"It might not be cheerful," she admitted, "but it would be honest, and we might learn to like it. Besides, the truth is not always disagreeable."
"Wouldn't the monotony of candor appall us?" urged Palmerston. "Isn't it possible that our deceptions are all the individuality we have?"
"Heaven forbid!" said his companion curtly.
They drove on without speaking. The young man was obstinately averse to breaking the silence, which, nevertheless, annoyed him. He had a theory that feminine chatter was disagreeable. Just why he should feel aggrieved that this particular young woman did not talk to him he could not say. No doubt he would have resented with high disdain the suggestion that his vanity had been covertly feeding for years upon the anxiety of young women to make talk for his diversion.
"Do you think my father has closed his agreement with this man of whom you were speaking – this Mr. Dysart?" asked Miss Brownell, returning to the subject as if they had never left it.
"I am very certain he has not; at least, he had not this morning," rejoined Palmerston.
"I wish it might be prevented," she said earnestly, with a note of appeal.
"I have talked with Dysart, but my arguments fail to impress him; perhaps you may be more successful."
Palmerston was aware of responding to her tone rather than to her words. The girl shook her head.
"I can do nothing. People who have only common sense are at a terrible disadvantage when it comes to argument. I know it is all nonsense; but a great many people seem to prefer nonsense. I believe my father would die if he were reduced to bare facts."
"There is something in that," laughed Palmerston. "A theory makes a very comfortable mental garment, if it is roomy enough."
The young woman turned and glanced at him curiously, as if she could not divine what he was laughing at.
"They are like children – such people. My father is like a child. He does not live in the world; he cannot defend himself."
Palmerston's skepticism rushed into his face. The girl looked at him, and the color mounted to her forehead.
"You do not believe in him!" she broke out. "It cannot be – you cannot think – you do not know him!"
"I know very little of your father's theories, Miss Brownell," protested Palmerston. "You cannot blame me if I question them; you seem to question them yourself."
"His theories – I loathe them!" She spoke with angry emphasis. "It is not that; it is himself. I cannot bear to think that you – that any one" —
"Pardon me," interrupted Palmerston; "we were speaking of his theories. I have no desire to discuss your father."
He knew his tone was resentful. He found himself wondering whether it was an excess of egotism or of humility that made her ignore his personality.
"Why should we not discuss him?" she asked, turning her straightforward eyes upon him.
"Because" – Palmerston broke into an impatient laugh – "because we are not disembodied spirits; at least, I am not."
The girl gave him a look of puzzled incomprehension, and turned back to her own thoughts. That they were troubled thoughts her face gave abundant evidence. Palmerston waited curiously eager for some manifestation of social grace, some comment on the scenery which should lead by the winding path of young-ladyism to the Mecca of her personal tastes and preferences; should unveil that sacred estimate of herself which she so gladly shared with others, but which others too often failed to share with her.
"I wish you would tell me all you know about it," she said presently, "this proposition my father has made. He writes me very indefinitely, and sometimes it is hard for me to learn, even when I am with him, just what he is doing. He forgets that he has not told me."
The young man hesitated, weighing the difficulties that would beset him if he should attempt to explain his hesitation, seeing also the more tangible difficulties of evasion if she should turn her clear eyes upon him. It would be better for Dysart if she knew, he said to himself. They had made no secret of the transaction, and sooner or later she must hear of it from others, if not from her father. He yielded to the infection of her candor, and told her what she asked. She listened with knitted brows and an introspective glance.
"Mr. Dysart might lose his work," she commented tentatively.
Palmerston was silent.
The girl turned abruptly. "Could he lose anything else?" The color swept across her face, and her voice had a half-pathetic menace in it.
"Every business arrangement is uncertain, contains a possibility of loss."
Palmerston was defiantly aware that he had not answered her question. He emphasized his defiance by jerking the reins.
"Don't!" said the girl reproachfully. "I think his mouth is tender."
"You like horses?" inquired the young man, with a sensation of relief.
She shook her head. "No; I think not. I never notice them except when they seem uncomfortable."
"But if you didn't like them you wouldn't care."
"Oh, yes, I should. I don't like to see anything uncomfortable."
