By Shore and Sedge - Bret Harte (recommended ebook reader .txt) 📗

you for your style—for yourself. And I want you to accept. You could keep these rooms till they got a house ready for you. Together— you and me—we’d make that organ howl. But because I like it— because it’s everything to us—and nothing to you, it don’t seem square for me to ask it. Does it?”

Gideon replied by taking Hamlin’s hand. His face was perfectly pale, but his look collected. He had not expected this offer, and yet when it was made he felt as if he had known it before—as if he had been warned of it—as if it was the great temptation of his life. Watching him with an earnestness only slightly overlaid by his usual manner, Hamlin went on.

“I know it would be lonely here, and a man like you ought to have a wife for—” he slightly lifted his eyebrows—“for example’s sake. I heard there was a young lady in the case over there in Tasajara— but the old people didn’t see it on account of your position. They’d jump at it now. Eh? No? Well,” continued Jack, with a decent attempt to conceal his cynical relief, “perhaps those boys have been so eager to find out all they could do for you that they’ve been sold. Perhaps we’re making equal fools of ourselves now in asking you to stay. But don’t say no just yet—take a day or a week to think of it.”

Gideon still pale but calm, cast his eyes around the elegant room, at the magic organ, then upon the slight handsome figure before him. “I WILL think of it,” he said, in a low voice, as he pressed Jack’s hand. “And if I accept you will find me here tomorrow afternoon at this time; if I do not you will know that I keep with me wherever I go the kindness, the brotherly love, and the grace of God that prompts your offer, even though He withholds from me His blessed light, which alone can make me know His wish.” He stopped and hesitated. “If you love me, Jack, don’t ask me to stay, but pray for that light which alone can guide my feet back to you, or take me hence for ever.”

He once more tightly pressed the hand of the embarrassed man before him and was gone.

Passers-by on the Martinez road that night remembered a mute and ghostly rider who, heedless of hail or greeting, moved by them as in a trance or vision. But the Widow Hiler the next morning, coming from the spring, found no abstraction or preoccupation in the soft eyes of Gideon Deane as he suddenly appeared before her, and gently relieved her of the bucket she was carrying. A quick flash of color over her brow and cheekbone, as if a hot iron had passed there, and a certain astringent coyness, would have embarrassed any other man than him.

“Sho, it’s YOU. I reck’ned I’d seen the last of you.”

“You don’t mean that, Sister Hiler?” said Gideon, with a gentle smile.

“Well, what with the report of your goin’s on at Martinez and improvin’ the occasion of that sinner’s death, and leadin’ a revival, I reckoned you’ld hev forgotten low folks at Tasajara. And if your goin’ to be settled there in a new church, with new hearers, I reckon you’ll want new surroundings too. Things change and young folks change with ‘em.”

They had reached the house. Her breath was quick and short as if she and not Gideon had borne the burden. He placed the bucket in its accustomed place, and then gently took her hand in his. The act precipitated the last drop of feeble coquetry she had retained, and the old tears took its place. Let us hope for the last time. For as Gideon stooped and lifted her ailing babe in his strong arms, he said softly, “Whatever God has wrought for me since we parted, I know now He has called me to but one work.”

“And that work?” she asked, tremulously.

“To watch over the widow and fatherless. And with God’s blessing, sister, and His holy ordinance, I am here to stay.”

SARAH WALKER

It was very hot. Not a breath of air was stirring throughout the western wing of the Greyport Hotel, and the usual feverish life of its four hundred inmates had succumbed to the weather. The great veranda was deserted; the corridors were desolated; no footfall echoed in the passages; the lazy rustle of a wandering skirt, or a passing sigh that was half a pant, seemed to intensify the heated silence. An intoxicated bee, disgracefully unsteady in wing and leg, who had been holding an inebriated conversation with himself in the corner of my window pane, had gone to sleep at last and was snoring. The errant prince might have entered the slumberous halls unchallenged, and walked into any of the darkened rooms whose open doors gaped for more air, without awakening the veriest Greyport flirt with his salutation. At times a drowsy voice, a lazily interjected sentence, an incoherent protest, a long-drawn phrase of saccharine tenuity suddenly broke off with a gasp, came vaguely to the ear, as if indicating a half-suspended, half-articulated existence somewhere, but not definite enough to indicate conversation. In the midst of this, there was the sudden crying of a child.

I looked up from my work. Through the camera of my jealously guarded window I could catch a glimpse of the vivid, quivering blue of the sky, the glittering intensity of the ocean, the long motionless leaves of the horse-chestnut in the road,—all utterly inconsistent with anything as active as this lamentation. I stepped to the open door and into the silent hall.

Apparently the noise had attracted the equal attention of my neighbors. A vague chorus of “Sarah Walker,” in querulous recognition, of “O Lord! that child again!” in hopeless protest, rose faintly from the different rooms. As the lamentations seemed to approach nearer, the visitors’ doors were successively shut, swift footsteps hurried along the hall; past my open door came a momentary vision of a heated nursemaid carrying a tumultuous chaos of frilled skirts, flying sash, rebellious slippers, and tossing curls; there was a moment’s rallying struggle before the room nearly opposite mine, and then a door opened and shut upon the vision. It was Sarah Walker!

