Overland Tales Part 10

"I did not observe. My opinion, however, if I may venture to express it, is that Mrs. Clayton, with all her talent for subjugating mankind, will hardly succeed in bringing that gentleman to her feet. This piece of rock, I think, could be inspired with the tender pa.s.sion just as soon."

"Oh! did he refuse that valuable information in regard to the resources of California?" asked Mrs. Clayton, with mingled indignation and concern.

Mrs. Bradshaw was bubbling over with laughter, while the rest of the ladies shared her mirth more or less openly, according to the degree of friendship entertained for Miss Kingsley.

When the party rounded the last bend near the spring, a tall, spare man, conspicuous in a generous expanse of white shirt-bosom, and low, stiff-brimmed hat, hastily laid down the drinking-cup, and moved out of sight, making the circuit of the bath-houses in his anxiety to avoid the advancing column of fair ones. Uncle George was on hand, as usual, smilingly filling gla.s.ses and dippers with the boiling waters, trying between whiles to answer the numerous questions propounded, mostly in regard to the retreating form disappearing among the manzanite on the hillside.

"It's the gentleman from Siskiyou." The words were addressed to Mrs.

Clayton, who was blowing little puffs of wind into the gla.s.s in her hand, and seemed to have no interest in common with the eager, laughing crowd about. "He and his pardner are both here; they own placer-mines on Yreka Flats, and came here because the gentleman's liver is affected.

They're a funny couple--never speak to no ladies, and ain't sociable like, only among themselves. His pardner--there he is now, going up after him," pointing to a low-built, square-shouldered man, with black, bushy eyebrows--"waits on him like a woman, and no two brothers couldn't be more affectionate. His pardner told me his own self that when they first came together, eighteen years ago, he got into a row at Placerville--used to be Hangtown, then--and they were firing into him thick and fast after he was down, when Mr. Brodie stepped in, picked him up and carried him to their cabin, and nussed him till he was well again. You see he limps a little yet; but then Mr. Brodie was the only doctor he had, and he says it's a wonder to him he has any legs left at all, he was so riddled with shot."

Sufficient water having been drank, the ladies wended their way back, scattering as they approached the hotel building--generally spoken of as "the house"--which contained parlor, dining and a.s.sembly rooms. Some sought their cottages, others climbed the hill-sides, while still others visited the little stream rushing along through the green depths that the stage-road overhung. Some had escorts, others went alone, or formed groups of three or four; and all gave themselves up to the enjoyment of that perfect freedom which makes the stay at these California watering-places a recreation and a holiday.

As the heat of the sun became more oppressive, the stragglers returned; and the closed window-blinds of the cottages spoke of an unusually warm day for the season. This, however, did not forbid the ushering in of the next day with an extra heavy fog, which dripped from the eaves like rain, and made more penetrating the wind that came in surly gusts and rudely swept back the end of the shawl thrown Spanish-fashion over Mrs.

Clayton's shoulder. Her right hand grasped a bottle filled with water from the Springs; and the left, hidden until now under the shawl, was bound up in a white cloth. The wind had carried her hat away, too; and after looking helplessly around, she deposited the bottle on the bench nearest her, and gave chase to the runaway. But the hat was suddenly held up before her, and the bottle taken from the bench. It was the gentleman from Siskiyou, who stammered something she did not understand, and to which she replied sweetly and plaintively, "Thank you, ever so much. I am so helpless with that hand. I sprained it some weeks ago, falling from a carriage, and did not know how bad it was till the doctors sent me here. I must have hurt it again yesterday; and now I've got to go about like a cripple." The voice was like a child's; and a half sob seemed to rise in her throat as she spoke the last words, and a tell-tale moisture shone in her eyes.

He had awkwardly set the bottle back on the bench; and when she prepared to move on, he bent over to seize the bottle and carry it for her. In his nervousness he did not heed that she, too, was stooping forward; and only when their heads came in contact did he realize how near he had stood to her. A deep scarlet overspread his sallow face, while Mrs.

Clayton said, "Oh, will you carry the bottle for me? Thanks. I wanted to bathe my hand, and was afraid to go more than once through the fog and wind."

They reached the cottage, where he deposited the bottle on the door-steps, and withdrew with a somewhat awkward, but perfectly chivalrous bow.

After breakfast, when the ground was still too wet to walk out, Jenny, sitting in the low rocking-chair by the open door, was startled by footsteps crunching under the window; and a moment later Mr. Brodie placed a bottle at her feet.

"I thought it might be better for your wrist to have the water hot to bathe it in; that's just from the spring, and I walked fast." In spite of the unvarnished speech, there was something about the man that made it plain to her why people involuntarily spoke of him as "the gentleman," when his partner was always spoken of merely as his partner.

