A Sappho of Green Springs

“Those,” said the major, poetically, “are the veins and arteries of the ranch. Come with me now, and I’ll show you its pulsating heart.” Descending from the wagon into pedestrian prose again, he led Rose a hundred yards further to a shed that covered a wonderful artesian well. In the centre of a basin a column of water rose regularly with the even flow and volume of a brook. “It is one of the largest in the State,” said the major, “and is the life of all that grows here during six months of the year.”

Pleased as the young girl was with those evidences of the prosperity and position of her host, she was struck, however, with the fact that the farm-laborers, wine-growers, nurserymen, and all field hands scattered on the vast estate were apparently of the same independent, unpastoral, and unprofessional character as the men of the wheat-field. There were no cottages or farm buildings that she could see, nor any apparent connection between the household and the estate; far from suggesting tenantry or retainers, the men who were working in the fields glanced at them as they passed with the indifference of strangers, or replied to the major’s greetings or questionings with perfect equality of manner, or even businesslike reserve and caution. Her host explained that the ranch was worked by a company “on shares;” that those laborers were, in fact, the bulk of the company; and that he, the major, only furnished the land, the seed, and the implements. “That man who was driving the long roller, and with whom you were indignant because he wouldn’t get out of our way, is the president of the company.”

“That needn’t make him so uncivil,” said Rose, poutingly, “for if it comes to that you’re the LANDLORD,” she added triumphantly.

“No,” said the major, good-humoredly. “I am simply the man driving the lighter and more easily-managed team for pleasure, and he’s the man driving the heavier and more difficult machine for work. It’s for me to get out of his way; and looked at in the light of my being THE LANDLORD it is still worse, for as we’re working ‘on shares’ I’m interrupting HIS work, and reducing HIS profits merely because I choose to sacrifice my own.”

I need not say that those atrociously leveling sentiments were received by the young ladies with that feminine scorn which is only qualified by misconception. Rose, who, under the influence of her hostess, had a vague impression that they sounded something like the French Revolution, and that Adele must feel like the Princess Elizabeth, rushed to her relief like a good girl. “But, major, now, YOU’RE a gentleman, and if YOU had been driving that roller, you know you would have turned out for us.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the major, mischievously; “but if I had, I should have known that the other fellow who accepted it wasn’t a gentleman.”

But Rose, having sufficiently shown her partisanship in the discussion, after the feminine fashion, did not care particularly for the logical result. After a moment’s silence she resumed: “And the wheat ranch below—is that carried on in the same way?”

“Yes. But their landlord is a bank, who advances not only the land, but the money to work it, and doesn’t ride around in a buggy with a couple of charmingly distracting young ladies.”

“And do they all share alike?” continued Rose, ignoring the pleasantry, “big and little—that young inventor with the rest?”

She stopped. She felt the ingenue’s usually complacent eyes suddenly fixed upon her with an unhallowed precocity, and as quickly withdrawn. Without knowing why, she felt embarrassed, and changed the subject.

The next day they drove to the Convent of Santa Clara and the Mission College of San Jose. Their welcome at both places seemed to Rose to be a mingling of caste greeting and spiritual zeal, and the austere seclusion and reserve of those cloisters repeated that suggestion of an Old World civilization that had already fascinated the young Western girl. They made other excursions in the vicinity, but did not extend it to a visit to their few neighbors. With their reserved and exclusive ideas this fact did not strike Rose as peculiar, but on a later shopping expedition to the town of San Jose, a certain reticence and aggressive sensitiveness on the part of the shopkeepers and tradespeople towards the Randolphs produced an unpleasant impression on her mind. She could not help noticing, too, that after the first stare of astonishment which greeted her appearance with her hostess, she herself was included in the antagonism. With her youthful prepossession for her friends, this distinction she regarded as flattering and aristocratic, and I fear she accented it still more by discussing with Mrs. Randolph the merits of the shopkeepers’ wares in schoolgirl French before them. She was unfortunate enough, however, to do this in the shop of a polyglot German.

