IF Leroy Brainard had not had such a respect for literature, he would
have written a book.
As it was, he played at being an architect--and succeeded in being a
charming fellow. My sister Jessica never lost an opportunity of laughing
at his endeavors as an architect.
“You can build an enchanting villa, but what would you do with a
cathedral?”
“I shall never have a chance at a cathedral,” he would reply. “And,
besides, it always seems to me so material and so impertinent to build a
little structure of stone and wood in which to worship God!”
You see what he was like? He was frivolous, yet one could never tell
when he would become eloquently earnest.
Brainard went off suddenly Westward one day. I suspected that Jessica
was at the bottom of it, but I asked no questions; and I did not hear
from him for months. Then I got a letter from Colorado.
“I have married a mountain woman,” he wrote. “None of your puny breed
of modern femininity, but a remnant left over from the heroic ages,--a
primitive woman, grand and vast of spirit, capable of true and steadfast
wifehood. No sophistry about her; no knowledge even that there is
sophistry. Heavens! man, do you remember the rondeaux and triolets I
used to write to those pretty creatures back East? It would take a Saga
man of the old Norseland to write for my mountain woman. If I were an
artist, I would paint her with the north star in her locks and her feet
on purple cloud. I suppose you are at the Pier. I know you usually are
at this season. At any rate, I shall direct this letter thither, and
will follow close after it. I want my wife to see something of life. And
I want her to meet your sister.”
“Dear me!” cried Jessica, when I read the letter to her; “I don't know
that I care to meet anything quite so gigantic as that mountain woman.
I'm one of the puny breed of modern femininity, you know. I don't think
my nerves can stand the encounter.”
“Why, Jessica!” I protested. She blushed a little.
“Don't think bad of me, Victor. But, you see, I've a little scrap-book
of those triolets upstairs.” Then she burst into a peal of irresistible
laughter. “I'm not laughing because I am piqued,” she said frankly.
“Though any one will admit that it is rather irritating to have a man
who left you in a blasted condition recover with such extraordinary
promptness. As a philanthropist, one of course rejoices, but as a woman,
Victor, it must be admitted that one has a right to feel annoyed. But,
honestly, I am not ungenerous, and I am going to do him a favor. I shall
write, and urge him not to bring his wife here. A primitive woman, with
the north star in her hair, would look well down there in the Casino
eating a pineapple ice, wouldn't she? It's all very well to have a soul,
you know; but it won't keep you from looking like a guy among women who
have good dressmakers. I shudder at the thought of what the poor thing
will suffer if he brings her here.”
Jessica wrote, as she said she would; but, for all that, a fortnight
later she was walking down the wharf with the “mountain woman,” and I
was sauntering beside Leroy. At dinner Jessica gave me no chance to talk
with our friend's wife, and I only caught the quiet contralto tones of
her voice now and then contrasting with Jessica's vivacious soprano. A
drizzling rain came up from the east with nightfall. Little groups of
shivering men and women sat about in the parlors at the card-tables,
and one blond woman sang love songs. The Brainards were tired with their
journey, and left us early. When they were gone, Jessica burst into
eulogy.
“That is the first woman,” she declared, “I ever met who would make a
fit heroine for a book.”
“Then you will not feel under obligations to educate her, as you
insinuated the other day?”
“Educate her! I only hope she will help me to unlearn some of the things
I know. I never saw such simplicity. It is antique!”
“You're sure it's not mere vacuity?” “Victor! How can you? But you
haven't talked with her. You must to-morrow. Good-night.” She gathered
up her trailing skirts and started down the corridor. Suddenly she
turned back. “For Heaven's sake!” she whispered, in an awed tone, “I
never even noticed what she had on!”
The next morning early we made up a riding party, and I rode with
Mrs. Brainard. She was as tall as I, and sat in her saddle as if quite
unconscious of her animal. The road stretched hard and inviting under
our horses' feet. The wind smelled salt. The sky was ragged with gray
masses of cloud scudding across the blue. I was beginning to glow with
exhilaration, when suddenly my companion drew in her horse.
