looked up.
Jack Hamlin had closed the magazine, but with one hand thrown over the
back of the sofa he was still holding it, his slim forefinger between
its leaves to keep the place, and his handsome profile and dark
lashes lifted towards the window. The editor, smiling at this unwonted
abstraction, said quietly,--
“Well, what do you think of them?”
Jack rose, laid the magazine down, settled his white waistcoat with both
hands, and lounged towards his friend with audacious but slightly
veiled and shining eyes. “They sort of sing themselves to you,” he said,
quietly, leaning beside the editor's desk, and looking down upon him.
After a pause he said, “Then you don't know what she's like?”
“That's what Mr. Bowers asked me,” remarked the editor.
“D--n Bowers!”
“I suppose you also wish me to write and ask for permission to give you
her address?” said the editor, with great gravity.
“No,” said Jack, coolly. “I propose to give it to YOU within a week, and
you will pay me with a breakfast. I should like to have it said that I
was once a paid contributor to literature. If I don't give it to you,
I'll stand you a dinner, that's all.”
“Done!” said the editor. “And you know nothing of her now?”
“No,” said Jack, promptly. “Nor you?”
“No more than I have told you.”
“That'll do. So long!” And Jack, carefully adjusting his glossy hat over
his curls at an ominously wicked angle, sauntered lightly from the room.
The editor, glancing after his handsome figure and hearing him take
up his pretermitted whistle as he passed out, began to think that the
contingent dinner was by no means an inevitable prospect.
Howbeit, he plunged once more into his monotonous duties. But the
freshness of the day seemed to have departed with Jack, and the
later interruptions of foreman and publisher were of a more practical
character. It was not until the post arrived that the superscription on
one of the letters caught his eye, and revived his former interest.
It was the same hand as that of his unknown contributor's
manuscript--ill-formed and boyish. He opened the envelope. It contained
another poem with the same signature, but also a note--much longer than
the brief lines that accompanied the first contribution--was scrawled
upon a separate piece of paper. This the editor opened first, and read
the following, with an amazement that for the moment dominated all other
sense:--
MR. EDITOR,--I see you have got my poetry in. But I don't see the
spondulix that oughter follow. Perhaps you don't know where to send it.
Then I'll tell you. Send the money to Lock Box 47, Green Springs P.
O., per Wells Fargo's Express, and I'll get it there, on account of my
parents not knowing. We're very high-toned, and they would think it's
low making poetry for papers. Send amount usually paid for poetry in
your papers. Or may be you think I make poetry for nothing? That's where
you slip up!
Yours truly,
WHITE VIOLET.
P. S.--If you don't pay for poetry, send this back. It's as good as what
you did put in, and is just as hard to make. You hear me? that's me--all
the time.
WHITE VIOLET.
The editor turned quickly to the new contribution for some corroboration
of what he felt must be an extraordinary blunder. But no! The few lines
that he hurriedly read breathed the same atmosphere of intellectual
repose, gentleness, and imagination as the first contribution. And yet
they were in the same handwriting as the singular missive, and both were
identical with the previous manuscript.
Had he been the victim of a hoax, and were the verses not original? No;
they were distinctly original, local in color, and even local in the use
of certain old English words that were common in the Southwest. He had
before noticed the apparent incongruity of the handwriting and the text,
and it was possible that for the purposes of disguise the poet might
have employed an amanuensis. But how could he reconcile the incongruity
of the mercenary and slangy purport of the missive itself with the
mental habit of its author? Was it possible that these inconsistent
qualities existed in the one individual? He smiled grimly as he thought
of his visitor Bowers and his friend Jack. He was startled as he
remembered the purely imaginative picture he had himself given to the
seriously interested Bowers of the possible incongruous personality of
the poetess.
Was he quite fair in keeping this from Jack? Was it really honorable, in
view of their wager? It is to be feared that a very human enjoyment of
Jack's possible discomfiture quite as much as any chivalrous friendship
impelled the editor to ring eventually for the office-boy.
“See if Mr. Hamlin is in his rooms.”
The editor then sat down, and wrote rapidly as follows:--
DEAR MADAM,--You are as right as you are generous in supposing that
only ignorance of your address prevented the manager from previously
remitting the honorarium for your beautiful verses. He now begs to send
it to you in the manner you have indicated. As the verses have attracted
deserved attention, I have been applied to for your address. Should
you care to submit it to me to be used at my discretion, I shall feel
honored by your confidence. But this is a matter left entirely to your
own kindness and better judgment. Meantime, I take pleasure in accepting
“White Violet's” present contribution, and remain, dear madam, your
obedient servant,
THE EDITOR.
The boy returned as he was folding the letter. Mr. Hamlin was not only
NOT in his rooms, but, according to his negro servant Pete, had left
town an hour ago for a few days in the country.
“Did he say where?” asked the editor, quickly.
“No, sir: he didn't know.”
“Very well. Take this to the manager.” He addressed the letter, and,
scrawling a few hieroglyphics on a memorandum-tag, tore it off, and
handed it with the letter to the boy.
An hour later he stood in the manager's office. “The next number is
pretty well made up,” he said, carelessly, “and I think of taking a day
or two off.”
“Certainly,” said the manager. “It will do you good. Where do you think
you'll go?”
“I haven't quite made up my mind.”
CHAPTER II
“Hullo!” said Jack Hamlin.
He had halted his mare at the edge of an abrupt chasm. It did not appear
to be fifty feet across, yet its depth must have been nearly two
hundred to where the hidden mountain-stream, of which it was the banks,
alternately slipped, tumbled, and fell with murmuring and monotonous
regularity. One or two pine-trees growing on the opposite edge, loosened
at the roots, had tilted their straight shafts like spears over the
abyss, and the top of one, resting on the upper branches of a sycamore a
few yards from him, served as an aerial bridge for the passage of a boy
of fourteen to whom Mr. Hamlin's challenge was addressed.
The boy stopped midway in his perilous transit, and, looking down upon
the horseman, responded, coolly, “Hullo, yourself!”
“Is that the only way across this infernal hole, or the one you prefer
for exercise?” continued Hamlin, gravely.
The boy sat down on a bough, allowing his bare feet to dangle over the
dizzy depths, and critically examined his questioner. Jack had on this
occasion modified his usual correct conventional attire by a tasteful
combination of a vaquero's costume, and, in loose white bullion-fringed
trousers, red sash, jacket, and sombrero, looked infinitely more dashing
and picturesque than his original. Nevertheless, the boy did not reply.
Mr. Hamlin's pride in his usual ascendency over women, children, horses,
and all unreasoning animals was deeply nettled. He smiled, however, and
said, quietly,--
“Come here, George Washington. I want to talk to you.”
Without rejecting this august yet impossible title, the boy presently
lifted his feet, and carelessly resumed his passage across the
chasm until, reaching the sycamore, he began to let himself down
squirrel-wise, leap by leap, with an occasional trapeze swinging from
bough to bough, dropping at last easily to the ground. Here he appeared
to be rather good-looking, albeit the sun and air had worked a miracle
of brown tan and freckles on his exposed surfaces, until the mottling of
his oval cheeks looked like a polished bird's egg. Indeed, it struck Mr.
Hamlin that he was as intensely a part of that sylvan seclusion as
the hidden brook that murmured, the brown velvet shadows that lay like
trappings on the white flanks of his horse, the quivering heat, and the
stinging spice of bay. Mr. Hamlin had vague ideas of dryads and fauns,
but at that moment would have bet something on the chances of their
survival.
“I did not hear what you said just now, general,” he remarked, with
great elegance of manner, “but I know from your reputation that it could
not be a lie. I therefore gather that there IS another way across.”
The boy smiled; rather, his very short upper lip apparently vanished
completely over his white teeth, and his very black eyes, which showed a
great deal of the white around them, danced in their orbits.
“But YOU couldn't find it,” he said, slyly.
“No more could you find the half-dollar I dropped just now, unless I
helped you.”
Mr. Hamlin, by way of illustration, leaned deeply over his left stirrup,
and pointed to the ground. At the same moment a bright half-dollar
absolutely appeared to glitter in the herbage at the point of his
finger. It was a trick that had always brought great pleasure and profit
to his young friends, and some loss and discomfiture of wager to his
older ones.
The boy picked up the coin: “There's a dip and a level crossing about a
mile over yer,”--he pointed,--“but it's through the woods, and they're
that high with thick bresh.”
“With what?”
“Bresh,” repeated the boy; “THAT,”--pointing to a few fronds of bracken
growing in the shadow of the sycamore.
“Oh! underbrush?”
“Yes; I said 'bresh,'” returned the boy, doggedly. “YOU might get
through, ef you war spry, but not your hoss. Where do you want to go,
anyway?”
“Do you know, George,” said Mr. Hamlin, lazily throwing his right
leg over the horn of his saddle for greater ease and deliberation in
replying, “it's very odd, but that's just what I'D like to know. Now,
what would YOU, in your broad statesmanlike views of things generally,
advise?”
Quite convinced of the stranger's mental unsoundness, the boy glanced
again at his half-dollar, as if to make sure of its integrity, pocketed
it doubtfully, and turned away.
“Where are you going?” said Hamlin, resuming his seat with the agility
of a circus-rider, and spurring forward.
“To Green Springs, where I live, two miles over the ridge on the far
slope,”--indicating the direction.
“Ah!” said Jack, with thoughtful gravity. “Well, kindly give my love to
your sister, will you?”
“George Washington didn't have no sister,” said the boy, cunningly.
“Can I have been mistaken?” said Hamlin, lifting his hand to his
forehead with grieved accents. “Then it seems YOU have. Kindly give her
my love.”
“Which one?” asked the boy, with a swift glance of mischief. “I've got
four.”
“The one that's like you,” returned Hamlin, with prompt exactitude.
“Now, where's the 'bresh' you spoke of?”
“Keep along the edge until you come to the log-slide. Foller that, and
it'll lead you into the woods. But ye won't go far, I tell ye. When you
have to turn back, instead o' comin' back here, you kin take the trail
that goes round the woods, and that'll bring ye out into the stage road
ag'in near the post-office at the Green Springs crossin' and the new
hotel. That'll be war ye'll turn up, I reckon,” he added, reflectively.
“Fellers that come yer gunnin' and fishin' gin'rally do,” he concluded,
with a half-inquisitive air.
“Ah?” said Mr. Hamlin, quietly shedding the inquiry. “Green Springs
Hotel is where the stage stops, eh?”
“Yes, and at the post-office,” said the boy. “She'll be along here
soon,” he added.
“If you mean the Santa Cruz stage,” said Hamlin, “she's here already. I
passed her on the ridge half an hour ago.”
The boy gave a sudden start, and a quick uneasy expression passed over
his face. “Go 'long with ye!” he said, with a forced smile: “it ain't
her time yet.”
“But I SAW her,” repeated Hamlin, much amused. “Are you expecting
company? Hullo! Where are you off to? Come back.”
But his companion had already vanished in the thicket with the
undeliberate and impulsive act of an animal. There was a momentary
rustle in the alders fifty feet away, and then all was silent. The
hidden brook took up its monotonous murmur, the tapping of a distant
woodpecker became suddenly audible, and Mr. Hamlin was again alone.
“Wonder whether he's got parents in the stage, and has been playing
truant here,” he mused, lazily. “Looked as if he'd been up to some
devilment, or more like as if he was primed for it. If he'd been a
little older, I'd have bet he was in league with some road-agents to
watch the coach. Just my luck to have him light out as I was beginning
to get some talk out of him.” He paused, looked at his watch, and
straightened himself in his stirrups. “Four o'clock. I reckon I might as
well try the woods and what that imp calls the 'bresh;' I may strike a
shanty or a native by the way.”
With this determination, Mr. Hamlin urged his horse along the faint
trail by the brink of the watercourse which the boy had just indicated.
He had no definite end in view beyond the one that had brought him the
day before to that locality--his quest of the unknown poetess. His clue
would have seemed to ordinary humanity the faintest. He had merely
noted the provincial name of a certain plant mentioned in the poem, and
learned that its habitat was limited to the southern local range; while
its peculiar nomenclature was clearly of French Creole or Gulf State
origin. This gave him a large though sparsely-populated area
for locality, while it suggested a settlement of Louisianians or
Mississippians near the Summit, of whom, through their native gambling
proclivities, he was professionally cognizant. But he mainly trusted
Fortune. Secure in his faith in the feminine character of that goddess,
he relied a great deal on her well-known weakness for scamps of his
quality.
It was not long before he came to the “slide”--a lightly-cut or shallow
ditch. It descended slightly in a course that was far from straight, at
times diverging to avoid the obstacles of trees or boulders, at times
shaving them so closely as to leave smooth abrasions along their sides
made by the grinding passage of long logs down the incline. The track
itself was slippery from this, and preoccupied all Hamlin's skill as a
horseman, even to the point of stopping his usual careless whistle.
At the end of half an hour the track became level again, and he was
confronted with a singular phenomenon.
He had entered the wood, and the trail seemed to cleave through a
far-stretching, motionless sea of ferns that flowed on either side to
the height of his horse's flanks. The straight shafts of the trees rose
like columns from their hidden bases and were lost again in a roof
of impenetrable leafage, leaving a clear space of fifty feet between,
through which the surrounding horizon of sky was perfectly visible.
All the light that entered this vast sylvan hall came from the sides;
nothing permeated from above; nothing radiated from below; the height
of the crest on which the wood was placed gave it this lateral
illumination, but gave it also the profound isolation of some temple
raised by long-forgotten hands. In spite of the height of these clear
shafts, they seemed dwarfed by the expanse of the wood, and in the
farthest perspective the base of ferns and the capital of foliage
appeared almost to meet. As the boy had warned him, the slide had turned
aside, skirting the wood to follow the incline, and presently the little
trail he now followed vanished utterly, leaving him and his horse adrift
breast-high in this green and yellow sea of fronds. But Mr. Hamlin,
imperious of obstacles, and touched by some curiosity, continued to
advance lazily, taking the bearings of a larger red-wood in the centre
of the grove for his objective point. The elastic mass gave way before
him, brushing his knees or combing his horse's flanks with wide-spread
elfin fingers, and closing up behind him as he passed, as if to
obliterate any track by which he might return. Yet his usual luck did
not desert him here. Being on horseback, he found that he could detect
what had been invisible to the boy and probably to all pedestrians,
namely, that the growth was not equally dense, that there were certain
thinner and more open spaces that he could take advantage of by more
circuitous progression, always, however, keeping the bearings of the
central tree. This he at last reached, and halted his panting horse.
Here a new idea which had been haunting him since he entered the wood
took fuller possession of him. He had seen or known all this before!
There was a strange familiarity either in these objects or in the
impression or spell they left upon him. He remembered the verses! Yes,
this was the “underbrush” which the poetess had described: the gloom
above and below, the light that seemed blown through it like the wind,
the suggestion of hidden life beneath this tangled luxuriance, which she
alone had penetrated,--all this was here. But, more than that, here was
the atmosphere that she had breathed into the plaintive melody of her
verse. It did not necessarily follow that Mr. Hamlin's translation of
her sentiment was the correct one, or that the ideas her verses had
provoked in his mind were at all what had been hers: in his easy
susceptibility he was simply thrown into a corresponding mood of
emotion and relieved himself with song. One of the verses he had already
associated in his mind with the rhythm of an old plantation melody, and
it struck his fancy to take advantage of the solitude to try its effect.
Humming to himself, at first softly, he at last grew bolder, and let his
voice drift away through the stark pillars of the sylvan colonnade till
it seemed to suffuse and fill it with no more effort than the light
which strayed in on either side. Sitting thus, his hat thrown a little
back from his clustering curls, the white neck and shoulders of his
horse uplifting him above the crested mass of fern, his red sash the one
fleck of color in their olive depths, I am afraid he looked much
more like the real minstrel of the grove than the unknown poetess who
transfigured it. But this, as has been already indicated, was Jack
Hamlin's peculiar gift. Even as he had previously outshone the vaquero
in his borrowed dress, he now silenced and supplanted a few fluttering
blue-jays--rightful tenants of the wood--with a more graceful and airy
presence and a far sweeter voice.
The open horizon towards the west had taken a warmer color from the
already slanting sun when Mr. Hamlin, having rested his horse, turned
to that direction. He had noticed that the wood was thinner there,
and, pushing forward, he was presently rewarded by the sound of far-off
wheels, and knew he must be near the high-road that the boy had spoken
of. Having given up his previous intention of crossing the stream, there
seemed nothing better for him to do than to follow the truant's advice
and take the road back to Green Springs. Yet he was loath to leave the
wood, halting on its verge, and turning to look back into its charmed
recesses. Once or twice--perhaps because he recalled the words of the
poem--that yellowish sea of ferns had seemed instinct with hidden life,
and he had even fancied, here and there, a swaying of its plumed crests.
Howbeit, he still lingered long enough for the open sunlight into which
he had obtruded to point out the bravery of his handsome figure. Then
he wheeled his horse, the light glanced from polished double bit and
bridle-fripperies, caught his red sash and bullion buttons, struck a
parting flash from his silver spurs, and he was gone!
For a moment the light streamed unbrokenly through the wood. And then
it could be seen that the yellow mass of undergrowth HAD moved with the
passage of another figure than his own. For ever since he had entered
the shade, a woman, shawled in a vague, shapeless fashion, had watched
him wonderingly, eagerly, excitedly, gliding from tree to tree as he
advanced, or else dropping breathlessly below the fronds of fern whence
she gazed at him as between parted fingers. When he wheeled she had run
openly to the west, albeit with hidden face and still clinging shawl,
and taken a last look at his retreating figure. And then, with a faint
but lingering sigh, she drew back into the shadow of the wood again and
vanished also.
CHAPTER III
At the end of twenty minutes Mr. Hamlin reined in his mare. He had just
observed in the distant shadows of a by-lane that intersected his road
the vanishing flutter of two light print dresses. Without a moment's
hesitation he lightly swerved out of the high-road and followed the
retreating figures.
As he neared them, they seemed to be two slim young girls, evidently
so preoccupied with the rustic amusement of edging each other off the
grassy border into the dust of the track that they did not perceive
his approach. Little shrieks, slight scufflings, and interjections of
“Cynthy! you limb!” “Quit that, Eunice, now!” and “I just call that
real mean!” apparently drowned the sound of his canter in the soft dust.
Checking his speed to a gentle trot, and pressing his horse close beside
the opposite fence, he passed them with gravely uplifted hat and a
serious, preoccupied air. But in that single, seemingly conventional
glance, Mr. Hamlin had seen that they were both pretty, and that one had
the short upper lip of his errant little guide. A hundred yards farther
on he halted, as if irresolutely, gazed doubtfully ahead of him, and
then turned back. An expression of innocent--almost childlike--concern
was clouding the rascal's face. It was well, as the two girls had drawn
closely together, having been apparently surprised in the midst of a
glowing eulogium of this glorious passing vision by its sudden return.
At his nearer approach, the one with the short upper lip hid that
piquant feature and the rest of her rosy face behind the other's
shoulder, which was suddenly and significantly opposed to the advance
of this handsome intruder, with a certain dignity, half real, half
affected, but wholly charming. The protectress appeared--possibly from
her defensive attitude--the superior of her companion.
Audacious as Jack was to his own sex, he had early learned that
such rare but discomposing graces as he possessed required a certain
apologetic attitude when presented to women, and that it was only a
plain man who could be always complacently self-confident in their
presence. There was, consequently, a hesitating lowering of this
hypocrite's brown eyelashes as he said, in almost pained accents,--
“Excuse me, but I fear I've taken the wrong road. I'm going to Green
Springs.”
“I reckon you've taken the wrong road, wherever you're going,” returned
the young lady, having apparently made up her mind to resent each of
Jack's perfections as a separate impertinence: “this is a PRIVATE road.”
She drew herself fairly up here, although gurgled at in the ear and
pinched in the arm by her companion.
“I beg your pardon,” said Jack, meekly. “I see I'm trespassing on your
grounds. I'm very sorry. Thank you for telling me. I should have gone on
a mile or two farther, I suppose, until I came to your house,” he added,
innocently.
“A mile or two! You'd have run chock ag'in' our gate in another minit,”
said the short-lipped one, eagerly. But a sharp nudge from her companion
sent her back again into cover, where she waited expectantly for another
crushing retort from her protector.
But, alas! it did not come. One cannot be always witty, and Jack looked
distressed. Nevertheless, he took advantage of the pause.
“It was so stupid in me, as I think your brother”--looking at
Short-lip--“very carefully told me the road.”
The two girls darted quick glances at each other. “Oh, Bawb!” said the
first speaker, in wearied accents,--“THAT limb! He don't keer.”
“But he DID care,” said Hamlin, quietly, “and gave me a good deal of
information. Thanks to him, I was able to see that ferny wood that's so
famous--about two miles up the road. You know--the one that there's a
poem written about!”
The shot told! Short-lip burst into a display of dazzling little teeth
and caught the other girl convulsively by the shoulders. The superior
girl bent her pretty brows, and said, “Eunice, what's gone of ye? Quit
that!” but, as Hamlin thought, paled slightly.
“Of course,” said Hamlin, quickly, “you know--the poem everybody's
talking about. Dear me! let me see! how does it go?” The rascal knit his
brows, said, “Ah, yes,” and then murmured the verse he had lately sung
quite as musically.
Short-lip was shamelessly exalted and excited. Really she could scarcely
believe it! She already heard herself relating the whole occurrence.
Here was the most beautiful young man she had ever seen--an entire
stranger--talking to them in the most beautiful and natural way,
right in the lane, and reciting poetry to her sister! It was like a
novel--only more so. She thought that Cynthia, on the other hand, looked
distressed, and--she must say it--“silly.”
All of which Jack noted, and was wise. He had got all he wanted--at
present. He gathered up his reins.
“Thank you so much, and your brother, too, Miss Cynthia,” he said,
without looking up. Then, adding, with a parting glance and smile, “But
don't tell Bob how stupid I was,” he swiftly departed.
In half an hour he was at the Green Springs Hotel. As he rode into the
stable yard, he noticed that the coach had only just arrived, having
been detained by a land-slip on the Summit road. With the recollection
of Bob fresh in his mind, he glanced at the loungers at the stage
office. The boy was not there, but a moment later Jack detected him
among the waiting crowd at the post-office opposite. With a view of
following up his inquiries, he crossed the road as the boy entered the
vestibule of the post-office. He arrived in time to see him unlock one
of a row of numbered letter-boxes rented by subscribers, which occupied
a partition by the window, and take out a small package and a letter.
But in that brief glance Mr. Hamlin detected the printed address of the
“Excelsior Magazine” on the wrapper. It was enough. Luck was certainly
with him.
He had time to get rid of the wicked sparkle that had lit his dark eyes,
and to lounge carelessly towards the boy as the latter broke open the
package, and then hurriedly concealed it in his jacket-pocket, and
started for the door. Mr. Hamlin quickly followed him, unperceived, and,
as he stepped into the street, gently tapped him on the shoulder. The
boy turned and faced him quickly. But Mr. Hamlin's eyes showed nothing
but lazy good-humor.
“Hullo, Bob. Where are you going?”
The boy again looked up suspiciously at this revelation of his name.
“Home,” he said, briefly.
“Oh, over yonder,” said Hamlin, calmly. “I don't mind walking with you
as far as the lane.”
He saw the boy's eyes glance furtively towards an alley that ran beside
the blacksmith's shop a few rods ahead, and was convinced that he
intended to evade him there. Slipping his arm carelessly in the youth's,
he concluded to open fire at once.
“Bob,” he said, with irresistible gravity, “I did not know when I met
you this morning that I had the honor of addressing a poet--none other
than the famous author of 'Underbrush.'”
The boy started back, and endeavored to withdraw his arm, but Mr. Hamlin
tightened his hold, without, however, changing his careless expression.
“You see,” he continued, “the editor is a friend of mine, and, being
afraid this package might not get into the right hands--as you didn't
give your name--he deputized me to come here and see that it was all
square. As you're rather young, for all you're so gifted, I reckon I'd
better go home with you, and take a receipt from your parents. That's
about square, I think?”
The consternation of the boy was so evident and so far beyond Mr.
Hamlin's expectation that he instantly halted him, gazed into his
shifting eyes, and gave a long whistle.
“Who said it was for ME? Wot you talkin' about? Lemme go!” gasped the
boy, with the short intermittent breath of mingled fear and passion.
“Bob,” said Mr. Hamlin, in a singularly colorless voice which was very
rare with him, and an expression quite unlike his own, “what is your
little game?”
The boy looked down in dogged silence.
“Out with it! Who are you playing this on?”
“It's all among my own folks; it's nothin' to YOU,” said the boy,
suddenly beginning to struggle violently, as if inspired by this
extenuating fact.
“Among your own folks, eh? White Violet and the rest, eh? But SHE'S not
in it?”
No reply.
“Hand me over that package. I'll give it back to you again.”
The boy handed it to Mr. Hamlin. He read the letter, and found the
inclosure contained a twenty-dollar gold-piece. A half-supercilious
smile passed over his face at this revelation of the inadequate
emoluments of literature and the trifling inducements to crime. Indeed,
I fear the affair began to take a less serious moral complexion in his
eyes.
“Then White Violet--your sister Cynthia, you know,” continued Mr.
Hamlin, in easy parenthesis--“wrote for this?” holding the coin
contemplatively in his fingers, “and you calculated to nab it yourself?”
