A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 18

_I_ was there to meet Miss Kitty Comyn, I told him, and he said so was he, and might he have a little talk with me? He seemed excited and serious, very.

"Are you _the_ Mr. Harshaw?" I asked, though I hadn't an idea, of course, that he could be anybody else.

"Not exactly," he said. "I'm his cousin, Cecil Harshaw."

"Is Mr. Harshaw ill?"

He looked foolish, and dropped his eyes. "No," said he. "He was well last night when I left him at the ranch." Last night! He had come a hundred miles between dark of one day and noon of the next!

"Your cousin takes a royal way of bringing home his bride--by proxy," I said.

"Ah, but it's partly my fault, you know"--he could not quell a sudden shamefaced laugh,--"if you'd kindly allow me to explain. I shall have to be quite brutally frank; but Mrs. Percifer said"--Here he lugged in a propitiatory compliment, which sounded no more like Mrs. Percifer than it fitted me; but mistaking my smile of irony for one of encouragement, he babbled on. I wish I could do justice to his "charmin'" accent and his perfectly unstudied manner of speech, a mixture of British and American colloquialisms, not to say slang.

"It's like this, Mrs. Daly. A man oughtn't to be a dog-in-the-manger about a girl, even if he has got her promise, you know. If he can't get a move on and marry her before her hair is gray, he ought to step out and give the other fellows a chance. I'm not speaking for myself, though I would have spoken three years ago if she hadn't been engaged to Micky--she's always been engaged to him, one may say. And I accepted the fact; and when I came over here and took a share in Micky's ranch I meant right by him, and G.o.d knows I meant more than right by her. Wasn't it right to suppose she must be tremendously fond of him, to let him keep her on the string the way he has? They've been engaged four years now. And was it any wonder I was mad with Micky, seeing how he was loafing along, fooling his money away, not looking ahead and denying himself as a man ought who's got a nice girl waiting for him? I'm quite frank, you see; but when you hear what an a.s.s I've made of myself, you'll not begrudge me the few excuses I have to offer. All I tried to do was to give Micky a leg to help him over his natural difficulty--laziness, you know. He's not a bad sort at all, only he's slow, and it's hard to get him to look things square in the face.

It was for her sake, supposing her happiness was bound up in him, that I undertook to boom the marriage a bit. But Micky won't boom worth a ----. He's back on my hands now, and what in Heaven's name I'm to say to her"--His eloquence failed him here, and he came down to the level of ordinary conversation, with the remark, "It's a facer, by Jove!"

I managed not to smile. If he'd undertaken, I said, to "boom" his cousin's marriage to a girl he liked himself, he ought at least to get credit for disinterestedness; but so few good acts were ever rewarded in this world! I seemed to have heard that it was not very comfortable, though it might be heroic, to put one's hand between the tree and the bark.

"Ah," he said feelingly, "it's fierce! I never was so rattled in my life.

But before you give me too much credit for disinterestedness, you know, I must tell you that I'm thinking of--that--in short, I've a mind to speak for myself now, if Micky doesn't come up to time."

I simply looked at him, and he blushed, but went on more explicitly. "He could have married her, Mrs. Daly, any time these three years if he'd had the pluck to think so. He'd say, 'If we have a good season with the horses, I'll send for her in the fall.' We'd have our usual season, and then he'd say, 'It won't do, Cecy.' And in the spring we are always as poor as jack-rabbits, and so he'd wait till the next fall. I got so mad with his infernal coolness, and the contrast of how things were and how she must think they were! Still, I knew he'd be good to her if he had her here, and he'd save twice as much with her to provide for as he ever could alone. I used to hear all her little news, poor girl. She had lost her father, and there were tight times at home. The next word was that she was going for a governess. Then I said, 'You ought to go over and get her, or else send for her sharp. You are as ready to marry her now as ever you will be.'

"'I'm too confounded strapped,' said he. I told him I would fix all that if he would go, or write her to come. But the weeks went by, and he never made a move. And there were reasons, Mrs. Daly, why it was best that any one who cared for him should be on the ground. Then I made my kick. I don't believe in kicking, as a rule; but if you do kick, kick hard, I say. 'If you don't send for her, Micky, I'll send for her myself,' I said.

"'What for?' said he.