“If you do not mind, we will go back,” she said.
Her tone was dejected. I thought she was tired.
“Oh, no!” she protested, when I apologized for my thoughtlessness in
bringing her so far. “I'm not tired. I can ride all day. Where I come
from, we have to ride if we want to go anywhere; but here there seems to
be no particular place to--to reach.”
“Are you so utilitarian?” I asked, laughingly. “Must you always have
some reason for everything you do? I do so many things just for the mere
pleasure of doing them, I'm afraid you will have a very poor opinion of
me.”
“That is not what I mean,” she said, flushing, and turning her large
gray eyes on me. “You must not think I have a reason for everything I
do.” She was very earnest, and it was evident that she was unacquainted
with the art of making conversation. “But what I mean,” she went on,
“is that there is no place--no end--to reach.” She looked back over her
shoulder toward the west, where the trees marked the sky line, and an
expression of loss and dissatisfaction came over her face. “You
see,” she said, apologetically, “I'm used to different things--to the
mountains. I have never been where I could not see them before in my
life.”
“Ah, I see! I suppose it is odd to look up and find them not there.”
“It's like being lost, this not having anything around you. At least,
I mean,” she continued slowly, as if her thought could not easily put
itself in words,--“I mean it seems as if a part of the world had been
taken down. It makes you feel lonesome, as if you were living after the
world had begun to die.”
“You'll get used to it in a few days. It seems very beautiful to me
here. And then you will have so much life to divert you.”
“Life? But there is always that everywhere.”
“I mean men and women.”
“Oh! Still, I am not used to them. I think I might be not--not very
happy with them. They might think me queer. I think I would like to show
your sister the mountains.”
“She has seen them often.”
“Oh, she told me. But I don't mean those pretty green hills such as we
saw coming here. They are not like my mountains. I like mountains that
go beyond the clouds, with terrible shadows in the hollows, and belts
of snow lying in the gorges where the sun cannot reach, and the snow is
blue in the sunshine, or shining till you think it is silver, and the
mist so wonderful all about it, changing each moment and drifting up and
down, that you cannot tell what name to give the colors. These mountains
of yours here in the East are so quiet; mine are shouting all the time,
with the pines and the rivers. The echoes are so loud in the valley that
sometimes, when the wind is rising, we can hardly hear a man talk unless
he raises his voice. There are four cataracts near where I live, and
they all have different voices, just as people do; and one of them
is happy--a little white cataract--and it falls where the sun shines
earliest, and till night it is shining. But the others only get the sun
now and then, and they are more noisy and cruel. One of them is always
in the shadow, and the water looks black. That is partly because the
rocks all underneath it are black. It falls down twenty great ledges in
a gorge with black sides, and a white mist dances all over it at every
leap. I tell father the mist is the ghost of the waters. No man ever
goes there; it is too cold. The chill strikes through one, and makes
your heart feel as if you were dying. But all down the side of the
mountain, toward the south and the west, the sun shines on the granite
and draws long points of light out of it. Father tells me soldiers
marching look that way when the sun strikes on their bayonets. Those are
the kind of mountains I mean, Mr. Grant.”
She was looking at me with her face transfigured, as if it, like the
mountains she told me of, had been lying in shadow, and waiting for the
dazzling dawn.
“I had a terrible dream once,” she went on; “the most terrible dream
ever I had. I dreamt that the mountains had all been taken down, and
that I stood on a plain to which there was no end. The sky was burning
up, and the grass scorched brown from the heat, and it was twisting as
if it were in pain. And animals, but no other person save myself, only
wild things, were crouching and looking up at that sky. They could not
run because there was no place to which to go.”
