The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems Part 11

"I wish I had those spoons," said f.a.n.n.y, "they would be such a curiosity at home."

"The spoon I wish for is one of the vessel's forks, with a bit of roast beef on it. Here, Sis, jump in; we shall be late for dinner, and the Captain will call us to account."

In a few moments we were out of the little cove, and in open water of the sound, pulling back toward the harbor, where the steamer was lying that had brought us this summer excursion. As we came abreast of a certain inlet, f.a.n.n.y cried out, "Look there!" and turning our eyes in the direction of her glance, we saw the canoe with its bronzed crew just disappearing up the narrow entrance, half-hidden in shrubbery.

Our adventure was related at dinner in the steamer's cabin, and various were the conjectures regarding the ident.i.ty of Chief Nittinat. The captain declared his ignorance of any such personage. Most of the party were inclined to regard the whole affair as a practical joke, though who could have been the authors of it no one ventured to say. It was proposed that another party should repeat the excursion on the following day, in order that another opportunity might be given the mysterious medicine man to put in an appearance. And this, I believe, really was carried into effect, but without result, so far as solving the mystery was concerned. A canoe, similar to the one we had seen, had been discovered up one of the numerous arms of the Sound, but on attempting to overtake it, the pursuing party had been easily distanced, and the clue lost, so that all hope of clearing up the mystery was relinquished.

One evening, shortly after, f.a.n.n.y and I sat together in the soft, clear moonlight, listening to the dance-music in the cabin, and the gentle splash of the waters about the vessel's keel. All at once, a canoe-load of Nootkans shot across the moon's wake, not fifty yards from our anchorage, and as suddenly was lost again in shadow. "f.a.n.n.y," I said, "being the only invalid of this party, I feel a good deal nervous about these apparitions. They are usually regarded, I believe, as portentious.

Without designing to take advantage of your too sympathizing disposition, I am tempted to remind you that if I am ever to have the happiness of calling your precious self truly my own, it ought to be before the third appearance of the ghostly presence; will you condescend to name the day?"

"I should prefer, Pierre, not to have any ghostly influences brought to bear on this occasion. Suppose we try a valse, which I think will tend to dissipate your melancholy forebodings."

I may as well own it here: the little witch could not be brought to make any final arrangements, although I did entreat her seriously.

"You must talk about these things when I am at home with my papa and mamma," she insisted; and I was compelled to respect her decision.

But we have been married almost a year, and we often refer to the strange interview we had with Chief Nittinat. Perhaps the Smoke-eller doctrine now popular among the northern Indians, and which corresponds to our spiritualism, may have some foundation in similar occurrences themselves. Who knows but Nittinat was talking to us through a medium?

MR. ELA'S STORY.

Three or four years ago, my husband and I were making a winter voyage up the Oregon coast. The weather was not peculiarly bad: it was the ordinary winter weather, with a quartering wind, giving the ship an awkward motion over an obliquely-rolling sea. Cold, sick, thoroughly uncomfortable, with no refuge but the narrow and dimly-lighted state-room, I was reduced in the first twenty-four hours to a condition of ignominious helplessness, hardly willing to live, and not yet fully wishing or intending to die.

In this unhappy frame of mind the close of the second weary day found me, when my husband opened our state-room door to say that Mr. Ela, of ----, Oregon, was on board, and proposed to come and talk to me, in the hope of amusing me and making me forget my wretchedness. Submitting rather than agreeing to the proposal, chairs were brought and placed just inside the door-way, where the light of the saloon lamps shown athwart the countenance of my self-const.i.tuted physician. He was a young man, and looked younger than his years; slightly built, though possessing a supple, well-knit frame, with hands of an elegant shape, fine texture, and great expression. You saw at a glance that he had a poet's head, and a poet's sensitiveness of face; but it was only after observation that you saw how much the face was capable of which it did not convey, for faces are apt to indicate not so much individual culture as the culture of those with whom we are habitually a.s.sociated. Mr.

Ela's face clearly indicated to me the intellectual poverty, the want of aesthetic cultivation in his accustomed circle of society, at the same time that it suggested possible phases of great beauty, should it ever become possible for certain emotions to be habitually called to the surface by sympathy. Evidently a vein of drollery in his nature had been better appreciated, and oftener exhibited to admiring audiences, than any of the finer qualities of thought or sentiment of which you instinctively knew him to be capable; and yet the face protested against it, too, by a gentle irony with a hint of self-scorn in it, as if its owner, in his own estimation, wrote himself a buffoon for his condescension. Altogether it was a good face; but one to make you wish it were better, since by not being so, it was untrue to itself. I remember thinking all this, looking out with sluggish interest from my berth, while the two gentlemen did a little preliminary talking.

Mr. Ela's voice, I observed, like his face, was susceptible of great change and infinite modulations. Deep chest tones were followed by finely attenuated sounds; droning nasal tones, by quick and clear ones.

The quality of the voice was soft and musical; the enunciation slow, often emphatic. His manner was ill.u.s.trative, egotistic, and keenly watchful of effects.

