Produced by William Flis and the Online Distributed Proofreaders Team
IN EXILE
AND OTHER STORIES
By Mary Hallock Foote
CONTENTS.
IN EXILE
FRIEND BARTON'S “CONCERN”
THE STORY OF THE ALCÁZAR
A CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN
THE RAPTURE OF HETTY
THE WATCHMAN
IN EXILE
I.
Nicky Dyer and the schoolmistress sat upon the slope of a hill, one of a
low range overlooking an arid Californian valley. These sunburnt slopes
were traversed by many narrow footpaths, descending, ascending, winding
among the tangle of poison-oak and wild-rose bushes, leading from the
miners' cabins to the shaft-houses and tunnels of the mine which gave to
the hills their only importance. Nicky was a stout Cornish lad of thirteen,
with large light eyes that seemed mildly to protest against the sportive
relation which a broad, freckled, turned-up nose bore to the rest of his
countenance; he was doing nothing in particular, and did it as if he were
used to it. The schoolmistress sat with her skirts tucked round her ankles,
the heels of her stout little boots driven well into the dry, gritty
soil. There was in her attitude the tension of some slight habitual
strain--perhaps of endurance--as she leaned forward, her arms stretched
straight before her, with her delicate fingers interlocked. Whatever may
be the type of Californian young womanhood, it was not her type; you felt,
looking at her cool, clear tints and slight, straight outlines, that she
had winter in her blood.
She was gazing down into the valley, as one looks at a landscape who has
not yet mastered all its changes of expression; its details were blurred in
the hot, dusty glare; the mountains opposite had faded to a flat outline
against the indomitable sky. A light wind blew up the slope, flickering the
pale leaves of a manzanita, whose burnished, cinnamon-colored stems glowed
in the sun. As the breeze strengthened, the young girl stood up, lifting
her arms, to welcome its coolness on her bare wrists.
“Nicky, why do the trees in that hollow between the hills look so green?”
“There'll be water over there, miss; that's the Chilano's spring. I'm
thinkin' the old cow might 'a' strayed over that way somewheres; they
mostly goes for the water, wherever it is.”
“Is it running water, Nicky,--not water in a tank?”
“Why, no, miss; it cooms right out o' the rock as pretty as iver you saw!
I often goes there myself for a drink, cos it tastes sort o' different,
coomin' out o' the ground like. We wos used to that kind o' water at 'ome.”
“Let us go, Nicky,” said the girl. “I should like to taste that water, too.
Do we cross the hill first, or is there a shorter way?”
“Over the 'ill's the shortest, miss. It's a bit of a ways, but you've been
longer ways nor they for less at th' end on't.”
They “tacked” down the steepest part of the hill, and waded through a
shady hollow, where ferns grew rank and tall,--crisp, faded ferns, with an
aromatic odor which escaped by the friction of their garments, like the
perfume of warmed amber. They reached at length the green trees, a clump
of young cottonwoods at the entrance to a narrow cañon, and followed the
dry bed of a stream for some distance, until water began to show among the
stones. The principal outlet of the spring was on a small plantation at the
head of the cañon, rented of the “company” by a Chilian, or “the Chilano,”
as he was called; he was not at all a pastoral-looking personage, but, with
the aid of his good water, he earned a moderately respectable living by
supplying the neighboring cabins and the miners' boarding-house with green
vegetables. After a temporary disappearance, as if to purge its memory of
the Chilano's water-buckets, the spring again revealed itself in a thin,
clear trickle down the hollowed surface of a rock which closed the narrow
passage of the cañon. Young sycamores and cottonwoods shut out the sun
above; their tangled roots, interlaced with vines still green and growing,
trailed over the edge of the rock, where a mass of earth had fallen; green
moss lined the hollows of the rock, and water-plants grew in the dark pools
below.
The strollers had left behind them the heat and glare; only the breeze
followed them into this green stillness, stirring the boughs overhead and
scattering spots of sunlight over the wet stones. Nicky, after enjoying
for a few moments the schoolmistress' surprised delight, proposed that she
should wait for him at the spring, while he went “down along” in search
of his cow. Nicky was not without a certain awe of the schoolmistress, as
a part of creation he had not fathomed in all its bearings; but when they
rambled on the hills together, he found himself less uneasily conscious of
her personality, and more comfortably aware of the fact that, after all,
she was “nothin' but a woman.” He was a trifle disappointed that she showed
no uneasiness at being left alone, but consoled himself by the reflection
that she was “a good un to 'old 'er tongue,” and probably felt more than
she expressed.
The schoolmistress did not look in the least disconsolate after Nicky's
departure. She gazed about her very contentedly for a while, and then
prepared to help herself to a drink of water. She hollowed her two hands
into a cup, and waited for it to fill, stooping below the rock, her lifted
skirt held against her side by one elbow, while she watched with a childish
eagerness the water trickle into her pink palms. Miss Frances Newell had
never looked prettier in her life. A pretty girl is always prettier in
the open air, with her head uncovered. Her cheeks were red; the sun just
touched the roughened braids of dark brown hair, and intensified the glow
of a little ear which showed beneath. She stooped to drink; but Miss
Frances was destined never to taste that virgin cup of water. There was a
trampling among the bushes, overhead; a little shower of dust and pebbles
pattered down upon her bent head, soiling the water. She let her hands fall
as she looked up, with a startled “Oh!” A pair of large boots were rapidly
making their way down the bank, and the cause of all this disturbance stood
before her,--a young man in a canvas jacket, with a leathern case slung
across his shoulder, and a small tin lamp fastened in front of the hat
which he took off while he apologized to the girl for his intrusion.
