A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 24

This was her position, which any child might have taken in defense of a beloved toy; but she was holding it with all a woman's force and constancy.

I was glad of it, I said to Tom, and I hoped she would stand them off for all she was worth. But I am not really glad. What woman could love a waterfall better than her husband's success? There are hundreds of waterfalls in the world, but only this one scheme for Tom.

But anent this. .h.i.tch, it teases me a little, I confess, on Kitty's account, when Cecil meanders over to the island at all hours of the day. To be sure, it relieves Kitty of his company; but is she so glad, after all, to be relieved?

It was last Friday, after one of Harshaw's entirely frank but perfectly unexplained absences, that he came into camp and inquired if there was any clam-broth left in the kitchen. I referred him to the cook. Finding there was, he returned to me and asked if he might take a tin of it to Miss Malcolm for her patient.

"Who is Miss Malcolm?" I asked. But of course who could she be but the lady of the island, where he spends the greater part of his time? He was welcome to the clam-broth, or anything else he thought would be acceptable in that quarter, I said. And how was the patient?

"Oh, she's quite bad all the time. She doesn't get about. I wonder if you'd mind, Mrs. Daly, if I asked you to look in on her some day? The old creature's in a sad way, it seems to me."

Of course I didn't mind, if Miss Malcolm did not. Harshaw seemed to feel authorized to a.s.sure me of that fact. So I went first with Tom, and then I went again alone, leaving Harshaw in the boat with Kitty.

Miss Malcolm's maid or man servant, or both--for she does the work of both, and looks in her bed (dressed in a flannel bed-sack, her head tied up in an old blue knitted "fascinator") less like a woman than anything I ever beheld--appears to have had a mild form of grippe fever, and having never been sick in her life before, she thought she was nearing her end. My simple treatment, the basis of which was quinine and whiskey, seemed to strike old Tamar favorably; and after the second visit there was no need to come again to see her. But by this time I was deep in the good books of her mistress, who knows too little of illness herself to appreciate how little has been done, by me at least, or how very little needed to be done after restoring the old woman's confidence in her power to live. (The last time I saw her she still wore the blue fascinator, but with a man's hat on top of it; she was waddling toward the cow-corral with half a haystack, it looked like, poised on a hay-fork above her head. She was certainly a credit to her doctor, if not to her _corsetiere_, she and the haystack being much of a figure.)

Miss Malcolm's innocent grat.i.tude is most embarra.s.sing, really painful, under the circ.u.mstances, and the poor child cannot let the circ.u.mstances alone. She imagines I am always thinking about Tom's scheme. It is evident that _she_ is; and not being exactly a woman of the world, out of the fullness of her heart her mouth speaketh. That would be all right if she would speak to somebody else. _I_ don't want to take advantage of her grat.i.tude, as she seems determined I shall do.

"You must think me a very strained, sentimental creature," she said to me the last time, "to care so much for a few old rocks and a little piece of foamy water."

I didn't think so at all, I told her. If I had lived there all my life, I should feel about the place just as she did.

Here she began to blush and distress herself. "But think how kind you have all been to me! Mr. Harshaw was here every day, after he found how ill poor Tamar was. He did so many things: he lifted her, for one thing, and that I couldn't have done to save her life. And your two visits have simply cured her! And here I am making myself a stumbling-block and ruining your husband's plans!"

I said he was quite capable of taking care of himself.

"Does your husband want _all_ the water?" she persisted. "Do I understand that he must have it all?"

I supposed she was talking of the Snow Bank, and since she was determined we should discuss the affair in this social way, I said he would have to have a great deal; and I told her about the distance the power would have to be sent, and about the mines and the smelters, and all the rest of it, for it was no use to belittle the scheme. I had got started unintentionally, and I saw by her face that I had made an impression. It is a small-featured, rather set, colorless face, not so pretty as Tom pretended, but very delicate and pure; but now it became suddenly the face of a fierce little bigot, and enthusiast to boot.

"It shall never go through,--not _that_ scheme--not if"--Then she remembered to whom she was talking, and set her lips together, and two great shiny drops stood in her eyes.

"Don't, don't, you child!" I said. "Don't worry about their old scheme! If it must come it will come; but as a rule, a scheme, my dear, is the last thing that ever does go through. There's plenty of time."

"But I can't give in," she said. "No; I _must_ try to hinder it all I can. I will be honest with you. I like you all; of all the strangers who have come here I never liked any people better. But your husband--must _not_--set his heart on _all_ that water! It doesn't belong to him."