"You never heard the story of my adventure in the mountains?" Ela began, turning to me with the air of a man who had made up his mind to tell his story.

"No; please tell it."

"Well"--running his tapering fingers through his hair and pulling it over his forehead--"I started out in life with a theory, and it was this: that no young man should ask a woman to marry him until he had prepared a home for her. Correct, wasn't it? I was about nineteen years old when I took up some land down in the Rogue River Valley, and worked away at it with this object."

"Had you really a wife selected at that age?"

"No; but it was the fashion in early times in that country to marry early, and I was getting ready, according to my theory; don't you see? I was pretty successful, too; had considerable stock, built me a house, made a flower garden for my wife, even put up the pegs or nails she was to hang her dresses on. I intended that fall to get on my horse, ride through the Wallamet Valley, and find me my girl."

At the notion of courting in that off-hand, general style, both my husband and I laughed doubtingly. Ela laughed, too, but as if the recollection pleased him.

"You think that is strange, do you? 'Twasn't so very strange in those days, because girls were scarce, don't you see? There was not a girl within forty miles of me; and just the thought of one now, as I was fixing those nails to hang her garments on; why, it ran just through me like a shock of electricity!

"Well, as I said, I had about two hundred and fifty head of cattle, a house with a garden, a young orchard, and vegetables growing; everything in readiness for the wife I had counted on getting to help me take care of it. And what do you think happened? There came such a plague of gra.s.shoppers upon the valley that they destroyed every green thing: crops, orchard, flowers, gra.s.s, everything! My stock died, the greater portion of them, and _I was ruined_." (Deep ba.s.s.) "I considered myself disappointed in love, too, because, though I hadn't yet found my girl, I knew she was somewhere in the valley waiting for me; and I felt somehow, when the gra.s.shoppers ate up every thing, as if I had been jilted.

Actually, it pierces me with a pang now to think of those useless pegs on which so often my imagination hung a pink calico dress and a girl's sun-bonnet."

Knitting his brows, and sighing as he shifted his position, Ela once more pulled the hair over his forehead, in his peculiar fashion, and went on:

"I became misanthropic; felt myself badly used. Packing up my books and a few other traps, I started for the mountains with what stock I had left, built myself a fort, and played hermit."

"A regular fort?"

"A stockade eighteen feet high, with an embankment four feet high around it, a strong gate, a tent in the middle of the inclosure, all my property, such as books, feed, arms, etc., inside."

"On account of Indians?"

"Indians and White Men. Yes, I've seen a good many Indians through the bead of my rifle. They learned to keep away from my fort. There were mining camps down in the valley, and you know the hangers-on of those camps? I sold beef to the miners; had plenty of money by me sometimes.

It was necessary to be strongly forted."

"What a strange life for a boy! What did you do? How spend your time?"

"I herded my cattle, drove them to market, cooked, studied, wrote, and indulged in misanthropy, with a little rifle practice. By the time I had been one summer in the mountains, I had got my hand in, and knew how to make money buying up cattle to sell again in the mines."

"So there was method in your madness--misanthropy, I mean?"

"Well, a man cannot resign life before he is twenty-one. I was doing well, and beginning to think again of visiting the Wallamet to hunt up my girl. One Sunday afternoon, I knew it was Sunday, because I kept a journal; I was sitting outside of my fort writing, when a shadow fell across the paper, and, looking up, lo! a skeleton figure stood before me." (Sepulchral tones, and a pause.) "Used as I was to lonely encounters with strange men, my hair stood on end as I gazed on the spectre before me. He was the merest boy in years; pretty and delicate by nature, and then reduced by starvation to a shadow. His story was soon told. He had left Boston on a vessel coming out to the northwest coast, had been wrecked at the mouth of the Umpqua, and been wandering about in the mountains ever since, subsisting as best he could on roots and berries. But you are becoming tired?"

"No, I a.s.sure you; on the contrary, growing deeply interested."

"The boy was not a young woman in disguise, or anything like that, you know"--with an amused look at me. "I thought you'd think so; but as he comes into the story as a collateral, I just mention his introduction to myself. I fed him and nursed him until he was able to go to work, and then I got Sam Chong Lung to let him take up a claim alongside a Chinese camp, promising to favor the Chinaman in a beef contract if he was good to the boy. His claim proved a good one, and he was making money, when two Chinamen stole a lot of horses from Sam Chong Lung, and he offered four hundred dollars to Edwards if he would go after them and bring them back. Edwards asked my advice, and I encouraged him to go, telling him how to take and bring back his prisoners." (Reflective pause.) "You can't imagine me living alone, now, can you? Such an egotistical fellow as I am, and fond of ladies' society. You can't believe it, can you?"

"Hermits and solitaires are always egotists, I believe. As to the ladies, your loneliness was the result of circ.u.mstances, as you have explained."

