Kitabı oku: «Jeff Briggs's Love Story», sayfa 4

When Jeff ascended to his room that night he went directly to his trunk and took out Miss Mayfield’s slipper. Alack! during the day Aunt Sally had “put things to rights” in his room, and the trunk had been moved. This had somewhat disordered its contents, and Miss Mayfield’s slipper contained a dozen shot from a broken Eley’s cartridge, a few quinine pills, four postage stamps, part of a coral earring which Jeff—on the most apocryphal authority—fondly believed belonged to his mother, whom he had never seen, and a small silver school medal which Jeff had once received for “good conduct,” much to his own surprise, but which he still religiously kept as evidence of former conventional character. He colored a little, rubbed the medal and earring ruefully on his sleeve, replaced them in his trunk, and then hastily emptied the rest of the slipper’s contents on the floor. This done, he drew off his boots, and, gliding noiselessly down the stair, hung the slipper on the knob of Miss Mayfield’s door, and glided back again without detection.

Rolling himself in his blankets, he lay down on his bed. But not to sleep! Staringly wide awake, he at last felt the lulling of the wind that nightly shook his casement, and listened while the great, rambling, creaking, disjointed “Half-way House” slowly settled itself to repose. He thought of many things; of himself, of his past, of his future, but chiefly, I fear, of the pale proud face now sleeping contentedly in the chamber below him. He tossed with many plans and projects, more or less impracticable, and then began to doze. Whereat the moon, creeping in the window, laid a cold white arm across him, and eventually dried a few foolish tears upon his sleeping lashes.

IV

Aunt Sally was making pies in the kitchen the next morning when Jeff hesitatingly stole upon her. The moment was not a felicitous one. Pie-making was usually an aggressive pursuit with Aunt Sally, entered into severely, and prosecuted unto the bitter end. After watching her a few moments Jeff came up and placed his arms tenderly around her. People very much in love find relief, I am told, in this vicarious expression.

“Aunty.”

“Well, Jeff! Thar, now—yer gittin’ all dough!” Nevertheless, the hard face relaxed a little. Something of a smile stole round her mouth, showing what she might have been before theology and bitters had supplied the natural feminine longings.

“Aunty dear!”

“You—boy!”

It WAS a boy’s face—albeit bearded like the pard, with an extra fierceness in the mustaches—that looked upon hers. She could not help bestowing a grim floury kiss upon it.

“Well, what is it now?”

“I’m thinking, aunty, it’s high time you and me packed up our traps and ‘shook’ this yar shanty, and located somewhere else.” Jeff’s voice was ostentatiously cheerful, but his eyes were a little anxious.

“What for NOW?”

Jeff hastily recounted his ill luck, and the various reasons—excepting of course the dominant one—for his resolution.

“And when do you kalkilate to go?”

“If you’ll look arter things here,” hesitated Jeff, “I reckon I’ll go up along with Bill to-morrow, and look round a bit.”

“And how long do you reckon that gal would stay here after yar gone?”

This was a new and startling idea to Jeff. But in his humility he saw nothing in it to flatter his conceit. Rather the reverse. He colored, and then said apologetically,—

“I thought that you and Jinny could get along without me. The butcher will pack the provisions over from the Fork.”

Laying down her rolling-pin, Aunt Sally turned upon Jeff with ostentatious deliberation. “Ye ain’t,” she began slowly, “ez taking a man with wimmen ez your father was—that’s a fact, Jeff Briggs! They used to say that no woman as he went for could get away from him. But ye don’t mean to say yer think yer not good enough—such as ye are—for this snip of an old maid, ez big as a gold dollar, and as yaller?”

“Aunty,” said Jeff, dropping his boyish manner, and his color as suddenly, “I’d rather ye wouldn’t talk that way of Miss Mayfield. Ye don’t know her; and there’s times,” he added, with a sigh, “ez I reckon ye don’t quite know ME either. That young lady, bein’ sick, likes to be looked after. Any one can do that for her. She don’t mind who it is. She don’t care for me except for that, and,” added Jeff humbly, “it’s quite natural.”