Palmerston laughed. "You have made me very uncomfortable, and you do not seem to mind. I must conclude that you have not noticed it, and that conclusion hurts my vanity."
The young woman did not turn her head.
"I try to be candid," she said, "and I am always being misunderstood. I think I must be very stupid."
Her companion began to breathe more freely. She was going to talk of herself, after all. He was perfectly at home when it came to that.
"Not at all," he said graciously; "you only make the rest of us appear stupid. We are at a disadvantage when we get what we do not expect, and none of us expect candor."
"But if we tell the truth ourselves, I don't see why we shouldn't expect it from others."
"Oh, yes, if we ourselves tell the truth."
"I think you have been telling me the truth," she said, turning her steadfast eyes upon him.
"Thank you," said Palmerston lightly. "I hope my evident desire for approval doesn't suggest a sense of novelty in my position."
Miss Brownell smiled indulgently, and then knitted her brows. "I am glad you have told me," she said; "I may not be able to help it, but it is better for me to know."
They were nearing the Dysart house, and Palmerston remembered that he had no definite instruction concerning the newcomer's destination.
"I think I will take her directly to her father's tent," he reflected, "and let Mrs. Dysart plan her own attack upon the social situation."
When he had done this and returned to his boarding-place, there was a warmth in the greeting of his worthy hostess which suggested a sense of his recent escape from personal danger.
"I'm real glad to see you safe home, Mr. Palmerston," she said amply. "I don't wonder you look fagged; the ride through the dust was hard enough without having all sorts of other things to hatchel you. I do hope you won't have that same kind of a phthisicky ketch in your breath that you had the other night after you overdone. I think it was mostly nervousness, and, dear knows, you've had enough to make you nervous to-day. I told Jawn after you was gone that I'd hate to be answerable for the consequences."
Two days later John Dysart came into Palmerston's tent, and drew a camp-stool close to the young man's side.
"I'm in a kind of a fix," he said, seating himself and fastening his eyes on the floor with an air of profound self-commiseration. "You see, this girl of Brownell's she came up where I was mending the flume yesterday, and we got right well acquainted. She seems friendly. She took off her coat and laid it on a boulder, and we set down there in our shirt-sleeves and had quite a talk. I think she means all right, but she's visionary. I can't understand it, living with a practical man like the professor. But you can't always tell. Now, there's Emeline. Emeline means well, but she lets her prejudices run away with her judgment. I guess women generally do. But, someway, this girl rather surprised me. When I first saw her I thought she looked kind of reasonable; maybe it was her cravat – I don't know."
John shook his head in a baffled way. He had taken off his hat, and the handkerchief which he had spread over his bald crown to protect it from the flies drooped pathetically about his honest face.
"What did Miss Brownell say?" asked Palmerston, flushing a little.
John looked at him absently from under his highly colored awning. "The girl? Oh, she don't understand. She wanted me to be careful. I told her I'd been careful all my life, and I wasn't likely to rush into anything now. She thinks her father's 'most too sanguine about the water, but she doesn't understand the machine – I could see that. She said she was afraid I'd lose something, and she wants me to back out right now. I'm sure I don't know what to do. I want to treat everybody right."
"Including yourself, I hope," suggested Palmerston.
"Yes, of course. I don't feel quite able to give up all my prospects just for a notion; and yet I want to do the square thing by Emeline. It's queer about women – especially Emeline. I've often thought if there was only men it would be easier to make up your mind; but still, I suppose we'd oughtn't to feel that way. They don't mean any harm."
John drew the protecting drapery from his head, and lashed his bald crown with it softly, as if in punishment for his seeming disloyalty.
"You could withdraw from the contract now without any great loss to Mr. Brownell," suggested Palmerston.
John looked at him blankly. "Why, of course he wouldn't lose anything; I'd be the loser. But I haven't any notion of doing that. I'm only wondering whether I ought to tell Emeline about the girl. You see, Emeline's kind of impulsive, and she's took a dead set against the girl because, you see, she thinks," – John leaned forward confidentially and shut one eye, as if he were squinting along his recital to see that it was in line with the facts, – "you see, she thinks – well, I don't know as I'd ought to take it on myself to say just what Emeline thinks, but I think she thinks – well, I don't know as I'd ought to say what I think she thinks, either; but you'd understand if you'd been married."
