The Black Cat (magazine)/Volume 1/Number 3/Frazer's Find

by Roberta Littlehale

Frazer's Find.

by Roberta Littlehale.

THE midnight stars glowed through the broken blackness of a winter's sky down upon the roof of a house where a man sat alone with his arms stretched over an empty bed. Such of his thoughts as were within his control were focused on the life and the death of his past. The bare branches of the willows scraped to and fro on the shingles, and the water in the reservoir lapped softly against the piles of the foundation. There was no light in the room to show the already hopeless untidiness of inanimate things, and the quiet figure of the aging man seemed carved out of rock.

To the youth of him, physical and mental, he returned, and remembered that he had been modeled on lines which made people expect the things for which they willingly yielded him affection and consideration in advance. It was in the tempered pain of the hope of fulfilment that his family and friends had speeded him from New England to the practise of his profession of law in a Southern city. It was in their early triumph at having counted on him truly that the fever of the California gold days got into his veins. It had been no struggle to him to throw everything over and make for the life that beat fastest and fullest in incident. The struggle had lain in separation from a woman whose saneness and spirit he felt he could not live without. But in the end he had disregarded her opposition for the sake of the beckoning fortunes and joined an ox-train caravan over the plains. The dragging slowness with which the days went by had been broken only by the alertness of his own fancy, until the discovery, one blistering Arizona night, of the loss of his money-belt. He had bathed only five miles farther back, and he had no memory of having restrapped the hot and heavy buckskin about his waist. Ignoring the danger of Indian attack, he rode over again in the starlight the miles to the little creek in the wilderness. It had been so much of a relief to find it safe. He stood strapping it about him, and he could hear as distinctly now as then the sound that fell on his ears. It was the hot and hopeless sobbing of a human voice. He had stood immovable, conscious that a group of cacti on his right sheltered a prostrate body. Then he had hurried over and found a slender boy, a slight, nervous, black-eyed Mexican, with a sunburned fairness of skin revealing his mixture of Castilian blood.

He had raised the boy quietly, and the child Jad hung about his neck, frenzied and fainting. The weakness of his condition made anything impossible beyond literally riding with him in his arms back again to camp. The boy's clothes were torn and dirty and his flesh was bleeding, but his delicate Southern beauty was none the less strongly in evidence.

Frazer remembered the interest and assistance of his comrades. They had hovered in the silence of men's earnestness until the boy was able to make himself coherent. His father, and mother, and brothers had been seized by the Indians, and only the accident of his having been sent after a straying mare had saved his life, by enabling him to hide himself successfully from the raiders.

His extravagant affection for Frazer made a shadow the only simile of his constant presence with him. The boy's nervous timidity and gentleness had found its chief outlet in the watch fullest care of him and the things he cared for. He had seemed wholly lacking in the lore of his class regarding life in the open. He had never gone among the horses or cared to use a gun, but had taken upon himself the cooking and domestic duties of camp life.

The men, in their vigorous courage and spirit, had found the boy monotonous except in the satisfaction he picturesquely afforded, and Frazer had accepted his homage with a mind so absorbed in his own affairs as to be little short of indifferent to the lad's presence.

As they had traveled heavily on over the Texas plains and slept under the Texas stars, Frazer could remember the softness of the small hand that had wakened him from sleep in its searching for the comfort of his presence. And one night the child had crept close to him.

"Señor——"

Frazer had wanted to sleep; he had answered nothing.

"Señor!" The boy's hand lingered this time in an earnest pressure upon his own.

"Yes?" he had said.

"It is only—may I stay always with you?"

It had seemed a simple thing to promise to keep him with him, and Frazer had gone to sleep in the very midst of the passionate little torrent of Mexican gratitude.

In the excitement of his early months in California the boy had seemed vastly a nuisance in transportation. Frazer had stayed only long enough in San Francisco to acquire an outfit and vocabulary, and hurried off to the southern mines. The boy rode closely by his side, indifferent to fatigue, his cheerfulness clouded by the fear that he might be overlooked and left behind.

Those months of feverish toil, and exaltation, and depression! As they lengthened into years, with the pot of gold still at the inaccessible end of the rainbow, and the blunt unloveliness of the frontier life rusting the vigor of his finer fiber, Frazer remembered his sense of restless resentment because the woman whom he loved and had left would not make any acknowledgment of his mistake or his failure. The impersonal tone of her early letters had been easier to bear than the silence she was beginning to make him endure. It seemed to him the tensity of his resolve to wrest the success of yellow gold through the clustering difficulties had only taken its firmest hold of him before the illness came that had hastened a revelation perhaps unfortunately delayed.

He remembered through the first hours before unconsciousness had come to him how glad he had been to feel that the boy was with him. They were living in the roughest of cliff cabins, alone, and he bad ordered him off to camp for a doctor. The boy had given him whisky, and then had stood in so irresolute a fright and suffering that Frazer had sworn him into action.

He knew now that he had lain four weeks near death; but when he opened his eyes upon that mellow October twilight, long ago, he was unconscious of anything but a pair of dimming Mexican eyes that dropped tears on his gaunt face, and an intense feminine sobbing mingled with expressions of love for him shaken out of the abyss of a suffering woman's heart. The hot cheeks that rested on his own were those he was used to in the boy. The clothes on her limbs in all their pitiful poverty were the masculine ones he had liked to see so picturesquely carried, but the strain in the voice and the music of its words were new, and amazing, and appalling.

