Upon that occasion he found two patients. Molly Wood lay in bed at Mrs. Taylor's, filled with apology and indignation. With little to do, and deprived of the strong stimulant of anxiety and action, her strength had quite suddenly left her, so that she had spoken only in a sort of whisper. But upon waking from a long sleep, after Mrs. Taylor had taken her firmly, almost severely, in hand, her natural voice had returned, and now the chief treatment the doctor gave her was a sort of scolding, which it pleased Mrs. Taylor to hear. The doctor even dropped a phrase concerning the arrogance of strong nerves in slender bodies, and of undertaking several people's work when several people were at hand to do it for themselves, and this pleased Mrs. Taylor remarkably. As for the wounded man, he was behaving himself properly. Perhaps in another week he could be moved to a more cheerful room. Just now, with cleanliness and pure air, any barn would do.
“We are real lucky to have such a sensible doctor in the country,” Mrs. Taylor observed, after the physician had gone.
“No doubt,” said Molly. “He said my room was a barn.”
“That's what you've made it, deary. But sick men don't notice much.”
Nevertheless, one may believe, without going widely astray, that illness, so far from veiling, more often quickens the perceptions—at any rate those of the naturally keen. On a later day—and the interval was brief—while Molly was on her second drive to take the air with Mrs. Taylor, that lady informed her that the sick man had noticed. “And I could not tell him things liable to disturb him,” said she, “and so I—well, I expect I just didn't exactly tell him the facts. I said yes, you were packing up for a little visit to your folks. They had not seen you for quite a while, I said. And he looked at those boxes kind of silent like.”
“There's no need to move him,” said Molly. '“It is simpler to move them—the boxes. I could take out some of my things, you know, just while he has to be kept there. I mean—you see, if the doctor says the room should be cheerful—”
“Yes, deary.”
“I will ask the doctor next time,” said Molly, “if he believes I am—competent to spread a rug upon a floor.” Molly's references to the doctor were usually acid these days. And this he totally failed to observe, telling her when he came, why, to be sure! the very thing! And if she could play cards or read aloud, or afford any other light distractions, provided they did not lead the patient to talk and tire himself, that she would be most useful. Accordingly she took over the cribbage board, and came with unexpected hesitation face to face again with the swarthy man she had saved and tended. He was not so swarthy now, but neat, with chin clean, and hair and mustache trimmed and smooth, and he sat propped among pillows watching for her.
“You are better,” she said, speaking first, and with uncertain voice.
“Yes. They have given me awdehs not to talk,” said the Southerner, smiling.
“Oh, yes. Please do not talk—not to-day.”
“No. Only this”—he looked at her, and saw her seem to shrink—“thank you for what you have done,” he said simply.
She took tenderly the hand he stretched to her; and upon these terms they set to work at cribbage. She won, and won again, and the third time laid down her cards and reproached him with playing in order to lose.
“No,” he said, and his eye wandered to the boxes. “But my thoughts get away from me. I'll be strong enough to hold them on the cyards next time, I reckon.”
Many tones in his voice she had heard, but never the tone of sadness until to-day.
Then they played a little more, and she put away the board for this first time.
“You are going now?” he asked.
“When I have made this room look a little less forlorn. They haven't wanted to meddle with my things, I suppose.” And Molly stooped once again among the chattels destined for Vermont. Out they came; again the bearskin was spread on the floor, various possessions and ornaments went back into their ancient niches, the shelves grew comfortable with books, and, last, some flowers were stood on the table.
“More like old times,” said the Virginian, but sadly.
“It's too bad,” said Molly, “you had to be brought into such a looking place.”
“And your folks waiting for you,” said he.
“Oh, I'll pay my visit later,” said Molly, putting the rug a trifle straighter.
“May I ask one thing?” pleaded the Virginian, and at the gentleness of his voice her face grew rosy, and she fixed her eyes on him with a sort of dread.
“Anything that I can answer,” said she.
“Oh, yes. Did I tell yu' to quit me, and did yu' load up my gun and stay? Was that a real business? I have been mixed up in my haid.”
“That was real,” said Molly. “What else was there to do?”
“Just nothing—for such as you!” he exclaimed. “My haid has been mighty crazy; and that little grandmother of yours yondeh, she—but I can't just quite catch a-hold of these things”—he passed a hand over his forehead—“so many—or else one right along—well, it's all foolishness!” he concluded, with something almost savage in his tone. And after she had gone from the cabin he lay very still, looking at the miniature on the wall.
He was in another sort of mood the next time, cribbage not interesting him in the least. “Your folks will be wondering about you,” said he.
“I don't think they will mind which month I go to them,” said Molly. “Especially when they know the reason.”
“Don't let me keep you, ma'am,” said he. Molly stared at him; but he pursued, with the same edge lurking in his slow words: “Though I'll never forget. How could I forget any of all you have done—and been? If there had been none of this, why, I had enough to remember! But please don't stay, ma'am. We'll say I had a claim when yu' found me pretty well dead, but I'm gettin' well, yu' see—right smart, too!”