"Well, I should have missed Edwards a good deal, if it had not been for some singular _incidents_ which happened during his absence." Ela always accented the last syllable of any word ending in e-n-t, like "incident"

or "commencement," giving it besides a peculiar nasal sound, which was sure to secure the attention. The word incident, as he p.r.o.nounced it, produced quite a different effect from the same word, spoken in the usual style.

"A man came to my fort one day who was naked and starving. He was a bad-looking fellow; but a man naturally does look bad when his clothes are in rags, and his bones protruding through his skin. I clothed him, fed him, cared for him kindly, until he was able to travel, and then he went away. The next Sunday, I was sitting outside the stockade, as customary, reading some translations of the Greek poets, when, on raising my eyes from the book to glance over the approach to my fort--I was always on the alert--I beheld a VISION. Remember, I had not seen a woman for a year and half! She was slowly advancing, riding with superb grace a horse of great beauty and value, richly caparisoned. She came slowly up the trail, as if to give me time for thought, and I needed it. That picture is still indelibly impressed upon my mind; the very flicker of the sunlight and shadow across the road, and the glitter of her horse's trappings, as he champed his bit and arched his neck with impatience at her restraining hand----. Are you very tired?" asked Ela, suddenly.

"Never less so in my life; pray go on."

"You see I had been alone so long, and I am very susceptible. That vision coming upon me suddenly as it did, in my solitude, gave me the strangest sensations I ever had. I was spell-bound. Not so she. Reining in her horse beside me, she squared around in her saddle, as if asking a.s.sistance to dismount. Struggling with my embarra.s.sment, I helped her down, and she accepted my invitation into the fort, signifying, at the same time, that she wished me to attend to stripping and feeding her horse. This gave us mutually an opportunity to prepare for the coming interview.

"When I returned to my guest, she had laid aside her riding-habit and close sun-bonnet, and stood revealed a young, beautiful, elegantly-dressed woman. To my unaccustomed eyes, she looked a G.o.ddess.

Her figure was n.o.ble; her eyes large, black, and melting; her hair long and curling; her manner easy and attractive. She was hungry, she said; would I give her something to eat? And, while I was on hospitable cares intent, she read to me some of my Greek poems, especially an ode of one of the votaries of Diana, with comments by herself. She was a splendid reader. Well," said Ela, slowly, with a furtive glance at me, and in his peculiar nasal tones, "you can guess whether a young man, used to the mountains, as I was, and who had been disappointed and jilted as I had been, enjoyed this sort of thing or not. It wasn't in my line, you see, this entertaining G.o.ddesses; though, doubtless, in this way, before now, men have entertained angels unawares. You shall judge whether I did.

"What with reading, eating together, singing--she sang 'Kate Kearney'

for me, and her voice was glorious--our acquaintance ripened very fast.

Finally, I conquered my embarra.s.sment so far as to ask her some questions about herself, and she told me that she was of a good New England family, raised in affluence, well educated, accomplished, but by a freak of fortune, reduced to poverty: that she had come to California resolved to get money, and had got it. She went from camp to camp of the miners with stationery, and other trifling articles needed by them; sold them these things, wrote letters for them, sang to them, nursed them when sick, or carried letters express to San Francisco, to be mailed.

For all these services, she received high prices, and had also had a good deal of gold given to her in specimens. I asked her if she liked that kind of a life, so contrary to her early training. She answered me: 'It's not what we choose that we select to do in this world, but what chooses us to do it. I have made a competency, and gained a rich and varied experience. If life is not what I once dreamed it was, I am content.' But she sighed as she said it, and I couldn't believe in her content."

"You have not told us yet what motives brought her to you," I remarked, in an interval of silence.

"No; she hadn't told me herself, then. By and by, I asked her, in my green kind of way, what brought her to see _me_. I never shall forget the smile with which she turned to answer me. We were sitting quite close: it never was in my nature, when once acquainted with a woman, to keep away from her. Her garments brushed my knees; occasionally, in the enthusiasm of talk, I leaned near her cheek. You know how it was. I was thinking of the useless pegs in my house down in the valley: 'You will be disappointed,' she said, 'when you learn that I came to do you a real service.' And then she went on to relate that, having occasion to pa.s.s the night at a certain place not many miles away, she had overheard through the thin part.i.tions of the house, the description of my fort, an account of my wealth, real or supposed, and a plan for my murder and robbery. The would-be murderer was so described as to make it quite certain that it was he whom I had fed, clothed, and sent away rejoicing, only a few days previous. I was inclined to treat the matter as a jest; but she awed me into belief and humility at once by the majesty with which she reproved my unbelief: 'A _woman_ does not trifle with subjects like this; nor go out of her way to tell travelers tales. I warn you.

Good bye.'

"After this she would not stay, though I awkwardly expressed my regret at her going. By her command I saddled her horse, and helped her mount him. Once in the saddle, her humor turned, and she reminded me that I had not invited her to return. She said she 'could fancy that a week of reading, talking, riding, trout-fishing, and romancing generally, up there in those splendid woods, might be very charming. Was I going to ask her to come?'