From Sand Hill to Pine

“I ought to,” responded the lady dryly. “I had a dozen such cases, some of them with complications, while I was assistant at the Sacramento Hospital.”

“Ah, then!” returned the doctor, dropping gladly into purely professional detail, “you’ll see this is very simple, not a comminuted fracture; constitution and blood healthy; all you’ve to do is to see that he eats properly, keeps free from excitement and worry, but does not get despondent; a little company; his partners and some of the boys from the Ledge will drop in occasionally; not too much of THEM, you know; and of course, absolute immobility of the injured parts.” The lady nodded; the patient lifted his blue eyes for an instant to hers with a look of tentative appeal, but it slipped off Miss Trotter’s dark pupils—which were as abstractedly critical as the doctor’s—without being absorbed by them. When the door closed behind her, the doctor exclaimed: “By Jove! you’re in luck, Chris! That’s a splendid woman! Just the one to look after you!” The patient groaned slightly. “Do what she says, and we’ll pull you through in no time. Why! she’s able to adjust those bandages herself!”

This, indeed, she did a week later, when the surgeon had failed to call, unveiling his neck and arm with professional coolness, and supporting him in her slim arms against her stiff, erect buckramed breast, while she replaced the splints with masculine firmness of touch and serene and sexless indifference. His stammered embarrassed thanks at the relief—for he had been in considerable pain—she accepted with a certain pride as a tribute to her skill, a tribute which Dr. Duchesne himself afterward fully indorsed.

On re-entering his room the third or fourth morning after his advent at the Summit House, she noticed with some concern that there was a slight flush on his cheek and a certain exaltation which she at first thought presaged fever. But an examination of his pulse and temperature dispelled that fear, and his talkativeness and good spirits convinced her that it was only his youthful vigor at last overcoming his despondency. A few days later, this cheerfulness not being continued, Dr. Duchesne followed Miss Trotter into the hall. “We must try to keep our patient from moping in his confinement, you know,” he began, with a slight smile, “and he seems to be somewhat of an emotional nature, accustomed to be amused and—er—er—petted.”

“His friends were here yesterday,” returned Miss Trotter dryly, “but I did not interfere with them until I thought they had stayed long enough to suit your wishes.”

“I am not referring to THEM,” said the doctor, still smiling; “but you know a woman’s sympathy and presence in a sickroom is often the best of tonics or sedatives.”

Miss Trotter raised her eyes to the speaker with a half critical impatience.

“The fact is,” the doctor went on, “I have a favor to ask of you for our patient. It seems that the other morning a new chambermaid waited upon him, whom he found much more gentle and sympathetic in her manner than the others, and more submissive and quiet in her ways—possibly because she is a foreigner, and accustomed to servitude. I suppose you have no objection to HER taking charge of his room?”

Miss Trotter’s cheek slightly flushed. Not from wounded vanity, but from the consciousness of some want of acumen that had made her make a mistake. She had really believed, from her knowledge of the patient’s character and the doctor’s preamble, that he wished HER to show some more kindness and personal sympathy to the young man, and had even been prepared to question its utility! She saw her blunder quickly, and at once remembering that the pretty Swedish girl had one morning taken the place of an absent fellow servant, in the rebound from her error, she said quietly: “You mean Frida! Certainly! she can look after his room, if he prefers her.” But for her blunder she might have added conscientiously that she thought the girl would prove inefficient, but she did not. She remembered the incident of the wood; yet if the girl had a lover in the wood, she could not urge it as a proof of incapacity. She gave the necessary orders, and the incident passed.

Visiting the patient a few days afterward, she could not help noticing a certain shy gratitude in Mr. Calton’s greeting of her, which she quietly ignored. This forced the ingenuous Chris to more positive speech. He dwelt with great simplicity and enthusiasm on the Swedish girl’s gentleness and sympathy. “You have no idea of—her—natural tenderness, Miss Trotter,” he stammered naively. Miss Trotter, remembering the wood, thought to herself that she had some faint idea of it, but did not impart what it was. He spoke also of her beauty, not being clever enough to affect an indifference or ignorance of it, which made Miss Trotter respect him and smile an unqualified acquiescence. Frida certainly was pretty! But when he spoke of her as “Miss Jansen,” and said she was so much more “ladylike and refined than the other servants,” she replied by asking him if his bandages hurt him, and, receiving a negative answer, graciously withdrew.