The quick searching glance with which Bob received the name of his
sister, Mr. Hamlin attributed only to his natural surprise that
this stranger should be on such familiar terms with her; but the boy
responded immediately and bluntly:--
“No! SHE didn't write for it. She didn't want nobody to know who she
was. Nobody wrote for it but me. Nobody KNEW FOLKS WAS PAID FOR PO'TRY
BUT ME. I found it out from a feller. I wrote for it. I wasn't goin' to
let that skunk of an editor have it himself!”
“And you thought YOU would take it,” said Hamlin, his voice resuming
its old tone. “Well, George--I mean Bob, your conduct was praiseworthy,
although your intentions were bad. Still, twenty dollars is rather
too much for your trouble. Suppose we say five and call it square?” He
handed the astonished boy five dollars. “Now, George Washington,” he
continued, taking four other twenty-dollar pieces from his pocket, and
adding them to the inclosure, which he carefully refolded, “I'm going to
give you another chance to live up to your reputation. You'll take that
package, and hand it to White Violet, and say you found it, just as
it is, in the lock-box. I'll keep the letter, for it would knock you
endways if it was seen, and I'll make it all right with the editor. But,
as I've got to tell him that I've seen White Violet myself, and know
she's got it, I expect YOU to manage in some way to have me see her.
I'll manage the rest of it; and I won't blow on you, either. You'll
come back to the hotel, and tell me what you've done. And now, George,”
concluded Mr. Hamlin, succeeding at last in fixing the boy's evasive eye
with a peculiar look, “it may be just as well for you to understand
that I know every nook and corner of this place, that I've already been
through that underbrush you spoke of once this morning, and that I've
got a mare that can go wherever YOU can, and a d----d sight quicker!”
“I'll give the package to White Violet,” said the boy, doggedly.
“And you'll come back to the hotel?”
The boy hesitated, and then said, “I'll come back.”
“All right, then. Adios, general.”
Bob disappeared around the corner of a cross-road at a rapid trot, and
Mr. Hamlin turned into the hotel.
“Smart little chap that!” he said to the barkeeper.
“You bet!” returned the man, who, having recognized Mr. Hamlin, was
delighted at the prospect of conversing with a gentleman of such
decidedly dangerous reputation. “But he's been allowed to run a little
wild since old man Delatour died, and the widder's got enough to do, I
reckon, lookin' arter her four gals, and takin' keer of old Delatour's
ranch over yonder. I guess it's pretty hard sleddin' for her sometimes
to get clo'es and grub for the famerly, without follerin' Bob around.”
“Sharp girls, too, I reckon; one of them writes things for the
magazines, doesn't she?--Cynthia, eh?” said Mr. Hamlin, carelessly.
Evidently this fact was not a notorious one to the barkeeper. He,
however, said, “Dunno; mabbee; her father was eddicated, and the widder
Delatour, too, though she's sorter queer, I've heard tell. Lord!
Mr. Hamlin, YOU oughter remember old man Delatour! From Opelousas,
Louisiany, you know! High old sport French style, frilled
bosom--open-handed, and us'ter buck ag'in' faro awful! Why, he dropped
a heap o' money to YOU over in San Jose two years ago at poker! You must
remember him!”
The slightest possible flush passed over Mr. Hamlin's brow under the
shadow of his hat, but did not get lower than his eyes. He suddenly HAD
recalled the spendthrift Delatour perfectly, and as quickly regretted
now that he had not doubled the honorarium he had just sent to his
portionless daughter. But he only said, coolly, “No,” and then, raising
his pale face and audacious eyes, continued in his laziest and most
insulting manner, “no: the fact is, my mind is just now preoccupied in
wondering if the gas is leaking anywhere, and if anything is ever served
over this bar except elegant conversation. When the gentleman who mixes
drinks comes back, perhaps you'll be good enough to tell him to send a
whisky sour to Mr. Jack Hamlin in the parlor. Meantime, you can turn off
your soda fountain: I don't want any fizz in mine.”
Having thus quite recovered himself, Mr. Hamlin lounged gracefully
across the hall into the parlor. As he did so, a darkish young man, with
a slim boyish figure, a thin face, and a discontented expression,
rose from an armchair, held out his hand, and, with a saturnine smile,
said:--
“Jack!”
“Fred!”
The two men remained gazing at each other with a half-amused,
half-guarded expression. Mr. Hamlin was first to begin. “I didn't think
YOU'D be such a fool as to try on this kind of thing, Fred,” he said,
half seriously.
“Yes, but it was to keep you from being a much bigger one that I hunted
you up,” said the editor, mischievously. “Read that. I got it an hour
after you left.” And he placed a little triumphantly in Jack's hand the
letter he had received from White Violet.
Mr. Hamlin read it with an unmoved face, and then laid his two hands
on the editor's shoulders. “Yes, my young friend, and you sat down and
wrote her a pretty letter and sent her twenty dollars--which, permit me
to say, was d----d poor pay! But that isn't your fault, I reckon: it's
the meanness of your proprietors.”
“But it isn't the question, either, just now, Jack, however you have
been able to answer it. Do you mean to say seriously that you want to
know anything more of a woman who could write such a letter?”
“I don't know,” said Jack, cheerfully. “She might be a devilish sight
funnier than if she hadn't written it--which is the fact.”
“You mean to say SHE didn't write it?”
“Yes.”
“Who did, then?”
“Her brother Bob.”
After a moment's scrutiny of his friend's bewildered face, Mr. Hamlin
briefly related his adventures, from the moment of his meeting Bob at
the mountain-stream to the barkeeper's gossiping comment and sequel.
“Therefore,” he concluded, “the author of 'Underbrush' is Miss Cynthia
Delatour, one of four daughters of a widow who lives two miles from
here at the crossing. I shall see her this evening and make sure;
but to-morrow morning you will pay me the breakfast you owe me. She's
good-looking, but I can't say I fancy the poetic style: it's a little
too high-toned for me. However, I love my love with a C, because she is
your Contributor; I hate her with a C, because of her Connections; I met
her by Chance and treated her with Civility; her name is Cynthia, and
she lives on a Cross-road.”
“But you surely don't expect you will ever see Bob, again!” said the
editor, impatiently. “You have trusted him with enough to start him for
the Sandwich Islands, to say nothing of the ruinous precedent you have
established in his mind of the value of poetry. I am surprised that
a man of your knowledge of the world would have faith in that imp the
second time.”
“My knowledge of the world,” returned Mr. Hamlin, sententiously, “tells
me that's the only way you can trust anybody. ONCE doesn't make a habit,
nor show a character. I could see by his bungling that he had never
tried this on before. Just now the temptation to wipe out his punishment
by doing the square thing, and coming back a sort of hero, is stronger
than any other. 'Tisn't everybody that gets that chance,” he added, with
an odd laugh.
Nevertheless, three hours passed without bringing Bob. The two men had
gone to the billiard-room, when a waiter brought a note, which he
handed to Mr. Hamlin with some apologetic hesitation. It bore no
superscription, but had been brought by a boy who described Mr. Hamlin
perfectly, and requested that the note should be handed to him with the
remark that “Bob had come back.”
“And is he there now?” asked Mr. Hamlin, holding the letter unopened in
his hand.
“No, sir; he run right off.”
The editor laughed, but Mr. Hamlin, having perused the note, put away
his cue. “Come into my room,” he said.
The editor followed, and Mr. Hamlin laid the note before him on the
table. “Bob's all right,” he said, “for I'll bet a thousand dollars that
note is genuine.”
It was delicately written, in a cultivated feminine hand, utterly unlike
the scrawl that had first excited the editor's curiosity, and ran as
follows:--
He who brought me the bounty of your friend--for I cannot call a
recompense so far above my deserts by any other name--gives me also to
understand that you wished for an interview. I cannot believe that this
is mere idle curiosity, or that you have any motive that is not kindly
and honorable, but I feel that I must beg and pray you not to seek to
remove the veil behind which I have chosen to hide myself and my
poor efforts from identification. I THINK I know you--I KNOW I
know myself--well enough to believe it would give neither of us any
happiness. You will say to your generous friend that he has already
given the Unknown more comfort and hope than could come from any
personal compliment or publicity, and you will yourself believe that you
have all unconsciously brightened a sad woman's fancy with a Dream and a
Vision that before today had been unknown to
WHITE VIOLET.
“Have you read it?” asked Mr. Hamlin.
“Yes.”
“Then you don't want to see it any more, or even remember you ever saw
it,” said Mr. Hamlin, carefully tearing the note into small pieces and
letting them drift from the windows like blown blossoms.
“But, I say, Jack! look here; I don't understand! You say you have
already seen this woman, and yet”--
“I HAVEN'T seen her,” said Jack, composedly, turning from the window.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you and I, Fred, are going to drop this fooling right here
and leave this place for Frisco by first stage to-morrow, and--that I
owe you that dinner.”
CHAPTER IV
When the stage for San Francisco rolled away the next morning with Mr.
Hamlin and the editor, the latter might have recognized in the occupant
of a dust-covered buggy that was coming leisurely towards them the tall
figure, long beard, and straight duster of his late visitor, Mr. James
Bowers. For Mr. Bowers was on the same quest that the others had just
abandoned. Like Mr. Hamlin, he had been left to his own resources, but
Mr. Bowers's resources were a life-long experience and technical skill;
he too had noted the topographical indications of the poem, and his
knowledge of the sylva of Upper California pointed as unerringly as Mr.
Hamlin's luck to the cryptogamous haunts of the Summit. Such abnormal
growths were indicative of certain localities only, but, as they were
not remunerative from a pecuniary point of view, were to be avoided by
the sagacious woodman. It was clear, therefore, that Mr. Bowers's
visit to Green Springs was not professional, and that he did not even
figuratively accept the omen.
He baited and rested his horse at the hotel, where his bucolic exterior,
however, did not elicit that attention which had been accorded to Mr.
Hamlin's charming insolence or the editor's cultivated manner. But he
glanced over a township map on the walls of the reading-room, and took
note of the names of the owners of different lots, farms, and ranches,
passing that of Delatour with the others. Then he drove leisurely in the
direction of the woods, and, reaching them, tied his horse to a young
sapling in the shade, and entered their domain with a shambling but
familiar woodman's step.
It is not the purpose of this brief chronicle to follow Mr. Bowers in
his professional diagnosis of the locality. He recognized Nature in one
of her moods of wasteful extravagance,--a waste that his experienced
eye could tell was also sapping the vitality of those outwardly robust
shafts that rose around him. He knew, without testing them, that half of
these fair-seeming columns were hollow and rotten at the core; he could
detect the chill odor of decay through the hot balsamic spices stirred
by the wind that streamed through their long aisles,--like incense
mingling with the exhalations of a crypt. He stopped now and then to
part the heavy fronds down to their roots in the dank moss, seeing
again, as he had told the editor, the weird SECOND twilight through
their miniature stems, and the microcosm of life that filled it. But,
even while paying this tribute to the accuracy of the unknown poetess,
he was, like his predecessor, haunted more strongly by the atmosphere
and melody of her verse. Its spell was upon him, too. Unlike Mr. Hamlin,
he did not sing. He only halted once or twice, silently combing his
straight narrow beard with his three fingers, until the action seemed
to draw down the lines of his face into limitless dejection, and an
inscrutable melancholy filled his small gray eyes. The few birds which
had hailed Mr. Hamlin as their successful rival fled away before the
grotesque and angular half-length of Mr. Bowers, as if the wind had
blown in a scarecrow from the distant farms.
Suddenly he observed the figure of a woman, with her back towards him,
leaning motionless against a tree, and apparently gazing intently in the
direction of Green Springs. He had approached so near to her that it
was singular she had not heard him. Mr. Bowers was a bashful man in the
presence of the other sex. He felt exceedingly embarrassed; if he could
have gone away without attracting her attention he would have done so.
Neither could he remain silent, a tacit spy of her meditation. He had
recourse to a polite but singularly artificial cough.
To his surprise, she gave a faint cry, turned quickly towards him, and
then shrank back and lapsed quite helpless against the tree. Her evident
distress overcame his bashfulness. He ran towards her.
“I'm sorry I frighted ye, ma'am, but I was afraid I might skeer ye more
if I lay low, and said nothin'.”
Even then, if she had been some fair young country girl, he would have
relapsed after this speech into his former bashfulness. But the face and
figure she turned towards him were neither young nor fair: a woman past
forty, with gray threads and splashes in her brushed-back hair, which
was turned over her ears in two curls like frayed strands of rope. Her
forehead was rather high than broad, her nose large but well-shaped,
and her eyes full but so singularly light in color as to seem almost
sightless. The short upper lip of her large mouth displayed her teeth
in an habitual smile, which was in turn so flatly contradicted by every
other line of her careworn face that it seemed gratuitously artificial.
Her figure was hidden by a shapeless garment that partook equally of the
shawl, cloak, and wrapper.
“I am very foolish,” she began, in a voice and accent that at once
asserted a cultivated woman, “but I so seldom meet anybody here that a
voice quite startled me. That, and the heat,” she went on, wiping her
face, into which the color was returning violently--“for I seldom go out
as early as this--I suppose affected me.”
Mr. Bowers had that innate Far-Western reverence for womanhood which
I fancy challenges the most polished politeness. He remained patient,
undemonstrative, self-effacing, and respectful before her, his angular
arm slightly but not obtrusively advanced, the offer of protection being
in the act rather than in any spoken word, and requiring no response.
“Like as not, ma'am,” he said, cheerfully looking everywhere but in her
burning face. “The sun IS pow'ful hot at this time o' day; I felt it
myself comin' yer, and, though the damp of this timber kinder sets it
back, it's likely to come out ag'in. Ye can't check it no more than the
sap in that choked limb thar”--he pointed ostentatiously where a fallen
pine had been caught in the bent and twisted arm of another, but which
still put out a few green tassels beyond the point of impact. “Do you
live far from here, ma'am?” he added.
“Only as far as the first turning below the hill.”
“I've got my buggy here, and I'm goin' that way, and I can jist set ye
down thar cool and comfortable. Ef,” he continued, in the same assuring
tone, without waiting for a reply, “ye'll jist take a good grip of
my arm thar,” curving his wrist and hand behind him like a shepherd's
crook, “I'll go first, and break away the brush for ye.”
She obeyed mechanically, and they fared on through the thick ferns in
this fashion for some moments, he looking ahead, occasionally dropping
a word of caution or encouragement, but never glancing at her face.
When they reached the buggy he lifted her into it carefully,--and
perpendicularly, it struck her afterwards, very much as if she had been
a transplanted sapling with bared and sensitive roots,--and then gravely
took his place beside her.
“Bein' in the timber trade myself, ma'am,” he said, gathering up the
reins, “I chanced to sight these woods, and took a look around. My name
is Bowers, of Mendocino; I reckon there ain't much that grows in the
way o' standin' timber on the Pacific Slope that I don't know and can't
locate, though I DO say it. I've got ez big a mill, and ez big a run in
my district, ez there is anywhere. Ef you're ever up my way, you ask for
Bowers--Jim Bowers--and that's ME.”
There is probably nothing more conducive to conversation between
strangers than a wholesome and early recognition of each other's
foibles. Mr. Bowers, believing his chance acquaintance a superior woman,
naively spoke of himself in a way that he hoped would reassure her
that she was not compromising herself in accepting his civility, and so
satisfy what must be her inevitable pride. On the other hand, the woman
regained her self-possession by this exhibition of Mr. Bowers's vanity,
and, revived by the refreshing breeze caused by the rapid motion of the
buggy along the road, thanked him graciously.
“I suppose there are many strangers at the Green Springs Hotel,” she
said, after a pause.
“I didn't get to see 'em, as I only put up my hoss there,” he replied.
“But I know the stage took some away this mornin': it seemed pretty well
loaded up when I passed it.”
The woman drew a deep sigh. The act struck Mr. Bowers as a possible
return of her former nervous weakness. Her attention must at once be
distracted at any cost--even conversation.
“Perhaps,” he began, with sudden and appalling lightness, “I'm a-talkin'
to Mrs. McFadden?”
“No,” said the woman, abstractedly.
“Then it must be Mrs. Delatour? There are only two township lots on that
crossroad.”
“My name IS Delatour,” she said, somewhat wearily.
Mr. Bowers was conversationally stranded. He was not at all anxious to
know her name, yet, knowing it now, it seemed to suggest that there was
nothing more to say. He would, of course, have preferred to ask her
if she had read the poetry about the Underbrush, and if she knew the
poetess, and what she thought of it; but the fact that she appeared
to be an “eddicated” woman made him sensitive of displaying technical
ignorance in his manner of talking about it. She might ask him if it was
“subjective” or “objective”--two words he had heard used at the Debating
Society at Mendocino on the question, “Is poetry morally beneficial?”
For a few moments he was silent. But presently she took the initiative
in conversation, at first slowly and abstractedly, and then, as if
appreciating his sympathetic reticence, or mayhap finding some relief
in monotonous expression, talked mechanically, deliberately, but
unostentatiously about herself. So colorless was her intonation that at
times it did not seem as if she was talking to him, but repeating some
conversation she had held with another.
She had lived there ever since she had been in California. Her husband
had bought the Spanish title to the property when they first married.
The property at his death was found to be greatly involved; she had been
obliged to part with much of it to support her children--four girls and
a boy. She had been compelled to withdraw the girls from the convent at
Santa Clara to help about the house; the boy was too young--she feared,
too shiftless--to do anything. The farm did not pay; the land was poor;
she knew nothing about farming; she had been brought up in New Orleans,
where her father had been a judge, and she didn't understand country
life. Of course she had been married too young--as all girls were.
Lately she had thought of selling off and moving to San Francisco, where
she would open a boarding-house or a school for young ladies. He could
advise her, perhaps, of some good opportunity. Her own girls were far
enough advanced to assist her in teaching; one particularly, Cynthia,
was quite clever, and spoke French and Spanish fluently.
As Mr. Bowers was familiar with many of these counts in the feminine
American indictment of life generally, he was not perhaps greatly moved.
But in the last sentence he thought he saw an opening to return to his
main object, and, looking up cautiously, said:--
“And mebbe write po'try now and then?” To his great discomfiture, the
only effect of this suggestion was to check his companion's speech for
some moments and apparently throw her back into her former abstraction.
Yet, after a long pause, as they were turning into the lane, she said,
as if continuing the subject:--
“I only hope that, whatever my daughters may do, they won't marry
young.”
The yawning breaches in the Delatour gates and fences presently came
in view. They were supposed to be reinforced by half a dozen dogs,
who, however, did their duty with what would seem to be the prevailing
inefficiency, retiring after a single perfunctory yelp to shameless
stretching, scratching, and slumber. Their places were taken on the
veranda by two negro servants, two girls respectively of eight and
eleven, and a boy of fourteen, who remained silently staring. As Mr.
Bowers had accepted the widow's polite invitation to enter, she was
compelled, albeit in an equally dazed and helpless way, to issue some
preliminary orders:--
“Now, Chloe--I mean aunt Dinah--do take Eunice--I mean Victorine and
Una--away, and--you know--tidy them; and you, Sarah--it's Sarah, isn't
it?--lay some refreshment in the parlor for this gentleman. And,
Bob, tell your sister Cynthia to come here with Eunice.” As Bob still
remained staring at Mr. Bowers, she added, in weary explanation, “Mr.
Bowers brought me over from the Summit woods in his buggy--it was so
hot. There--shake hands and thank him, and run away--do!”
They crossed a broad but scantily-furnished hall. Everywhere the same
look of hopeless incompleteness, temporary utility, and premature decay;
most of the furniture was mismatched and misplaced; many of the rooms
had changed their original functions or doubled them; a smell of cooking
came from the library, on whose shelves, mingled with books, were
dresses and household linen, and through the door of a room into which
Mrs. Delatour retired to remove her duster Mr. Bowers caught a glimpse
of a bed, and of a table covered with books and papers, at which a
tall, fair girl was writing. In a few moments Mrs. Delatour returned,
accompanied by this girl, and Eunice, her short-lipped sister. Bob, who
joined the party seated around Mr. Bowers and a table set with cake, a
decanter, and glasses, completed the group. Emboldened by the presence
of the tall Cynthia and his glimpse of her previous literary attitude,
Mr. Bowers resolved to make one more attempt.
“I suppose these yer young ladies sometimes go to the wood, too?” As his
eye rested on Cynthia, she replied:--
“Oh, yes.”
“I reckon on account of the purty shadows down in the brush, and the
soft light, eh? and all that?” he continued, with a playful manner but a
serious accession of color.
“Why, the woods belong to us. It's mar's property!” broke in Eunice with
a flash of teeth.
“Well, Lordy, I wanter know!” said Mr. Bowers, in some astonishment.
“Why, that's right in my line, too! I've been sightin' timber all along
here, and that's how I dropped in on yer mar.” Then, seeing a look of
eagerness light up the faces of Bob and Eunice, he was encouraged to
make the most of his opportunity. “Why, ma'am,” he went on, cheerfully,
“I reckon you're holdin' that wood at a pretty stiff figger, now.”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Delatour, simply.
Mr. Bowers delivered a wink at Bob and Eunice, who were still watching
him with anxiety. “Well, not on account of the actool timber, for the
best of it ain't sound,” he said, “but on account of its bein' famous!
Everybody that reads that pow'ful pretty poem about it in the 'Excelsior
Magazine' wants to see it. Why, it would pay the Green Springs
hotel-keeper to buy it up for his customers. But I s'pose you reckon to
keep it--along with the poetess--in your famerly?”
Although Mr. Bowers long considered this speech as the happiest and most
brilliant effort of his life, its immediate effect was not, perhaps,
all that could be desired. The widow turned upon him a restrained and
darkening face. Cynthia half rose with an appealing “Oh, mar!” and Bob
and Eunice, having apparently pinched each other to the last stage of
endurance, retired precipitately from the room in a prolonged giggle.
“I have not yet thought of disposing of the Summit woods, Mr. Bowers,”
said Mrs. Delatour, coldly, “but if I should do so, I will consult you.
You must excuse the children, who see so little company, they are quite
unmanageable when strangers are present. Cynthia, WILL you see if the
servants have looked after Mr. Bowers's horse? You know Bob is not to be
trusted.”
There was clearly nothing else for Mr. Bowers to do but to take his
leave, which he did respectfully, if not altogether hopefully. But when
he had reached the lane, his horse shied from the unwonted spectacle of
Bob, swinging his hat, and apparently awaiting him, from the fork of a
wayside sapling.
“Hol' up, mister. Look here!”
Mr. Bowers pulled up. Bob dropped into the road, and, after a backward
glance over his shoulder, said:--
“Drive 'longside the fence in the shadder.” As Mr. Bowers obeyed,
Bob approached the wheels of the buggy in a manner half shy, half
mysterious. “You wanter buy them Summit woods, mister?”
“Well, per'aps, sonny. Why?” smiled Mr. Bowers.
“Coz I'll tell ye suthin'. Don't you be fooled into allowin' that
Cynthia wrote that po'try. She didn't--no more'n Eunice nor me. Mar
kinder let ye think it, 'cos she don't want folks to think SHE did it.
But mar wrote that po'try herself; wrote it out o' them thar woods--all
by herself. Thar's a heap more po'try thar, you bet, and jist as good.
And she's the one that kin write it--you hear me? That's my mar, every
time! You buy that thar wood, and get mar to run it for po'try, and
you'll make your pile, sure! I ain't lyin'. You'd better look spry:
thar's another feller snoopin' 'round yere--only he barked up the wrong
tree, and thought it was Cynthia, jist as you did.”
“Another feller?” repeated the astonished Bowers.
“Yes; a rig'lar sport. He was orful keen on that po'try, too, you bet.
So you'd better hump yourself afore somebody else cuts in. Mar got a
hundred dollars for that pome, from that editor feller and his pardner.
I reckon that's the rig'lar price, eh?” he added, with a sudden
suspicious caution.
“I reckon so,” replied Mr. Bowers, blankly. “But--look here, Bob! Do you
mean to say it was your mother--your MOTHER, Bob, who wrote that poem?
Are you sure?”
“D'ye think I'm lyin'?” said Bob, scornfully. “Don't I know? Don't I
copy 'em out plain for her, so as folks won't know her handwrite? Go
'way! you're loony!” Then, possibly doubting if this latter expression
were strictly diplomatic with the business in hand, he added, in
half-reproach, half-apology, “Don't ye see I don't want ye to be fooled
into losin' yer chance o' buying up that Summit wood? It's the cold
truth I'm tellin' ye.”
Mr. Bowers no longer doubted it. Disappointed as he undoubtedly was at
first,--and even self-deceived,--he recognized in a flash the grim fact
that the boy had stated. He recalled the apparition of the sad-faced
woman in the wood--her distressed manner, that to his inexperienced
mind now took upon itself the agitated trembling of disturbed mystic
inspiration. A sense of sadness and remorse succeeded his first shock of
disappointment.
“Well, are ye going to buy the woods?” said Bob, eying him grimly. “Ye'd
better say.”
Mr. Bowers started. “I shouldn't wonder, Bob,” he said, with a smile,
gathering up his reins. “Anyhow, I'm comin' back to see your mother this
afternoon. And meantime, Bob, you keep the first chance for me.”
