Читать книгу The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, and Other Stories - Bret Harte - Страница 7

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It was a week later that Madison Wayne and Mr. McGee were seen, to the astonishment of the Bar, leisurely walking together in the direction of the promontory. Here they disappeared, entering a damp fringe of willows and laurels that seemed to mark its limits, and gradually ascending some thickly-wooded trail, until they reached its crest, which, to Madison's surprise, was cleared and open, and showed an acre or two of rude cultivation. Here, too, stood the McGees' conjugal home—a small, four-roomed house, but so peculiar and foreign in aspect that it at once challenged even Madison's abstracted attention. It was a tiny Swiss chalet, built in sections, and originally packed in cases, one of the early importations from Europe to California after the gold discovery, when the country was supposed to be a woodless wilderness. Mr. McGee explained, with his usual laborious care, how he had bought it at Marysville, not only for its picturesqueness, but because in its unsuggestive packing-cases it offered no indication to the curious miners, and could be put up by himself and a single uncommunicative Chinaman, without any one else being aware of its existence. There was, indeed, something quaint in this fragment of Old World handicraft, with its smooth-jointed paneling, in two colors, its little lozenge fretwork, its lapped roof, overhanging eaves, and miniature gallery. Inartistic as Madison was—like most men of rigidly rectangular mind and principle—and accustomed to the bleak and economic sufficiency of the Californian miner's cabin, he was touched strangely by its novel grace and freshness. It reminded him of HER; he had a new respect for this rough, sinful man who had thus idealized his wife in her dwelling. Already a few Madeira vines and a Cherokee rose clambered up the gallery. And here Mrs. McGee was sitting.

In the face that she turned upon the two men Madison could see that she was not expecting them, and even in the slight curiosity with which she glanced at her husband, that evidently he had said nothing of his previous visit or invitation. And this conviction became certainty at Mr. McGee's first words.

“I've brought you an ole friend, Safie. He used to spark ye once at Angel's afore my time—he told me so; he picked ye outer the water here—he told me that, too. Ye mind that I said afore that he was the only man I wanted ter know; I reckon now it seems the square thing that he should be the one man YOU wanted ter know, too. You understand what I mean—you follow me, don't you?”

Whether or not Mrs. McGee DID follow him, she exhibited neither concern, solicitude, nor the least embarrassment. An experienced lover might have augured ill from this total absence of self-consciousness. But Madison was not an experienced lover. He accepted her amused smile as a recognition of his feelings, trembled at the touch of her cool hands, as if it had been a warm pressure, and scarcely dared to meet her maliciously laughing eyes. When he had followed Mr. McGee to the little gallery, the previous occupation of Mrs. McGee when they arrived was explained. From that slight elevation there was a perfect view over the whole landscape and river below; the Bar stretched out as a map at her feet; in that clear, transparent air she could see every movement and gesture of Wayne's brother, all unconscious of that surveillance, at work on the Bar. For an instant Madison's sallow cheek reddened, he knew not why; a remorseful feeling that he ought to be there with Arthur came over him. Mrs. McGee's voice seemed to answer his thought. “You can see everything that's going on down there without being seen yourself. It's good fun for me sometimes. The other day I saw that young Carpenter hanging round Mrs. Rogers's cabin in the bush when old Rogers was away. And I saw her creep out and join him, never thinking any one could see her!”

She laughed, seeking Madison's averted eyes, yet scarcely noticing his suddenly contracted brows. Mr. McGee alone responded.

“That's why,” he said, explanatorily, to Madison, “I don't allow to have my Safie go round with those women. Not as I ever see anything o' that sort goin' on, or keer to look, but on gin'ral principles. You understand what I mean.”

“That's your brother over there, isn't it?” said Mrs. McGee, turning to Madison and calmly ignoring her husband's explanation, as she indicated the distant Arthur. “Why didn't you bring him along with you?”

Madison hesitated, and looked at McGee. “He wasn't asked,” said that gentleman cheerfully. “One's company, two's none! You don't know him, my dear; and this yer ain't a gin'ral invitation to the Bar. You follow me?”

To this Mrs. McGee made no comment, but proceeded to show Madison over the little cottage. Yet in a narrow passage she managed to touch his hand, lingered to let her husband precede them from one room to another, and once or twice looked meaningly into his eyes over McGee's shoulder. Disconcerted and embarrassed, he tried to utter a few commonplaces, but so constrainedly that even McGee presently noticed it. And the result was still more embarrassing.

