In Exile and Other Stories Part 4

"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 const.i.tuents. 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 a.s.sociated with the fact that the schoolmistress was to remain in her present isolated circ.u.mstances. 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 pa.s.s 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, brus.h.i.+ng the raindrops from the live-oak scrub as they pa.s.sed. A subtle underlying content had lulled them both, of late, into an easier companions.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 s.h.i.+vering 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!"