A Phyllis of the Sierras

by Harte, Bret

  Another half hour passed without incident. He could hear the voices of the two women in the kitchen and dining-room. After a while they appeared to cease, and he heard the sound of an opening door. It then occurred to him that the veranda was still too exposed for a confidential interview, and he resolved to descend the steps, pass before the windows of the kitchen where Louise might see him, and penetrate the shrubbery, where she might be induced to follow him. They would not be interrupted nor overheard there.

  But he had barely left the veranda before the figure of Richelieu, who had been patiently waiting for Mainwaring's disappearance, emerged stealthily from the shrubbery. He had discovered his loss on handing his "fire assays" to the good-humored Bradley for later examination, and he had retraced his way, step by step, looking everywhere for his missing stone with the unbounded hopefulness, lazy persistency, and lofty disregard for time and occupation known only to the genuine boy.

  He remembered to have placed his knotted bag upon the veranda, and, slipping off his stiff boots slowly and softly, slid along against the wall of the house, looking carefully on the floor, and yet preserving a studied negligence of demeanor, with one hand in his pocket, and his small mouth contracted into a singularly soothing and almost voiceless whistle--Richelieu's own peculiar accomplishment. But no stone appeared.

  Like most of his genus he was superstitious, and repeated to himself the cabalistic formula: "Losin's seekin's, findin's keepin's"--presumed to be of great efficacy in such cases--with religious fervor. He had laboriously reached the end of the veranda when he noticed the open window of Louise's room, and stopped as a perfunctory duty to look in.

  And then Richelieu Sharpe stood for an instant utterly confounded and aghast at this crowning proof of the absolute infamy and sickening enormity of Man.

  There was HIS stone--HIS, RICHELIEU'S, OWN SPECIMEN, carefully gathered by himself and none other--and now stolen, abstracted, "skyugled,"

  "smouged," "hooked" by this "rotten, skunkified, long-legged, splay-footed, hoss-laughin', nigger-toothed, or'nary despot" And, worse than all, actually made to do infamous duty as a "love token"--a "candy-gift!"--a "philanderin' box" to HIS, Richelieu's, girl--for Louise belonged to that innocent and vague outside seraglio of Richelieu's boyish dreams--and put atop of a letter to her! And Providence permitted such an outrage! "Wot was he, Richelieu, sent to school for, and organized wickedness in the shape of gorilla Injins like this allowed to ride high horses rampant over Californey!" He looked at the heavens in mute appeal. And then--Providence not immediately interfering--he thrust his own small arm into the window, regained his priceless treasure, and fled swiftly.

  A fateful silence ensued. The wind slightly moved the curtain outward, as if in a playful attempt to follow him, and then subsided. A moment later, apparently re-enforced by other winds, or sympathizing with Richelieu, it lightly lifted the unlucky missive and cast it softly from the window. But here another wind, lying in wait, caught it cleverly, and tossed it, in a long curve, into the abyss. For an instant it seemed to float lazily, as on the mirrored surface of a lake, until, turning upon its side, it suddenly darted into utter oblivion.

  When Mainwaring returned from the shrubbery, he went softly to the window. The disappearance of the letter and stone satisfied him of the success of his stratagem, and for the space of three hours relieved his anxiety. But at the end of that time, finding no response from Louise, his former uneasiness returned. Was she offended, or--the first doubt of her acceptance of him crossed his mind!

  A sudden and inexplicable sense of shame came upon him. At the same moment, he heard his name called from the steps, turned--and beheld Minty.

  Her dark eyes were shining with a pleasant light, and her lips parted on her white teeth with a frank, happy smile. She advanced and held out her hand. He took it with a mingling of disappointment and embarrassment.

  "You're wondering why I kem on here, arter I sent word this morning that I kelkilated not to come. Well, 'twixt then and now suthin' 's happened.

  We've had fine doin's over at our house, you bet! Pop don't know which end he's standin' on; and I reckon that for about ten minutes I didn't know my own name. But ez soon ez I got fairly hold o' the hull thing, and had it put straight in my mind, I sez to myself, Minty Sharpe, sez I, the first thing for you to do now, is to put on yer bonnet and shawl, and trapse over to Jim Bradley's and help them two womenfolks get dinner for themselves and that sick stranger. And," continued Minty, throwing herself into a chair and fanning her glowing face with her apron, "yer I am!"