“Miss Newell! Forgive me for dropping down on you like a thousand of brick!
You've found the spring, I see.”
Miss Frances stood with her elbows still pressed to her sides, though her
skirt had slipped down into the water, her wet palms helplessly extended.
“I was getting a drink,” she said, searching with the tips of her fingers
among the folds of her dress for a handkerchief. “You came just in time to
remind me of the slip between the cup and the lip.”
“I'm very sorry, but there is plenty of water left. I came for some myself.
Let me help you.” He took from one of the many pockets stitched into the
breast and sides of his jacket a covered flask, detached the cup, and,
after carefully rinsing, filled and handed it to the girl. “I hope it
doesn't taste of 'store claret;' the water underground is just a shade
worse than that exalted vintage.”
“It is delicious, thank you, and it doesn't taste in the least of claret.
Have you just come out of the mine?”
“Yes. It is measuring-up day. I've been toddling through the drifts and
sliding down chiflons”--he looked ruefully at the backs of his trousers
legs--“ever since seven o'clock this morning. Haven't had time to eat any
luncheon yet, you see.” He took from another pocket a small package folded
in a coarse napkin. “I came here to satisfy the pangs of hunger and enjoy
the beauties of nature at the same time,--such nature as we have here. Will
you excuse me, Miss Newell? I'll promise to eat very fast.”
“I'll excuse you if you will not ask me to eat with you.”
“Oh, I've entirely too much consideration for myself to think of such a
thing; there isn't enough for two.”
He seated himself, with a little sigh, and opened the napkin on the ground
before him. Miss Newell stood leaning against a rock on the opposite side
of the brook, regarding the young man with a shy and smiling curiosity.
“Meals,” he continued, “are a reckless tribute to the weakness of the flesh
we all engage in three times a day at the boarding-house; a man must eat,
you know, if he expects to live. Have you ever tried any of Mrs. Bondy's
fare, Miss Newell?”
“I'm sure Mrs. Bondy tries to have everything very nice,” the young girl
replied, with some embarrassment.
“Of course she does; she is a very good old girl. I think a great deal of
Mrs. Bondy; but when she asks me if I have enjoyed my dinner, I always make
a point of telling her the truth; she respects me for it. This is her idea
of sponge cake, you see.” He held up admiringly a damp slab of some compact
pale-yellow substance, with crumbs of bread adhering to one side. “It is a
little mashed, but otherwise a fair specimen.”
Miss Frances laughed. “Mr. Arnold, I think you are too bad. How can she
help it, with those dreadful Chinamen? But I would really advise you not to
eat that cake; it doesn't look wholesome.”
“Oh, as to that, I've never observed any difference; one thing is about
as wholesome as another. Did you ever eat bacon fried by China Sam? The
sandwiches were made of that. You see I still live.” The sponge cake was
rapidly disappearing. “Miss Newell, you look at me as if I were making away
with myself, instead of the cake,--will you appear at the inquest?”
“No, I will not testify to anything so unromantic; besides, it might be
inconvenient for Mrs. Bondy's cook.” She put on her hat, and stepped along
the stones towards the entrance to the glen.
“You are not going to refuse me the last offices?”
“I am going to look for Nicky Dyer. He came with me to show me the spring,
and now he has gone to hunt for his cow.”
“And you are going to hunt for him? I hope you won't try it, Miss Frances:
a boy on the track of a cow is a very uncertain object in life. Let me call
him, if you really must have him.”
“Oh, don't trouble yourself. I suppose he will come after a while. I said I
would wait for him here.”
“Then permit me to say that I think you had better do as you promised.”
Miss Frances recrossed the stones, and seated herself, with a faint
deprecatory smile.
“I hope you don't mind if I stay,” Arnold said, moving some loose stones to
make her seat more comfortable. “You have the prior right to-day, but this
is an old haunt of mine. I feel as if I were doing the honors; and to tell
you the truth, I am rather used up. The new workings are very hot and the
drifts are low. It's a combination of steam-bath and hoeing corn.”
The girl's face cleared, as she looked at him. His thin cheek was pale
under the tan, and where his hat was pushed back the hair clung in damp
points to his forehead and temples.
“I should be very sorry to drive you away,” she said. “I thought you looked
tired. If you want to go to sleep, or anything, I will promise to be very
quiet.”
Arnold laughed. “Oh, I'm not such an utter wreck; but I'm glad you can be
very quiet. I was afraid you might be a little uproarious at times, you
know.”
The girl gave a sudden shy laugh. It was really a giggle, but a very sweet,
girlish giggle. It called up a look of keen pleasure to Arnold's face.
“Now I call this decidedly gay,” he remarked, stretching out his long legs
slowly, and leaning against a slanting rock, with one arm behind his head.
“Miss Frances, will you be good enough to tell me that my face isn't
dirty?”
“Truth compels me to admit that you have one little daub over your left
eyebrow.”
