Chapter 14

In spite of the camp's curiosity, for the next few days they delicately withheld their usual evening visits to Prossy's mother. “They'll be wantin' to talk o' old times, and we don't wanter be too previous,” suggested Wynbrook. But their verdict, when they at last met the new cousin, was unanimous, and their praises extravagant. To their inexperienced eyes she seemed to possess all her aunt's gentility and precision of language, with a vivacity and playfulness all her own. In a few days the whole camp was in love with her. Yet she dispensed her favors with such tactful impartiality and with such innocent enjoyment--free from any suspicion of coquetry--that there were no heartburnings, and the unlucky man who nourished a fancied slight would have been laughed at by his fellows. She had a town-bred girl's curiosity and interest in camp life, which she declared was like a “perpetual picnic,” and her slim, graceful figure halting beside a ditch where the men were working seemed to them as grateful as the new spring sunshine. The whole camp became tidier; a coat was considered de rigueur at “Prossy's mother” evenings; there was less horseplay in the trails, and less shouting. “It's all very well to talk about 'old mothers,'” said the cynical barkeeper, “but that gal, single handed, has done more in a week to make the camp decent than old Ma'am Riggs has in a month o' Sundays.”

Since Prosper's brief conversation with Miss Pottinger before the house, the question “What is to be done?” had singularly lapsed, nor had it been referred to again by either. The young lady had apparently thrown herself into the diversions of the camp with the thoughtless gayety of a brief holiday maker, and it was not for him to remind her--even had he wished to--that her important question had never been answered. He had enjoyed her happiness with the relief of a secret shared by her. Three weeks had passed; the last of the winter's rains had gone. Spring was stirring in underbrush and wildwood, in the pulse of the waters, in the sap of the great pines, in the uplifting of flowers. Small wonder if Prosper's boyish heart had stirred a little too.

In fact, he had been possessed by another luminous idea--a wild idea that to him seemed almost as absurd as the one which had brought him all this trouble. It had come to him like that one--out of a starlit night--and he had risen one morning with a feverish intent to put it into action! It brought him later to take an unprecedented walk alone with Miss Pottinger, to linger under green leaves in unfrequented woods, and at last seemed about to desert him as he stood in a little hollow with her hand in his--their only listener an inquisitive squirrel. Yet this was all the disappointed animal heard him stammer,--

“So you see, dear, it would THEN be no lie--for--don't you see?--she'd be really MY mother as well as YOURS.”

The marriage of Prosper Riggs and Miss Pottinger was quietly celebrated at Sacramento, but Prossy's “old mother” did not return with the happy pair.

Of Mrs. Pottinger's later career some idea may be gathered from a letter which Prosper received a year after his marriage. “Circumstances,” wrote Mrs. Pottinger, “which had induced me to accept the offer of a widower to take care of his motherless household, have since developed into a more enduring matrimonial position, so that I can always offer my dear Prosper a home with his mother, should he choose to visit this locality, and a second father in Hiram W. Watergates, Esq., her husband.”

THE CONVALESCENCE OF JACK HAMLIN

The habitually quiet, ascetic face of Seth Rivers was somewhat disturbed and his brows were knitted as he climbed the long ascent of Windy Hill to its summit and his own rancho. Perhaps it was the effect of the characteristic wind, which that afternoon seemed to assault him from all points at once and did not cease its battery even at his front door, but hustled him into the passage, blew him into the sitting room, and then celebrated its own exit from the long, rambling house by the banging of doors throughout the halls and the slamming of windows in the remote distance.

Mrs. Rivers looked up from her work at this abrupt onset of her husband, but without changing her own expression of slightly fatigued self-righteousness. Accustomed to these elemental eruptions, she laid her hands from force of habit upon the lifting tablecloth, and then rose submissively to brush together the scattered embers and ashes from the large hearthstone, as she had often done before.

“You're in early, Seth,” she said.

“Yes. I stopped at the Cross Roads Post Office. Lucky I did, or you'd hev had kempany on your hands afore you knowed it--this very night! I found this letter from Dr. Duchesne,” and he produced a letter from his pocket.