  "But you have not told me WHAT has happened," said Mainwaring, with a constrained smile, and an uneasy glance towards the house.

  "That's so," said Minty, with a brilliant laugh. "I clean forgot the hull gist of the thing. Well, we're rich folks now--over thar' on Barren Ledge! That onery brother of mine, Richelieu, hez taken some of his specimens over to Jim Bradley to be tested. And Bradley, just to please that child, takes 'em; and not an hour ago Bradley comes running, likety switch, over to Pop to tell him to put up his notices, for the hull of that ledge where the forge stands is a mine o' silver and copper. Afore ye knew it, Lordy! half the folks outer the Summit and the mill was scattered down thar all over it. Richardson--that stranger ez knows you--kem thar too with Jim, and he allows, ef Bradley's essay is right, it's worth more than a hundred thousand dollars ez it stands!"

  "I suppose I must congratulate you, Miss Sharpe," said Mainwaring with an attempt at interest, but his attention still preoccupied with the open doorway.

  "Oh, THEY know all about it!" said Minty, following the direction of his abstracted eyes with a slight darkening of her own, "I jest kem out o'

  the kitchen the other way, and Jim sent 'em a note; but I allowed I'd tell YOU myself. Specially ez you are going away to-morrow."

  "Who said I was going away to-morrow?" asked Mainwaring, uneasily.

  "Loo Macy!"

  "Ah--she did? But I may change my mind, you know!" he continued, with a faint smile.

  Minty shook her curls decisively. "I reckon SHE knows," she said dryly, "she's got law and gospel for wot she says. But yer she comes. Ask her!

  Look yer, Loo," she added, as the two women appeared at the doorway, with a certain exaggeration of congratulatory manner that struck Mainwaring as being as artificial and disturbed as his own, "didn't Sir Francis yer say he was going to-morrow?"

  "That's what I understood!" returned Louise, with cold astonishment, letting her clear indifferent eyes fall upon Mainwaring. "I do not know that he has changed his mind."

  "Unless, as Miss Sharpe is a great capitalist now, she is willing to use her powers of persuasion," added Mrs. Bradley, with a slight acidulous pointing of her usual prim playfulness.

  "I reckon Minty Sharpe's the same ez she allus wos, unless more so,"

  returned Minty, with an honest egotism that carried so much conviction to the hearer as to condone its vanity. "But I kem yer to do a day's work, gals, and I allow to pitch in and do it, and not sit yer swoppin'

  compliments and keeping HIM from packin' his duds. Onless," she stopped, and looked around at the uneasy, unsympathetic circle with a faint tremulousness of lip that belied the brave black eyes above it, "onless I'm in yer way."

  The two women sprang forward with a feminine bewildering excess of protestation; and Mainwaring, suddenly pierced through his outer selfish embarrassment to his more honest depths, stammered quickly--

  "Look here, Miss Sharpe, if you think of running away again, after having come all the way here to make us share the knowledge of your good fortune and your better heart, by Jove! I'll go back with you."

  But here the two women effusively hurried her away from the dangerous proximity of such sympathetic honesty, and a moment later Mainwaring heard her laughing voice, as of old, ringing in the kitchen. And then, as if unconsciously responding to the significant common sense that lay in her last allusion to him, he went to his room and grimly began his packing.

 
He did not again see Louise alone. At their informal luncheon the conversation turned upon the more absorbing topic of the Sharpes'

  discovery, its extent, and its probable effect upon the fortunes of the locality. He noticed, abstractedly, that both Mrs. Bradley and her cousin showed a real or assumed scepticism of its value. This did not disturb him greatly, except for its intended check upon Minty's enthusiasm. He was more conscious, perhaps,--with a faint touch of mortified vanity,--that his own contemplated departure was of lesser importance than this local excitement. Yet in his growing conviction that all was over--if, indeed, it had ever begun--between himself and Louise, he was grateful to this natural diversion of incident which spared them both an interval of embarrassing commonplaces. And, with the suspicion of some indefinable insincerity--either of his own or Louise's--haunting him, Minty's frank heartiness and outspoken loyalty gave him a strange relief. It seemed to him as if the clear cool breath of the forest had entered with her homely garments, and the steadfast truth of Nature were incarnate in her shining eyes. How far this poetic fancy would have been consistent or even coexistent with any gleam of tenderness or self-forgetfulness in Louise's equally pretty orbs, I leave the satirical feminine reader to determine.