“Look yer,” he said, suddenly turning to them both. “I reckon as how you two wanter talk over old times, and I'll just meander over to the claim, and do a spell o' work. Don't mind ME. And if HE”—indicating Madison with his finger—“gets on ter religion, don't you mind him. It won't hurt you, Safie—no more nor my revolver—but it's pow'ful persuadin', and you understand me? You follow me? Well, so long!”

He turned away quickly, and was presently lost among the trees. For an instant the embarrassed Madison thought of following him; but he was confronted by Mrs. McGee's wicked eyes and smiling face between him and the door. Composing herself, however, with a simulation of perfect gravity she pointed to a chair.

“Sit down, Brother Wayne. If you're going to convert me, it may take some time, you know, and you might as well make yourself comfortable. As for me, I'll take the anxious bench.” She laughed with a certain girlishness, which he well remembered, and leaped to a sitting posture on the table with her hands on her knees, swinging her smart shoes backwards and forwards below it.

Madison looked at her in hopeless silence, with a pale, disturbed face and shining eyes.

“Or, if you want to talk as we used to talk, Mad, when we sat on the front steps at Angel's and pa and ma went inside to give us a show, ye can hop up alongside o' me.” She made a feint of gathering her skirts beside her.

“Safie!” broke out the unfortunate man, in a tone that seemed to increase in formal solemnity with his manifest agitation, “this is impossible. The laws of God that have joined you and this man”—

“Oh, it's the prayer-meeting, is it?” said Safie, settling her skirts again, with affected resignation. “Go on.”

“Listen, Safie,” said Madison, turning despairingly towards her. “Let us for His sake, let us for the sake of our dear blessed past, talk together earnestly and prayerfully. Let us take this time to root out of our feeble hearts all yearnings that are not prompted by Him—yearnings that your union with this man makes impossible and sinful. Let us for the sake of the past take counsel of each other, even as brother and sister.”

“Sister McGee!” she interrupted mockingly. “It wasn't as brother and sister you made love to me at Angel's.”

“No! I loved you then, and would have made you my wife.”

“And you don't love me any more,” she said, audaciously darting a wicked look into his eyes, “only because I didn't marry you? And you think that Christian?”

“You know I love you as I have loved you always,” he said passionately.

“Hush!” she said mockingly; “suppose he should hear you.”

“He knows it!” said Madison bitterly. “I told him all!”

She stared at him fixedly.

“You have—told—him—that—you STILL love me?” she repeated slowly.

“Yes, or I wouldn't be here now. It was due to him—to my own conscience.”

“And what did he say?”

“He insisted upon my coming, and, as God is my Judge and witness—he seemed satisfied and content.”

She drew her pretty lips together with a long whistle, and then leaped from the table. Her face was hard and her eyes were bright as she went to the window and looked out. He followed her timidly.

“Don't touch me,” she said, sharply striking away his proffered hand. He turned with a flushed cheek and walked slowly towards the door. Her laugh stopped him.

“Come! I reckon that squeezin' hands ain't no part of your contract with Sandy?” she said, glancing down at her own. “Well, so you're goin'?”

“I only wished to talk seriously and prayerfully with you for a few moments, Safie, and then—to see you no more.”

“And how would that suit him,” she said dryly, “if he wants your company here? Then, just because you can't convert me and bring me to your ways of thinkin' in one visit, I suppose you think it is Christian-like to run away like this! Or do you suppose that, if you turn tail now, he won't believe that your Christian strength and Christian resignation is all humbug?”

Madison dropped into the chair, put his elbows on the table, and buried his face in his hands. She came a little nearer, and laid her hand lightly on his arm. He made a movement as if to take it, but she withdrew it impatiently.

“Come,” she said brusquely; “now you're in for it you must play the game out. He trusts you; if he sees you can't trust yourself, he'll shoot you on sight. That don't frighten you? Well, perhaps this will then! He'll SAY your religion is a sham and you a hypocrite—and everybody will believe him. How do you like that, Brother Wayne? How will that help the Church? Come! You're a pair of cranks together; but he's got the whip-hand of you this time. All you can do is to keep up to his idea of you. Put a bold face on it, and come here as often as you can—the oftener the better; the sooner you'll both get sick of each other—and of ME. That's what you're both after, ain't it? Well! I can tell you now, you needn't either of you be the least afraid of me.”

She walked away to the window again, not angrily, but smoothing down the folds of her bright print dress as if she were wiping her hands of her husband and his guest. Something like a very material and man-like sense of shame struggled up through his crust of religion. He stammered, “You don't understand me, Safie.”