“Thank you,” said Arnold, rubbing it languidly with his handkerchief. His
hat had dropped off, and he did not replace it; he did not look at the
girl, but let his eyes rest on the thread of falling water that gleamed
from the spring. Miss Frances, regarding him with some timidity, thought:
How much younger he looks without his hat! He had that sensitive fairness
which in itself gives a look of youth and purity; the sternness of his
face lay in the curves which showed under his mustache, and in the silent,
dominant eye.
“You've no idea how good it sounds to a lonely fellow like me,” he said,
“to hear a girl's laugh.”
“But there are a great many women here,” Miss Frances observed.
“Oh yes, there are women everywhere, such as they are; but it takes a nice
girl, a lady, to laugh!”
“I don't agree with you at all,” replied Miss Frances coldly. “Some of
those Mexican women have the sweetest voices, speaking or laughing, that I
have ever heard; and the Cornish women, too, have very fresh, pure voices.
I often listen to them in the evening when I sit alone in my room. Their
voices sound so happy”--
“Well, then it is the home accent,--or I'm prejudiced. Don't laugh again,
please, Miss Frances; it breaks me all up.” He moved his head a little, and
looked across at the girl to assure himself that her silence did not mean
disapproval. “I admit,” he went on, “that I like our Eastern girls. I know
you are from the East, Miss Newell.”
“I am from what I used to think was East,” she said, smiling. “But
everything is East here; people from Indiana and Wisconsin say they are
from the East.”
“Ah, but you are from our old Atlantic coast. I was sure of it when I first
saw you. If you will pardon me, I knew it by your way of dressing.”
The young girl flushed with pleasure; then, with a reflective air: “I
confess myself, since you speak of clothes, to a feeling of relief when I
saw your hat the first Sunday after I came. Western men wear such dreadful
hats.”
“Good!” he cried gayly. “You mean my hat that I _call_ a hat.” He reached
for the one behind his head, and spun it lightly upward, where it settled
on a projecting branch. “I respect that hat myself,--my _other_ hat, I
mean; I'm trying to live up to it. Now, let me guess your State, Miss
Newell: is it Massachusetts?”
“No,--Connecticut; but at this distance it seems like the same thing.”
“Oh, pardon me, there are very decided differences. I'm from Massachusetts
myself. Perhaps the points of difference show more in the women,--the ones
who stay at home, I mean, and become more local and idiomatic than the men.
You are not one of the daughters of the soil, Miss Newell.”
She looked pained as she said, “I wish I were; but there is not room for us
all, where there is so little soil.”
Arnold moved uneasily, extracted a stone from under the small of his
back and tossed it out of sight with some vehemence. “You think it goes
rather hard with women who are uprooted, then,” he said. “I suppose it is
something a roving man can hardly conceive of,--a woman's attachment to
places, and objects, and associations; they are like cats.”
Miss Newell was silent.
Arnold moved restlessly; then began again, with his eyes still on the
trickle of water: “Miss Newell, do you remember a poem--I think it is
Bryant's--called 'The Hunter of the Prairies'? It's no disgrace not to
remember it, and it may not be Bryant's.”
“I remember seeing it, but I never read it. I always skipped those Western
things.”
Arnold gave a short laugh, and said, “Well, you are punished, you see, by
going West yourself to hear me repeat it to you. I think I can give you the
idea in the Hunter's own words:--
“'Here, with my rifle and my steed,
And her who left the world for me'”--
The sound of his own voice in the stillness of the little glen, and a look
of surprise in the young girl's quiet eyes, brought a sudden access of
color to Arnold's face. “Hm-m-m,” he murmured to himself, “it's queer how
rhymes slip away. Well, the last line ends in _free_. You see, it is a
man's idea of happiness,--a young man's. Now, how do you suppose _she_
liked it,--the girl, you know, who left the world, and all that? Did you
ever happen to see a poem or a story, written by a woman, celebrating the
joys of a solitary existence with the man of her heart?”
“I suppose that many a woman has tried it,” Miss Newell said evasively,
“but I'm sure she”--
“Never lived to tell the tale?” cried Arnold.
“She probably had something else to do, while the hunter was riding around
with his gun,” Miss Frances continued.
“Well, give her the odds of the rifle and the steed; give the man some
commonplace employment to take the swagger out of him; let him come home
reasonably tired and cross at night,--do you suppose he would find the
'kind' eyes and the 'smile'? I forgot to tell you that the Hunter of the
Prairies is always welcomed by a smile at night.”
“He must have been an uncommonly fortunate man,” she said.
“Of course he was; but the question is: Could any living man be so
fortunate? Come, Miss Frances, don't prevaricate!”
“Well, am I speaking for the average woman?”
“Oh, not at all,--you are speaking for the very nicest of women; any other
kind would be intolerable on a prairie.”
“I should think, if she were very healthy,” said Miss Newell, hesitating
between mischief and shyness, “and not too imaginative, and of a cheerful
disposition; and if he, the hunter, were above the average,--supposing that
she cared for him in the beginning,--I should think the smile might last a
year or two.”
“Heavens, what a cynic you are! I feel like a mere daub of sentiment beside
you. There have been moments, do you know, even in this benighted mining
camp, when I have believed in that hunter and his smile!”
He got up suddenly, and stood against the rock, facing her. Although he
kept his cool, bantering tone, his breathing had quickened, and his eyes
looked darker.