“I didn’t say she did,” returned Aunt Sally viciously; “but seeing ez you’ve got an empty house yer on yer hands, and me a-slavin’ here on jist nothin’, if this gal, for the sake o’ gallivantin’ with ye for a spell, chooses to stay here and keep her family here, and pay high for it, I don’t see why it ain’t yer duty to Providence and me to take advantage of it.”

Jeff raised his eyes to his aunt’s face. For the first time it struck him that she might be his father’s sister and yet have no blood in her veins that answered to his. There are few shocks more startling and overpowering to original natures than this sudden sense of loneliness. Jeff could not speak, but remained looking fiercely at her.

Aunt Sally misinterpreted his silence, and returned to her work on the pies. “The gal ain’t no fool,” she continued, rolling out the crust as if she were laying down broad propositions. “SHE reckons on it too, ez if it was charged in the bill with the board and lodging. Why, didn’t she say to me, last night, that she kalkilated afore she went away to bring up some friends from ‘Frisco for a few days’ visit? and didn’t she say, in that pipin’, affected voice o’ hers, ‘I oughter make some return for yer kindness and yer nephew’s kindness, Aunt Sally, by showing people that can help you, and keep your house full, how pleasant it is up here.’ She ain’t no fool, with all her faintin’s and dyin’s away! No, Jeff Briggs. And if she wants to show ye off agin them city fellows ez she knows, and ye ain’t got spunk enough to stand up and show off with her—why”—she turned her head impatiently, but he was gone.

If Jeff had ever wavered in his resolution he would have been steady enough NOW. But he had never wavered; the convictions and resolutions of suddenly awakened character are seldom moved by expediency. He was eager to taste the bitter dregs of his cup at once. He began to pack his trunk, and make his preparations for departure. Without avoiding Miss Mayfield in this new excitement, he no longer felt the need of her presence. He had satisfied his feverish anxieties by placing his trunk in the hall beside his open door, and was sitting on his bed, wrestling with a faded and overtasked carpet-bag that would not close and accept his hard conditions, when a small voice from the staircase thrilled him. He walked to the corridor, and, looking down, beheld Miss Mayfield midway on the steps of the staircase.

She had never looked so beautiful before! Jeff had only seen her in those soft enwrappings and half-deshabille that belong to invalid femininity. Always refined and modest thus, in her present walking-costume there was added a slight touch of coquettish adornment. There was a brightness of color in her cheek and eye, partly the result of climbing the staircase, partly the result of that audacious impulse that had led her—a modest virgin—to seek a gentleman in this personal fashion. Modesty in a young girl has a comfortable satisfying charm, recognized easily by all humanity; but he must be a sorry knave or a worse prig who is not deliciously thrilled when Modesty puts her charming little foot just over the threshold of Propriety.

“The mountain would not come to Mohammed, so Mohammed must come to the mountain,” said Miss Mayfield. “Mother is asleep, Aunt Sally is at work in the kitchen, and here am I, already dressed for a ramble in this bright afternoon sunshine, and no one to go with me. But, perhaps, you, too, are busy?”

“No, miss. I will be with you in a moment.”

I wish I could say that he went back to calm his pulses, which the dangerous music of Miss Mayfield’s voice had set to throbbing, by a few moments’ calm and dispassionate reflection. But he only returned to brush his curls out of his eyes and ears, and to button over his blue flannel shirt a white linen collar, which he thought might better harmonize with Miss Mayfield’s attire.

She was sitting on the staircase, poking her parasol through the balusters. “You need not have taken that trouble, Mr. Jeff,” she said pleasantly. “YOU are a part of this mountain picture at all times; but I am obliged to think of dress.”

“It was no trouble, miss.”