“Then talk of something I do understand,” she said pertly. “Tell me some news of Angel's. Your brother was over there the other day. He made himself quite popular with the young ladies—so I hear from Mrs. Selvedge. You can tell me as we walk along the bank towards Sandy's claim. It's just as well that you should move on now, as it's your FIRST call, and next time you can stop longer.” She went to the corner of the room, removed her smart slippers, and put on a pair of walking-shoes, tying them, with her foot on a chair, in a quiet disregard of her visitor's presence; took a brown holland sunbonnet from the wall, clapped it over her browner hair and hanging braids, and tied it under her chin with apparently no sense of coquetry in the act—becoming though it was—and without glancing at him. Alas for Madison's ethics! The torment of her worldly speech and youthful contempt was nothing to this tacit ignoring of the manhood of her lover—this silent acceptance of him as something even lower than her husband. He followed her with a burning cheek and a curious revolting of his whole nature that it is to be feared were scarcely Christian. The willows opened to let them pass and closed behind them.

An hour later Mrs. McGee returned to her leafy bower alone. She took off her sunbonnet, hung it on its nail on the wall, shook down her braids, took off her shoes, stained with the mud of her husband's claim, and put on her slippers. Then she ascended to her eyrie in the little gallery, and gazed smilingly across the sunlit Bar. The two gaunt shadows of her husband and lover, linked like twins, were slowly passing along the river bank on their way to the eclipsing obscurity of the cottonwoods. Below her—almost at her very feet—the unconscious Arthur Wayne was pushing his work on the river bed, far out to the promontory. The sunlight fell upon his vivid scarlet shirt, his bared throat, and head clustering with perspiring curls. The same sunlight fell upon Mrs. McGee's brown head too, and apparently put a wicked fancy inside it. She ran to her bedroom, and returned with a mirror from its wall, and, after some trials in getting the right angle, sent a searching reflection upon the spot where Arthur was at work.

For an instant a diamond flash played around him. Then he lifted his head and turned it curiously towards the crest above him. But the next moment he clapped his hands over his dazzled but now smiling eyes, as Mrs. McGee, secure in her leafy obscurity, fell back and laughed to herself, like a very schoolgirl.

It was three weeks later, and Madison Wayne was again sitting alone in his cabin. This solitude had become of more frequent occurrence lately, since Arthur had revolted and openly absented himself from his religious devotions for lighter diversions of the Bar. Keenly as Madison felt his defection, he was too much preoccupied with other things to lay much stress upon it, and the sting of Arthur's relapse to worldliness and folly lay in his own consciousness that it was partly his fault. He could not chide his brother when he felt that his own heart was absorbed in his neighbor's wife, and although he had rigidly adhered to his own crude ideas of self-effacement and loyalty to McGee, he had been again and again a visitor at his house. It was true that Mrs. McGee had made this easier by tacitly accepting his conditions of their acquaintanceship, by seeming more natural, by exhibiting a gayety, and at times even a certain gentleness and thoughtfulness of conduct that delighted her husband and astonished her lover. Whether this wonderful change had really been effected by the latter's gloomy theology and still more hopeless ethics, he could not say. She certainly showed no disposition to imitate their formalities, nor seemed to be impressed by them on the rare occasions when he now offered them. Yet she appeared to link the two men together—even physically—as on these occasions when, taking an arm of each, she walked affectionately between them along the river bank promenade, to the great marveling and admiration of the Bar. It was said, however, that Mr. Jack Hamlin, a gambler, at that moment professionally visiting Wayne's Bar, and a great connoisseur of feminine charms and weaknesses, had glanced at them under his handsome lashes, and asked a single question, evidently so amusing to the younger members of the Bar that Madison Wayne knit his brow and Arthur Wayne blushed. Mr. Hamlin took no heed of the elder brother's frown, but paid some slight attention to the color of the younger brother, and even more to a slightly coquettish glance from the pretty Mrs. McGee. Whether or not—as has been ingeniously alleged by some moralists—the light and trifling of either sex are prone to recognize each other by some mysterious instinct, is not a necessary consideration of this chronicle; enough that the fact is recorded.

And yet Madison Wayne should have been satisfied with his work! His sacrifice was accepted; his happy issue from a dangerous situation, and his happy triumph over a more dangerous temptation, was complete and perfect, and even achieved according to his own gloomy theories of redemption and regeneration. Yet he was not happy. The human heart is at times strangely unappeasable. And as he sat that evening in the gathering shadows, the Book which should have yielded him balm and comfort lay unopened in his lap.