He drove away, leaving the youthful diplomatist standing with his bare
feet in the dust. For a minute or two the young gentleman amused himself
by a few light saltatory steps in the road. Then a smile of scornful
superiority, mingled perhaps with a sense of previous slights and
unappreciation, drew back his little upper lip, and brightened his
mottled cheek.
“I'd like ter know,” he said, darkly, “what this yer God-forsaken
famerly would do without ME!”
CHAPTER V
It is to be presumed that the editor and Mr. Hamlin mutually kept to
their tacit agreement to respect the impersonality of the poetess,
for during the next three months the subject was seldom alluded to
by either. Yet in that period White Violet had sent two other
contributions, and on each occasion Mr. Hamlin had insisted upon
increasing the honorarium to the amount of his former gift. In vain the
editor pointed out the danger of this form of munificence; Mr. Hamlin
retorted by saying that if he refused he would appeal to the proprietor,
who certainly would not object to taking the credit of this liberality.
“As to the risks,” concluded Jack, sententiously, “I'll take them; and
as far as you're concerned, you certainly get the worth of your money.”
Indeed, if popularity was an indiction, this had become suddenly true.
For the poetess's third contribution, without changing its strong
local color and individuality, had been an unexpected outburst of human
passion--a love-song, that touched those to whom the subtler meditative
graces of the poetess had been unknown. Many people had listened to this
impassioned but despairing cry from some remote and charmed solitude,
who had never read poetry before, who translated it into their own
limited vocabulary and more limited experience, and were inexpressibly
affected to find that they, too, understood it; it was caught up and
echoed by the feverish, adventurous, and unsatisfied life that filled
that day and time. Even the editor was surprised and frightened. Like
most cultivated men, he distrusted popularity: like all men who believe
in their own individual judgment, he doubted collective wisdom. Yet
now that his protegee had been accepted by others, he questioned that
judgment and became her critic. It struck him that her sudden outburst
was strained; it seemed to him that in this mere contortion of passion
the sibyl's robe had become rudely disarranged. He spoke to Hamlin, and
even approached the tabooed subject.
“Did you see anything that suggested this sort of business in--in--that
woman--I mean in--your pilgrimage, Jack?”
“No,” responded Jack, gravely. “But it's easy to see she's got hold
of some hay-footed fellow up there in the mountains with straws in his
hair, and is playing him for all he's worth. You won't get much more
poetry out of her, I reckon.”
Is was not long after this conversation that one afternoon, when the
editor was alone, Mr. James Bowers entered the editorial room with much
of the hesitation and irresolution of his previous visit. As the editor
had not only forgotten him, but even, dissociated him with the poetess,
Mr. Bowers was fain to meet his unresponsive eye and manner with some
explanation.
“Ye disremember my comin' here, Mr. Editor, to ask you the name o' the
lady who called herself 'White Violet,' and how you allowed you couldn't
give it, but would write and ask for it?”
Mr. Editor, leaning back in his chair, now remembered the occurrence,
but was distressed to add that the situation remained unchanged, and
that he had received no such permission.
“Never mind THAT, my lad,” said Mr. Bowers, gravely, waving his hand. “I
understand all that; but, ez I've known the lady ever since, and am now
visiting her at her house on the Summit, I reckon it don't make much
matter.”
It was quite characteristic of Mr. Bowers's smileless earnestness that
he made no ostentation of this dramatic retort, nor of the undisguised
stupefaction of the editor.
“Do you mean to say that you have met White Violet, the author of these
poems?” repeated the editor.
“Which her name is Delatour,--the widder Delatour,--ez she has herself
give me permission to tell you,” continued Mr. Bowers, with a certain
abstracted and automatic precision that dissipated any suggestion of
malice in the reversed situation.
“Delatour!--a widow!” repeated the editor.
“With five children,” continued Mr. Bowers. Then, with unalterable
gravity, he briefly gave an outline of her condition and the
circumstances of his acquaintance with her.
“But I reckoned YOU might have known suthin' o' this; though she never
let on you did,” he concluded, eying the editor with troubled curiosity.
The editor did not think it necessary to implicate Mr. Hamlin. He said,
briefly, “I? Oh, no!”
“Of course, YOU might not have seen her?” said Mr. Bowers, keeping the
same grave, troubled gaze on the editor.
“Of course not,” said the editor, somewhat impatient under the singular
scrutiny of Mr. Bowers; “and I'm very anxious to know how she looks.
Tell me, what is she like?”
“She is a fine, pow'ful, eddicated woman,” said Mr. Bowers, with slow
deliberation. “Yes, sir,--a pow'ful woman, havin' grand ideas of her
own, and holdin' to 'em.” He had withdrawn his eyes from the editor, and
apparently addressed the ceiling in confidence.
“But what does she look like, Mr. Bowers?” said the editor, smiling.
“Well, sir, she looks--LIKE--IT! Yes,”--with deliberate caution,--“I
should say, just like it.”
After a pause, apparently to allow the editor to materialize this
ravishing description, he said, gently, “Are you busy just now?”
“Not very. What can I do for you?”
“Well, not much for ME, I reckon,” he returned, with a deeper
respiration, that was his nearest approach to a sigh, “but suthin'
perhaps for yourself and--another. Are you married?”
“No,” said the editor, promptly.
“Nor engaged to any--young lady?”--with great politeness.
“No.”
“Well, mebbe you think it a queer thing for me to say,--mebbe you reckon
you KNOW it ez well ez anybody,--but it's my opinion that White Violet
is in love with you.”
“With me?” ejaculated the editor, in a hopeless astonishment that at
last gave way to an incredulous and irresistible laugh.
A slight touch of pain passed over Mr. Bowers's dejected face, but left
the deep outlines set with a rude dignity. “It's SO,” he said, slowly,
“though, as a young man and a gay feller, ye may think it's funny.”
“No, not funny, but a terrible blunder, Mr. Bowers, for I give you my
word I know nothing of the lady and have never set eyes upon her.”
“No, but she has on YOU. I can't say,” continued Mr. Bowers, with
sublime naivete, “that I'd ever recognize you from her description, but
a woman o' that kind don't see with her eyes like you and me, but with
all her senses to onct, and a heap more that ain't senses as we know
'em. The same eyes that seed down through the brush and ferns in the
Summit woods, the same ears that heerd the music of the wind trailin'
through the pines, don't see you with my eyes or hear you with my ears.
And when she paints you, it's nat'ril for a woman with that pow'ful mind
and grand idees to dip her brush into her heart's blood for warmth and
color. Yer smilin', young man. Well, go on and smile at me, my lad, but
not at her. For you don't know her. When you know her story as I do,
when you know she was made a wife afore she ever knew what it was to be
a young woman, when you know that the man she married never understood
the kind o' critter he was tied to no more than ef he'd been a steer
yoked to a Morgan colt, when ye know she had children growin' up around
her afore she had given over bein' a sort of child herself, when ye
know she worked and slaved for that man and those children about the
house--her heart, her soul, and all her pow'ful mind bein' all the time
in the woods along with the flickering leaves and the shadders,--when
ye mind she couldn't get the small ways o' the ranch because she had the
big ways o' Natur' that made it,--then you'll understand her.”
Impressed by the sincerity of his visitor's manner, touched by the
unexpected poetry of his appeal, and yet keenly alive to the absurdity
of an incomprehensible blunder somewhere committed, the editor gasped
almost hysterically,--
“But why should all this make her in love with ME?”
“Because ye are both gifted,” returned Mr. Bowers, with sad but
unconquerable conviction; “because ye're both, so to speak, in a line
o' idees and business that draws ye together,--to lean on each other and
trust each other ez pardners. Not that YE are ezakly her ekal,” he went
on, with a return to his previous exasperating naivete, “though I've
heerd promisin' things of ye, and ye're still young, but in matters
o' this kind there is allers one ez hez to be looked up to by
the other,--and gin'rally the wrong one. She looks up to you, Mr.
Editor,--it's part of her po'try,--ez she looks down inter the brush
and sees more than is plain to you and me. Not,” he continued, with a
courteously deprecating wave of the hand, “ez you hain't bin kind to
her--mebbe TOO kind. For thar's the purty letter you writ her, thar's
the perlite, easy, captivatin' way you had with her gals and
that boy--hold on!”--as the editor made a gesture of despairing
renunciation,--“I ain't sayin' you ain't right in keepin' it to
yourself,--and thar's the extry money you sent her every time. Stop! she
knows it was EXTRY, for she made a p'int o' gettin' me to find out the
market price o' po'try in papers and magazines, and she reckons you've
bin payin' her four hundred per cent. above them figgers--hold on! I
ain't sayin' it ain't free and liberal in you, and I'd have done the
same thing; yet SHE thinks”--
But the editor had risen hastily to his feet with flushing cheeks.
“One moment, Mr. Bowers,” he said, hurriedly. “This is the most dreadful
blunder of all. The gift is not mine. It was the spontaneous offering
of another who really admired our friend's work,--a gentleman who”--He
stopped suddenly.
The sound of a familiar voice, lightly humming, was borne along the
passage; the light tread of a familiar foot was approaching. The editor
turned quickly towards the open door,--so quickly that Mr. Bowers was
fain to turn also.
For a charming instant the figure of Jack Hamlin, handsome, careless,
and confident, was framed in the doorway. His dark eyes, with their
habitual scorn of his average fellow-man, swept superciliously over
Mr. Bowers, and rested for an instant with caressing familiarity on the
editor.
“Well, sonny, any news from the old girl at the Summit?”
“No-o,” hastily stammered the editor, with a half-hysterical laugh. “No,
Jack. Excuse me a moment.”
“All right; busy, I see. Hasta manana.”
The picture vanished, the frame was empty.
“You see,” continued the editor, turning to Mr. Bowers, “there has been
a mistake. I”--but he stopped suddenly at the ashen face of Mr. Bowers,
still fixed in the direction of the vanished figure.
“Are you ill?”
Mr. Bowers did not reply, but slowly withdrew his eyes, and turned them
heavily on the editor. Then, drawing a longer, deeper breath, he picked
up his soft felt hat, and, moulding it into shape in his hands as if
preparing to put it on, he moistened his dry, grayish lips, and said,
gently:--
“Friend o' yours?”
“Yes,” said the editor--“Jack Hamlin. Of course, you know him?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Bowers here put his hat on his head, and, after a pause, turned
round slowly once or twice, as if he had forgotten it, and was still
seeking it. Finally he succeeded in finding the editor's hand, and shook
it, albeit his own trembled slightly. Then he said:--
“I reckon you're right. There's bin a mistake. I see it now. Good-by.
If you're ever up my way, drop in and see me.” He then walked to the
doorway, passed out, and seemed to melt into the afternoon shadows of
the hall.
He never again entered the office of the “Excelsior Magazine,” neither
was any further contribution ever received from White Violet. To a
polite entreaty from the editor, addressed first to “White Violet”
and then to Mrs. Delatour, there was no response. The thought of Mr.
Hamlin's cynical prophecy disturbed him, but that gentleman, preoccupied
in filling some professional engagements in Sacramento, gave him no
chance to acquire further explanations as to the past or the future. The
youthful editor was at first in despair and filled with a vague remorse
of some unfulfilled duty. But, to his surprise, the readers of the
magazine seemed to survive their talented contributor, and the feverish
life that had been thrilled by her song, in two months had apparently
forgotten her. Nor was her voice lifted from any alien quarter; the
domestic and foreign press that had echoed her lays seemed to respond no
longer to her utterance.
It is possible that some readers of these pages may remember a previous
chronicle by the same historian wherein it was recorded that the
volatile spirit of Mr. Hamlin, slightly assisted by circumstances,
passed beyond these voices at the Ranch of the Blessed Fisherman, some
two years later. As the editor stood beside the body of his friend on
the morning of the funeral, he noticed among the flowers laid upon his
bier by loving hands a wreath of white violets. Touched and disturbed
by a memory long since forgotten, he was further embarrassed, as the
cortege dispersed in the Mission graveyard, by the apparition of the
tall figure of Mr. James Bowers from behind a monumental column. The
editor turned to him quickly.
“I am glad to see you here,” he said, awkwardly, and he knew not
why; then, after a pause, “I trust you can give me some news of Mrs.
Delatour. I wrote to her nearly two years ago, but had no response.”
“Thar's bin no Mrs. Delatour for two years,” said Mr. Bowers,
contemplatively stroking his beard; “and mebbe that's why. She's bin for
two years Mrs. Bowers.”
“I congratulate you,” said the editor; “but I hope there still remains
a White Violet, and that, for the sake of literature, she has not given
up”--
“Mrs. Bowers,” interrupted Mr. Bowers, with singular deliberation,
“found that makin' po'try and tendin' to the cares of a growin'-up
famerly was irritatin' to the narves. They didn't jibe, so to speak.
What Mrs. Bowers wanted--and what, po'try or no po'try, I've bin tryin'
to give her--was Rest! She's bin havin' it comfor'bly up at my ranch
at Mendocino, with her children and me. Yes, sir”--his eye wandered
accidentally to the new-made grave--“you'll excuse my sayin' it to a man
in your profession, but it's what most folks will find is a heap better
than readin' or writin' or actin' po'try--and that's Rest!”
THE CHATELAINE OF BURNT RIDGE
CHAPTER I
It had grown dark on Burnt Ridge. Seen from below, the whole serrated
crest that had glittered in the sunset as if its interstices were eaten
by consuming fires, now, closed up its ranks of blackened shafts and
became again harsh and sombre chevaux de frise against the sky. A faint
glow still lingered over the red valley road, as if it were its own
reflection, rather than any light from beyond the darkened ridge. Night
was already creeping up out of remote canyons and along the furrowed
flanks of the mountain, or settling on the nearer woods with the sound
of home-coming and innumerable wings. At a point where the road began to
encroach upon the mountain-side in its slow winding ascent the darkness
had become so real that a young girl cantering along the rising terrace
found difficulty in guiding her horse, with eyes still dazzled by the
sunset fires.
In spite of her precautions, the animal suddenly shied at some object
in the obscured roadway, and nearly unseated her. The accident disclosed
not only the fact that she was riding in a man's saddle, but also a foot
and ankle that her ordinary walking-dress was too short to hide. It was
evident that her equestrian exercise was extempore, and that at that
hour and on that road she had not expected to meet company. But she was
apparently a good horsewoman, for the mischance which might have thrown
a less practical or more timid rider seemed of little moment to her.
With a strong hand and determined gesture she wheeled her frightened
horse back into the track, and rode him directly at the object. But here
she herself slightly recoiled, for it was the body of a man lying in the
road.
As she leaned forward over her horse's shoulder, she could see by the
dim light that he was a miner, and that, though motionless, he was
breathing stertorously. Drunk, no doubt!--an accident of the locality
alarming only to her horse. But although she cantered impatiently
forward, she had not proceeded a hundred yards before she stopped
reflectively, and trotted back again. He had not moved. She could now
see that his head and shoulders were covered with broken clods of earth
and gravel, and smaller fragments lay at his side. A dozen feet above
him on the hillside there was a foot trail which ran parallel with the
bridle-road, and occasionally overhung it. It seemed possible that he
might have fallen from the trail and been stunned.
Dismounting, she succeeded in dragging him to a safer position by the
bank. The act discovered his face, which was young, and unknown to her.
Wiping it with the silk handkerchief which was loosely slung around his
neck after the fashion of his class, she gave a quick feminine glance
around her and then approached her own and rather handsome face near his
lips. There was no odor of alcohol in the thick and heavy respiration.
Mounting again, she rode forward at an accelerated pace, and in twenty
minutes had reached a higher tableland of the mountain, a cleared
opening in the forest that showed signs of careful cultivation, and
a large, rambling, yet picturesque-looking dwelling, whose unpainted
red-wood walls were hidden in roses and creepers. Pushing open a
swinging gate, she entered the inclosure as a brown-faced man, dressed
as a vaquero, came towards her as if to assist her to alight. But she
had already leaped to the ground and thrown him the reins.
“Miguel,” she said, with a mistress's quiet authority in her boyish
contralto voice, “put Glory in the covered wagon, and drive down the
road as far as the valley turning. There's a man lying near the right
bank, drunk, or sick, may be, or perhaps crippled by a fall. Bring him
up here, unless somebody has found him already, or you happen to know
who he is and where to take him.”
The vaquero raised his shoulders, half in disappointed expectation
of some other command. “And your brother, senora, he has not himself
arrived.”
A light shadow of impatience crossed her face. “No,” she said, bluntly.
“Come, be quick.”
She turned towards the house as the man moved away. Already a
gaunt-looking old man had appeared in the porch, and was awaiting her
with his hand shadowing his angry, suspicious eyes, and his lips moving
querulously.
“Of course, you've got to stand out there and give orders and 'tend
to your own business afore you think o' speaking to your own flesh and
blood,” he said aggrievedly. “That's all YOU care!”
“There was a sick man lying in the road, and I've sent Miguel to look
after him,” returned the girl, with a certain contemptuous resignation.
“Oh, yes!” struck in another voice, which seemed to belong to the female
of the first speaker's species, and to be its equal in age and temper,
“and I reckon you saw a jay bird on a tree, or a squirrel on the fence,
and either of 'em was more important to you than your own brother.”
“Steve didn't come by the stage, and didn't send any message,” continued
the young girl, with the same coldly resigned manner. “No one had any
news of him, and, as I told you before, I didn't expect any.”
“Why don't you say right out you didn't WANT any?” said the old man,
sneeringly. “Much you inquired! No; I orter hev gone myself, and I would
if I was master here, instead of me and your mother bein' the dust of
the yearth beneath your feet.”
The young girl entered the house, followed by the old man, passing an
old woman seated by the window, who seemed to be nursing her resentment
and a large Bible which she held clasped against her shawled bosom
at the same moment. Going to the wall, she hung up her large hat
and slightly shook the red dust from her skirts as she continued her
explanation, in the same deep voice, with a certain monotony of logic
and possibly of purpose and practice also.
“You and mother know as well as I do, father, that Stephen is no more to
be depended upon than the wind that blows. It's three years since he has
been promising to come, and even getting money to come, and yet he has
never showed his face, though he has been a dozen times within five
miles of this house. He doesn't come because he doesn't want to come. As
to YOUR going over to the stage-office, I went there myself at the last
moment to save you the mortification of asking questions of strangers
that they know have been a dozen times answered already.”
There was such a ring of absolute truthfulness, albeit worn by
repetition, in the young girl's deep honest voice that for one instant
her two more emotional relatives quailed before it; but only for a
moment.
“That's right!” shrilled the old woman. “Go on and abuse your own
brother. It's only the fear you have that he'll make his fortune yet and
shame you before the father and mother you despise.”
The young girl remained standing by the window, motionless and
apparently passive, as if receiving an accepted and usual punishment.
But here the elder woman gave way to sobs and some incoherent snuffling,
at which the younger went away. Whether she recognized in her mother's
tears the ordinary deliquescence of emotion, or whether, as a woman
herself, she knew that this mere feminine conventionality could not
possibly be directed at her, and that the actual conflict between them
had ceased, she passed slowly on to an inner hall, leaving the male
victim, her unfortunate father, to succumb, as he always did sooner or
later, to their influence. Crossing the hall, which was decorated with a
few elk horns, Indian trophies, and mountain pelts, she entered another
room, and closed the door behind her with a gesture of relief.
The room, which looked upon a porch, presented a singular combination of
masculine business occupations and feminine taste and adornment. A desk
covered with papers, a shelf displaying a ledger and account-books,
another containing works of reference, a table with a vase of flowers
and a lady's riding-whip upon it, a map of California flanked on either
side by an embroidered silken workbag and an oval mirror decked with
grasses, a calendar and interest-table hanging below two school-girl
crayons of classic heads with the legend, “Josephine Forsyth
fecit,”--were part of its incongruous accessories. The young girl
went to her desk, but presently moved and turned towards the window
thoughtfully. The last gleam had died from the steel-blue sky; a
few lights like star points began to prick out the lower valley. The
expression of monotonous restraint and endurance had not yet faded from
her face.
Yet she had been accustomed to scenes like the one she had just passed
though since her girlhood. Five years ago, Alexander Forsyth, her uncle,
had brought her to this spot--then a mere log cabin on the hillside--as
a refuge from the impoverished and shiftless home of his elder brother
Thomas and his ill-tempered wife. Here Alexander Forsyth, by reason of
his more dominant character and business capacity, had prospered until
he became a rich and influential ranch owner. Notwithstanding her
father's jealousy of Alexander's fortune, and the open rupture that
followed between the brothers, Josephine retained her position in the
heart and home of her uncle without espousing the cause of either; and
her father was too prudent not to recognize the near and prospective
advantages of such a mediator. Accustomed to her parents' extravagant
denunciations, and her uncle's more repressed but practical contempt of
them, the unfortunate girl early developed a cynical disbelief in the
virtues of kinship in the abstract, and a philosophical resignation to
its effects upon her personally. Believing that her father and uncle
fairly represented the fraternal principle, she was quite prepared for
the early defection and distrust of her vagabond and dissipated brother
Stephen, and accepted it calmly. True to an odd standard of justice,
which she had erected from the crumbling ruins of her own domestic
life, she was tolerant of everything but human perfection. This quality,
however fatal to her higher growth, had given her a peculiar capacity
for business which endeared her to her uncle. Familiar with the
strong passions and prejudices of men, she had none of those feminine
meannesses, a wholesome distrust of which had kept her uncle a bachelor.
It was not strange, therefore, that when he died two years ago it was
found that he had left her his entire property, real and personal,
limited only by a single condition. She was to undertake the vocation
of a “sole trader,” and carry on the business under the name of “J.
Forsyth.” If she married, the estate and property was to be held
distinct from her husband's, inalienable under the “Married Woman's
Property Act,” and subject during her life only to her own control and
personal responsibilities as a trader.
The intense disgust and discomfiture of her parents, who had expected to
more actively participate in their brother's fortune, may be imagined.
But it was not equal to their fury when Josephine, instead of providing
for them a separate maintenance out of her abundance, simply offered to
transfer them and her brother to her own house on a domestic but not
a business equality. There being no alternative but their former
precarious shiftless life in their “played-out” claim in the valley,
they wisely consented, reserving the sacred right of daily protest and
objurgation. In the economy of Burnt Ridge Ranch they alone took it upon
themselves to represent the shattered domestic altar and its outraged
Lares and Penates. And so conscientiously did they perform their task
as even occasionally to impede the business visitor to the ranch, and to
cause some of the more practical neighbors seriously to doubt the young
girl's commercial wisdom. But she was firm. Whether she thought her
parents a necessity of respectable domesticity, or whether she regarded
their presence in the light of a penitential atonement for some previous
disregard of them, no one knew. Public opinion inclined to the latter.
The black line of ridge faded out with her abstraction, and she
turned from the window and lit the lamp on her desk. The yellow light
illuminated her face and figure. In their womanly graces there was no
trace of what some people believed to be a masculine character, except
a singularly frank look of critical inquiry and patient attention in her
dark eyes. Her long brown hair was somewhat rigidly twisted into a knot
on the top of her head, as if more for security than ornament. Brown
was also the prevailing tint of her eyebrows, thickly-set eyelashes, and
eyes, and was even suggested in the slight sallowness of her complexion.
But her lips were well-cut and fresh-colored and her hands and feet
small and finely formed. She would have passed for a pretty girl, had
she not suggested something more.
She sat down, and began to examine a pile of papers before her with that
concentration and attention to detail which was characteristic of her
eyes, pausing at times with prettily knit brows, and her penholder
between her lips, in the semblance of a pout that was pleasant enough to
see. Suddenly the rattle of hoofs and wheels struck her with the sense
of something forgotten, and she put down her work quickly and stood up
listening. The sound of rough voices and her father's querulous accents
was broken upon by a cultivated and more familiar utterance: “All right;
I'll speak to her at once. Wait there,” and the door opened to the
well-known physician of Burnt Ridge, Dr. Duchesne.
“Look here,” he said, with an abruptness that was only saved from being
brusque by a softer intonation and a reassuring smile, “I met Miguel
helping an accident into your buggy. Your orders, eh?”
“Oh, yes,” said Josephine, quietly. “A man I saw on the road.”
“Well, it's a bad case, and wants prompt attention. And as your house is
the nearest I came with him here.”
“Certainly,” she said gravely. “Take him to the second room
beyond--Steve's room--it's ready,” she explained to two dusky shadows in
the hall behind the doctor.
“And look here,” said the doctor, partly closing the door behind him
and regarding her with critical eyes, “you always said you'd like to see
some of my queer cases. Well, this is one--a serious one, too; in fact,
it's just touch and go with him. There's a piece of the bone pressing
on the brain no bigger than that, but as much as if all Burnt Ridge was
atop of him! I'm going to lift it. I want somebody here to stand by,
some one who can lend a hand with a sponge, eh?--some one who isn't
going to faint or scream, or even shake a hair's-breadth, eh?”
The color rose quickly to the girl's cheek, and her eyes kindled. “I'll
come,” she said thoughtfully. “Who is he?”
The doctor stared slightly at the unessential query. “Don't know,--one
of the river miners, I reckon. It's an urgent case. I'll go and get
everything ready. You'd better,” he added, with an ominous glance at
her gray frock, “put something over your dress.” The suggestion made her
grave, but did not alter her color.
