FullReads

Harshaw brought me your sweet letter yesterday. It was stage-day, and he went up over the bluffs to the ferry mail-box at the cross-roads, where the road to Shoshone Falls branches from the road to Bliss.

I read to Kitty what you wrote me about the Garretts and their children, and the going to New York and then to Paris. (Thank you so much, dear, for your prompt interest in my little bride that isn’t to be!) She had two letters of her own which she had read by herself, and afterward I thought she had been crying; but with her it is best not to press the note of sympathy. Neither does she like me to handle her affairs with gloves on, so to speak. So I plunged into the business in a matter-of-fact tone, and she replied in the same. Her objection is to going east to New York, and then to the other side. “I had rather stay in California,” she said, “or anywhere in the West.” Naturally; westward lies the way of escape from social complications.

She is afraid of the Percifers, and of meeting people she knows in Paris. But an offer like this was exceptional in this part of the world, I reminded her. A nurse for the boy, a maid, and only two little girls of eight and ten on her hands; and such nice people as the Garretts, who have been all over the world!

“Well,” she said, “I should certainly like to get away from here as soon as possible. From here, not from you !” she added, looking me in the face. Her eyes were full of tears. We clasped hands on that.

“What is it? Has anything else happened?” I asked; for I knew by her looks that something had.

“Oh, dear!” she sighed, “I should so like to take myself and my troubles seriously once in a while. No sooner do I try, but something perfectly farcical is sure to happen. If I tell you this, promise me you won’t laugh. It’s indecent for me to laugh; mamma would never forgive me. The old dear! I’m so fond of him!”

The “old dear,” it seems, is Micky’s father–a very superior sort of father for such a son to have, but accidents will happen in the best-regulated families. He is a gallant widower of fair estate, one of those splendid old club-men of London; a very expensive article of old gentleman, with fine old-fashioned manners and morals, and a few stray impulses left, it would seem by what follows. According to the father’s code, the son has not conducted himself in his engagement to Kitty Comyn as a gentleman should. Thereupon the head of the house goes to Miss Kitty’s mother and makes the amende honorable by offering his hand and heart and fortune to his son’s insulted bride! The mother is touched and pleased not a little by this prompt espousal of her daughter’s cause; and having wiped away all tears from her eyes, this gallant old gentleman is coming over to America, for the first time in his life, to make his proposal to the bride herself! He is not so old, to get down to particulars; sixty-three doesn’t look so old to some of us as it does to Miss Kitty. He is in fine health, I doubt not, and magnificently preserved. Kitty’s mother is not at all averse, as I gather, to this way of settling her child’s difficulties. She rather pleadingly assures Kitty that Mr. Harshaw senior has solemnly sworn that this is no unpleasant duty he feels called on to perform; not only his honor, but his affections are profoundly enlisted in this proposal. Kitty has had for years a sacred place in his regard; and from thinking of her as a daughter absolutely after his own heart, it is but a step to think of her in a still nearer–the nearest–relation. He begs her mother to prepare her for no perfunctory offer of marriage, but one that warms with every day’s delay till he can take the dear child under his lifelong protection. Not to punish or to redress does he come, but to secure for himself and posterity a treasure which his son had trampled under foot. Somehow we did not feel like laughing, after all. Kitty, I think, is a little frightened. She cannot reach her mother, even with a cable dispatch, before this second champion will arrive.