Joan is a puzzle to the reader, but so she was to those who knew her. Was she a conscious hypocrite, deliberately playing a false part in the world, or was she a monstrous egotist, one in whom the soul of truth had so died out that she thought herself justified in everything that she did, and committed the worst acts from what she supposed to be the most excusable motives? Her intimates did not know. One of the finest strokes in the story is the dawning of suspicion upon the mind of her second husband. “For with all his deep affection for his wife, Richard Demorest unconsciously feared her. The strong man whose dominance over men and women alike had been his salient characteristic, had begun to feel an indefinable sense of some unrecognized quality in the woman he loved. He had once or twice detected it in a tone of her voice, in a remembered and perhaps even once idolized gesture, or in the accidental lapse of some bewildering word.”
New England people at their best did not attract Bret Harte. That Miltonic conception of the universe upon which New England was built seemed to him simply ridiculous, and he did not appreciate the strength of character in which it resulted. Moreover, the crudity of New England offended his æsthetic taste as much as its theology offended his reason and his charity. North Liberty on a cold, stormy Sunday night in March is described with that gusto, with that minuteness of detail which could be shown only by one who loved it or by one who hated it.
And yet it would be unjust to say that Bret Harte had no conception of the better type of New England women. The schoolmistress in The Idyl of Red Gulch, one of his earliest and best stories, is as pure and noble a maiden, and as characteristic of the soil, as Hilda herself. The Reader will remember the description of Miss Mary as she appeared playing with her pupils in the woods. “The color came faintly into her pale cheeks.... Felinely fastidious and entrenched as she was in the purity of spotless skirts, collars and cuffs, she forgot all else, and ran like a crested quail at the head of her brood, until romping, laughing and panting, with a loosened braid of brown hair, a hat hanging by a knotted ribbon from her throat, she came ...” upon Sandy, the unheroic hero of the tale.
In the culminating scene of this story, the interview between Miss Mary and the mother of Sandy’s illegitimate boy, when the teacher consents to take the child with her to her home in the East, although she is still under the shock of the discovery that Sandy is the boy’s father,—in this scene the schoolmistress exhibits true New England restraint, and a beautiful absence of heroics. It was just at sunset. “The last red beam crept higher, suffused Miss Mary’s eyes with something of its glory, nickered and faded and went out. The sun had set in Red Gulch. In the twilight and silence Miss Mary’s voice sounded pleasantly, ‘I will take the boy. Send him to me to-night.’”
One can hardly help speculating about Bret Harte’s personal taste and preferences in regard to women. Cressy and the Rose of Tuolumne were both blondes; and yet on the whole he certainly preferred brunettes. Even his blue-eyed girls usually have black hair. The Treasure of the Redwoods disclosed from the recesses of her sunbonnet “a pale blue eye and a thin black arch of eyebrow.” One associates a contralto voice with a brunette, and Bret Harte’s heroines, so far as the subject is mentioned, have contralto voices. Not one is spoken of as having a soprano voice. Even the slight and blue-eyed Tinka Gallinger “sang in a youthful, rather nasal contralto.” Bret Harte’s wife had a contralto voice and was a good singer.
As to eyes, he seems to have preferred them gray or brown, a “tender gray” and a “reddish brown.” Ailsa Callender’s hair was “dark with a burnished copper tint at its roots, and her eyes had the same burnished metallic lustre in their brown pupils.” Mrs. MacGlowrie was “a fair-faced woman with eyes the color of pale sherry.”
A small foot with an arched instep was a sine qua non with Bret Harte, and he speaks particularly of the small, well-shod foot of the Southwestern girl. He believed in breeding, and all his heroines were well-bred,—not well-bred in the conventional sense, but in the sense of coming from sound, courageous, self-respecting, self-improving stock. Within these limits his range of heroines is exceedingly wide, including some that are often excluded from that category. He is rather partial to widows, for example, and always looks upon their innocent gayeties with an indulgent eye. Can a woman be a widow and untidy in her dress, and still retain her preëminence as heroine? Yes, Bret Harte’s genius is equal even to that. “Mrs. MacGlowrie was looking wearily over some accounts on the desk before her, and absently putting back some tumbled sheaves from the shock of her heavy hair. For the widow had a certain indolent Southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, and a characteristic hook-and-eye-less freedom of attire, which on less graceful limbs would have been slovenly. One sleeve-cuff was unbuttoned, but it showed the vein of her delicate wrist; the neck of her dress had lost a hook, but the glimpse of a bit of edging round the white throat made amends. Of all which, however, it should be said that the widow, in her limp abstraction, was really unconscious.”
I THOUGHT YOU WERE THAT HORSE-THIEF
From “Lanty Foster’s Mistake”
Denman Fink, del.
Red-haired women have been so popular in fiction during recent years that it was perhaps no great feat for Bret Harte in the Buckeye Hollow Inheritance to make a heroine out of a red-haired girl, and a bad-tempered one too; but what other romancer has ever dared to represent a young and lovely woman as “hard of hearing”! There can be no question that The Youngest Miss Piper was not quite normal in this respect, although, for purposes of coquetry and sarcasm no doubt, she magnified the defect. In her memorable interview with the clever young grocery clerk (whom she afterward married) she begins by failing to hear distinctly the title of the book which he was reading when she entered the store; and we have this picture: “Miss Delaware, leaning sideways and curling her little fingers around her pink ear: ‘Did you say the first principles of geology or politeness? You know I am so deaf; but of course it couldn’t be that.’”