A moment later she entered the room. It was the one that had always been
set apart for her brother: the very bed on which the unconscious man
lay had been arranged that morning with her own hands. Something of
this passed through her mind as she saw that the doctor had wheeled it
beneath the strong light in the centre of the room, stripped its
outer coverings with professional thoughtfulness, and rearranged the
mattresses. But it did not seem like the same room. There was a pungent
odor in the air from some freshly-opened phial; an almost feminine
neatness and luxury in an open morocco case like a jewel box on the
table, shining with spotless steel. At the head of the bed one of her
own servants, the powerful mill foreman, was assisting with the
mingled curiosity and blase experience of one accustomed to smashed and
lacerated digits. At first she did not look at the central unconscious
figure on the bed, whose sufferings seemed to her to have been
vicariously transferred to the concerned, eager, and drawn faces that
looked down upon its immunity. Then she femininely recoiled before the
bared white neck and shoulders displayed above the quilt, until, forcing
herself to look upon the face half-concealed by bandages and the head
from which the dark tangles of hair had been ruthlessly sheared, she
began to share the doctor's unconcern in his personality. What mattered
who or what HE was? It was--a case!
The operation began. With the same earnest intelligence that she had
previously shown, she quickly and noiselessly obeyed the doctor's
whispered orders, and even half anticipated them. She was conscious of a
singular curiosity that, far from being mean or ignoble, seemed to lift
her not only above the ordinary weaknesses of her own sex, but made her
superior to the men around her. Almost before she knew it, the operation
was over, and she regarded with equal curiosity the ostentatious
solicitude with which the doctor seemed to be wiping his fateful
instrument that bore an odd resemblance to a silver-handled centre-bit.
The stertorous breathing below the bandages had given way to a fainter
but more natural respiration. There was a moment of suspense. The
doctor's hand left the pulse and lifted the closed eyelid of the
sufferer. A slight movement passed over the figure. The sluggish face
had cleared; life seemed to struggle back into it before even the dull
eyes participated in the glow. Dr. Duchesne with a sudden gesture waved
aside his companions, but not before Josephine had bent her head eagerly
forward.
“He is coming to,” she said.
At the sound of that deep clear voice--the first to break the hush of
the room--the dull eyes leaped up, and the head turned in its direction.
The lips moved and uttered a single rapid sentence. The girl recoiled.
“You're all right now,” said the doctor, cheerfully, intent only upon
the form before him.
The lips moved again, but this time feebly and vacantly; the eyes were
staring vaguely around.
“What's matter? What's all about?” said the man, thickly.
“You've had a fall. Think a moment. Where do you live?”
Again the lips moved, but this time only to emit a confused, incoherent
murmur. Dr. Duchesne looked grave, but recovered himself quickly.
“That will do. Leave him alone now,” he said brusquely to the others.
But Josephine lingered.
“He spoke well enough just now,” she said eagerly. “Did you hear what he
said?”
“Not exactly,” said the doctor, abstractedly, gazing at the man.
“He said, 'You'll have to kill me first,'” said Josephine, slowly.
“Humph;” said the doctor, passing his hand backwards and forwards before
the man's eyes to note any change in the staring pupils.
“Yes,” continued Josephine, gravely. “I suppose,” she added, cautiously,
“he was thinking of the operation--of what you had just done to him?”
“What I had done to him? Oh, yes!”
CHAPTER II
Before noon the next day it was known throughout Burnt Ridge Valley that
Dr. Duchesne had performed a difficult operation upon an unknown man,
who had been picked up unconscious from a fall, and carried to Burnt
Ridge Ranch. But although the unfortunate man's life was saved by the
operation, he had only momentarily recovered consciousness--relapsing
into a semi-idiotic state, which effectively stopped the discovery
of any clue to his friends or his identity. As it was evidently an
ACCIDENT, which, in that rude community--and even in some more civilized
ones--conveyed a vague impression of some contributary incapacity on the
part of the victim, or some Providential interference of a retributive
character, Burnt Ridge gave itself little trouble about it. It is
unnecessary to say that Mr. and Mrs. Forsyth gave themselves and
Josephine much more. They had a theory and a grievance. Satisfied from
the first that the alleged victim was a drunken tramp, who submitted to
have a hole bored in his head in order to foist himself upon the ranch,
they were loud in their protests, even hinting at a conspiracy between
Josephine and the stranger to supplant her brother in the property, as
he had already in the spare bedroom. “Didn't all that yer happen THE
VERY NIGHT she pretended to go for Stephen--eh?” said Mrs. Forsyth.
“Tell me that! And didn't she have it all arranged with the buggy
to bring him here, as that sneaking doctor let out--eh? Looks mighty
curious, don't it?” she muttered darkly to the old man. But although
that gentleman, even from his own selfish view, would scarcely have
submitted to a surgical operation and later idiocy as the price of
insuring comfortable dependency, he had no doubt others were base enough
to do it; and lent a willing ear to his wife's suspicions.
Josephine's personal knowledge of the stranger went little further.
Doctor Duchesne had confessed to her his professional disappointment at
the incomplete results of the operation. He had saved the man's life,
but as yet not his reason. There was still hope, however, for the
diagnosis revealed nothing that might prejudice a favorable progress. It
was a most interesting case. He would watch it carefully, and as soon
as the patient could be removed would take him to the county hospital,
where, under his own eyes, the poor fellow would have the benefit of
the latest science and the highest specialists. Physically, he was doing
remarkably well; indeed, he must have been a fine young chap, free from
blood taint or vicious complication, whose flesh had healed like an
infant's. It should be recorded that it was at this juncture that Mrs.
Forsyth first learnt that a SILVER PLATE let into the artful stranger's
skull was an adjunct of the healing process! Convinced that this
infamous extravagance was part and parcel of the conspiracy, and was
only the beginning of other assimilations of the Forsyths' metallic
substance; that the plate was probably polished and burnished with
a fulsome inscription to the doctor's skill, and would pass into the
possession and adornment of a perfect stranger, her rage knew no bounds.
He or his friends ought to be made to pay for it or work it out! In vain
it was declared that a few dollars were all that was found in the man's
pocket, and that no memoranda gave any indication of his name, friends,
or history beyond the suggestion that he came from a distance. This was
clearly a part of the conspiracy! Even Josephine's practical good
sense was obliged to take note of this singular absence of all record
regarding him, and the apparent obliteration of everything that might be
responsible for his ultimate fate.
Homeless, friendless, helpless, and even nameless, the unfortunate man
of twenty-five was thus left to the tender mercies of the mistress of
Burnt Ridge Ranch, as if he had been a new-born foundling laid at her
door. But this mere claim of weakness was not all; it was supplemented
by a singular personal appeal to Josephine's nature. From the time that
he turned his head towards her voice on that fateful night, his eyes had
always followed her around the room with a wondering, yearning, canine
half-intelligence. Without being able to convince herself that he
understood her better than his regular attendant furnished by the
doctor, she could not fail to see that he obeyed her implicitly, and
that whenever any difficulty arose between him and his nurse she was
always appealed to. Her pride in this proof of her practical sovereignty
WAS flattered; and when Doctor Duchesne finally admitted that although
the patient was now physically able to be removed to the hospital, yet
he would lose in the change that very strong factor which Josephine had
become in his mental recovery, the young girl as frankly suggested that
he should stay as long as there was any hope of restoring his reason.
Doctor Duchesne was delighted. With all his enthusiasm for science, he
had a professional distrust of some of its disciples, and perhaps was
not sorry to keep this most interesting case in his own hands. To
him her suggestion was only a womanly kindness, tempered with womanly
curiosity. But the astonishment and stupefaction of her parents at this
evident corroboration of suspicions they had as yet only half believed
was tinged with superstitious dread. Had she fallen in love with this
helpless stranger? or, more awful to contemplate, was he really no
stranger, but a surreptitious lover thus strategically brought under her
roof? For once they refrained from open criticism. The very magnitude of
their suspicions left them dumb.
It was thus that the virgin Chatelaine of Burnt Ridge Ranch was left to
gaze untrammeled upon her pale and handsome guest, whose silken,
bearded lips and sad, childlike eyes might have suggested a more Exalted
Sufferer in their absence of any suggestion of a grosser material
manhood. But even this imaginative appeal did not enter into her
feelings. She felt for her good-looking, helpless patient a profound
and honest pity. I do not know whether she had ever heard that “pity was
akin to love.” She would probably have resented that utterly untenable
and atrocious commonplace. There was no suggestion, real or illusive,
of any previous masterful quality in the man which might have made his
present dependent condition picturesque by contrast. He had come to her
handicapped by an unromantic accident and a practical want of energy and
intellect. He would have to touch her interest anew if, indeed, he
would ever succeed in dispelling the old impression. His beauty, in a
community of picturesquely handsome men, had little weight with her,
except to accent the contrast with their fuller manhood.
Her life had given her no illusions in regard to the other sex. She had
found them, however, more congenial and safer companions than women, and
more accessible to her own sense of justice and honor. In return, they
had respected and admired rather than loved her, in spite of her womanly
graces. If she had at times contemplated eventual marriage, it was only
as a possible practical partnership in her business; but as she lived in
a country where men thought it dishonorable and a proof of incompetency
to rise by their wives' superior fortune, she had been free from that
kind of mercenary persecution, even from men who might have worshiped
her in hopeless and silent honor.
For this reason, there was nothing in the situation that suggested
a single compromising speculation in the minds of the neighbors, or
disturbed her own tranquillity. There seemed to be nothing in the future
except a possible relief to her curiosity. Some day the unfortunate
man's reason would be restored, and he would tell his simple history.
Perhaps he might explain what was in his mind when he turned to her
the first evening with that singular sentence which had often recurred
strangely to her, she knew not why. It did not strike her until later
that it was because it had been the solitary indication of an energy and
capacity that seemed unlike him. Nevertheless, after that explanation,
she would have been quite willing to have shaken hands with him and
parted.
And yet--for there was an unexpressed remainder in her thought--she
was never entirely free or uninfluenced in his presence. The flickering
vacancy of his sad eyes sometimes became fixed with a resolute
immobility under the gentle questioning with which she had sought to
draw out his faculties, that both piqued and exasperated her. He could
say “Yes” and “No,” as she thought intelligently, but he could not utter
a coherent sentence nor write a word, except like a child in imitation
of his copy. She taught him to repeat after her the names of the
inanimate objects in the room, then the names of the doctor, his
attendant, the servant, and, finally, her own under her Christian
prenomen, with frontier familiarity; but when she pointed to himself he
waited for HER to name him! In vain she tried him with all the masculine
names she knew; his was not one of them, or he would not or could not
speak it. For at times she rejected the professional dictum of the
doctor that the faculty of memory was wholly paralyzed or held in
abeyance, even to the half-automatic recollection of his letters, yet
she inconsistently began to teach him the alphabet with the same method,
and--in her sublime unconsciousness of his manhood--with the
same discipline as if he were a very child. When he had recovered
sufficiently to leave his room, she would lead him to the porch before
her window, and make him contented and happy by allowing him to watch
her at work at her desk, occasionally answering his wondering eyes with
a word, or stirring his faculties with a question. I grieve to say
that her parents had taken advantage of this publicity and his supposed
helpless condition to show their disgust of his assumption, to the
extreme of making faces at him--an act which he resented with such a
furious glare that they retreated hurriedly to their own veranda. A
fresh though somewhat inconsistent grievance was added to their previous
indictment of him: “If we ain't found dead in our bed with our throats
cut by that woman's crazy husband” (they had settled by this time that
there had been a clandestine marriage), “we'll be lucky,” groaned Mrs.
Forsyth.
Meantime, the mountain summer waxed to its fullness of fire and
fruition. There were days when the crowded forest seemed choked and
impeded with its own foliage, and pungent and stifling with its own
rank maturity; when the long hillside ranks of wild oats, thickset and
impassable, filled the air with the heated dust of germination. In this
quickening irritation of life it would be strange if the unfortunate
man's torpid intellect was not helped in its awakening, and he was
allowed to ramble at will over the ranch; but with the instinct of a
domestic animal he always returned to the house, and sat in the porch,
where Josephine usually found him awaiting her when she herself returned
from a visit to the mill. Coming thence one day she espied him on the
mountain-side leaning against a projecting ledge in an attitude so rapt
and immovable that she felt compelled to approach him. He appeared to
be dumbly absorbed in the prospect, which might have intoxicated a saner
mind.
Half veiled by the heat that rose quiveringly from the fiery canyon
below, the domain of Burnt Ridge stretched away before him, until,
lifted in successive terraces hearsed and plumed with pines, it was at
last lost in the ghostly snow-peaks. But the practical Josephine seized
the opportunity to try once more to awaken the slumbering memory of her
pupil. Following his gaze with signs and questions, she sought to draw
from him some indication of familiar recollection of certain points of
the map thus unrolled behind him. But in vain. She even pointed out the
fateful shadow of the overhanging ledge on the road where she had picked
him up--there was no response in his abstracted eyes. She bit her lips;
she was becoming irritated again. Then it occurred to her that, instead
of appealing to his hopeless memory, she had better trust to some
unreflective automatic instinct independent of it, and she put the
question a little forward: “When you leave us, where will you go from
here?” He stirred slightly, and turned towards her. She repeated her
query slowly and patiently, with signs and gestures recognized between
them. A faint glow of intelligence struggled into his eyes: he lifted
his arm slowly, and pointed.
“Ah! those white peaks--the Sierras?” she asked, eagerly. No reply.
“Beyond them?”
“Yes.”
“The States?” No reply. “Further still?”
He remained so patiently quiet and still pointing that she leaned
forward, and, following with her eyes the direction of his hand, saw
that he was pointing to the sky!
Then a great quiet fell upon them. The whole mountain-side seemed to her
to be hushed, as if to allow her to grasp and realize for the first time
the pathos of the ruined life at her side, which IT had known so long,
but which she had never felt till now. The tears came to her eyes; in
her swift revulsion of feeling she caught the thin uplifted hand between
her own. It seemed to her that he was about to raise them to his lips,
but she withdrew them hastily, and moved away. She had a strange fear
that if he had kissed them, it might seem as if some dumb animal had
touched them--or--IT MIGHT NOT. The next day she felt a consciousness
of this in his presence, and a wish that he was well-cured and away. She
determined to consult Dr. Duchesne on the subject when he next called.
But the doctor, secure in the welfare of his patient, had not visited
him lately, and she found herself presently absorbed in the business of
the ranch, which at this season was particularly trying. There had also
been a quarrel between Dick Shipley, her mill foreman, and Miguel, her
ablest and most trusted vaquero, and in her strict sense of impartial
justice she was obliged to side on the merits of the case with Shipley
against her oldest retainer. This troubled her, as she knew that with
the Mexican nature, fidelity and loyalty were not unmixed with quick and
unreasoning jealousy. For this reason she was somewhat watchful of the
two men when work was over, and there was a chance of their being
thrown together. Once or twice she had remained up late to meet Miguel
returning from the posada at San Ramon, filled with aguardiente and a
recollection of his wrongs, and to see him safely bestowed before she
herself retired. It was on one of those occasions, however, that she
learned that Dick Shipley, hearing that Miguel had disparaged him freely
at the posada, had broken the discipline of the ranch, and absented
himself the same night that Miguel “had leave,” with a view of facing
his antagonist on his own ground. To prevent this, the fearless girl at
once secretly set out alone to overtake and bring back the delinquent.
For two or three hours the house was thus left to the sole occupancy of
Mr. and Mrs. Forsyth and the invalid--a fact only dimly suspected by the
latter, who had become vaguely conscious of Josephine's anxiety, and had
noticed the absence of light and movement in her room. For this reason,
therefore, having risen again and mechanically taken his seat in the
porch to await her return, he was startled by hearing HER voice in the
shadow of the lower porch, accompanied by a hurried tapping against the
door of the old couple. The half-reasoning man arose, and would have
moved towards it, but suddenly he stopped rigidly, with white and parted
lips and vacantly distended eyeballs.
Meantime the voice and muffled tapping had brought the tremulous fingers
of old Forsyth to the door-latch. He opened the door partly; a slight
figure that had been lurking in the shadow of the porch pushed rapidly
through the opening. There was a faint outcry quickly hushed, and the
door closed again. The rays of a single candle showed the two old people
hysterically clasping in their arms the figure that had entered--a
slight but vicious-looking young fellow of five-and-twenty.
“There, d--n it!” he said impatiently, in a voice whose rich depth was
like Josephine's, but whose querulous action was that of the two old
people before him, “let me go, and quit that, I didn't come here to be
strangled! I want some money--money, you hear! Devilish quick, too, for
I've got to be off again before daylight. So look sharp, will you?”
“But, Stevy dear, when you didn't come that time three months ago, but
wrote from Los Angeles, you said you'd made a strike at last, and”--
“What are you talking about?” he interrupted violently. “That was just
my lyin' to keep you from worryin' me. Three months ago--three months
ago! Why, you must have been crazy to have swallowed it; I hadn't a
cent.”
“Nor have we,” said the old woman, shrilly. “That hellish sister of
yours still keeps us like beggars. Our only hope was you, our own boy.
And now you only come to--to go again.”
“But SHE has money; SHE'S doing well, and SHE shall give it to me,”
he went on, angrily. “She can't bully me with her business airs and
morality. Who else has got a right to share, if it is not her own
brother?”
Alas for the fatuousness of human malevolence! Had the unhappy couple
related only the simple facts they knew about the new guest of Burnt
Ridge Ranch, and the manner of his introduction, they might have spared
what followed.
But the old woman broke into a vindictive cry: “Who else, Steve--who
else? Why, the slut has brought a MAN here--a sneaking, deceitful,
underhanded, crazy lover!”
“Oh, has she?” said the young man, fiercely, yet secretly pleased at
this promising evidence of his sister's human weakness. “Where is she?
I'll go to her. She's in her room, I suppose,” and before they could
restrain him, he had thrown off their impeding embraces and darted
across the hall.
The two old people stared doubtfully at each other. For even this
powerful ally, whose strength, however, they were by no means sure
of, might succumb before the determined Josephine! Prudence demanded a
middle course. “Ain't they brother and sister?” said the old man, with
an air of virtuous toleration. “Let 'em fight it out.”
The young man impatiently entered the room he remembered to have been
his sister's. By the light of the moon that streamed upon the window
he could see she was not there. He passed hurriedly to the door of her
bedroom; it was open; the room was empty, the bed unturned. She was not
in the house--she had gone to the mill. Ah! What was that they had said?
An infamous thought passed through the scoundrel's mind. Then, in what
he half believed was an access of virtuous fury, he began by the dim
light to rummage in the drawers of the desk for such loose coin or
valuables as, in the perfect security of the ranch, were often left
unguarded. Suddenly he heard a heavy footstep on the threshold, and
turned.
An awful vision--a recollection, so unexpected, so ghostlike in that
weird light that he thought he was losing his senses--stood before him.
It moved forwards with staring eyeballs and white and open lips from
which a horrible inarticulate sound issued that was the speech of no
living man! With a single desperate, almost superhuman effort Stephen
Forsyth bounded aside, leaped from the window, and ran like a madman
from the house. Then the apparition trembled, collapsed, and sank in an
undistinguishable heap to the ground.
When Josephine Forsyth returned an hour later with her mill foreman, she
was startled to find her helpless patient in a fit on the floor of her
room. With the assistance of her now converted and penitent employee,
she had the unfortunate man conveyed to his room--but not until she had
thoughtfully rearranged the disorder of her desk and closed the open
drawers without attracting Dick Shipley's attention. In the morning,
hearing that the patient was still in the semiconscious exhaustion of
his late attack, but without seeing him, she sent for Dr. Duchesne. The
doctor arrived while she was absent at the mill, where, after a careful
examination of his patient, he sought her with some little excitement.
“Well?” she said, with eager gravity.
“Well, it looks as if your wish would be gratified. Your friend has
had an epileptic fit, but the physical shock has started his mental
machinery again. He has recovered his faculties; his memory is
returning: he thinks and speaks coherently; he is as sane as you and I.”
“And”--said Josephine, questioning the doctor's knitted eyebrows.
“I am not yet sure whether it was the result of some shock he doesn't
remember; or an irritation of the brain, which would indicate that the
operation had not been successful and that there was still some physical
pressure or obstruction there--in which case he would be subject to
these attacks all his life.”
“Do you think his reason came before the fit or after?” asked the girl,
anxiously.
“I couldn't say. Had anything happened?”
“I was away, and found him on the floor on my return,” she answered,
half uneasily. After a pause she said, “Then he has told you his name
and all about himself?”
“Yes, it's nothing at all! He was a stranger just arrived from the
States, going to the mines--the old story; had no near relations, of
course; wasn't missed or asked after; remembers walking along the ridge
and falling over; name, John Baxter, of Maine.” He paused, and relaxing
into a slight smile, added, “I haven't spoiled your romance, have I?”
“No,” she said, with an answering smile. Then as the doctor walked
briskly away she slightly knitted her pretty brows, hung her head,
patted the ground with her little foot beyond the hem of her gown, and
said to herself, “The man was lying to him.”
CHAPTER III
On her return to the house, Josephine apparently contented herself with
receiving the bulletin of the stranger's condition from the servant, for
she did not enter his room. She had obtained no theory of last night's
incident from her parents, who, beyond a querulous agitation that was
quickened by the news of his return to reason, refrained from even that
insidious comment which she half feared would follow. When another
day passed without her seeing him, she nevertheless was conscious of a
little embarrassment when his attendant brought her the request that
she would give him a moment's speech in the porch, whither he had been
removed.
She found him physically weaker; indeed, so much so that she was fain,
even in her embarrassment, to assist him back to the bench from which
he had ceremoniously risen. But she was so struck with the change in
his face and manner, a change so virile and masterful, in spite of its
gentle sadness of manner, that she recoiled with a slight timidity as if
he had been a stranger, although she was also conscious that he seemed
to be more at his ease than she was. He began in a low exhausted voice,
but before he had finished his first sentence, she felt herself in the
presence of a superior.
“My thanks come very late, Miss Forsyth,” he said, with a faint smile,
“but no one knows better than yourself the reason why, or can better
understand that they mean that the burden you have so generously taken
on yourself is about to be lifted. I know all, Miss Forsyth. Since
yesterday I have learned how much I owe you, even my life I believe,
though I am afraid I must tell you in the same breath that THAT is of
little worth to any one. You have kindly helped and interested yourself
in a poor stranger who turns out to be a nobody, without friends,
without romance, and without even mystery. You found me lying in the
road down yonder, after a stupid accident that might have happened to
any other careless tramp, and which scarcely gave me a claim to a bed
in the county hospital, much less under this kindly roof. It was not my
fault, as you know, that all this did not come out sooner; but while it
doesn't lessen your generosity, it doesn't lessen my debt, and although
I cannot hope to ever repay you, I can at least keep the score from
running on. Pardon my speaking so bluntly, but my excuse for speaking at
all was to say 'Good-by' and 'God bless you.' Dr. Duchesne has promised
to give me a lift on my way in his buggy when he goes.”
There was a slight touch of consciousness in his voice in spite of its
sadness, which struck the young girl as a weak and even ungentlemanly
note in his otherwise self-abnegating and undemonstrative attitude. If
he was a common tramp, he wouldn't talk in that way, and if he wasn't,
why did he lie? Her practical good sense here asserted itself.
“But you are far from strong yet; in fact, the doctor says you might
have a relapse at any moment, and you have--that is, you SEEM to have no
money,” she said gravely.
“That's true,” he said, quickly. “I remember I was quite played out when
I entered the settlement, and I think I had parted from even some little
trifles I carried with me. I am afraid I was a poor find to those who
picked me up, and you ought to have taken warning. But the doctor has
offered to lend me enough to take me to San Francisco, if only to give a
fair trial to the machine he has set once more a-going.”
“Then you have friends in San Francisco?” said the young girl quickly.
“Those who know you? Why not write to them first, and tell them you are
here?”
“I don't think your postmaster here would be preoccupied with letters
for John Baxter, if I did,” he said, quietly. “But here is the doctor
waiting. Good-by.”
He stood looking at her in a peculiar, yet half-resigned way, and held
out his hand. For a moment she hesitated. Had he been less independent
and strong, she would have refused to let him go--have offered him
some slight employment at the ranch; for oddly enough, in spite of the
suspicion that he was concealing something, she felt that she would have
trusted him, and he would have been a help to her. But he was not only
determined, but SHE was all the time conscious that he was a totally
different man from the one she had taken care of, and merely ordinary
prudence demanded that she should know something more of him first. She
gave him her hand constrainedly; he pressed it warmly.
Dr. Duchesne drove up, helped him into the buggy, smiled a good-natured
but half-perfunctory assurance that he would look after “her patient,”
and drove away.
The whole thing was over, but so unexpectedly, so suddenly, so
unromantically, so unsatisfactorily, that, although her common sense
told her that it was perfectly natural, proper, business-like, and
reasonable, and, above all, final and complete, she did not know whether
to laugh or be angry. Yet this was her parting from the man who had but
a few days ago moved her to tears with a single hopeless gesture.
Well, this would teach her what to expect. Well, what had she expected?
Nothing!