“You may consider me a representative man, if you please: I speak for
hundreds of us scattered about in mining camps and on cattle ranches, in
lighthouses and frontier farms and military posts, and all the Godforsaken
holes you can conceive of, where men are trying to earn a living, or lose
one,--we are all going to the dogs for the want of that smile! What is to
become of us if the women whose smiles we care for cannot support life in
the places where we have to live? Come, Miss Frances, can't you make that
smile last at least two years?” He gathered a handful of dry leaves from a
broken branch above his head and crushed them in his long hands, sifting
the yellow dust upon the water below.
“The places you speak of are very different,” the girl answered, with
a shade of uneasiness in her manner. “A mining camp is anything but a
solitude, and a military post may be very gay.”
“Oh, the principle is the same. It is the absolute giving up of everything.
You know most women require a background of family and friends and
congenial surroundings; the question is whether _any_ woman can do without
them.”
The young girl moved in a constrained way, and flushed as she said, “It
must always be an experiment, I suppose, and its success would depend, as I
said before, on the woman and on the man.”
“An 'experiment' is good!” said Arnold, rather savagely. “I see you won't
say anything you can't swear to.”
“I really do not see that I am called upon to say anything on the subject
at all!” said the girl, rising and looking at him across the brook with
indignant eyes and a hot glow on her cheek.
He did not appear to notice her annoyance.
“You are, because you know something about it, and most women don't: your
testimony is worth something. How long have you been here,--a year? I
wonder how it seems to a woman to live in a place like this a year! I hate
it all, you know,--I've seen so much of it. But is there really any beauty
here? I suppose beauty, and all that sort of thing, is partly within us,
isn't it?--at least, that's what the goody little poems tell us.”
“I think it is very beautiful here,” said Miss Frances, softening, as he
laid aside his strained manner, and spoke more quietly. “It is the kind
of place a happy woman might be very happy in; but if she were
sad--or--disappointed”--
“Well?” said Arnold, pulling at his mustache, and fixing a rather gloomy
gaze upon her.
“She would die of it! I really do not think there would be any hope for her
in a place like this.”
“But if she were happy, as you say,” persisted the young man, “don't
you think her woman's adaptability and quick imagination would help her
immensely? She wouldn't see what I, for instance, know to be ugly and
coarse; her very ignorance of the world would help her.”
There was a vague, pleading look in his eyes. “Arrange it to suit
yourself,” she said. “Only, I can assure you, if anything should happen to
her, it will be the--the hunter's fault.”
“All right,” said he, rousing himself. “That hunter, if I know him, is a
man who is used to taking risks! Where are you going?”
“I thought I heard Nicky.”
They were both silent, and as they listened, footsteps, with a tinkling
accompaniment, crackled among the bushes below the cañon. Miss Newell
turned towards the spring again. “I want one more drink before I go,” she
said.
Arnold followed her. “Let us drink to our return. Let this be our fountain
of Trevi.”
“Oh, no,” said Miss Frances. “Don't you remember what your favorite Bryant
says about bringing the 'faded fancies of an elder world' into these
'virgin solitudes'?”
“Faded fancies!” cried Arnold. “Do you call that a faded fancy? It is as
fresh and graceful as youth itself, and as natural. I should have thought
of it myself, if there had been no fountain of Trevi.”
“Do you think so?” smiled the girl. “Then imagination, it would seem, is
not entirely confined to homesick women.”
“Come, fill the cup, Miss Frances! Nicky is almost here.”
The girl held her hands beneath the trickle again, until they were brimming
with the clear sweet water.
“Drink first,” said Arnold.
“I'm not sure that I want to return,” she replied, smiling, with her eyes
on the space of sky between the treetops.
“Nonsense,--you must be morbid. Drink, drink!”
“Drink yourself; the water is all running away!”
He bent his head, and took a vigorous sip of the water, holding his hands
beneath hers, inclosing the small cup in the larger one. The small cup
trembled a little. He was laughing and wiping his mustache, when Nicky
appeared; and Miss Frances, suddenly brightening and recovering her freedom
of movement, exclaimed, “Why, Nicky! You have been _forever_! We must go at
once, Mr. Arnold; so good-by! I hope”--
She did not say what she hoped, and Arnold, after looking at her with an
interrogative smile a moment, caught his hat from the branch overhead, and
made her a great flourishing bow with it in his hand.
He did not follow her, pushing her way through the swaying, rustling ferns,
but he watched her light figure out of sight. “What an extraordinary ass
I've been making of myself!” He confided this remark to the stillness of
the little cañon, and then, with long strides, took his way over the hills
in an opposite direction.
It was the middle of July when this little episode of the spring occurred.
The summer had reached its climax. The dust did not grow perceptibly
deeper, nor the fields browner, during the long brazen weeks that followed;
one only wearied of it all, more and more.
So thought Miss Newell, at least. It was her second summer in California,
and the phenomenon of the dry season was not so impressive on its
repetition. She had been surprised to observe how very brief had been the
charm of strangeness, in her experience of life in a new country. She began
to wonder if a girl, born and brought up among the hills of Connecticut,
could have the seeds of _ennui_ subtly distributed through her frame, to
reach a sudden development in the heat of a Californian summer. She longed
for the rains to begin, that in their violence and the sound of the wind
she might gain a sense of life in action by which to eke out her dull and
expressionless days. She was, as Nicky Dyer had said, “a good un to 'old
'er tongue,” and therein lay her greatest strength as well as her greatest
danger.