Mrs. Rivers looked up with an expression of worldly interest. Dr. Duchesne had brought her two children into the world with some difficulty, and had skillfully attended her through a long illness consequent upon the inefficient maternity of soulful but fragile American women of her type. The doctor had more than a mere local reputation as a surgeon, and Mrs. Rivers looked up to him as her sole connecting link with a world of thought beyond Windy Hill.

“He's comin' up yer to-night, bringin' a friend of his--a patient that he wants us to board and keep for three weeks until he's well agin,” continued Mr. Rivers. “Ye know how the doctor used to rave about the pure air on our hill.”

Mrs. Rivers shivered slightly, and drew her shawl over her shoulders, but nodded a patient assent.

“Well, he says it's just what that patient oughter have to cure him. He's had lung fever and other things, and this yer air and gin'ral quiet is bound to set him up. We're to board and keep him without any fuss or feathers, and the doctor sez he'll pay liberal for it. This yer's what he sez,” concluded Mr. Rivers, reading from the letter: “'He is now fully convalescent, though weak, and really requires no other medicine than the--ozone'--yes, that's what the doctor calls it--'of Windy Hill, and in fact as little attendance as possible. I will not let him keep even his negro servant with him. He'll give you no trouble, if he can be prevailed upon to stay the whole time of his cure.'”

“There's our spare room--it hasn't been used since Parson Greenwood was here,” said Mrs. Rivers reflectively. “Melinda could put it to rights in an hour. At what time will he come?”

“He'd come about nine. They drive over from Hightown depot. But,” he added grimly, “here ye are orderin' rooms to be done up and ye don't know who for.”

“You said a friend of Dr. Duchesne,” returned Mrs. Rivers simply.

“Dr. Duchesne has many friends that you and me mightn't cotton to,” said her husband. “This man is Jack Hamlin.” As his wife's remote and introspective black eyes returned only vacancy, he added quickly. “The noted gambler!”

“Gambler?” echoed his wife, still vaguely.

“Yes--reg'lar; it's his business.”

“Goodness, Seth! He can't expect to do it here.”

“No,” said Seth quickly, with that sense of fairness to his fellow man which most women find it so difficult to understand. “No--and he probably won't mention the word 'card' while he's here.”

“Well?” said Mrs. Rivers interrogatively.

“And,” continued Seth, seeing that the objection was not pressed, “he's one of them desprit men! A reg'lar fighter! Killed two or three men in dools!”

Mrs. Rivers stared. “What could Dr. Duchesne have been thinking of? Why, we wouldn't be safe in the house with him!”

Again Seth's sense of equity triumphed. “I never heard of his fightin' anybody but his own kind, and when he was bullyragged. And ez to women he's quite t'other way in fact, and that's why I think ye oughter know it afore you let him come. He don't go round with decent women. In fact”--But here Mr. Rivers, in the sanctity of conjugal confidences and the fullness of Bible reading, used a few strong scriptural substantives happily unnecessary to repeat here.

“Seth!” said Mrs. Rivers suddenly, “you seem to know this man.”

The unexpectedness and irrelevancy of this for a moment startled Seth. But that chaste and God-fearing man had no secrets. “Only by hearsay, Jane,” he returned quietly; “but if ye say the word I'll stop his comin' now.”

“It's too late,” said Mrs. Rivers decidedly.

“I reckon not,” returned her husband, “and that's why I came straight here. I've only got to meet them at the depot and say this thing can't be done--and that's the end of it. They'll go off quiet to the hotel.”

“I don't like to disappoint the doctor, Seth,” said Mrs. Rivers. “We might,” she added, with a troubled look of inquiry at her husband, “we might take that Mr. Hamlin on trial. Like as not he won't stay, anyway, when he sees what we're like, Seth. What do you think? It would be only our Christian duty, too.”

“I was thinkin' o' that as a professin' Christian, Jane,” said her husband. “But supposin' that other Christians don't look at it in that light. Thar's Deacon Stubbs and his wife and the parson. Ye remember what he said about 'no covenant with sin'?”

“The Stubbses have no right to dictate who I'll have in my house,” said Mrs. Rivers quickly, with a faint flush in her rather sallow cheeks.

“It's your say and nobody else's,” assented her husband with grim submissiveness. “You do what you like.”

