Again, the practical nature of Californians and their familiarity with scenes and incidents which would be novel to other people have occasioned me great uneasiness. In the course of the last three chapters of M’liss I have received some twenty or thirty communications from different parts of the State corroborating incidents of my story, which I solemnly assure the reader is purely fictitious. Some one has lately sent me a copy of an interior paper containing an old obituary of Smith of Smith’s Pocket. Another correspondent writes to me that he was acquainted with the schoolmaster in the fall of ’49, and that they “grubbed together.” The editors of the serial in which this story appears assure me that they have received an advertisement from the landlord of the “National Hotel” contingent upon an editorial notice of its having been at one time the abode of M’liss; while an aunt of the heroine, alluding in excellent terms to the reformed character of her niece M’liss, clenches her sincerity by requesting the loan of twenty dollars to buy clothes for the desolate orphan.
Under these circumstances I have hesitated to go on. What were the bodiless creatures of my fancy—the pale phantoms of thought, evoked in the solitude of my chamber, and sometimes even midst the hum of busy streets—have suddenly grown into flesh and blood, living people, protected by the laws of society, and having their legal right to actions for slander in any court. Worse than that, I have sometimes thought with terror of the new responsibility which might attach to my development of their characters. What if I were obliged to support and protect these Frankenstein monsters? What if the original of the principal villain of my story should feel impelled through aesthetic principles of art to work out in real life the supposititious denouement I have sketched for him?
I have therefore concluded to lay aside my pen for this week, leaving the catastrophe impending, and await the suggestion of my correspondents. I do so the more cheerfully as it enables the editors of this weekly to publish twenty-seven more columns of Miss Braddon’s “Outcasts of Society” and the remainder of the “Duke’s Motto,”—two works which in the quiet simplicity of their home-like pictures and household incidents are attended with none of the difficulties which beset my unhappy story.
CHAPTER IX
CLEANING UP
As the master, wan-eyed and unrefreshed by slumber, strayed the next morning among the blackened ruins of the fire, he was conscious of having undergone some strange revulsion of sentiment. What he remembered of the last evening’s events, though feverish and indistinct as a dream, and though, like a dream, without coherency or connected outline, had nevertheless seriously impressed him. How frivolous and trifling his past life and its pursuits looked through the lightning vista opened to his eyes by the flash of Waters’s pistol! “Suppose I had been killed,” ruminated the master, “what then? A paragraph in the ‘Banner,’ headed ‘Fatal Affray,’ and my name added to the already swollen list of victims to lawless violence and crime! Humph! A pretty scrape, truly!” And the master ground his teeth with vexation.
Let not the reader judge him too hastily. In the best regulated mind, thankfulness for deliverance from danger is apt to be mingled with some doubts as to the necessity of the trial.
In this frame of mind the last person he would have cared to meet was Clytie. That young woman’s evil genius, however, led her to pass the burnt district that morning. Perhaps she had anticipated the meeting. At all events, he had proceeded but a few steps before he was confronted by the identical round hat and cherry colored ribbons. But in his present humor the cheerful color somehow reminded him of the fire and of a ruddy stain over McSnagley’s heart, and invested the innocent Clytie with a figurative significance. Now Clytie’s reveries at that moment were pleasant, if the brightness of her eyes and the freshened color on her cheeks were any sign, and, as she had not seen the master since then, she naturally expected to take up the thread of romance where it had been dropped. But it required all her feminine tact to conceal her embarrassment at his formal greeting and constrained manner.
“He is bashful,” reasoned Clytie to herself.