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

the gale, with fluttering skirt and flying tresses. Then the vault behind her cracked with three jagged burning fissures, a weird flame leaped upon the sand, there was a cry of terror from the grotto, echoed by a scream of nurses on the cliff, a deluge of rain, a terrific onset from the gale—and—Sarah Walker was gone? Nothing of the kind! When I reached the ledge, after a severe struggle with the storm, I found Sarah on the leeward side, drenched but delighted. I held her tightly, while we waited for a lull to regain the cliff, and took advantage of the sympathetic situation.

“But you know you WERE frightened, Sarah,” I whispered; “you thought of what happened to poor Kribbles.”

“Do you know who Kribbles was?” she asked confidentially.

“No.”

“Well,” she whispered, “I made Kribbles up. And the hidgeous storm and thunderbolt—and the burning! All out of my own head.”

The only immediate effect of this escapade was apparently to precipitate and bring into notoriety the growing affection of an obscure lover of Sarah Walker’s, hitherto unsuspected. He was a mild inoffensive boy of twelve, known as “Warts,” solely from an inordinate exhibition of these youthful excrescences. On the day of Sarah Walker’s adventure his passion culminated in a sudden and illogical attack upon Sarah’s nurse and parents while they were bewailing her conduct, and in assaulting them with his feet and hands. Whether he associated them in some vague way with the cause of her momentary peril, or whether he only wished to impress her with the touching flattery of a general imitation of her style, I cannot say. For his lovemaking was peculiar. A day or two afterwards he came to my open door and remained for some moments bashfully looking at me. The next day I found him standing by my chair in the piazza with an embarrassed air and in utter inability to explain his conduct. At the end of a rapid walk on the sand one morning, I was startled by the sound of hurried breath, and looking around, discovered the staggering Warts quite exhausted by endeavoring to keep up with me on his short legs. At last the daily recurrence of his haunting presence forced a dreadful suspicion upon me. Warts was courting ME for Sarah Walker! Yet it was impossible to actually connect her with these mute attentions. “You want me to give them to Sarah Walker,” I said cheerfully one afternoon, as he laid upon my desk some peculiarly uninviting crustacea which looked not unlike a few detached excrescences from his own hands. He shook his head decidedly. “I understand,” I continued, confidently; “you want me to keep them for her.” “No,” said Warts, doggedly. “Then you only want me to tell her how nice they are?” The idea was apparently so shamelessly true that he blushed himself hastily into the passage, and ceased any future contribution. Naturally still more ineffective was the slightest attempt to bring his devotion into the physical presence of Sarah Walker. The most ingenious schemes to lure him into my room while she was there failed utterly. Yet he must have at one time basked in her baleful presence. “Do you like Warts?” I asked her one day bluntly. “Yes,” said Sarah Walker with cheerful directness; “ain’t HE got a lot of ‘em?—though he used to have more. But,” she added reflectively, “do you know the little Ilsey boy?” I was compelled to admit my ignorance. “Well!” she said with a reminiscent sigh of satisfaction, “HE’S got only two toes on his left foot—showed ‘em to me. And he was born so.” Need it be said that in these few words I read the dismal sequel of Warts’ unfortunate attachment? His accidental eccentricity was no longer attractive. What were his evanescent accretions, subject to improvement or removal, beside the hereditary and settled malformations of his rival?

Once only, in this brief summer episode, did Sarah Walker attract the impulsive and general sympathy of Greyport. It is only just to her consistency to say it was through no fault of hers, unless a characteristic exposure which brought on a chill and diphtheria could be called her own act. Howbeit, towards the close of the season, when a sudden suggestion of the coming autumn had crept, one knew not how, into the heart of a perfect day; when even a return of the summer warmth had a suspicion of hectic,—on one of these days Sarah Walker was missed with the bees and the butterflies. For two days her voice had not been heard in hall or corridor, nor had the sunshine of her French marigold head lit up her familiar places. The two days were days of relief, yet mitigated with a certain uneasy apprehension of the return of Sarah Walker, or—more alarming thought!—the Sarah Walker element in a more appalling form. So strong was this impression that an unhappy infant who unwittingly broke this interval with his maiden outcry was nearly lynched. “We’re not going to stand that from YOU, you know,” was the crystallized sentiment of a brutal bachelor. In fact, it began to be admitted that Greyport had been accustomed to Sarah Walker’s ways. In the midst of this, it was suddenly whispered that Sarah Walker was lying dangerously ill, and was not expected to live.

Then occurred one of those strange revulsions of human sentiment which at first seem to point the dawning of a millennium of poetic justice, but which, in this case, ended in merely stirring the languid pulses of society into a hectic fever, and in making sympathy for Sarah Walker an insincere and exaggerated fashion. Morning and afternoon visits to her apartment, with extravagant offerings, were de rigueur; bulletins were issued three times a day; an allusion to her condition was the recognized preliminary to all conversation; advice, suggestions, and petitions to restore the baleful existence, flowed readily from the same facile invention that had once proposed its banishment; until one afternoon the shadow had drawn so close that even Folly withheld its careless feet before it, and laid down its feeble tinkling bells and gaudy cap tremblingly on the threshold. But the sequel must be told in more vivid words than mine.