Miss Newell boarded at Captain Dyer's. The prosperous ex-mining captain
was a good deal nearer to the primitive type than any man Miss Newell had
ever sat at table with in her life before, but she had a thorough respect
for him, and she felt that the time might come when she could enjoy
him--as a reminiscence. Mrs. Dyer was kindly, and not more of a gossip
than her neighbors; and there were no children,--only one grandchild,
the inoffensive Nicky. The ways of the house were somewhat uncouth, but
everything was clean and in a certain sense homelike. To Miss Newell's
homesick sensitiveness it seemed better than being stared at across the
boarding-house table by Boker and Pratt, and pitied by the engineer. She
had a little room at the Dyers', which was a reflection of herself so far
as a year's occupancy and very moderate resources could make it; perhaps
for that very reason she often found her little room an intolerable prison.
One night her homesickness had taken its worst form, a restlessness, which
began in a nervous inward throbbing and extended to her cold and tremulous
finger-tips. She went softly downstairs and out on the piazza, where the
moonlight lay in a brilliant square on the unpainted boards. The moonlight
increased her restlessness, but she could not keep away from it. She dared
not walk up and down the piazza, because the people in the street below
would see her; she stood there perfectly still, holding her elbows with her
hands, crouched into a little dark heap against the side of the house.
Lights were twinkling, far and near, over the hills, singly, and in
clusters. Black figures moved across the moonlit spaces in the street.
There were sounds of talking, laughing, and singing; dogs barking;
occasionally a stir and tinkle in the scrub, as a cow wandered past. The
engines throbbed from the distant shaft-houses. A miner's wife was hushing
her baby in the next house, and across the street a group of Mexicans were
talking all at once in a loud, monotonous cadence.
In her early days at the mines there had been a certain piquancy in her
sense of the contrast between herself and her circumstances, but that had
long passed into a dreary recognition of the fact that she had no real part
in the life of the place.
She recalled one afternoon when Arnold had passed the schoolhouse, and
found her sitting alone on the doorstep. He had stopped to ask if that
“mongrel pack on the hill were worrying the life out of her,” and had added
with a laugh, in answer to her look of silent disapproval, “Oh, I mean the
dear lambs of your flock. I saw two of them just now on the trail, fighting
over a lame donkey. The clans were gathering on both sides; there will be
a pitched battle in a few minutes. The donkey was enjoying it. I think
he was asleep!” The day had been an unusually hard one, and the patient
little schoolmistress was just then struggling with a distracted sense of
unavailing effort. Arnold's grim banter had brought the tears, as blood
follows a blow. He got down from his horse, looking wretched at what he had
done. “I am a brute, I believe,--worse than any of the pack. You have so
much patience with them,--please have a little with me. Trust me, I am not
utterly blind to your sufferings. Indeed, Miss Newell, I see them, and they
make me savage!” With the gentlest touch he had lifted her hand, held it in
his a moment, and then had mounted his horse and ridden away.
Yes, he _did_ understand,--she felt sure of that. What an unutterable rest
it would be if she could go to some one with the small worries of her life!
But she could not yield to such impulses. It was different with men. She
had often thought of Arnold's words that day at the spring, all the more
that he had never, before or since, revealed so much of himself to her.
Under an apparently careless frankness and extravagance of speech he was a
reticent man; but lightly spoken as the words had been, were they not the
sparks and ashes blown from a deep and smothered core of fire? She seemed
to feel its glow on her cheek as she recalled his singular persistence and
the darkening of his imperious eyes. No, she would not permit herself to
think of that day at the spring.
There was a bright light in the engineer's office across the street. She
could see Arnold through the windows (for, like a man, he did not pull his
shades down) at one of the long drawing-tables. He worked late, it seemed.
He was writing; he wrote rapidly page after page, tearing each sheet from
what appeared to be a paper block, and tossing it on the table beside him;
he covered only one side of the paper, she noticed, thinking with a smile
of her own small economies. Presently he got up, swept the papers together
in his hands, and stooped over them. He is numbering and folding them,
she thought, and now he is directing the envelope,--to whom, I wonder!
He turned, and as he walked towards the window she saw him put something
into the pocket of his coat. He lighted a cigar, and began walking, with
long strides, up and down the room, one hand in his pocket; the other
he occasionally rubbed over his eyes and head, as if they hurt him. She
remembered that the engineer had headaches, and wished that somebody would
ask him to try valerian. Is he ever really lonely? she thought. What can
he, what can any man, know of loneliness? He may go out and walk about on
the hills; he may go away altogether, and take the risks of life somewhere
else. A woman must take no risks. There is not a house in the camp where
he might not enter to-night, if he chose; he might come over here and
talk to me. The East, with all its cherished memories and prejudices and
associations, seemed so hopelessly far away; they two alone, in that
strange, uncongenial new world which had crowded out the old, seemed to
speak a common language: and yet how little she really knew of him!
Suddenly the lights disappeared from the windows of the office. She heard
a door unlock, and presently the young man's figure crossed the street and
turned up the trail past the house.
Two other figures going up halted, and the taller one said, “Will you go up
on the hill, to-night, Arnold?”
“What for?” said Arnold, slackening his pace without stopping.
