The San Rosario Ranch
vigorously tossing about the bright water. The old wood-cutter looked
at the young man as if the sight did him good. He responded to the
uproarious greeting which the artist shouted to him, by his usual silent
nod of the head. Had words been worth their weight in diamond dust, the
old soldier could not have been more chary of wasting them, but the look
in his faded blue eyes was gentle and full of admiration. He had had a
son of whom he had lost all trace since its infancy. If the boy had
lived he would have been about Graham's age, and it was the man's fancy
that he would have resembled his patron. He imagined he could trace in
the splendidly modelled arms and legs and the strong, perfectly
proportioned torso of the bather the shape into which the baby contours
he remembered so well must have developed. Graham had by this time
gained the green turf and stood shaking the water out of his thick hair,
drawing quick panting breaths, meanwhile, and springing about to warm
himself, with the grace and strength of a leopard. The old Frenchman
gave a deep sigh as he looked at him.
"Yes; Hector certainly must resemble this young man," he murmured, as he
wetted his hard hands, and, grasping the handle of his axe, smote
heavily at the stem of a young pine-tree. Graham rapidly made his toilet
in the open air. The plunge in the clear cold water had rather
stimulated than expended the electric, nervous force which ran through
his veins, quickening the life-blood in its flow. He felt ten years
younger since yesterday morning. His thirty years and the gravity they
had brought to him had shrunk to twenty. As he looked up at his tower
he sang aloud a snatch of an old song which had been often on his lips
in those happy, careless days in the _Rue d' Enfer_,--words which he had
painted over the tiny grate in the cramped apartment under the leads,
where he had suffered from heat all summer, and shivered all winter:
Dans un grenier qu' on est bien
A vingt ans, a vingt ans!
He would have liked to dance. Had his years in truth been but twenty,
he would have yielded to the temptation. He would gladly have thrown
his arms about the old Frenchman, for lack of another confidant, and
have told him the cause of his happiness. But, after all, this reflex
of youth could not entirely melt the reserve of manhood from him; he
wore his thirty years lightly indeed, but could not shake them off.
"Give me your axe, John; I know something of your woodman's craft; let
me show you how easily I can fell this young tree."
He took the tool from the woodcutter, and, whirling the sharp edge in
the air, laid it at the root of the tree with a ringing blow.
"It appears in truth that monsieur 'ave 'andled an axe before."
"Surely, John. I once spent a summer with some friends of mine, who
lived in a forest in Brittany; they were _sabotiers_."
"Monsieur is jesting?"
"Not in the least. I not only can fell a tree,--clumsily enough, be it
confessed,--but if I had the tools I could shape you a pair of _sabots_,
as good ones as you could buy for ten sous at Quimper; that is your
town, I think?"
He talked in short, jerky sentences between the strokes, while the white
splinters flew about him like a hail-storm. After a few moments the
knack which he seemed at first to have forgotten came back to him. The
smell of the bruised bark was aromatic; the death-sigh of the young
branches was musical as they trembled for the last time together,
reaching out to touch their sister trees in solemn leave-taking. Their
sigh was now drowned in the groan of the swaying tree.
"Take care, monsieur, take care; it is about to fall," cried the
Frenchman.
His warning was a timely one. Graham, so long unused to the exercise of
the craft, had not noticed how deeply he had cut into the stem. The
straight tree seemed to hesitate, tossing its branches helplessly
heavenward, and then with a creaking sound crashed through the
surrounding underbrush, and with a dull thud measured its slender length
upon the earth. For a moment its branches shook convulsively, and then
all was quiet. It seemed as if all nature paused at the fall of so fair
a thing: the birds were silent in the thicket; the babble of the
water-fall grew faint; and the wood creatures stirred not in their
burrows. A mighty breeze crept through the forest, rustling the
surrounding trees, wailing through the open gap as if in requiem, and a
light cloud floated over the face of the sun, throwing its shadowy pall
on the spot.
"That was well done, monsieur."
And, at the sound of the man's voice, the cloud floated by and the sun
shone out once more, the wood birds took up their song again, the
squirrel in the hollow of the white oak went on cracking her nut, and
the brief mourning was over.
That man must feel himself indeed beloved, who fancies that the world
will pause as long beside his grave as does the forest at the fall of
one of its children.
Not until the branches had been lopped off and the long stem cut into
lengths, did Graham cease his labor. The exercise did him good, and
gave him an appetite for the breakfast which old John served him in the
open air. He declared that the coffee was better than could be had at
the _Cafe de Paris_; and assured John that neither Paris nor Vienna
could produce such bread as that which the old man had baked in some
mysterious manner in an oven of his own construction, made of flat stone
sunk in the ground. Graham remembered that he had somewhere in the tower
a bottle of rare old wine, which he sent John to fetch.
"Bring my glass and your tin cup, John."