“You were having a vision of the last man,” I said. “I wonder myself
sometimes whether this old globe of ours is going to collapse suddenly
and take us with her, or whether we will disappear through slow
disastrous ages of fighting and crushing, with hunger and blight to help
us to the end. And then, at the last, perhaps, some luckless fellow,
stronger than the rest, will stand amid the ribs of the rotting earth
and go mad.”
The woman's eyes were fixed on me, large and luminous. “Yes,” she said;
“he would go mad from the lonesomeness of it. He would be afraid to be
left alone like that with God. No one would want to be taken into God's
secrets.”
“And our last man,” I went on, “would have to stand there on that
swaying wreck till even the sound of the crumbling earth ceased. And
he would try to find a voice and would fail, because silence would have
come again. And then the light would go out--”
The shudder that crept over her made me stop, ashamed of myself.
“You talk like father,” she said, with a long-drawn breath. Then she
looked up suddenly at the sun shining through a rift in those reckless
gray clouds, and put out one hand as if to get it full of the headlong
rollicking breeze. “But the earth is not dying,” she cried. “It is
well and strong, and it likes to go round and round among all the other
worlds. It likes the sun and moon; they are all good friends; and it
likes the people who live on it. Maybe it is they instead of the fire
within who keep it warm; or maybe it is warm just from always going, as
we are when we run. We are young, you and I, Mr. Grant, and Leroy, and
your beautiful sister, and the world is young too!” Then she laughed a
strong splendid laugh, which had never had the joy taken out of it
with drawing-room restrictions; and I laughed too, and felt that we had
become very good companions indeed, and found myself warming to the joy
of companionship as I had not since I was a boy at school.
That afternoon the four of us sat at a table in the Casino together. The
Casino, as every one knows, is a place to amuse yourself. If you have a
duty, a mission, or an aspiration, you do not take it there with you,
it would be so obviously out of place; if poverty is ahead of you, you
forget it; if you have brains, you hasten to conceal them; they would be
a serious encumbrance.
There was a bubbling of conversation, a rustle and flutter such as there
always is where there are many women. All the place was gay with flowers
and with gowns as bright as the flowers. I remembered the apprehensions
of my sister, and studied Leroy's wife to see how she fitted into this
highly colored picture. She was the only woman in the room who seemed
to wear draperies. The jaunty slash and cut of fashionable attire were
missing in the long brown folds of cloth that enveloped her figure. I
felt certain that even from Jessica's standpoint she could not be called
a guy. Picturesque she might be, past the point of convention, but she
was not ridiculous.
“Judith takes all this very seriously,” said Leroy, laughingly. “I
suppose she would take even Paris seriously.”
His wife smiled over at him. “Leroy says I am melancholy,” she said,
softly; “but I am always telling him that I am happy. He thinks I am
melancholy because I do not laugh. I got out of the way of it by being
so much alone. You only laugh to let some one else know you are pleased.
When you are alone there is no use in laughing. It would be like
explaining something to yourself.”
“You are a philosopher, Judith. Mr. Max Mueller would like to know
you.”
“Is he a friend of yours, dear?”
Leroy blushed, and I saw Jessica curl her lip as she noticed the blush.
She laid her hand on Mrs. Brainard's arm.
“Have you always been very much alone?” she inquired.
“I was born on the ranch, you know; and father was not fond of leaving
it. Indeed, now he says he will never again go out of sight of it. But
you can go a long journey without doing that; for it lies on a plateau
in the valley, and it can be seen from three different mountain passes.
Mother died there, and for that reason and others--father has had
a strange life--he never wanted to go away. He brought a lady from
Pennsylvania to teach me. She had wonderful learning, but she didn't
make very much use of it. I thought if I had learning I would not waste
it reading books. I would use it to--to live with. Father had a library,
but I never cared for it. He was forever at books too. Of course,”
she hastened to add, noticing the look of mortification deepen on her
husband's face, “I like books very well if there is nothing better at
hand. But I always said to Mrs. Windsor--it was she who taught me--why
read what other folk have been thinking when you can go out and think
yourself? Of course one prefers one's own thoughts, just as one prefers
one's own ranch, or one's own father.”