“Oh, nothing in particular,--to see the señoritas.”
“Oh, thank you, Boker, I've seen the señoritas.”
He walked quickly past the men, and the shorter one, who had not spoken,
called after him rather huskily,--
“W-what do you think of the little school-ma'am?”
Arnold turned back and confronted the speaker in silence.
“I say! Is she thin 'nough to suit you?” the heavy-playful one persisted.
“Shut up, Jack!” said his comrade. “You're a little high now, you know.”
He dragged him on, up the trail; the voices of the two men blended with the
night chorus of the camp as they passed out of sight.
Miss Newell sat perfectly still for a while; then she went to her room, and
threw herself down on the bed, listening to an endless mental repetition of
those words that the faithless night had brought to her ear. The moonlight
had left the piazza, and crept round to the side of the house; it shone
in at the window, touching the girl's cold fingers pressed to her burning
cheeks and temples. She got up, drew the curtain, and groped her way back
to the bed, where she lay for hours, trying to convince herself that her
misery was out of all proportion to the cause, and that those coarse words
could make no real difference in her life.
They did make a little difference: they loosened the slight, indefinite
threads of intercourse which a year had woven between these two exiles.
Miss Newell was prepared to withdraw from any further overtures of
friendship from the engineer; but he made it unnecessary for her to do
so,--he made no overtures. On the night of Pratt's tipsy salutation he had
abruptly decided that a mining camp was no place for a nice girl, with no
acknowledged masculine protector. In Miss Newell's circumstances a girl
must be left entirely alone, or exposed to the gossip of the camp. He
knew very well which she would choose, and so he kept away,--though at
considerable loss to himself, he felt. It made him cross to watch her
pretty figure going up the trail every morning and to reflect that so much
sweetness and refinement should not be having its ameliorating influence on
his own barren and somewhat defiant existence.
II.
The autumn rains set in early, and the winter was unusually severe. Arnold
had a purpose which kept him hard at work and very happy in those days.
During the long December nights he was shut up in his office, plodding
over his maps and papers, or smoking in dreamy comfort by the fire. He was
seldom interrupted, for he had earned the character of a social ingrate and
hardened recluse in the camp. He had earned it quite unconsciously, and
was as little troubled by the fact as by its consequences. On the evening
of New Year's Day he crossed the street to the Dyers' and asked for Miss
Newell. She presently greeted him in the parlor, where she looked, Arnold
thought, more than ever out of place, among the bead baskets, and splint
frames inclosing photographs of deceased members of the Dyer family, and
the pallid walls, weak-legged chairs, and crude imaginings in worsted work.
Her apparent unconsciousness of these abominations was another source of
irritation. It is always irritating to a man to see a charming woman in an
unhappy and false position, where he is powerless to help her. Arnold had
not expected that it would be a very exhilarating occasion,--he remembered
the Dyer parlor,--but it was even less pleasant than he had expected. He
sat down, carefully, in a glued chair whose joints had opened with the
dry season and refused to close again; he did not know where the transfer
of his person might end. Captain Dyer was present, and told a great many
stories in a loud, tiring voice. Miss Frances sat by with some soft white
knitting in her hands, and her attitude of patient attention made Arnold
long to attack her with some savage pleasantries on the subject of
Christmas in a mining camp; it seemed to him that patience was a virtue
that could be carried too far, even in woman. Then Mrs. Dyer came in, and
manoeuvred her husband out into the passage; after some loudly suggestive
whispering there, she succeeded in getting him into the kitchen, and shut
the door. Arnold got up soon after that, and said good-evening.
Miss Newell remained in the parlor for some time, after he had gone, moving
softly about. She had gathered her knitting closely into her clasped hands;
the ball trailed after her, among the legs of the chairs, and when in
her silent promenade she had spun a grievous tangle of wool she sat down,
and dropped the work out of her hands with a helpless gesture. Her head
drooped, and tears trickled slowly between the slender white fingers
which covered her face. Presently the fingers descended to her throat and
clasped it close, as if to still an intolerable throbbing ache which her
half-suppressed tears had left.
At length she rose, picked up her work, and patiently followed the tangled
clue until she had recovered her ball; then she wound it all up neatly,
wrapped the knitting in a thin white handkerchief, and went to her room.
With the fine March weather--fine in spite of the light rains--the engineer
was laying out a road to the new shaft; it wound along the hillside where
Miss Newell had first seen the green trees, by the spring. The engineer's
orders included the building of a flume, carrying the water down from the
Chilano's plantation into a tank, built on the ruins of the rock which had
guarded the sylvan spring. The discordant voices of a gang of Chinamen
profaned the stillness which had framed Miss Frances' girlish laughter;
the blasting of the rock had loosened, to their fall, the clustering trees
above, and the brook below was a mass of trampled mud.
The engineer's visits to the spring gave him no pleasure, in those days. He
felt that he was the inevitable instrument of its desecration; but over the
hill, just in sight from the spring, carpenters were putting a new piazza
round a cottage that stood remote from the camp, where a spur of the hills
descended steeply towards the valley. Arnold took a great interest in this
cottage. He was frequently to be seen there in the evening, tramping up and
down the new piazza, and offering to the moon, that looked in through the
boughs of a live-oak at the end of the gallery, the incense of his lonely
cigar. Sometimes he would take the key of the front door from his pocket,
enter the silent house, and wander from one room to another, like a
restless but not unhappy ghost; the moonlight, touching his face, showed it
strangely stirred and softened. His was no melancholy madness.