Yet for the rest of the day she was unreasonably irritable, and, if the
conjointure be not paradoxical, severely practical, and inhumanly
just. Falling foul of some presumption of Miguel's, based upon his
prescriptive rights through long service on the estate, with the
recollection of her severity towards his antagonist in her mind, she
rated that trusted retainer with such pitiless equity and unfeminine
logic that his hot Latin blood chilled in his veins, and he stood livid
on the road. Then, informing Dick Shipley with equally relentless calm
that she might feel it necessary to change ALL her foremen unless
they could agree in harmony, she sought the dignified seclusion of
her castle. But her respected parents, whose triumphant relief at the
stranger's departure had emboldened them to await her return in their
porch with bended bows of invective and lifted javelins of aggression,
recoiled before the resistless helm of this cold-browed Minerva, who
galloped contemptuously past them.
Nevertheless, she sat late that night at her desk. The cold moon looked
down upon her window, and lit up the empty porch where her silent guest
had mutely watched her. For a moment she regretted that he had recovered
his reason, excusing herself on the practical ground that he would never
have known his dependence, and he would have been better cared for
by her. She felt restless and uneasy. This slight divergence from the
practical groove in which her life had been set had disturbed her in
many other things, and given her the first views of the narrowness of
it.
Suddenly she heard a step in the porch. The lateness of the hour,
perhaps some other reason, seemed to startle her, and she half rose.
The next moment the figure of Miguel appeared at the doorway, and with
a quick, hurried look around him, and at the open window, he approached
her. He was evidently under great excitement, his hollow shaven
cheek looked like a waxen effigy in the mission church; his yellow,
tobacco-stained eye glittered like phosphorescent amber, his lank
gray hair was damp and perspiring; but more striking than this was the
evident restraint he had put upon himself, pressing his broad-brimmed
sombrero with both of his trembling yellow hands against his breast. The
young girl cast a hurried glance at the open window and at the gun which
stood in the corner, and then confronted him with clear and steady eyes,
but a paler cheek.
Ah, he began in Spanish, which he himself had taught her as a child,
it was a strange thing, his coming there to-night; but, then, mother of
God! it was a strange, a terrible thing that she had done to him--old
Miguel, her uncle's servant: he that had known her as a muchacha; he
that had lived all his life at the ranch--ay, and whose fathers before
him had lived there all THEIR lives and driven the cattle over the very
spot where she now stood, before the thieving Americans came here! But
he would be calm; yes, the senora should find him calm, even as she
was when she told him to go. He would not speak. No, he--Miguel--would
contain himself; yes, he HAD mastered himself, but could he restrain
others? Ah, yes, OTHERS--that was it. Could he keep Manuel and Pepe and
Dominguez from talking to the milkman--that leaking sieve, that gabbling
brute of a Shipley, for whose sake she had cast off her old servant that
very day?
She looked at him with cold astonishment, but without fear. Was he drunk
with aguardiente, or had his jealousy turned his brain? He continued
gasping, but still pressing his hat against his breast.
Ah, he saw it all! Yes, it was to-day, the day he left. Yes, she had
thought it safe to cast Miguel off now--now that HE was gone!
Without in the least understanding him, the color had leaped to her
cheek, and the consciousness of it made her furious.
“How dare you?” she said, passionately. “What has that stranger to do
with my affairs or your insolence?”
He stopped and gazed at her with a certain admiring loyalty. “Ah! so,”
he said, with a deep breath, “the senora is the niece of her uncle. She
does well not to fear HIM--a dog,”--with a slight shrug,--“who is more
than repaid by the senora's condescension. HE dare not speak!”
“Who dare not speak? Are you mad?” She stopped with a sudden terrible
instinct of apprehension. “Miguel,” she said in her deepest voice,
“answer me, I command you! Do you know anything of this man?”
It was Miguel's turn to recoil from his mistress. “Ah, my God! is it
possible the senora has not suspect?”
“Suspect!” said Josephine, haughtily, albeit her proud heart was beating
quickly. “I SUSPECT nothing. I command you to tell me what you KNOW.”
Miguel turned with a rapid gesture and closed the door. Then, drawing
her away from the window, he said in a hurried whisper,--
“I know that that man has not the name of Baxter! I know that he has
the name of Randolph, a young gambler, who have won a large sum at
Sacramento, and, fearing to be robbed by those he won of, have walk
to himself through the road in disguise of a miner. I know that your
brother Esteban have decoyed him here, and have fallen on him.”
“Stop!” said the young girl, her eyes, which had been fixed with the
agony of conviction, suddenly flashing with the energy of despair. “And
you call yourself the servant of my uncle, and dare say this of his
nephew?”
“Yes, senora,” broke out the old man, passionately. “It is because I am
the servant of your uncle that I, and I ALONE, dare say it to you! It
is because I perjured my soul, and have perjured my soul to deny it
elsewhere, that I now dare to say it! It is because I, your servant,
knew it from one of my countrymen, who was of the gang,--because I,
Miguel, knew that your brother was not far away that night, and because
I, whom you would dismiss, have picked up this pocket-book of Randolph's
and your brother's ring which he have dropped, and I have found beneath
the body of the man you sent me to fetch.”
He drew a packet from his bosom, and tossed it on the desk before her.
“And why have you not told me this before?” said Josephine,
passionately.
Miguel shrugged his shoulders.
“What good? Possibly this dog Randolph would die. Possibly he would
live--as a lunatic. Possibly would happen what has happened! The senora
is beautiful. The American has eyes. If the Dona Josephine's beauty
shall finish what the silly Don Esteban's arm have begun--what matter?”
“Stop!” cried Josephine, pressing her hands across her shuddering eyes.
Then, uncovering her white and set face, she said rapidly, “Saddle my
horse and your own at once. Then take your choice! Come with me and
repeat all that you have said in the presence of that man, or leave this
ranch forever. For if I live I shall go to him tonight, and tell the
whole story.”
The old man cast a single glance at his mistress, shrugged his
shoulders, and, without a word, left the room. But in ten minutes they
were on their way to the county town.
Day was breaking over the distant Burnt Ridge--a faint, ghostly level,
like a funeral pall, in the dim horizon--as they drew up before the
gaunt, white-painted pile of the hospital building. Josephine uttered
a cry. Dr. Duchesne's buggy was before the door. On its very threshold
they met the doctor, dark and irritated. “Then you heard the news?” he
said, quickly.
Josephine turned her white face to the doctor's. “What news?” she asked,
in a voice that seemed strangely deep and resonant.
“The poor fellow had another attack last night, and died of exhaustion
about an hour ago. I was too late to save him.”
“Did he say anything? Was he conscious?” asked the girl, hoarsely.
“No; incoherent! Now I think of it, he harped on the same string as he
did the night of the operation. What was it he said? you remember.”
“'You'll have to kill me first,'” repeated Josephine, in a choking
voice.
“Yes; something about his dying before he'd tell. Well, he came back to
it before he went off--they often do. You seem a little hoarse with your
morning ride. You should take care of that voice of yours. By the way,
it's a good deal like your brother's.”
*****
The Chatelaine of Burnt Ridge never married.
THROUGH THE SANTA CLARA WHEAT
CHAPTER I
It was an enormous wheat-field in the Santa Clara valley, stretching to
the horizon line unbroken. The meridian sun shone upon it without glint
or shadow; but at times, when a stronger gust of the trade winds passed
over it, there was a quick slanting impression of the whole surface that
was, however, as unlike a billow as itself was unlike a sea. Even when
a lighter zephyr played down its long level, the agitation was
superficial, and seemed only to momentarily lift a veil of greenish
mist that hung above its immovable depths. Occasional puffs of dust
alternately rose and fell along an imaginary line across the field,
as if a current of air were passing through it, but were otherwise
inexplicable.
Suddenly a faint shout, apparently somewhere in the vicinity of the
line, brought out a perfectly clear response, followed by the audible
murmur of voices, which it was impossible to localize. Yet the whole
field was so devoid of any suggestion of human life or motion that
it seemed rather as if the vast expanse itself had become suddenly
articulate and intelligible.
“Wot say?”
“Wheel off.”
“Whare?”
“In the road.”
One of the voices here indicated itself in the direction of the line of
dust, and said, “Comin',” and a man stepped out from the wheat into a
broad and dusty avenue.
With his presence three things became apparent.
First, that the puffs of dust indicated the existence of the invisible
avenue through the unlimited and unfenced field of grain; secondly, that
the stalks of wheat on either side of it were so tall as to actually
hide a passing vehicle; and thirdly, that a vehicle had just passed, had
lost a wheel, and been dragged partly into the grain by its frightened
horse, which a dusty man was trying to restrain and pacify.
The horse, given up to equine hysterics, and evidently convinced that
the ordinary buggy behind him had been changed into some dangerous and
appalling creation, still plunged and kicked violently to rid himself
of it. The man who had stepped out of the depths of the wheat quickly
crossed the road, unhitched the traces, drew back the vehicle, and,
glancing at the traveler's dusty and disordered clothes, said, with curt
sympathy:--
“Spilt, too; but not hurt, eh?”
“No, neither of us. I went over with the buggy when the wheel cramped,
but SHE jumped clear.”
He made a gesture indicating the presence of another. The man turned
quickly. There was a second figure, a young girl standing beside the
grain from which he had emerged, embracing a few stalks of wheat with
one arm and a hand in which she still held her parasol, while she
grasped her gathered skirts with the other, and trying to find a secure
foothold for her two neat narrow slippers on a crumbling cake of adobe
above the fathomless dust of the roadway. Her face, although annoyed
and discontented, was pretty, and her light dress and slim figure were
suggestive of a certain superior condition.
The man's manner at once softened with Western courtesy. He swung
his broad-brimmed hat from his head, and bent his body with the
ceremoniousness of the country ball-room. “I reckon the lady had better
come up to the shanty out o' the dust and sun till we kin help you get
these things fixed,” he said to the driver. “I'll send round by the road
for your hoss, and have one of mine fetch up your wagon.”
“Is it far?” asked the girl, slightly acknowledging his salutation,
without waiting for her companion to reply.
“Only a step this way,” he answered, motioning to the field of wheat
beside her.
“What in THERE? I never could go in there,” she said, decidedly.
“It's a heap shorter than by the road, and not so dusty. I'll go with
you, and pilot you.”
The young girl cast a vexed look at her companion as the probable cause
of all this trouble, and shook her head. But at the same moment one
little foot slipped from the adobe into the dust again. She instantly
clambered back with a little feminine shriek, and ejaculated: “Well,
of all things!” and then, fixing her blue annoyed eyes on the stranger,
asked impatiently, “Why couldn't I go there by the road 'n the wagon? I
could manage to hold on and keep in.”
“Because I reckon you'd find it too pow'ful hot waitin' here till we got
round to ye.”
There was no doubt it was very hot; the radiation from the baking
roadway beating up under her parasol, and pricking her cheekbones and
eyeballs like needles. She gave a fastidious little shudder, furled her
parasol, gathered her skirts still tighter, faced about, and said, “Go
on, then.” The man slipped backwards into the ranks of stalks, parting
them with one hand, and holding out the other as if to lead her. But
she evaded the invitation by holding her tightly-drawn skirt with both
hands, and bending her head forward as if she had not noticed it. The
next moment the road, and even the whole outer world, disappeared behind
them, and they seemed floating in a choking green translucent mist.
But the effect was only momentary; a few steps further she found that
she could walk with little difficulty between the ranks of stalks, which
were regularly spaced, and the resemblance now changed to that of a long
pillared conservatory of greenish glass, that touched all objects with
its pervading hue. She also found that the close air above her head
was continually freshened by the interchange of currents of lower
temperature from below,--as if the whole vast field had a circulation of
its own,--and that the adobe beneath her feet was gratefully cool to
her tread. There was no dust, as he had said; what had at first half
suffocated her seemed to be some stimulating aroma of creation that
filled the narrow green aisles, and now imparted a strange vigor and
excitement to her as she walked along. Meantime her guide was not
conversationally idle. Now, no doubt, she had never seen anything like
this before? It was ordinary wheat, only it was grown on adobe soil--the
richest in the valley. These stalks, she could see herself, were ten and
twelve feet high. That was the trouble, they all ran too much to stalk,
though the grain yield was “suthen' pow'ful.” She could tell that to
her friends, for he reckoned she was the only young lady that had ever
walked under such a growth. Perhaps she was new to Californy? He thought
so from the start. Well, this was Californy, and this was not the least
of the ways it could “lay over” every other country on God's yearth.
Many folks thought it was the gold and the climate, but she could see
for herself what it could do with wheat. He wondered if her brother had
ever told, her of it? No, the stranger wasn't her brother. Nor cousin,
nor company? No; only the hired driver from a San Jose hotel, who was
takin' her over to Major Randolph's. Yes, he knew the old major; the
ranch was a pretty place, nigh unto three miles further on. Now that he
knew the driver was no relation of hers he didn't mind telling her that
the buggy was a “rather old consarn,” and the driver didn't know his
business. Yes, it might be fixed up so as to take her over to the
major's; there was one of their own men--a young fellow--who could do
anything that COULD be done with wood and iron,--a reg'lar genius!--and
HE'D tackle it. It might take an hour, but she'd find it quite cool
waiting in the shanty. It was a rough place, for they only camped out
there during the season to look after the crop, and lived at their own
homes the rest of the time. Was she going to stay long at the major's?
He noticed she had not brought her trunk with her. Had she known the
major's wife long? Perhaps she thought of settling in the neighborhood?
All this naive, good-humored questioning--so often cruelly misunderstood
as mere vulgar curiosity, but as often the courteous instinct of simple
unaffected people to entertain the stranger by inviting him to talk of
what concerns himself rather than their own selves--was nevertheless,
I fear, met only by monosyllables from the young lady or an impatient
question in return. She scarcely raised her eyes to the broad
jean-shirted back that preceded her through the grain until the
man abruptly ceased talking, and his manner, without losing its
half-paternal courtesy, became graver. She was beginning to be conscious
of her incivility, and was trying to think of something to say, when
he exclaimed with a slight air of relief, “Here we are!” and the shanty
suddenly appeared before them.
It certainly was very rough--a mere shell of unpainted boards that
scarcely rose above the level of the surrounding grain, and a few yards
distant was invisible. Its slightly sloping roof, already warped and
shrunken into long fissures that permitted glimpses of the steel-blue
sky above, was evidently intended only as a shelter from the cloudless
sun in those two months of rainless days and dewless nights when it was
inhabited. Through the open doors and windows she could see a row of
“bunks,” or rude sleeping berths against the walls, furnished with
coarse mattresses and blankets. As the young girl halted, the man
with an instinct of delicacy hurried forward, entered the shanty, and
dragging a rude bench to the doorway, placed it so that she could sit
beneath the shade of the roof, yet with her back to these domestic
revelations. Two or three men, who had been apparently lounging there,
rose quietly, and unobtrusively withdrew. Her guide brought her a tin
cup of deliciously cool water, exchanged a few hurried words with his
companions, and then disappeared with them, leaving her alone.
Her first sense of relief from their company was, I fear, stronger than
any other feeling. After a hurried glance around the deserted apartment,
she arose, shook out her dress and mantle, and then going into the
darkest corner supported herself with one hand against the wall while
with the other she drew off, one by one, her slippers from her slim,
striped-stockinged feet, shook and blew out the dust that had penetrated
within, and put them on again. Then, perceiving a triangular fragment
of looking-glass nailed against the wall, she settled the strings of her
bonnet by the aid of its reflection, patted the fringe of brown hair on
her forehead with her separated five fingers as if playing an imaginary
tune on her brow, and came back with maidenly abstraction to the
doorway.
Everything was quiet, and her seclusion seemed unbroken. A smile played
for an instant in the soft shadows of her eyes and mouth as she recalled
the abrupt withdrawal of the men. Then her mouth straightened and her
brows slightly bent. It was certainly very unmannerly in them to go off
in that way. “Good heavens! couldn't they have stayed around without
talking? Surely it didn't require four men to go and bring up that
wagon!” She picked up her parasol from the bench with an impatient
little jerk. Then she held out her ungloved hand into the hot sunshine
beyond the door with the gesture she would have used had it been
raining, and withdrew it as quickly--her hand quite scorched in
the burning rays. Nevertheless, after another impatient pause she
desperately put up her parasol and stepped from the shanty.
Presently she was conscious of a faint sound of hammering not far away.
Perhaps there was another shed, but hidden, like everything else, in
this monotonous, ridiculous grain. Some stalks, however, were trodden
down and broken around the shanty; she could move more easily and see
where she was going. To her delight, a few steps further brought her
into a current of the trade-wind and a cooler atmosphere. And a short
distance beyond them, certainly, was the shed from which the hammering
proceeded. She approached it boldly.
It was simply a roof upheld by rude uprights and crossbeams, and open
to the breeze that swept through it. At one end was a small blacksmith's
forge, some machinery, and what appeared to be part of a small
steam-engine. Midway of the shed was a closet or cupboard fastened with
a large padlock. Occupying its whole length on the other side was a
work-bench, and at the further end stood the workman she had heard.
He was apparently only a year or two older than herself, and clad in
blue jean overalls, blackened and smeared with oil and coal-dust. Even
his youthful face, which he turned towards her, had a black smudge
running across it and almost obliterating a small auburn moustache. The
look of surprise that he gave her, however, quickly passed; he remained
patiently and in a half-preoccupied way, holding his hammer in his
hand, as she advanced. This was evidently the young fellow who could “do
anything that could be done with wood and iron.”
She was very sorry to disturb him, but could he tell her how long it
would be before the wagon could be brought up and mended? He could not
say that until he himself saw what was to be done; if it was only a
matter of the wheel he could fix it up in a few moments; if, as he had
been told, it was a case of twisted or bent axle, it would take longer,
but it would be here very soon. Ah, then, would he let her wait here, as
she was very anxious to know at once, and it was much cooler than in the
shed? Certainly; he would go over and bring her a bench. But here she
begged he wouldn't trouble himself, she could sit anywhere comfortably.
The lower end of the work-bench was covered with clean and odorous
shavings; she lightly brushed them aside and, with a youthful movement,
swung herself to a seat upon it, supporting herself on one hand as
she leaned towards him. She could thus see that his eyes were of a
light-yellowish brown, like clarified honey, with a singular look of
clear concentration in them, which, however, was the same whether turned
upon his work, the surrounding grain, or upon her. This, and his sublime
unconsciousness of the smudge across his face and his blackened hands,
made her wonder if the man who could do everything with wood and iron
was above doing anything with water. She had half a mind to tell him of
it, particularly as she noticed also that his throat below the line
of sunburn disclosed by his open collar was quite white, and his grimy
hands well made. She was wondering whether he would be affronted if she
said in her politest way, “I beg your pardon, but do you know you
have quite accidentally got something on your face,” and offer her
handkerchief, which, of course, he would decline, when her eye fell on
the steam-engine.
“How odd! Do you use that on the farm?”
“No,”--he smiled here, the smudge accenting it and setting off his white
teeth in a Christy Minstrel fashion that exasperated her--no, although
it COULD be used, and had been. But it was his first effort, made two
years ago, when he was younger and more inexperienced. It was a rather
rough thing, she could see--but he had to make it at odd times with
what iron he could pick up or pay for, and at different forges where he
worked.
She begged his pardon--where--
WHERE HE WORKED.
Ah, then he was the machinist or engineer here?
No, he worked here just like the others, only he was allowed to put up a
forge while the grain was green, and have his bench in consideration of
the odd jobs he could do in the way of mending tools, etc. There was
a heap of mending and welding to do--she had no idea how quickly
agricultural machines got out of order! He had done much of his work on
the steam-engine on moonlit nights. Yes; she had no idea how perfectly
clear and light it was here in the valley on such nights; although of
course the shadows were very dark, and when he dropped a screw or a nut
it was difficult to find. He had worked there because it saved time
and because it didn't cost anything, and he had nobody to look on or
interfere with him. No, it was not lonely; the coyotes and wild cats
sometimes came very near, but were always more surprised and frightened
than he was; and once a horseman who had strayed off the distant road
yonder mistook him for an animal and shot at him twice.
He told all this with such freedom from embarrassment and with such
apparent unconsciousness of the blue eyes that were following him, and
the light, graceful figure,--which was so near his own that in some
of his gestures his grimy hands almost touched its delicate
garments,--that, accustomed as she was to a certain masculine aberration
in her presence, she was greatly amused by his naive acceptance of her
as an equal. Suddenly, looking frankly in her face, he said:
“I'll show you a secret, if you care to see it.”
Nothing would please her more.
He glanced hurriedly around, took a key from his pocket, and unlocked
the padlock that secured the closet she had noticed. Then, reaching
within, with infinite care he brought out a small mechanical model.
“There's an invention of my own. A reaper and thresher combined. I'm
going to have it patented and have a big one made from this model. This
will work, as you see.”
He then explained to her with great precision how as it moved over the
field the double operation was performed by the same motive power. That
it would be a saving of a certain amount of labor and time which she
could not remember. She did not understand a word of his explanations;
she saw only a clean and pretty but complicated toy that under the
manipulation of his grimy fingers rattled a number of frail-like staves
and worked a number of wheels and drums, yet there was no indication of
her ignorance in her sparkling eyes and smiling, breathless attitude.
Perhaps she was interested in his own absorption; the revelation of
his preoccupation with this model struck her as if he had made her
a confidante of some boyish passion for one of her own sex, and she
regarded him with the same sympathizing superiority.
“You will make a fortune out of it,” she said pleasantly.
Well, he might make enough to be able to go on with some other
inventions he had in his mind. They cost money and time, no matter how
careful one was.
This was another interesting revelation to the young girl. He not only
did not seem to care for the profit his devotion brought him, but even
his one beloved ideal might be displaced by another. So like a man,
after all!
Her reflections were broken upon by the sound of voices. The young man
carefully replaced the model in its closet with a parting glance as if
he was closing a shrine, and said, “There comes the wagon.” The young
girl turned to face the men who were dragging it from the road, with
the half-complacent air of having been victorious over their late rude
abandonment, but they did not seem to notice it or to be surprised
at her companion, who quickly stepped forward and examined the broken
vehicle with workmanlike deliberation.
“I hope you will be able to do something with it,” she said sweetly,
appealing directly to him. “I should thank you SO MUCH.”
He did not reply. Presently he looked up to the man who had brought her
to the shanty, and said, “The axle's strained, but it's safe for five or
six miles more of this road. I'll put the wheel on easily.” He paused,
and without glancing at her, continued, “You might send her on by the
cart.”
“Pray don't trouble yourselves,” interrupted the young girl, with a pink
uprising in her cheeks; “I shall be quite satisfied with the buggy as
it stands. Send her on in the cart, indeed! Really, they were a rude
set--ALL of them.”
Without taking the slightest notice of her remark, the man replied
gravely to the young mechanic, “Yes, but we'll be wanting the cart
before it can get back from taking her.”
“Her” again. “I assure you the buggy will serve perfectly well--if
this--gentleman--will only be kind enough to put on the wheel again,”
she returned hotly.
The young mechanic at once set to work. The young girl walked apart
silently until the wheel was restored to its axle. But to her surprise a
different horse was led forward to be harnessed.
“We thought your horse wasn't safe in case of another accident,” said
the first man, with the same smileless consideration. “This one wouldn't
cut up if he was harnessed to an earthquake or a worse driver than
you've got.”
It occurred to her instantly that the more obvious remedy of sending
another driver had been already discussed and rejected by them. Yet,
when her own driver appeared a moment afterwards, she ascended to her
seat with some dignity and a slight increase of color.
“I am very much obliged to you all,” she said, without glancing at the
young inventor.
“Don't mention it, miss.”
“Good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon.” They all took off their hats with the same formal
gravity as the horse moved forward, but turned back to their work again
before she was out of the field.
CHAPTER II
The ranch of Major Randolph lay on a rich falda of the Coast Range, and
overlooked the great wheat plains that the young girl had just left.
The house of wood and adobe, buried to its first story in rose-trees
and passion vines, was large and commodious. Yet it contained only the
major, his wife, her son and daughter, and the few occasional visitors
from San Francisco whom he entertained, and she tolerated.
For the major's household was not entirely harmonious. While a young
infantry subaltern at a Gulf station, he had been attracted by the
piquant foreign accent and dramatic gestures of a French Creole widow,
and--believing them, in the first flush of his youthful passion more
than an offset to the encumbrance of her two children who, with the
memory of various marital infidelities were all her late husband had
left her--had proposed, been accepted, and promptly married to her.
Before he obtained his captaincy, she had partly lost her accent, and
those dramatic gestures, which had accented the passion of their brief
courtship, began to intensify domestic altercation and the bursts
of idle jealousy to which she was subject. Whether she was revenging
herself on her second husband for the faults of her first is not known,
but it was certain that she brought an unhallowed knowledge of the
weaknesses, cheap cynicism, and vanity of a foreign predecessor, to sit
in judgment upon the simple-minded and chivalrous American soldier who
had succeeded him, and who was, in fact, the most loyal of husbands. The
natural result of her skepticism was an espionage and criticism of the
wives of the major's brother officers that compelled a frequent change
of quarters. When to this was finally added a racial divergence and
antipathy, the public disparagement of the customs and education of her
female colleagues, and the sudden insistence of a foreign and French
dominance in her household beyond any ordinary Creole justification,
Randolph, presumably to avoid later international complications,
resigned while he was as yet a major. Luckily his latest banishment to
an extreme Western outpost had placed him in California during the flood
of a speculation epoch. He purchased a valuable Spanish grant to three
leagues of land for little over a three months' pay. Following that
yearning which compels retired ship-captains and rovers of all degrees
to buy a farm in their old days, the major, professionally and socially
inured to border strife, sought surcease and Arcadian repose in
ranching.
