In Exile and Other Stories

M >> Mary Hallock Foote >> In Exile and Other Stories

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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.

In her early days at the mines there had been a certain piquancy in her
sense of the contrast between herself and her circumstances, but that had
long passed into a dreary recognition of the fact that she had no real part
in the life of the place.

She recalled one afternoon when Arnold had passed the schoolhouse, and
found her sitting alone on the doorstep. He had stopped to ask if that
"mongrel pack on the hill were worrying the life out of her," and had added
with a laugh, in answer to her look of silent disapproval, "Oh, I mean the
dear lambs of your flock. I saw two of them just now on the trail, fighting
over a lame donkey. The clans were gathering on both sides; there will be
a pitched battle in a few minutes. The donkey was enjoying it. I think
he was asleep!" The day had been an unusually hard one, and the patient
little schoolmistress was just then struggling with a distracted sense of
unavailing effort. Arnold's grim banter had brought the tears, as blood
follows a blow. He got down from his horse, looking wretched at what he had
done. "I am a brute, I believe,--worse than any of the pack. You have so
much patience with them,--please have a little with me. Trust me, I am not
utterly blind to your sufferings. Indeed, Miss Newell, I see them, and they
make me savage!" With the gentlest touch he had lifted her hand, held it in
his a moment, and then had mounted his horse and ridden away.

Yes, he _did_ understand,--she felt sure of that. What an unutterable rest
it would be if she could go to some one with the small worries of her life!
But she could not yield to such impulses. It was different with men. She
had often thought of Arnold's words that day at the spring, all the more
that he had never, before or since, revealed so much of himself to her.
Under an apparently careless frankness and extravagance of speech he was a
reticent man; but lightly spoken as the words had been, were they not the
sparks and ashes blown from a deep and smothered core of fire? She seemed
to feel its glow on her cheek as she recalled his singular persistence and
the darkening of his imperious eyes. No, she would not permit herself to
think of that day at the spring.

There was a bright light in the engineer's office across the street. She
could see Arnold through the windows (for, like a man, he did not pull his
shades down) at one of the long drawing-tables. He worked late, it seemed.
He was writing; he wrote rapidly page after page, tearing each sheet from
what appeared to be a paper block, and tossing it on the table beside him;
he covered only one side of the paper, she noticed, thinking with a smile
of her own small economies. Presently he got up, swept the papers together
in his hands, and stooped over them. He is numbering and folding them,
she thought, and now he is directing the envelope,--to whom, I wonder!
He turned, and as he walked towards the window she saw him put something
into the pocket of his coat. He lighted a cigar, and began walking, with
long strides, up and down the room, one hand in his pocket; the other
he occasionally rubbed over his eyes and head, as if they hurt him. She
remembered that the engineer had headaches, and wished that somebody would
ask him to try valerian. Is he ever really lonely? she thought. What can
he, what can any man, know of loneliness? He may go out and walk about on
the hills; he may go away altogether, and take the risks of life somewhere
else. A woman must take no risks. There is not a house in the camp where
he might not enter to-night, if he chose; he might come over here and
talk to me. The East, with all its cherished memories and prejudices and
associations, seemed so hopelessly far away; they two alone, in that
strange, uncongenial new world which had crowded out the old, seemed to
speak a common language: and yet how little she really knew of him!

Suddenly the lights disappeared from the windows of the office. She heard
a door unlock, and presently the young man's figure crossed the street and
turned up the trail past the house.

Two other figures going up halted, and the taller one said, "Will you go up
on the hill, to-night, Arnold?"

"What for?" said Arnold, slackening his pace without stopping.

"Oh, nothing in particular,--to see the senoritas."

"Oh, thank you, Boker, I've seen the senoritas."

He walked quickly past the men, and the shorter one, who had not spoken,
called after him rather huskily,--

"W-what do you think of the little school-ma'am?"

Arnold turned back and confronted the speaker in silence.

"I say! Is she thin 'nough to suit you?" the heavy-playful one persisted.

"Shut up, Jack!" said his comrade. "You're a little high now, you know."

He dragged him on, up the trail; the voices of the two men blended with the
night chorus of the camp as they passed out of sight.