  It was late when Bradley at last returned, bringing further and more complete corroboration of the truth of Sharpe's good fortune. Two experts had arrived, one from Pine Flat and another from the Summit, and upon this statement Richardson had offered to purchase an interest in the discovery that would at once enable the blacksmith to develop his mine. "I shouldn't wonder, Mainwaring," he added cheerfully, "if he'd put you into it, too, and make your eternal fortune."

  "With larks falling from the skies all round you, it's a pity YOU couldn't get put into something," said Mrs. Bradley, straightening her pretty brows.

  "I'm not a gold-miner, my dear," said Bradley, pleasantly.

  "Nor a gold-finder," returned his wife, with a cruel little depression of her pink nostrils, "but you can work all night in that stupid mill and then," she added in a low voice, to escape Minty's attention, "spend the whole of the next day examining and following up a boy's discovery that his own relations had been too lazy and too ignorant to understand and profit by. I suppose that next you will be hunting up a site on the OTHER SIDE of the Canyon, where somebody else can put up a hotel and ruin your own prospects."

  A sensitive shadow of pain quickly dimmed Bradley's glance--not the first or last time evidently, for it was gradually bringing out a background of sadness in his intelligent eyes. But the next moment he turned kindly to Mainwaring, and began to deplore the necessity of his early departure, which Richardson had already made known to him with practical and satisfying reasons.

  "I hope you won't forget, my dear fellow, that your most really urgent business is to look after your health; and if, hereafter, you'll only remember the old Lookout enough to impress that fact upon you, I shall feel that any poor service I have rendered you has been amply repaid."

  Mainwaring, notwithstanding that he winced slightly at this fateful echo of Louise's advice, returned the grasp of his friend's hand with an honest pressure equal to his own. He longed now only for the coming of Richardson, to complete his scheme of grateful benefaction to his host.

  The banker came fortunately as the conversation began to flag; and Mrs. Bradley's half-coquettish ill-humor of a pretty woman, and Louise's abstracted indifference, were becoming so noticeable as to even impress Minty into a thoughtful taciturnity. The graciousness of his reception by Mrs. Bradley somewhat restored his former ostentatious gallantry, and his self-satisfied, domineering manner had enough masculine power in it to favorably affect the three women, who, it must be confessed, were a little bored by the finer abstractions of Bradley and Mainwaring.

  After a few moments, Mainwaring rose and, with a significant glance at Richardson to remind him of his proposed conference with Bradley, turned to leave the room. He was obliged to pass Louise, who was sitting by the table. His attention was suddenly arrested by something in her hand with which she was listlessly playing. It was the stone which he had put on his letter to her.

  As he had not been present when Bradley arrived, he did not know that this fateful object had been brought home by his host, who, after receiving it from Richelieu, had put it in his pocket to illustrate his story of the discovery. On the contrary, it seemed that Louise's careless exposure of his foolish stratagem was gratuitously and purposely cruel. Nevertheless, he stopped and looked at her.

  "That's a queer stone you have there," he said, in a tone which she recognized as coldly and ostentatiously civil.

  "Yes," she replied, without looking up; "it's the outcrop of that mine."

  She handed it to him as if to obviate any further remark. "I thought you had seen it before."

  "The outcrop," he repeated dryly. "That is--it--it--it is the indication or sign of something important that's below it--isn't it?"

  Louise shrugged her shoulders sceptically. "It don't follow. It's just as likely to cover rubbish, after you've taken the trouble to look."

  "Thanks," he said, with measured gentleness, and passed quietly out of the room.

