The Essential Elinor Glyn Collection. Glyn Elinor

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ not touchy. He can see his own nation's faults as well as ours, and his first thought is to appreciate the good qualities.

      He says there is a very grave danger to the country in the liberty of the press, which has a most debasing influence by printing all the sensational news, and encouraging the interest in these things in the youthful mind. It must bring a paltry taint into the glorious freedom of the true American spirit, but that will right itself. He says: "They are too darned sane to suffer a scourge when once they begin to see its fruits." And while the rest were in the observation car after tea he talked to me of happiness. Happiness, he said, was the main and chief object in life, and yet nine-tenths of the people of the world throw it away for such imitation pleasure; and you can't often catch it again once you have lost it.

      I asked him what the greatest was, and he said perfect happiness was to be close to the woman you loved. If that was impossible there were several substitutes of a secondary sort--your children, ambition, success, and even rest. Then his eyes grew all misty and sad, and he looked out on the desert, and at that moment we were passing a group of a few shanties close to the rails. They were tumbled down and deserted, and nearby lay the skeleton of a horse. "It was in just such a place as that, only a good bit farther west, I first saw my Hearts-ease," he said. "The boys called her 'Hearts-ease' because she was the sweetest English flower, drifted out to the mines with the people who had adopted her." He paused, and I slipped my hand into his, he looked so sad, and then he told me all the story, Mamma, and it has touched me so, I tell it to you.

      He had gone to this small rough camp, about thirty miles short of the Great Eagles, with only ten cents in his pocket, from the ranch where he had been a cowboy. He had ridden for days, and there his horse had died. He crept up half dead, carrying his saddle bags, and these people, "human devils," he called them, who owned Hearts-ease, let him come in and lie in a shed. They kept a sort of a gambling den, all of the most primitive, and the worst rogues of the world congregated there in the evenings.

      Hearts-ease was about sixteen, and they looked upon her as a promising decoy-duck, but she was "just the purest flower of the prairies," he said, and so they beat and starved her in consequence, for not falling in with their views.

      That night when he lay in the straw, she crept out of some corner where she slept, and warned him not to remain, if he had gold in the bags, or they would certainly murder him before morning; and she gave him some water, and half her wretched supper, because he had been too tired to eat when he arrived. Then he told her he was only a poor cowboy, hoping to get on to the Great Eagles Camp and make his fortune; and they stayed there talking till dawn, and she bathed his poor feet, all bleeding from his long tramp, and must have been too sweet and adorable, Mamma. And when the morning came and her adopted parents found he was still there and had only ten cents to pay with, they tried to make him leave, and beat Hearts-ease before his eyes, which made him so mad he got out his gun (that means revolver) and would have shot the man, only Hearts-ease clung to him, and begged him not to. Then they called in some more brutes, who had been drinking and gambling all night in the bar, and overpowered him, and threw him out, and the girl, too, and said he might take her to hell with him, they would shelter her no more. And one of the brutes said he would fight him for her, and they made a ring and the brute tried to get his pistol off first; but it hit another man, and before he could shoot again, the Senator fired and wounded him in the side; and as he fell, and the others, angry at his hitting one of them, all began to quarrel together, the Senator and the girl slipped away, and ran and hid in the scrub. If you could have heard him telling all this, Mamma, in the dying light, his strong face and quiet voice so impressive! I shall never forget it. Well, the girl had brought some bread in a handkerchief, which he had not eaten, and they shared that together, and when it was dark they slept under the stars; and "by then I'd just grown to love her," he said, and "we were quite content to die together if we couldn't push on to the big camp; but we meant to make an almighty try."

      They did get there, finally, and the sheriff married them, and here his voice broke a little and was so low I could hardly hear him. There were no two people ever so happy, he said. He built a little shack of boards not twelve feet long, "way up on the mountain," and she kept it like a new pin, and was dainty and sweet and loving, and when he came in from the mines she would run to meet him "as gentle as a fawn," and he never wanted to go to the saloons or drink like the other men, "though I was always pretty handy with my gun," he said, "and had been through the whole ugly show."

      And presently he began to make a little money and would contrive to give her small things for the house; it gave her more pleasure than anything in the world to make it pretty, so that the little shed was the admiration of all the other miners' wives. And once he was able to buy some flower seeds, and she grew a pansy in a pot because there is no green thing in that barren land, and she tended it and watched it as it came through the earth, and no one was so joyous as she. "It hurts me to look at pansies even now," he said; and I was glad, Mamma, it was getting dark, because I felt the tears coming in my eyes. They were perfectly happy like this for about three years, and then Lola was born and they were happier still; but before that she used to take him up on the mountains, above their shack, to look down at the camps, and watch the stars, and she always used to see things in the future--how they would be very rich, and he would be a great man. "And this is where blood tells," he said. "She was nothing but the love-child of some young English lord, drifted out to our land with her servant-girl mother. And she'd spent all her life in gambling hells among rogues, but her soul was the daintiest lady angel that ever walked this earth, though she could hardly read or write, and all the stars were her friends, and even a rattlesnake wouldn't have wounded her." Mustn't she have been a darling, Mamma? She had hair like gold, and little ears, pink as sea shells, and big blue eyes and a flower for a mouth. No wonder he loved her so. He said her baby was even more pleasure to her than the pansy had been, and they both were "just kind of foolish over it." Well, when Lola was about three months old a gang of desperadoes came to the camp, and among them the man the Senator had wounded for his wife. Before the Senator came in from the mine Hearts-ease heard the other miners' wives talking of this, and how this man had boasted he would kill him. She knew her husband was unarmed, having left his gun behind him that day because his second one was broken, and he would not leave her with none in the shack; quite unsuspiciously he returned with his comrades, and went into a bar to have a drink on his way back, as he often did to hear the news of the day. And when Hearts-ease could not find him on the road, she ran down there, carrying the gun and the baby, to warn him and give him his weapon, and got into the saloon just as the desperado and his following entered by another door.

      The enemy called out to the Senator that he meant to "do for him this time," and as Hearts-ease rushed up to her husband with no fear for herself, holding out the gun, the brute fired and shot her through the heart, and she fell forward with Lola, dead in the Senator's arms. "And then the heavens turned to blood," he said, "and I took the gun out of her dead clasp and killed him like a dog." But by this time, Mamma, I really was crying so I could hardly hear what he said. No wonder his eyes have a sad look sometimes, or his hair is gray.

      We neither of us spoke for a while. I could only press his strong kind hand. Then he recovered his voice, and went on as if dreaming: "It all came true what she prophesied. I am rich beyond her uttermost fancyings, and I've sampled pretty well most all the world, but I've always tried to do the things she would have liked me to do. I guess you've wondered at my dandy clothes, and shiny finger nails. Well, it's just to please her--if she's looking on." Wasn't he a man worth loving, Mamma! And of course she did not mind dying for him, and how happy and glad she must be now, if she is "looking on." Somehow the whole story has made me so long for Harry, that I have been perfectly miserable all the evening, and if you think you could cable to him and tell him to come back I think perhaps you might, and I will say I am sorry.

      Your affectionate daughter,

      ELIZABETH.

      SAN FRANCISCO.

      San СКАЧАТЬ