“I can't understand, indeed I can't,” said Molly, “why you're talking so!”
He seemed to have certain moods when he would address her as “ma'am,” and this she did not like, but could not prevent.
“Oh, a sick man is funny. And yu' know I'm grateful to you.”
“Please say no more about that, or I shall go this afternoon. I don't want to go. I am not ready. I think I had better read something now.”
“Why, yes. That's cert'nly a good notion. Why, this is the best show you'll ever get to give me education. Won't yu' please try that EMMA book now, ma'am? Listening to you will be different.” This was said with softness and humility.
Uncertain—as his gravity often left her—precisely what he meant by what he said, Molly proceeded with EMMA, slackly at first, but soon with the enthusiasm that Miss Austen invariably gave her. She held the volume and read away at it, commenting briefly, and then, finishing a chapter of the sprightly classic, found her pupil slumbering peacefully. There was no uncertainty about that.
“You couldn't be doing a healthier thing for him, deary,” said Mrs. Taylor. “If it gets to make him wakeful, try something harder.” This was the lady's scarcely sympathetic view.
But it turned out to be not obscurity in which Miss Austen sinned.
When Molly next appeared at the Virginian's threshold, he said plaintively, “I reckon I am a dunce.” And he sued for pardon. “When I waked up,” he said, “I was ashamed of myself for a plumb half-hour.” Nor could she doubt this day that he meant what he said. His mood was again serene and gentle, and without referring to his singular words that had distressed her, he made her feel his contrition, even in his silence.
“I am right glad you have come,” he said. And as he saw her going to the bookshelf, he continued, with diffidence: “As regyards that EMMA book, yu' see—yu' see, the doin's and sayin's of folks like them are above me. But I think” (he spoke most diffidently), “if yu' could read me something that was ABOUT something, I—I'd be liable to keep awake.” And he smiled with a certain shyness.
“Something ABOUT something?” queried Molly, at a loss.
“Why, yes. Shakespeare. HENRY THE FOURTH. The British king is fighting, and there is his son the prince. He cert'nly must have been a jim-dandy boy if that is all true. Only he would go around town with a mighty triflin' gang. They sported and they held up citizens. And his father hated his travelling with trash like them. It was right natural—the boy and the old man! But the boy showed himself a man too. He killed a big fighter on the other side who was another jim-dandy—and he was sorry for having it to do.” The Virginian warmed to his recital. “I understand most all of that. There was a fat man kept everybody laughing. He was awful natural too; except yu' don't commonly meet 'em so fat. But the prince—that play is bed-rock, ma'am! Have you got something like that?”
“Yes, I think so,” she replied. “I believe I see what you would appreciate.”
She took her Browning, her idol, her imagined affinity. For the pale decadence of New England had somewhat watered her good old Revolutionary blood too, and she was inclined to think under glass and to live underdone—when there were no Indians to shoot! She would have joyed to venture “Paracelsus” on him, and some lengthy rhymed discourses; and she fondly turned leaves and leaves of her pet doggerel analytics. “Pippa Passes” and others she had to skip, from discreet motives—pages which he would have doubtless stayed awake at; but she chose a poem at length. This was better than Emma, he pronounced. And short. The horse was a good horse. He thought a man whose horse must not play out on him would watch the ground he was galloping over for holes, and not be likely to see what color the rims of his animal's eye-sockets were. You could not see them if you sat as you ought to for such a hard ride. Of the next piece that she read him he thought still better. “And it is short,” said he. “But the last part drops.”
Molly instantly exacted particulars.
“The soldier should not have told the general he was killed,” stated the cow-puncher.
“What should he have told him, I'd like to know?” said Molly.
“Why, just nothing. If the soldier could ride out of the battle all shot up, and tell his general about their takin' the town—that was being gritty, yu' see. But that truck at the finish—will yu' please say it again?”
So Molly read:—
“'You're wounded! 'Nay,' the soldier's pride
Touched to the quick, he said,
'I'm killed, sire!' And, his chief beside,
Smiling the boy fell dead.”
“'Nay, I'm killed, sire,'” drawled the Virginian, amiably; for (symptom of convalescence) his freakish irony was revived in him. “Now a man who was man enough to act like he did, yu' see, would fall dead without mentioning it.”
None of Molly's sweet girl friends had ever thus challenged Mr. Browning. They had been wont to cluster over him with a joyous awe that deepened proportionally with their misunderstanding. Molly paused to consider this novelty of view about the soldier. “He was a Frenchman, you know,” she said, under inspiration.
“A Frenchman,” murmured the grave cow-puncher. “I never knowed a Frenchman, but I reckon they might perform that class of foolishness.”
“But why was it foolish?” she cried.
“His soldier's pride—don't you see?”
“No.”