It was only common politeness that she should allow him to sit on the door-step, while she immersed the soft, white hand; and the bottle of hot spring water was repeated, till she declared the ground dry enough to walk down to the spring with him. Any number of necks were stretched from parlor-doors and windows, when the shy, bashful gentleman from Siskiyou was seen escorting Mrs. Clayton; but falling in with a train of ladies at the Springs, they all walked back together. Mr. Brodie, unnoticed apparently by Jenny, and uncomfortable among so many of the "contrary s.e.x," quietly slipped away under the shadow of a clump of young trees, where he was joined directly by his partner, who had watched him uneasily all the morning.

It was a warm, cloudless day, a few weeks later, and Mrs. Clayton had not joined the picnic party--because, Ben. Brodie said to himself, with a flutter of his unsophisticated heart, _he_ had felt too unwell in the morning to go. Going down to the Springs alone, Jenny met his partner, and asked pleasantly whether Mr. Brodie had yet recovered from his attack of last night.

"Thank you, Miss, he's better; but it's my opinion as how he'd get well much quicker if he left these Springs and went down to 'Frisco for a spell."

"But, Mr. Perkins, his liver is affected; and these waters are said to be very beneficial."

"Yes, Miss, it _was_ his liver; but I think as how it's in the chist now; and"--doggedly aside--"mebbee the heart, too; and he'll never be himself again while he's up here."

"Oh, you must not see things so black. See, there comes Mr. Brodie now."

"Yes--" something like an oath was smothered between the bearded lips, and the s.h.a.ggy eyebrows were lowered portentously--"so I see. Ben, didn't I tell yer to stay in the house, and I'd fetch yer the water?"

Whenever Si Perkins addressed Jenny as "Miss"--which was almost invariably his custom--it made her think of a short conversation between Mr. Brodie and herself, soon after their first acquaintance. He had asked her, with an a.s.sumed indifference, but a nervous tremor in his voice, "And you are a widow, Mrs. Clayton?" upon which she had turned sharply and said, snappishly, "Would I be away up here all alone if I had a husband?" It flashed through her mind again, as she saw the partner's darkened brow and working lips when Mr. Brodie answered, "It's all right, Si; I wanted to come;" and he laughed a short, confused laugh that stood for any number of unexpressed sentiments--particularly when Jenny was by.

"Shall we walk up toward the garden?" he asked of Jenny.

"I think there is shade all the way up," she replied, throwing an uneasy look on Si Perkins's scowling face. "You may light your cigar, if you feel well enough to smoke." Mr. Brodie turned to his partner to ask for a match, and the next moment left him standing alone in the sun, as though he had no more existence for him.

They halted many times on their way to the garden. It was in an opposite direction from the Springs; but here as there the road had been partly cut out on the mountain-side--partly filled in--so that it formed a terrace overhanging the dense forest-growth in the ravine below, while on the banks and mountain-tops above grew pines and madrones, the manzanite shrub and treacherous gloss of the poison-oak making the whole look like a carefully planted park. The "garden" was a little mountain valley, taking its name from an enclosed patch, where nothing was grown, but where the neglected fields were kept fresh and green by the little rivulet flowing from the cold spring at the foot of an immense sycamore.

Farther on were groups of young oaks, and under these were benches; but Jenny preferred sitting in the shade of the pines on the clean, sweet gra.s.s. The birds, never molested here, hovered fearlessly about them, singing and chirping, the blue and yellow b.u.t.terflies keeping time to the music.

For quite a while Mr. Brodie had been watching Jenny's lithe figure darting hither and thither, trying to take the b.u.t.terflies prisoners under her hat; her eyes sparkled, and she shouted merrily whenever she had secured a prize, which, after a moment's triumph, she always set free again.

"Come and sit down," called Mr. Brodie to her, "or you will hurt your hand again, and all my three weeks' doctoring will be thrown away."

"It hurts me now," said Jenny, ruefully, "for I struck it against that tree."

She held up the offending hand, and he inspected it narrowly, looking up suddenly into her eyes, as though to read in them an answer to something he had just thought. But it was hard to read anything there, though Jenny had the sweetest eyes in the world--laughing and sad by turns, and of warm liquid light. What their color was, it was hard to determine.

They had been called black, hazel, gray; never blue. Her smile was as unfathomable as her eyes; and you could read nothing of her life, her history, her character, from either brow or lip. Her hand alone--it was the right one--as it rested on the sward beside her, might have told to one better versed in such reading than Ben Brodie, how, like Theodore Storm's "Elizabeth," it had, "through many a sleepless night, been resting on a sore, sick heart."

He raised the hand tenderly, not understanding its secret, and asked, stroking it as we do a child's, "What was my partner saying to you as I came up a while ago?"