Miss Newell sat perfectly still for a while; then she went to her room, and
threw herself down on the bed, listening to an endless mental repetition of
those words that the faithless night had brought to her ear. The moonlight
had left the piazza, and crept round to the side of the house; it shone
in at the window, touching the girl's cold fingers pressed to her burning
cheeks and temples. She got up, drew the curtain, and groped her way back
to the bed, where she lay for hours, trying to convince herself that her
misery was out of all proportion to the cause, and that those coarse words
could make no real difference in her life.

They did make a little difference: they loosened the slight, indefinite
threads of intercourse which a year had woven between these two exiles.
Miss Newell was prepared to withdraw from any further overtures of
friendship from the engineer; but he made it unnecessary for her to do
so,--he made no overtures. On the night of Pratt's tipsy salutation he had
abruptly decided that a mining camp was no place for a nice girl, with no
acknowledged masculine protector. In Miss Newell's circumstances a girl
must be left entirely alone, or exposed to the gossip of the camp. He
knew very well which she would choose, and so he kept away,--though at
considerable loss to himself, he felt. It made him cross to watch her
pretty figure going up the trail every morning and to reflect that so much
sweetness and refinement should not be having its ameliorating influence on
his own barren and somewhat defiant existence.

II.

The autumn rains set in early, and the winter was unusually severe. Arnold
had a purpose which kept him hard at work and very happy in those days.

During the long December nights he was shut up in his office, plodding
over his maps and papers, or smoking in dreamy comfort by the fire. He was
seldom interrupted, for he had earned the character of a social ingrate and
hardened recluse in the camp. He had earned it quite unconsciously, and
was as little troubled by the fact as by its consequences. On the evening
of New Year's Day he crossed the street to the Dyers' and asked for Miss
Newell. She presently greeted him in the parlor, where she looked, Arnold
thought, more than ever out of place, among the bead baskets, and splint
frames inclosing photographs of deceased members of the Dyer family, and
the pallid walls, weak-legged chairs, and crude imaginings in worsted work.
Her apparent unconsciousness of these abominations was another source of
irritation. It is always irritating to a man to see a charming woman in an
unhappy and false position, where he is powerless to help her. Arnold had
not expected that it would be a very exhilarating occasion,--he remembered
the Dyer parlor,--but it was even less pleasant than he had expected. He
sat down, carefully, in a glued chair whose joints had opened with the
dry season and refused to close again; he did not know where the transfer
of his person might end. Captain Dyer was present, and told a great many
stories in a loud, tiring voice. Miss Frances sat by with some soft white
knitting in her hands, and her attitude of patient attention made Arnold
long to attack her with some savage pleasantries on the subject of
Christmas in a mining camp; it seemed to him that patience was a virtue
that could be carried too far, even in woman. Then Mrs. Dyer came in, and
manoeuvred her husband out into the passage; after some loudly suggestive
whispering there, she succeeded in getting him into the kitchen, and shut
the door. Arnold got up soon after that, and said good-evening.

Miss Newell remained in the parlor for some time, after he had gone, moving
softly about. She had gathered her knitting closely into her clasped hands;
the ball trailed after her, among the legs of the chairs, and when in
her silent promenade she had spun a grievous tangle of wool she sat down,
and dropped the work out of her hands with a helpless gesture. Her head
drooped, and tears trickled slowly between the slender white fingers
which covered her face. Presently the fingers descended to her throat and
clasped it close, as if to still an intolerable throbbing ache which her
half-suppressed tears had left.

At length she rose, picked up her work, and patiently followed the tangled
clue until she had recovered her ball; then she wound it all up neatly,
wrapped the knitting in a thin white handkerchief, and went to her room.

With the fine March weather--fine in spite of the light rains--the engineer
was laying out a road to the new shaft; it wound along the hillside where
Miss Newell had first seen the green trees, by the spring. The engineer's
orders included the building of a flume, carrying the water down from the
Chilano's plantation into a tank, built on the ruins of the rock which had
guarded the sylvan spring. The discordant voices of a gang of Chinamen
profaned the stillness which had framed Miss Frances' girlish laughter;
the blasting of the rock had loosened, to their fall, the clustering trees
above, and the brook below was a mass of trampled mud.