“Oxcoos me, mees,” he said gravely,—“but dot lady speeks Engeleesh so goot mit yourselluf, and ven you dells to her dot silk is hallf gotton in English, she onderstand you mooch better, and it don’t make nodings to me.” The laugh which would have followed from her own countrywomen did not, however, break upon the trained faces of the “de Fontanges l’Hommadieus,” yet while Rose would have joined in it, albeit a little ruefully, she felt for the first time mortified at their civil insincerity.

At the end of two weeks, Major Randolph received a letter from Mr. Mallory. When he had read it, he turned to his wife: “He thanks you,” he said, “for your kindness to his daughter, and explains that his sudden departure was owing to the necessity of his taking advantage of a great opportunity for speculation that had offered.” As Mrs. Randolph turned away with a slight shrug of the shoulders, the major continued: “But you haven’t heard all! That opportunity was the securing of a half interest in a cinnabar lode in Sonora, which has already gone up a hundred thousand dollars in his hands! By Jove! a man can afford to drop a little social ceremony on those terms—eh, Josephine?” he concluded with a triumphant chuckle.

“He’s as likely to lose his hundred thousand to-morrow, while his manners will remain,” said Mrs. Randolph. “I’ve no faith in these sudden California fortunes!”

“You’re wrong as regards Mallory, for he’s as careful as he is lucky. He don’t throw money away for appearance sake, or he’d have a rich home for that daughter. He could afford it.”

Mrs. Randolph was silent. “She is his only daughter, I believe,” she continued presently.

“Yes—he has no other kith or kin,” returned the major.

“She seems to be very much impressed by Emile,” said Mrs. Randolph.

Major Randolph faced his wife quickly.

“In the name of all that’s ridiculous, my dear, you are not already thinking of”—he gasped.

“I should be very loth to give MY sanction to anything of the kind, knowing the difference of her birth, education, and religion,—although the latter I believe she would readily change,” said Mrs. Randolph, severely. “But when you speak of MY already thinking of ‘such things,’ do you suppose that your friend, Mr. Mallory, didn’t consider all that when he sent that girl here?”

“Never,” said the major, vehemently, “and if it entered his head now, by Jove, he’d take her away to-morrow—always supposing I didn’t anticipate him by sending her off myself.”

Mrs. Randolph uttered her mirthless laugh. “And you suppose the girl would go? Really, major, you don’t seem to understand this boasted liberty of your own countrywoman. What does she care for her father’s control? Why, she’d make him do just what SHE wanted. But,” she added with an expression of dignity, “perhaps we had better not discuss this until we know something of Emile’s feelings in the matter. That is the only question that concerns us.” With this she swept out of the room, leaving the major at first speechless with honest indignation, and then after the fashion of all guileless natures, a little uneasy and suspicious of his own guilelessness. For a day or two after, he found himself, not without a sensation of meanness, watching Rose when in Emile’s presence, but he could distinguish nothing more than the frank satisfaction she showed equally to the others. Yet he found himself regretting even that, so subtle was the contagion of his wife’s suspicions.

CHAPTER III

It had been a warm morning; an unusual mist, which the sun had not dissipated, had crept on from the great grain-fields beyond, and hung around the house charged with a dry, dusty closeness that seemed to be quite independent of the sun’s rays, and more like a heated exhalation or emanation of the soil itself. In its acrid irritation Rose thought she could detect the breath of the wheat as on the day she had plunged into its pale, green shadows. By the afternoon this mist had disappeared, apparently in the same mysterious manner, but not scattered by the usual trade-wind, which—another unusual circumstance—that day was not forthcoming. There was a breathlessness in the air like the hush of listening expectancy, which filled the young girl with a vague restlessness, and seemed to even affect a scattered company of crows in the field beyond the house, which rose suddenly with startled but aimless wings, and then dropped vacantly among the grain again.