"Oh, I can understand," asserted the young man. "Mrs. Dysart's position is very natural. But I think you should tell her what Miss Brownell advises. There is no other woman near, and it will prove very uncomfortable for the young lady if your wife remains unfriendly toward her. You certainly don't want to be unjust, Dysart."
John shook his head dolorously over this extension of his moral obligations.
"No," he declared valiantly; "I want to be square with everybody; but I don't want to prejudice Emeline against the professor, and I'm afraid this would. You see, Emeline's this way – well, I don't know as I'd ought to say just how Emeline is, but you know she's an awful good woman!"
John leaned forward and gave the last three words a slow funereal emphasis which threatened his companion's gravity.
"Oh, I know," Palmerston broke out quickly; "Mrs. Dysart's a good woman, and she's a very smart woman, too; she has good ideas."
"Yes, yes; Emeline's smart," John made haste to acquiesce; "she's smart as far as she knows, but when she don't quite understand, then she's prejudiced. I guess women are generally prejudiced about machinery; they can't be expected to see into it: but still, if you think I'd ought to tell her what this Brownell girl says, why, I'm a-going to do it."
John got up with the air of a man harassed but determined, and went out of the tent.
The next afternoon Mrs. Dysart put on her beaded dolman and her best bonnet and panted through the tar-weed to call upon her new neighbor. Palmerston watched the good woman's departure, and awaited her return, taunting himself remorselessly meanwhile for the curiosity which prompted him to place a decoy-chair near his tent door, and exulting shamefacedly at the success of his ruse when she sank into it with the interrogative glance with which fat people always commit themselves to furniture.
"Well, I've been to see her, and I must say, for a girl that's never found grace, she's about the straightforwardest person I ever came across. I know I was prejudiced." Mrs. Dysart took off her bonnet, a sacred edifice constructed of cotton velvet, frowzy feathers, and red glass currants, and gazed at it penitentially. "That father of hers is enough to prejudice a saint. But the girl ain't to blame. I think she must have had a prayin' mother, though she says she doesn't remember anything about her exceptin' her clothes, which does sound worldly."
Mrs. Dysart straightened out the varnished muslin leaves of her horticultural headgear, and held the structure at arm's length with a sigh of gratified sense and troubled spirit.
"I invited her to come to the mothers' meetin' down at Mrs. Stearns's in the wash with me next Thursday afternoon, and I'm goin' to have her over to dinner some day when the old perfessor's off on a tramp. I try to have Christian grace, but I can't quite go him, though I would like to see the girl brought into the fold."
Palmerston remembered the steadfast eyes of the wanderer, and wondered how they had met all this. His companion replaced the bonnet on her head, where it lurched a little, by reason of insufficient skewering, as she got up.
"Then you were pleased with Miss Brownell?" the young man broke out, rather senselessly, he knew – aware, all at once, of a desire to hear more.
Mrs. Dysart did not sit down.
"Yes," she said judicially; "for a girl without any bringin' up, and with no religious inflooences, and no mother and no father to speak of, I think she's full as good as some that's had more chances. I've got to go and start a fire now," she went on, with an air of willingness but inability to continue the subject. "There's Jawn comin' after the milk-pail; I do wish he could be brought to listen to reason."
Palmerston watched the good woman as she labored down the path, her dusty skirts drawn close about her substantial ankles, and the beaded dolman glittering unfeelingly in the sun.
"I hope she has a sense of humor," he said to himself. Then he got up hastily, went into the tent, and brought out a letter, which he read carefully from the beginning to the signature scribbled in the upper corner of the first page – "Your own Bess." After that he sat quite still, letting his glance play with the mists of the valley, until Mrs. Dysart rang the supper-bell.
"If she has a sense of humor, how much she must enjoy her!" he said to himself, with the confusion of pronouns we all allow ourselves and view with such scorn in others.