“Whin I saw that angel lyin’ there,” said Sarah Walker’s nurse, “as white, if ye plaze, as if the whole blessed blood of her body had gone to make up the beautiful glory of her hair; speechless as she was, I thought I saw a sort of longin’ in her eyes.

“‘Is it anythin’ you’ll be wantin’, Sarah darlint’, sez her mother with a thremblin’ voice, ‘afore it’s lavin’ us ye are? Is it the ministher yer askin’ for, love?’ sez she.

“And Sarah looked at me, and if it was the last words I spake, her lips moved and she whispered ‘Scotty.’

“‘Wirra! wirra!’ sez the mother, ‘it’s wanderin’ she is, the darlin’;’ for Scotty, don’t ye see, was the grand barkeeper of the hotel.

“‘Savin’ yer presence, ma’am,’ sez I, ‘and the child’s here, ez is half a saint already, it’s thruth she’s spakin’—it’s Scotty she wants.’ And with that my angel blinks wid her black eyes ‘yes.’

“‘Bring him,’ says the docthor, ‘at once.’

“And they bring him in wid all the mustachios and moighty fine curls of him, and his diamonds, rings, and pins all a-glistening just like his eyes when he set ‘em on that suffering saint.

“‘Is it anythin’ you’re wantin,’ Sarah dear?’ sez he, thryin’ to spake firm. And Sarah looks at him, and then looks at a tumbler on the table.

“‘Is it a bit of a cocktail, the likes of the one I made for ye last Sunday unbeknownst?’ sez he, looking round mortal afraid of the parents. And Sarah Walker’s eyes said, ‘It is.’ Then the ministher groaned, but the docthor jumps to his feet.

“‘Bring it,’ sez he, ‘and howld your jaw, an ye’s a Christian sowl.’ And he brought it. An’ afther the first sip, the child lifts herself up on one arm, and sez, with a swate smile and a toss of the glass:

“‘I looks towards you, Scotty,’ sez she.

“‘I observes you and bows, miss,’ sez he, makin’ as if he was dhrinkin’ wid her.

“‘Here’s another nail in yer coffin, old man,’ sez she winkin’.

“‘And here’s the hair all off your head, miss,’ sez he quite aisily, tossin’ back the joke betwixt ‘em.

“And with that she dhrinks it off, and lies down and goes to sleep like a lamb, and wakes up wid de rosy dawn in her cheeks, and the morthal seekness gone forever.”

 

… … …

 

Thus Sarah Walker recovered. Whether the fact were essential to the moral conveyed in these pages, I leave the reader to judge.

I was leaning on the terrace of the Kronprinzen-Hof at Rolandseck one hot summer afternoon, lazily watching the groups of tourists strolling along the road that ran between the Hof and the Rhine. There was certainly little in the place or its atmosphere to recall the Greyport episode of twenty years before, when I was suddenly startled by hearing the name of “Sarah Walker.”

In the road below me were three figures,—a lady, a gentleman, and a little girl. As the latter turned towards the lady who addressed her, I recognized the unmistakable copper-colored tresses, trim figure, delicate complexion, and refined features of the friend of my youth! I seized my hat, but by the time I had reached the road, they had disappeared.

The utter impossibility of its being Sarah Walker herself, and the glaring fact that the very coincidence of name would be inconsistent with any conventional descent from the original Sarah, I admit confused me. But I examined the book of the Kronprinzen-Hof and the other hotels, and questioned my portier. There was no “Mees” nor “Madame Walkiere” extant in Rolandseck. Yet might not Monsieur have heard incorrectly? The Czara Walka was evidently Russian, and Rolandseck was a resort for Russian princes. But pardon! Did Monsieur really mean the young demoiselle now approaching? Ah! that was a different affair. She was the daughter of the Italian Prince and Princess Monte Castello staying here. The lady with her was not the Princess, but a foreign friend. The gentleman was the Prince. Would he present Monsieur’s card?

They were entering the hotel. The Prince was a little, inoffensive-looking man, the lady an evident countrywoman of my own, and the child—was, yet was NOT, Sarah! There was the face, the outline, the figure—but the life, the verve, the audacity, was wanting! I could contain myself no longer.

“Pardon an inquisitive compatriot, madam,” I said; “but I heard you a few moments ago address this young lady by the name of a very dear young friend, whom I knew twenty years ago—Sarah Walker. Am I right?”

The Prince stopped and gazed at us both with evident affright; then suddenly recognizing in my freedom some wild American indecorum, doubtless provoked by the presence of another of my species, which he really was not expected to countenance, retreated behind the portier. The circumstance by no means increased the good-will of the lady, as she replied somewhat haughtily:—

“The Principessina is named Sarah Walker, after her mother’s maiden name.”

“Then this IS Sarah Walker’s daughter!” I said joyfully.

“She is the daughter of the Prince and Princess of Monte Castello,” corrected the lady frigidly.

“I had the pleasure of knowing her mother very well.” I stopped and blushed. Did I really know Sarah Walker very well? And would Sarah Walker know me now? Or would it not be very like her to go back on me? There was certainly anything but promise in the feeble-minded, vacuous copy of Sarah before me. I was yet hesitating, when the Prince, who had possibly received some quieting assurance from the portier, himself stepped forward, stammered that the Princess would, without doubt, be charmed