Snow-Bound at Eagle's. Bret Harte
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of books. She hoped to find a vague freedom in this unconventional life thus opened to her, or rather to show others that she knew how intelligently to appreciate it, but as yet she was only able to express it in the one detail of dress already alluded to. Some of the men, and nearly all the women, she had met thus far, she was amazed to find, valued the conventionalities she believed she despised, and were voluntarily assuming the chains she thought she had thrown off. Instead of learning anything from them, these children of nature had bored her with eager questionings regarding the civilization she had abandoned, or irritated her with crude imitations of it for her benefit. “Fancy,” she had written to a friend in Boston, “my calling on Sue Murphy, who remembered the Donner tragedy, and who once shot a grizzly that was prowling round her cabin, and think of her begging me to lend her my sack for a pattern, and wanting to know if ‘polonays’ were still worn.” She remembered more bitterly the romance that had tickled her earlier fancy, told of two college friends of her brother-in-law’s who were living the “perfect life” in the mines, laboring in the ditches with a copy of Homer in their pockets, and writing letters of the purest philosophy under the free air of the pines. How, coming unexpectedly on them in their Arcadia, the party found them unpresentable through dirt, and thenceforth unknowable through domestic complications that had filled their Arcadian cabin with half-breed children.
Much of this disillusion she had kept within her own heart, from a feeling of pride, or only lightly touched upon it in her relations with her mother and sister. For Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Scott had no idols to shatter, no enthusiasm to subdue. Firmly and unalterably conscious of their own superiority to the life they led and the community that surrounded them, they accepted their duties cheerfully, and performed them conscientiously. Those duties were loyalty to Hale’s interests and a vague missionary work among the neighbors, which, like most missionary work, consisted rather in making their own ideas understood than in understanding the ideas of their audience. Old Mrs. Scott’s zeal was partly religious, an inheritance from her Puritan ancestry; Mrs. Hale’s was the affability of a gentlewoman and the obligation of her position. To this was added the slight languor of the cultivated American wife, whose health has been affected by the birth of her first child, and whose views of marriage and maternity were slightly tinged with gentle scepticism. She was sincerely attached to her husband, “who dominated the household” like the rest of his “women folk,” with the faint consciousness of that division of service which renders the position of the sultan of a seraglio at once so prominent and so precarious. The attitude of John Hale in his family circle was dominant because it had never been subjected to criticism or comparison; and perilous for the same reason.
Mrs. Hale presently joined her sister in the veranda, and, shading her eyes with a narrow white hand, glanced on the prospect with a polite interest and ladylike urbanity. The searching sun, which, as Miss Kate once intimated, was “vulgarity itself,” stared at her in return, but could not call a blush to her somewhat sallow cheek. Neither could it detract, however, from the delicate prettiness of her refined face with its soft gray shadows, or the dark gentle eyes, whose blue-veined lids were just then wrinkled into coquettishly mischievous lines by the strong light. She was taller and thinner than Kate, and had at times a certain shy, coy sinuosity of movement which gave her a more virginal suggestion than her unmarried sister. For Miss Kate, from her earliest youth, had been distinguished by that matronly sedateness of voice and step, and completeness of figure, which indicates some members of the gallinaceous tribe from their callow infancy.
“I suppose John must have stopped at the Summit on some business,” said Mrs. Hale, “or he would have been here already. It’s scarcely worth while waiting for him, unless you choose to ride over and meet him. You might change your dress,” she continued, looking doubtfully at Kate’s costume. “Put on your riding-habit, and take Manuel with you.”
“And take the only man we have, and leave you alone?” returned Kate slowly. “No!”
“There are the Chinese field hands,” said Mrs. Hale; “you must correct your ideas, and really allow them some humanity, Kate. John says they have a very good compulsory school system in their own country, and can read and write.”
“That would be of little use to you here alone if—if—” Kate hesitated.
“If what?” said Mrs. Hale smiling. “Are you thinking of Manuel’s dreadful story of the grizzly tracks across the fields this morning? I promise you that neither I, nor mother, nor Minnie shall stir out of the house until you return, if you wish it.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” said Kate; “though I don’t believe the beating of a gong and the using of strong language is the best way to frighten a grizzly from the house. Besides, the Chinese are going down the river to-day to a funeral, or a wedding, or a feast of stolen chickens—they’re all the same—and won’t be here.”
“Then take Manuel,” repeated Mrs. Hale. “We have the Chinese servants and Indian Molly in the house to protect us from Heaven knows what! I have the greatest confidence in Chy-Lee as a warrior, and in Chinese warfare generally. One has only to hear him pipe in time of peace to imagine what a terror he might become in war time. Indeed, anything more deadly and soul-harrowing than that love song he sang for us last night I cannot conceive. But really, Kate, I am not afraid to stay alone. You know what John says: we ought to be always prepared for anything that might happen.
“My dear Josie,” returned Kate, putting her arm around her sister’s waist, “I am perfectly convinced that if three-fingered Jack, or two-toed Bill, or even Joaquim Murietta himself, should step, red-handed, on that veranda, you would gently invite him to take a cup of tea, inquire about the state of the road, and refrain delicately from any allusions to the sheriff. But I shan’t take Manuel from you. I really cannot undertake to look after his morals at the station, and keep him from drinking aguardiente with suspicious characters at the bar. It is true he ‘kisses my hand’ in his speech, even when it is thickest, and offers his back to me for a horse-block, but I think I prefer the sober and honest familiarity of even that Pike County landlord who is satisfied to say, ‘Jump, girl, and I’ll ketch ye!’”
“I hope you didn’t change your manner to either of them for that,” said Mrs. Hale with a faint sigh. “John wants to be good friends with them, and they are behaving quite decently lately, considering that they can’t speak a grammatical sentence nor know the use of a fork.”
“And now the man puts on gloves and a tall hat to come here on Sundays, and the woman won’t call until you’ve called first,” retorted Kate; “perhaps you call that improvement. The fact is, Josephine,” continued the young girl, folding her arms demurely, “we might as well admit it at once—these people don’t like us.”
“That’s impossible!” said Mrs. Hale, with sublime simplicity. “You don’t like them, you mean.”
“I like them better than you do, Josie, and that’s the reason why I feel it and YOU don’t.” She checked herself, and after a pause resumed in a lighter tone: “No; I sha’n’t go to the station; I’ll commune with nature to-day, and won’t ‘take any humanity in mine, thank you,’ as Bill the driver says. Adios.”
“I wish Kate would not use that dreadful slang, even in jest,” said Mrs. Scott, in her rocking-chair at the French window, when Josephine reentered the parlor as her sister walked briskly away. “I am afraid she is being infected by the people at the station. She ought to have a change.”
“I was just thinking,” said Josephine, looking abstractedly at her mother, “that I would try to get John to take her to San Francisco this winter. The Careys are expected, you know; she might visit them.”
“I’m afraid, if she stays here much longer, she won’t care to see them at all. She seems to care for nothing now that she ever liked before,” returned the old lady ominously.
Meantime the subject of these criticisms was carrying away her own reflections tightly buttoned up in her short jacket. She had driven back her dog Spot—another one of her disillusions, who, giving way to his lower nature, had once killed a sheep—as she did not wish her Jacques-like contemplation of any wounded deer to be inconsistently interrupted by a fresh outrage from her companion. The air was really very chilly, and for the first time in her mountain