Mrs. Rivers mused. “There's only myself and Melinda here,” she said with sublime naivete; “and the children ain't old enough to be corrupted. I am satisfied if you are, Seth,” and she again looked at him inquiringly.

“Go ahead, then, and get ready for 'em,” said Seth, hurrying away with unaffected relief. “If you have everything fixed by nine o'clock, that'll do.”

Mrs. Rivers had everything “fixed” by that hour, including herself presumably, for she had put on a gray dress which she usually wore when shopping in the county town, adding a prim collar and cuffs. A pearl-encircled brooch, the wedding gift of Seth, and a solitaire ring next to her wedding ring, with a locket containing her children's hair, accented her position as a proper wife and mother. At a quarter to nine she had finished tidying the parlor, opening the harmonium so that the light might play upon its polished keyboard, and bringing from the forgotten seclusion of her closet two beautifully bound volumes of Tupper's “Poems” and Pollok's “Course of Time,” to impart a literary grace to the centre table. She then drew a chair to the table and sat down before it with a religious magazine in her lap. The wind roared over the deep-throated chimney, the clock ticked monotonously, and then there came the sound of wheels and voices.

But Mrs. Rivers was not destined to see her guest that night. Dr. Duchesne, under the safe lee of the door, explained that Mr. Hamlin had been exhausted by the journey, and, assisted by a mild opiate, was asleep in the carriage; that if Mrs. Rivers did not object, they would carry him at once to his room. In the flaring and guttering of candles, the flashing of lanterns, the flapping of coats and shawls, and the bewildering rush of wind, Mrs. Rivers was only vaguely conscious of a slight figure muffled tightly in a cloak carried past her in the arms of a grizzled negro up the staircase, followed by Dr. Duchesne. With the closing of the front door on the tumultuous world without, a silence fell again on the little parlor.

When the doctor made his reappearance it was to say that his patient was being undressed and put to bed by his negro servant, who, however, would return with the doctor to-night, but that the patient would be left with everything that was necessary, and that he would require no attention from the family until the next day. Indeed, it was better that he should remain undisturbed. As the doctor confined his confidences and instructions entirely to the physical condition of their guest, Mrs. Rivers found it awkward to press other inquiries.

“Of course,” she said at last hesitatingly, but with a certain primness of expression, “Mr. Hamlin must expect to find everything here very different from what he is accustomed to--at least from what my husband says are his habits.”

“Nobody knows that better than he, Mrs. Rivers,” returned the doctor with an equally marked precision of manner, “and you could not have a guest who would be less likely to make you remind him of it.”

A little annoyed, yet not exactly knowing why, Mrs. Rivers abandoned the subject, and as the doctor shortly afterwards busied himself in the care of his patient, with whom he remained until the hour of his departure, she had no chance of renewing it. But as he finally shook hands with his host and hostess, it seemed to her that he slightly recurred to it. “I have the greatest hope of the curative effect of this wonderful locality on my patient, but even still more of the beneficial effect of the complete change of his habits, his surroundings, and their influences.” Then the door closed on the man of science and the grizzled negro servant, the noise of the carriage wheels was shut out with the song of the wind in the pine tops, and the rancho of Windy Hill possessed Mr. Jack Hamlin in peace. Indeed, the wind was now falling, as was its custom at that hour, and the moon presently arose over a hushed and sleeping landscape.

For the rest of the evening the silent presence in the room above affected the household; the half-curious servants and ranch hands spoke in whispers in the passages, and at evening prayers, in the dining room, Seth Rivers, kneeling before and bowed over a rush-bottomed chair whose legs were clutched by his strong hands, included “the stranger within our gates” in his regular supplications. When the hour for retiring came, Seth, with a candle in his hand, preceded his wife up the staircase, but stopped before the door of their guest's room. “I reckon,” he said interrogatively to Mrs. Rivers, “I oughter see ef he's wantin' anythin'?”