"'For you,' said I, 'if you'll have the manliness to step up and claim her, and treat her as you ought. If not, she can see how things are, and maybe she'll want a change. You may not think you are wronging her and deceiving her,' I said, 'but that's what you are; and if you won't make an end of this situation' (I haven't told you, and I can't tell you, the whole of it, Mrs. Daly), 'I will end it myself--for your sake and for her sake and for my own.' And I warned him that I should have a word to say to her if he didn't occupy the field of vision quite promptly after she arrived. 'One of us will meet her at the train,' said I, 'and the one who loves her will get there first.'

"Well, I'm here, and he was cooking himself a big supper when I left him at the ranch. It was a simple test, Mrs. Daly. If he scorned to abide by it, he might at least have written and put her on her guard, for he knew I was not bluffing. He pawed up the ground a bit, but he never did a thing. Then I cabled her just the question, Would she come? and she answered directly that she would. So I wired her the money. I signed myself Harshaw, and I told Micky what I'd done.

"And whether he is sulking over my interference, I can't say, but from that moment he has never opened his mouth to me on the subject. I haven't a blessed notion what he means to do; judging by what he has done, nothing, I should say. But it may be he's only waiting to give me the full strength of the situation, seeing it's one of my own contriving. There's a sort of rum justice in it; but think of his daring to insult her so, for the sake of punishing me!

"Now, what am I to say to her, Mrs. Daly? Am I to make a clean breast of it, and let her know the true and peculiar state of the case, including the fact that I'm in love with her myself? Or would you let that wait, and try to smooth things over for Micky, and get her to give him another chance?

There was no sign of his moving last night; still, he may get here yet."

The young man's spirits seemed to be rising as he neared the end of his tale, perhaps because he could see that it looked pretty black for "Micky."

"If one could only know what he does mean to do, it would be simpler, wouldn't it?"

I agreed that it would. Then I made the only suggestion it occurred to me to offer in the case--that he should go to his hotel and get his luncheon or breakfast, for I doubted if he'd had any, and leave me to meet Miss Comyn, and say to her whatever a kind Providence might inspire me with. My husband would call for him and fetch him up to dinner, I said; and after dinner, if Mr. Michael Harshaw had not arrived, or sent some satisfactory message, he could cast himself into the breach.

"And I'm sorry for you," I said; "for I don't think you will have an easy time of it."

"She can't do worse than hate me, Mrs. Daly; and that's better than sending me friendly little messages in her letters to Micky."

I wish I could give you this story in his own words, or any idea of his extraordinary, joyous naturalness, and his air of preposterous good faith--as if he had done the only thing conceivable in the case. It was as convincing as a scene in comic opera.

"By the way," said he, "I didn't enc.u.mber myself with much luggage this trip. I have nothing but the clothes I stand in."

I made a reckless offer of my husband's evening things, which he as recklessly accepted, not knowing if he could get into them; but I thought he did not look so badly as he was, in his sun-faded corduroys, the whole of him from head to foot as pale as a plaster cast with dust, except his bright blue eyes, which had hard, dark circles around them.

"The train is coming," I warned him.

"_She_ is coming! _a la bonne heure!_" he cried, and was off on a run, and whistled a car that was going up Main Street to the natatorium; and I knew that in ten minutes he would be reveling in the plunge, while I should be making the best of this beautiful crisis of his inventing to Miss Comyn.

My dear, they are the prettiest pair! Providence, no doubt, designed them for each other, if he had not made this unpardonable break. She has a spirit of her own, has Miss Kitty, and if she cried up-stairs alone with me,--tears of anger and mortification, it struck me, rather than of heart-grief,--I will venture she shed no tears before him.

As Mr. Michael Harshaw did not arrive, we gave Mr. Cecil his opportunity, as promised, of speech with his victim and judge. He talked to her in the little sitting-room after dinner--as long as she would listen to him, apparently. We heard her come flying out with a sort of pa.s.sionate suddenness, as if she had literally run away from his words. But he had followed her, and for an instant I saw them together in the hall. His poor young face was literally burning; perhaps it was only sunburn, but I fancied she had been giving him a metaphorical drubbing--"ragging," as Tom would call it--worse than Lady Anne gave Richard.

She was still in a fine Shakespearean temper when I carried her off up-stairs. Reserves were impossible between us; her right to any privacy in her own affairs had been given away from the start; that was one of the pleasing features of the situation.

