A Phyllis of the Sierras

“I’m not so sure of that,” said Mrs. Bradley, with playful precision. “But for the present we’ll let you off with a good wash and a nap afterwards in that rocking-chair, while my cousin and I make some little domestic preparations. You see,” she added with a certain proud humility, “we’ve got only one servant—a Chinaman, and there are many things we can’t leave to him.”

The color again rose in Mainwaring’s cheek, but he had tact enough to reflect that any protest or hesitation on his part at that moment would only increase the difficulties of his gentle entertainers. He allowed himself to be ushered into the house by Mrs. Bradley, and shown to her husband’s room, without perceiving that Miss Macy had availed herself of his absence to run to the end of the veranda, mischievously try to lift the discarded knapsack to her own pretty shoulder, but, failing, heroically stagger with it into the passage and softly deposit it at his door. This done, she pantingly rejoined her cousin in the kitchen.

“Well,” said Mrs. Bradley, emphatically. “DID you ever? Walking fifteen miles for pleasure—and with such lungs!”

“And that knapsack!” added Louise Macy, pointing to the mark in her little palm where the strap had imbedded itself in the soft flesh.

“He’s nice, though; isn’t he?” said Mrs. Bradley, tentatively.

“Yes,” said Miss Macy, “he isn’t, certainly, one of those provincial fine gentlemen you object to. But DID you see his shoes? I suppose they make the miles go quickly, or seem to measure less by comparison.”

“They’re probably more serviceable than those high-heeled things that Captain Greyson hops about in.”

“But the Captain always rides—and rides very well—you know,” said Louise, reflectively. There was a moment’s pause.

“I suppose Jim will tell us all about him,” said Mrs. Bradley, dismissing the subject, as she turned her sleeves back over her white arms, preparatory to grappling certain culinary difficulties.

“Jim,” observed Miss Macy, shortly, “in my opinion, knows nothing more than his note says. That’s like Jim.”

“There’s nothing more to know, really,” said Mrs. Bradley, with a superior air. “He’s undoubtedly the son of some Englishman of fortune, sent out here for his health.”

“Hush!”

Miss Macy had heard a step in the passage. It halted at last, half irresolutely, before the open door of the kitchen, and the stranger appeared with an embarrassed air.

But in his brief absence he seemed to have completely groomed himself, and stood there, the impersonation of close-cropped, clean, and wholesome English young manhood. The two women appreciated it with cat-like fastidiousness.

“I beg your pardon; but really you’re going to let a fellow do something for you,” he said, “just to keep him from looking like a fool. I really can do no end of things, you know, if you’ll try me. I’ve done some camping-out, and can cook as well as the next man.”

The two women made a movement of smiling remonstrance, half coquettish, and half superior, until Mrs. Bradley, becoming conscious of her bare arms and the stranger’s wandering eyes, colored faintly, and said with more decision:—

“Certainly not. You’d only be in the way. Besides, you need rest more than we do. Put yourself in the rocking-chair in the veranda, and go to sleep until Mr. Bradley comes.”

Mainwaring saw that she was serious, and withdrew, a little ashamed at his familiarity into which his boyishness had betrayed him. But he had scarcely seated himself in the rocking-chair before Miss Macy appeared, carrying with both hands a large tin basin of unshelled peas.

“There,” she said pantingly, placing her burden in his lap, “if you really want to help, there’s something to do that isn’t very fatiguing. You may shell these peas.”

“SHELL them—I beg pardon, but how?” he asked, with smiling earnestness.

“How? Why, I’ll show you—look.”

She frankly stepped beside him, so close that her full-skirted dress half encompassed him and the basin in a delicious confusion, and, leaning over his lap, with her left hand picked up a pea-cod, which, with a single movement of her charming little right thumb, she broke at the end, and stripped the green shallow of its tiny treasures.

He watched her with smiling eyes; her own, looking down on him, were very bright and luminous. “There; that’s easy enough,” she said, and turned away.

“But—one moment, Miss—Miss—?”

“Macy,” said louise.

“Where am I to put the shells?”

“Oh! throw them down there—there’s room enough.”