“You heard what the doctor said,” returned Mrs. Rivers cautiously. At the same time she did not speak decidedly, and the frontiersman's instinct of hospitality prevailed. He knocked lightly; there was no response. He turned the door handle softly. The door opened. A faint clean perfume--an odor of some general personality rather than any particular thing--stole out upon them. The light of Seth's candle struck a few glints from some cut-glass and silver, the contents of the guest's dressing case, which had been carefully laid out upon a small table by his negro servant. There was also a refined neatness in the disposition of his clothes and effects which struck the feminine eye of even the tidy Mrs. Rivers as something new to her experience. Seth drew nearer the bed with his shaded candle, and then, turning, beckoned his wife to approach. Mrs. Rivers hesitated--but for the necessity of silence she would have openly protested--but that protest was shut up in her compressed lips as she came forward.

For an instant that awe with which absolute helplessness invests the sleeping and dead was felt by both husband and wife. Only the upper part of the sleeper's face was visible above the bedclothes, held in position by a thin white nervous hand that was encircled at the wrist by a ruffle. Seth stared. Short brown curls were tumbled over a forehead damp with the dews of sleep and exhaustion. But what appeared more singular, the closed eyes of this vessel of wrath and recklessness were fringed with lashes as long and silky as a woman's. Then Mrs. Rivers gently pulled her husband's sleeve, and they both crept back with a greater sense of intrusion and even more cautiously than they had entered. Nor did they speak until the door was closed softly and they were alone on the landing. Seth looked grimly at his wife.

“Don't look much ez ef he could hurt anybody.”

“He looks like a sick man,” returned Mrs. Rivers calmly.

The unconscious object of this criticism and attention slept until late; slept through the stir of awakened life within and without, through the challenge of early cocks in the lean-to shed, through the creaking of departing ox teams and the lazy, long-drawn commands of teamsters, through the regular strokes of the morning pump and the splash of water on stones, through the far-off barking of dogs and the half-intelligible shouts of ranchmen; slept through the sunlight on his ceiling, through its slow descent of his wall, and awoke with it in his eyes! He woke, too, with a delicious sense of freedom from pain, and of even drawing a long breath without difficulty--two facts so marvelous and dreamlike that he naturally closed his eyes again lest he should waken to a world of suffering and dyspnoea. Satisfied at last that this relief was real, he again opened his eyes, but upon surroundings so strange, so wildly absurd and improbable, that he again doubted their reality. He was lying in a moderately large room, primly and severely furnished, but his attention was for the moment riveted to a gilt frame upon the wall beside him bearing the text, “God Bless Our Home,” and then on another frame on the opposite wall which admonished him to “Watch and Pray.” Beside them hung an engraving of the “Raising of Lazarus,” and a Hogarthian lithograph of “The Drunkard's Progress.” Mr. Hamlin closed his eyes; he was dreaming certainly--not one of those wild, fantastic visions that had so miserably filled the past long nights of pain and suffering, but still a dream! At last, opening one eye stealthily, he caught the flash of the sunlight upon the crystal and silver articles of his dressing case, and that flash at once illuminated his memory. He remembered his long weeks of illness and the devotion of Dr. Duchesne. He remembered how, when the crisis was past, the doctor had urged a complete change and absolute rest, and had told him of a secluded rancho in some remote locality kept by an honest Western pioneer whose family he had attended. He remembered his own reluctant assent, impelled by gratitude to the doctor and the helplessness of a sick man. He now recalled the weary journey thither, his exhaustion and the semi-consciousness of his arrival in a bewildering wind on a shadowy hilltop. And this was the place!

He shivered slightly, and ducked his head under the cover again. But the brightness of the sun and some exhilarating quality in the air tempted him to have another outlook, avoiding as far as possible the grimly decorated walls. If they had only left him his faithful servant he could have relieved himself of that mischievous badinage which always alternately horrified and delighted that devoted negro. But he was alone--absolutely alone--in this conventicle!

Presently he saw the door open slowly. It gave admission to the small round face and yellow ringlets of a little girl, and finally to her whole figure, clasping a doll nearly as large as herself. For a moment she stood there, arrested by the display of Mr. Hamlin's dressing case on the table. Then her glances moved around the room and rested upon the bed. Her blue eyes and Mr. Hamlin's brown ones met and mingled. Without a moment's hesitation she moved to the bedside. Taking her doll's hands in her own, she displayed it before him.