Major Randolph was inspecting a distant part of the ranch, Mrs. Randolph was presumably engaged in her boudoir, and Rose was sitting between Adele and Emile before the piano in the drawing-room, listlessly turning over the leaves of some music. There had been an odd mingling of eagerness and abstraction in the usual attentions of the young man that morning, and a certain nervous affectation in his manner of twisting the ends of a small black moustache, which resembled his mother’s eyebrows, that had affected Rose with a half-amused, half-uneasy consciousness, but which she had, however, referred to the restlessness produced by the weather. It occurred to her also that the vacuously amiable Adele had once or twice regarded her with the same precocious, childlike curiosity and infantine cunning she had once before exhibited. All this did not, however, abate her admiration for both—perhaps particularly for this picturesquely gentlemanly young fellow, with his gentle audacities of compliment, his caressing attentions, and his unfailing and equal address. And when, discovering that she had mislaid her fan for the fifth time that morning, he started up with equal and undiminished fire to go again and fetch it, the look of grateful pleasure and pleading perplexity in her pretty eyes might have turned a less conceited brain than his.

“But you don’t know where it is!”

“I shall find it by instinct.”

“You are spoiling me—you two.” The parenthesis was a hesitating addition, but she continued, with fresh sincerity, “I shall be quite helpless when I leave here—if I am ever able to go by myself.”

“Don’t ever go, then.”

“But just now I want my fan; it is so close everywhere to-day.”

“I fly, mademoiselle.”

He started to the door.

She called after him:—

“Let me help your instinct, then; I had it last in the major’s study.”

“That was where I was going.”

He disappeared. Rose got up and moved uneasily towards the window. “How queer and quiet it looks outside. It’s really too bad that he should be sent after that fan again. He’ll never find it.” She resumed her place at the piano, Adele following her with round, expectant eyes. After a pause she started up again. “I’ll go and fetch it myself,” she said, with a half-embarrassed laugh, and ran to the door.

Scarcely understanding her own nervousness, but finding relief in rapid movement, Rose flew lightly up the staircase. The major’s study, where she had been writing letters, during his absence, that morning, was at the further end of a long passage, and near her own bedroom, the door of which, as she passed, she noticed, half-abstractedly, was open, but she continued on and hurriedly entered the study. At the same moment Emile, with a smile on his face, turned towards her with the fan in his hand.

“Oh, you’ve found it,” she said, with nervous eagerness. “I was so afraid you’d have all your trouble for nothing.”

She extended her hand, with a half-breathless smile, for the fan, but he caught her outstretched little palm in his own, and held it.

“Ah! but you are not going to leave us, are you?”

In a flash of consciousness she understood him, and, as it seemed to her, her own nervousness, and all, and everything. And with it came a swift appreciation of all it meant to her and her future. To be always with him and like him, a part of this refined and restful seclusion—akin to all that had so attracted her in this house; not to be obliged to educate herself up to it, but to be in it on equal terms at once; to know that it was no wild, foolish youthful fancy, but a wise, thoughtful, and prudent resolve, that her father would understand and her friends respect: these were the thoughts that crowded quickly upon her, more like an explanation of her feelings than a revelation, in the brief second that he held her hand. It was not, perhaps, love as she had dreamed it, and even BELIEVED it, before. She was not ashamed or embarrassed; she even felt, with a slight pride, that she was not blushing. She raised her eyes frankly. What she WOULD have said she did not know, for the door, which he had closed behind her, began to shake violently.

It was not the fear of some angry intrusion or interference surely that made him drop her hand instantly. It was not—her second thought—the idea that some one had fallen in a fit against it that blanched his face with abject and unreasoning terror! It must have been something else that caused him to utter an inarticulate cry and dash out of the room and down the stairs like a madman! What had happened?

In her own self-possession she knew that all this was passing rapidly, that it was not the door now that was still shaking, for it had swung almost shut again—but it was the windows, the book-shelves, the floor beneath her feet, that were all shaking. She heard a hurried scrambling, the trampling of feet below, and the quick rustling of a skirt in the passage, as if some one had precipitately fled from her room. Yet no one had called to her—even HE had said nothing. Whatever had happened they clearly had not cared for her to know.