When a man first awakes to the fact that he is thinking of the wrong woman, it is always with a comfortable sense of certainty that he can change his attitude of mind by a slight effort of the will. If he does not make the effort, it is only because he is long past the necessity of demonstrating himself to himself, and not from any fickleness of fancy on his own part. It was in this comfortable state of certainty that Sidney Palmerston betook himself, a few days later, to the Brownell tent, armed with a photograph which might have been marked "Exhibit A" in the case which he was trying with himself before his own conscience. If there was in his determination to place himself right with Miss Brownell any trace of solicitude for the young woman, to the credit of his modesty be it said, he had not formulated it. Perhaps there was. A belief in the general overripeness of feminine affection, and a discreet avoidance of shaking the tree upon which it grows, have in some way become a part of masculine morals, and Sidney Palmerston was still young enough to take himself seriously.
Miss Brownell had moved a table outside the tent, and was bending over a map fastened to it by thumb-tacks.
"I am trying to find out what my father is doing," she said, looking straight into Palmerston's eyes without a word of greeting. "I suppose you know they are about to begin work on the tunnel."
The young man was beginning to be a trifle tired of the tunnel. "Dysart mentioned it yesterday," he said. "May I sit down, Miss Brownell?"
She gave a little start, and went into the tent for another chair. When she reappeared, Palmerston met her at the tent door and took the camp-chair from her hand.
"I want to sit here," he said willfully, turning his back toward the table. "I don't want to talk about the tunnel; I want to turn the conversation upon agreeable things – myself, for instance."
She frowned upon him smilingly, and put her hand to her cheek with a puzzled gesture.
"Have I talked too much about the tunnel?" she asked. "I thought something might be done to stop it."
Palmerston shook his head. "You have done everything in your power. Dysart has been fairly warned. Besides, who knows?" he added rather flippantly. "They may strike a hundred inches of water, as your father predicts."
"I have not been objecting merely to rid myself of responsibility; I have never felt any. I only wanted – I hoped" – She stopped, aware of the unresponsive chill that always came at mention of her father. "I know he is honest."
"Of course," protested Palmerston, with artificial warmth; "and, really, I think the place for the work is well selected. I am not much of an engineer, but I went up the other day and looked about, and there are certainly indications of water. I" – he stopped suddenly, aware of his mistake.
The girl had not noticed it. "I wish I could make people over," she said, curling her fingers about her thumb, and striking the arm of her chair with the soft side of the resultant fist, after the manner of women.
Her companion laughed.
"Not every person, I hope; not this one, at least." He drew the photograph from his breast pocket and held it toward her. She took it from him, and looked at it absently an instant.
"What a pretty girl!" she said, handing it back to him. "Your sister?"
The young man flushed. "No; my fiancée."
She held out her hand and took the card again, looking at it with fresh eyes.
"A very pretty girl," she said. "What is her name?"
"Elizabeth Arnold."
"Where does she live?"
Palmerston mentioned a village in Michigan. His companion gave another glance at the picture, and laid it upon the arm of the chair. The young man rescued it from her indifference with a little irritable jerk. She was gazing unconsciously toward the horizon.
"Don't you intend to congratulate me?" he inquired with a nettled laugh.
She turned quickly, flushing to her forehead. "Pardon me. I said she was very pretty – I thought young men found that quite sufficient. I have never heard them talk much of girls in any other way. But perhaps I should have told you: I care very little about photographs, especially of women. They never look like them. They always make me think of paper dolls."
She halted between her sentences with an ungirlish embarrassment which Palmerston was beginning to find dangerously attractive.
"But the women themselves – you find them interesting?"
"Oh, yes; some of them. Mrs. Dysart, for instance. As soon as she learned I had no mother, she invited me to a mothers' meeting. I thought that very interesting."
"Very sensible, too. They are mostly childless mothers, and a sprinkling of motherless children will add zest to the assemblage."
They both laughed, and the young man's laugh ended in a cough. The girl glanced uneasily toward the bank of fog that was sweeping across the valley.
"Mr. Palmerston," she said, "the fog is driving in very fast, and it is growing quite damp and chilly. I think you ought to go home. Wait a minute," she added, hurrying into the tent and returning with a soft gray shawl. "I am afraid you will be cold; let me put this about your shoulders."
She threw it around him and pinned it under his chin, standing in front of him with her forehead on a level with his lips.
"Now hurry!"
