The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories Part 5

She held out her hand and took the card again, looking at it with fresh eyes.

"A _very_ pretty girl," she said. "What is her name?"

"Elizabeth Arnold."

"Where does she live?"

Palmerston mentioned a village in Michigan. His companion gave another glance at the picture, and laid it upon the arm of the chair. The young man rescued it from her indifference with a little irritable jerk. She was gazing unconsciously toward the horizon.

"Don't you intend to congratulate me?" he inquired with a nettled laugh.

She turned quickly, flus.h.i.+ng to her forehead. "Pardon me. I said she was very pretty--I thought young men found that quite sufficient. I have never heard them talk much of girls in any other way. But perhaps I should have told you: I care very little about photographs, especially of women. They never look like them. They always make me think of paper dolls."

She halted between her sentences with an ungirlish embarra.s.sment which Palmerston was beginning to find dangerously attractive.

"But the women themselves--you find them interesting?"

"Oh, yes; some of them. Mrs. Dysart, for instance. As soon as she learned I had no mother, she invited me to a mothers' meeting. I thought that very interesting."

"Very sensible, too. They are mostly childless mothers, and a sprinkling of motherless children will add zest to the a.s.semblage."

They both laughed, and the young man's laugh ended in a cough. The girl glanced uneasily toward the bank of fog that was sweeping across the valley.

"Mr. Palmerston," she said, "the fog is driving in very fast, and it is growing quite damp and chilly. I think you ought to go home. Wait a minute," she added, hurrying into the tent and returning with a soft gray shawl. "I am afraid you will be cold; let me put this about your shoulders."

She threw it around him and pinned it under his chin, standing in front of him with her forehead on a level with his lips.

"Now hurry!"

A man does not submit to the humiliation of having a shawl pinned about his shoulders without questioning his own sanity, and some consciousness of this fact forced itself upon Palmerston as he made his way along the narrow path through the greasewood. He had removed the obnoxious drapery, of course, and was vindicating his masculinity by becoming very cold and damp in the clammy folds of the fog which had overtaken him; but the shawl hung upon his arm and reminded him of many things--not altogether unpleasant things, he would have been obliged to confess if he had not been busy a.s.suring himself that he had no confession to make. He had done his duty, he said to himself; but there was something else which he did not dare to say even to himself--something which made him dissatisfied with his duty now that it was done. Of course he did not expect her to care about his engagement, but she should have been sympathetic; well-bred women were always sympathetic, he argued, arriving at his conclusion by an unanswerable transposition of adjectives. He turned his light coat collar up about his throat, and the shawl on his arm brushed his cheek warmly. No man is altogether colorblind to the danger-signals of his own nature. Did he really want her to care, after all? he asked himself angrily. He might have spared himself the trouble of telling her. She was absorbed in herself, or, what was the same, in that unsavory fraud whom she called father. The young man unfastened the flap of his tent nervously, and took himself in out of the drenching mist, which seemed in some way to have got into his brain. He was angry with himself for his interest in these people, as he styled them in his lofty self-abas.e.m.e.nt. They were ungrateful, unworthy. His eye fell upon two letters propped up on his table in a manner so conspicuous as to suggest a knowledge of his preoccupation--as if some one were calling him out of his reverie in an offensively loud voice. He turned the address downward, and busied himself in putting to rights the articles which John had piled up to attract his tardy notice.

He would read his letters, of course, but not in his present mood: that would be a species of sacrilege, he patronizingly informed his restive conscience.

And he did read them later, after he had carefully folded the gray shawl and placed it out of his range of vision--half a score of closely written pages filled with gentle girlish a.n.a.lysis of the writer's love and its unique manifestations, and ending with a tepid interest in the "queer people" among whom her lover's lot was cast. "It is very hard, my dear," she wrote, "to think of you in that lonely place, cut off from everybody and everything interesting; but we must bear it bravely, since it is to make you strong and well."

Palmerston held the letter in his hand, and looked steadily through the tent window across the sea of fog that had settled over the valley.

"After all, she is not selfish," he reflected; "she has nothing to gain by saving Dysart, except"--he smiled grimly--"her rascally father's good name."

The rains were late, but they came at last, blowing in soft and warm from the southeast, was.h.i.+ng the dust from the patient orange-trees and the draggled bananas, and luring countless green things out of the brown mould of the mesa into the winter sun. Birds fledged in the golden drought of summer went mad over the miracles of rain and gra.s.s, and riotously announced their discovery of a new heaven and a new earth to their elders. The leafless poinsettia flaunted its scarlet diadem at Palmerston's tent door, a monarch robbed of all but his crown, and the acacias west of the Dysart dooryard burst into sunlit yellow in a night.