Arnold was leaning on the gate of this cottage, one afternoon, when the
schoolmistress came down the trail from the camp. She did not appear to see
him, but turned off from the trail at a little distance from the cottage,
and took her way across the hill behind it. Arnold watched her a few
minutes, and then followed, overtaking her on the hills above the new road,
where she had sat with Nicky Dyer nearly a year ago.
“I don't like to see you wandering about here, alone,” he said. “The men on
the road are a scratch gang, picked up anyhow, not like the regular miners.
I hope you are not going to the spring!”
“Why?” said she. “Did you not drink to our return?”
“But you would not drink with me, so the spell did not work; and now the
spring is gone,--all its beauty, I mean. The water is there, in a tank,
where the Chinamen fill their buckets night and morning, and the teamsters
water their horses. We'll go over there, if you would like to see the march
of modern improvements.”
“No,” she said; “I had rather remember it as it was; still, I don't believe
in being sentimental about such things. Let us sit down a while.”
A vague depression, which Arnold had been aware of in her manner when they
met, became suddenly manifest in her paleness and in a look of dull pain in
her eyes.
“But you are hurt about it,” he said. “I wish I hadn't told you in that
brutal way. I'm afraid I'm not many degrees removed from the primeval
savage, after all.”
“Oh, you needn't mind,” she said, after a moment. “That was the only place
I cared for, here, so now there will be nothing to regret when I go away.”
“Are you going away, then? I'm very sorry to hear it; but of course I'm
not surprised. You couldn't be expected to stand it another year; those
children must have been something fearful.”
“Oh, it wasn't the children.”
“Well, I'm sorry. I had hoped”--
“Yes,” said she, with a modest interrogation, as he hesitated, “what is it
you had hoped?”
“That I might indirectly be the means of making your life less lonely here.
You remember that 'experiment' we talked about at the spring?”
“That _you_ talked about, you mean.”
“I am going to try it myself. Not because you were so
encouraging,--but--it's a risk anyway, you know, and I'm not sure the
circumstances make so much difference. I've known people to be wretched
with all the modern conveniences. I am going East for her in about two
weeks. How sorry she will be to find you gone! I wrote to her about you.
You might have helped each other; couldn't you stand it, Miss Newell, don't
you think, if you had another girl?”
“I'm afraid not,” she said very gently. “I _must_ go home. You may be sure
she will not need me; you must see to it that she doesn't need--any one.”
They were walking back and forth on the hill.
“I was just looking for the cottonwood-trees; are they gone too?” she
asked.
“Oh yes; there isn't a tree left in the cañon. Don't you envy me my work?”
“I suppose everything we do seems like desecration to somebody. Here am I
making history very rapidly for this colony of ants.” She looked down with
a rueful smile as she spoke.
“I wish you had the history of the entire species under your foot, and
could finish it at once.”
“I'm not sure that I would; I'm not so fond of extermination as you pretend
to be.”
“Well, keep the ants if you like them, but I am firm on the subject of
the camp children. There _are_ blessings that brighten as they take their
flight. I pay my monthly assessment for the doctor with the greatest
cheerfulness; if it wasn't for him, in this climate, they would crowd us
off the hill.”
“Please don't!” she said wearily. “Even _I_ don't like to hear you talk
like that; I am sure _she_ will not.”
He laughed softly. “You have often reminded me of her in little ways: that
was what upset me at the spring. I was very near telling you all about her
that day.”
“I wish that you had!” she said. They were walking towards home now. “I
suppose you know it is talked of in the camp,” she said, after a pause.
“Mr. Dyer told me, and showed me the house, a week ago. And now I must tell
you about my violets. I had them in a box in my room all winter. I should
like to leave them as a little welcome to her. Last night Nicky Dyer and
I planted them on the bank by the piazza under the climbing-rose; it was
a secret between Nicky and me, and Nicky promised to water them until she
came; but of course I meant to tell you. Will you look at them to-night,
please, and see if Nicky has been faithful?”
“I will, indeed,” said Arnold. “That is just the kind of thing she
will delight in. If you are going East, Miss Newell, shall we not be
fellow-travelers? I should be so glad to be of any service.”
“No, thank you. I am to spend a month in Santa Barbara, and escort an
invalid friend home. I shall have to say good-by, now. Don't go any farther
with me, please.”
That night Arnold mused late, leaning over the railing of the new piazza
in the moonlight. He fancied that a faint perfume of violets came from the
damp earth below; but it could have been only fancy, for when he searched
the bank for them they were not there. The new sod was trampled, and a few
leaves and slight, uptorn roots lay scattered about, with some broken twigs
from the climbing-rose. He had found the gate open when he came, and the
Dyer cow had passed him, meandering peacefully up the trail.