"Does it belong to you, dear?"

"The _sight_ of it belongs to me," she said. "I will not have the place all littered up with their pipes and power-plants. Look out there! Look at that! Has any one the right to come here and spoil such a lovely thing as that?"--This is what it is to be the daughter of an artist.

"And how about the other despoiler," I asked--"the young man with the pneumatic pipe?"

"The 'pneumatic pipe'!" she repeated.

"'Pump,' I mean. Is he to be allowed all over the place to do as _he_ pleases? His scaling-ladders are littering up the bluffs--not that they incommode the bluffs any; but if I lived here, I should want to brush them away as I would sweep the cobwebs from my walls."

"I do not own the bluffs," she said in a distant, tremulous voice.

But the true answer to my question, as I surmise, was the sudden, helpless flush which rose, wave upon wave, covering her poor little face, blotting out all expression but that of painful girlish shame. Here, if I'm not mistaken, will be found the heart of the difficulty. Miss Malcolm's sympathies are evidently with compressed air rather than with electrical transmission. I shall tell Tom he need waste no more arguments on her. Let him first compound with his rival of the pump.

I suppose there is just such a low, big moon as this looking in upon you where you sit, you little dot of a woman, lost in the piazza perspectives of the Coronado; and you might think small things of our present habitation--a little tent among the bushes, with wind-blown weeds against the moon, shifting their shadow-patterns over our canvas walls. But you'd not think small things of our Sand Springs Fall by night, that glimmers on the dark cliff opposite--cliff, and mist-like cataract, and the low moon throwing the shadow of the bluff across it, all repeated in the stiller, darker picture of the lagoon. I shall not inflict much of this sort of thing upon you; but the senseless beauty of it all gives one a heartache.

Why should it be here, where you and I shall never see it together--where I shall leave it soon, never to see it again? Tom says we are coming back--when the great scheme is under way. Ah, the scheme, the scheme! It looks very far away to-night, and so do some other schemes that I had set my heart on unaware, foolish old woman that I am. As if there was only one way in this--world for young men and women to be happy!

Harshaw brought me your sweet letter yesterday. It was stage-day, and he went up over the bluffs to the ferry mail-box at the cross-roads, where the road to Shoshone Falls branches from the road to Bliss.

I read to Kitty what you wrote me about the Garretts and their children, and the going to New York and then to Paris. (Thank you so much, dear, for your prompt interest in my little bride that isn't to be!) She had two letters of her own which she had read by herself, and afterward I thought she had been crying; but with her it is best not to press the note of sympathy. Neither does she like me to handle her affairs with gloves on, so to speak. So I plunged into the business in a matter-of-fact tone, and she replied in the same. Her objection is to going east to New York, and then to the other side. "I had rather stay in California," she said, "or anywhere in the West." Naturally; westward lies the way of escape from social complications.

She is afraid of the Percifers, and of meeting people she knows in Paris.

But an offer like this was exceptional in this part of the world, I reminded her. A nurse for the boy, a maid, and only two little girls of eight and ten on her hands; and such nice people as the Garretts, who have been all over the world!

"Well," she said, "I should certainly like to get away from here as soon as possible. From _here_, not from _you_!" she added, looking me in the face.

Her eyes were full of tears. We clasped hands on that.

"What is it? Has anything else happened?" I asked; for I knew by her looks that something had.

"Oh, dear!" she sighed, "I should so like to take myself and my troubles seriously once in a while. No sooner do I try, but something perfectly farcical is sure to happen. If I tell you this, promise me you won't laugh.

It's indecent for me to laugh; mamma would never forgive me. The old dear!

I'm so fond of him!"

The "old dear," it seems, is Micky's father--a very superior sort of father for such a son to have, but accidents will happen in the best-regulated families. He is a gallant widower of fair estate, one of those splendid old club-men of London; a very expensive article of old gentleman, with fine old-fashioned manners and morals, and a few stray impulses left, it would seem by what follows. According to the father's code, the son has not conducted himself in his engagement to Kitty Comyn as a gentleman should.