Indeed, his bandages gave him little trouble now, and his improvement was so marked and sustained that the doctor was greatly gratified, and, indeed, expressed as much to Miss Trotter, with the conscientious addition that he believed the greater part of it was due to her capable nursing! “Yes, ma’am, he has to thank YOU for it, and no one else!”

Miss Trotter raised her dark eyes and looked steadily at him. Accustomed as he was to men and women, the look strongly held him. He saw in her eyes an intelligence equal to his own, a knowledge of good and evil, and a toleration and philosophy, equal to his own, but a something else that was as distinct and different as their sex. And therein lay its charm, for it merely translated itself in his mind that she had very pretty eyes, which he had never noticed before, without any aggressive intellectual quality. And with this, alas! came the man’s propensity to reason. It meant of course but ONE thing; he saw it all now! If HE, in his preoccupation and coolness, had noticed her eyes, so also had the younger and emotional Chris. The young fellow was in love with her! It was that which had stimulated his recovery, and she was wondering if he, the doctor, had observed it. He smiled back the superior smile of our sex in moments of great inanity, and poor Miss Trotter believed he understood her. A few days after this, she noticed that Frida Jansen was wearing a pearl ring and a somewhat ostentatious locket. She remembered now that Mr. Bilson had told her that the Roanoke Ledge was very rich, and that Calton was likely to prove a profitable guest. But it was not HER business.

It became her business, however, some days later, when Mr. Calton was so much better that he could sit in a chair, or even lounge listlessly in the hall and corridor. It so chanced that she was passing along the upper hall when she saw Frida’s pink cotton skirt disappear in an adjacent room, and heard her light laugh as the door closed. But the room happened to be a card-room reserved exclusively for gentlemen’s poker or euchre parties, and the chambermaids had no business there. Miss Trotter had no doubt that Mr. Calton was there, and that Frida knew it; but as this was an indiscretion so open, flagrant, and likely to be discovered by the first passing guest, she called to her sharply. She was astonished, however, at the same moment to see Mr. Calton walking in the corridor at some distance from the room in question. Indeed, she was so confounded that when Frida appeared from the room a little flurried, but with a certain audacity new to her, Miss Trotter withheld her rebuke, and sent her off on an imaginary errand, while she herself opened the card-room door. It contained simply Mr. Bilson, her employer; his explanation was glaringly embarrassed and unreal! Miss Trotter affected obliviousness, but was silent; perhaps she thought her employer was better able to take care of himself than Mr. Calton.

A week later this tension terminated by the return of Calton to Roanoke Ledge, a convalescent man. A very pretty watch and chain afterward were received by Miss Trotter, with a few lines expressing the gratitude of the ex-patient. Mr. Bilson was highly delighted, and frequently borrowed the watch to show to his guests as an advertisement of the healing powers of the Summit Hotel. What Mr. Calton sent to the more attractive and flirtatious Frida did not as publicly appear, and possibly Mr. Bilson did not know it. The incident of the cardroom was forgotten. Since that discovery, Miss Trotter had felt herself debarred from taking the girl’s conduct into serious account, and it did not interfere with her work.

One afternoon Miss Trotter received a message that Mr. Calton desired a few moments’ private conversation with her. A little curious, she had him shown into one of the sitting-rooms, but was surprised on entering to find that she was in the presence of an utter stranger! This was explained by the visitor saying briefly that he was Chris’s elder brother, and that he presumed the name would be sufficient introduction. Miss Trotter smiled doubtfully, for a more distinct opposite to Chris could not be conceived. The stranger was apparently strong, practical, and masterful in all those qualities in which his brother was charmingly weak. Miss Trotter, for no reason whatever, felt herself inclined to resent them.

“I reckon, Miss Trotter,” he said bluntly, “that you don’t know anything of this business that brings me here. At least,” he hesitated, with a certain rough courtesy, “I should judge from your general style and gait that you wouldn’t have let it go on so far if you had, but the fact is, that darned fool brother of mine—beg your pardon!—has gone and got himself engaged to one of the girls that help here,—a yellow-haired foreigner, called Frida Jansen.”