The jarring and rattling ceased as suddenly, but the house seemed silent and empty. She moved to the door, which had now swung open a few inches, but to her astonishment it was fixed in that position, and she could not pass. As yet she had been free from any personal fear, and even now it was with a half smile at her imprisonment in the major’s study, that she rang the bell and turned to the window. A man, whom she recognized as one of the ranch laborers, was standing a hundred feet away in the garden, looking curiously at the house. He saw her face as she tried to raise the sash, uttered an exclamation, and ran forward. But before she could understand what he said, the sash began to rattle in her hand, the jarring recommenced, the floor shook beneath her feet, a hideous sound of grinding seemed to come from the walls, a thin seam of dust-like smoke broke from the ceiling, and with the noise of falling plaster a dozen books followed each other from the shelves, in what in the frantic hurry of that moment seemed a grimly deliberate succession; a picture hanging against the wall, to her dazed wonder, swung forward, and appeared to stand at right angles from it; she felt herself reeling against the furniture; a deadly nausea overtook her; as she glanced despairingly towards the window, the outlying fields beyond the garden seemed to be undulating like a sea. For the first time she raised her voice, not in fear, but in a pathetic little cry of apology for her awkwardness in tumbling about and not being able to grapple this new experience, and then she found herself near the door, which had once more swung free. She grasped it eagerly, and darted out of the study into the deserted passage. Here some instinct made her follow the line of the wall, rather than the shaking balusters of the corridor and staircase, but before she reached the bottom she heard a shout, and the farm laborer she had seen coming towards her seized her by the arm, dragged her to the open doorway of the drawing-room, and halted beneath its arch in the wall. Another thrill, but lighter than before, passed through the building, then all was still again.

“It’s over; I reckon that’s all just now,” said the man, coolly. “It’s quite safe to cut and run for the garden now, through this window.” He half led, half lifted her through the French window to the veranda and the ground, and locking her arm in his, ran quickly forward a hundred feet from the house, stopping at last beneath a large post oak where there was a rustic seat into which she sank. “You’re safe now, I reckon,” he said grimly.

She looked towards the house; the sun was shining brightly; a cool breeze seemed to have sprung up as they ran. She could see a quantity of rubbish lying on the roof from which a dozen yards of zinc gutter were perilously hanging; the broken shafts of the further cluster of chimneys, a pile of bricks scattered upon the ground and among the battered down beams of the end of the veranda—but that was all. She lifted her now whitened face to the man, and with the apologetic smile still lingering on her lips, asked:—

“What does it all mean? What has happened?”

The man stared at her. “D’ye mean to say ye don’t know?”

“How could I? They must have all left the house as soon as it began. I was talking to—to M. l’Hommadieu, and he suddenly left.”

The man brought his face angrily down within an inch of her own. “D’ye mean to say that them d–d French half-breeds stampeded and left yer there alone?”

She was still too much stupefied by the reaction to fully comprehend his meaning, and repeated feebly with her smile still faintly lingering: “But you don’t tell me WHAT it was?”

“An earthquake,” said the man, roughly, “and if it had lasted ten seconds longer it would have shook the whole shanty down and left you under it. Yer kin tell that to them, if they don’t know it, but from the way they made tracks to the fields, I reckon they did. They’re coming now.”

Without another word he turned away half surlily, half defiantly, passing scarce fifty yards away Mrs. Randolph and her daughter, who were hastening towards their guest.

“Oh, here you are!” said Mrs. Randolph, with the nearest approach to effusion that Rose had yet seen in her manner. “We were wondering where you had run to, and were getting quite concerned. Emile was looking for you everywhere.”

The recollection of his blank and abject face, his vague outcry and blind fright, came back to Rose with a shock that sent a flash of sympathetic shame to her face. The ingenious Adele noticed it, and dutifully pinched her mother’s arm.

“Emile?” echoed Rose faintly—“looking for ME?”

Mother and daughter exchanged glances.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Randolph, cheerfully, “he says he started to run with you, but you got ahead and slipped out of the garden door—or something of the kind,” she added, with the air of making light of Rose’s girlish fears. “You know one scarcely knows what one does at such times, and it must have been frightfully strange to YOU—and he’s been quite distracted, lest you should have wandered away. Adele, run and tell him Miss Mallory has been here under the oak all the time.”