"He wants you to go to San Francisco, away from here. Would you go and leave me here alone, when you know how lonesome I should be without you?"

She heard his low, nervous laugh, as he moved uneasily, and held the hand tighter; but when she looked up into his face, expecting an answer, it came in his usual abrupt, or, as Jenny said, "jerky" style.

"No, of course I wouldn't go. I'll stay as long as you want me to.

I--I--like you--pretty well."

Jenny's paling cheek blazed up crimson, and she looked fairly aghast as she repeated mechanically, "'Like you pretty well.' Thank you. _Like_ me, indeed!" She had drawn away her hand, like a pettish child, and she muttered, a wicked smile breaking over her face, "I don't believe the man _could_ love any one if he tried. But I'll find out;" and she turned again to where he sat, disconsolate at the loss of her hand.

Her quicker ear caught the crackling of dry twigs before he could speak again, and a shrill scream burst from her lips. He was on his feet in an instant, and flung his arms about the trembling form before his eye could follow the direction of hers.

"The bear!" she stammered; "the grizzly--there, there!" and the story of the huge grizzly having been seen in the mountains those last weeks flashed through his mind.

"Be still!" he said, as she glided from his arms to the ground; "he cannot hurt you till he has killed me." He stooped to pick up a fallen branch, and as he did so his eyes came on a level with a large black calf, rolling over and over in the tall gra.s.s. He flung the stick from him with a disgusted "Pshaw!" and Jenny dropped her hands from her eyes when his laugh fell on her ear. She joined in the laugh, though hers sounded a little hysterical; and then insisted on returning immediately, and his promise to keep the tragi-comic _intermezzo_ a profound secret.

Days pa.s.sed before Jenny would venture out again; and poor Mr. Brodie wandered about like one lost, dreading to visit the cottage, because of a sudden indescribable reserve of the fair tenant, yet held as by invisible hands in the nearest neighborhood of the place. One day, sitting with blinds closed and a headache, ready for an excuse to all who should come to tempt her out, Jenny missed the tall form pa.s.sing shyly by the door half a dozen times per diem. The next morning she met Si Perkins--by the merest accident, of course, on her part--coming from the spring with a bottle of water.

"Is Mr. Brodie sick?" she asked, quickly.

"Yes, Miss; he was took bad night before last; but he's better," he added, anxious to prevent--he hardly knew what.

"Very well; you may tell Mr. Brodie that I am coming to see him and read to him this afternoon." She spoke determinedly, almost savagely, as though she antic.i.p.ated finding Si Perkins at the door with drawn sword, ready to dispute the entrance.

She was shocked to find Mr. Brodie so pale and thin as he lay on the bed that afternoon; and Si Perkins, in a tone that seemed to accuse her of being the cause, said, "I told you it was his chist, Miss; he's getting powerful weak up here in the mountains, and yit he won't go down."

She was an angel while he was too sick to leave his room, sitting by him for hours, reading to him in her soft child's voice, and speaking to him so gently and tenderly that he felt a better, and oh! so much happier a man when he first walked out beside her again.

Then there came a day when Ben Brodie stopped at the cottage of his kind nurse, and with the air of a culprit asked Jenny to come with him, "away up into the mountains." The light that flashed in her eyes a moment was quenched by something that looked strangely like a tear, as she turned to reach for her hat. It was early afternoon, and most people were still in their cottages, with blinds, and perhaps eyes too, closed. The two walked slowly, or climbed rather, resting often and looking back to where they could see the white cottages blinking through the trees. The wind blew only enough to rustle the pine branches, without stirring the sobs and wails that lay dormant in those trees. Jays and woodp.e.c.k.e.rs went with them, and many a shining flower was broken by the way. At last Jenny stopped and looked around.

"Don't let us go farther--who knows but what we may encounter another bear?" she said roguishly; and he prepared a soft seat for her under the pines, by pulling handfuls of gra.s.s and heaping it up in one place.

She smiled to herself as she watched him; his awkwardness had left him, and for the comfort of one whom he only "liked pretty well," he was taking a great deal of pains, she thought. When she was seated, and had made him share the gra.s.s seat, the restraint suddenly returned, and he fell to stroking her hand again, and stammered something about her wrist being better.

"Yes," she affirmed, "and I mean to return to the city in a day or two."

He blushed like a girl. "May I go with you?" he asked; and then jumped at once into the midst of a "declaration"--which had evidently been gotten by heart--winding up by asking again, "and now may I go with you to San Francisco, Jenny? and will you marry me?"

Her eyes had been fixed on the lone bare crag away off across the valley; and the color in them had changed from light gray to deep black, and had faded again to a dull heavy gray.

"You may go to San Francisco, of course, though I shall not see you there. And 'I like you pretty well,' too; but you must not dare to dream that I could ever marry you."