Molly now burst into a luxury of discussion. She leaned toward her cow-puncher with bright eyes searching his; with elbow on knee and hand propping chin, her lap became a slant, and from it Browning the poet slid and toppled, and lay unrescued. For the slow cow-puncher unfolded his notions of masculine courage and modesty (though he did not deal in such high-sounding names), and Molly forgot everything to listen to him, as he forgot himself and his inveterate shyness and grew talkative to her. “I would never have supposed that!” she would exclaim as she heard him; or, presently again, “I never had such an idea!” And her mind opened with delight to these new things which came from the man's mind so simple and direct. To Browning they did come back, but the Virginian, though interested, conceived a dislike for him. “He is a smarty,” said he, once or twice.
“Now here is something,” said Molly. “I have never known what to think.”
“Oh, Heavens!” murmured the sick man, smiling. “Is it short?”
“Very short. Now please attend.” And she read him twelve lines about a lover who rowed to a beach in the dusk, crossed a field, tapped at a pane, and was admitted.
“That is the best yet,” said the Virginian. “There's only one thing yu' can think about that.”
“But wait,” said the girl, swiftly. “Here is how they parted:—
“Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim—
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.”
“That is very, very true,” murmured the Virginian, dropping his eyes from the girl's intent ones.
“Had they quarrelled?” she inquired.
“Oh, no!”
“But—”
“I reckon he loved her very much.”
“Then you're sure they hadn't quarrelled?”
“Dead sure, ma'am. He would come back afteh he had played some more of the game.”
“The game?”
“Life, ma'am. Whatever he was a-doin' in the world of men. That's a bed-rock piece, ma'am!”
“Well, I don't see why you think it's so much better than some of the others.”
“I could sca'cely explain,” answered the man. “But that writer does know something.”
“I am glad they hadn't quarrelled,” said Molly, thoughtfully. And she began to like having her opinions refuted.
His bandages, becoming a little irksome, had to be shifted, and this turned their discourse from literature to Wyoming; and Molly inquired, had he ever been shot before? Only once, he told her. “I have been lucky in having few fusses,” said he. “I hate them. If a man has to be killed—”
“You never—” broke in Molly. She had started back a little. “Well,” she added hastily, “don't tell me if—”
“I shouldn't wonder if I got one of those Indians,” he said quietly. “But I wasn't waitin' to see! But I came mighty near doing for a white man that day. He had been hurtin' a hawss.”
“Hurting?” said Molly.
“Injurin.' I will not tell yu' about that. It would hurt yu' to hear such things. But hawsses—don't they depend on us? Ain't they somethin' like children? I did not lay up the man very bad. He was able to travel 'most right away. Why, you'd have wanted to kill him yourself!”
So the Virginian talked, nor knew what he was doing to the girl. Nor was she aware of what she was receiving from him as he unwittingly spoke himself out to her in these Browning meetings they had each day. But Mrs. Taylor grew pleased. The kindly dame would sometimes cross the road to see if she were needed, and steal away again after a peep at the window. There, inside, among the restored home treasures, sat the two: the rosy alert girl, sweet as she talked or read to him; and he, the grave, half-weak giant among his wraps, watching her.
Of her delayed home visit he never again spoke, either to her or to Mrs. Taylor; and Molly veered aside from any trend of talk she foresaw was leading toward that subject. But in those hours when no visitors came, and he was by himself in the quiet, he would lie often sombrely contemplating the girl's room, her little dainty knickknacks, her home photographs, all the delicate manifestations of what she came from and what she was. Strength was flowing back into him each day, and Judge Henry's latest messenger had brought him clothes and mail from Sunk Creek and many inquiries of kindness, and returned taking the news of the cow-puncher's improvement, and how soon he would be permitted the fresh air. Hence Molly found him waiting in a flannel shirt of highly becoming shade, and with a silk handkerchief knotted round his throat; and he told her it was good to feel respectable again.
She had come to read to him for the allotted time; and she threw around his shoulders the scarlet and black Navajo blanket, striped with its splendid zigzags of barbarity. Thus he half sat, half leaned, languid but at ease. In his lap lay one of the letters brought over by the messenger: and though she was midway in a book that engaged his full attention—DAVID COPPERFIELD—his silence and absent look this morning stopped her, and she accused him of not attending.
“No,” he admitted; “I am thinking of something else.”
She looked at him with that apprehension which he knew.
“It had to come,” said he. “And to-day I see my thoughts straighter than I've been up to managing since—since my haid got clear. And now I must say these thoughts—if I can, if I can!” He stopped. His eyes were intent upon her; one hand was gripping the arm of his chair.
“You promised—” trembled Molly.
“I promised you should love me,” he sternly interrupted. “Promised that to myself. I have broken that word.”
She shut DAVID COPPERFIELD mechanically, and grew white.
“Your letter has come to me hyeh,” he continued, gentle again.
“My—” She had forgotten it.
“The letter you wrote to tell me good-by. You wrote it a little while ago—not a month yet, but it's away and away long gone for me.”
“I have never let you know—” began Molly.
“The doctor,” he interrupted once more, but very gently now, “he gave awdehs I must be kept quiet. I reckon yu' thought tellin' me might—”
“Forgive me!” cried the girl. “Indeed I ought to have told you sooner! Indeed I had no excuse!”
