A Mountain Woman Part 11

"Do not," she said fiercely between those set white teeth, "do not forget the lilies." She sank back and fixed her glazing eyes on the antlers, and kept them there watching those dangling silken scarves, while the priest, in haste, spoke the words for the departing soul.

The next morning she lay dead among those half barbaric relics of her coquetry, and two white lilies with hearts of gold shed perfume from an altar in a wilderness.

Up the Gulch

"GO West?" sighed Kate. "Why, yes! I'd like to go West."

She looked at the babies, who were playing on the floor with their father, and sighed again.

"You've got to go somewhere, you know, Kate. It might as well be west as in any other direction. And this is such a chance! We can't have mamma lying around on sofas without any roses in her cheeks, can we?" He put this last to the children, who, being yet at the age when they talked in "Early English," as their father called it, made a clamorous but inarticulate reply.

Major Sh.e.l.ly, the grandfather of these very young persons, stroked his mustache and looked indulgent.

"Show almost human intelligence, don't they?" said their father, as he lay flat on his back and permitted the babies to climb over him.

"Ya-as," drawled the major. "They do. Don't see how you account for it, Jack."

Jack roared, and the lips of the babies trembled with fear.

Their mother said nothing. She was on the sofa, her hands lying inert, her eyes fixed on her rosy babies with an expression which her father-in-law and her husband tried hard not to notice.

It was not easy to tell why Kate was ailing. Of course, the babies were young, but there were other reasons.

"I believe you're too happy," Jack sometimes said to her. "Try not to be quite so happy, Kate. At least, try not to take your happiness so seriously. Please don't adore me so; I'm only a commonplace fellow. And the babies--they're not going to blow away."

But Kate continued to look with intense eyes at her little world, and to draw into it with loving and generous hands all who were willing to come.

"Kate is just like a kite," Jack explained to his father, the major; "she can't keep afloat without just so many bobs."

Kate's "bobs" were the unfortunates she collected around her. These absorbed her strength. She felt their misery with sympathies that were abnormal. The very laborer in the streets felt his toil less keenly than she, as she watched the drops gather on his brow.

"Is life worth keeping at the cost of a lot like that?" she would ask.

She felt ashamed of her own ease. She apologized for her own serene and perfect happiness. She even felt sorry for those mothers who had not children as radiantly beautiful as her own.

"Kate must have a change," the major had given out. He was going West on business and insisted on taking her with him. Jack looked doubtful.

He wasn't sure how he would get along without Kate to look after everything. Secretly, he had an idea that servants were a kind of wild animal that had to be fed by an experienced keeper. But when the time came, he kissed her good-by in as jocular a manner as he could summon, and refused to see the tears that gathered in her eyes.

Until Chicago was reached, there was nothing very different from that which Kate had been in the habit of seeing. After that, she set herself to watch for Western characteristics. She felt that she would know them as soon as she saw them.

"I expected to be stirred up and shocked," she explained to the major.

But somehow, the Western type did not appear. Commonplace women with worn faces--browned and seamed, though not aged--were at the stations, waiting for something or some one. Men with a hurried, nervous air were everywhere. Kate looked in vain for the gayety and heartiness which she had always a.s.sociated with the West.

After they got beyond the timber country and rode hour after hour on a tract smooth as a becalmed ocean, she gave herself up to the feeling of immeasurable vastness which took possession of her. The sun rolled out of the sky into oblivion with a frantic, headlong haste. Nothing softened the aspect of its wrath. Near, red, familiar, it seemed to visibly bowl along the heavens. In the morning it rose as baldly as it had set. And back and forth over the awful plain blew the winds,--blew from east to west and back again, strong as if fresh from the chambers of their birth, full of elemental scents and of mighty murmurings.

"This is the West!" Kate cried, again and again.

The major listened to her unsmilingly. It always seemed to him a waste of muscular energy to smile. He did not talk much. Conversation had never appealed to him in the light of an art. He spoke when there was a direction or a command to be given, or an inquiry to be made. The major, if the truth must be known, was material. Things that he could taste, touch, see, appealed to him. He had been a volunteer in the civil war,--a volunteer with a good record,--which he never mentioned; and, having acquitted himself decently, let the matter go without asking reprisal or payment for what he had freely given. He went into business and sold cereal foods.

"I believe in useful things," the major expressed himself. "Oatmeal, wheat,-men have to have them. G.o.d intended they should. There's Jack--my son-Jack Sh.e.l.ly--lawyer. What's the use of litigation? G.o.d didn't design litigation. It doesn't do anybody any good. It isn't justice you get.

It's something entirely different,--a verdict according to law. They say Jack's clever. But I'm mighty glad I sell wheat."

He didn't sell it as a speculator, however. That wasn't his way.

"I earn what I make," he often said; and he had grown rich in the selling of his wholesome foods.

Helena lies among round, brown hills. Above it is a sky of deep and illimitable blue. In the streets are crumbs of gold, but it no longer pays to mine for these; because, as real estate, the property is more valuable. It is a place of fict.i.tious values. There is excitement in the air. Men have the faces of speculators. Every laborer is patient at his task because he cherishes a hope that some day he will be a millionnaire. There is hospitality, and cordiality and good fellows.h.i.+p, and an undeniable democracy. There is wealth and luxurious living. There is even culture,--but it is obtruded as a sort of novelty; it is not accepted as a matter of course.

