A Daughter of the Middle Border Part 14

"Where's my new daughter? Why didn't you bring her?" she demanded.

"She couldn't come this time. The question is still unsettled."

"Go right back and settle it," she urged. "Go quick, before some one else gets her. Write to her. Tell her to come right up. Send her a telegram. Seems as though I can't wait another week."

Her urgency made me laugh, even while I perceived the pathos of it. "I can't bring her to you, mother, till she is willing to come as a bride--but she's thinking about it, and I am going back next week to get my answer. Be patient a little while longer. I promise you the whole question will be settled soon, and I _hope_ it will be settled our way.

Zulime seems to like me."

Dear old mother! Her stammering, tremulous utterance made me smile and it made me weep. She was growing old prematurely, and the need of haste was urgent. "If I can possibly persuade her to come," I added very gravely, "I'll fetch her home to eat Thanksgiving dinner with you."

My tone, rather than my words, silenced her, and gave her a measure of content, although she was childishly impatient of even a day's delay.

All that week I alternately hoped and doubted, a.s.sembling all the items on the credit side of my ledger, and at last a letter came in which Zulime indicated that she wished to see me. "I am still undecided," she said, "but you may come." I left at once for the camp, feeling that her confession of indecision was in my favor.

Lorado was not markedly favorable to me as a brother-in-law. He liked me and respected me as a friend, but as a suitor for the hand of his sister--well, that was another and far more serious matter.

The camp "Equipage" met me at the station, and I consented to ride in it as far as the Heckman gate, hoping that Zulime would be there to welcome me. In this I was not disappointed, and something in her face and the firm clasp of her hand rea.s.sured me.

For nearly a week, in the midst of the most glorious October landscape, surrounded by the scarlet and gold and crimson branches of the maples and the deep-reds and bronze-greens of the oaks, she and I walked and rode and boated in almost constant companionship. Idyllic days! Days of a quality I had lost all hope of ever again reliving. Days of quiet happiness and almost perfect content, for on an afternoon of dreamlike beauty, in a glade radiant with hazy golden sunshine and odorous with the ripening leaves, she spoke the all-important words which joined her future life with mine.

We were seated at the moment on our favorite bank, under a tall oak tree, gorgeous as a sunset cloud, and as silent. I had been reading to her, and she was busy with some delicate embroidery. The crickets were chirping sleepily in the gra.s.s at our feet, and the jays calling harshly seemed warning us of the pa.s.sing of summer and the coming on of frost.

"Let the wedding day be soon," I pleaded as we rose to return to camp.

"I am nearing the dead-line. I am almost forty years old--I can't afford to wait. I want you to come to me now--at once. The old folks are waiting for you. They want you for Thanksgiving Day. Your presence would make them happier than any other good fortune in this world."

She understood my way of putting the argument. She knew that I was veiling my own eagerness under my mother's need, and after a little reflection she said, "I am going out to my father's home in Kansas. You may come for me there on the twenty-third of November. That is--if you still want me at that time."

The end of the camp season was at hand; everybody was packing up, and so my girl and I turned with deep regret from the golden halls of our sylvan meeting-place. "This is my Indian summer," I said to her, "and that you may never have cause to regret the decision which this day has brought to you, is my earnest hope."

More than twenty years have gone over our heads, and as I write these lines our silver wedding is not far off. Our lives have not been all sunshine, but Zulime has met all storms with a brave sweetness, which I cannot overpraise. If she has regrets, she does not permit me to know them. My poverty--which persists--has not embittered her or caused her, so far as I know, a single mood of self-commiseration.

CHAPTER NINE

A Judicial Wedding

On reaching my Elm Street home the next day, I was surprised and deeply gratified to find on my desk a letter from William Dean Howells, in which he said: "I am at the Palmer House. I hope you will come to see me soon, for I start for Kansas on a lecture trip in a few days."

Although I had long been urging that he should come to Chicago, he had steadfastly declined to accept a lecture engagement west of Ohio, and I could not quite understand what had led him so far afield as Kansas. I hastened to call upon him, and, at the first appropriate pause in the conversation, I spoke to him of my engagement. "Miss Taft loves your books and would keenly appreciate the honor of meeting you."