She was pointing to the canyon below. The veranda actually projected over its brink, and seemed to hang in mid air above it. Mainwaring almost mechanically threw his arm out to catch the incautious girl, who had stepped heedlessly to its extreme edge.

“How odd! Don’t you find it rather dangerous here?” he could not help saying. “I mean—you might have had a railing that wouldn’t intercept the view and yet be safe?”

“It’s a fancy of Mr. Bradley’s,” returned the young girl carelessly. “It’s all like this. The house was built on a ledge against the side of the precipice, and the road suddenly drops down to it.”

“It’s tremendously pretty, all the same, you know,” said the young man thoughtfully, gazing, however, at the girl’s rounded chin above him.

“Yes,” she replied curtly. “But this isn’t working. I must go back to Jenny. You can shell the peas until Mr. Bradley comes home. He won’t be long.”

She turned away, and re-entered the house. Without knowing why, he thought her withdrawal abrupt, and he was again feeling his ready color rise with the suspicion of either having been betrayed by the young girl’s innocent fearlessness into some unpardonable familiarity, which she had quietly resented, or of feeling an ease and freedom in the company of these two women that were inconsistent with respect, and should be restrained.

He, however, began to apply himself to the task given to him with his usual conscientiousness of duty, and presently acquired a certain manual dexterity in the operation. It was “good fun” to throw the cast-off husks into the mighty unfathomable void before him, and watch them linger with suspended gravity in mid air for a moment—apparently motionless—until they either lost themselves, a mere vanishing black spot in the thin ether, or slid suddenly at a sharp angle into unknown shadow. How deuced odd for him to be sitting here in this fashion! It would be something to talk of hereafter, and yet,—he stopped—it was not at all in the line of that characteristic adventure, uncivilized novelty, and barbarous freedom which for the last month he had sought and experienced. It was not at all like his meeting with the grizzly last week while wandering in a lonely canyon; not a bit in the line of his chance acquaintance with that notorious ruffian, Spanish Jack, or his witnessing with his own eyes that actual lynching affair at Angels. No! Nor was it at all characteristic, according to his previous ideas of frontier rural seclusion—as for instance the Pike County cabin of the family where he stayed one night, and where the handsome daughter asked him what his Christian name was. No! These two young women were very unlike her; they seemed really quite the equals of his family and friends in England,—perhaps more attractive,—and yet, yes, it was this very attractiveness that alarmed his inbred social conservatism regarding women. With a man it was very different; that alert, active, intelligent husband, instinct with the throbbing life of his saw-mill, creator and worker in one, challenged his unqualified trust and admiration.

He had become conscious for the last minute or two of thinking rapidly and becoming feverishly excited; of breathing with greater difficulty, and a renewed tendency to cough. The tendency increased until he instinctively put aside the pan from his lap and half rose. But even that slight exertion brought on an accession of coughing. He put his handkerchief to his lips, partly to keep the sound from disturbing the women in the kitchen, partly because of a certain significant taste in his mouth which he unpleasantly remembered. When he removed the handkerchief it was, as he expected, spotted with blood. He turned quickly and re-entered the house softly, regaining the bedroom without attracting attention. An increasing faintness here obliged him to lie down on the bed until it should pass.

Everything was quiet. He hoped they would not discover his absence from the veranda until he was better; it was deucedly awkward that he should have had this attack just now—and after he had made so light of his previous exertions. They would think him an effeminate fraud, these two bright, active women and that alert, energetic man. A faint color came into his cheek at the idea, and an uneasy sense that he had been in some way foolishly imprudent about his health. Again, they might be alarmed at missing him from the veranda; perhaps he had better have remained there; perhaps he ought to tell them that he had concluded to take their advice and lie down. He tried to rise, but the deep blue chasm before the window seemed to be swelling up to meet him, the bed slowly sinking into its oblivious profundity. He knew no more.

He came to with the smell and taste of some powerful volatile spirit, and the vague vision of Mr. Bradley still standing at the window of the mill and vibrating with the machinery; this changed presently to a pleasant lassitude and lazy curiosity as he perceived Mr. Bradley smile and apparently slip from the window of the mill to his bedside. “You’re all right now,” said Bradley, cheerfully.