Kate and the major were driven over two or three miles of dusty, hard road to a distant hotel, which stands in the midst of greenness,--in an oasis. Immediately above the green sward that surrounds it the brown hills rise, the gra.s.s scorched by the sun.

Kate yielded herself to the almost absurd luxury of the place with ease and complacency. She took kindly to the great verandas. She adapted herself to the elaborate and ill-a.s.sorted meals. She bathed in the marvellous pool, warm with the heat of eternal fires in mid-earth. This pool was covered with a picturesque Moorish structure, and at one end a cascade tumbled, over which the sun, coming through colored windows, made a mimic prism in the white spray. The life was not unendurable. The major was seldom with her, being obliged to go about his business; and Kate amused herself by driving over the hills, by watching the inhabitants, by wondering about the lives in the great, pretentious, unhomelike houses with their treeless yards and their closed shutters.

The sunlight, white as the glare on Arabian sands, penetrated everywhere. It seemed to fairly scorch the eye-b.a.l.l.s.

"Oh, we're West, now," Kate said, exultantly. "I've seen a thousand types. But yet--not quite THE type--not the impersonation of simplicity and daring that I was looking for."

The major didn't know quite what she was talking about. But he acquiesced. All he cared about was to see her grow stronger; and that she was doing every day. She was growing amazingly lovely, too,-at least the major thought so. Every one looked at her; but that was, perhaps, because she was such a sylph of a woman. Beside the stalwart major, she looked like a fairy princess.

One day she suddenly realized the fact that she had had a companion on the veranda for several mornings. Of course, there were a great many persons--invalids, largely--sitting about, but one of them had been obtruding himself persistently into her consciousness. It was not that he was rude; it was only that he was thinking about her. A person with a temperament like Kate's could not long be oblivious to a thing like that; and she furtively observed the offender with that genius for psychological perception which was at once her greatest danger and her charm.

The man was dressed with a childish attempt at display. His s.h.i.+rt-front was decorated with a diamond, and his cuff-b.u.t.tons were of onyx with diamond settings. His clothes were expensive and perceptibly new, and he often changed his costumes, but with a noticeable disregard for propriety. He was very conscious of his silk hat, and frequently wiped it with a handkerchief on which his monogram was worked in blue.

When the 'busses brought up their loads, he was always on hand to watch the newcomers. He took a long time at his dinners, and appeared to order a great deal and eat very little. There were card-rooms and a billiard-hall, not to mention a bowling-alley and a tennis-court, where the other guests of the hotel spent much time. But this man never visited them. He sat often with one of the late reviews in his hand, looking as if he intended giving his attention to it at any moment.

But after he had scrupulously cut the leaves with a little carved ivory paper-cutter, he sat staring straight before him with the book open, but unread, in his hand.

Kate took more interest in this melancholy, middle-aged man than she would have done if she had not been on the outlook for her Western type,--the man who was to combine all the qualities of chivalry, daring, bombast, and generosity, seasoned with piquant grammar, which she firmly believed to be the real thing. But notwithstanding this kindly and somewhat curious interest, she might never have made his acquaintance if it had not been for a rather unpleasant adventure.

The major was "closing up a deal" and had hurried away after breakfast, and Kate, in the luxury of convalescence, half-reclined in a great chair on the veranda and watched the dusky blue mist twining itself around the brown hills. She was not thinking of the babies; she was not worrying about home; she was not longing for anything, or even indulging in a dream. That vacuous content which engrosses the body after long indisposition, held her imperatively. Suddenly she was aroused from this happy condition of nothingness by the spectacle of an enormous bull-dog approaching her with threatening teeth. She had noticed the monster often in his kennel near the stables, and it was well understood that he was never to be permitted his freedom. Now he walked toward her with a solid step and an alarming deliberateness. Kate sat still and tried to a.s.sure herself that he meant no mischief, but by the time the great body had made itself felt on the skirt of her gown she could restrain her fear no longer, and gave a nervous cry of alarm. The brute answered with a growl. If he had lacked provocation before, he considered that he had it now. He showed his teeth and flung his detestable body upon her; and Kate felt herself growing dizzy with fear. But just then an arm was interposed and the dog was flung back. There was a momentary struggle.

Some gentlemen came hurrying out of the office; and as they beat the dog back to its retreat, Kate summoned words from her parched throat to thank her benefactor.

It was the melancholy man with the new clothes. This morning he was dressed in a suit of the lightest gray, with a white ma.r.s.eilles waistcoat, over which his glittering chain shone ostentatiously. White tennis-shoes, a white rose in his b.u.t.tonhole, and a white straw hat in his hand completed a toilet over which much time had evidently been spent. Kate noted these details as she held out her hand.

"I may have been alarmed without cause," she said; "but I was horribly frightened. Thank you so much for coming to my rescue. And I think, if you would add to your kindness by getting me a gla.s.s of water--"

When he came back, his hand was trembling a little; and as Kate looked up to learn the cause, she saw that his face was flushed. He was embarra.s.sed. She decided that he was not accustomed to the society of ladies. "Brutes like that dog ain't no place in th' world--that's my opinion. There are some bad things we can't help havin' aroun'; but a bull-dog ain't one of 'em."

"I quite agree with you," Kate acquiesced, as she drank the water. "But as this is the first unpleasant experience of any kind that I have had since I came here, I don't feel that I have any right to complain."

"You're here fur yur health?"

"Yes. And I am getting it. You're not an invalid, I imagine?"

"No--no-op. I'm here be--well, I've thought fur a long time I'd like t'

stay at this here hotel."

"Indeed!"