With instant perception of my wish to have him know my future wife, he replied, "My dear fellow, I am eager to meet _her_. Perhaps my gray hairs will excuse your bringing her to call upon me."

"At your convenience," I replied eagerly. "I want you to know her. She is very much worth while."

"I am sure of that," he smilingly retorted.

He was billed to speak that night, and as he was leaving for Rock Island the following day he arranged that I should bring Zulime to the hotel just before he started for his lecture.

After telling her of his wish to see her, I explained the significance of it. "You must understand that Mr. Howells is a kind of literary father confessor to me. He is a man of most delicate courtesy. Once you have seen him, once you have looked into his face, you will love him."

She was as ready as I was to take her, and promptly on the minute we sent up our names and took seats in the Ladies' Parlor. It had been years since I had entered the Palmer House, and as we waited we compared memories of its old-time splendor. "My father still regards it as the grandest hotel in the West, and it is probable that Mr. Howells knew of no other. So far as I know he has never been in Chicago before, unless possibly for a few days during the World's Fair."

Zulime was much excited at the thought of meeting the great novelist, but when he came, she took his hand with graceful composure, expressing just the right mingling of reserve and pleasure. I was proud of her, and the fact that Howells instantly and plainly approved of her, added to my satisfaction.

"I congratulate you both," he said as we were leaving. "You see," he added, addressing himself to Zulime, "your husband-elect is one of my boys. I am particularly concerned with his good fortune. I like his bringing you to see me, and I hope we shall see you both in New York."

In a literary sense this was my paternal blessing, for "Mr. Howells" had been a kind of spiritual progenitor and guide ever since my first meeting with him in '87. His wisdom, his humor, his exquisite art, had been of incalculable a.s.sistance to me, as they had been to Clemens, Burroughs, and many others of my fellow-craftsmen, and his commendation of me to my intended wife almost convinced me, for the moment, of my worthiness. How delightful he was! How delicate--how understanding! We both went away, rich in the honor of his approval of our prospective union.

Rich in his friendship, I was but poorly furnished in other respects. I recall with shame the shopping tour which I made along State Street, searching for an engagement ring, a gauge which Zulime, knowing my poverty, stoutly insisted that she did not need--a statement which I was simple enough to believe until her sister enlightened me. "That's only Zuhl's way. Of course she wants a ring--every girl does. Don't fail to get her one--a nice one!"

I found one at last that Zulime thought I could afford. It was a small gold band with five opals, surrounded by several very minute diamonds, all of which could be had for the sum of thirty-eight dollars. As I bought this ring Zulime's girlish delight in it touched as well as instructed me. Each time she held her finger up for me to see (she had a beautiful hand) I regretted that I had not purchased a better ring. Why did I take a ring at thirty-eight dollars! Why not fifty dollars? But what could be expected of a man who never before had spent so much as one dollar on a piece of jewelry, a man whose chief way of earning money was to save it? Whenever I look at that poor little jewel now I experience a curious mingling of shame and regret. I had so little money at that time, and the future was so uncertain!

Zulime was living with her sister, and there I spent most of my evenings and some of my afternoons during the following week, scarcely able to realize my change of fortune except when alone with her, discussing our future. She agreed at last to a date for the wedding which would enable us to spend Thanksgiving at West Salem, and then for some reason, not clear to me now, I suddenly took the train for Gallup, New Mexico, with the Navajo Indian Agency for final destination.

Just why I should have chosen to visit Ganado at this precise time is inexplicable, but there is no mystery in my leaving Chicago. My future sister-in-law bluntly informed me that my absence from the city would greatly facilitate the necessary dressmaking. Although an obtuse person in some ways, I know when I am b.u.mped. Three days after Fuller's luncheon to Howells, I reached the town of Gallup, which is the point of departure for the Navajo Agency, some twenty-five or thirty miles north of the Santa Fe railway.

For nearly ten years I had been going to the Rocky Mountains at least once during the summer season, and it is probable that I felt the need of something to offset the impressions of my tour in England and France--to lose touch with my material even for twelve months was to be cheated--then, too, I hoped in this way to shorten the weeks of waiting.

Anyhow, here I was in Gallup, a drab little town which would have been a horror to my bride-elect.