“I was not aware that it had gone so far as that,” said Miss Trotter quietly, “although his admiration for her was well known, especially to his doctor, at whose request I selected her to especially attend to your brother.”

“The doctor is a fool,” broke in Mr. Calton abruptly. “He only thought of keeping Chris quiet while he finished his job.”

“And really, Mr. Calton,” continued Miss Trotter, ignoring the interruption, “I do not see what right I have to interfere with the matrimonial intentions of any guest in this house, even though or—as you seem to put it—BECAUSE the object of his attentions is in its employ.”

Mr. Calton stared—angrily at first, and then with a kind of wondering amazement that any woman—above all a housekeeper—should take such a view. “But,” he stammered, “I thought you—you—looked after the conduct of those girls.”

“I’m afraid you’ve assumed too much,” said Miss Trotter placidly. “My business is to see that they attend to their duties here. Frida Jansen’s duty was—as I have just told you—to look after your brother’s room. And as far as I understand you, you are not here to complain of her inattention to that duty, but of its resulting in an attachment on your brother’s part, and, as you tell me, an intention as to her future, which is really the one thing that would make my ‘looking after her conduct’ an impertinence and interference! If you had come to tell me that he did NOT intend to marry her, but was hurting her reputation, I could have understood and respected your motives.”

Mr. Calton felt his face grow red and himself discomfited. He had come there with the firm belief that he would convict Miss Trotter of a grave fault, and that in her penitence she would be glad to assist him in breaking off the match. On the contrary, to find himself arraigned and put on his defense by this tall, slim woman, erect and smartly buckramed in logic and whalebone, was preposterous! But it had the effect of subduing his tone.

“You don’t understand,” he said awkwardly yet pleadingly. “My brother is a fool, and any woman could wind him round her finger. SHE knows it. She knows he is rich and a partner in the Roanoke Ledge. That’s all she wants. She is not a fit match for him. I’ve said he was a fool—but, hang it all! that’s no reason why he should marry an ignorant girl—a foreigner and a servant—when he could do better elsewhere.”

“This would seem to be a matter between you and your brother, and not between myself and my servant,” said Miss Trotter coldly. “If you cannot convince HIM, your own brother, I do not see how you expect me to convince HER, a servant, over whom I have no control except as a mistress of her WORK, when, on your own showing, she has everything to gain by the marriage. If you wish Mr. Bilson, the proprietor, to threaten her with dismissal unless she gives up your brother,”—Miss Trotter smiled inwardly at the thought of the card-room incident,—“it seems to me you might only precipitate the marriage.”

Mr. Calton looked utterly blank and hopeless. His reason told him that she was right. More than that, a certain admiration for her clear-sightedness began to possess him, with the feeling that he would like to have “shown up” a little better than he had in this interview. If Chris had fallen in love with HER—but Chris was a fool and wouldn’t have appreciated her!

“But you might talk with her, Miss Trotter,” he said, now completely subdued. “Even if you could not reason her out of it, you might find out what she expects from this marriage. If you would talk to her as sensibly as you have to me”—

“It is not likely that she will seek my assistance as you have,” said Miss Trotter, with a faint smile which Mr. Calton thought quite pretty, “but I will see about it.”

Whatever Miss Trotter intended to do did not transpire. She certainly was in no hurry about it, as she did not say anything to Frida that day, and the next afternoon it so chanced that business took her to the bank and post-office. Her way home again lay through the Summit woods. It recalled to her the memorable occasion when she was first a witness to Frida’s flirtations. Neither that nor Mr. Bilson’s presumed gallantries, however, seemed inconsistent, in Miss Trotter’s knowledge of the world, with a serious engagement with young Calton. She was neither shocked nor horrified by it, and for that reason she had not thought it necessary to speak of it to the elder Mr. Calton.

Her path wound through a thicket fragrant with syringa and southernwood; the faint perfume was reminiscent of Atlantic hillsides, where, long ago, a girl teacher, she had walked with the girl pupils of the Vermont academy, and kept them from the shy advances of the local swains. She smiled—a little sadly—as the thought occurred to her that after this interval of years it was again her business to restrain the callow affections. Should she never have the matchmaking instincts of her sex; never become the trusted confidante of youthful passion? Young Calton had not confessed his passion to HER, nor had Frida revealed her secret. Only the elder brother had appealed to her hard, practical common sense against such sentiment. Was there something in her manner that forbade it? She wondered if it was some uneasy consciousness of this quality which had impelled her to snub the elder Calton, and rebelled against it.

