Devil's Ford by Bret Harte (best free ebook reader for android .TXT) 📖

“But the hired men—the superintendent and his workmen—were the only ones who ever got anything out of your last experience with Colonel Waters at La Grange, and—and we at least lived among civilized people there.”

“These young men are not common people, Christie; even if they have forgotten the restraints of speech and manners, they’re gentlemen.”

“Who are willing to live like—like negroes.”

“You can make them what you please.”

Christie raised her eyes. There was a certain cynical ring in her father’s voice that was unlike his usual hesitating abstraction. It both puzzled and pained her.

“I mean,” he said hastily, “that you have the same opportunity to direct the lives of these young men into more regular, disciplined channels that I have to regulate and correct their foolish waste of industry and material here. It would at least beguile the time for you.”

Fortunately for Mr. Carr’s escape and Christie’s uneasiness, Jessie, who had been examining the details of the living-room, broke in upon this conversation.

“I’m sure it will be as good as a perpetual picnic. George Kearney says we can have a cooking-stove under the tree outside at the back, and as there will be no rain for three months we can do the cooking there, and that will give us more room for—for the piano when it comes; and there’s an old squaw to do the cleaning and washing-up any day—and—and—it will be real fun.”

She stopped breathlessly, with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes—a charming picture of youth and trustfulness. Mr. Carr had seized the opportunity to escape.

“Really, now, Christie,” said Jessie confidentially, when they were alone, and Christie had begun to unpack her trunk, and to mechanically put her things away, “they’re not so bad.”

“Who?” asked Christie.

“Why, the Kearneys, and Mattinglys, and Fairfax, and the lot, provided you don’t look at their clothes. And think of it! they told me—for they tell one EVERYTHING in the most alarming way— that those clothes were bought to please US. A scramble of things bought at La Grange, without reference to size or style. And to hear these creatures talk, why, you’d think they were Astors or Rothschilds. Think of that little one with the curls—I don’t believe he is over seventeen, for all his baby moustache—says he’s going to build an assembly hall for us to give a dance in next month; and apologizes the next breath to tell us that there isn’t any milk to be had nearer than La Grange, and we must do without it, and use syrup in our tea to-morrow.”

“And where is all this wealth?” said Christie, forcing herself to smile at her sister’s animation.

“Under our very feet, my child, and all along the river. Why, what we thought was pure and simple mud is what they call ‘gold-bearing cement.’”

“I suppose that is why they don’t brush their boots and trousers, it’s so precious,” returned Christie drily. “And have they ever translated this precious dirt into actual coin?”

“Bless you, yes. Why, that dirty little gutter, you know, that ran along the side of the road and followed us down the hill all the way here, that cost them—let me see—yes, nearly sixty thousand dollars. And fancy! papa’s just condemned it—says it won’t do; and they’ve got to build another.”

An impatient sigh from Christie drew Jessie’s attention to her troubled eyebrows.

“Don’t worry about our disappointment, dear. It isn’t so very great. I dare say we’ll be able to get along here in some way, until papa is rich again. You know they intend to make him share with them.”

“It strikes me that he is sharing with them already,” said Christie, glancing bitterly round the cabin; “sharing everything— ourselves, our lives, our tastes.”

“Ye-e-s!” said Jessie, with vaguely hesitating assent. “Yes, even these:” she showed two dice in the palm of her little hand. “I found ‘em in the drawer of our dressing-table.”

“Throw them away,” said Christie impatiently.

But Jessie’s small fingers closed over the dice. “I’ll give them to the little Kearney. I dare say they were the poor boy’s playthings.”

The appearance of these relics of wild dissipation, however, had lifted Christie out of her sublime resignation. “For Heaven’s sake, Jessie,” she said, “look around and see if there is anything more!”

To make sure, they each began to scrimmage; the broken-spirited Christie exhibiting both alacrity and penetration in searching obscure corners. In the dining-room, behind the dresser, three or four books were discovered: an odd volume of Thackeray, another of Dickens, a memorandum-book or diary. “This seems to be Latin,” said Jessie, fishing out a smaller book. “I can’t read it.”

“It’s just as well you shouldn’t,” said Christie shortly, whose ideas of a general classical impropriety had been gathered from pages of Lempriere’s dictionary. “Put it back directly.”

Jessie returned certain odes of one Horatius Flaccus to the corner, and uttered an exclamation. “Oh, Christie! here are some letters tied up with a ribbon.”

They were two or three prettily written letters, exhaling a faint odor of refinement and of the pressed flowers that peeped from between the loose leaves. “I see, ‘My darling Fairfax.’ It’s from some woman.”

“I don’t think much of her, whosoever she is,” said Christie, tossing the intact packet back into the corner.

“Nor I,” echoed Jessie.

Nevertheless, by some feminine inconsistency, evidently the circumstance did make them think more of HIM, for a minute later, when they had reentered their own room, Christie remarked, “The idea of petting a man by his family name! Think of mamma ever having called papa ‘darling Carr’!”