“Why, should yu' tell me if yu' preferred not? You had written. And you speak” (he lifted the letter) “of never being able to repay kindness; but you have turned the tables. I can never repay you by anything! by anything! So I had figured I would just jog back to Sunk Creek and let you get away, if you did not want to say that kind of good-by. For I saw the boxes. Mrs. Taylor is too nice a woman to know the trick of lyin', and she could not deceive me. I have knowed yu' were going away for good ever since I saw those boxes. But now hyeh comes your letter, and it seems no way but I must speak. I have thought a deal, lyin' in this room. And—to-day—I can say what I have thought. I could not make you happy.” He stopped, but she did not answer. His voice had grown softer than whispering, but yet was not a whisper. From its quiet syllables she turned away, blinded with sudden tears.
“Once, I thought love must surely be enough,” he continued. “And I thought if I could make you love me, you could learn me to be less—less—more your kind. And I think I could give you a pretty good sort of love. But that don't help the little mean pesky things of day by day that make roughness or smoothness for folks tied together so awful close. Mrs. Taylor hyeh—she don't know anything better than Taylor does. She don't want anything he can't give her. Her friends will do for him and his for her. And when I dreamed of you in my home—” he closed his eyes and drew a long breath. At last he looked at her again. “This is no country for a lady. Will yu' forget and forgive the bothering I have done?”
“Oh!” cried Molly. “Oh!” And she put her hands to her eyes. She had risen and stood with her face covered.
“I surely had to tell you this all out, didn't I?” said the cow-puncher, faintly, in his chair.
“Oh!” said Molly again.
“I have put it clear how it is,” he pursued. “I ought to have seen from the start I was not the sort to keep you happy.”
“But,” said Molly—“but I—you ought—please try to keep me happy!” And sinking by his chair, she hid her face on his knees.
Speechless, he bent down and folded her round, putting his hands on the hair that had been always his delight. Presently he whispered:— “You have beat me; how can I fight this?”
She answered nothing. The Navajo's scarlet and black folds fell over both. Not with words, not even with meeting eyes, did the two plight their troth in this first new hour. So they remained long, the fair head nesting in the great arms, and the black head laid against it, while over the silent room presided the little Grandmother Stark in her frame, rosy, blue, and flaxen, not quite familiar, not quite smiling.
For a long while after she had left him, he lay still, stretched in his chair. His eyes were fixed steadily upon the open window and the sunshine outside. There he watched the movement of the leaves upon the green cottonwoods. What had she said to him when she went? She had said, “Now I know how unhappy I have been.” These sweet words he repeated to himself over and over, fearing in some way that he might lose them. They almost slipped from him at times; but with a jump of his mind he caught them again and held them,—and then—“I'm not all strong yet,” he murmured. “I must have been very sick.” And, weak from his bullet wound and fever, he closed his eyes without knowing it. There were the cottonwoods again, waving, waving; and he felt the cool, pleasant air from the window. He saw the light draught stir the ashes in the great stone fireplace. “I have been asleep,” he said. “But she was cert'nly here herself. Oh, yes. Surely. She always has to go away every day because the doctor says—why, she was readin'!” he broke off, aloud. “DAVID COPPERFIELD.” There it was on the floor. “Aha! nailed you anyway!” he said. “But how scared I am of myself!—You're a fool. Of course it's so. No fever business could make yu' feel like this.”
His eye dwelt awhile on the fireplace, next on the deer horns, and next it travelled toward the shelf where her books were; but it stopped before reaching them.
“Better say off the names before I look,” said he. “I've had a heap o' misreading visions. And—and supposin'—if this was just my sickness fooling me some more—I'd want to die. I would die! Now we'll see. If COPPERFIELD is on the floor” (he looked stealthily to be sure that it was), “then she was readin' to me when everything happened, and then there should be a hole in the book row, top, left. Top, left,” he repeated, and warily brought his glance to the place. “Proved!” he cried. “It's all so!”
He now noticed the miniature of Grandmother Stark. “You are awful like her,” he whispered. “You're cert'nly awful like her. May I kiss you too, ma'am?”
Then, tottering, he rose from his sick-chair. The Navajo blanket fell from his shoulders, and gradually, experimentally, he stood upright.
Helping himself with his hand slowly along the wall of the room, and round to the opposite wall with many a pause, he reached the picture, and very gently touched the forehead of the ancestral dame with his lips. “I promise to make your little girl happy,” he whispered.
He almost fell in stooping to the portrait, but caught himself and stood carefully quiet, trembling, and speaking to himself. “Where is your strength?” he demanded. “I reckon it is joy that has unsteadied your laigs.”
The door opened. It was she, come back with his dinner.
“My Heavens!” she said; and setting the tray down, she rushed to him. She helped him back to his chair, and covered him again. He had suffered no hurt, but she clung to him; and presently he moved and let himself kiss her with fuller passion.
“I will be good,” he whispered.
“You must,” she said. “You looked so pale!”
“You are speakin' low like me,” he answered. “But we have no dream we can wake from.”
