For a while they sat silent, in the midst of the profound and measureless calm.Looking down upon the dim moonlit abyss at their feet, they themselves seemed a part of this night that arched above it; the half-risen moon appeared to linger long enough at their side to enwrap and suffuse them with its glory; a few bright stars quietly ringed themselves around them, and looked wonderingly into the level of their own shining eyes.For some vague yearning to humanity seemed to draw this dark and passionless void towards them.The vast protecting maternity of Nature leant hushed and breathless over the solitude.Warm currents of air rose occasionally from the valley, which one might have believed were sighs from its full and overflowing breast, or a grateful coolness swept their cheeks and hair when the tranquil heights around them were moved to slowly respond.Odors from invisible bay and laurel sometimes filled the air; the incense of some rare and remoter cultivated meadow beyond their ken, or the strong germinating breath of leagues of wild oats, that had yellowed the upland by day.In the silence and shadow, their voices took upon themselves,almost without their volition, a far-off confidential murmur, with intervals of meaning silence--rather as if their thoughts had spoken for themselves, and they had stopped wonderingly to listen.
They talked at first vaguely to this discreet audience of space and darkness, and then, growing bolder, spoke to each other and of themselves.Invested by the infinite gravity of nature, they had no fear of human ridicule to restrain their youthful conceit or the extravagance of their unimportant confessions.They talked of their tastes, of their habits, of their friends and acquaintances.
They settled some points of doctrine, duty, and etiquette, with the sweet seriousness of youth and its all-powerful convictions.The listening vines would have recognized no flirtation or love-****** in their animated but important confidences; yet when Mrs. Bradley reappeared to warn the invalid that it was time to seek his couch,they both coughed slightly in the nervous consciousness of some unaccustomed quality in their voices, and a sense of interruption far beyond their own or the innocent intruder's ken.
"Well?" said Mrs. Bradley, in the sitting-room as Mainwaring's steps retreated down the passage to his room.
"Well," said Louise with a slight yawn, leaning her pretty shoulders languidly against the door-post, as she shaded her moonlight-accustomed eyes from the vulgar brilliancy of Mrs.
Bradley's bedroom candle."Well--oh, he talked a great deal about 'his people' as he called them, and I talked about us.He's very nice.You know in some things he's really like a boy."
"He looks much better."
"Yes; but he is far from strong yet."
Meantime, Mainwaring had no other confidant of his impressions than his own thoughts.Mingled with his exaltation, which was the more seductive that it had no well-defined foundation for existing, and implied no future responsibility, was a recurrence of his uneasiness at the impending visit of Richardson the next day.Strangely enough,it had increased under the stimulus of the evening.Just as he was really getting on with the family, he felt sure that this visitor would import some foreign element into their familiarity, as Minty had done.It was possible they would not like him: now he remembered there was really something ostentatiously British and insular about this Richardson--something they would likely resent.
Why couldn't this fellow have come later--or even before?Before what?But here he fell asleep, and almost instantly slipped from this veranda in the Sierras, six thousand miles away, to an ancient terrace, overgrown with moss and tradition, that overlooked the sedate glory of an English park.Here he found himself, restricted painfully by his inconsistent night-clothes, endeavoring to impress his mother and sisters with the singular virtues and excellences of his American host and hostesses--virtues and excellences that he himself was beginning to feel conscious had become more or less apocryphal in that atmosphere.He heard his mother's voice saying severely, "When you learn, Francis, to respect the opinions and prejudices of your family enough to prevent your appearing before them in this uncivilized aboriginal costume, we will listen to what you have to say of the friends whose habits you seem to have adopted;" and he was frantically indignant that his efforts to convince them that his negligence was a personal oversight, and not a Californian custom, were utterly futile.But even then this vision was brushed away by the bewildering sweep of Louise's pretty skirt across the dreamy picture, and her delicate features and softly-fringed eyes remained the last to slip from his fading consciousness.
The moon rose higher and higher above the sleeping house and softly breathing canyon.There was nothing to mar the idyllic repose of the landscape; only the growing light of the last two hours had brought out in the far eastern horizon a dim white peak, that gleamed faintly among the stars, like a bridal couch spread between the hills fringed with fading nuptial torches.No one would have believed that behind that impenetrable shadow to the west, in the heart of the forest, the throbbing saw-mill of James Bradley was even at that moment eating its destructive way through the conserved growth of Nature and centuries, and that the refined proprietor of house and greenwood, with the glow of his furnace fires on his red shirt, and his alert, intelligent eyes, was the genie of that devastation, and the toiling leader of the shadowy,toiling figures around him.