A man does not submit to the humiliation of having a shawl pinned about his shoulders without questioning his own sanity, and some consciousness of this fact forced itself upon Palmerston as he made his way along the narrow path through the greasewood. He had removed the obnoxious drapery, of course, and was vindicating his masculinity by becoming very cold and damp in the clammy folds of the fog which had overtaken him; but the shawl hung upon his arm and reminded him of many things – not altogether unpleasant things, he would have been obliged to confess if he had not been busy assuring himself that he had no confession to make. He had done his duty, he said to himself; but there was something else which he did not dare to say even to himself – something which made him dissatisfied with his duty now that it was done. Of course he did not expect her to care about his engagement, but she should have been sympathetic; well-bred women were always sympathetic, he argued, arriving at his conclusion by an unanswerable transposition of adjectives. He turned his light coat collar up about his throat, and the shawl on his arm brushed his cheek warmly. No man is altogether colorblind to the danger-signals of his own nature. Did he really want her to care, after all? he asked himself angrily. He might have spared himself the trouble of telling her. She was absorbed in herself, or, what was the same, in that unsavory fraud whom she called father. The young man unfastened the flap of his tent nervously, and took himself in out of the drenching mist, which seemed in some way to have got into his brain. He was angry with himself for his interest in these people, as he styled them in his lofty self-abasement. They were ungrateful, unworthy. His eye fell upon two letters propped up on his table in a manner so conspicuous as to suggest a knowledge of his preoccupation – as if some one were calling him out of his reverie in an offensively loud voice. He turned the address downward, and busied himself in putting to rights the articles which John had piled up to attract his tardy notice. He would read his letters, of course, but not in his present mood: that would be a species of sacrilege, he patronizingly informed his restive conscience.
And he did read them later, after he had carefully folded the gray shawl and placed it out of his range of vision – half a score of closely written pages filled with gentle girlish analysis of the writer's love and its unique manifestations, and ending with a tepid interest in the "queer people" among whom her lover's lot was cast. "It is very hard, my dear," she wrote, "to think of you in that lonely place, cut off from everybody and everything interesting; but we must bear it bravely, since it is to make you strong and well."
Palmerston held the letter in his hand, and looked steadily through the tent window across the sea of fog that had settled over the valley.
"After all, she is not selfish," he reflected; "she has nothing to gain by saving Dysart, except" – he smiled grimly – "her rascally father's good name."
The rains were late, but they came at last, blowing in soft and warm from the southeast, washing the dust from the patient orange-trees and the draggled bananas, and luring countless green things out of the brown mould of the mesa into the winter sun. Birds fledged in the golden drought of summer went mad over the miracles of rain and grass, and riotously announced their discovery of a new heaven and a new earth to their elders. The leafless poinsettia flaunted its scarlet diadem at Palmerston's tent door, a monarch robbed of all but his crown, and the acacias west of the Dysart dooryard burst into sunlit yellow in a night.
The rains had not been sufficient to stop work on the tunnel, and John watched its progress with the feverish eagerness of an inexperienced gambler. Now that it was fairly under way, Brownell seemed to lose interest in the result, and wandered, satchel in hand, over the mountain-side, leaving fragments of his linen duster on the thorny chaparral, and devising new schemes for the enrichment of the valley, to which his daughter listened at night in skeptical silence. Now and then his voice fell from some overhanging crag in a torrent of religious rapture, penetrating the cabin walls and trying Mrs. Dysart's pious soul beyond endurance.
"Now listen to that, Emeline!" said John, exultantly, during one of these vocal inundations. "He's a-singin' the doxology. Now I believe he's a Christian."
Mrs. Dysart averted her face with a sigh of long-suffering patience.
"Singin' is the easiest part of the Christian religion, Jawn. As for that," – she jerked her head toward the source of vocal supply, – "it's soundin' brass; that's what I'd say if I was settin' in judgment, which I thank our heavenly Fawther I'm not."
"Well, there goes Mr. Palmerston and the girl, anyway," said John, with eager irrelevance; "they seem to be gettin' pretty thick."
Mrs. Dysart moved toward the open window with piously restrained curiosity.
"I'm sorry for that girl," she said; "she's got one man more'n she can manage now, without tacklin' another."