It was here that Mrs. Randolph, late relict of the late Scipion
L'Hommadieu, devoted herself to bringing up her children after the
extremest of French methods, and in resurrecting a “de” from her own
family to give a distinct and aristocratic character to their name. The
“de Fontanges l'Hommadieu” were, however, only known to their neighbors,
after the Western fashion, by their stepfather's name,--when they were
known at all--which was seldom. For the boy was unpleasantly conceited
as a precocious worldling, and the girl as unpleasantly complacent in
her role of ingenue. The household was completely dominated by Mrs.
Randolph. A punctilious Catholic, she attended all the functions of the
adjacent mission, and the shadow of a black soutane at twilight gliding
through the wild oat-fields behind the ranch had often been mistaken for
a coyote. The peace-loving major did not object to a piety which, while
it left his own conscience free, imparted a respectable religious air to
his household, and kept him from the equally distasteful approaches of
the Puritanism of his neighbors, and was blissfully unconscious that he
was strengthening the antagonistic foreign element in his family with an
alien church.
Meantime, as the repaired buggy was slowly making its way towards his
house, Major Randolph entered his wife's boudoir with a letter which the
San Francisco post had just brought him. A look of embarrassment on his
good-humored face strengthened the hard lines of hers; she felt some
momentary weakness of her natural enemy, and prepared to give battle.
“I'm afraid here's something of a muddle, Josephine,” he began with a
deprecating smile. “Mallory, who was coming down here with his daughter,
you know”--
“This is the first intimation I have had that anything has been settled
upon,” interrupted the lady, with appalling deliberation.
“However, my dear, you know I told you last week that he thought of
bringing her here while he went South on business. You know, being a
widower, he has no one to leave her with.”
“And I suppose it is the American fashion to intrust one's daughters to
any old boon companions?”
“Mallory is an old friend,” interrupted the major, impatiently. “He
knows I'm married, and although he has never seen YOU, he is quite
willing to leave his daughter here.”
“Thank you!”
“Come, you know what I mean. The man naturally believes that my wife
will be a proper chaperone for his daughter. But that is not the present
question. He intended to call here; I expected to take you over to San
Jose to see her and all that, you know; but the fact of it is--that
is--it seems from this letter that--he's been called away sooner than he
expected, and that--well--hang it! the girl is actually on her way here
now.”
“Alone?”
“I suppose so. You know one thinks nothing of that here.”
“Or any other propriety, for that matter.”
“For heaven's sake, Josephine, don't be ridiculous! Of course it's
stupid her coming in this way, and Mallory ought to have brought
her--but she's coming, and we must receive her. By Jove! Here she is
now!” he added, starting up after a hurried glance through the window.
“But what kind of a d----d turn-out is that, anyhow?”
It certainly was an odd-looking conveyance that had entered the gates,
and was now slowly coming up the drive towards the house. A large
draught horse harnessed to a dust-covered buggy, whose strained
fore-axle, bent by the last mile of heavy road, had slanted the tops
of the fore-wheels towards each other at an alarming angle. The light,
graceful dress and elegant parasol of the young girl, who occupied half
of its single seat, looked ludicrously pronounced by the side of the
slouching figure and grimy duster of the driver, who occupied the other
half.
Mrs. Randolph gave a gritty laugh. “I thought you said she was alone. Is
that an escort she has picked up, American fashion, on the road?”
“That's her hired driver, no doubt. Hang it! she can't drive here by
herself,” retorted the major, impatiently, hurrying to the door and down
the staircase. But he was instantly followed by his wife. She had no
idea of permitting a possible understanding to be exchanged in their
first greeting. The late M. l'Hommadieu had been able to impart a whole
plan of intrigue in a single word and glance.
Happily, Rose Mallory, already in the hall, in a few words detailed the
accident that had befallen her, to the honest sympathy of the major and
the coldly-polite concern of Mrs. Randolph, who, in deliberately chosen
sentences, managed to convey to the young girl the conviction that
accidents of any kind to young ladies were to be regarded as only
a shade removed from indiscretions. Rose was impressed, and even
flattered, by the fastidiousness of this foreign-appearing woman, and
after the fashion of youthful natures, accorded to her the respect due
to recognized authority. When to this authority, which was evident, she
added a depreciation of the major, I fear that some common instinct
of feminine tyranny responded in Rose's breast, and that on the very
threshold of the honest soldier's home she tacitly agreed with the wife
to look down upon him. Mrs. Randolph departed to inform her son and
daughter of their guest's arrival. As a matter of fact, however, they
had already observed her approach to the house through the slits of
their drawn window-blinds, and those even narrower prejudices and
limited comprehensions which their education had fostered. The girl,
Adele, had only grasped the fact that Rose had come to their house in
fine clothes, alone with a man, in a broken-down vehicle, and was moved
to easy mirth and righteous wonder. The young man, Emile, had agreed
with her, with the mental reservation that the guest was pretty, and
must eventually fall in love with him. They both, however, welcomed her
with a trained politeness and a superficial attention that, while the
indifference of her own countrymen in the wheat-field was still fresh in
her recollection, struck her with grateful contrast; the major's quiet
and unobtrusive kindliness naturally made less impression, or was
accepted as a matter of course.
“Well,” said the major, cheerfully but tentatively, to his wife when
they were alone again, “she seems a nice girl, after all; and a good
deal of pluck and character, by Jove! to push on in that broken buggy
rather than linger or come in a farm cart, eh?”
“She was alone in that wheat-field,” said Mrs. Randolph, with grim
deliberation, “for half an hour; she confesses it herself--TALKING WITH
A YOUNG MAN!”
“Yes, but the others had gone for the buggy. And, in the name of Heaven,
what would you have her do--hide herself in the grain?” said the major,
desperately. “Besides,” he added, with a recklessness he afterwards
regretted, “that mechanical chap they've got there is really intelligent
and worth talking to.”
“I have no doubt SHE thought so,” said Mrs. Randolph, with a mirthless
smile. “In fact, I have observed that the American freedom generally
means doing what you WANT to do. Indeed, I wonder she didn't bring him
with her! Only I beg, major, that you will not again, in the presence
of my daughter,--and I may even say, of my son,--talk lightly of the
solitary meetings of young ladies with mechanics, even though their
faces were smutty, and their clothes covered with oil.”
The major here muttered something about there being less danger in a
young lady listening to the intelligence of a coarsely-dressed laborer
than to the compliments of a rose-scented fop, but Mrs. Randolph walked
out of the room before he finished the evident platitude.
That night Rose Mallory retired to her room in a state of
sell-satisfaction that she even felt was to a certain extent a virtue.
She was delighted with her reception and with her hostess and family.
It was strange her father had not spoken more of MRS. Randolph, who was
clearly the superior of his old friend. What fine manners they all had,
so different from other people she had known! There was quite an Old
World civilization about them; really, it was like going abroad! She
would make the most of her opportunity and profit by her visit. She
would begin by improving her French; they spoke it perfectly, and with
such a pure accent. She would correct certain errors she was conscious
of in her own manners, and copy Mrs. Randolph as much as possible.
Certainly, there was a great deal to be said of Mrs. Randolph's way
of looking at things. Now she thought of it calmly, there WAS too much
informality and freedom in American ways! There was not enough respect
due to position and circumstances. Take those men in the wheat-field,
for example. Yet here she found it difficult to formulate an indictment
against them for “freedom.” She would like to go there some day with the
Randolphs and let them see what company manners were! She was thoroughly
convinced now that her father had done wrong in sending her alone; it
certainly was most disrespectful to them and careless of him (she had
quite forgotten that she had herself proposed to her father to go alone
rather than wait at the hotel), and she must have looked very ridiculous
in her fine clothes and the broken-down buggy. When her trunk came by
express to-morrow she would look out something more sober. She must
remember that she was in a Catholic and religious household now. Ah,
yes! how very fine it was to see that priest at dinner in his soutane,
sitting down like one of the family, and making them all seem like a
picture of some historical and aristocratic romance! And then they were
actually “de Fontanges l'Hommadieu.” How different he was from that
shabby Methodist minister who used to come to see her father in a black
cravat with a hideous bow! Really there was something to say for a
religion that contained so much picturesque refinement; and for her
part--but that will do. I beg to say that I am not writing of any
particular snob or feminine monstrosity, but of a very charming
creature, who was quite able to say her prayers afterwards like a good
girl, and lay her pretty cheek upon her pillow without a blush.
She opened her window and looked out. The moon, a great silver dome,
was uplifting itself from a bluish-gray level, which she knew was the
distant plain of wheat. Somewhere in its midst appeared a dull star,
at times brightening as if blown upon or drawn upwards in a comet-like
trail. By some odd instinct she felt that it was the solitary forge
of the young inventor, and pictured him standing before it with his
abstracted hazel eyes and a face more begrimed in the moonlight than
ever. When DID he wash himself? Perhaps not until Sunday. How lonely it
must be out there! She slightly shivered and turned from the window.
As she did so, it seemed to her that something knocked against her door
from without. Opening it quickly, she was almost certain that the sound
of a rustling skirt retreated along the passage. It was very late;
perhaps she had disturbed the house by shutting her window. No doubt
it was the motherly interest of Mrs. Randolph that impelled her to
come softly and look after her; and for once her simple surmises were
correct. For not only the inspecting eyes of her hostess, but the
amatory glances of the youthful Emile, had been fastened upon her window
until the light disappeared, and even the Holy Mission Church of San
Jose had assured itself of the dear child's safety with a large and
supple ear at her keyhole.
The next morning Major Randolph took her with Adele in a light cariole
over the ranch. Although his domain was nearly as large as the adjoining
wheat plain, it was not, like that, monopolized by one enormous
characteristic yield, but embraced a more diversified product. There
were acres and acres of potatoes in rows of endless and varying
succession; there were miles of wild oats and barley, which overtopped
them as they drove in narrow lanes of dry and dusty monotony; there were
orchards of pears, apricots, peaches, and nectarines, and vineyards of
grapes, so comparatively dwarfed in height that they scarcely reached
to the level of their eyes, yet laden and breaking beneath the weight of
their ludicrously disproportionate fruit. What seemed to be a vast green
plateau covered with tiny patches, that headed the northern edge of
the prospect, was an enormous bed of strawberry plants. But everywhere,
crossing the track, bounding the fields, orchards, and vineyards,
intersecting the paths of the whole domain, were narrow irrigating ducts
and channels of running water.
“Those,” said the major, poetically, “are the veins and arteries of
the ranch. Come with me now, and I'll show you its pulsating heart.”
Descending from the wagon into pedestrian prose again, he led Rose a
hundred yards further to a shed that covered a wonderful artesian well.
In the centre of a basin a column of water rose regularly with the even
flow and volume of a brook. “It is one of the largest in the State,”
said the major, “and is the life of all that grows here during six
months of the year.”
Pleased as the young girl was with those evidences of the prosperity and
position of her host, she was struck, however, with the fact that the
farm-laborers, wine-growers, nurserymen, and all field hands scattered
on the vast estate were apparently of the same independent, unpastoral,
and unprofessional character as the men of the wheat-field. There were
no cottages or farm buildings that she could see, nor any apparent
connection between the household and the estate; far from suggesting
tenantry or retainers, the men who were working in the fields glanced
at them as they passed with the indifference of strangers, or replied to
the major's greetings or questionings with perfect equality of manner,
or even businesslike reserve and caution. Her host explained that the
ranch was worked by a company “on shares;” that those laborers were, in
fact, the bulk of the company; and that he, the major, only furnished
the land, the seed, and the implements. “That man who was driving the
long roller, and with whom you were indignant because he wouldn't get
out of our way, is the president of the company.”
“That needn't make him so uncivil,” said Rose, poutingly, “for if it
comes to that you're the LANDLORD,” she added triumphantly.
“No,” said the major, good-humoredly. “I am simply the man driving the
lighter and more easily-managed team for pleasure, and he's the man
driving the heavier and more difficult machine for work. It's for me to
get out of his way; and looked at in the light of my being THE LANDLORD
it is still worse, for as we're working 'on shares' I'm interrupting HIS
work, and reducing HIS profits merely because I choose to sacrifice my
own.”
I need not say that those atrociously leveling sentiments were received
by the young ladies with that feminine scorn which is only qualified
by misconception. Rose, who, under the influence of her hostess, had a
vague impression that they sounded something like the French Revolution,
and that Adele must feel like the Princess Elizabeth, rushed to her
relief like a good girl. “But, major, now, YOU'RE a gentleman, and if
YOU had been driving that roller, you know you would have turned out for
us.”
“I don't know about that,” said the major, mischievously; “but if I
had, I should have known that the other fellow who accepted it wasn't a
gentleman.”
But Rose, having sufficiently shown her partisanship in the discussion,
after the feminine fashion, did not care particularly for the logical
result. After a moment's silence she resumed: “And the wheat ranch
below--is that carried on in the same way?”
“Yes. But their landlord is a bank, who advances not only the land, but
the money to work it, and doesn't ride around in a buggy with a couple
of charmingly distracting young ladies.”
“And do they all share alike?” continued Rose, ignoring the pleasantry,
“big and little--that young inventor with the rest?”
She stopped. She felt the ingenue's usually complacent eyes suddenly
fixed upon her with an unhallowed precocity, and as quickly withdrawn.
Without knowing why, she felt embarrassed, and changed the subject.
The next day they drove to the Convent of Santa Clara and the Mission
College of San Jose. Their welcome at both places seemed to Rose to be a
mingling of caste greeting and spiritual zeal, and the austere seclusion
and reserve of those cloisters repeated that suggestion of an Old World
civilization that had already fascinated the young Western girl. They
made other excursions in the vicinity, but did not extend it to a visit
to their few neighbors. With their reserved and exclusive ideas this
fact did not strike Rose as peculiar, but on a later shopping
expedition to the town of San Jose, a certain reticence and aggressive
sensitiveness on the part of the shopkeepers and tradespeople towards
the Randolphs produced an unpleasant impression on her mind. She could
not help noticing, too, that after the first stare of astonishment which
greeted her appearance with her hostess, she herself was included in
the antagonism. With her youthful prepossession for her friends, this
distinction she regarded as flattering and aristocratic, and I fear she
accented it still more by discussing with Mrs. Randolph the merits
of the shopkeepers' wares in schoolgirl French before them. She was
unfortunate enough, however, to do this in the shop of a polyglot
German.
“Oxcoos me, mees,” he said gravely,--“but dot lady speeks Engeleesh so
goot mit yourselluf, and ven you dells to her dot silk is hallf gotton
in English, she onderstand you mooch better, and it don't make nodings
to me.” The laugh which would have followed from her own countrywomen
did not, however, break upon the trained faces of the “de Fontanges
l'Hommadieus,” yet while Rose would have joined in it, albeit a
little ruefully, she felt for the first time mortified at their civil
insincerity.
At the end of two weeks, Major Randolph received a letter from Mr.
Mallory. When he had read it, he turned to his wife: “He thanks you,” he
said, “for your kindness to his daughter, and explains that his sudden
departure was owing to the necessity of his taking advantage of a great
opportunity for speculation that had offered.” As Mrs. Randolph turned
away with a slight shrug of the shoulders, the major continued: “But you
haven't heard all! That opportunity was the securing of a half interest
in a cinnabar lode in Sonora, which has already gone up a hundred
thousand dollars in his hands! By Jove! a man can afford to drop a
little social ceremony on those terms--eh, Josephine?” he concluded with
a triumphant chuckle.
“He's as likely to lose his hundred thousand to-morrow, while his
manners will remain,” said Mrs. Randolph. “I've no faith in these sudden
California fortunes!”
“You're wrong as regards Mallory, for he's as careful as he is lucky. He
don't throw money away for appearance sake, or he'd have a rich home for
that daughter. He could afford it.”
Mrs. Randolph was silent. “She is his only daughter, I believe,” she
continued presently.
“Yes--he has no other kith or kin,” returned the major.
“She seems to be very much impressed by Emile,” said Mrs. Randolph.
Major Randolph faced his wife quickly.
“In the name of all that's ridiculous, my dear, you are not already
thinking of”--he gasped.
“I should be very loth to give MY sanction to anything of the kind,
knowing the difference of her birth, education, and religion,--although
the latter I believe she would readily change,” said Mrs. Randolph,
severely. “But when you speak of MY already thinking of 'such things,'
do you suppose that your friend, Mr. Mallory, didn't consider all that
when he sent that girl here?”
“Never,” said the major, vehemently, “and if it entered his head now, by
Jove, he'd take her away to-morrow--always supposing I didn't anticipate
him by sending her off myself.”
Mrs. Randolph uttered her mirthless laugh. “And you suppose the girl
would go? Really, major, you don't seem to understand this boasted
liberty of your own countrywoman. What does she care for her father's
control? Why, she'd make him do just what SHE wanted. But,” she added
with an expression of dignity, “perhaps we had better not discuss this
until we know something of Emile's feelings in the matter. That is the
only question that concerns us.” With this she swept out of the room,
leaving the major at first speechless with honest indignation, and
then after the fashion of all guileless natures, a little uneasy and
suspicious of his own guilelessness. For a day or two after, he found
himself, not without a sensation of meanness, watching Rose when in
Emile's presence, but he could distinguish nothing more than the frank
satisfaction she showed equally to the others. Yet he found himself
regretting even that, so subtle was the contagion of his wife's
suspicions.
CHAPTER III
It had been a warm morning; an unusual mist, which the sun had not
dissipated, had crept on from the great grain-fields beyond, and hung
around the house charged with a dry, dusty closeness that seemed to be
quite independent of the sun's rays, and more like a heated exhalation
or emanation of the soil itself. In its acrid irritation Rose thought
she could detect the breath of the wheat as on the day she had
plunged into its pale, green shadows. By the afternoon this mist had
disappeared, apparently in the same mysterious manner, but not scattered
by the usual trade-wind, which--another unusual circumstance--that day
was not forthcoming. There was a breathlessness in the air like the
hush of listening expectancy, which filled the young girl with a vague
restlessness, and seemed to even affect a scattered company of crows
in the field beyond the house, which rose suddenly with startled but
aimless wings, and then dropped vacantly among the grain again.
Major Randolph was inspecting a distant part of the ranch, Mrs. Randolph
was presumably engaged in her boudoir, and Rose was sitting between
Adele and Emile before the piano in the drawing-room, listlessly
turning over the leaves of some music. There had been an odd mingling of
eagerness and abstraction in the usual attentions of the young man that
morning, and a certain nervous affectation in his manner of twisting the
ends of a small black moustache, which resembled his mother's eyebrows,
that had affected Rose with a half-amused, half-uneasy consciousness,
but which she had, however, referred to the restlessness produced by the
weather. It occurred to her also that the vacuously amiable Adele had
once or twice regarded her with the same precocious, childlike curiosity
and infantine cunning she had once before exhibited. All this did not,
however, abate her admiration for both--perhaps particularly for this
picturesquely gentlemanly young fellow, with his gentle audacities
of compliment, his caressing attentions, and his unfailing and equal
address. And when, discovering that she had mislaid her fan for the
fifth time that morning, he started up with equal and undiminished fire
to go again and fetch it, the look of grateful pleasure and pleading
perplexity in her pretty eyes might have turned a less conceited brain
than his.
“But you don't know where it is!”
“I shall find it by instinct.”
“You are spoiling me--you two.” The parenthesis was a hesitating
addition, but she continued, with fresh sincerity, “I shall be quite
helpless when I leave here--if I am ever able to go by myself.”
“Don't ever go, then.”
“But just now I want my fan; it is so close everywhere to-day.”
“I fly, mademoiselle.”
He started to the door.
She called after him:--
“Let me help your instinct, then; I had it last in the major's study.”
“That was where I was going.”
He disappeared. Rose got up and moved uneasily towards the window. “How
queer and quiet it looks outside. It's really too bad that he should be
sent after that fan again. He'll never find it.” She resumed her place
at the piano, Adele following her with round, expectant eyes. After a
pause she started up again. “I'll go and fetch it myself,” she said,
with a half-embarrassed laugh, and ran to the door.
Scarcely understanding her own nervousness, but finding relief in rapid
movement, Rose flew lightly up the staircase. The major's study, where
she had been writing letters, during his absence, that morning, was at
the further end of a long passage, and near her own bedroom, the door of
which, as she passed, she noticed, half-abstractedly, was open, but she
continued on and hurriedly entered the study. At the same moment Emile,
with a smile on his face, turned towards her with the fan in his hand.
“Oh, you've found it,” she said, with nervous eagerness. “I was so
afraid you'd have all your trouble for nothing.”
She extended her hand, with a half-breathless smile, for the fan, but he
caught her outstretched little palm in his own, and held it.
“Ah! but you are not going to leave us, are you?”
In a flash of consciousness she understood him, and, as it seemed to
her, her own nervousness, and all, and everything. And with it came a
swift appreciation of all it meant to her and her future. To be
always with him and like him, a part of this refined and restful
seclusion--akin to all that had so attracted her in this house; not to
be obliged to educate herself up to it, but to be in it on equal terms
at once; to know that it was no wild, foolish youthful fancy, but a
wise, thoughtful, and prudent resolve, that her father would understand
and her friends respect: these were the thoughts that crowded quickly
upon her, more like an explanation of her feelings than a revelation, in
the brief second that he held her hand. It was not, perhaps, love as
she had dreamed it, and even BELIEVED it, before. She was not ashamed
or embarrassed; she even felt, with a slight pride, that she was not
blushing. She raised her eyes frankly. What she WOULD have said she did
not know, for the door, which he had closed behind her, began to shake
violently.
It was not the fear of some angry intrusion or interference surely that
made him drop her hand instantly. It was not--her second thought--the
idea that some one had fallen in a fit against it that blanched his face
with abject and unreasoning terror! It must have been something else
that caused him to utter an inarticulate cry and dash out of the room
and down the stairs like a madman! What had happened?
In her own self-possession she knew that all this was passing rapidly,
that it was not the door now that was still shaking, for it had swung
almost shut again--but it was the windows, the book-shelves, the floor
beneath her feet, that were all shaking. She heard a hurried scrambling,
the trampling of feet below, and the quick rustling of a skirt in the
passage, as if some one had precipitately fled from her room. Yet no one
had called to her--even HE had said nothing. Whatever had happened they
clearly had not cared for her to know.
The jarring and rattling ceased as suddenly, but the house seemed silent
and empty. She moved to the door, which had now swung open a few inches,
but to her astonishment it was fixed in that position, and she could not
pass. As yet she had been free from any personal fear, and even now it
was with a half smile at her imprisonment in the major's study, that she
rang the bell and turned to the window. A man, whom she recognized
as one of the ranch laborers, was standing a hundred feet away in the
garden, looking curiously at the house. He saw her face as she tried to
raise the sash, uttered an exclamation, and ran forward. But before she
could understand what he said, the sash began to rattle in her hand, the
jarring recommenced, the floor shook beneath her feet, a hideous sound
of grinding seemed to come from the walls, a thin seam of dust-like
smoke broke from the ceiling, and with the noise of falling plaster a
dozen books followed each other from the shelves, in what in the frantic
hurry of that moment seemed a grimly deliberate succession; a picture
hanging against the wall, to her dazed wonder, swung forward, and
appeared to stand at right angles from it; she felt herself reeling
against the furniture; a deadly nausea overtook her; as she glanced
despairingly towards the window, the outlying fields beyond the garden
seemed to be undulating like a sea. For the first time she raised her
voice, not in fear, but in a pathetic little cry of apology for her
awkwardness in tumbling about and not being able to grapple this new
experience, and then she found herself near the door, which had once
more swung free. She grasped it eagerly, and darted out of the study
into the deserted passage. Here some instinct made her follow the line
of the wall, rather than the shaking balusters of the corridor and
staircase, but before she reached the bottom she heard a shout, and
the farm laborer she had seen coming towards her seized her by the arm,
dragged her to the open doorway of the drawing-room, and halted beneath
its arch in the wall. Another thrill, but lighter than before, passed
through the building, then all was still again.
“It's over; I reckon that's all just now,” said the man, coolly. “It's
quite safe to cut and run for the garden now, through this window.” He
half led, half lifted her through the French window to the veranda and
the ground, and locking her arm in his, ran quickly forward a hundred
feet from the house, stopping at last beneath a large post oak where
there was a rustic seat into which she sank. “You're safe now, I
reckon,” he said grimly.
She looked towards the house; the sun was shining brightly; a cool
breeze seemed to have sprung up as they ran. She could see a quantity of
rubbish lying on the roof from which a dozen yards of zinc gutter
were perilously hanging; the broken shafts of the further cluster of
chimneys, a pile of bricks scattered upon the ground and among the
battered down beams of the end of the veranda--but that was all. She
lifted her now whitened face to the man, and with the apologetic smile
still lingering on her lips, asked:--
“What does it all mean? What has happened?”
The man stared at her. “D'ye mean to say ye don't know?”
“How could I? They must have all left the house as soon as it began. I
was talking to--to M. l'Hommadieu, and he suddenly left.”
The man brought his face angrily down within an inch of her own. “D'ye
mean to say that them d----d French half-breeds stampeded and left yer
there alone?”
She was still too much stupefied by the reaction to fully comprehend
his meaning, and repeated feebly with her smile still faintly lingering:
“But you don't tell me WHAT it was?”