* * * * *
The crescent moon had waxed and waned since the night when it lighted the
engineer's musings through the wind-parted live-oak boughs, and another
slender bow gleamed in the pale, tinted haze of twilight. The month had
gone, like a feverish dream, to the young schoolmistress, as she lay in her
small, upper chamber, unconscious of all save alternate light and darkness,
and rest following pain. When, at last, she crept down the short staircase
to breathe the evening coolness, clinging to the stair-rail and holding her
soft white draperies close around her, she saw the pink light lingering
on the mountains, and heard the chorus to the “Sweet By and By” from the
miners' chapel on the hill. It was Sunday evening, and the house was
piously “emptied of its folk.” She took her old seat by the parlor window,
and looked across to the engineer's office; its windows and doors were
shut, and the dogs of the camp were chasing each other over the loose
boards of the piazza floor. She laughed a weak, convulsive laugh, thinking
of the engineer's sallies of old upon that band of Ishmaelites, and of the
scrambling, yelping rush that followed. He must have gone East, else the
dogs had not been so bold. She looked down the valley where the mountains
parted seaward, the only break in the continuous barrier of land that cut
off her retreat and closed in about the atom of her own identity. The
thought of that immensity of distance made her faint.
There were steps on the porch,--not Captain Dyer's, for he and his good
wife were lending their voices to swell the stentorian chorus that was
shaking the church on the hill; the footsteps paused at the door, and
Arnold himself opened it. He had not, evidently, expected to see her.
“I was looking for some one to ask about you,” he said. “Are you sure you
are able to be down?”
“Oh yes. I've been sitting up for several days. I wanted to see the
mountains again.”
He was looking at her intently, while she flushed with weakness, and drew
the fringes of her shawl over her tremulous hands.
“How ill you have been! I have wished myself a woman, that I might do
something for you! I suppose Mrs. Dyer nursed you like a horse.”
“Oh no; she was very good; but I don't remember much about the worst of it.
I thought you had gone home.”
“Home! Where do you mean? I didn't know that I had ever boasted of any
reserved rights of that kind. I have no mortgage, in fact or sentiment, on
any part of the earth's surface, that I'm acquainted with!”
He spoke with a hard carelessness in his manner which make her shrink.
“I mean the East. I am homeless, too, but all the East seems like home to
me.”
“You had better get rid of those sentimental, backward fancies as soon as
possible. The East concerns itself very little about us, I can tell you! It
can spare us.”
She thrilled with pain at his words. “I should think you would be the last
one to say so,--you, who have so much treasure there.”
“Will you please to understand,” he said, turning upon her a face of bitter
calmness, “that I claim no treasure anywhere,--not even in heaven!”
She sat perfectly still, conscious that by some fatality of helpless
incomprehension every word that she said goaded him, and she feared to
speak again.
“Now I have hurt you,” he said in his gentlest voice. “I am always hurting
you. I oughtn't to come near you with my rough edges! I'll go away now, if
you will tell me that you forgive me!”
She smiled at him without speaking, while her fair throat trembled with a
pulse of pain.
“Will you let me take your hand a moment? It is so long since I have
touched a woman's hand! God! how lonely I am! Don't look at me in that way;
don't pity me, or I shall lose what little manhood I have left!”
“What is it?” she said, leaning towards him. “There is something strange in
your face. If you are in trouble, tell me; it will help me to hear it. I am
not so very happy myself.”
“Why should I add my load to yours? I seem always to impose myself upon
you, first my hopes, and now my--no, it isn't despair; it is only a kind
of brutal numbness. You must have the fatal gift of sympathy, or you would
never have seen my little hurt.”
Miss Frances was not strong enough to bear the look in his eyes as he
turned them upon her, with a dreary smile. She covered her face with one
hand, while she whispered,--
“Is it--you have not lost her?”
“Yes! Or, rather, I never had her. I've been dreaming like a boy all these
years,--'In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter.'”
“It is not death, then?”
“No, she is not dead. She is not even false; that is, not very false. How
can I tell you how little it is, and yet how much! She is only a trifle
selfish. Why shouldn't she be? Why should we men claim the exclusive right
to choose the best for ourselves? It was selfish of me to ask her to share
such a life as mine; and she has gently and reasonably reminded me that
I'm not worth the sacrifice. It's quite true. I always knew I wasn't. She
put it very delicately and sweetly;--she's the sweetest girl you ever saw.
She'd marry me to-morrow if I could add myself, such as I am,--she doesn't
overrate me,--to what she has already; but an exchange she wasn't prepared
for. In all my life I never was so clearly estimated, body and soul. I
don't blame her, you understand. When I left her, three years ago, I saw my
way easily enough to a reputation, and an income, and a home in the East;
she never thought of anything else; I never taught her to look for anything
else. I dare say she rather enjoyed having a lover working for her in the
unknown West; she enjoyed the pretty letters she wrote me; but when it came
to the bare bones of existence in a mining camp, with a husband not very
rich or very distinguished, she had nothing to clothe them with. You said
once that to be happy here a woman must not have too much imagination; she
hadn't quite enough. I had to be dead honest with her when I asked her to
come. I told her there was nothing here but the mountains and the sunsets,
and a few items of picturesqueness which count with some people. Of course
I had to tell her I was but little better off than when I left. A man's
experience is something he cannot set forth at its value to himself; she
passed it over as a word of no practical meaning. There her imagination
failed her again. She took me frankly at my own estimate; and in justice to
her I must say I put myself at the lowest figures. I made a very poor show
on paper.”
“You wrote to her!” exclaimed Miss Frances. “You did not go on? Oh, you
have made a great mistake! Do go: it cannot be too late. Letters are the
most untrusty things!”