In the silence of weakness he listened, and over and over again he heard the reiteration of her resolve.

"There is nothing, beloved, that can drive me from you but the death from your hand which will not kill."

And after awhile he had said to her:

"Little one, why did you do it?"

But he had known it was the wisdom of the wisest before she had answered him, that for a girl this life offered greater perils as well as fewer chances.

She did not light their candle, but remained on her knees by the bed, getting his medicine at intervals by the lingering light that came in from the window.

"It will be just the same," she had whispered; "it need make no difference, señor."

And Frazer had lain there, facing the fact of the very great difference, in a regret that could fancy no arrangement not death doing to this woman who had nursed him, and had loved him, and had told him so.

"The woman at the hotel—the landlady," he had said to her in his weak, thin voice, "she would care for you if I paid her, or you might go East. You might go to school."

But the helpless poverty of his present condition had forced a wan smile on his dry lips, and the girl was writhing as with actual physical pain and would not listen.

In his weakened condition he could not concentrate himself sufficiently to adopt any decisive measure. He had felt the tumult of her emotions gradually still itself as he laid his hand on her short, black hair, and when her breathing was even and quiet he had asked her, feeling a revolt within him. "The doctor, and the boys—have they guessed it?"

But how had he expected her to know anything of any man but the one she loved? She did not know, she had answered him; she had not thought to think of it.

And she had not slept through the long night hours, nor had he, and in the morning the fever was high again. In the dragging feebleness of his convalescence both had avoided any reference to the revelation that night. Things went on as before, but the humble devotion and care of Frazer's Mexican protégée was as properly interpreted by the quick camp instinct as it was immediately acquiesced in and forgotten.

From this time Frazer had little communication with the civilization he had deserted, and none whatever with the woman who waited in the South in silence and the suffering of doubt. He remembered the utter emptiness of his life and his hope as the following years of his toil and alertness yielded him only bitterer disappointments. There came children now, little dark miniatures of their stout, faded mother, whose heart was as full of reverence and love for him as was her girl's heart, and who seemed not to know that the hours which he lived with her were lost hours.

It was on his way home to her one night, in the gentleness which masked his hideous unrest, that his eye discovered the ledge of quartz which had more than laid the foundation of that success he had early strived for. It had not taken long to form a company, and before the year was out gold came to his pocket in as unsweated for a fashion as the air to his lungs.

The men, his partners, had thrown back their shoulders and inflated their chests. The blood ran in their veins to more composite measure, and they planned diversion and further manipulation after their different natures. Three of them were for the East and the world again—and, O God! but the frenzy in his own brain. They had come to him seriously as man to man and explained their sense of his absolute insanity in throwing up the entire future of his career by life in this place, tied down in his fashion. Other men,—they themselves,—were under obligation, but not so deeply that money would not bridge it and—damn it!—friends and family must have some consideration in successful men's lives.

That night had been another so strongly accented that its impression would never fade. He had sat at the oilclothed table, in the little cabin, and tried to sufficiently detach himself from the children and himself to get an unbiased view-point. He could see only the light of her love in her eyes, the child-love in theirs, and, through their gentle subjection, their genuine faith in and dependence on him. The shabbiness of his environment she did not permit to become slovenly; but the common vulgarity of it all surged through his eyes like light. He had sent the children from him and gone out into the pines, until the vast, sweet silence of their majesty laid more on him than he could bear.

As he came in the door she had handed him a letter left by a miner on his way from camp. She had lighted two candles, and pulled up his chair, and hushed the talking of the children in their bed. She had sat near and searched his face for what the actual possession of the letter could not have given her, and felt only misunderstanding because she had never seen a struggle between the spirit's life and death.

Frazer had read, "Whatever the mistake, we can yet outlive the pain of it. I am waiting for you." She had signed the name he had made for her, and he could not look at it twice for the blinding tears under his lids.

Geraldine was waiting for him!

Geraldine's mouth, which drooped at the corners and created the dimples she hated, when it fell a-smiling, was ready to yield to him!

Geraldine's face, and beauty, and spirit were true to him!

He could not tell how long it was before he got possession of himself. The candles were dripping low in their tin sockets, and one of the women who loved him was still in her chair near his elbow, frightened, and quiet, and intense.

He had held out a hand to her and she had come over and knelt at his side.

"Little one," he had said, "this life is not right for our children. To-morrow we must get the priest and be married. There is money now, and they must be taught to live more cleverly than their father and their mother."

He had left her perplexed in her relief, while he threw himself on the bed for the sleep of utter exhaustion.

The burden of life would be doubly worse with the material leisure money could bring, but Frazer had never stopped toiling all his days. He could not.

Money in the helpless hands of his wife meant only unwelcome care for her, and their exclusion in a larger, isolated home was in no sense different from life in their cabin.

Frazer held himself aloof from the movement of the growing towns and cities, and watched the weak physical fiber of his children, marked by their unambitious Southern strain. Energy for acquirement of any sort was not theirs, and for his family his money meant only the material supply of food and clothes.

From this very home on the reservoir banks he had gone to his mines with a regularity interrupted only when it was necessary to follow the coffin of one of his children to the rocky, shrub-dotted cemetery on the hills. There had been three of them, and none of the apparently sturdy children had escaped the fatal collapse of consumption.

That morning he had driven there the fourth time. The body of his wife was laid under the ground after her thirty years of faithful care, according to her light. And Frazer was alone with his money, and his love, and the suffering he had made it his business to bear.