Something in the tone of his voice made her look in his face as she rose. It was a trifle paler, and a little older. The result, doubtless, thought Miss Mayfield, of his yesterday’s experience with the deputy-sheriff.

Such was her rapid deduction. Nevertheless, after the fashion of her sex, she immediately began to argue from quite another hypothesis.

“You are angry with me, Mr. Jeff.”

“What, I—Miss Mayfield?”

“Yes, you!”

“Miss Mayfield!”

“Oh yes, you are. Don’t deny it?”

“Upon my soul—”

“Yes! You give me punishments and—penances!”

Jeff opened his blue eyes on his tormentor. Could Aunt Sally have been saying anything?

“If anybody, Miss Mayfield—” he began.

“Nobody but you. Look here!”

She extended her little hand with a smile. In the centre of her palm lay four shining double B SHOT.

“There! I found those in my slipper this morning!” Jeff was speechless.

“Of course YOU did it! Of course it was YOU who found my slipper!” said Miss Mayfield, laughing. “But why did you put shot in it, Mr. Jeff? In some Catholic countries, when people have done wrong, the priests make them do penance by walking with peas in their shoes! What have I ever done to you? And why SHOT? They’re ever so much harder than peas.”

Seeing only the mischievous, laughing face before him, and the open palm containing the damning evidence of the broken Eley’s cartridge, Jeff stammered out the truth.

“I found the slipper in the bear-skin, Miss Mayfield. I put it in my trunk to keep, thinking yer wouldn’t miss it, and it’s being a kind of remembrance after you’re gone away—of—of the night you came here. Somebody moved the trunk in my room,” and he hung his head here. “The things inside all got mixed up.”

“And that made you change your mind about keeping it?” said Miss Mayfield, still smiling.

“No, miss.”

“What was it, then?”

“I gave it back to you, Miss Mayfield, because I was going away.”

“Indeed! Where?”

“I’m going to find another location. Maybe you’ve noticed,” he continued, falling back into his old apologetic manner in spite of his pride of resolution—“maybe you’ve noticed that this place here has no advantages for a hotel.”

“I had not, indeed. I have been very comfortable.”

“Thank you, miss.”

“When do you go?”

“To-night.”

For all his pride and fixed purpose he could not help looking eagerly in her face. Miss Mayfield’s eyes met his pleasantly and quietly.

“I’m sorry to part with you so soon,” she said, as she stepped back a pace or two with folded hands. “Of course every moment of your time now is occupied. You must not think of wasting it on me.”

But Jeff had recovered his sad composure. “I’d like to go with you, Miss Mayfield. It’s the last time, you know,” he added simply.

Miss Mayfield did not reply. It was a tacit assent, however, although she moved somewhat stiffly at his side as they walked towards the door. Quite convinced that Jeff’s resolution came from his pecuniary troubles, Miss Mayfield was wondering if she had not better assure him of his security from further annoyance from Dodd. Wonderful complexity of female intellect! she was a little hurt at his ingratitude to her for a kindness he could not possibly have known. Miss Mayfield felt that in some way she was unjustly treated. How many of our miserable sex, incapable of divination, have been crushed under that unreasonable feminine reproof, “You ought to have known!”

The afternoon sun was indeed shining brightly as they stepped out before the bleak angle of the “Half-way House”; but it failed to mitigate the habitually practical austerity of the mountain breeze—a fact which Miss Mayfield had never before noticed. The house was certainly bleak and exposed; the site by no means a poetical one. She wondered if she had not put a romance into it, and perhaps even into the man beside her, which did not belong to either. It was a moment of dangerous doubt.

“I don’t know but that you’re right, Mr. Jeff,” she said finally, as they faced the hill, and began the ascent together. “This place is a little queer, and bleak, and—unattractive.”

“Yes, miss,” said Jeff, with direct simplicity, “I’ve always wondered what you saw in it to make you content to stay, when it would be so much prettier, and more suitable for you at the ‘Summit.’”

