A Phyllis of the Sierras. Bret Harte
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and lie down. He tried to rise, but the deep blue chasm before the window seemed to be swelling up to meet him, the bed slowly sinking into its oblivious profundity. He knew no more.
He came to with the smell and taste of some powerful volatile spirit, and the vague vision of Mr. Bradley still standing at the window of the mill and vibrating with the machinery; this changed presently to a pleasant lassitude and lazy curiosity as he perceived Mr. Bradley smile and apparently slip from the window of the mill to his bedside. “You’re all right now,” said Bradley, cheerfully.
He was feeling Mainwaring’s pulse. Had he really been ill and was Bradley a doctor?
Bradley evidently saw what was passing in his mind. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said gayly. “I’m not a doctor, but I practise a little medicine and surgery on account of the men at the mill, and accidents, you know. You’re all right now; you’ve lost a little blood: but in a couple of weeks in this air we’ll have that tubercle healed, and you’ll be as right as a trivet.”
“In a couple of weeks!” echoed Mainwaring, in faint astonishment. “Why, I leave here to-morrow.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind” said Mrs. Bradley, with smiling peremptoriness, suddenly slipping out from behind her husband. “Everything is all perfectly arranged. Jim has sent off messengers to your friends, so that if you can’t come to them, they can come to you. You see you can’t help yourself! If you WILL walk fifteen miles with such lungs, and then frighten people to death, you must abide by the consequences.”
“You see the old lady has fixed you,” said Bradley, smiling; “and she’s the master here. Come, Mainwaring, you can send any other message you like, and have who and what you want here; but HERE you must stop for a while.”
“But did I frighten you really?” stammered Mainwaring, faintly, to Mrs. Bradley.
“Frighten us!” said Mrs. Bradley. “Well, look there!”
She pointed to the window, which commanded a view of the veranda. Miss Macy had dropped into the vacant chair, with her little feet stretched out before her, her cheeks burning with heat and fire, her eyes partly closed, her straw hat hanging by a ribbon round her neck, her brown hair clinging to her ears and forehead in damp tendrils, and an enormous palm-leaf fan in each hand violently playing upon this charming picture of exhaustion and abandonment.
“She came tearing down to the mill, bare-backed on our half-broken mustang, about half an hour ago, to call me ‘to help you,’” explained Bradley. “Heaven knows how she managed to do it!”
CHAPER II
The medication of the woods was not overestimated by Bradley. There was surely some occult healing property in that vast reservoir of balmy and resinous odors over which The Lookout beetled and clung, and from which at times the pure exhalations of the terraced valley seemed to rise. Under its remedial influence and a conscientious adherence to the rules of absolute rest and repose laid down for him, Mainwaring had no return of the hemorrhage. The nearest professional medical authority, hastily summoned, saw no reason for changing or for supplementing Bradley’s intelligent and simple treatment, although astounded that the patient had been under no more radical or systematic cure than travel and exercise. The women especially were amazed that Mainwaring had taken “nothing for it,” in their habitual experience of an unfettered pill-and-elixir-consuming democracy. In their knowledge of the thousand “panaceas” that filled the shelves of the general store, this singular abstention of their guest seemed to indicate a national peculiarity.
His bed was moved beside the low window, from which he could not only view the veranda but converse at times with its occupants, and even listen to the book which Miss Macy, seated without, read aloud to him. In the evening Bradley would linger by his couch until late, beguiling the tedium of his convalescence with characteristic stories and information which he thought might please the invalid. For Mainwaring, who had been early struck with Bradley’s ready and cultivated intelligence, ended by shyly avoiding the discussion of more serious topics, partly because Bradley impressed him with a suspicion of his own inferiority, and partly because Mainwaring questioned the taste of Bradley’s apparent exhibition of his manifest superiority. He learned accidentally that this mill-owner and backwoodsman was a college-bred man; but the practical application of that education to the ordinary affairs of life was new to the young Englishman’s traditions, and grated a little harshly on his feelings. He would have been quite content if Bradley had, like himself and fellows he knew, undervalued his training, and kept his gifts conservatively impractical. The knowledge also that his host’s education naturally came from some provincial institution unlike Oxford and Cambridge may have unconsciously affected his general estimate. I say unconsciously, for his strict conscientiousness would have rejected any such formal proposition.
Another trifle annoyed him. He could not help noticing also that although Bradley’s manner and sympathy were confidential and almost brotherly, he never made any allusion to Mainwaring’s own family or connections, and, in fact, gave no indication of what he believed was the national curiosity in regard to strangers. Somewhat embarrassed by this indifference, Mainwaring made the occasion of writing some letters home an opportunity for laughingly alluding to the fact that he had made his mother and his sisters fully aware of the great debt they owed the household of The Lookout.
“They’ll probably all send you a round robin of thanks, except, perhaps, my next brother, Bob.”
Bradley contented himself with a gesture of general deprecation, and did not ask WHY Mainwaring’s young brother should contemplate his death with satisfaction. Nevertheless, some time afterwards Miss Macy remarked that it seemed hard that the happiness of one member of a family should depend upon a calamity to another. “As for instance?” asked Mainwaring, who had already forgotten the circumstance. “Why, if you had died and your younger brother succeeded to the baronetcy, and become Sir Robert Mainwaring,” responded Miss Macy, with precision. This was the first and only allusion to his family and prospective rank. On the other hand, he had—through naive and boyish inquiries, which seemed to amuse his entertainers—acquired, as he believed, a full knowledge of the history and antecedents of the Bradley household. He knew how Bradley had brought his young wife and her cousin to California and abandoned a lucrative law practice in San Francisco to take possession of this mountain mill and woodland, which he had acquired through some professional service.
“Then you are a barrister really?” said Mainwaring, gravely.
Bradley laughed. “I’m afraid I’ve had more practice—though not as lucrative a one—as surgeon or doctor.”
“But you’re regularly on the rolls, you know; you’re entered as Counsel, and all that sort of thing?” continued Mainwaring, with great seriousness.
“Well, yes,” replied Bradley, much amused. “I’m afraid I must plead guilty to that.”
“It’s not a bad sort of thing,” said Mainwaring, naively, ignoring Bradley’s amusement. “I’ve got a cousin who’s gone in for the law. Got out of the army to do it—too. He’s a sharp fellow.”
“Then you DO allow a man to try many trades—over there,” said Miss Macy, demurely.
“Yes, sometimes,” said Mainwaring, graciously, but by no means certain that the case was at all analogous.
Nevertheless, as if relieved of certain doubts of the conventional quality of his host’s attainments, he now gave himself up to a very hearty and honest admiration of Bradley. “You know it’s awfully kind of him to talk to a fellow like me who just pulled through, and never got any prizes at Oxford, and don’t understand the half of these things,” he remarked confidentially to Mrs. Bradley. “He knows more about the things we used to go in for at Oxford than lots of our men, and he’s never been there. He’s uncommonly clever.”
“Jim was always very brilliant,” returned Mrs. Bradley, indifferently, and with more than even conventionally polite wifely deprecation; “I wish he were more practical.”
“Practical! Oh, I say, Mrs. Bradley! Why, a fellow that can go in among a lot of workmen and tell them just what to do—an all-round chap that can