Jeff Briggs's Love Story

Jeff’s purchases were of a temporary and ornamental quality, but not always judicious as a permanent investment. Overhearing some remark from Miss Mayfield concerning the dangerous character of the two-tined steel fork, which was part of the table equipage of the “Half-way House,” he purchased half a dozen of what his aunt was pleased to specify as “split spoons,” and thereby lost his late good standing with her. He not only repaired the window-shutter, but tempered the glaring window itself with a bit of curtain; he half carpeted Miss Mayfield’s bed-room with wild-cat skins and the now historical bear-skin, and felt himself overpaid when that young lady, passing the soft tabbyskins across her cheek, declared they were “lovely.” For Miss Mayfield, deprecating slaughter in the abstract, accepted its results gratefully, like the rest of her sex, and while willing to “let the hart ungalled play,” nevertheless was able to console herself with its venison. The woods, besides yielding aid and comfort of this kind to the distressed damsel, were flamboyant with vivid spring blossoms, and Jeff lit up the cold, white walls of her virgin cell with demonstrative color, and made—what his aunt, a cleanly soul, whose ideas of that quality were based upon the absence of any color whatever, called—“a litter.”

The result of which was to make Miss Mayfield, otherwise lanquid and ennuye, welcome Jeff’s presence with a smile; to make Jeff, otherwise anxious, eager, and keenly attentive, mute and silent in her presence. Two symptoms bad for Jeff.

Meantime Mr. Mayfield’s small conventional spirit pined for fellowship, only to be found in larger civilizations, and sought, under plea of business, a visit to Sacramento, where a few of the Mayfield type, still surviving, were to be found.

This was a relief to Jeff, who only through his regard for the daughter, was kept from open quarrel with the father. He fancied Miss Mayfield felt relieved too, although Jeff had noticed that Mayfield had deferred to his daughter more often than his wife—over whom your conventional small autocrat is always victorious. It takes the legal matrimonial contract to properly develop the first-class tyrant, male or female.

On one of these days Jeff was returning through the woods from marketing at the Forks, which, since the sale of Rabbit, had became a foot-sore and tedious business. He had reached the edge of the forest, and through the wider-spaced trees, the bleak sunlit plateau of his house was beginning to open out, when he stopped instantly. I know not what Jeff had been thinking of, as he trudged along, but here, all at once, he was thrilled and possessed with the odor of some faint, foreign perfume. He flushed a little at first, and then turned pale. Now the woods were as full of as delicate, as subtle, as grateful, and, I wot, far healthier and purer odors than this; but this represented to Jeff the physical contiguity of Miss Mayfield, who had the knack—peculiar to some of her sex—of selecting a perfume that ideally identified her. Jeff looked around cautiously; at the foot of a tree hard by lay one of her wraps, still redolent of her. Jeff put down the bag which, in lieu of a market basket, he was carrying on his shoulder, and with a blushing face hid it behind a tree. It contained her dinner!

He took a few steps forwards with an assumption of ease and unconsciousness. Then he stopped, for not a hundred yards distant sat—Miss Mayfield on a mossy boulder, her cloak hanging from her shoulders, her hands clasped round her crossed knees, and one little foot out—an exasperating combination of Evangeline and little Red Riding Hood in everything, I fear, but credulousness and self-devotion. She looked up as he walked towards her (non constat that the little witch had not already seen him half a mile away!) and smiled sweetly as she looked at him. So sweetly, indeed, that poor Jeff felt like the hulking wolf of the old world fable, and hesitated—as that wolf did not. The California faunae have possibly depreciated.

“Come here!” she cried, in a small head voice, not unlike a bird’s twitter.

Jeff lumbered on clumsily. His high boots had become suddenly very heavy.

“I’m so glad to see you. I’ve just tired poor mother out—I’m always tiring people out—and she’s gone back to the house to write letters. Sit down, Mr. Jeff, do, please!”

Jeff, feeling uncomfortably large in Miss Mayfield’s presence, painfully seated himself on the edge of a very low stone, which had the effect of bringing his knees up on a level with his chin, and affected an ease glaringly simulated.

“Or lie down, there, Mr. Jeff—it is so comfortable.”

Jeff, with a dreadful conviction that he was crashing down like a falling pine-tree, managed at last to acquire a recumbent position at a respectful distance from the little figure.

“There, isn’t it nice?”

“Yes, Miss Mayfield.”

“But, perhaps,” said Miss Mayfield, now that she had him down, “perhaps you too have got something to do. Dear me! I’m like that naughty boy in the story-book, who went round to all the animals, in turn, asking them to play with him. He could only find the butterfly who had nothing to do. I don’t wonder he was disgusted. I hate butterflies.”

Love clarifies the intellect! Jeff, astonished at himself, burst out, “Why, look yer, Miss Mayfield, the butterfly only hez a day or two to—to—to live and—be happy!”

Miss Mayfield crossed her knees again, and instantly, after the sublime fashion of her sex, scattered his intellect by a swift transition from the abstract to the concrete. “But you’re not a butterfly, Mr. Jeff. You’re always doing something. You’ve been hunting.”

“No-o!” said Jeff, scarlet, as he thought of his gun in pawn at the “Summit.”

“But you do hunt; I know it.”

“How?”

“You shot those quail for me the morning after I came. I heard you go out—early—very early.”

“Why, you allowed you slept so well that night, Miss Mayfield.”

“Yes; but there’s a kind of delicious half-sleep that sick people have sometimes, when they know and are gratefully conscious that other people are doing things for them, and it makes them rest all the sweeter.”