Miss Mayfield bit her lip, and was silent. After a few moments’ climbing she said, almost pettishly, “Where is this famous ‘Summit’?”

Jeff stopped. They had reached the top of the hill. He pointed across an olive-green chasm to a higher level, where, basking in the declining sun, clustered the long rambling outbuildings around the white blinking facade of the “Summit House.” Framed in pines and hemlocks, tender with soft gray shadows, and nestling beyond a foreground of cultivated slope, it was a charming rustic picture.

Miss Mayfield’s quick eye took in its details. Her quick intellect took in something else. She had seated herself on the road-bank, and, clasping her knees between her locked fingers, she suddenly looked up at Jeff. “What possessed you to come half-way up a mountain, instead of going on to the top?”

“Poverty, miss!”

Miss Mayfield flushed a little at this practical direct answer to her half-figurative question. However, she began to think that moral Alpine-climbing youth might have pecuniary restrictions in their high ambitions, and that the hero of “Excelsior” might have succumbed to more powerful opposition than the wisdom of Age or the blandishments of Beauty.

“You mean that poverty up there is more expensive?”

“Yes, miss.”

“But you would like to live there?”

“Yes.”

They were both silent. Miss Mayfield glanced at Jeff under the corners of her lashes. He was leaning against a tree, absorbed in thought. Accustomed to look upon him as a pleasing picturesque object, quite fresh, original, and characteristic, she was somewhat disturbed to find that to-day he presented certain other qualities which clearly did not agree with her preconceived ideas of his condition. He had abandoned his usual large top-boots for low shoes, and she could not help noticing that his feet were small and slender as were his hands, albeit browned by exposure. His ruddy color was gone too, and his face, pale with sorrow and experience, had a new expression. His buttoned-up coat and white collar, so unlike his usual self, also had its suggestions—which Miss Mayfield was at first inclined to resent. Women are quick to notice and augur more or less wisely from these small details. Nevertheless, she began in quite another tone.

“Do you remember your mother—MR.—MR.—BRIGGS?”

Jeff noticed the new epithet. “No, miss; she died when I was quite young.”

“Your father, then?”

Jeff’s eye kindled a little, aggressively. “I remember HIM.”

“What was he?”

“Miss Mayfield!”

“What was his business or profession?”

“He—hadn’t—any!”

“Oh, I see—a gentleman of property.”

Jeff hesitated, looked at Miss Mayfield hurriedly, colored, and did not reply.

“And lost his property, Mr. Briggs?” With one of those rare impulses of an overtasked gentle nature, Jeff turned upon her almost savagely. “My father was a gambler, and shot himself at a gambling table.”

Miss Mayfield rose hurriedly. “I—I beg your pardon, Mr. Jeff.”

Jeff was silent.

“You know—you MUST know—I did not mean—”

No reply.

“Mr. Jeff!”

Her little hand fluttered toward him, and lit upon his sleeve, where it was suddenly captured and pressed passionately to his lips.

“I did not mean to be thoughtless or unkind,” said Miss Mayfield, discreetly keeping to the point, and trying weakly to disengage her hand. “You know I wouldn’t hurt your feelings.”

“I know, Miss Mayfield.” (Another kiss.)

“I was ignorant of your history.”

“Yes, miss.” (A kiss.)

“And if I could do anything for you, Mr. Jeff—” She stopped.

It was a very trying position. Being small, she was drawn after her hand quite up to Jeff’s shoulder, while he, assenting in monosyllables, was parting the fingers, and kissing them separately. Reasonable discourse in this attitude was out of the question. She had recourse to strategy.

“Oh!”

“Miss Mayfield!”

“You hurt my hand.”

Jeff dropped it instantly. Miss Mayfield put it in the pocket of her sacque for security. Besides, it had been so bekissed that it seemed unpleasantly conscious.

“I wish you would tell me all about yourself,” she went on, with a certain charming feminine submission of manner quite unlike her ordinary speech; “I should like to help you. Perhaps I can. You know I am quite independent; I mean—”

She paused, for Jeff’s face betrayed no signs of sympathetic following.