He was feeling Mainwaring’s pulse. Had he really been ill and was Bradley a doctor?

Bradley evidently saw what was passing in his mind. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said gayly. “I’m not a doctor, but I practise a little medicine and surgery on account of the men at the mill, and accidents, you know. You’re all right now; you’ve lost a little blood: but in a couple of weeks in this air we’ll have that tubercle healed, and you’ll be as right as a trivet.”

“In a couple of weeks!” echoed Mainwaring, in faint astonishment. “Why, I leave here to-morrow.”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind” said Mrs. Bradley, with smiling peremptoriness, suddenly slipping out from behind her husband. “Everything is all perfectly arranged. Jim has sent off messengers to your friends, so that if you can’t come to them, they can come to you. You see you can’t help yourself! If you WILL walk fifteen miles with such lungs, and then frighten people to death, you must abide by the consequences.”

“You see the old lady has fixed you,” said Bradley, smiling; “and she’s the master here. Come, Mainwaring, you can send any other message you like, and have who and what you want here; but HERE you must stop for a while.”

“But did I frighten you really?” stammered Mainwaring, faintly, to Mrs. Bradley.

“Frighten us!” said Mrs. Bradley. “Well, look there!”

She pointed to the window, which commanded a view of the veranda. Miss Macy had dropped into the vacant chair, with her little feet stretched out before her, her cheeks burning with heat and fire, her eyes partly closed, her straw hat hanging by a ribbon round her neck, her brown hair clinging to her ears and forehead in damp tendrils, and an enormous palm-leaf fan in each hand violently playing upon this charming picture of exhaustion and abandonment.

“She came tearing down to the mill, bare-backed on our half-broken mustang, about half an hour ago, to call me ‘to help you,’” explained Bradley. “Heaven knows how she managed to do it!”

CHAPER II

The medication of the woods was not overestimated by Bradley. There was surely some occult healing property in that vast reservoir of balmy and resinous odors over which The Lookout beetled and clung, and from which at times the pure exhalations of the terraced valley seemed to rise. Under its remedial influence and a conscientious adherence to the rules of absolute rest and repose laid down for him, Mainwaring had no return of the hemorrhage. The nearest professional medical authority, hastily summoned, saw no reason for changing or for supplementing Bradley’s intelligent and simple treatment, although astounded that the patient had been under no more radical or systematic cure than travel and exercise. The women especially were amazed that Mainwaring had taken “nothing for it,” in their habitual experience of an unfettered pill-and-elixir-consuming democracy. In their knowledge of the thousand “panaceas” that filled the shelves of the general store, this singular abstention of their guest seemed to indicate a national peculiarity.

His bed was moved beside the low window, from which he could not only view the veranda but converse at times with its occupants, and even listen to the book which Miss Macy, seated without, read aloud to him. In the evening Bradley would linger by his couch until late, beguiling the tedium of his convalescence with characteristic stories and information which he thought might please the invalid. For Mainwaring, who had been early struck with Bradley’s ready and cultivated intelligence, ended by shyly avoiding the discussion of more serious topics, partly because Bradley impressed him with a suspicion of his own inferiority, and partly because Mainwaring questioned the taste of Bradley’s apparent exhibition of his manifest superiority. He learned accidentally that this mill-owner and backwoodsman was a college-bred man; but the practical application of that education to the ordinary affairs of life was new to the young Englishman’s traditions, and grated a little harshly on his feelings. He would have been quite content if Bradley had, like himself and fellows he knew, undervalued his training, and kept his gifts conservatively impractical. The knowledge also that his host’s education naturally came from some provincial institution unlike Oxford and Cambridge may have unconsciously affected his general estimate. I say unconsciously, for his strict conscientiousness would have rejected any such formal proposition.

Another trifle annoyed him. He could not help noticing also that although Bradley’s manner and sympathy were confidential and almost brotherly, he never made any allusion to Mainwaring’s own family or connections, and, in fact, gave no indication of what he believed was the national curiosity in regard to strangers. Somewhat embarrassed by this indifference, Mainwaring made the occasion of writing some letters home an opportunity for laughingly alluding to the fact that he had made his mother and his sisters fully aware of the great debt they owed the household of The Lookout.