“Isn't it pitty?”

Mr. Hamlin was instantly his old self again. Thrusting his hand comfortably under the pillow, he lay on his side and gazed at it long and affectionately. “I never,” he said in a faint voice, but with immovable features, “saw anything so perfectly beautiful. Is it alive?”

“It's a dolly,” she returned gravely, smoothing down its frock and straightening its helpless feet. Then seized with a spontaneous idea, like a young animal she suddenly presented it to him with both hands and said,--

“Kiss it.”

Mr. Hamlin implanted a chaste salute on its vermilion cheek. “Would you mind letting me hold it for a little?” he said with extreme diffidence.

The child was delighted, as he expected. Mr. Hamlin placed it in a sitting posture on the edge of his bed, and put an ostentatious paternal arm around it.

“But you're alive, ain't you?” he said to the child.

This subtle witticism convulsed her. “I'm a little girl,” she gurgled.

“I see; her mother?”

“Ess.”

“And who's your mother?”

“Mammy.”

“Mrs. Rivers?”

The child nodded until her ringlets were shaken on her cheek. After a moment she began to laugh bashfully and with repression, yet as Mr. Hamlin thought a little mischievously. Then as he looked at her interrogatively she suddenly caught hold of the ruffle of his sleeve.

“Oo's got on mammy's nighty.”

Mr. Hamlin started. He saw the child's obvious mistake and actually felt himself blushing. It was unprecedented--it was the sheerest weakness--it must have something to do with the confounded air.

“I grieve to say you are deeply mistaken--it is my very own,” he returned with great gravity. Nevertheless, he drew the coverlet close over his shoulder. But here he was again attracted by another face at the half-opened door--a freckled one, belonging to a boy apparently a year or two older than the girl. He was violently telegraphing to her to come away, although it was evident that he was at the same time deeply interested in the guest's toilet articles. Yet as his bright gray eyes and Mr. Hamlin's brown ones met, he succumbed, as the girl had, and walked directly to the bedside. But he did it bashfully--as the girl had not. He even attempted a defensive explanation.

“She hadn't oughter come in here, and mar wouldn't let her, and she knows it,” he said with superior virtue.

“But I asked her to come as I'm asking you,” said Mr. Hamlin promptly, “and don't you go back on your sister or you'll never be president of the United States.” With this he laid his hand on the boy's tow head, and then, lifting himself on his pillow to a half-sitting posture, put an arm around each of the children, drawing them together, with the doll occupying the central post of honor. “Now,” continued Mr. Hamlin, albeit in a voice a little faint from the exertion, “now that we're comfortable together I'll tell you the story of the good little boy who became a pirate in order to save his grandmother and little sister from being eaten by a wolf at the door.”

But, alas! that interesting record of self-sacrifice never was told. For it chanced that Melinda Bird, Mrs. Rivers's help, following the trail of the missing children, came upon the open door and glanced in. There, to her astonishment, she saw the domestic group already described, and to her eyes dominated by the “most beautiful and perfectly elegant” young man she had ever seen. But let not the incautious reader suppose that she succumbed as weakly as her artless charges to these fascinations. The character and antecedents of that young man had been already delivered to her in the kitchen by the other help. With that single glance she halted; her eyes sought the ceiling in chaste exaltation. Falling back a step, she called in ladylike hauteur and precision, “Mary Emmeline and John Wesley.”

Mr. Hamlin glanced at the children. “It's Melindy looking for us,” said John Wesley. But they did not move. At which Mr. Hamlin called out faintly but cheerfully, “They're here, all right.”

Again the voice arose with still more marked and lofty distinctness, “John Wesley and Mary Em-me-line.” It seemed to Mr. Hamlin that human accents could not convey a more significant and elevated ignoring of some implied impropriety in his invitation. He was for a moment crushed.

But he only said to his little friends with a smile, “You'd better go now and we'll have that story later.”

“Affer beckus?” suggested Mary Emmeline.

“In the woods,” added John Wesley.

Mr. Hamlin nodded blandly. The children trotted to the door. It closed upon them and Miss Bird's parting admonition, loud enough for Mr. Hamlin to hear, “No more freedoms, no more intrudings, you hear.”