Had she surrendered on this day to her cow-puncher, her wild man? Was she forever wholly his? Had the Virginian's fire so melted her heart that no rift in it remained? So she would have thought if any thought had come to her. But in his arms to-day, thought was lost in something more divine.
They kept their secret for a while, or at least they had that special joy of believing that no one in all the world but themselves knew this that had happened to them. But I think that there was one person who knew how to keep a secret even better than these two lovers. Mrs. Taylor made no remarks to any one whatever. Nobody on Bear Creek, however, was so extraordinarily cheerful and serene. That peculiar severity which she had manifested in the days when Molly was packing her possessions, had now altogether changed. In these days she was endlessly kind and indulgent to her “deary.” Although, as a housekeeper, Mrs. Taylor believed in punctuality at meals, and visited her offspring with discipline when they were late without good and sufficient excuse, Molly was now exempt from the faintest hint of reprimand.
“And it's not because you're not her mother,” said George Taylor, bitterly. “She used to get it, too. And we're the only ones that get it. There she comes, just as we're about ready to quit! Aren't you going to say NOTHING to her?”
“George,” said his mother, “when you've saved a man's life it'll be time for you to talk.”
So Molly would come in to her meals with much irregularity; and her remarks about the imperfections of her clock met with no rejoinder. And yet one can scarcely be so severe as had been Mrs. Taylor, and become wholly as mild as milk. There was one recurrent event that could invariably awaken hostile symptoms in the dame. Whenever she saw a letter arrive with the Bennington postmark upon it, she shook her fist at that letter. “What's family pride?” she would say to herself. “Taylor could be a Son of the Revolution if he'd a mind to. I wonder if she has told her folks yet.”
And when letters directed to Bennington would go out, Mrs. Taylor would inspect every one as if its envelope ought to grow transparent beneath her eyes, and yield up to her its great secret, if it had one. But in truth these letters had no great secret to yield up, until one day—yes; one day Mrs. Taylor would have burst, were bursting a thing that people often did. Three letters were the cause of this emotion on Mrs. Taylor's part; one addressed to Bennington, one to Dunbarton, and the third—here was the great excitement—to Bennington, but not in the little schoolmarm's delicate writing. A man's hand had traced those plain, steady vowels and consonants.
“It's come!” exclaimed Mrs. Taylor, at this sight. “He has written to her mother himself.”
That is what the Virginian had done, and here is how it had come about.
The sick man's convalescence was achieved. The weeks had brought back to him, not his whole strength yet—that could come only by many miles of open air on the back of Monte; but he was strong enough now to GET strength. When a patient reaches this stage, he is out of the woods.
He had gone for a little walk with his nurse. They had taken (under the doctor's recommendation) several such little walks, beginning with a five-minute one, and at last to-day accomplishing three miles.
“No, it has not been too far,” said he. “I am afraid I could walk twice as far.”
“Afraid?”
“Yes. Because it means I can go to work again. This thing we have had together is over.”
For reply, she leaned against him.
“Look at you!” he said. “Only a little while ago you had to help me stand on my laigs. And now—” For a while there was silence between them. “I have never had a right down sickness before,” he presently went on. “Not to remember, that is. If any person had told me I could ENJOY such a thing—” He said no more, for she reached up, and no more speech was possible.
“How long has it been?” he next asked her.
She told him.
“Well, if it could be forever—no. Not forever with no more than this. I reckon I'd be sick again! But if it could be forever with just you and me, and no one else to bother with. But any longer would not be doing right by your mother. She would have a right to think ill of me.”
“Oh!” said the girl. “Let us keep it.”
“Not after I am gone. Your mother must be told.”
“It seems so—can't we—oh, why need anybody know?”
“Your mother ain't 'anybody.' She is your mother. I feel mighty responsible to her for what I have done.”
“But I did it!”
“Do you think so? Your mother will not think so. I am going to write to her to-day.”
“You! Write to my mother! Oh, then everything will be so different! They will all—” Molly stopped before the rising visions of Bennington. Upon the fairy-tale that she had been living with her cow-boy lover broke the voices of the world. She could hear them from afar. She could see the eyes of Bennington watching this man at her side. She could imagine the ears of Bennington listening for slips in his English. There loomed upon her the round of visits which they would have to make. The ringing of the door-bells, the waiting in drawing-rooms for the mistress to descend and utter her prepared congratulations, while her secret eye devoured the Virginian's appearance, and his manner of standing and sitting. He would be wearing gloves, instead of fringed gauntlets of buckskin. In a smooth black coat and waistcoat, how could they perceive the man he was? During those short formal interviews, what would they ever find out of the things that she knew about him? The things for which she was proud of him? He would speak shortly and simply; they would say, “Oh, yes!” and “How different you must find this from Wyoming!”—and then, after the door was shut behind his departing back they would say—He would be totally underrated, not in the least understood. Why should he be subjected to this? He should never be!
