XXVIIJEAN TRANSFORMED
“Where did you spend the night, Jean?” asked Mary.
“In heaven,” answered Jean, her cheeks glowing.
“Nonsense.”
“I mean exactly what I say, Mame. I lodged with an Indian princess, and ate my meals with a member of the British aristocracy. The princess couldn’t speak English, but her brother acted as interpreter, so we got on all right. She is a slave of an old chief of the Seattles. I wish I had the money; I’d buy her, and send her back to her people.”
“You might as well wish you owned the moon!”
“I own the earth,—as much of it as I need. Everybody does.”
“Then the most of us get cheated out of our patrimony,” laughed Sally O’Dowd.
“I wish you could all have had a chance to look in on me and my princess last night; we were as snug as two bugs in a rug. The crickets sang on the hearth, just as they used to do of nights in the old home. The wind roared like a storm at sea, and the rush of the river was grand. I can shut my eyes and live it all over again.”
“You’ve gone stark mad!” laughed Hal.
“As mad as a March hare,” said Sally O’Dowd. “I know the symptoms from sad experience.”
“You ought to be repenting in sackcloth and ashes. Why are you not sorry?” asked Mary.
“Because in losing myself I found my fate.”
“Was it an Indian brave in a breech-cloth, with a bowand arrow, a shirt-collar, and a pair of spurs?” asked Hal.
The roar of laughter that greeted this query made Jean fairly frantic. “You’re worse than a lot of savages yourselves,” she cried. “If I had my way, I’d go back to that lodge in the wilderness and stay there!”
Jean climbed into the wagon, buried her face in her hands, and abandoned herself to a deep, absorbing reverie. “Oh, mother dear,” she said softly, “if you could speak, you would sympathize with me, I am sure. If I only had your love and sympathy, I wouldn’t care what anybody else might think or say,—not even daddie. A new light and a new life have come into my soul. Though a cruel fate may separate us through this life, we shall always be one. But God made us for each other, and we shall surely meet again.”
There was no longer any game to be had for the shooting; the little extra food the company could purchase from the Indians, or from the few white borderers at infrequent trading-posts, was held at almost prohibitive prices. Dead cattle continued to abound at the roadside, filling the air with an intolerable stench through every hour of the day and night. No camping-spot could be found where the surroundings were not thus polluted. Captain Ranger’s teams were giving out from sheer exhaustion, induced by starvation rather than overwork, and two or more of his weaker oxen were dying daily.
“I’ll break the horrible monotony of this diary,” said Jean at last, “or I’ll die trying.” And for many days her jottings were confined to minute, and sometimes glowing, descriptions of snow-capped mountains, bald hills, tree-studded lesser heights, and vast and desolate wastes of sand and sage and rocks. Sterile valleys, verdant banks of little rivers, mighty streams, and running brooks received attention, in their turn, from her pen, the wholemaking a record surprisingly akin to the journals kept by Lewis and Clark, and left on record half a century earlier, of the existence of which she had no knowledge. There was one theme of which her father enforced daily mention,—a regular account of the scarcity of grass and game and wood and water.
A murder by the roadside, and the consequent trial, conviction, and execution of the murderer by a “provisional government” temporarily organized for the purpose received a painstaking record, as did also a difficulty with some thieving and beggarly Indians, whose hostility was awakened by the rashness of one of a trio of bachelors, who were encamped one night near the Ranger wagons. Captain Ranger made the Indians a pacifying speech, but only by the aid of some trifling present among the women of the tribe, and a gift of a pair of blankets to their chieftain, was the impending danger averted. A double guard was placed outside that night; and, for several nights following, a corral was made of the wagons in the shape of a hollow square, into which the cattle were driven to rest and sleep.
The now famous Soda Springs, known to the commercial world as Idanha, next caught the coloring of Jean’s pen. The different geysers rising from the tops of the gutter-sided mounds of soda-stone were carefully and graphically described. The crater of a long-extinct volcano received special mention. The bad water of alkali-infected streams and swamps, left by slowly evaporating pools and ponds, through which cattle and wagons labored with the greatest difficulty; the dreary wastes of sagebrush, sand, and rock, through which everybody who was able to walk at all was compelled to trudge on foot; the devastations of prairie fires; the endless wastes of stunted sage and greasewood; the struggling aspens on the margins of tiny streams,—all met graphic and detailed delineation, such as nobody can appreciate to thefull who to-day traverses these vast and wondrous wilds in a railway coach, or gazes upon them from a Pullman car.
“Captain Ranger,” said Sally O’Dowd one evening, “do you notice that Jean is growing strikingly beautiful?”
They were halting for the night after a day’s hard drive; and the jaded oxen, weak and sick from the combined effects of hard labor, cruel whippings, and an insufficient supply of grass and water, were necessarily the chief objects of his attention and solicitude. A broken wagon-tongue added to his perplexities, as good timber for repairs was not available; and the mileage of the day’s travel had been much shortened by the necessity of stopping to mend the break, or, as the Little Doctor not inaptly said, “to reduce the compound fracture of a most important part of the wagon’s anatomy.”
