A Phyllis of the Sierras

“They’ll probably all send you a round robin of thanks, except, perhaps, my next brother, Bob.”

Bradley contented himself with a gesture of general deprecation, and did not ask WHY Mainwaring’s young brother should contemplate his death with satisfaction. Nevertheless, some time afterwards Miss Macy remarked that it seemed hard that the happiness of one member of a family should depend upon a calamity to another. “As for instance?” asked Mainwaring, who had already forgotten the circumstance. “Why, if you had died and your younger brother succeeded to the baronetcy, and become Sir Robert Mainwaring,” responded Miss Macy, with precision. This was the first and only allusion to his family and prospective rank. On the other hand, he had—through naive and boyish inquiries, which seemed to amuse his entertainers—acquired, as he believed, a full knowledge of the history and antecedents of the Bradley household. He knew how Bradley had brought his young wife and her cousin to California and abandoned a lucrative law practice in San Francisco to take possession of this mountain mill and woodland, which he had acquired through some professional service.

“Then you are a barrister really?” said Mainwaring, gravely.

Bradley laughed. “I’m afraid I’ve had more practice—though not as lucrative a one—as surgeon or doctor.”

“But you’re regularly on the rolls, you know; you’re entered as Counsel, and all that sort of thing?” continued Mainwaring, with great seriousness.

“Well, yes,” replied Bradley, much amused. “I’m afraid I must plead guilty to that.”

“It’s not a bad sort of thing,” said Mainwaring, naively, ignoring Bradley’s amusement. “I’ve got a cousin who’s gone in for the law. Got out of the army to do it—too. He’s a sharp fellow.”

“Then you DO allow a man to try many trades—over there,” said Miss Macy, demurely.

“Yes, sometimes,” said Mainwaring, graciously, but by no means certain that the case was at all analogous.

Nevertheless, as if relieved of certain doubts of the conventional quality of his host’s attainments, he now gave himself up to a very hearty and honest admiration of Bradley. “You know it’s awfully kind of him to talk to a fellow like me who just pulled through, and never got any prizes at Oxford, and don’t understand the half of these things,” he remarked confidentially to Mrs. Bradley. “He knows more about the things we used to go in for at Oxford than lots of our men, and he’s never been there. He’s uncommonly clever.”

“Jim was always very brilliant,” returned Mrs. Bradley, indifferently, and with more than even conventionally polite wifely deprecation; “I wish he were more practical.”

“Practical! Oh, I say, Mrs. Bradley! Why, a fellow that can go in among a lot of workmen and tell them just what to do—an all-round chap that can be independent of his valet, his doctor, and his—banker! By Jove—THAT’S practical!”

“I mean,” said Mrs. Bradley, coldly, “that there are some things that a gentleman ought not to be practical about nor independent of. Mr. Bradley would have done better to have used his talents in some more legitimate and established way.”

Mainwaring looked at her in genuine surprise. To his inexperienced observation Bradley’s intelligent energy and, above all, his originality, ought to have been priceless in the eyes of his wife—the American female of his species. He felt that slight shock which most loyal or logical men feel when first brought face to face with the easy disloyalty and incomprehensible logic of the feminine affections. Here was a fellow, by Jove, that any woman ought to be proud of, and—and—he stopped blankly. He wondered if Miss Macy sympathized with her cousin.

Howbeit, this did not affect the charm of their idyllic life at The Lookout. The precipice over which they hung was as charming as ever in its poetic illusions of space and depth and color; the isolation of their comfortable existence in the tasteful yet audacious habitation, the pleasant routine of daily tasks and amusements, all tended to make the enforced quiet and inaction of his convalescence a lazy recreation. He was really improving; more than that, he was conscious of a certain satisfaction in this passive observation of novelty that was healthier and perhaps TRUER than his previous passion for adventure and that febrile desire for change and excitement which he now felt was a part of his disease. Nor were incident and variety entirely absent from this tranquil experience. He was one day astonished at being presented by Bradley with copies of the latest English newspapers, procured from Sacramento, and he equally astonished his host, after profusely thanking him, by only listlessly glancing at their columns. He estopped a proposed visit from one of his influential countrymen; in the absence of his fair entertainers at their domestic duties, he extracted infinite satisfaction from Foo-Yup, the Chinese servant, who was particularly detached for his service. From his invalid coign of vantage at the window he was observant of all that passed upon the veranda, that al-fresco audience-room of The Lookout, and he was good-humoredly conscious that a great many eccentric and peculiar visitors were invariably dragged thither by Miss Macy, and goaded into characteristic exhibition within sight and hearing of her guest, with a too evident view, under the ostentatious excuse of extending his knowledge of national character or mischievously shocking him.

“When you are strong enough to stand Captain Gashweiler’s opinions of the Established Church and Chinamen,” said Miss Macy, after one of these revelations, “I’ll get Jim to bring him here, for really he swears so outrageously that even in the broadest interests of international understanding and good-will neither Mrs. Bradley nor myself could be present.”

On another occasion she provokingly lingered before his window for a moment with a rifle slung jauntily over her shoulder. “If you hear a shot or two don’t excite yourself, and believe we’re having a lynching case in the woods. It will be only me. There’s some creature—confess, you expected me to say ‘critter’—hanging round the barn. It may be a bear. Good-by.” She missed the creature,—which happened to be really a bear,—much to Mainwaring’s illogical satisfaction. “I wonder why,” he reflected, with vague uneasiness, “she doesn’t leave all that sort of thing to girls like that tow-headed girl at the blacksmith’s.”

It chanced, however, that this blacksmith’s tow-headed daughter, who, it may be incidentally remarked, had the additional eccentricities of large black eyes and large white teeth, came to the fore in quite another fashion. Shortly after this, Mainwaring being able to leave his room and join the family board, Mrs. Bradley found it necessary to enlarge her domestic service, and arranged with her nearest neighbor, the blacksmith, to allow his daughter to come to The Lookout for a few days to “do the chores” and assist in the housekeeping, as she had on previous occasions. The day of her advent Bradley entered Mainwaring’s room, and, closing the door mysteriously, fixed his blue eyes, kindling with mischief, on the young Englishman.

“You are aware, my dear boy,” he began with affected gravity, “that you are now living in a land of liberty, where mere artificial distinctions are not known, and where Freedom from her mountain heights generally levels all social positions. I think you have graciously admitted that fact.”

“I know I’ve been taking a tremendous lot of freedom with you and yours, old man, and it’s a deuced shame,” interrupted Mainwaring, with a faint smile.

“And that nowhere,” continued Bradley, with immovable features, “does equality exist as perfectly as above yonder unfathomable abyss, where you have also, doubtless, observed the American eagle proudly soars and screams defiance.”

“Then that was the fellow that kept me awake this morning, and made me wonder if I was strong enough to hold a gun again.”

“That wouldn’t have settled the matter,” continued Bradley, imperturbably. “The case is simply this: Miss Minty Sharpe, that blacksmith’s daughter, has once or twice consented, for a slight emolument, to assist in our domestic service for a day or two, and she comes back again to-day. Now, under the aegis of that noble bird whom your national instincts tempt you to destroy, she has on all previous occasions taken her meals with us, at the same table, on terms of perfect equality. She will naturally expect to do the same now. Mrs. Bradley thought it proper, therefore, to warn you, that, in case your health was not quite equal to this democratic simplicity, you could still dine in your room.”