Now in all these half-formed, hurried, distressing thoughts which streamed through the girl's mind, she altogether forgot one truth. True it was that the voice of the world would speak as she imagined. True it was that in the eyes of her family and acquaintance this lover of her choice would be examined even more like a SPECIMEN than are other lovers upon these occasions: and all accepted lovers have to face this ordeal of being treated like specimens by the other family. But dear me! most of us manage to stand it, don't we? It isn't, perhaps, the most delicious experience that we can recall in connection with our engagement. But it didn't prove fatal. We got through it somehow. We dined with Aunt Jane, and wined with Uncle Joseph, and perhaps had two fingers given to us by old Cousin Horatio, whose enormous fortune was of the greatest importance to everybody. And perhaps fragments of the other family's estimate of us subsequently reached our own ears. But if a chosen lover cannot stand being treated as a specimen by the other family, he's a very weak vessel, and not worth any good girl's love. That's all I can say for him.
Now the Virginian was scarcely what even his enemy would term a weak vessel; and Molly's jealousy of the impression which he might make upon Bennington was vastly superfluous. She should have known that he would indeed care to make a good impression; but that such anxiety on his part would be wholly for her sake, that in the eyes of her friends she might stand justified in taking him for her wedded husband. So far as he was concerned apart from her, Aunt Jane and Uncle Joseph might say anything they pleased, or think anything they pleased. His character was open for investigation. Judge Henry would vouch for him.
This is what he would have said to his sweetheart had she but revealed to him her perturbations. But she did not reveal them; and they were not of the order that he with his nature was likely to divine. I do not know what good would have come from her speaking out to him, unless that perfect understanding between lovers which indeed is a good thing. But I do not believe that he could have reassured her; and I am certain that she could not have prevented his writing to her mother.
“Well, then,” she sighed at last, “if you think so, I will tell her.”
That sigh of hers, be it well understood, was not only because of those far-off voices which the world would in consequence of her news be lifting presently. It came also from bidding farewell to the fairy-tale which she must leave now; that land in which she and he had been living close together alone, unhindered, unmindful of all things.
“Yes, you will tell her,” said her lover. “And I must tell her too.”
“Both of us?” questioned the girl.
What would he say to her mother? How would her mother like such a letter as he would write to her? Suppose he should misspell a word? Would not sentences from him at this time—written sentences—be a further bar to his welcome acceptance at Bennington?
“Why don't you send messages by me?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “She is not going to like it, anyway,” he answered. “I must speak to her direct. It would be like shirking.”
Molly saw how true his instinct was here; and a little flame shot upward from the glow of her love and pride in him. Oh, if they could all only know that he was like this when you understood him! She did not dare say out to him what her fear was about this letter of his to her mother. She did not dare because—well, because she lacked a little faith. That is it, I am afraid. And for that sin she was her own punishment. For in this day, and in many days to come, the pure joy of her love was vexed and clouded, all through a little lack of faith; while for him, perfect in his faith, his joy was like crystal.
“Tell me what you're going to write,” she said.
He smiled at her. “No.”
“Aren't you going to let me see it when it's done?”
“No.” Then a freakish look came into his eyes. “I'll let yu' see anything I write to other women.” And he gave her one of his long kisses. “Let's get through with it together,” he suggested, when they were once more in his sick-room, that room which she had given to him. “You'll sit one side o' the table, and I'll sit the other, and we'll go ahaid; and pretty soon it will be done.”
“O dear!” she said. “Yes, I suppose that is the best way.”
And so, accordingly, they took their places. The inkstand stood between them. Beside each of them she distributed paper enough, almost, for a presidential message. And pens and pencils were in plenty. Was this not the headquarters of the Bear Creek schoolmarm?
“Why, aren't you going to do it in pencil first?” she exclaimed, looking up from her vacant sheet. His pen was moving slowly, but steadily.
“No, I don't reckon I need to,” he answered, with his nose close to the paper. “Oh, damnation, there's a blot!” He tore his spoiled beginning in small bits, and threw them into the fireplace. “You've got it too full,” he commented; and taking the inkstand, he tipped a little from it out of the window. She sat lost among her false starts. Had she heard him swear, she would not have minded. She rather liked it when he swore. He possessed that quality in his profanity of not offending by it. It is quite wonderful how much worse the same word will sound in one man's lips than in another's. But she did not hear him. Her mind was among a litter of broken sentences. Each thought which she began ran out into the empty air, or came against some stone wall. So there she sat, her eyes now upon that inexorable blank sheet that lay before her, waiting, and now turned with vacant hopelessness upon the sundry objects in the room. And while she thus sat accomplishing nothing, opposite to her the black head bent down, and the steady pen moved from phrase to phrase.
She became aware of his gazing at her, flushed and solemn. That strange color of the sea-water, which she could never name, was lustrous in his eyes. He was folding his letter.
“You have finished?” she said.
“Yes.” His voice was very quiet. “I feel like an honester man.”
“Perhaps I can do something to-night at Mrs. Taylor's,” she said, looking at her paper.
On it were a few words crossed out. This was all she had to show. At this set task in letter-writing, the cow-puncher had greatly excelled the schoolmarm!
