Read Ebook: In Exile and Other Stories by Foote Mary Hallock

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Ebook has 926 lines and 51550 words, and 19 pages

The young girl flushed with pleasure; then, with a reflective air: "I confess myself, since you speak of clothes, to a feeling of relief when I saw your hat the first Sunday after I came. Western men wear such dreadful hats."

"No,--Connecticut; but at this distance it seems like the same thing."

"Oh, pardon me, there are very decided differences. I'm from Massachusetts myself. Perhaps the points of difference show more in the women,--the ones who stay at home, I mean, and become more local and idiomatic than the men. You are not one of the daughters of the soil, Miss Newell."

She looked pained as she said, "I wish I were; but there is not room for us all, where there is so little soil."

Arnold moved uneasily, extracted a stone from under the small of his back and tossed it out of sight with some vehemence. "You think it goes rather hard with women who are uprooted, then," he said. "I suppose it is something a roving man can hardly conceive of,--a woman's attachment to places, and objects, and associations; they are like cats."

Miss Newell was silent.

Arnold moved restlessly; then began again, with his eyes still on the trickle of water: "Miss Newell, do you remember a poem--I think it is Bryant's--called 'The Hunter of the Prairies'? It's no disgrace not to remember it, and it may not be Bryant's."

"I remember seeing it, but I never read it. I always skipped those Western things."

Arnold gave a short laugh, and said, "Well, you are punished, you see, by going West yourself to hear me repeat it to you. I think I can give you the idea in the Hunter's own words:--

"'Here, with my rifle and my steed, And her who left the world for me'"--

"I suppose that many a woman has tried it," Miss Newell said evasively, "but I'm sure she"--

"Never lived to tell the tale?" cried Arnold.

"She probably had something else to do, while the hunter was riding around with his gun," Miss Frances continued.

"Well, give her the odds of the rifle and the steed; give the man some commonplace employment to take the swagger out of him; let him come home reasonably tired and cross at night,--do you suppose he would find the 'kind' eyes and the 'smile'? I forgot to tell you that the Hunter of the Prairies is always welcomed by a smile at night."

"He must have been an uncommonly fortunate man," she said.

"Of course he was; but the question is: Could any living man be so fortunate? Come, Miss Frances, don't prevaricate!"

"Well, am I speaking for the average woman?"

"Oh, not at all,--you are speaking for the very nicest of women; any other kind would be intolerable on a prairie."

"I should think, if she were very healthy," said Miss Newell, hesitating between mischief and shyness, "and not too imaginative, and of a cheerful disposition; and if he, the hunter, were above the average,--supposing that she cared for him in the beginning,--I should think the smile might last a year or two."

"Heavens, what a cynic you are! I feel like a mere daub of sentiment beside you. There have been moments, do you know, even in this benighted mining camp, when I have believed in that hunter and his smile!"

He got up suddenly, and stood against the rock, facing her. Although he kept his cool, bantering tone, his breathing had quickened, and his eyes looked darker.

"You may consider me a representative man, if you please: I speak for hundreds of us scattered about in mining camps and on cattle ranches, in lighthouses and frontier farms and military posts, and all the Godforsaken holes you can conceive of, where men are trying to earn a living, or lose one,--we are all going to the dogs for the want of that smile! What is to become of us if the women whose smiles we care for cannot support life in the places where we have to live? Come, Miss Frances, can't you make that smile last at least two years?" He gathered a handful of dry leaves from a broken branch above his head and crushed them in his long hands, sifting the yellow dust upon the water below.

"The places you speak of are very different," the girl answered, with a shade of uneasiness in her manner. "A mining camp is anything but a solitude, and a military post may be very gay."

The young girl moved in a constrained way, and flushed as she said, "It must always be an experiment, I suppose, and its success would depend, as I said before, on the woman and on the man."

"An 'experiment' is good!" said Arnold, rather savagely. "I see you won't say anything you can't swear to."

"I really do not see that I am called upon to say anything on the subject at all!" said the girl, rising and looking at him across the brook with indignant eyes and a hot glow on her cheek.

He did not appear to notice her annoyance.

"You are, because you know something about it, and most women don't: your testimony is worth something. How long have you been here,--a year? I wonder how it seems to a woman to live in a place like this a year! I hate it all, you know,--I've seen so much of it. But is there really any beauty here? I suppose beauty, and all that sort of thing, is partly within us, isn't it?--at least, that's what the goody little poems tell us."