The engineer's visits to the spring gave him no pleasure, in those days. He
felt that he was the inevitable instrument of its desecration; but over the
hill, just in sight from the spring, carpenters were putting a new piazza
round a cottage that stood remote from the camp, where a spur of the hills
descended steeply towards the valley. Arnold took a great interest in this
cottage. He was frequently to be seen there in the evening, tramping up and
down the new piazza, and offering to the moon, that looked in through the
boughs of a live-oak at the end of the gallery, the incense of his lonely
cigar. Sometimes he would take the key of the front door from his pocket,
enter the silent house, and wander from one room to another, like a
restless but not unhappy ghost; the moonlight, touching his face, showed it
strangely stirred and softened. His was no melancholy madness.

Arnold was leaning on the gate of this cottage, one afternoon, when the
schoolmistress came down the trail from the camp. She did not appear to see
him, but turned off from the trail at a little distance from the cottage,
and took her way across the hill behind it. Arnold watched her a few
minutes, and then followed, overtaking her on the hills above the new road,
where she had sat with Nicky Dyer nearly a year ago.

"I don't like to see you wandering about here, alone," he said. "The men on
the road are a scratch gang, picked up anyhow, not like the regular miners.
I hope you are not going to the spring!"

"Why?" said she. "Did you not drink to our return?"

"But you would not drink with me, so the spell did not work; and now the
spring is gone,--all its beauty, I mean. The water is there, in a tank,
where the Chinamen fill their buckets night and morning, and the teamsters
water their horses. We'll go over there, if you would like to see the march
of modern improvements."

"No," she said; "I had rather remember it as it was; still, I don't believe
in being sentimental about such things. Let us sit down a while."

A vague depression, which Arnold had been aware of in her manner when they
met, became suddenly manifest in her paleness and in a look of dull pain in
her eyes.

"But you are hurt about it," he said. "I wish I hadn't told you in that
brutal way. I'm afraid I'm not many degrees removed from the primeval
savage, after all."

"Oh, you needn't mind," she said, after a moment. "That was the only place
I cared for, here, so now there will be nothing to regret when I go away."

"Are you going away, then? I'm very sorry to hear it; but of course I'm
not surprised. You couldn't be expected to stand it another year; those
children must have been something fearful."

"Oh, it wasn't the children."

"Well, I'm sorry. I had hoped"--

"Yes," said she, with a modest interrogation, as he hesitated, "what is it
you had hoped?"

"That I might indirectly be the means of making your life less lonely here.
You remember that 'experiment' we talked about at the spring?"

"That _you_ talked about, you mean."

"I am going to try it myself. Not because you were so
encouraging,--but--it's a risk anyway, you know, and I'm not sure the
circumstances make so much difference. I've known people to be wretched
with all the modern conveniences. I am going East for her in about two
weeks. How sorry she will be to find you gone! I wrote to her about you.
You might have helped each other; couldn't you stand it, Miss Newell, don't
you think, if you had another girl?"

"I'm afraid not," she said very gently. "I _must_ go home. You may be sure
she will not need me; you must see to it that she doesn't need--any one."

They were walking back and forth on the hill.

"I was just looking for the cottonwood-trees; are they gone too?" she
asked.

"Oh yes; there isn't a tree left in the canon. Don't you envy me my work?"

"I suppose everything we do seems like desecration to somebody. Here am I
making history very rapidly for this colony of ants." She looked down with
a rueful smile as she spoke.

"I wish you had the history of the entire species under your foot, and
could finish it at once."

"I'm not sure that I would; I'm not so fond of extermination as you pretend
to be."

"Well, keep the ants if you like them, but I am firm on the subject of
the camp children. There _are_ blessings that brighten as they take their
flight. I pay my monthly assessment for the doctor with the greatest
cheerfulness; if it wasn't for him, in this climate, they would crowd us
off the hill."

"Please don't!" she said wearily. "Even _I_ don't like to hear you talk
like that; I am sure _she_ will not."

He laughed softly. "You have often reminded me of her in little ways: that
was what upset me at the spring. I was very near telling you all about her
that day."