It was quite warm; she had been walking a little faster than her usual deliberate gait, and checked herself, halting in the warm breath of the syringas. Here she heard her name called in a voice that she recognized, but in tones so faint and subdued that it seemed to her part of her thoughts. She turned quickly and beheld Chris Calton a few feet from her, panting, partly from running and partly from some nervous embarrassment. His handsome but weak mouth was expanded in an apologetic smile; his blue eyes shone with a kind of youthful appeal so inconsistent with his long brown mustache and broad shoulders that she was divided between a laugh and serious concern.

“I saw you—go into the wood—but I lost you,” he said, breathing quickly, “and then when I did see you again—you were walking so fast I had to run after you. I wanted—to speak—to you—if you’ll let me. I won’t detain you—I can walk your way.”

Miss Trotter was a little softened, but not so much as to help him out with his explanation. She drew her neat skirts aside, and made way for him on the path beside her.

“You see,” he went on nervously, taking long strides to her shorter ones, and occasionally changing sides in his embarrassment, “my brother Jim has been talking to you about my engagement to Frida, and trying to put you against her and me. He said as much to me, and added you half promised to help him! But I didn’t believe him—Miss Trotter!—I know you wouldn’t do it—you haven’t got it in your heart to hurt a poor girl! He says he has every confidence in you—that you’re worth a dozen such girls as she is, and that I’m a big fool or I’d see it. I don’t say you’re not all he says, Miss Trotter; but I’m not such a fool as he thinks, for I know your GOODNESS too. I know how you tended me when I was ill, and how you sent Frida to comfort me. You know, too,—for you’re a woman yourself,—that all you could say, or anybody could, wouldn’t separate two people who loved each other.”

Miss Trotter for the first time felt embarrassed, and this made her a little angry. “I don’t think I gave your brother any right to speak for me or of me in this matter,” she said icily; “and if you are quite satisfied, as you say you are, of your own affection and Frida’s, I do not see why you should care for anybody’sinterference.”

“Now you are angry with me,” he said in a doleful voice which at any other time would have excited her mirth; “and I’ve just done it. Oh, Miss Trotter, don’t! Please forgive me! I didn’t mean to say your talk was no good. I didn’t mean to say you couldn’t help us. Please don’t be mad at me!”

He reached out his hand, grasped her slim fingers in his own, and pressed them, holding them and even arresting her passage. The act was without familiarity or boldness, and she felt that to snatch her hand away would be an imputation of that meaning, instead of the boyish impulse that prompted it. She gently withdrew her hand as if to continue her walk, and said, with a smile:—

“Then you confess you need help—in what way?”

“With her!”

Miss Trotter stared. “With HER!” she repeated. This was a new idea. Was it possible that this common, ignorant girl was playing and trifling with her golden opportunity? “Then you are not quite sure of her?” she said a little coldly.

“She’s so high spirited, you know,” he said humbly, “and so attractive, and if she thought my friends objected and were saying unkind things of her,—well!”—he threw out his hands with a suggestion of hopeless despair—“there’s no knowing what she might do.”

Miss Trotter’s obvious thought was that Frida knew on which side her bread was buttered; but remembering that the proprietor was a widower, it occurred to her that the young woman might also have it buttered on both sides. Her momentary fancy of uniting two lovers somehow weakened at this suggestion, and there was a hardening of her face as she said, “Well, if YOU can’t trust her, perhaps your brother may be right.”

“I don’t say that, Miss Trotter,” said Chris pleadingly, yet with a slight wincing at her words; “YOU could convince her, if you would only try. Only let her see that she has some other friends beside myself. Look! Miss Trotter, I’ll leave it all to you—there! If you will only help me, I will promise not to see her—not to go near her again—until you have talked with her. There! Even my brother would not object to that. And if he has every confidence in you, I’m showing you I’ve more—don’t you see? Come, now, promise—won’t you, dear Miss Trotter?” He again took her hand, and this time pressed a kiss upon her slim fingers. And this time she did not withdraw them. Indeed, it seemed to her, in the quick recurrence of her previous sympathy, as if a hand had been put into her loveless past, grasping and seeking hers in its loneliness. None of her school friends had ever appealed to her like this simple, weak, and loving young man. Perhaps it was because they were of her own sex, and she distrusted them.