  The moon had already risen when Bradley, with his brierwood pipe, preceded Richardson upon the veranda. The latter threw his large frame into Louise's rocking-chair near the edge of the abyss; Bradley, with his own chair tilted against the side of the house after the national fashion, waited for him to speak. The absence of Mainwaring and the stimulus of Mrs. Bradley's graciousness had given the banker a certain condescending familiarity, which Bradley received with amused and ironical tolerance that his twinkling eyes made partly visible in the darkness.

  "One of the things I wanted to talk to you about, Bradley, was that old affair of the advance you asked for from the Bank. We did not quite see our way to it then, and, speaking as a business man, it isn't really a matter of business now; but it has lately been put to me in a light that would make the doing of it possible--you understand? The fact of the matter is this: Sir Robert Mainwaring, the father of the young fellow you've got in your house, is one of our directors and largest shareholders, and I can tell you--if you don't suspect it already--you've been lucky, Bradley--deucedly lucky--to have had him in your house and to have rendered him a service. He's the heir to one of the largest landed estates in his country, one of the oldest county families, and will step into the title some day. But, ahem!" he coughed patronizingly, "you knew all that! No? Well, that charming wife of yours, at least, does; for she's been talking about it. Gad, Bradley, it takes those women to find out anything of that kind, eh?"

  The light in Bradley's eyes and his pipe went slowly out together.

  "Then we'll say that affair of the advance is as good as settled. It's Sir Robert's wish, you understand, and this young fellow's wish,--and if you'll come down to the Bank next week we'll arrange it for you; I think you'll admit they're doing the handsome to you and yours. And therefore," he lowered his voice confidentially, "you'll see, Bradley, that it will only be the honorable thing in you, you know, to look upon the affair as finished, and, in fact, to do all you can"--he drew his chair closer--"to--to--to drop this other foolishness."

  "I don't think I quite understand you!" said Bradley, slowly.

  "But your wife does, if you don't," returned Richardson, bluntly; "I mean this foolish flirtation between Louise Macy and Mainwaring, which is utterly preposterous. Why, man, it can't possibly come to anything, and it couldn't be allowed for a moment. Look at his position and hers.

  I should think, as a practical man, it would strike you--"

  "Only one thing strikes me, Richardson," interrupted Bradley, in a singularly distinct whisper, rising, and moving nearer the speaker; "it is that you're sitting perilously near the edge of this veranda. For, by the living God, if you don't take yourself out of that chair and out of this house, I won't be answerable for the consequences!"

  "Hold on there a minute, will you?" said Mainwaring's voice from the
window.

  Both men turned towards it. A long leg was protruding from Mainwaring's window; it was quickly followed by the other leg and body of the occupant, and the next moment Mainwaring come towards the two men, with his hands in his pockets.

  "Not so loud," he said, looking towards the house.

  "Let that man go," said Bradley, in a repressed voice. "You and I, Mainwaring, can speak together afterwards."

  "That man must stay until he hears what I have got to say," said Mainwaring, stepping between them. He was very white and grave in the moonlight, but very quiet; and he did not take his hands from his pockets. "I've listened to what he said because he came here on MY business, which was simply to offer to do you a service. That was all, Bradley, that I told him to do. This rot about what he expects of you in return is his own impertinence. If you'd punched his head when he began it, it would have been all right. But since he has begun it, before he goes I think he ought to hear me tell you that I have already OFFERED myself to Miss Macy, and she has REFUSED me! If she had given me the least encouragement, I should have told you before. Further, I want to say that, in spite of that man's insinuations, I firmly believe that no one is aware of the circumstance except Miss Macy and myself."

  "I had no idea of intimating that anything had happened that was not highly honorable and creditable to you and the young lady," began Richardson hurriedly.

  "I don't know that it was necessary for you to have any ideas on the subject at all," said Mainwaring, sternly; "nor that, having been shown how you have insulted this gentleman and myself, you need trouble us an instant longer with your company. You need not come back. I will manage my other affairs myself."

  "Very well, Mr. Mainwaring--but--you may be sure that I shall certainly take the first opportunity to explain myself to Sir Robert," returned Richardson as, with an attempt at dignity, he strode away.

  There was an interval of silence.