"_Marry_ him! marry _him_!" she cried. "That impertinent, meddlesome boy!

That false, dishonorable"--

"Go slow, dear," I said. "I don't think he's quite so bad as that."

"And what do I want with _him_! And what do you think he tells me, Mrs.

Daly? And whether there's any truth in him, how do I know? He declares it was not Michael Harshaw who sent for me at all! The message, all the messages, were from him. In that case I have been decoyed over here to marry a man who not only never asked me to come, but who stood by and let me be hoaxed in this shameful way, and now leaves me to be persecuted by this one's ridiculous offers of marriage,--as if I belonged to all or any of the Harshaws, whichever one came first! Michael may not even know that I am here," she added in a lower key. "If Cecil Harshaw was capable of doing what he has done, by his own confession, it would be little more to intercept my answers to his forgeries."

That was true, I said. It was quite possible the young man lied. She would, of course, give Mr. Michael Harshaw a chance to tell _his_ story.

"I cannot believe," said the distracted girl, "that Michael would lend himself, even pa.s.sively, to such an abominable trick. Could any one believe it--of his worst enemy!"

Impossible, I agreed. She must believe nothing till she had heard from her lover.

"But if Michael did not know it," she mused, with a piteous blush, "then Cecil Harshaw must have sent me that money himself--the insolence! And after that to ask me to marry him!"

Men were fearfully primitive still, after all that we had done for them, I reminded her, especially in their notions of love-making. Their intentions were generally better than their methods. No great harm had been done, for that matter. A letter, if written that night, would reach Mr. Michael Harshaw at his ranch not later than the next night. All these troubles could wait till the real Mr. Harshaw had been heard from. My husband would see that her letter reached him promptly, and in the mean time Mr. Cecil need not be told that we were proving his little story.

I was forced to humor her own theory of her case; but I have no idea, myself, that Cecil Harshaw has not told the truth. He does not look like a liar, to begin with, and how silly to palm off an invention for to-day which to-morrow would expose!

Tom is still talking and talking. I really must interfere and give Mr.

Cecil a chance to go. It is quite too late to look for the other one. If he comes at this hour, there is nothing he can do but go to bed.

... Well, the young man has gone, and Tom is shutting up the house, and I hope the bride is asleep, though I doubt it. Have I told you how charming she is? Not so discouragingly tall or so cla.s.sic as the Du Maurier G.o.ddess, but "comfy," much more "comfy," to my mind. Her nose is rudimentary, rather, which doesn't prevent her having a mind of her own, though noses are said to have it all to say as to force of character. Her upper lip has the most fascinating little pout; her chin is full and emotional--but these are emotional times; and there is a beautiful finish about her throat and hands and wrists. She looks more dressed in a shirt-waist, in which she came down to dinner, her trunk not having come, than some of us do in the best we have. Her clothes are very fresh and recent, to a woman of Idaho; but she does not wear her pretty ears "cachees," I am glad to say. They are very pretty, and one--the left one--is burned pure crimson from sitting next the window of her section all the way from Omaha.

But why do I write all this nonsense at twelve o'clock at night, when all I need say by way of description is that we want her to stay with us, indefinitely if necessary, and let her countrymen and lovers go to--their ranch on the Snake River!

What do you suppose those wretches were arguing about in the dining-room last night, over their whisky and soda? Sentiment was "not in it," as they would say. They were talking up a scheme--a scheme that Tom has had in mind ever since he first saw the Thousand Springs six years ago, when he had the Snake River placer-mining fever. It was of no use then, because electrical transmission was in its infancy, its long-distance capacities undreamed of.

But Harshaw was down there fishing last summer, and he was able to satisfy the only doubt Tom has had as to some natural feature of the scheme--I don't know what; but Harshaw has settled it, and is as wild as Tom himself about the thing. Also he wants to put into it all the money he can recover out of his cousin's ranch. (I shouldn't think the future of that partnership would be exactly happy!) And now they propose to take hold of it together, and at once.

Harshaw, who, it seems, is enough of an engineer to run a level, will go down with Tom and make the preliminary surveys. Tom will work up the plans and estimates, and prepare a report, which Harshaw will take to London, where his father has influence in the City, and the sanguine child sees himself placing it in the twinkling of an eye.