“All my girls are handsome,” said the Captain, as he tested the strength of a splice on the broken tongue by jumping upon it with both feet.
“But Jean has been transformed, Captain. The change has been growing upon her daily since the date of that Green River episode. The child is hopelessly infatuated with that young Englishman.”
“Much good it’ll do her,” he exclaimed, mopping his brow with a soiled bandanna. “It is painfully evident that three of my girls will soon be women. If their mother were here, it wouldn’t be so hard to manage them. No, Sally, I’ve noticed no particular change in Jean.”
“Because you are too busy for observation, sir. She hasn’t been a particle like herself of late.”
The Captain hurried away to his work, muttering, “Nonsense!”
Jean had seated herself on the most distant wagon-tongue, her battered, ink-bespattered journal in her lap, her pen in one hand, her inkstand in the other, herknitted brows and glowing face expressing deep concentration of thought and feeling.
Captain Ranger, having finished his work of repairs, dropped wearily upon an axle-tree, and, for the first time in several days, prompted doubtless by the words of Sally O’Dowd, took a long and searching look at Jean.
“Yes, indeed; Sally is right,” he soliloquized. “Jean is developing a wonderfully beautiful style of womanhood. What a pity it is that she cannot have her mother at the very time when she needs her most!”
Pangs of anxiety akin to jealousy shot through his heart as he studied her features; her downcast eyes were hidden by the heavy lashes as she bent over her work. “She doesn’t resemble her mother as Mary does, but she must be the almost exact counterpart of what my mother was at her age,” he mused, as he noted for the first time the ripening lips, the rosy and yet transparent hue of her cheeks, and the sunny sheen of her hair. He was surprised that he had not before observed the soft, exquisite contour of her face and neck, the full rounded bust, and the shapely development of her feet and hands.
As he sat watching the lights and shadows of thought and feeling that played upon her features, the remembrance of the girlhood of her mother, whose arduous married years had all been spent in his service, arose before him with startling power. “Dear, patient, tender, self-sacrificing Annie!” he exclaimed, as he arose from his rocking seat and strode away in the gloaming. “I never half appreciated your worth until I lost you for ever!”
“No, not for ever,” softly sung a still, small voice in the depths of his inner consciousness. “Do not reproach yourself. All eternity is yet to be.”
Jean felt, rather than saw, the pressure of his eyes, and half divined his thoughts. She felt the telltale blood as it rushed unbidden to her cheeks, and was seized with a great longing to throw herself into his arms and breatheout the full secret of her great awakening in his ears; but something in his manner repelled her advances, and she withdrew more than ever into herself.
“O Love!” she cried in a tone so low and sweet that none but a messenger from the Unseen might hear, “how ungovernable art thou, and how incomprehensible! The worldly-wise may decry thee; the misanthropic may deride thee; the vulgar may make of thy existence an unholy jest; the selfish and ignorant may trample upon thee; human laws may crush thee; but thou remainest still a thing of life, to fill thy votaries with a holy joy and endow them with the very attributes of God. An imperishable entity art thou, O Love! Thou art interblended with every fibre of my being now, and I accept thee as a sweet fulfilment of my earthly destiny.”
Of course Jean was young and fond and inexperienced and foolish; and these chronicles would offer her rhapsodies as the utterances of no worldly-wise oracle. But her thoughts were fresh and pure; and who shall say they did not emanate from the very fountain of life itself, whose presence she could sense but could not understand?
She wandered off toward the rushing, maddening torrent of Snake River, whose music had for her, in these moods of introspection, but one interpretation.
“Daddie may denounce, Hal and Mame may tease, and Marjorie,—yes, and all the world deride me,” she said, as she sat upon a bowlder and abandoned herself to reverie; “but henceforth there shall be nothing in this world for me to cherish but Love and its handmaiden, Duty.”
Snake River, full at this point of jutting rocky islands, through which the foaming, roaring waters rushed like a thousand mill-races on parade, dashed madly against its banks beneath her feet, and rushing on again, roared and laughed and shrieked and sang. Lichens clung to the uplifted rocks, which, hoary with age and massive in proportions, held vigil in the midst of the eternalgrandeur. Mountains clambered over mountains in the dimly lighted distance, and reaching to the red horizon, overlooked the Pacific seas.
“The antelope and elk are gone,” she thought, “and we are lone watchers amid the eternal vastness. But the sage-hen, the lizard, the owl, and the jaybird linger; and yonder, among the everlasting rocks, are the homes of the Indian, the rattlesnake, the badger, and the wolf.”
Rustling footsteps startled her. “Why, it’s daddie!” she exclaimed, her heart beating audibly. “I thought you were an Indian or a bear!”
“You oughtn’t to go off alone, my daughter. There is some hidden danger threatening us; I feel, but cannot divine it. Something is going wrong somewhere or somehow. Let’s hurry back to camp.”
“You’re the last person on earth I’d suspect of giving way to a morbid fancy, daddie dear. You must be very tired.”
“It isn’t that, my daughter. I am sad because you have allowed your heart to stray, and I do need you so much—so much!”
She answered not a word.