But that night, while he lay quite fast asleep in his bed, she was keeping vigil in her room at Mrs. Taylor's.
Accordingly, the next day, those three letters departed for the mail, and Mrs. Taylor consequently made her exclamation, “It's come!”
On the day before the Virginian returned to take up his work at Judge Henry's ranch, he and Molly announced their news. What Molly said to Mrs. Taylor and what Mrs. Taylor said to her, is of no interest to us, though it was of much to them.
But Mr. McLean happened to make a call quite early in the morning to inquire for his friend's health.
“Lin,” began the Virginian, “there is no harm in your knowing an hour or so before the rest, I am—”
“Lord!” said Mr. McLean, indulgently. “Everybody has knowed that since the day she found yu' at the spring.”
“It was not so, then,” said the Virginian, crossly.
“Lord! Everybody has knowed it right along.”
“Hmp!” said the Virginian. “I didn't know this country was that rank with gossips.”
Mr. McLean laughed mirthfully at the lover. “Well,” he said, “Mrs. McLean will be glad. She told me to give yu' her congratulations quite a while ago. I was to have 'em ready just as soon as ever yu' asked for 'em yourself.” Lin had been made a happy man some twelve months previous to this. And now, by way of an exchange of news, he added: “We're expectin' a little McLean down on Box Elder. That's what you'll be expectin' some of these days, I hope.”
“Yes,” murmured the Virginian, “I hope so too.”
“And I don't guess,” said Lin, “that you and I will do much shufflin' of other folks' children any more.”
Whereupon he and the Virginian shook hands silently, and understood each other very well.
On the day that the Virginian parted with Molly, beside the weight of farewell which lay heavy on his heart, his thoughts were also grave with news. The cattle thieves had grown more audacious. Horses and cattle both were being missed, and each man began almost to doubt his neighbor.
“Steps will have to be taken soon by somebody, I reckon,” said the lover.
“By you?” she asked quickly.
“Most likely I'll get mixed up with it.”
“What will you have to do?”
“Can't say. I'll tell yu' when I come back.”
So did he part from her, leaving her more kisses than words to remember.
And what was doing at Bennington, meanwhile, and at Dunbarton? Those three letters which by their mere outside had so moved Mrs. Taylor, produced by their contents much painful disturbance.
It will be remembered that Molly wrote to her mother, and to her great-aunt. That announcement to her mother was undertaken first. Its composition occupied three hours and a half, and it filled eleven pages, not counting a postscript upon the twelfth. The letter to the great-aunt took only ten minutes. I cannot pretend to explain why this one was so greatly superior to the other; but such is the remarkable fact. Its beginning, to be sure, did give the old lady a start; she had dismissed the cow-boy from her probabilities.
“Tut, tut, tut!” she exclaimed out loud in her bedroom. “She has thrown herself away on that fellow!”
But some sentences at the end made her pause and sit still for a long while. The severity upon her face changed to tenderness, gradually. “Ah, me,” she sighed. “If marriage were as simple as love!” Then she went slowly downstairs, and out into her garden, where she walked long between the box borders. “But if she has found a great love,” said the old lady at length. And she returned to her bedroom, and opened an old desk, and read some old letters.
There came to her the next morning a communication from Bennington. This had been penned frantically by poor Mrs. Wood. As soon as she had been able to gather her senses after the shock of her daughter's eleven pages and the postscript, the mother had poured out eight pages herself to the eldest member of the family. There had been, indeed, much excuse for the poor lady. To begin with, Molly had constructed her whole opening page with the express and merciful intention of preparing her mother. Consequently, it made no sense whatever. Its effect was the usual effect of remarks designed to break a thing gently. It merely made Mrs. Wood's head swim, and filled her with a sickening dread. “Oh, mercy, Sarah,” she had cried, “come here. What does this mean?” And then, fortified by her elder daughter, she had turned over that first page and found what it meant on the top of the second. “A savage with knives and pistols!” she wailed.
“Well, mother, I always told you so,” said her daughter Sarah.
“What is a foreman?” exclaimed the mother. “And who is Judge Henry?”
“She has taken a sort of upper servant,” said Sarah. “If it is allowed to go as far as a wedding, I doubt if I can bring myself to be present.” (This threat she proceeded to make to Molly, with results that shall be set forth in their proper place.)
“The man appears to have written to me himself,” said Mrs. Wood.
“He knows no better,” said Sarah.
“Bosh!” said Sarah's husband later. “It was a very manly thing to do.” Thus did consternation rage in the house at Bennington. Molly might have spared herself the many assurances that she gave concerning the universal esteem in which her cow-puncher was held, and the fair prospects which were his. So, in the first throes of her despair, Mrs. Wood wrote those eight not maturely considered pages to the great-aunt.
“Tut, tut, tut!” said the great-aunt as she read them. Her face was much more severe to-day. “You'd suppose,” she said, “that the girl had been kidnapped! Why, she has kept him waiting three years!” And then she read more, but soon put the letter down with laughter. For Mrs. Wood had repeated in writing that early outburst of hers about a savage with knives and pistols. “Law!” said the great-aunt. “Law, what a fool Lizzie is!”
