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!”
“Wait,” he said. “There is something else. She has a head for business; she proposed that I should come East, and accept a superintendentship from a cousin of hers, the owner of a gun-factory in one of those shady New England towns women are so fond of. She intimated that he was in politics, this cousin, and of course would expect his employees to become part of his constituency. It's a very pretty little bribe, you see; when you add the—the girl, it's enough to shake a man—who wants that girl. I'm not worth much to myself, or to anybody else, apparently, but by Heaven I'll not sell out as cheap as that!
“It all amounts to nothing except one more illusion gone. If there is a woman on this earth that can love a man without knowing for what, and take the chances of life with him without counting the cost, I have never known her. I asked you once if a woman could do that. You hadn't the courage to tell me the truth. I wouldn't have been satisfied if you had; but I'm satisfied now.”
“I believed she would be happy; I believe she would be, now, if only you would go to her and persuade her to try.”
“I persuade her! I would never try to persuade a woman to be my wife were I dying for love of her! I don't think myself invented by nature to promote the happiness of woman, in the aggregate or singly. I know there are men who do: let them urge their claims. I thought that she loved me; that was another illusion. She will probably marry the cousin, and become the most loyal of his constituents. He is welcome to her; but there's a ghostly blank somewhere. How I have tired you! You'll be in bed another week for this selfishness of mine.” He stopped, while a sudden thought brought a change to his face. “But when are you going home?”
“I cannot go,” she said. Her weakness came over her like a cloud, darkening the room and pressing upon her heavily. “Will you give me your arm?”
At the stairs she stopped, and leaning against the wall looked at him with wide, hopeless eyes.
“We are cut off from everything. My friend does not need me now; she has gone home,—alone. She is dead!”
Arnold took a long walk upon the hills that night, and smoked a great many cigars in gloomy meditation. He was thinking of two girls, as young men who smoke a great many cigars without counting them often are; he was also thinking of Arizona. He had fully made up his mind to resign, and depart for that problematic region as soon as his place was filled; but an alternative had presented itself to him with a pensive attractiveness,—an alternative unmistakably associated with the fact that the schoolmistress was to remain in her present isolated circumstances. It even had occurred to him that there might be some question of duty involved in his “standing by her,” as he phrased it to himself, “till she got her color back.” There was an unconscious appeal in the last words he had heard her speak which constrained him to do so. He was not in the habit of pitying himself, but had there been another soul to follow this mental readjustment of himself to his mutilated life, it would surely have pitied the eagerness with which he clung to this one shadow of a duty to a fellow-creature. It was the measure of his loneliness.
It was late in November. The rains had begun again with sound and fury; with ranks of clouds forming along the mountain sides, and driven before the sea-winds upward through the gulches; with days of breeze and sunshine, when the fog veil was lightly lifted and blown apart, showing the valley always greener; with days of lowering stillness, when the veil descended and left the mountains alone, like islands of shadow rising from a sea of misty whiteness.
On such a lowering day, Miss Frances stood at the junction of three trails, in front of the door of the blacksmith's shop. She was wrapped in a dark blue cloak, with the hood drawn over her head; the cool dampness had given to her cheeks a clear, pure glow, and her brown eyes looked out with a cheerful light. She was watching the parting of the mist in the valley below; for a wind had sprung up, and now the rift widened, as the windows of heaven might have opened, giving a glimpse of the world to the “Blessed Damozel.” All was dark above and around her; only a single shaft of sunlight pierced the fog, and startled into life a hundred tints of brightness in the valley. She caught the sparkle on the roofs and windows of the town ten miles away; the fields of sunburnt stubble glowed a deep Indian red; the young crops were tenderest emerald; and the line of the distant bay, a steel-blue thread against the horizon.
Arnold was plodding up the lower trail on his gray mare, fetlock deep in mud. He dismounted at the door of the shop, and called to him a small Mexican lad with a cheek of the tint of ripe corn.
“Here, Pedro Segundo! Take this mare up to the camp! Can you catch?” He tossed him a coin. “Bueno!”
“Mucho bueno!” said Pedro the First, looking on approvingly from the door of his shop.
Arnold turned to the schoolmistress, who was smiling from her perch on a pile of wet logs.
“I'm perfectly happy!” she said. “This east wind takes me home. I hear the bluebirds, and smell the salt-marshes and the wood-mosses. I'm not sure but that when the fog lifts we shall see white caps in the valley.”
“I dare say there are some very good people down there,” said Arnold, with deliberation, “but all the same I should welcome an inundation. Think what a climate this would be, if we could have the sea below us, knocking against the rocks on still nights, and thundering at us in a storm!”
“Don't speak of it! It makes me long for a miracle, or a judgment, or something that's not likely to happen.”
“Meantime, I want you to come down the trail, and pass judgment on my bachelor quarters. I can't stand the boarding-house any longer! By Jove, I'm like the British footman in 'Punch,'—'what with them legs o' mutton and legs o' pork, I'm a'most wore out! I want a new hanimal inwented!' I've found an old girl down in the valley who consents to look after me and vary the monotony of my dinners at the highest market price. She isn't here yet, but the cabin is about ready. I want you to come down and look it over. I'm a perfect barbarian about color! You can't put it on too thick and strong to suit me. I dare say I need toning down.”
They were slipping and sliding down the muddy trail, brushing the raindrops from the live-oak scrub as they passed. A subtle underlying content had lulled them both, of late, into an easier companionship than they had ever found possible before, and they were gay with that enjoyment of wet weather which is like an intoxication after seven months of drought.
“Now I suppose you like soft, harmonious tints and neutral effects. You're a bit of a conservative in everything, I fear.”