Thereupon the head of the house goes to Miss Kitty's mother and makes the _amende honorable_ by offering his hand and heart and fortune to his son's insulted bride! The mother is touched and pleased not a little by this prompt espousal of her daughter's cause; and having wiped away all tears from _her_ eyes, this gallant old gentleman is coming over to America, for the first time in his life, to make his proposal to the bride herself! He is not so old, to get down to particulars; sixty-three doesn't look so old to some of us as it does to Miss Kitty. He is in fine health, I doubt not, and magnificently preserved. Kitty's mother is not at all averse, as I gather, to this way of settling her child's difficulties. She rather pleadingly a.s.sures Kitty that Mr. Harshaw senior has solemnly sworn that this is no unpleasant duty he feels called on to perform; not only his honor, but his affections are profoundly enlisted in this proposal. Kitty has had for years a sacred place in his regard; and from thinking of her as a daughter absolutely after his own heart, it is but a step to think of her in a still nearer--the nearest--relation. He begs her mother to prepare her for no perfunctory offer of marriage, but one that warms with every day's delay till he can take the dear child under his lifelong protection. Not to punish or to redress does he come, but to secure for himself and posterity a treasure which his son had trampled under foot. Somehow we did not feel like laughing, after all. Kitty, I think, is a little frightened. She cannot reach her mother, even with a cable dispatch, before this second champion will arrive.

"He's an awfully grand old fellow, you know. I could never talk to him as I do to the boys. If he thinks it his duty to marry me, I don't know if I can help myself. Poor Uncle George! I've always called him 'uncle' like his own nieces, who are all my friends. I never thought that I should be 'poor-ing'

Uncle George! But he can't have heard yet of Micky's marriage. Fancy his going down to the ranch to stay with Micky and that woman! And then for a girl like me to toss him aside, after such a journey and such kindness! I don't know how I shall ever have courage to do it. There are fine women in London who would jump at the chance of being Mrs. Harshaw--not Mrs. Micky, nor Mrs. Stephen, nor Mrs. Sidney, but _Mrs. Harshaw_, you understand?" I understood.

"And now," she said, producing the second letter, "you _will_ laugh! And you may!"

The envelope contained a notification, in due form, of the arrival from New York, charges not paid, of some five hundred pounds of second-cla.s.s freight consigned to Mrs. Harshaw, Harshaw's ranch, Glenn's Ferry (via Bisuka).

"These things belong to me," said Kitty. "They cost me the last bit of money I had that was my own. Mrs. Percifer, who is so clever at managing, persuaded me I should need them directly on the ranch--curtains and rugs and china, and heaven knows what! She nearly killed me, dragging me about those enormous New York shops. She said it would be far and away cheaper and better to buy them there. I didn't mind about anything, I was so scared and homesick; I did whatever she said. She saw to getting them off, I suppose. That must have been her idea, directing them to Mrs. Harshaw. She thought there would be no Kitty Comyn, no _me_, when these got here. And there isn't; _this_ is not the Kitty Comyn who left England--six weeks, is it?--or six years ago!"

"How did the letter reach you?" I asked. We examined the envelope. It bore the postmark, not of Bisuka, but of Glenn's Ferry, which is the nearest post-office to the Harshaw ranch. Micky's wife had doubtless opened the letter, and Micky, perceiving where the error lay, had reinclosed, but some one else had directed it--the postmaster, probably, at his request--to Kitty, at our camp. That was rather a nice little touch in Micky, that last about the direction.

"Come, he is honest, at the least," I said, "whether Mrs. Micky would have scrupled or not. She could claim the things if she chose."

"She is quite welcome," said Kitty. "I don't know what in the world I shall do with them. There'll be boxes and bales and barrels--enough to bury me and all my troubles. I might build me a funeral pyre!"

We fell into each other's arms and screamed with laughter.

"Kitty, we'll have an auction," I cried. "There's nothing succeeds like an auction out here. We'll sell the things at boom prices--we'll sell everything."

"But the bride," said Kitty; "you will have to keep the bride." And without a moment's warning, from laughing till she wept, she began to weep in earnest. I haven't seen her cry so since she came to us, not even that miserable first night. She struggled with herself, and seemed dreadfully ashamed, and angry with me that I should have seen her cry. Did she suppose I thought she was crying because she wasn't going to be a bride, after all?

"Oh, Mrs. Daly, I feel so ill!" were Kitty's first words to me when I woke this morning. I looked her over and questioned her, and concluded that a sleepless night, with not very pleasant thoughts for company, might be held responsible for a good share of her wretchedness.

"What were you lying awake about? Your new champion, Uncle George?" I asked her.