“An earthquake,” said the man, roughly, “and if it had lasted ten
seconds longer it would have shook the whole shanty down and left you
under it. Yer kin tell that to them, if they don't know it, but from the
way they made tracks to the fields, I reckon they did. They're coming
now.”
Without another word he turned away half surlily, half defiantly,
passing scarce fifty yards away Mrs. Randolph and her daughter, who were
hastening towards their guest.
“Oh, here you are!” said Mrs. Randolph, with the nearest approach to
effusion that Rose had yet seen in her manner. “We were wondering where
you had run to, and were getting quite concerned. Emile was looking for
you everywhere.”
The recollection of his blank and abject face, his vague outcry and
blind fright, came back to Rose with a shock that sent a flash of
sympathetic shame to her face. The ingenious Adele noticed it, and
dutifully pinched her mother's arm.
“Emile?” echoed Rose faintly--“looking for ME?”
Mother and daughter exchanged glances.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Randolph, cheerfully, “he says he started to run with
you, but you got ahead and slipped out of the garden door--or something
of the kind,” she added, with the air of making light of Rose's girlish
fears. “You know one scarcely knows what one does at such times, and
it must have been frightfully strange to YOU--and he's been quite
distracted, lest you should have wandered away. Adele, run and tell him
Miss Mallory has been here under the oak all the time.”
Rose started--and then fell hopelessly back in her seat. Perhaps it WAS
true! Perhaps he had not rushed off with that awful face and without a
word. Perhaps she herself had been half-frightened out of her reason.
In the simple, weak kindness of her nature it seemed less dreadful to
believe that the fault was partly her own.
“And you went back into the house to look for us when all was over,”
said Mrs. Randolph, fixing her black, beady, magnetic eyes on Rose, “and
that stupid yokel Zake brought you out again. He needn't have clutched
your arm so closely, my dear,--I must speak to the major about his
excessive familiarity--but I suppose I shall be told that that is
American freedom. I call it 'a liberty.'”
It struck Rose that she had not even thanked the man--in the same flash
that she remembered something dreadful that he had said. She covered her
face with her hands and tried to recall herself.
Mrs. Randolph gently tapped her shoulder with a mixture of maternal
philosophy and discipline, and continued: “Of course, it's an upset--and
you're confused still. That's nothing. They say, dear, it's perfectly
well known that no two people's recollections of these things ever are
the same. It's really ridiculous the contradictory stories one hears.
Isn't it, Emile?”
Rose felt that the young man had joined them and was looking at her. In
the fear that she should still see some trace of the startled, selfish
animal in his face, she did not dare to raise her eyes to his, but
looked at his mother. Mrs. Randolph was standing then, collected but
impatient.
“It's all over now,” said Emile, in his usual voice, “and except the
chimneys and some fallen plaster there's really no damage done. But
I'm afraid they have caught it pretty badly at the mission, and at San
Francisco in those tall, flashy, rattle-trap buildings they're putting
up. I've just sent off one of the men for news.”
Her father was in San Francisco by that time; and she had never thought
of him! In her quick remorse she now forgot all else and rose to her
feet.
“I must telegraph to my father at once,” she said hurriedly; “he is
there.”
“You had better wait until the messenger returns and hear his news,”
said Emile. “If the shock was only a slight one in San Francisco, your
father might not understand you, and would be alarmed.”
She could see his face now--there was no record of the past expression
upon it, but he was watching her eagerly. Mrs. Randolph and Adele had
moved away to speak to the servants. Emile drew nearer.
“You surely will not desert us now?” he said in a low voice.
“Please don't,” she said vaguely. “I'm so worried,” and, pushing quickly
past him, she hurriedly rejoined the two women.
They were superintending the erection of a long tent or marquee in the
garden, hastily extemporized from the awnings of the veranda and other
cloth. Mrs. Randolph explained that, although all danger was over, there
was the possibility of the recurrence of lighter shocks during the day
and night, and that they would all feel much more secure and comfortable
to camp out for the next twenty-four hours in the open air.
“Only imagine you're picnicking, and you'll enjoy it as most people
usually enjoy those horrid al fresco entertainments. I don't believe
there's the slightest real necessity for it, but,” she added in a lower
voice, “the Irish and Chinese servants are so demoralized now, they
wouldn't stay indoors with us. It's a common practice here, I believe,
for a day or two after the shock, and it gives time to put things right
again and clear up. The old, one-storied, Spanish houses with walls
three feet thick, and built round a courtyard or patio, were much safer.
It's only when the Americans try to improve upon the old order of things
with their pinchbeck shams and stucco that Providence interferes like
this to punish them.”
It was the fact, however, that Rose was more impressed by what seemed to
her the absolute indifference of Providence in the matter, and the cool
resumption by Nature of her ordinary conditions. The sky above their
heads was as rigidly blue as ever, and as smilingly monotonous; the
distant prospect, with its clear, well-known silhouettes, had not
changed; the crows swung on lazy, deliberate wings over the grain as
before; and the trade-wind was again blowing in its quiet persistency.
And yet she knew that something had happened that would never again make
her enjoyment of the prospect the same--that nothing would ever be as
it was yesterday. I think at first she referred only to the material and
larger phenomena, and did not confound this revelation of the insecurity
of the universe with her experience of man. Yet the fact also remained
that to the conservative, correct, and, as she believed, secure
condition to which she had been approximating, all her relations were
rudely shaken and upset. It really seemed to this simple-minded young
woman that the revolutionary disturbance of settled conditions might
have as Providential an origin as the “Divine Right” of which she had
heard so much.
CHAPTER IV
In her desire to be alone and to evade the now significant attentions
of Emile, she took advantage of the bustle that followed the hurried
transfer of furniture and articles from the house to escape through the
garden to the outlying fields. Striking into one of the dusty lanes that
she remembered, she wandered on for half an hour until her progress and
meditation were suddenly arrested. She had come upon a long chasm or
crack in the soil, full twenty feet wide and as many in depth, crossing
her path at right angles. She did not remember having seen it before;
the track of wheels went up to its precipitous edge; she could see
the track on the other side, but the hiatus remained, unbridged and
uncovered. It was not there yesterday. She glanced right and left; the
fissure seemed to extend, like a moat or ditch, from the distant road to
the upland between her and the great wheat valley below, from which she
was shut off. An odd sense of being in some way a prisoner confronted
her. She drew back with an impatient start, and perhaps her first real
sense of indignation. A voice behind her, which she at once recognized,
scarcely restored her calmness.
“You can't get across there, miss.”
She turned. It was the young inventor from the wheat ranch, on horseback
and with a clean face. He had just ridden out of the grain on the same
side of the chasm as herself.
“But you seem to have got over,” she said bluntly.
“Yes, but it was further up the field. I reckoned that the split might
be deeper but not so broad in the rock outcrop over there than in the
adobe here. I found it so and jumped it.”
He looked as if he might--alert, intelligent, and self-contained. He
lingered a moment, and then continued:--
“I'm afraid you must have been badly shaken and a little frightened up
there before the chimneys came down?”
“No,” she was glad to say briefly, and she believed truthfully, “I wasn't
frightened. I didn't even know it was an earthquake.”
“Ah!” he reflected, “that was because you were a stranger. It's
odd--they're all like that. I suppose it's because nobody really expects
or believes in the unlooked-for thing, and yet that's the thing that
always happens. And then, of course, that other affair, which really is
serious, startled you the more.”
She felt herself ridiculously and angrily blushing. “I don't know what
you mean,” she said icily. “What other affair?”
“Why, the well.”
“The well?” she repeated vacantly.
“Yes; the artesian well has stopped. Didn't the major tell you?”
“No,” said the girl. “He was away; I haven't seen him yet.”
“Well, the flow of water has ceased completely. That's what I'm here
for. The major sent for me, and I've been to examine it.”
“And is that stoppage so very important?” she said dubiously.
It was his turn to look at her wonderingly.
“If it's LOST entirely, it means ruin for the ranch,” he said sharply.
He wheeled his horse, nodded gravely, and trotted off.
Major Randolph's figure of the “life-blood of the ranch” flashed across
her suddenly. She knew nothing of irrigation or the costly appliances
by which the Californian agriculturist opposed the long summer droughts.
She only vaguely guessed that the dreadful earthquake had struck at the
prosperity of those people whom only a few hours ago she had been proud
to call her friends. The underlying goodness of her nature was touched.
Should she let a momentary fault--if it were not really, after all,
only a misunderstanding--rise between her and them at such a moment? She
turned and hurried quickly towards the house.
Hastening onward, she found time, however, to wonder also why
these common men--she now included even the young inventor in that
category--were all so rude and uncivil to HER! She had never before
been treated in this way; she had always been rather embarrassed by the
admiring attentions of young men (clerks and collegians) in her Atlantic
home, and, of professional men (merchants and stockbrokers) in San
Francisco. It was true that they were not as continually devoted to her
and to the nice art and etiquette of pleasing as Emile,--they had other
things to think about, being in business and not being GENTLEMEN,--but
then they were greatly superior to these clowns, who took no notice of
her, and rode off without lingering or formal leave-taking when their
selfish affairs were concluded. It must be the contact of the vulgar
earth--this wretched, cracking, material, and yet ungovernable and
lawless earth--that so depraved them. She felt she would like to say
this to some one--not her father, for he wouldn't listen to her, nor to
the major, who would laughingly argue with her, but to Mrs. Randolph,
who would understand her, and perhaps say it some day in her own
sharp, sneering way to these very clowns. With those gentle sentiments
irradiating her blue eyes, and putting a pink flush upon her fair
cheeks, Rose reached the garden with the intention of rushing
sympathetically into Mrs. Randolph's arms. But it suddenly occurred
to her that she would be obliged to state how she became aware of this
misfortune, and with it came an instinctive aversion to speak of her
meeting with the inventor. She would wait until Mrs. Randolph told her.
But although that lady was engaged in a low-voiced discussion in French
with Emile and Adele, which instantly ceased at her approach, there was
no allusion made to the new calamity. “You need not telegraph to your
father,” she said as Rose approached, “he has already telegraphed to you
for news; as you were out, and the messenger was waiting an answer, we
opened the dispatch, and sent one, telling him that you were all right,
and that he need not hurry here on your account. So you are satisfied,
I hope.” A few hours ago this would have been true, and Rose would have
probably seen in the action of her hostess only a flattering motherly
supervision; there was, in fact, still a lingering trace of trust in her
mind yet she was conscious that she would have preferred to answer the
dispatch herself, and to have let her father come. To a girl brought
up with a belief in the right of individual independence of thought and
action, there was something in Mrs. Randolph's practical ignoring of
that right which startled her in spite of her new conservatism, while,
as the daughter of a business man, her instincts revolted against Mrs.
Randolph's unbusiness-like action with the telegram, however vulgar and
unrefined she may have begun to consider a life of business. The
result was a certain constraint and embarrassment in her manner, which,
however, had the laudable effect of limiting Emile's attention to
significant glances, and was no doubt variously interpreted by the
others. But she satisfied her conscience by determining to make a
confidence of her sympathy to the major on the first opportunity.
This she presently found when the others were preoccupied; the major
greeting her with a somewhat careworn face, but a voice whose habitual
kindness was unchanged. When he had condoled with her on the terrifying
phenomenon that had marred her visit to the ranch,--and she could not
help impatiently noticing that he too seemed to have accepted his wife's
theory that she had been half deliriously frightened,--he regretted that
her father had not concluded to come down to the ranch, as his practical
advice would have been invaluable in this emergency. She was about to
eagerly explain why, when it occurred to her that Mrs. Randolph had only
given him a suppressed version of the telegram, and that she would be
betraying her, or again taking sides in this partisan divided home.
With some hesitation she at last alluded to the accident to the artesian
well. The major did not ask her how she had heard of it; it was a bad
business, he thought, but it might not be a total loss. The water may
have been only diverted by the shock and might be found again at the
lower level, or in some lateral fissure. He had sent hurriedly for Tom
Bent--that clever young engineer at the wheat ranch, who was always
studying up these things with his inventions--and that was his opinion.
No, Tom was not a well-digger, but it was generally known that he had
“located” one or two, and had long ago advised the tapping of that flow
by a second boring, in case of just such an emergency. He was coming
again to-morrow. By the way, he had asked how the young lady visitor
was, and hoped she had not been alarmed by the earthquake!
Rose felt herself again blushing, and, what was more singular, with an
unexpected and it seemed to her ridiculous pleasure, although outwardly
she appeared to ignore the civility completely. And she had no
intention of being so easily placated. If this young man thought by mere
perfunctory civilities to her HOST to make up for his clownishness to
HER, he was mistaken. She would let him see it when he called to-morrow.
She quickly turned the subject by assuring the major of her sympathy and
her intention of sending for her father. For the rest of the afternoon
and during their al fresco dinner she solved the difficulty of her
strained relations with Mrs. Randolph and Emile by conversing chiefly
with the major, tacitly avoiding, however, any allusion to this Mr.
Bent. But Mrs. Randolph was less careful.
“You don't really mean to say, major,” she began in her dryest,
grittiest manner, “that instead of sending to San Francisco for some
skilled master-mechanic, you are going to listen to the vagaries of a
conceited, half-educated farm-laborer, and employ him? You might as well
call in some of those wizards or water-witches at once.” But the major,
like many other well-managed husbands who are good-humoredly content
to suffer in the sunshine of prosperity, had no idea of doing so in
adversity, and the prospect of being obliged to go back to youthful
struggles had recalled some of the independence of that period. He
looked up quietly, and said:--
“If his conclusions are as clear and satisfactory to-morrow as they were
to-day, I shall certainly try to secure his services.”
“Then I can only say I would prefer the water-witch. He at least
would not represent a class of neighbors who have made themselves
systematically uncivil and disagreeable to us.”
“I am afraid, Josephine, we have not tried to make ourselves
particularly agreeable to THEM,” said the major.
“If that can only be done by admitting their equality, I prefer they
should remain uncivil. Only let it be understood, major, that if you
choose to take this Tom-the-ploughboy to mend your well, you will at
least keep him there while he is on the property.”
With what retort the major would have kept up this conjugal discussion,
already beginning to be awkward to the discreet visitor, is not known,
as it was suddenly stopped by a bullet from the rosebud lips of the
ingenuous Adele.
“Why, he's very handsome when his face is clean, and his hands are small
and not at all hard. And he doesn't talk the least bit queer or common.”
There was a dead silence. “And pray where did YOU see him, and what do
you know about his hands?” asked Mrs. Randolph, in her most desiccated
voice. “Or has the major already presented you to him? I shouldn't be
surprised.”
“No, but”--hesitated the young girl, with a certain mouse-like
audacity,--“when you sent me to look after Miss Mallory, I came up to
him just after he had spoken to her, and he stopped to ask me how we all
were, and if Miss Mallory was really frightened by the earthquake, and
he shook hands for good afternoon--that's all.”
“And who taught you to converse with common strangers and shake hands
with them?” continued Mrs. Randolph, with narrowing lips.
“Nobody, mamma; but I thought if Miss Mallory, who is a young lady,
could speak to him, so could I, who am not out yet.”
“We won't discuss this any further at present,” said Mrs. Randolph,
stiffly, as the major smiled grimly at Rose. “The earthquake seems to
have shaken down in this house more than the chimneys.”
It certainly had shaken all power of sleep from the eyes of Rose when
the household at last dispersed to lie down in their clothes on
the mattresses which had been arranged under the awnings. She was
continually starting up from confused dreams of the ground shaking under
her, or she seemed to be standing on the brink of some dreadful abyss
like the great chasm on the grain-field, when it began to tremble and
crumble beneath her feet. It was near morning when, unable to endure
it any longer, she managed without disturbing the sleeping Adele,
who occupied the same curtained recess with her, to slip out from
the awning. Wrapped in a thick shawl, she made her way through the
encompassing trees and bushes of the garden that had seemed to imprison
and suffocate her, to the edge of the grain-field, where she could
breathe the fresh air beneath an open, starlit sky. There was no moon
and the darkness favored her; she had no fears that weighed against the
horror of seclusion with her own fancies. Besides, they were camping
OUT of the house, and if she chose to sit up or walk about, no one could
think it strange. She wished her father were here that she might have
some one of her own kin to talk to, yet she knew not what to say to him
if he had come. She wanted somebody to sympathize with her feelings,--or
rather, perhaps, some one to combat and even ridicule the uneasiness
that had lately come over her. She knew what her father would say,--“Do
you want to go, or do you want to stay here? Do you like these people,
or do you not?” She remembered the one or two glowing and enthusiastic
accounts she had written him of her visit here, and felt herself
blushing again. What would he think of Mrs. Randolph's opening and
answering the telegram? Wouldn't he find out from the major if she had
garbled the sense of his dispatch?
Away to the right, in the midst of the distant and invisible
wheat-field, there was the same intermittent star, which like a living,
breathing thing seemed to dilate in glowing respiration, as she had seen
it the first night of her visit. Mr. Bent's forge! It must be nearly
daylight now; the poor fellow had been up all night, or else was
stealing this early march on the day. She recalled Adele's sudden
eulogium of him. The first natural smile that had come to her lips since
the earthquake broke up her nervous restraint, and sent her back more
like her old self to her couch.
But she had not proceeded far towards the tent, when she heard the sound
of low voices approaching her. It was the major and his wife, who, like
herself, had evidently been unable to sleep, and were up betimes. A new
instinct of secretiveness, which she felt was partly the effect of her
artificial surrounding, checked her first natural instinct to call to
them, and she drew back deeper in the shadow to let them pass. But to
her great discomfiture the major in a conversational emphasis stopped
directly in front of her.
“You are wrong, I tell you, a thousand times wrong. The girl is simply
upset by this earthquake. It's a great pity her father didn't come
instead of telegraphing. And by Jove, rather than hear any more of
this, I'll send for him myself,” said the major, in an energetic but
suppressed voice.
“And the girl won't thank you, and you'll be a fool for your pains,”
returned Mrs. Randolph, with dry persistency.
“But according to your own ideas of propriety, Mallory ought to be the
first one to be consulted--and by me, too.”
“Not in this case. Of course, before any actual engagement is on, you
can speak of Emile's attentions.”
“But suppose Mallory has other views. Suppose he declines the honor. The
man is no fool.”
“Thank you. But for that very reason he must. Listen to me, major; if he
doesn't care to please his daughter for her own sake, he will have to
do so for the sake of decency. Yes, I tell you, she has thoroughly
compromised herself--quite enough, if it is ever known, to spoil any
other engagement her father may make. Why, ask Adele! The day of the
earthquake she ABSOLUTELY had the audacity to send him out of the room
upstairs into your study for her fan, and then follow him up there
alone. The servants knew it. I knew it, for I was in her room at the
time with Father Antonio. The earthquake made it plain to everybody.
Decline it! No. Mr. Mallory will think twice about it before he does
that. What's that? Who's there?”
There was a sudden rustle in the bushes like the passage of some
frightened animal--and then all was still again.
CHAPTER V
The sun, an hour high, but only just topping the greenish crests of the
wheat, was streaming like the morning breeze through the open length of
Tom Bent's workshed. An exaggerated and prolonged shadow of the young
inventor himself at work beside his bench was stretching itself far into
the broken-down ranks of stalks towards the invisible road, and falling
at the very feet of Rose Mallory as she emerged from them.
She was very pale, very quiet, and very determined. The traveling mantle
thrown over her shoulders was dusty, the ribbons that tied her hat under
her round chin had become unloosed. She advanced, walking down the line
of shadow directly towards him.
“I am afraid I will have to trouble you once more,” she said with a
faint smile, which did not, however, reach her perplexed eyes. “Could
you give me any kind of a conveyance that would take me to San Jose at
once?”
The young man had started at the rustling of her dress in the shavings,
and turned eagerly. The faintest indication of a loss of interest was
visible for an instant in his face, but it quickly passed into a smile
of recognition. Yet she felt that he had neither noticed any change in
her appearance, nor experienced any wonder at seeing her there at that
hour.
“I did not take a buggy from the house,” she went on quickly, “for I
left early, and did not want to disturb them. In fact, they don't know
that I am gone. I was worried at not hearing news from my father in San
Francisco since the earthquake, and I thought I would run down to San
Jose to inquire without putting them to any trouble. Anything will do
that you have ready, if I can take it at once.”
Still without exhibiting the least surprise, Bent nodded affirmatively,
put down his tools, begged her to wait a moment, and ran off in the
direction of the cabin. As he disappeared behind the wheat, she lapsed
quite suddenly against the work bench, but recovered herself a moment
later, leaning with her back against it, her hands grasping it on either
side, and her knit brows and determined little face turned towards the
road. Then she stood erect again, shook the dust out of her skirts,
lifted her veil, wiped her cheeks and brow with the corner of a small
handkerchief, and began walking up and down the length of the shed as
Bent reappeared.
He was accompanied by the man who had first led her through the wheat.
He gazed upon her with apparently all the curiosity and concern that the
other had lacked.
“You want to get to San Jose as quick as you can?” he said
interrogatively.
“Yes,” she said quickly, “if you can help me.”
“You walked all the way from the major's here?” he continued, without
taking his eyes from her face.
“Yes,” she answered with an affectation of carelessness she had not
shown to Bent. “But I started very early, it was cool and pleasant, and
didn't seem far.”
“I'll put you down in San Jose inside the hour. You shall have my horse
and trotting sulky, and I'll drive you myself. Will that do?”
She looked at him wonderingly. She had not forgotten his previous
restraint and gravity, but now his face seemed to have relaxed with some
humorous satisfaction. She felt herself coloring slightly, but whether
with shame or relief she could not tell.
“I shall be so much obliged to you,” she replied hesitatingly, “and so
will my father, I know.”
“I reckon,” said the man with the same look of amused conjecture; then,
with a quick, assuring nod, he turned away, and dived into the wheat
again.
“You're all right now, Miss Mallory,” said Bent, complacently. “Dawson
will fix it. He's got a good horse, and he's a good driver, too.” He
paused, and then added pleasantly, “I suppose they're all well up at the
house?”
It was so evident that his remark carried no personal meaning to herself
that she was obliged to answer carelessly, “Oh, yes.”
“I suppose you see a good deal of Miss Randolph--Miss Adele, I think
you call her?” he remarked tentatively, and with a certain boyish
enthusiasm, which she had never conceived possible to his nature.
“Yes,” she replied a little dryly, “she is the only young lady there.”
She stopped, remembering Adele's naive description of the man before
her, and said abruptly, “You know her, then?”
“A little,” replied the young man, modestly. “I see her pretty often
when I am passing the upper end of the ranch. She's very well brought
up, and her manners are very refined--don't you think so?--and yet she's
just as simple and natural as a country girl. There's a great deal
in education after all, isn't there?” he went on confidentially, “and
although”--he lowered his voice and looked cautiously around him--“I
believe that some of us here don't fancy her mother much, there's no
doubt that Mrs. Randolph knows how to bring up her children. Some people
think that kind of education is all artificial, and don't believe in it,
but I do!”
With the consciousness that she was running away from these people and
the shameful disclosure she had heard last night--with the recollection
of Adele's scandalous interpretation of her most innocent actions and
her sudden and complete revulsion against all that she had previously
admired in that household, to hear this man who had seemed to her a
living protest against their ideas and principles, now expressing them
and holding them up for emulation, almost took her breath away.
“I suppose that means you intend to fix Major Randolph's well for him?”
she said dryly.
“Yes,” he returned without noticing her manner; “and I think I can find
that water again. I've been studying it up all night, and do you know
what I'm going to do? I am going to make the earthquake that lost it
help me to find it again.” He paused, and looked at her with a smile
and a return of his former enthusiasm. “Do you remember the crack in the
adobe field that stopped you yesterday?”
“Yes,” said the girl, with a slight shiver.
“I told you then that the same crack was a split in the rock outcrop
further up the plain, and was deeper. I am satisfied now, from what I
have seen, that it is really a rupture of the whole strata all the way
down. That's the one weak point that the imprisoned water is sure to
find, and that's where the borer will tap it--in the new well that the
earthquake itself has sunk.”
It seemed to her now that she understood his explanation perfectly, and
she wondered the more that he had been so mistaken in his estimate of
Adele. She turned away a little impatiently and looked anxiously towards
the point where Dawson had disappeared. Bent followed her eyes.
“He'll be here in a moment, Miss Mallory. He has to drive slowly through
the grain, but I hear the wheels.” He stopped, and his voice took up its
previous note of boyish hesitation. “By the way--I'll--I'll be going up
to the Rancho this afternoon to see the major. Have you any message for
Mrs. Randolph--or for--for Miss Adele?”
“No”--said Rose, hesitatingly, “and--and”--
“I see,” interrupted Bent, carelessly. “You don't want anything said
about your coming here. I won't.”
It struck her that he seemed to have no ulterior meaning in the
suggestion. But before she could make any reply, Dawson reappeared,
driving a handsome mare harnessed to a light, spider-like vehicle. He
had also assumed, evidently in great haste, a black frock coat buttoned
over his waistcoatless and cravatless shirt, and a tall black hat that
already seemed to be cracking in the sunlight. He drove up, at once
assisted her to the narrow perch beside him, and with a nod to Bent
drove off. His breathless expedition relieved the leave-taking of these
young people of any ceremony.