So she sat down and wrote to Mrs. Wood a wholesome reply about putting a little more trust in her own flesh and blood, and reminding her among other things that General Stark had himself been wont to carry knives and pistols owing to the necessities of his career, but that he had occasionally taken them off, as did probably this young man in Wyoming. “You had better send me the letter he has written you,” she concluded. “I shall know much better what to think after I have seen that.”
It is not probable that Mrs. Wood got much comfort from this communication; and her daughter Sarah was actually enraged by it. “She grows more perverse as she nears her dotage,” said Sarah. But the Virginian's letter was sent to Dunbarton, where the old lady sat herself down to read it with much attention.
Here is what the Virginian had said to the unknown mother of his sweetheart.
MRS. JOHN STARK WOOD Bennington, Vermont.
Madam: If your daughter Miss Wood has ever told you about her saving a man's life here when some Indians had shot him that is the man who writes to you now. I don't think she can have told you right about that affair for she is the only one in this country who thinks it was a little thing. So I must tell you it, the main points. Such an action would have been thought highly of in a Western girl, but with Miss Wood's raising nobody had a right to expect it.
“Indeed!” snorted the great-aunt. “Well, he would be right, if I had not had a good deal more to do with her 'raising' than ever Lizzie had.” And she went on with the letter.
I was starting in to die when she found me. I did not know anything then, and she pulled me back from where I was half in the next world. She did not know but what Indians would get her too but I could not make her leave me. I am a heavy man one hundred and seventy-three stripped when in full health. She lifted me herself from the ground me helping scarce any for there was not much help in me that day. She washed my wound and brought me to with her own whiskey. Before she could get me home I was out of my head but she kept me on my horse somehow and talked wisely to me so I minded her and did not go clean crazy till she had got me safe to bed. The doctor says I would have died all the same if she had not nursed me the way she did. It made me love her more which I did not know I could. But there is no end, for this writing it down makes me love her more as I write it.
And now Mrs. Wood I am sorry this will be bad news for you to hear. I know you would never choose such a man as I am for her for I have got no education and must write humble against my birth. I wish I could make the news easier but truth is the best.
I am of old stock in Virginia. English and one Scotch Irish grandmother my father's father brought from Kentucky. We have always stayed at the same place farmers and hunters not bettering our lot and very plain. We have fought when we got the chance, under Old Hickory and in Mexico and my father and two brothers were killed in the Valley sixty-four. Always with us one son has been apt to run away and I was the one this time. I had too much older brothering to suit me. But now I am doing well being in full sight of prosperity and not too old and very strong my health having stood the sundries it has been put through. She shall teach school no more when she is mine. I wish I could make this news easier for you Mrs. Wood. I do not like promises I have heard so many. I will tell any man of your family anything he likes to ask one, and Judge Henry would tell you about my reputation. I have seen plenty rough things but can say I have never killed for pleasure or profit and am not one of that kind, always preferring peace. I have had to live in places where they had courts and lawyers so called but an honest man was all the law you could find in five hundred miles. I have not told her about those things not because I am ashamed of them but there are so many things too dark for a girl like her to hear about.
I had better tell you the way I know I love Miss Wood. I am not a boy now, and women are no new thing to me. A man like me who has travelled meets many of them as he goes and passes on but I stopped when I came to Miss Wood. That is three years but I have not gone on. What right has such as he? you will say. So did I say it after she had saved my life. It was hard to get to that point and keep there with her around me all day. But I said to myself you have bothered her for three years with your love and if you let your love bother her you don't love her like you should and you must quit for her sake who has saved your life. I did not know what I was going to do with my life after that but I supposed I could go somewhere and work hard and so Mrs. Wood I told her I would give her up. But she said no. It is going to be hard for her to get used to a man like me—
But at this point in the Virginian's letter, the old great-aunt could read no more. She rose, and went over to that desk where lay those faded letters of her own. She laid her head down upon the package, and as her tears flowed quietly upon it, “O dear,” she whispered, “O dear! And this is what I lost!”
To her girl upon Bear Creek she wrote the next day. And this word from Dunbarton was like balm among the harsh stings Molly was receiving. The voices of the world reached her in gathering numbers, and not one of them save that great-aunt's was sweet. Her days were full of hurts; and there was no one by to kiss the hurts away. Nor did she even hear from her lover any more now. She only knew he had gone into lonely regions upon his errand.
That errand took him far:— Across the Basin, among the secret places of Owl Creek, past the Washakie Needles, over the Divide to Gros Ventre, and so through a final barrier of peaks into the borders of East Idaho. There, by reason of his bidding me, I met him, and came to share in a part of his errand.
It was with no guide that I travelled to him. He had named a little station on the railroad, and from thence he had charted my route by means of landmarks. Did I believe in omens, the black storm that I set out in upon my horse would seem like one to-day. But I had been living in cities and smoke; and Idaho, even with rain, was delightful to me.