"Oh, well, now, Emeline, young folks, will be young folks, you know." There was in John's voice something dangerously near satisfaction with this well-known peculiarity of youth.
"Yes; and they'll be old folks, too, which most of 'em seems to forget," returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after the retreating couple.
Mrs. Dysart was right. Sidney Palmerston and his companion were not thinking of old age that winter day. The mesa stretched a mass of purple lupine at their feet. There was the odor of spring, the warmth of summer, the languor of autumn, in the air. As they neared the cañon the path grew narrow, and the girl walked ahead, turning now and then, and blocking the way, in the earnestness of her speech. They had long since ceased to talk of the tunnel; Sidney had ceased even to think of it. For weeks he had hardly dared to think at all. There had been at first the keen sense of disappointment in himself which comes to every confident soul as it learns the limitations of its own will; then the determination, so easy to youth's foreshortening view, to keep the letter of his promise and bury the spirit out of his own sight and the sight of the world forever; then the self-pity and the pleading with fate for a little happiness as an advance deposit on the promise of lifelong self-sacrifice; then the perfumed days when thought was lulled and duty became a memory and a hope. Strangely enough, it was always duty, this unholy thing which he meant to do – this payment of a debt in base metal, when the pure gold of love had been promised. But ethics counted for little to-day as he followed a figure clad in blue serge down the path that led from the edge of the cañon to the bed of the stream. Budding willows made a green mist in the depths below them, and the sweet, tarry odors of the upland blew across the tops of the sycamores in the cañon and mingled with the smell of damp leaf-mould and the freshness of growing things.
The girl paused and peered down into the cañon inquiringly.
"Do you think of leaping?" asked Palmerston.
She smiled seriously, still looking down. "No; I was wondering if the rainfall had been as light in the mountains as it has been in the valley, and how the water-supply will hold out through the summer if we have no more."
Palmerston laughed. "Do you always think of practical things?" he asked.
She turned and confronted him with a half-defiant, half-whimsical smile.
"I do not think much about what I think," she said; "I am too busy thinking."
As she spoke she took a step backward and tripped upon some obstacle in the path.
Palmerston sprang forward and caught her upraised arm with both hands.
"I – I – love you!" he said eagerly, tightening his grasp, and then loosening it, and falling back with the startled air of one who hears a voice when he thinks himself alone.
The young woman let her arm fall at her side, and stood still an instant, looking at him with untranslatable eyes.
"You love me?" she repeated with slow questioning. "How can you?"
Palmerston smiled rather miserably. "Far more easily than I can explain why I have told you," he answered.
"If it is true, why should you not tell me?" she asked, still looking at him steadily.
Evasion seemed a drapery of lies before her gaze. Palmerston spoke the naked truth:
"Because I cannot ask you to love me in return – because I have promised to marry another woman, and I must keep my promise."
He made the last avowal with the bitter triumph of one who chooses death where he might easily have chosen dishonor.
His listener turned away a little, and looked through the green haze of the cañon at the snow of San Antonio.
"You say that you love me, and yet you intend to marry this other girl, who loves you, and live a lie?" she asked without looking at him.
"My God! but you make it hard!" groaned Palmerston.
She faced about haughtily.
"I make it hard!" she exclaimed. "I have been afraid of you – not for myself, but for – for others, about something in which one might be mistaken. And you come to me and tell me this! You would cheat a woman out of her life, a girl who loves you – who promised to marry you because you told her you loved her; who no doubt learned to love you because of your love for her. And this is what men call honor! Do you know what I intend to do? I intend to write to this girl and tell her what you have told me. Then she may marry you if she wishes. But she shall know. You shall not feed her on husks all her life, if I can help it. And because I intend to do this, even if – even if I loved you, I could never see you again!"
Palmerston knew that he stood aside to let her pass and walk rapidly out of the cañon.
The call of insects and the twitter of linnets seemed to deepen into a roar. A faint "halloo" came from far up the mountain-side, and in the distance men's voices rang across the cañon.
A workman came running down the path, almost stumbling over Palmerston in his haste.
"Where's the old man – where's Dysart?" he panted, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. "We've struck a flow that's washing us into the middle of next week. The old professor made a blamed good guess this time, sure."