“I suppose,” said Mr. Dawson, giving a half glance over his shoulder as
they struck into the dusty highway,--“I suppose you don't care to see
anybody before you get to San Jose?”
“No-o-o,” said Rose, timidly.
“And I reckon you wouldn't mind my racin' a bit if anybody kem up?”
“No.”
“The mare's sort o' fastidious about takin' anybody's dust.”
“Is she?” said Rose, with a faint smile.
“Awful,” responded her companion; “and the queerest thing of all is, she
can't bear to have any one behind her, either.”
He leaned forward with his expression of humorous enjoyment of some
latent joke and did something with the reins--Rose never could clearly
understand what, though it seemed to her that he simply lifted them with
ostentatious lightness; but the mare suddenly seemed to LENGTHEN herself
and lose her height, and the stalks of wheat on either side of the dusty
track began to melt into each other, and then slipped like a flash into
one long, continuous, shimmering green hedge. So perfect was the mare's
action that the girl was scarcely conscious of any increased effort; so
harmonious the whole movement that the light skeleton wagon seemed only
a prolonged process of that long, slim body and free, collarless neck,
both straight as the thin shafts on each side and straighter than the
delicate ribbon-like traces which, in what seemed a mere affectation of
conscious power, hung at times almost limp between the whiffle-tree and
the narrow breast band which was all that confined the animal's powerful
fore-quarters. So superb was the reach of its long easy stride that Rose
could scarcely see any undulations in the brown shining back on which
she could have placed her foot, nor felt the soft beat of the delicate
hoofs that took the dust so firmly and yet so lightly.
The rapidity of motion which kept them both with heads bent forward and
seemed to force back any utterance that rose to their lips spared Rose
the obligation of conversation, and her companion was equally reticent.
But it was evident to her that he half suspected she was running away
from the Randolphs, and that she wished to avoid the embarrassment of
being overtaken even in persuasive pursuit. It was not possible that
he knew the cause of her flight, and yet she could not account for
his evident desire to befriend her, nor, above all, for his apparently
humorous enjoyment of the situation. Had he taken it gravely, she might
have been tempted to partly confide in him and ask his advice. Was she
doing right, after all? Ought she not to have stayed long enough to
speak her mind to Mrs. Randolph and demand to be sent home? No! She had
not only shrunk from repeating the infamous slander she had overheard,
but she had a terrible fear that if she had done so, Mrs. Randolph was
capable of denying it, or even charging her of being still under the
influence of the earthquake shock and of walking in her sleep. No! She
could not trust her--she could trust no one there. Had not even the
major listened to those infamous lies? Had she not seen that he was
helpless in the hands of this cabal in his own household?--a cabal that
she herself had thoughtlessly joined against him.
They had reached the first slight ascent. Her companion drew out his
watch, looked at it with satisfaction, and changed the position of his
hands on the reins. Without being able to detect the difference, she
felt they were slackening speed. She turned inquiringly towards him; he
nodded his head, with a half smile and a gesture to her to look ahead.
The spires of San Jose were already faintly uplifting from the distant
fringe of oaks.
So soon! In fifteen minutes she would be there--and THEN! She remembered
suddenly she had not yet determined what to do. Should she go on at once
to San Francisco, or telegraph to her father and await him at San Jose?
In either case a new fear of the precipitancy of her action and the
inadequacy of her reasons had sprung up in her mind. Would her father
understand her? Would he underrate the cause and be mortified at the
insult she had given the family of his old friend, or, more dreadful
still, would he exaggerate her wrongs and seek a personal quarrel with
the major. He was a man of quick temper, and had the Western ideas of
redress. Perhaps even now she was precipitating a duel between them. Her
cheeks grew wan again, her breath came quickly, tears gathered in her
eyes. Oh, she was a dreadful girl, she knew it; she was an utterly
miserable one, and she knew that too!
The reins were tightened. The pace lessened and at last fell to a walk.
Conscious of her telltale eyes and troubled face, she dared not turn to
her companion to ask him why, but glanced across the fields.
“When you first came I didn't get to know your name, Miss Mallory, but I
reckon I know your father.”
Her father! What made him say that? She wanted to speak, but she
felt she could not. In another moment, if he went on, she must do
SOMETHING--she would cry!
“I reckon you'll be wanting to go to the hotel first, anyway?”
There!--she knew it! He WOULD keep on! And now she had burst into tears.
The mare was still walking slowly; the man was lazily bending forward
over the shafts as if nothing had occurred. Then suddenly, illogically,
and without a moment's warning, the pride that had sustained her
crumbled and became as the dust of the road.
She burst out and told him--this stranger!--this man she had
disliked!--all and EVERYTHING. How she had felt, how she had been
deceived, and what she had overheard!
“I thought as much,” said her companion, quietly, “and that's why I sent
for your father.”
“You sent for my father!--when?--where?” echoed Rose, in astonishment.
“Yesterday. He was to come to-day, and if we don't find him at the hotel
it will be because he has already started to come here by the upper and
longer road. But you leave it to ME, and don't you say anything to him
of this now. If he's at the hotel, I'll say I drove you down there to
show off the mare. Sabe? If he isn't, I'll leave you there and come back
here to find him. I've got something to tell him that will set YOU all
right.” He smiled grimly, lifted the reins, the mare started forward
again, and the vehicle and its occupants disappeared in a vanishing dust
cloud.
CHAPTER VI
It was nearly noon when Mr. Dawson finished rubbing down his sweating
mare in the little stable shed among the wheat. He had left Rose at the
hotel, for they found Mr. Mallory had previously started by a circuitous
route for the wheat ranch. He had resumed not only his working clothes
but his working expression. He was now superintending the unloading of
a wain of stores and implements when the light carryall of the Randolphs
rolled into the field. It contained only Mrs. Randolph and the driver.
A slight look of intelligence passed between the latter and the nearest
one of Dawson's companions, succeeded, however, by a dull look of stupid
vacancy on the faces of all the others, including Dawson. Mrs. Randolph
noticed it, and was forewarned. She reflected that no human beings ever
looked NATURALLY as stupid as that and were able to work. She smiled
sarcastically, and then began with dry distinctness and narrowing lips.
“Miss Mallory, a young lady visiting us, went out for an early walk this
morning and has not returned. It is possible she may have lost her way
among your wheat. Have you seen anything of her?”
Dawson raised his eyes from his work and glanced slowly around at his
companions, as if taking the heavy sense of the assembly. One or two
shook their heads mechanically, and returned to their suspended labor.
He said, coolly:--
“Nobody here seems to.”
She felt that they were lying. She was only a woman against five men.
She was only a petty domestic tyrant; she might have been a larger one.
But she had all the courage of that possibility.
“Major Randolph and my son are away,” she went on, drawing herself
erect. “But I know that the major will pay liberally if these men will
search the field, besides making it all right with your--EMPLOYERS--for
the loss of time.”
Dawson uttered a single word in a low voice to the man nearest him,
who apparently communicated it to the others, for the four men stopped
unloading, and moved away one after the other--even the driver joining
in the exodus. Mrs. Randolph smiled sarcastically; it was plain that
these people, with all their boasted independence, were quite amenable
to pecuniary considerations. Nevertheless, as Dawson remained looking
quietly at her, she said:--
“Then I suppose they've concluded to go and see?”
“No; I've sent them away so that they couldn't HEAR.”
“Hear what?”
“What I've got to say to you.”
She looked at him suddenly. Then she said, with a disdainful
glance around her: “I see I am helpless here, and--thanks to your
trickery--alone. Have a care, sir; I warn you that you will have to
answer to Major Randolph for any insolence.”
“I reckon you won't tell Major Randolph what I have to say to you,” he
returned coolly.
Her lips were nearly a grayish hue, but she said scornfully: “And why
not? Do you know who you are talking to?”
The man came lazily forward to the carryall, carelessly brushed aside
the slack reins, and resting his elbows on the horse's back, laid his
chin on his hands, as he looked up in the woman's face.
“Yes; I know who I'm talking to,” he said coolly. “But as the major
don't, I reckon you won't tell him.”
“Stand away from that horse!” she said, her whole face taking the
grayish color of her lips, but her black eyes growing smaller and
brighter. “Hand me those reins, and let me pass! What canaille are you
to stop me?”
“I thought so,” returned the man, without altering his position; “you
don't know ME. You never saw ME before. Well, I'm Jim Dawson, the nephew
of L'Hommadieu, YOUR OLD MASTER!”
She gripped the iron rail of the seat as if to leap from it, but checked
herself suddenly and leaned back, with a set smile on her mouth that
seemed stamped there. It was remarkable that with that smile she flung
away her old affectation of superciliousness for an older and ruder
audacity, and that not only the expression, but the type of her face
appeared to have changed.
“I don't say,” continued the man quietly, “that he didn't MARRY you
before he died. But you know as well as I do that the laws of his State
didn't recognize the marriage of a master with his octoroon slave! And
you know as well as I do that even if he had freed you, he couldn't
change your blood. Why, if I'd been willing to stay at Avoyelles to be a
nigger-driver like him, the plantation of 'de Fontanges'--whose name
you have taken--would have been left to me. If YOU had stayed there,
you might have been my property instead of YOUR owning a square man like
Randolph. You didn't think of that when you came here, did you?” he said
composedly.
“Oh, mon Dieu!” she said, dropping rapidly into a different accent,
with her white teeth and fixed mirthless smile, “so it is a claim for
PROPERTY, eh? You're wanting money--you? Tres bien, you forget we are
in California, where one does not own a slave. And you have a fine story
there, my poor friend. Very pretty, but very hard to prove, m'sieu. And
these peasants are in it, eh, working it on shares like the farm, eh?”
“Well,” said Dawson, slightly changing his position, and passing his
hand over the horse's neck with a half-wearied contempt, “one of these
men is from Plaquemine, and the other from Coupee. They know all the
l'Hommadieus' history. And they know a streak of the tar brush when they
see it. They took your measure when they came here last year, and sized
you up fairly. So had I, for the matter of that, when I FIRST saw you.
And we compared notes. But the major is a square man, for all he is your
husband, and we reckoned he had a big enough contract on his hands to
take care of you and l'Hommadieu's half-breeds, and so”--he tossed the
reins contemptuously aside--“we kept this to ourselves.”
“And now you want--what--eh?”
“We want an end to this foolery,” he broke out roughly, stepping back
from the vehicle, and facing her suddenly, with his first angry gesture.
“We want an end to these airs and grimaces, and all this dandy nigger
business; we want an end to this 'cake-walking' through the wheat, and
flouting of the honest labor of your betters. We want you and your 'de
Fontanges' to climb down. And we want an end to this roping-in of white
folks to suit your little game; we want an end to your trying to mix
your nigger blood with any one here, and we intend to stop it. We draw
the line at the major.”
Lashed as she had been by those words apparently out of all semblance of
her former social arrogance, a lower and more stubborn resistance seemed
to have sprung up in her, as she sat sideways, watching him with her set
smile and contracting eyes.
“Ah,” she said dryly, “so SHE IS HERE. I thought so. Which of you is it,
eh? It's a good spec--Mallory's a rich man. She's not particular.”
The man had stopped as if listening, his head turned towards the road.
Then he turned carelessly, and facing her again, waved his hand with a
gesture of tired dismissal, and said, “Go! You'll find your driver over
there by the tool-shed. He has heard nothing yet--but I've given you
fair warning. Go!”
He walked slowly back towards the shed, as the woman, snatching up
the reins, drove violently off in the direction where the men had
disappeared. But she turned aside, ignoring her waiting driver in her
wild and reckless abandonment of all her old conventional attitudes, and
lashing her horse forward with the same set smile on her face, the same
odd relaxation of figure, and the same squaring of her elbows.
Avoiding the main road, she pushed into a narrow track that intersected
another nearer the scene of the accident to Rose's buggy three weeks
before. She had nearly passed it when she was hailed by a strange voice,
and looking up, perceived a horseman floundering in the mazes of the
wheat to one side of the track. Whatever mean thought of her past life
she was flying from, whatever mean purpose she was flying to, she pulled
up suddenly, and as suddenly resumed her erect, aggressive stiffness.
The stranger was a middle-aged man; in dress and appearance a dweller of
cities. He lifted his hat as he perceived the occupant of the wagon to
be a lady.
“I beg your pardon, but I fear I've lost my way in trying to make a
short cut to the Excelsior Company's Ranch.”
“You are in it now,” said Mrs. Randolph, quickly.
“Thank you, but where can I find the farmhouse?”
“There is none,” she returned, with her old superciliousness, “unless
you choose to give that name to the shanties and sheds where the
laborers and servants live, near the road.”
The stranger looked puzzled. “I'm looking for a Mr. Dawson,” he said
reflectively, “but I may have made some mistake. Do you know Major
Randolph's house hereabouts?”
“I do. I am Mrs. Randolph,” she said stiffly.
The stranger's brow cleared, and he smiled pleasantly. “Then this is a
fortunate meeting,” he said, raising his hat again as he reined in his
horse beside the wagon, “for I am Mr. Mallory, and I was looking forward
to the pleasure of presenting myself to you an hour or two later. The
fact is, an old acquaintance, Mr. Dawson, telegraphed me yesterday to
meet him here on urgent business, and I felt obliged to go there first.”
Mrs. Randolph's eyes sparkled with a sudden gratified intelligence, but
her manner seemed rather to increase than abate its grim precision.
“Our meeting this morning, Mr. Mallory, is both fortunate and
unfortunate, for I regret to say that your daughter, who has not been
quite herself since the earthquake, was missing early this morning and
has not yet been found, though we have searched everywhere. Understand
me,” she said, as the stranger started, “I have no fear for her PERSONAL
safety, I am only concerned for any INDISCRETION that she may commit in
the presence of these strangers whose company she would seem to prefer
to ours.”
“But I don't understand you, madam,” said Mallory, sternly; “you are
speaking of my daughter, and”--
“Excuse me, Mr. Mallory,” said Mrs. Randolph, lifting her hand with
her driest deprecation and her most desiccating smile, “I'm not passing
judgment or criticism. I am of a foreign race, and consequently do not
understand the freedom of American young ladies, and their familiarity
with the opposite sex. I make no charges, I only wish to assure you that
she will no doubt be found in the company and under the protection of
her own countrymen. There is,” she added with ironical distinctness, “a
young mechanic, or field hand, or 'quack well-doctor,' whom she seems to
admire, and with whom she appears to be on equal terms.”
Mallory regarded her for a moment fixedly, and then his sternness
relaxed to a mischievously complacent smile. “That must be young Bent,
of whom I've heard,” he said with unabated cheerfulness. “And I don't
know but what she may be with him, after all. For now I think of it, a
chuckle-headed fellow, of whom a moment ago I inquired the way to your
house, told me I'd better ask the young man and young woman who were
'philandering through the wheat' yonder. Suppose we look for them. From
what I've heard of Bent he's too much wrapped up in his inventions for
flirtation, but it would be a good joke to stumble upon them.”
Mrs. Randolph's eyes sparkled with a mingling of gratified malice and
undisguised contempt for the fatuous father beside her. But before she
could accept or decline the challenge, it had become useless. A murmur
of youthful voices struck her ear, and she suddenly stood upright and
transfixed in the carriage. For lounging down slowly towards them out
of the dim green aisles of the arbored wheat, lost in themselves and the
shimmering veil of their seclusion, came the engineer, Thomas Bent, and
on his arm, gazing ingenuously into his face, the figure of Adele,--her
own perfect daughter.
“I don't think, my dear,” said Mr. Mallory, as the anxious Rose flew
into his arms on his return to San Jose, a few hours later, “that it
will be necessary for you to go back again to Major Randolph's before we
leave. I have said 'Good-by' for you and thanked them, and your trunks
are packed and will be sent here. The fact is, my dear, you see this
affair of the earthquake and the disaster to the artesian well have
upset all their arrangements, and I am afraid that my little girl would
be only in their way just now.”
“And you have seen Mr. Dawson--and you know why he sent for you?” asked
the young girl, with nervous eagerness.
“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Mallory thoughtfully, “THAT was really important.
You see, my child,” he continued, taking her hand in one of his own and
patting the back of it gently with the other, “we think, Dawson and I,
of taking over the major's ranch and incorporating it with the Excelsior
in one, to be worked on shares like the Excelsior; and as Mrs. Randolph
is very anxious to return to the Atlantic States with her children, it
is quite possible. Mrs. Randolph, as you have possibly noticed,” Mr.
Mallory went on, still patting his daughter's hand, “does not feel
entirely at home here, and will consequently leave the major free to
rearrange, by himself, the ranch on the new basis. In fact, as the
change must be made before the crops come in, she talks of going next
week. But if you like the place, Rose, I've no doubt the major and
Dawson will always find room for you and me when we run down there for a
little fresh air.”
“And did you have all that in your mind, papa, when you came down here,
and was that what you and Mr. Dawson wanted to talk about?” said the
astonished Rose.
“Mainly, my dear, mainly. You see I'm a capitalist now, and the
real value of capital is to know how and when to apply it to certain
conditions.”
“And this Mr.--Mr. Bent--do you think--he will go on and find the water,
papa?” said Rose, hesitatingly.
“Ah! Bent--Tom Bent--oh, yes,” said Mallory, with great heartiness.
“Capital fellow, Bent! and mighty ingenious! Glad you met him! Well,”
thoughtfully but still heartily, “he may not find it exactly where he
expected, but he'll find it or something better. We can't part with him,
and he has promised Dawson to stay. We'll utilize HIM, you may be sure.”
It would seem that they did, and from certain interviews and
conversations that took place between Mr. Bent and Miss Mallory on
a later visit, it would also appear that her father had exercised
a discreet reticence in regard to a certain experiment of the young
inventor, of which he had been an accidental witness.
A MAECENAS OF THE PACIFIC SLOPE
CHAPTER I
As Mr. Robert Rushbrook, known to an imaginative press as the “Maecenas
of the Pacific Slope,” drove up to his country seat, equally referred
to as a “palatial villa,” he cast a quick but practical look at the
pillared pretensions of that enormous shell of wood and paint and
plaster. The statement, also a reportorial one, that its site, the
Canyon of Los Osos, “some three years ago was disturbed only by the
passing tread of bear and wild-cat,” had lost some of its freshness as a
picturesque apology, and already successive improvements on the original
building seemingly cast the older part of the structure back to a hoary
antiquity. To many it stood as a symbol of everything Robert Rushbrook
did or had done--an improvement of all previous performances; it was
like his own life--an exciting though irritating state of transition to
something better. Yet the visible architectural result, as here shown,
was scarcely harmonious; indeed, some of his friends--and Maecenas had
many--professed to classify the various improvements by the successive
fortunate ventures in their owner's financial career, which had led
to new additions, under the names, of “The Comstock Lode Period,” “The
Union Pacific Renaissance,” “The Great Wheat Corner,” and “Water Front
Gable Style,” a humorous trifling that did not, however, prevent a few
who were artists from accepting Maecenas's liberal compensation for
their services in giving shape to those ideas.
Relinquishing to a groom his fast-trotting team, the second relay in his
two hours' drive from San Francisco, he leaped to the ground to meet the
architect, already awaiting his orders in the courtyard. With his eyes
still fixed upon the irregular building before him, he mingled his
greeting and his directions.
“Look here, Barker, we'll have a wing thrown out here, and a
hundred-foot ballroom. Something to hold a crowd; something that can be
used for music--sabe?--a concert, or a show.”
“Have you thought of any style, Mr. Rushbrook?” suggested the architect.
“No,” said Rushbrook; “I've been thinking of the time--thirty days, and
everything to be in. You'll stop to dinner. I'll have you sit near Jack
Somers. You can talk style to him. Say I told you.”
“You wish it completed in thirty days?” repeated the architect,
dubiously.
“Well, I shouldn't mind if it were less. You can begin at once. There's
a telegraph in the house. Patrick will take any message, and you can
send up to San Francisco and fix things before dinner.”
Before the man could reply, Rushbrook was already giving a hurried
interview to the gardener and others on his way to the front porch. In
another moment he had entered his own hall,--a wonderful temple of white
and silver plaster, formal, yet friable like the sugared erection of a
wedding cake,--where his major-domo awaited him.
“Well, who's here?” asked Rushbrook, still advancing towards his
apartments.
“Dinner is set for thirty, sir,” said the functionary, keeping step
demurely with his master, “but Mr. Appleby takes ten over to San
Mateo, and some may sleep there. The char-a-banc is still out and five
saddle-horses, to a picnic in Green Canyon, and I can't positively say,
but I should think you might count on seeing about forty-five guests
before you go to town to-morrow. The opera troupe seem to have not
exactly understood the invitation, sir.”
“How? I gave it myself.”
“The chorus and supernumeraries thought themselves invited too, sir, and
have come, I believe, sir. At least Signora Pegrelli and Madame Denise
said so, and that they would speak to you about it, but that meantime I
could put them up anywhere.”
“And you made no distinction, of course?”
“No, sir, I put them in the corresponding rooms opposite, sir. I don't
think the prima donnas like it.”
“Ah!”
“Yes, sir.”
Whatever was in their minds, the two men never changed their steady,
practical gravity of manner. The major-domo's appeared to be a subdued
imitation of his master's, worn, as he might have worn his master's
clothes, had he accepted, or Mr. Rushbrook permitted, such a
degradation. By this time they had reached the door of Mr. Rushbrook's
room, and the man paused. “I didn't include some guests of Mr. Leyton's,
sir, that he brought over here to show around the place, but he told me
to tell you he would take them away again, or leave them, as you liked.
They're some Eastern strangers stopping with him.”
“All right,” said Rushbrook, quietly, as he entered his own apartment.
It was decorated as garishly as the hall, as staring and vivid in color,
but wholesomely new and clean for all its paint, veneering, and plaster.
It was filled with heterogeneous splendor--all new and well kept, yet
with so much of the attitude of the show-room still lingering about
it that one almost expected to see the various articles of furniture
ticketed with their prices. A luxurious bed, with satin hangings and
Indian carved posts, standing ostentatiously in a corner, kept up this
resemblance, for in a curtained recess stood a worn camp bedstead,
Rushbrook's real couch, Spartan in its simplicity.
Mr. Rushbrook drew his watch from his pocket, and deliberately divested
himself of his boots, coat, waistcoat, and cravat. Then rolling himself
in a fleecy, blanket-like rug with something of the habitual dexterity
of a frontiersman, he threw himself on his couch, closed his eyes,
and went instantly to sleep. Lying there, he appeared to be a man
comfortably middle-aged, with thick iron-gray hair that might have
curled had he encouraged such inclination; a skin roughened and darkened
by external hardships and exposure, but free from taint of inner vice
or excess, and indistinctive features redeemed by a singularly handsome
mouth. As the lower part of the face was partly hidden by a dense but
closely-cropped beard, it is probable that the delicate outlines of his
lips had gained something from their framing.
He slept, through what seemed to be the unnatural stillness of the large
house,--a quiet that might have come from the lingering influence of
the still virgin solitude around it, as if Nature had forgotten the
intrusion, or were stealthily retaking her own; and later, through the
rattle of returning wheels or the sound of voices, which were, however,
promptly absorbed in that deep and masterful silence which was the
unabdicating genius of the canyon. For it was remarkable that even
the various artists, musicians, orators, and poets whom Maecenas had
gathered in his cool business fashion under that roof, all seemed to
become, by contrast with surrounding Nature, as new and artificial as
the house, and as powerless to assert themselves against its influence.
He was still sleeping when James re-entered the room, but awoke promptly
at the sound of his voice. In a few moments he had rearranged his
scarcely disordered toilette, and stepped out refreshed and observant
into the hall. The guests were still absent from that part of the
building, and he walked leisurely past the carelessly opened doors
of the rooms they had left. Everywhere he met the same glaring
ornamentation and color, the same garishness of treatment, the same
inharmonious extravagance of furniture, and everywhere the same troubled
acceptance of it by the inmates, or the same sense of temporary and
restricted tenancy. Dresses were hung over cheval glasses; clothes piled
up on chairs to avoid the use of doubtful and over ornamented wardrobes,
and in some cases more practical guests had apparently encamped in a
corner of their apartment. A gentleman from Siskyou--sole proprietor of
a mill patent now being considered by Maecenas--had confined himself to
a rocking-chair and clothes-horse as being trustworthy and familiar; a
bolder spirit from Yreka--in treaty for capital to start an independent
journal devoted to Maecenas's interests--had got a good deal out of, and
indeed all he had INTO, a Louis XVI. armoire; while a young painter from
Sacramento had simply retired into his adjoining bath-room, leaving the
glories of his bedroom untarnished. Suddenly he paused.
He had turned into a smaller passage in order to make a shorter cut
through one of the deserted suites of apartments that should bring him
to that part of the building where he designed to make his projected
improvement, when his feet were arrested on the threshold of a
sitting-room. Although it contained the same decoration and furniture
as the other rooms, it looked totally different! It was tasteful,
luxurious, comfortable, and habitable. The furniture seemed to have
fallen into harmonious position; even the staring decorations of the
walls and ceiling were toned down by sprays of laurel and red-stained
manzanito boughs with their berries, apparently fresh plucked from the
near canyon. But he was more unexpectedly impressed to see that the room
was at that moment occupied by a tall, handsome girl, who had paused
to take breath, with her hand still on the heavy centre-table she was
moving. Standing there, graceful, glowing, and animated, she looked the
living genius of the recreated apartment.