He needed sympathy, he who had lived for years without asking man or
woman to share his joys or sorrows; he felt a new need in himself for
human companionship; and the silent old fellow who did his bidding was
the only soul to whom he could look for it. The ice which had encased
his heart was broken; and instead of sternly demanding from his
fellow-men honor, truth, and sincerity, he embraced the whole world in a
warm, unquestioning love and sympathy. Yesterday he was a man who
labored for his kind; to-day he was content to love them. Yesterday he
was a reformer; to-day he was a philanthropist. The henchman returning
with the wine, Graham filled the crystal goblet and the humble cup to
the brim, and together these two denizens of the balmy forest drank to
the new day which had dawned on the young man's life. After the long,
black night which for months obscures the face of nature in the far
northern land, the first rising of the sun touches the hearts of men
with a deeper, more profound joy than the dwellers in a temperate zone
can well understand. So was the light of this new love more glorious a
thousand-fold to the man in whose life there had so long been darkness,
than if it had arisen in a heart unacquainted with grief. In the first
flush of happiness, his whole nature rebelled against the joyless life
he had been leading; his work lost its attraction for him, and he could
not have painted a stroke that day if his whole future reputation had
depended upon it. The new impulse had swung him far out of his
accustomed orbit; that there might be a rebound, he never for an instant
fancied.
He spent an hour in ransacking his tower to find the most beautiful
thing he possessed to carry to Millicent. He wanted to go to her with
something in his hand that might in some measure express the tide of
generous feeling that flooded his whole nature. He still had a score of
those treasures, souvenirs of his European residence, of which the
greater part had found their way to the shelves and cabinets of his
friends' houses. He spread them out before him on his one table,
ruthlessly pushing aside paints, brushes, books, and drawing chalks, in
a hubbub of disorder. With an intense interest he looked them all
through. He had almost decided upon a rare Etruscan coin which he had
seen roll from the palm of an exhumed skeleton, when his eye was caught
by a tiny Tanagrine figure. The exquisite modelling of this clay toy,
instinct with the beauty which pervaded every detail of Greek life, made
it a more appropriate gift. The miniature woman was as truly
proportioned as the Milo herself, and as surely constructed according to
that greatest law of art that the world has yet seen evolved, the Greek,
wherein are welded together the real and the ideal. A third article now
struck his fancy as more appropriate than either of these for his first
gift to Millicent. It was a crown of olive leaves of the purest gold,
which might have bound Helen's brow. It had lain amidst the dust of
eons which covers Troy with its pall; and now, in the nineteenth
century, it was to serve as the gift of a Californian lover to his
mistress. Surely, never before had the precious leaves encircled so fair
a head as that which they were now destined to adorn.
Among the many sins which had been laid at Graham's door by friend or
foe, the vice of foppery was missing. That minute attention to every
detail of dress, which is found as often in man as in woman, had no
place in his busy life. He was, however, always neatly dressed; and the
prosaic fashions of our time were modified as much as possible in his
wardrobe, especially while he inhabited the forest. On this occasion,
instead of one absent look in his small mirror, merely to ascertain if
his hair were properly parted and his cravat neatly tied, a full hour
was given to the process of dressing. Every suit of clothes, and each
possible combination of the garments which his wardrobe afforded, were
carefully considered. When at last the decision was made, the vest
needed a button, which the artist laboriously attached to the garment.
Taking a coarse linen thread strong enough for a halter, he made the
button fast, taking several turns of the thread about its eye, as if he
were belaying a rope. His cravat occupied him fully a quarter of an
hour. He must have brushed his hair at least half a dozen times. He
caught sight of his anxious face in the mirror, just as he was settling
his cravat for the last time, and burst into a peal of laughter at his
own dandyism. At the foot of the tower his sturdy mustang Tasso stood
ready saddled. French John had given an extra polish to the sleek gray
coat, bright enough to reflect the silver-studded Mexican bridle. A
pair of red cockades, set at the ears of the beast, were made from
flowers yielded by the small garden patch behind the woodcutter's cabin,
where he raised flowers and vegetables for his patron and himself. The
tall cock gave a condescending crow of approval as Graham mounted his
horse; while the three cats sunning themselves near by hunched their
backs at him, as if to express their disapproval of his idleness. It
was still early in the afternoon, and it was not his wont to sally forth
until the shadows were long. Where could he be going? they asked one of
the other, purring inquisitively together like a group of women-folk
over a cup of afternoon tea. Of all his brute friends, Tasso alone knew
whither his master was going; he snorted scornfully at cats and cock,
and, shaking his head playfully, sped over the bridle path with flying
feet, as if conscious of the eyes that were watching for him, the ears
that were strained to catch the first faint echo of his hoofs as they
flashed over the stony orchard road.
Those sweet eyes had not closed since they had last looked into
Graham's; that white form had known no rest since it had slipped from
his arms. The night, which had brought to him such peaceful dreams, was
fraught with bitter memories to Millicent. She had paced her room
through the long hours. No longer a half-yielding, shrinking maiden,