There was a dead silence. Jeff, thrilling all over, dared not say anything to dispel his delicious dream. Miss Mayfield, alarmed at his readiness with the butterfly illustration, stopped short. They both looked at the prospect, at the distant “Summit Hotel”—a mere snow-drift on the mountain—at the clear sunlight on the barren plateau, at the bleak, uncompromising “Half-way House,” and said nothing.

“I ought to be very grateful,” at last began Miss Mayfield, in quite another voice, and a suggestion that she was now approaching real and profitable conversation, “that I’m so much better. This mountain air has been like balm to me. I feel I am growing stronger day by day. I do not wonder that you are so healthy and so strong as you are, Mr. Jeff.”

Jeff, who really did not know before that he was so healthy, apologetically admitted the fact. At the same time, he was miserably conscious that Miss Mayfield’s condition, despite her ill health, was very superior to his own.

“A month ago,” she continued reflectively, “my mother would never have thought it possible to leave me here alone. Perhaps she may be getting worried now.”

Miss Mayfield had calculated over much on Jeff’s recumbent position. To her surprise and slight mortification, he rose instantly to his feet, and said anxiously,

“Ef you think so, miss, p’raps I’m keeping you here.”

“Not at all, Mr. Jeff. Your being here is a sufficient excuse for my staying,” she replied, with the large dignity of a small body.

Jeff, mentally and physically crushed again, came down a little heavier than before, and reclined humbly at her feet. Second knock-down blow for Miss Mayfield.

“Come, Mr. Jeff,” said the triumphant goddess, in her first voice, “tell me something about yourself. How do you live here—I mean; what do you do? You ride, of course—and very well too, I can tell you! But you know that. And of course that scarf and the silver spurs and the whole dashing equipage are not intended entirely for yourself. No! Some young woman is made happy by that exhibition, of course. Well, then, there’s the riding down to see her, and perhaps the riding out with her, and—what else?”

“Miss Mayfield,” said Jeff, suddenly rising above his elbow and his grammar, “thar isn’t no young woman! Thar isn’t another soul except yourself that I’ve laid eyes on, or cared to see since I’ve been yer. Ef my aunt hez been telling ye that—she’s—she—she—she—she—lies.”

Absolute, undiluted truth, even of a complimentary nature, is confounding to most women. Miss Mayfield was no exception to her sex. She first laughed, as she felt she ought to, and properly might with any other man than Jeff; then she got frightened, and said hurriedly, “No, no! you misunderstand me. Your aunt has said nothing.” And then she stopped with a pink spot on her cheek-bones. First blood for Jeff!

Now this would never do; it was worse than the butterflies! She rose to her full height—four feet eleven and a half—and drew her cloak over her shoulders. “I think I will return to the house,” she said quietly; “I suppose I ought not to overtask my strength.”

“You’d better let me go with you, miss,” said Jeff submissively.

“I will, on one condition,” she said, recovering her archness, with a little venom in it, I fear. “You were going home, too, when I called to you. Now, I do not intend to let you leave that bag behind that tree, and then have to come back for it, just because you feel obliged to go with me. Bring it with you on one arm, and I’ll take the other, or else—I’ll go alone. Don’t be alarmed,” she added softly; “I’m stronger than I was the first night I came, when you carried me and all my worldly goods besides.”

She turned upon him her subtle magnetic eyes, and looked at him as she had the first night they met. Jeff turned away bewildered, but presently appeared again with the bag on his shoulder, and her wrap on his arm. As she slipped her little hand over his sleeve, he began, apologetically and nervously,

“When I said that about Aunt Sally, miss, I”—

The hand immediately became limp, the grasp conventional.

“I was mad, miss,” Jeff blundered on, “and I don’t see how you believed it—knowing everything ez you do.”

“How knowing everything as I do?” asked Miss Mayfield coldly.

“Why, about the quail, and about the bag!”

“Oh,” said Miss Mayfield.

Five minutes later, Yuba Bill nearly ditched his coach in his utter amazement at an apparently simple spectacle—a tall, good-looking young fellow, in a red shirt and high boots, carrying a bag on his back, and beside him, hanging confidentially on his arm, a small, slight, pretty girl in a red cloak. “Nothing mean about her, eh, Bill?” said as admiring box-passenger. “Young couple, I reckon, just out from the States.”

“No!” roared Bill.

“Oh, well, his sweetheart, I reckon?” suggested the box-passenger.

“Nary time!” growled Bill. “Look yer! I know ‘em both, and they knows me. Did ye notiss she never drops his arm when she sees the stage comin’, but kinder trapes along jist the same? Had they been courtin’, she’d hev dropped his arm like pizen, and walked on t’other side the road.”

Nevertheless, for some occult reason, Bill was evidently out of humor; and for the next few miles exhorted the impenitent Blue Grass horse with considerable fervor.

Meanwhile this pair, outwardly the picture of pastoral conjugality, slowly descended the hill. In that brief time, failing to get at any further facts regarding Jeff’s life, or perhaps reading the story quite plainly, Miss Mayfield had twittered prettily about herself. She painted her tropic life in the Sandwich Islands—her delicious “laziness,” as she called it; “for, you know,” she added, “although I had the excuse of being an invalid, and of living in the laziest climate in the world, and of having money, I think, Mr. Jeff, that I’m naturally lazy. Perhaps if I lived here long enough, and got well again, I might do something, but I don’t think I could ever be like your aunt. And there she is now, Mr. Jeff, making signs for you to hasten. No, don’t mind me, but run on ahead; else I shall have her blaming me for demoralizing you too. Go; I insist upon it! I can walk the rest of the way alone. Will you go? You won’t? Then I shall stop here and not stir another step forward until you do.”