“I mean I am what people call rich in my own right. I can do as I please with my own. If any of your trouble, Mr. Jeff, arises from want of money, or capital; if any consideration of that kind takes you away from your home; if I could save you THAT TROUBLE, and find for you—perhaps a little nearer—that which you are seeking, I would be so glad to do it. You will find the world very wide, and very cold, Mr. Jeff,” she continued, with a certain air of practical superiority quite natural to her, but explicable to her friends and acquaintances only as the consciousness of pecuniary independence; “and I wish you would be frank with me. Although I am a woman, I know something of business.”

“I will be frank with you, miss,” said Jeff, turning a colorless face upon her. “If you was ez rich as the Bank of California, and could throw your money on any fancy or whim that struck you at the moment; if you felt you could buy up any man and woman in California that was willing to be bought up; and if me and my aunt were starving in the road, we wouldn’t touch the money that we hadn’t earned fairly, and didn’t belong to us. No, miss, I ain’t that sort o’ man!”

How much of this speech, in its brusqueness and slang, was an echo of Yuba Bill’s teaching, how much of it was a part of Jeff’s inward weakness, I cannot say. He saw Miss Mayfield recoil from him. It added to his bitterness that his thought, for the first time voiced, appeared to him by no means as effective or powerful as he had imagined it would be, but he could not recede from it; and there was the relief that the worst had come, and was over now.

Miss Mayfield took her hand out of her pocket. “I don’t think you quite understand me, Mr. Jeff,” she said quietly; “and I HOPE I don’t understand you.” She walked stiffly at his side for a few moments, but finally took the other side of the road. They had both turned, half unconsciously, back again to the “Half-way House.”

Jeff felt, like all quarrel-seekers, righteous or unrighteous, the full burden of the fight. If he could have relieved his mind, and at the next moment leaped upon Yuba Bill’s coach, and so passed away—without a further word of explanation—all would have been well. But to walk back with this girl, whom he had just shaken off, and who must now thoroughly hate him, was something he had not preconceived, in that delightful forecast of the imagination, when we determine what WE shall say and do without the least consideration of what may be said or done to us in return. No quarrel proceeds exactly as we expect; people have such a way of behaving illogically! And here was Miss Mayfield, who was clearly derelict, and who should have acted under that conviction, walking along on the other side of the road, trailing the splendor of her parasol in the dust like an offended goddess.

They had almost reached the house. “At what time do you go, Mr. Briggs?” asked the young lady quietly.

“At eleven to-night, by the up stage.”

“I expect some friends by that stage—coming with my father.”

“My aunt will take good care of them,” said Jeff, a little bitterly.

“I have no doubt,” responded Miss Mayfield gravely; “but I was not thinking of that. I had hoped to introduce them to you to-morrow. But I shall not be up so late to-night. And I had better say good-by to you now.”

She extended the unkissed hand. Jeff took it, but presently let the limp fingers fall through his own.

“I wish you good fortune, Mr. Briggs.”

She made a grave little bow, and vanished into the house. But here, I regret to say, her lady-like calm also vanished. She upbraided her mother peevishly for obliging her to seek the escort of Mr. Briggs in her necessary exercise, and flung herself with an injured air upon the sofa.

“But I thought you liked this Mr. Briggs. He seems an accommodating sort of person.”

“Very accommodating. Going away just as we are expecting company!”

“Going away?” said Mrs. Mayfield in alarm. “Surely he must be told that we expect some preparation for our friends?”

“Oh,” said Miss Mayfield quickly, “his aunt will arrange THAT.”

Mrs. Mayfield, habitually mystified at her daughter’s moods, said no more. She, however, fulfilled her duty conscientiously by rising, throwing a wrap over the young girl, tucking it in at her feet, and having, as it were, drawn a charitable veil over her peculiarities, left her alone.

