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The Harshaw Bride
by
“I don’t think you’ll have time to go uptown,” said the ticket-man.
Harshaw came out then, and he began to walk the platform, and to stare down the track toward Nampa; so I sat down. Presently he stopped, and raised his hat, and asked if I was Mrs. Daly, a friend of Mrs. Percifer of London and New York.
Not to be boastful, I said that I knew Mrs. Percifer.
“Then,” said he, “we are here on the same errand, I think.”
I was there to meet Miss Kitty Comyn, I told him, and he said so was he, and might he have a little talk with me? He seemed excited and serious, very.
“Are you the Mr. Harshaw?” I asked, though I hadn’t an idea, of course, that he could be anybody else.
“Not exactly,” he said. “I’m his cousin, Cecil Harshaw.”
“Is Mr. Harshaw ill?”
He looked foolish, and dropped his eyes. “No,” said he. “He was well last night when I left him at the ranch.” Last night! He had come a hundred miles between dark of one day and noon of the next!
“Your cousin takes a royal way of bringing home his bride–by proxy,” I said.
“Ah, but it’s partly my fault, you know”–he could not quell a sudden shamefaced laugh,–“if you’d kindly allow me to explain. I shall have to be quite brutally frank; but Mrs. Percifer said”–Here he lugged in a propitiatory compliment, which sounded no more like Mrs. Percifer than it fitted me; but mistaking my smile of irony for one of encouragement, he babbled on. I wish I could do justice to his “charmin'” accent and his perfectly unstudied manner of speech, a mixture of British and American colloquialisms, not to say slang.
“It’s like this, Mrs. Daly. A man oughtn’t to be a dog-in-the-manger about a girl, even if he has got her promise, you know. If he can’t get a move on and marry her before her hair is gray, he ought to step out and give the other fellows a chance. I’m not speaking for myself, though I would have spoken three years ago if she hadn’t been engaged to Micky–she’s always been engaged to him, one may say. And I accepted the fact; and when I came over here and took a share in Micky’s ranch I meant right by him, and God knows I meant more than right by her. Wasn’t it right to suppose she must be tremendously fond of him, to let him keep her on the string the way he has? They’ve been engaged four years now. And was it any wonder I was mad with Micky, seeing how he was loafing along, fooling his money away, not looking ahead and denying himself as a man ought who’s got a nice girl waiting for him? I’m quite frank, you see; but when you hear what an ass I’ve made of myself, you’ll not begrudge me the few excuses I have to offer. All I tried to do was to give Micky a leg to help him over his natural difficulty–laziness, you know. He’s not a bad sort at all, only he’s slow, and it’s hard to get him to look things square in the face. It was for her sake, supposing her happiness was bound up in him, that I undertook to boom the marriage a bit. But Micky won’t boom worth a —-. He’s back on my hands now, and what in Heaven’s name I’m to say to her”–His eloquence failed him here, and he came down to the level of ordinary conversation, with the remark, “It’s a facer, by Jove!”
I managed not to smile. If he’d undertaken, I said, to “boom” his cousin’s marriage to a girl he liked himself, he ought at least to get credit for disinterestedness; but so few good acts were ever rewarded in this world! I seemed to have heard that it was not very comfortable, though it might be heroic, to put one’s hand between the tree and the bark.