"I wish that you had!" she said. They were walking towards home now. "I
suppose you know it is talked of in the camp," she said, after a pause.
"Mr. Dyer told me, and showed me the house, a week ago. And now I must tell
you about my violets. I had them in a box in my room all winter. I should
like to leave them as a little welcome to her. Last night Nicky Dyer and
I planted them on the bank by the piazza under the climbing-rose; it was
a secret between Nicky and me, and Nicky promised to water them until she
came; but of course I meant to tell you. Will you look at them to-night,
please, and see if Nicky has been faithful?"

"I will, indeed," said Arnold. "That is just the kind of thing she
will delight in. If you are going East, Miss Newell, shall we not be
fellow-travelers? I should be so glad to be of any service."

"No, thank you. I am to spend a month in Santa Barbara, and escort an
invalid friend home. I shall have to say good-by, now. Don't go any farther
with me, please."

That night Arnold mused late, leaning over the railing of the new piazza
in the moonlight. He fancied that a faint perfume of violets came from the
damp earth below; but it could have been only fancy, for when he searched
the bank for them they were not there. The new sod was trampled, and a few
leaves and slight, uptorn roots lay scattered about, with some broken twigs
from the climbing-rose. He had found the gate open when he came, and the
Dyer cow had passed him, meandering peacefully up the trail.

* * * * *

The crescent moon had waxed and waned since the night when it lighted the
engineer's musings through the wind-parted live-oak boughs, and another
slender bow gleamed in the pale, tinted haze of twilight. The month had
gone, like a feverish dream, to the young schoolmistress, as she lay in her
small, upper chamber, unconscious of all save alternate light and darkness,
and rest following pain. When, at last, she crept down the short staircase
to breathe the evening coolness, clinging to the stair-rail and holding her
soft white draperies close around her, she saw the pink light lingering
on the mountains, and heard the chorus to the "Sweet By and By" from the
miners' chapel on the hill. It was Sunday evening, and the house was
piously "emptied of its folk." She took her old seat by the parlor window,
and looked across to the engineer's office; its windows and doors were
shut, and the dogs of the camp were chasing each other over the loose
boards of the piazza floor. She laughed a weak, convulsive laugh, thinking
of the engineer's sallies of old upon that band of Ishmaelites, and of the
scrambling, yelping rush that followed. He must have gone East, else the
dogs had not been so bold. She looked down the valley where the mountains
parted seaward, the only break in the continuous barrier of land that cut
off her retreat and closed in about the atom of her own identity. The
thought of that immensity of distance made her faint.

There were steps on the porch,--not Captain Dyer's, for he and his good
wife were lending their voices to swell the stentorian chorus that was
shaking the church on the hill; the footsteps paused at the door, and
Arnold himself opened it. He had not, evidently, expected to see her.

"I was looking for some one to ask about you," he said. "Are you sure you
are able to be down?"

"Oh yes. I've been sitting up for several days. I wanted to see the
mountains again."

He was looking at her intently, while she flushed with weakness, and drew
the fringes of her shawl over her tremulous hands.

"How ill you have been! I have wished myself a woman, that I might do
something for you! I suppose Mrs. Dyer nursed you like a horse."

"Oh no; she was very good; but I don't remember much about the worst of it.
I thought you had gone home."

"Home! Where do you mean? I didn't know that I had ever boasted of any
reserved rights of that kind. I have no mortgage, in fact or sentiment, on
any part of the earth's surface, that I'm acquainted with!"

He spoke with a hard carelessness in his manner which make her shrink.

"I mean the East. I am homeless, too, but all the East seems like home to
me."

"You had better get rid of those sentimental, backward fancies as soon as
possible. The East concerns itself very little about us, I can tell you! It
can spare us."

She thrilled with pain at his words. "I should think you would be the last
one to say so,--you, who have so much treasure there."

"Will you please to understand," he said, turning upon her a face of bitter
calmness, "that I claim no treasure anywhere,--not even in heaven!"

She sat perfectly still, conscious that by some fatality of helpless
incomprehension every word that she said goaded him, and she feared to
speak again.

"Now I have hurt you," he said in his gentlest voice. "I am always hurting
you. I oughtn't to come near you with my rough edges! I'll go away now, if
you will tell me that you forgive me!"