“Oh, but his family name isn’t Fairfax,” said Jessie hastily; “that’s his FIRST name, his Christian name. I forget what’s his other name, but nobody ever calls him by it.”

“Do you mean,” said Christie, with glistening eyes and awful deliberation—“do you mean to say that we’re expected to fall in with this insufferable familiarity? I suppose they’ll be calling US by our Christian names next.”

“Oh, but they do!” said Jessie, mischievously.

“What!”

“They call me Miss Jessie; and Kearney, the little one, asked me if Christie played.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said that you did,” answered Jessie, with an affectation of cherubic simplicity. “You do, dear; don’t you? … There, don’t get angry, darling; I couldn’t flare up all of a sudden in the face of that poor little creature; he looked so absurd—and so—so honest.”

Christie turned away, relapsing into her old resigned manner, and assuming her household duties in a quiet, temporizing way that was, however, without hope or expectation.

Mr. Carr, who had dined with his friends under the excuse of not adding to the awkwardness of the first day’s housekeeping returned late at night with a mass of papers and drawings, into which he afterwards withdrew, but not until he had delivered himself of a mysterious package entrusted to him by the young men for his daughters. It contained a contribution to their board in the shape of a silver spoon and battered silver mug, which Jessie chose to facetiously consider as an affecting reminiscence of the youthful Kearney’s christening days—which it probably was.

The young girls retired early to their white snow-drifts: Jessie not without some hilarious struggles with hers, in which she was, however, quickly surprised by the deep and refreshing sleep of youth; Christie to lie awake and listen to the night wind, that had changed from the first cool whispers of sunset to the sturdy breath of the mountain. At times the frail house shook and trembled. Wandering gusts laden with the deep resinous odors of the wood found their way through the imperfect jointure of the two cabins, swept her cheek and even stirred her long, wide-open lashes. A broken spray of pine needles rustled along the roof, or a pine cone dropped with a quick reverberating tap-tap that for an instant startled her. Lying thus, wide awake, she fell into a dreamy reminiscence of the past, hearing snatches of old melody in the moving pines, fragments of sentences, old words, and familiar epithets in the murmuring wind at her ear, and even the faint breath of long-forgotten kisses on her cheek. She remembered her mother—a pallid creature, who had slowly faded out of one of her father’s vague speculations in a vaguer speculation of her own, beyond his ken—whose place she had promised to take at her father’s side. The words, “Watch over him, Christie; he needs a woman’s care,” again echoed in her ears, as if borne on the night wind from the lonely grave in the lonelier cemetery by the distant sea. She had devoted herself to him with some little sacrifices of self, only remembered now for their uselessness in saving her father the disappointment that sprang from his sanguine and one-idea’d temperament. She thought of him lying asleep in the other room, ready on the morrow to devote those fateful qualities to the new enterprise that with equally fateful disposition she believed would end in failure. It did not occur to her that the doubts of her own practical nature were almost as dangerous and illogical as his enthusiasm, and that for that reason she was fast losing what little influence she possessed over him. With the example of her mother’s weakness before her eyes, she had become an unsparing and distrustful critic, with the sole effect of awakening his distrust and withdrawing his confidence from her.

He was beginning to deceive her as he had never deceived her mother. Even Jessie knew more of this last enterprise than she did herself.

All that did not tend to decrease her utter restlessness. It was already past midnight when she noticed that the wind had again abated. The mountain breeze had by this time possessed the stifling valleys and heated bars of the river in its strong, cold embraces; the equilibrium of Nature was restored, and a shadowy mist rose from the hollow. A stillness, more oppressive and intolerable than the previous commotion, began to pervade the house and the surrounding woods. She could hear the regular breathing of the sleepers; she even fancied she could detect the faint impulses of the more distant life in the settlement. The far-off barking of a dog, a lost shout, the indistinct murmur of some nearer watercourse—mere phantoms of sound—made the silence more irritating. With a sudden resolution she arose, dressed herself quietly and completely, threw a heavy cloak over her head and shoulders, and opened the door between the living-room and her own. Her father was sleeping soundly in his bunk in the corner. She passed noiselessly through the room, opened the lightly fastened door, and stepped out into the night.

In the irritation and disgust of her walk hither, she had never noticed the situation of the cabin, as it nestled on the slope at the fringe of the woods; in the preoccupation of her disappointment and the mechanical putting away of her things, she had never looked once from the window of her room, or glanced backward out of the door that she had entered. The view before her was a revelation—a reproach, a surprise that took away her breath. Over her shoulders the newly risen moon poured a flood of silvery light, stretching from her feet across the shining bars of the river to the opposite bank, and on up to the very crest of the Devil’s Spur—no longer a huge bulk of crushing shadow, but the steady exaltation of plateau, spur, and terrace clothed with replete and unutterable beauty. In this magical light that beauty seemed to be sustained and carried along by the river winding at its base, lifted again to the broad shoulder of the mountain, and lost only in the distant vista of death-like, overcrowning snow. Behind and above where she stood the towering woods seemed to be waiting with opened ranks