“Then you are sure to like New York when you go there to live,” cried
Jessica; “for there you will find something to make life entertaining
all the time. No one need fall back on books there.”
“I'm not sure. I'm afraid there must be such dreadful crowds of people.
Of course I should try to feel that they were all like me, with just the
same sort of fears, and that it was ridiculous for us to be afraid of
each other, when at heart we all meant to be kind.”
Jessica fairly wrung her hands. “Heavens!” she cried. “I said you would
like New York. I am afraid, my dear, that it will break your heart!”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Brainard, with what was meant to be a gentle jest, “no
one can break my heart except Leroy. I should not care enough about any
one else, you know.”
The compliment was an exquisite one. I felt the blood creep to my own
brain in a sort of vicarious rapture, and I avoided looking at Leroy
lest he should dislike to have me see the happiness he must feel. The
simplicity of the woman seemed to invigorate me as the cool air of her
mountains might if it blew to me on some bright dawn, when I had come,
fevered and sick of soul, from the city.
When we were alone, Jessica said to me: “That man has too much vanity,
and he thinks it is sensitiveness. He is going to imagine that his wife
makes him suffer. There's no one so brutally selfish as your sensitive
man. He wants every one to live according to his ideas, or he
immediately begins suffering. That friend of yours hasn't the courage
of his convictions. He is going to be ashamed of the very qualities that
made him love his wife.”
There was a hop that night at the hotel, quite an unusual affair as to
elegance, given in honor of a woman from New York, who wrote a novel a
month.
Mrs. Brainard looked so happy that night when she came in the parlor,
after the music had begun, that I felt a moisture gather in my eyes just
because of the beauty of her joy, and the forced vivacity of the women
about me seemed suddenly coarse and insincere. Some wonderful red
stones, brilliant as rubies, glittered in among the diaphanous black
driftings of her dress. She asked me if the stones were not very pretty,
and said she gathered them in one of her mountain river-beds.
“But the gown?” I said. “Surely, you do not gather gowns like that in
river-beds, or pick them off mountain-pines?”
“But you can get them in Denver. Father always sent to Denver for my
finery. He was very particular about how I looked. You see, I was all he
had--” She broke off, her voice faltering.
“Come over by the window,” I said, to change her thought. “I have
something to repeat to you. It is a song of Sydney Lanier's. I think he
was the greatest poet that ever lived in America, though not many agree
with me. But he is my dear friend anyway, though he is dead, and I never
saw him; and I want you to hear some of his words.”
I led her across to an open window. The dancers were whirling by us.
The waltz was one of those melancholy ones which speak the spirit of the
dance more eloquently than any merry melody can. The sound of the sea
booming beyond in the darkness came to us, and long paths of light, now
red, now green, stretched toward the distant light-house. These were the
lines I repeated:--
“What heartache--ne'er a hill!
Inexorable, vapid, vague, and chill
The drear sand levels drain my spirit low.
With one poor word they tell me all they know;
Whereat their stupid tongues, to tease my pain,
Do drawl it o'er and o'er again.
They hurt my heart with griefs I cannot name;
Always the same--the same.”
But I got no further. I felt myself moved with a sort of passion which
did not seem to come from within, but to be communicated to me from her.
A certain unfamiliar happiness pricked through with pain thrilled me,
and I heard her whispering,--
“Do not go on, do not go on! I cannot stand it to-night!”
“Hush,” I whispered back; “come out for a moment!” We stole into the
dusk without, and stood there trembling. I swayed with her emotion.
There was a long silence. Then she said: “Father may be walking alone
now by the black cataract. That is where he goes when he is sad. I can
see how lonely he looks among those little twisted pines that grow from
the rock. And he will be remembering all the evenings we walked there
together, and all the things we said.” I did not answer. Her eyes were
still on the sea.
“What was the name of the man who wrote that verse you just said to me?”