A step upon the gravel outside had become too familiar to startle him. It was Mr. McGee lounging into the cabin like a gaunt shadow. It must be admitted that the friendship of these strangely contrasted men, however sincere and sympathetic, was not cheerful. A belief in the thorough wickedness of humanity, kept under only through fear of extreme penalty and punishment, material and spiritual, was not conducive to light and amusing conversation. Their talk was mainly a gloomy chronicle of life at the Bar, which was in itself half an indictment. To-night, Mr. McGee spoke of the advent of Mr. Jack Hamlin, and together they deplored the diversion of the hard-earned gains and valuable time of the Bar through the efforts of that ingenious gentleman. “Not,” added McGee cautiously, “but what he can shoot straight enough, and I've heard tell that he don't LIE. That mout and it moutn't be good for your brother who goes around with him considerable, there's different ways of lookin' at that; you understand what I mean? You follow me?” For all that, the conversation seemed to languish this evening, partly through some abstraction on the part of Wayne and partly some hesitation in McGee, who appeared to have a greater fear than usual of not expressing himself plainly. It was quite dark in the cabin when at last, detaching himself from his usual lounging place, the door-post, he walked to the window and leaned, more shadowy than ever, over Wayne's chair. “I want to tell you suthin',” he said slowly, “that I don't want you to misunderstand—you follow me? and that ain't no ways carpin' or criticisin' nor reflectin' on YOU—you understand what I mean? Ever sens you and me had that talk here about you and Safie, and ever sens I got the hang of your ways and your style o' thinkin', I've been as sure of you and her as if I'd been myself trottin' round with you and a revolver. And I'm as sure of you now—you sabe what I mean? you understand? You've done me and her a heap o' good; she's almost another woman sens you took hold of her, and ef you ever want me to stand up and 'testify,' as you call it, in church, Sandy McGee is ready. What I'm tryin' to say to ye is this. Tho' I understand you and your work and your ways—there's other folks ez moutn't—you follow? You understand what I mean? And it's just that I'm coming to. Now las' night, when you and Safie was meanderin' along the lower path by the water, and I kem across you”—

“But,” interrupted Madison quickly, “you're mistaken. I wasn't”—

“Hol' on,” said McGee, quietly; “I know you got out o' the way without you seein' me or me you, because you didn't know it was me, don't you see? don't you follow? and that's just it! It mout have bin some one from the Bar as seed you instead o' ME. See? That's why you lit out before I could recognize you, and that's why poor Safie was so mighty flustered at first and was for runnin' away until she kem to herself agin. When, of course, she laughed, and agreed you must have mistook me.”

“But,” gasped Madison quickly, “I WASN'T THERE AT ALL LAST NIGHT.”

“What?”

The two men had risen simultaneously and were facing each other. McGee, with a good-natured, half-critical expression, laid his hand on Wayne's shoulder and slightly turned him towards the window, that he might see his face. It seemed to him white and dazed.

“You—wasn't there—last night?” he repeated, with a slow tolerance.

Scarcely a moment elapsed, but the agony of an hour may have thrilled through Wayne's consciousness before he spoke. Then all the blood of his body rushed to his face with his first lie as he stammered, “No! Yes! Of course. I have made a mistake—it WAS I.”

“I see—you thought I was riled?” said McGee quietly.

“No; I was thinking it was NIGHT BEFORE LAST! Of course it was last night. I must be getting silly.” He essayed a laugh—rare at any time with him—and so forced now that it affected McGee more than his embarrassment. He looked at Wayne thoughtfully, and then said slowly: “I reckon I did come upon you a little too sudden last night, but, you see, I was thinkin' of suthin' else and disremembered you might be there. But I wasn't mad—no! no! and I only spoke about it now that you might be more keerful before folks. You follow me? You understand what I mean?”

He turned and walked to the door, when he halted. “You follow me, don't you? It ain't no cussedness o' mine, or want o' trustin', don't you see? Mebbe I oughtened have spoken. I oughter remembered that times this sort o' thing must be rather rough on you and her. You follow me? You understand what I mean? Good-night.”

He walked slowly down the path towards the river. Had Madison Wayne been watching him, he would have noticed that his head was bent and his step less free. But Madison Wayne was at that moment sitting rigidly in his chair, nursing, with all the gloomy concentration of a monastic nature, a single terrible suspicion.