One of the reasons for my being in New Mexico I am sure about. With the prospect of having some sort of an apartment in the city and a cabin at the camp, I was in the market for Navajo rugs, and silver, and Hopi pottery. It was in pursuit of these (and of literary material) that I mounted the stage the next morning and set off up the sun-lit valley to the north.

In leaving Gallup behind, my spirits rose. I wished that Zulime might have shared this strange landscape with me. On the right a distant, dimly-blue wall of mountains ran, while to the west rolled high, treeless hills, against which an occasional native hut showed like a wolf's den, half-hid among dwarf pinon trees and surrounded by naked children and savage dogs.

At intervals we came upon solitary shepherds tending their piebald flocks, as David and Abner guarded their father's sheep in Judea. That these patient shepherds, watching their lean herds, these Deborahs weaving their bright blankets beneath gnarled branches of spa.r.s.e cedar trees, should be living less than forty-eight hours from Chicago, was incredible, and yet here they were! Their life and landscape, though of a texture with that of Arabia, were as real as Illinois, and every mile carried me deeper into the silence and serenity of their tribal home.

Brown boys, belted with silver and wearing shirts of gay calico, met us, riding their wiry little ponies with easy grace. Children, naked, shy as foxes, arrested their play beside dry clumps of sage-brush and stared in solemn row, whilst their wrinkled, leathery grand-sires hobbled out, cupping their thin brown hands in prayer for tobacco.

There was something Oriental, fictive in it all, and when at the end of the day I found myself a guest in a pleasant cottage at the Agency, I was fully awake to the contrasts of my "material." My ears, as well as my eyes, were open to the drama of this land whose prehistoric customs were about to pa.s.s. For the moment I was inclined to rest there and study my surroundings, but as the real objective of my journey was Ganado, about thirty miles to the west of the Fort, I decided to go on.

Ganado was the home of a famous Indian trader named Hubbell, whose store was known to me as a center of Navajo life. Toward this point I set forth a few days later, attended by a young Navajo whose _hogan_ was in that direction, and who had promised to put me on my trail.

He was a fine, athletic youth of pleasant countenance, mounted upon a spotted pony and wearing a shirt of purple calico. With a belt of silver disks around his waist and a fillet of green cloth binding his glossy black hair, he was distinctly and delightfully colorful.

Our way rose at once to the level of a majestic plateau, spa.r.s.ely set with pines and cedars, a barren land from which the gra.s.s and shrubs had long since been cropped by swarms of sheep and goats. Nevertheless, it was lovely to the eye, and as we rode forward we came upon a party of Navajo girls gathering pinon nuts, laughing and singing in happy abandon, untroubled by the white man's world. They greeted my guide with jests, but became very grave as he pointed out a fresh bear-track in the dust of the trail.

"Heap bears," he said to me. "Injun no kill bears. Bears big medicine,"

and as we rode away he laughed back at the panic-stricken girls, who were hurriedly collecting their nuts in order to flee the spot.

At last my guide halted. "I go here," he signed with graceful hand. "You keep trail; bimeby you come deep valley--stream. On left white man's house. You stop there." All of which was as plain as if in spoken words.

As I rode on alone, the peace, the poetry, the suggestive charm of that silent, lonely, radiant land took hold upon me with compelling power.

Here in the midst of busy, commonplace America it lay, a section of the Polished Stone Age, retaining the most distinctive customs, songs and dances of the past. Here was a people going about its immemorial pursuits, undisturbed by the railway and the telephone. Its shepherds, like the Hitt.i.tes, who wandered down from the hills upon the city of Babylon two thousand years before the Christian Era, were patriarchal and pastoral. They asked but a tent, a piece of goat's flesh, and a cool spring.

Late in the afternoon (I loitered luxuriously) I came to the summit of a long ridge which overlooked a broad, curving valley, at the far-away western rim of which a slender line of water gleamed. How beautiful it all was, but how empty! No furrow, no hut, no hint of human habitation appeared, a land which must ever be lonely, for it is without rains, and barren of streams for irrigation.

An hour later I rode up to the door of a long, low, mud-walled building, and was met by the trader, a bush-bearded, middle-aged man with piercing gray eyes and st.u.r.dy, upright figure. This was Lorenzo Hubbell, one of the best-known citizens of New Mexico, living here alone, a day's ride from a white settler.