Everybody knew her; few had ever seen more of her than this passing vision. In the great hall, in the dining-room, in the vast parlors, in the garden, in the avenue, on the beach, a sound of lamentation had always been followed by this same brief apparition. Was there a sudden pause among the dancers and a subjugation of the loudest bassoons in the early evening “hop,” the explanation was given in the words “Sarah Walker.” Was there a wild confusion among the morning bathers on the sands, people whispered “Sarah Walker.” A panic among the waiters at dinner, an interruption in the Sunday sacred concert, a disorganization of the after-dinner promenade on the veranda, was instantly referred to Sarah Walker. Nor were her efforts confined entirely to public life. In cozy corners and darkened recesses, bearded lips withheld the amorous declaration to mutter “Sarah Walker” between their clenched teeth; coy and bashful tongues found speech at last in the rapid formulation of “Sarah Walker.” Nobody ever thought of abbreviating her full name. The two people in the hotel, otherwise individualized, but known only as “Sarah Walker’s father” and “Sarah Walker’s mother,” and never as Mr. and Mrs. Walker, addressed her only as “Sarah Walker”; two animals that were occasionally a part of this passing pageant were known as “Sarah Walker’s dog” and “Sarah Walker’s cat,” and later it was my proud privilege to sink my own individuality under the title of “that friend of Sarah Walker’s.”

It must not be supposed that she had attained this baleful eminence without some active criticism. Every parent in the Greyport Hotel had held his or her theory of the particular defects of Sarah Walker’s education; every virgin and bachelor had openly expressed views of the peculiar discipline that was necessary to her subjugation. It may be roughly estimated that she would have spent the entire nine years of her active life in a dark cupboard on an exclusive diet of bread and water, had this discipline obtained; while, on the other hand, had the educational theories of the parental assembly prevailed, she would have ere this shone an etherealized essence in the angelic host. In either event she would have “ceased from troubling,” which was the general Greyport idea of higher education. A paper read before our Literary Society on “Sarah Walker and other infantile diseases,” was referred to in the catalogue as “Walker, Sarah, Prevention and Cure,” while the usual burlesque legislation of our summer season culminated in the Act entitled “An Act to amend an Act entitled an Act for the abatement of Sarah Walker.” As she was hereafter exclusively to be fed “on the PROVISIONS of this Act,” some idea of its general tone may be gathered. It was a singular fact in this point of her history that her natural progenitors not only offered no resistance to the doubtful celebrity of their offspring, but, by hopelessly accepting the situation, to some extent POSED as Sarah Walker’s victims. Mr. and Mrs. Walker were known to be rich, respectable, and indulgent to their only child. They themselves had been evolved from a previous generation of promiscuously acquired wealth into the repose of inherited property, but it was currently accepted that Sarah had “cast back” and reincarnated some waif on the deck of an emigrant ship at the beginning of the century.

Such was the child separated from me by this portentous history, a narrow passage, and a closed nursery door. Presently, however, the door was partly opened again as if to admit the air. The crying had ceased, but in its place the monotonous Voice of Conscience, for the moment personated by Sarah Walker’s nursemaid, kept alive a drowsy recollection of Sarah Walker’s transgressions.

“You see,” said the Voice, “what a dreadful thing it is for a little girl to go on as you do. I am astonished at you, Sarah Walker. So is everybody; so is the good ladies next door; so is the kind gentleman opposite; so is all! Where you expect to go to, ‘Evin only knows! How you expect to be forgiven, saints alone can tell! But so it is always, and yet you keep it up. And wouldn’t you like it different, Sarah Walker? Wouldn’t you like to have everybody love you? Wouldn’t you like them good ladies next door, and that nice gentleman opposite, all to kinder rise up and say, ‘Oh, what a dear good little girl Sarah Walker is?’” The interpolation of a smacking sound of lips, as if in unctuous anticipation of Sarah Walker’s virtue, here ensued—“Oh, what a dear, good, sw-e-et, lovely little girl Sarah Walker is!”

There was a dead silence. It may have been fancy, but I thought that some of the doors in the passage creaked softly as if in listening expectation. Then the silence was broken by a sigh. Had Sarah Walker ingloriously succumbed? Rash and impotent conclusion!

“I don’t,” said Sarah Walker’s voice, slowly rising until it broke on the crest of a mountainous sob, “I—don’t—want—‘em—to—love me. I—don’t want—‘em—to say—what a—dear—good—little girl— Sarah Walker is!” She caught her breath. “I—want—‘em—to say— what a naughty—bad—dirty—horrid—filthy—little girl Sarah Walker is—so I do. There!”

The doors slammed all along the passages. The dreadful issue was joined. I softly crossed the hall and looked into Sarah Walker’s room.

The light from a half-opened shutter fell full upon her rebellious little figure. She had stiffened herself in a large easy-chair into the attitude in which she had been evidently deposited there by the nurse whose torn-off apron she still held rigidly in