"I think it is very beautiful here," said Miss Frances, softening, as he laid aside his strained manner, and spoke more quietly. "It is the kind of place a happy woman might be very happy in; but if she were sad--or--disappointed"--

"Well?" said Arnold, pulling at his mustache, and fixing a rather gloomy gaze upon her.

"She would die of it! I really do not think there would be any hope for her in a place like this."

"But if she were happy, as you say," persisted the young man, "don't you think her woman's adaptability and quick imagination would help her immensely? She wouldn't see what I, for instance, know to be ugly and coarse; her very ignorance of the world would help her."

There was a vague, pleading look in his eyes. "Arrange it to suit yourself," she said. "Only, I can assure you, if anything should happen to her, it will be the--the hunter's fault."

"All right," said he, rousing himself. "That hunter, if I know him, is a man who is used to taking risks! Where are you going?"

"I thought I heard Nicky."

They were both silent, and as they listened, footsteps, with a tinkling accompaniment, crackled among the bushes below the ca?on. Miss Newell turned towards the spring again. "I want one more drink before I go," she said.

Arnold followed her. "Let us drink to our return. Let this be our fountain of Trevi."

"Oh, no," said Miss Frances. "Don't you remember what your favorite Bryant says about bringing the 'faded fancies of an elder world' into these 'virgin solitudes'?"

"Faded fancies!" cried Arnold. "Do you call that a faded fancy? It is as fresh and graceful as youth itself, and as natural. I should have thought of it myself, if there had been no fountain of Trevi."

"Do you think so?" smiled the girl. "Then imagination, it would seem, is not entirely confined to homesick women."

"Come, fill the cup, Miss Frances! Nicky is almost here."

The girl held her hands beneath the trickle again, until they were brimming with the clear sweet water.

"Drink first," said Arnold.

"I'm not sure that I want to return," she replied, smiling, with her eyes on the space of sky between the treetops.

"Nonsense,--you must be morbid. Drink, drink!"

"Drink yourself; the water is all running away!"

She did not say what she hoped, and Arnold, after looking at her with an interrogative smile a moment, caught his hat from the branch overhead, and made her a great flourishing bow with it in his hand.

He did not follow her, pushing her way through the swaying, rustling ferns, but he watched her light figure out of sight. "What an extraordinary ass I've been making of myself!" He confided this remark to the stillness of the little ca?on, and then, with long strides, took his way over the hills in an opposite direction.

It was the middle of July when this little episode of the spring occurred. The summer had reached its climax. The dust did not grow perceptibly deeper, nor the fields browner, during the long brazen weeks that followed; one only wearied of it all, more and more.

Miss Newell boarded at Captain Dyer's. The prosperous ex-mining captain was a good deal nearer to the primitive type than any man Miss Newell had ever sat at table with in her life before, but she had a thorough respect for him, and she felt that the time might come when she could enjoy him--as a reminiscence. Mrs. Dyer was kindly, and not more of a gossip than her neighbors; and there were no children,--only one grandchild, the inoffensive Nicky. The ways of the house were somewhat uncouth, but everything was clean and in a certain sense homelike. To Miss Newell's homesick sensitiveness it seemed better than being stared at across the boarding-house table by Boker and Pratt, and pitied by the engineer. She had a little room at the Dyers', which was a reflection of herself so far as a year's occupancy and very moderate resources could make it; perhaps for that very reason she often found her little room an intolerable prison. One night her homesickness had taken its worst form, a restlessness, which began in a nervous inward throbbing and extended to her cold and tremulous finger-tips. She went softly downstairs and out on the piazza, where the moonlight lay in a brilliant square on the unpainted boards. The moonlight increased her restlessness, but she could not keep away from it. She dared not walk up and down the piazza, because the people in the street below would see her; she stood there perfectly still, holding her elbows with her hands, crouched into a little dark heap against the side of the house.

Lights were twinkling, far and near, over the hills, singly, and in clusters. Black figures moved across the moonlit spaces in the street. There were sounds of talking, laughing, and singing; dogs barking; occasionally a stir and tinkle in the scrub, as a cow wandered past. The engines throbbed from the distant shaft-houses. A miner's wife was hushing her baby in the next house, and across the street a group of Mexicans were talking all at once in a loud, monotonous cadence.

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