Rose started—and then fell hopelessly back in her seat. Perhaps it WAS true! Perhaps he had not rushed off with that awful face and without a word. Perhaps she herself had been half-frightened out of her reason. In the simple, weak kindness of her nature it seemed less dreadful to believe that the fault was partly her own.

“And you went back into the house to look for us when all was over,” said Mrs. Randolph, fixing her black, beady, magnetic eyes on Rose, “and that stupid yokel Zake brought you out again. He needn’t have clutched your arm so closely, my dear,—I must speak to the major about his excessive familiarity—but I suppose I shall be told that that is American freedom. I call it ‘a liberty.’”

It struck Rose that she had not even thanked the man—in the same flash that she remembered something dreadful that he had said. She covered her face with her hands and tried to recall herself.

Mrs. Randolph gently tapped her shoulder with a mixture of maternal philosophy and discipline, and continued: “Of course, it’s an upset—and you’re confused still. That’s nothing. They say, dear, it’s perfectly well known that no two people’s recollections of these things ever are the same. It’s really ridiculous the contradictory stories one hears. Isn’t it, Emile?”

Rose felt that the young man had joined them and was looking at her. In the fear that she should still see some trace of the startled, selfish animal in his face, she did not dare to raise her eyes to his, but looked at his mother. Mrs. Randolph was standing then, collected but impatient.

“It’s all over now,” said Emile, in his usual voice, “and except the chimneys and some fallen plaster there’s really no damage done. But I’m afraid they have caught it pretty badly at the mission, and at San Francisco in those tall, flashy, rattle-trap buildings they’re putting up. I’ve just sent off one of the men for news.”

Her father was in San Francisco by that time; and she had never thought of him! In her quick remorse she now forgot all else and rose to her feet.

“I must telegraph to my father at once,” she said hurriedly; “he is there.”

“You had better wait until the messenger returns and hear his news,” said Emile. “If the shock was only a slight one in San Francisco, your father might not understand you, and would be alarmed.”

She could see his face now—there was no record of the past expression upon it, but he was watching her eagerly. Mrs. Randolph and Adele had moved away to speak to the servants. Emile drew nearer.

“You surely will not desert us now?” he said in a low voice.

“Please don’t,” she said vaguely. “I’m so worried,” and, pushing quickly past him, she hurriedly rejoined the two women.

They were superintending the erection of a long tent or marquee in the garden, hastily extemporized from the awnings of the veranda and other cloth. Mrs. Randolph explained that, although all danger was over, there was the possibility of the recurrence of lighter shocks during the day and night, and that they would all feel much more secure and comfortable to camp out for the next twenty-four hours in the open air.

“Only imagine you’re picnicking, and you’ll enjoy it as most people usually enjoy those horrid al fresco entertainments. I don’t believe there’s the slightest real necessity for it, but,” she added in a lower voice, “the Irish and Chinese servants are so demoralized now, they wouldn’t stay indoors with us. It’s a common practice here, I believe, for a day or two after the shock, and it gives time to put things right again and clear up. The old, one-storied, Spanish houses with walls three feet thick, and built round a courtyard or patio, were much safer. It’s only when the Americans try to improve upon the old order of things with their pinchbeck shams and stucco that Providence interferes like this to punish them.”

It was the fact, however, that Rose was more impressed by what seemed to her the absolute indifference of Providence in the matter, and the cool resumption by Nature of her ordinary conditions. The sky above their heads was as rigidly blue as ever, and as smilingly monotonous; the distant prospect, with its clear, well-known silhouettes, had not changed; the crows swung on lazy, deliberate wings over the grain as before; and the trade-wind was again blowing in its quiet persistency. And yet she knew that something had happened that would never again make her enjoyment of the prospect the same—that nothing would ever be as it was yesterday. I think at first she referred only to the material and larger phenomena, and did not confound this revelation of the insecurity of the universe with her experience of man. Yet the fact also remained that to the conservative, correct, and, as she believed, secure condition to which she had been approximating, all her relations were rudely shaken and upset. It really seemed to this simple-minded young woman that the revolutionary disturbance of settled conditions might have as Providential an origin as the “Divine Right” of which she had heard so much.