She smiled at him without speaking, while her fair throat trembled with a
pulse of pain.

"Will you let me take your hand a moment? It is so long since I have
touched a woman's hand! God! how lonely I am! Don't look at me in that way;
don't pity me, or I shall lose what little manhood I have left!"

"What is it?" she said, leaning towards him. "There is something strange in
your face. If you are in trouble, tell me; it will help me to hear it. I am
not so very happy myself."

"Why should I add my load to yours? I seem always to impose myself upon
you, first my hopes, and now my--no, it isn't despair; it is only a kind
of brutal numbness. You must have the fatal gift of sympathy, or you would
never have seen my little hurt."

Miss Frances was not strong enough to bear the look in his eyes as he
turned them upon her, with a dreary smile. She covered her face with one
hand, while she whispered,--

"Is it--you have not lost her?"

"Yes! Or, rather, I never had her. I've been dreaming like a boy all these
years,--'In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter.'"

"It is not death, then?"

"No, she is not dead. She is not even false; that is, not very false. How
can I tell you how little it is, and yet how much! She is only a trifle
selfish. Why shouldn't she be? Why should we men claim the exclusive right
to choose the best for ourselves? It was selfish of me to ask her to share
such a life as mine; and she has gently and reasonably reminded me that
I'm not worth the sacrifice. It's quite true. I always knew I wasn't. She
put it very delicately and sweetly;--she's the sweetest girl you ever saw.
She'd marry me to-morrow if I could add myself, such as I am,--she doesn't
overrate me,--to what she has already; but an exchange she wasn't prepared
for. In all my life I never was so clearly estimated, body and soul. I
don't blame her, you understand. When I left her, three years ago, I saw my
way easily enough to a reputation, and an income, and a home in the East;
she never thought of anything else; I never taught her to look for anything
else. I dare say she rather enjoyed having a lover working for her in the
unknown West; she enjoyed the pretty letters she wrote me; but when it came
to the bare bones of existence in a mining camp, with a husband not very
rich or very distinguished, she had nothing to clothe them with. You said
once that to be happy here a woman must not have too much imagination; she
hadn't quite enough. I had to be dead honest with her when I asked her to
come. I told her there was nothing here but the mountains and the sunsets,
and a few items of picturesqueness which count with some people. Of course
I had to tell her I was but little better off than when I left. A man's
experience is something he cannot set forth at its value to himself; she
passed it over as a word of no practical meaning. There her imagination
failed her again. She took me frankly at my own estimate; and in justice to
her I must say I put myself at the lowest figures. I made a very poor show
on paper."

"You wrote to her!" exclaimed Miss Frances. "You did not go on? Oh, you
have made a great mistake! Do go: it cannot be too late. Letters are the
most untrusty things!"

"Wait," he said. "There is something else. She has a head for business;
she proposed that I should come East, and accept a superintendentship from
a cousin of hers, the owner of a gun-factory in one of those shady New
England towns women are so fond of. She intimated that he was in politics,
this cousin, and of course would expect his employees to become part of
his constituency. It's a very pretty little bribe, you see; when you add
the--the girl, it's enough to shake a man--who wants that girl. I'm not
worth much to myself, or to anybody else, apparently, but by Heaven I'll
not sell out as cheap as that!

"It all amounts to nothing except one more illusion gone. If there is a
woman on this earth that can love a man without knowing for what, and take
the chances of life with him without counting the cost, I have never known
her. I asked you once if a woman could do that. You hadn't the courage
to tell me the truth. I wouldn't have been satisfied if you had; but I'm
satisfied now."

"I believed she would be happy; I believe she would be, now, if only you
would go to her and persuade her to try."

"I persuade her! I would never try to persuade a woman to be my wife were I
dying for love of her! I don't think myself invented by nature to promote
the happiness of woman, in the aggregate or singly. I know there are men
who do: let them urge their claims. I thought that she loved me; that was
another illusion. She will probably marry the cousin, and become the most
loyal of his constituents. He is welcome to her; but there's a ghostly
blank somewhere. How I have tired you! You'll be in bed another week for
this selfishness of mine." He stopped, while a sudden thought brought a
change to his face. "But when are you going home?"

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