At half past ten the coach dashed up to the “Half-way House,” with a flash of lights and a burst of cheery voices. Jeff, coming upon the porch, was met by Mr. Mayfield, accompanying a lady and two gentlemen,—evidently the guests alluded to by his daughter. Accustomed as Jeff had become to Mr. Mayfield’s patronizing superiority, it seemed unbearable now, and the easy indifference of the guests to his own presence touched him with a new bitterness. Here were HER friends, who were to take his place. It was a relief to grasp Yuba Bill’s large hand and stand with him alone beside the bar.

“I’m ready to go with you to-night, Bill,” said Jeff, after a pause.

Bill put down his glass—a sign of absorbing interest.

“And these yar strangers I fetched?”

“Aunty will take care of them. I’ve fixed everything.”

Bill laid both his powerful hands on Jeff’s shoulders, backed him against the wall, and surveyed him with great gravity.

“Briggs’s son clar through! A little off color, but the grit all thar! Bully for you, Jeff.” He wrung Jeff’s hand between his own.

“Bill!” said Jeff hesitatingly.

“Jeff!”

“You wouldn’t mind my getting up on the box NOW, before all the folks get round?”

“I reckon not. Thar’s the box-seat all ready for ye.”

Climbing to his high perch, Jeff, indistinguishable in the darkness, looked out upon the porch and the moving figures of the passengers, on Bill growling out his orders to his active hostler, and on the twinkling lights of the hotel windows. In the mystery of the night and the bitterness of his heart, everything looked strange. There was a light in Miss Mayfield’s room, but the curtains were drawn. Once he thought they moved, but then, fearful of the fascination of watching them, he turned his face resolutely away.

Then, to his relief, the hour came; the passengers re-entered the coach; Bill had mounted the box, and was slowly gathering his reins, when a shrill voice rose from the porch.

“Oh, Jeff!”

Jeff leaned an anxious face out over the coach lamps.

It was Aunt Sally, breathless and on tiptoe, reaching with a letter. “Suthin’ you forgot!” Then, in a hoarse stage whisper, perfectly audible to every one: “From HER!”

Jeff seized the letter with a burning face. The whip snapped, and the stage plunged forward into the darkness. Presently Yuba Bill reached down, coolly detached one of the coach lamps, and handed it to Jeff without a word.

Jeff tore open the envelope. It contained Cyrus Parker’s bill receipted, and the writ. Another small inclosure contained ten dollars, and a few lines written in pencil in a large masculine business hand. By the light of the lamp Jeff read as follows:—

“I hope you will forgive me for having tried to help you even in this accidental way, before I knew how strong were your objections to help from me. Nobody knows this but myself. Even Mr. Dodd thinks my father advanced the money. The ten dollars the rascal would have kept, but I made him disgorge it. I did it all while you were looking for the letter in the woods. Pray forget all about it, and any pain you may have had from J. M.”

Frank and practical as this letter appeared to be, and, doubtless, as it was intended to be by its writer, the reader will not fail to notice that Miss Mayfield said nothing of having overheard Jeff’s quarrel with the deputy, and left him to infer that that functionary had betrayed him. It was simply one of those unpleasant details not affecting the result, usually overlooked in feminine ethics.

For a moment Jeff sat pale and dumb, crushed under the ruins of his pride and self-love. For a moment he hated Miss Mayfield, small and triumphant! How she must have inwardly laughed at his speech that morning! With what refined cruelty she had saved this evidence of his humiliation, to work her vengeance on him now. He could not stand it! He could not live under it! He would go back and sell the house—his clothes—everything—to pay this wicked, heartless, cruel girl, that was killing—yes, killing—

A strong hand took the swinging-lantern from his unsteady fingers, a strong hand possessed itself of the papers and Miss Mayfield’s note, a strong arm was drawn around him,—for his figure was swaying to and fro, his head was giddy, and his hat had fallen off,—and a strong voice, albeit a little husky, whispered in his ear,—