Nevertheless, this momentary weakness did not disturb her good common sense. She looked at him fixedly for a moment, and then said, with a faint smile, “Perhaps she does not trust YOU. Perhaps you cannot trust yourself.”

He felt himself reddening with a strange embarrassment. It was not so much the question that disturbed him as the eyes of Miss Trotter; eyes that he had never before noticed as being so beautiful in their color, clearness, and half tender insight. He dropped her hand with a new-found timidity, and yet with a feeling that he would like to hold it longer.

“I mean,” she said, stopping short in the trail at a point where a fringe of almost impenetrable “buckeyes” marked the extreme edge of the woods,—“I mean that you are still very young, and as Frida is nearly your own age,”—she could not resist this peculiarly feminine innuendo,—“she may doubt your ability to marry her in the face of opposition; she may even think my interference is a proof of it; but,” she added quickly, to relieve his embarrassment and a certain abstracted look with which he was beginning to regard her, “I will speak to her, and,” she concluded playfully, “you must take the consequences.”

He said “Thank you,” but not so earnestly as his previous appeal might have suggested, and with the same awkward abstraction in his eyes. Miss Trotter did not notice it, as her own eyes were at that moment fixed upon a point on the trail a few rods away. “Look,” she said in a lower voice, “I may have the opportunity now for there is Frida herself passing.” Chris turned in the direction of her glance. It was indeed the young girl walking leisurely ahead of them. There was no mistaking the smart pink calico gown in which Frida was wont to array her rather generous figure, nor the long yellow braids that hung Marguerite-wise down her back. With the consciousness of good looks which she always carried, there was, in spite of her affected ease, a slight furtiveness in the occasional swift turn of her head, as if evading or seeking observation.

“I will overtake her and speak to her now,” continued Miss Trotter. “I may not have so good a chance again to see her alone. You can wait here for my return, if you like.”

Chris started out of his abstraction. “Stay!” he stammered, with a faint, tentative smile. “Perhaps—don’t you think?—I had better go first and tell her you want to see her. I can send her here. You see, she might”—He stopped.

Miss Trotter smiled. “It was part of your promise, you know, that you were NOT to see her again until I had spoken. But no matter! Have it as you wish. I will wait here. Only be quick. She has just gone into the grove.”

Without another word the young man turned away, and she presently saw him walking toward the pine grove into which Frida had disappeared. Then she cleared a space among the matted moss and chickweed, and, gathering her skirts about her, sat down to wait. The unwonted attitude, the whole situation, and the part that she seemed destined to take in this sentimental comedy affected her like some quaint child’s play out of her lost youth, and she smiled, albeit with a little heightening of color and lively brightening of her eyes. Indeed, as she sat there listlessly probing the roots of the mosses with the point of her parasol, the casual passer-by might have taken herself for the heroine of some love tryst. She had a faint consciousness of this as she glanced to the right and left, wondering what any one from the hotel who saw her would think of her sylvan rendezvous; and as the recollection of Chris kissing her hand suddenly came back to her, her smile became a nervous laugh, and she found herself actually blushing!

But she was recalled to herself as suddenly. Chris was returning. He was walking directly towards her with slow, determined steps, quite different from his previous nervous agitation, and as he drew nearer she saw with some concern an equally strange change in his appearance: his colorful face was pale, his eyes fixed, and he looked ten years older. She rose quickly.

“I came back to tell you,” he said, in a voice from which all trace of his former agitation had passed, “that I relieve you of your promise. It won’t be necessary for you to see—Frida. I thank you all the same, Miss Trotter,” he said, avoiding her eyes with a slight return to his boyish manner. “It was kind of you to promise to undertake a foolish errand for me, and to wait here, and the best thing I can do is to take myself off now and keep you no longer. Please don’t ask me WHY. Sometime I may tell you, but not now.”