“I think I should like plenty of color here, or else positive white; the monotony of the landscape and its own deep, low tones demand it. A neutral house would fade into an ash heap under this sun.”
“Good! Then you'll like my dark little den, with its barbaric reds and blues.”
They were at the gate of the little cottage, overlooking the valley. The gleam of sunlight had faded and the fog curtain rolled back. The house did indeed seem very dark as they entered. It was only a little after four o'clock, but the cloudy twilight of a short November day was suddenly descending upon them. The schoolmistress looked shyly around, while Arnold tramped about the rooms and sprung the shades up as high as they would go.
They were in a small, irregular parlor, wainscoted and floored in redwood, and lightly furnished with bamboo. This room communicated by a low arch with the dining-room beyond.
“I have some flags and spurs and old trophies to hang up there,” he said, pointing to the arch; “and perhaps I can get you to sew the rings on the curtain that's to hang underneath. I don't want too much of the society of my angel from the valley, you know; besides, I want to shield her from the vulgar gaze, as they do the picture of the Madonna.”
“It will serve you right if she never comes at all!”
“Oh, she's pining to come. She's dying to sacrifice herself for twenty-five dollars a month. Did I tell you, by the way, that I've had a rise in my salary? There is a rise in the work, too, which rather overbalances the increase of pay, but that's understood; for a good many years it will be more work than wage, but at the other end I hope it will be more wage than work. You don't seem to be very much interested in my affairs; if you knew how seldom I speak of them to any one but yourself, you might perhaps deign to listen.”
“I am listening; but I'm thinking, too, that it's getting very late.”
“See, here is my curtain!” he said, dragging out a breadth of heavy stuff. He took it to the window, and threw it over a Chinese lounge that stood beneath. “It's an old serape I picked up at Guadalajara five years ago: the beauty of having a house is that all the old rubbish you have bored yourself with for years immediately becomes respectable and useful. I expect to become so myself. You don't say that you like my curtain!”
“I think it is very pagan looking, and rather—dirty.”
“Well, I shan't make a point of the dirt. I dare say the thing would look just as well if it was clean. Won't you try my lounge?” he said, as she looked restlessly towards the door. “It was invented by a race that can loaf more naturally than we do: it takes an American back some time to relax enough to appreciate it.”
Miss Frances half reluctantly drew her cloak about her, and yielded her Northern slenderness to the long Oriental undulations of the couch. Her head was thrown back, showing her fair throat and the sweet upward curves of her lips and brows.
Arnold gazed at her with too evident delight.
“Why won't you sit still? You cannot deny that you have never been so comfortable in your life before.”
“It's a very good place to 'loaf and invite one's soul,'” she said, rising to a sitting position; “but that isn't my occupation at present. I must go home. It is almost dark.”
“There is no hurry. I'm going with you. I want you to see how the little room lights up. I've never seen it by firelight, and I'll have my house-warming to-night!”
“Oh no, indeed! I must go back. There's the five o'clock whistle, now!”
“Well, we've an hour yet. You must get warm before you go.”
He went out, and quickly returned with an armful of wood and shavings, which he crammed into the cold fireplace.
“What a litter you have made! Do you think your mature angel from the valley will stand that sort of thing?”
As she spoke, the rain descended in violence, sweeping across the piazza, and obliterating the fast-fading landscape. They could scarcely see each other in the darkness, and the trampling on the roof overhead made speech a useless effort. Almost as suddenly as it had opened upon them the tumult ceased, and in the silence that followed they listened to the heavy raindrops spattering from the eaves.
Arnold crossed to the window, where Miss Frances stood shivering and silent, with her hands clasped before her.
“I want you to light my fire,” he said, with a certain concentration in his voice.
“Why do you not light it yourself?” She drew away from his outstretched hand. “It seems to me you are a bit of a tyrant in your own house.”
He drew a match across his knee and held it towards her: by its gleam she saw his pale, unsmiling face, and again that darkening of the eyes which she remembered.
“Do you refuse me such a little thing,—my first guest? I ask it as a most especial grace!”
She took the match, and knelt with it in her hands; but it only flickered a moment, and went out. “It will not go for me. You must light it yourself.”
He knelt beside her and struck another match. “We will try together,” he said, placing it in her fingers and closing his hand about them. He held the trembling fingers and the little spark they guarded steadily against the shaving. It kindled; the flame breathed and brightened and curled upward among the crooked manzanita stumps, illuminating the two entranced young faces bending before it. Miss Frances rose to her feet, and Arnold, rising too, looked at her with a growing dread and longing in his eyes.
“You said to-day that you were happy, because in fancy you were at home. Is that the only happiness possible to you here?”
“I am quite contented here,” she said. “I am getting acclimated.”
“Oh, don't be content: I am not; I am horribly otherwise. I want something—so much that I dare not ask for it. You know what it is,—Frances!”
“You said once that I reminded you—of her: is that the reason you—Am I consoling you?”
“Good God! I don't want consolation! That thing never existed; but here is the reality; I cannot part with it. I wish you had as little as I have, outside of this room where we two stand together!”
“I don't know that I have anything,” she said under her breath.
“Then,” said he, taking her in his arms, “I don't see but that we are ready to enter the kingdom of heaven. It seems very near to me.”
They are still in exile: they have joined the band of lotus-eaters who inhabit that region of the West which is pervaded by a subtle breath from the Orient, blowing across the seas between. Mrs. Arnold has not yet made that first visit East which is said by her Californian friends to be so disillusioning, and the old home still hovers, like a beautiful mirage, on the receding horizon.