The rains had not been sufficient to stop work on the tunnel, and John watched its progress with the feverish eagerness of an inexperienced gambler. Now that it was fairly under way, Brownell seemed to lose interest in the result, and wandered, satchel in hand, over the mountain-side, leaving fragments of his linen duster on the th.o.r.n.y chaparral, and devising new schemes for the enrichment of the valley, to which his daughter listened at night in skeptical silence. Now and then his voice fell from some overhanging crag in a torrent of religious rapture, penetrating the cabin walls and trying Mrs. Dysart's pious soul beyond endurance.

"Now listen to that, Emeline!" said John, exultantly, during one of these vocal inundations. "He's a-singin' the doxology. Now _I_ believe he's a Christian."

Mrs. Dysart averted her face with a sigh of long-suffering patience.

"Singin' is the easiest part of the Christian religion, Jawn. As for that,"--she jerked her head toward the source of vocal supply,--"it's soundin' bra.s.s; that's what I'd say if I was settin' in judgment, which I thank our heavenly Fawther I'm not."

"Well, there goes Mr. Palmerston and the girl, anyway," said John, with eager irrelevance; "they seem to be gettin' pretty thick."

Mrs. Dysart moved toward the open window with piously restrained curiosity.

"I'm sorry for that girl," she said; "she's got one man more'n she can manage now, without tacklin' another."

"Oh, well, now, Emeline, young folks, will be young folks, you know."

There was in John's voice something dangerously near satisfaction with this well-known peculiarity of youth.

"Yes; and they'll be old folks, too, which most of 'em seems to forget,"

returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after the retreating couple.

Mrs. Dysart was right. Sidney Palmerston and his companion were not thinking of old age that winter day. The mesa stretched a ma.s.s of purple lupine at their feet. There was the odor of spring, the warmth of summer, the languor of autumn, in the air. As they neared the canon the path grew narrow, and the girl walked ahead, turning now and then, and blocking the way, in the earnestness of her speech. They had long since ceased to talk of the tunnel; Sidney had ceased even to think of it. For weeks he had hardly dared to think at all. There had been at first the keen sense of disappointment in himself which comes to every confident soul as it learns the limitations of its own will; then the determination, so easy to youth's foreshortening view, to keep the letter of his promise and bury the spirit out of his own sight and the sight of the world forever; then the self-pity and the pleading with fate for a little happiness as an advance deposit on the promise of lifelong self-sacrifice; then the perfumed days when thought was lulled and duty became a memory and a hope. Strangely enough, it was always duty, this unholy thing which he meant to do--this payment of a debt in base metal, when the pure gold of love had been promised. But ethics counted for little to-day as he followed a figure clad in blue serge down the path that led from the edge of the canon to the bed of the stream. Budding willows made a green mist in the depths below them, and the sweet, tarry odors of the upland blew across the tops of the sycamores in the canon and mingled with the smell of damp leaf-mould and the freshness of growing things.

The girl paused and peered down into the canon inquiringly.

"Do you think of leaping?" asked Palmerston.

She smiled seriously, still looking down. "No; I was wondering if the rainfall had been as light in the mountains as it has been in the valley, and how the water-supply will hold out through the summer if we have no more."

Palmerston laughed. "Do you always think of practical things?" he asked.

She turned and confronted him with a half-defiant, half-whimsical smile.

"I do not think much about what I think," she said; "I am too busy thinking."

As she spoke she took a step backward and tripped upon some obstacle in the path.

Palmerston sprang forward and caught her upraised arm with both hands.

"I--I--love you!" he said eagerly, tightening his grasp, and then loosening it, and falling back with the startled air of one who hears a voice when he thinks himself alone.

The young woman let her arm fall at her side, and stood still an instant, looking at him with untranslatable eyes.

"You love me?" she repeated with slow questioning. "How can you?"

Palmerston smiled rather miserably. "Far more easily than I can explain why I have told you," he answered.

"If it is true, why should you not tell me?" she asked, still looking at him steadily.

Evasion seemed a drapery of lies before her gaze. Palmerston spoke the naked truth:

"Because I cannot ask you to love me in return--because I have promised to marry another woman, and I must keep my promise."

He made the last avowal with the bitter triumph of one who chooses death where he might easily have chosen dishonor.

His listener turned away a little, and looked through the green haze of the canon at the snow of San Antonio.