Bret Harte - Under the Redwoods

While it may be gathered from this that the youngest Miss Piper was impervious to general masculine advances, it was not until later that Red Gulch was thrown into skeptical astonishment by the rumors that all this time she really had a lover! Allusion has been made to the charge that her deafness did not prevent her from perfectly understanding the ordinary tone of voice of a certain Mr. Thomas Sparrell.

No undue significance was attached to this fact through the very insignificance and “impossibility” of that individual;—a lanky, red-haired youth, incapacitated for manual labor through lameness,—a clerk in a general store at the Cross Roads! He had never been the recipient of Judge Piper’s hospitality; he had never visited the house even with parcels; apparently his only interviews with her or any of the family had been over the counter. To do him justice he certainly had never seemed to seek any nearer acquaintance; he was not at the church door when her sisters, beautiful in their Sunday gowns, filed into the aisle, with little Delaware bringing up the rear; he was not at the Democratic barbecue, that we attended without reference to our personal politics, and solely for the sake of Judge Piper and the girls; nor did he go to the Agricultural Fair Ball—open to all. His abstention we believed to be owing to his lameness; to a wholesome consciousness of his own social defects; or an inordinate passion for reading cheap scientific textbooks, which did not, however, add fluency nor conviction to his speech. Neither had he the abstraction of a student, for his accounts were kept with an accuracy which struck us, who dealt at the store, as ignobly practical, and even malignant. Possibly we might have expressed this opinion more strongly but for a certain rude vigor of repartee which he possessed, and a suggestion that he might have a temper on occasion. “Them red-haired chaps is like to be tetchy and to kinder see blood through their eyelashes,” had been suggested by an observing customer.

In short, little as we knew of the youngest Miss Piper, he was the last man we should have suspected her to select as an admirer. What we did know of their public relations, purely commercial ones, implied the reverse of any cordial understanding. The provisioning of the Piper household was entrusted to Del, with other practical odds and ends of housekeeping, not ornamental, and the following is said to be a truthful record of one of their overheard interviews at the store:—

The youngest Miss Piper, entering, displacing a quantity of goods in the centre to make a sideways seat for herself, and looking around loftily as she took a memorandum-book and pencil from her pocket.

“Ahem! If I ain’t taking you away from your studies, Mr. Sparrell, maybe you’ll be good enough to look here a minit;—but” (in affected politeness) “if I’m disturbing you I can come another time.”

Sparrell, placing the book he had been reading carefully under the counter, and advancing to Miss Delaware with a complete ignoring of her irony: “What can we do for you to-day, Miss Piper?”

Miss Delaware, with great suavity of manner, examining her memorandum-book: “I suppose it wouldn’t be shocking your delicate feelings too much to inform you that the canned lobster and oysters you sent us yesterday wasn’t fit for hogs?”

Sparrell (blandly): “They weren’t intended for them, Miss Piper. If we had known you were having company over from Red Gulch to dinner, we might have provided something more suitable for them. We have a fair quality of oil-cake and corn-cobs in stock, at reduced figures. But the canned provisions were for your own family.”

Miss Delaware (secretly pleased at this sarcastic allusion to her sister’s friends, but concealing her delight): “I admire to hear you talk that way, Mr. Sparrell; it’s better than minstrels or a circus. I suppose you get it outer that book,” indicating the concealed volume. “What do you call it?”

Sparrell (politely): “The First Principles of Geology.”

Miss Delaware, leaning sideways and curling her little fingers around her pink ear: “Did you say the first principles of ‘geology’ or ‘politeness’? You know I am so deaf; but, of course, it couldn’t be that.”

Sparrell (easily): “Oh no, you seem to have that in your hand”—pointing to Miss Delaware’s memorandum-book—“you were quoting from it when you came in.”

Miss Delaware, after an affected silence of deep resignation: “Well! it’s too bad folks can’t just spend their lives listenin’ to such elegant talk; I’d admire to do nothing else! But there’s my family up at Cottonwood—and they must eat. They’re that low that they expect me to waste my time getting food for ‘em here, instead of drinking in the First Principles of the Grocery.”

“Geology,” suggested Sparrell blandly. “The history of rock formation.”

“Geology,” accepted Miss Delaware apologetically; “the history of rocks, which is so necessary for knowing just how much sand you can put in the sugar. So I reckon I’ll leave my list here, and you can have the things toted to Cottonwood when you’ve got through with your First Principles.”

She tore out a list of her commissions from a page of her memorandum-book, leaped lightly from the counter, threw her brown braid from her left shoulder to its proper place down her back, shook out her skirts deliberately, and saying, “Thank you for a most improvin’ afternoon, Mr. Sparrell,” sailed demurely out of the store.

A few auditors of this narrative thought it inconsistent that a daughter of Judge Piper and a sister of the angelic host should put up with a mere clerk’s familiarity, but it was pointed out that “she gave him as good as he sent,” and the story was generally credited. But certainly no one ever dreamed that it pointed to any more precious confidences between them.

I think the secret burst upon the family, with other things, at the big picnic at Reservoir Canyon. This festivity had been arranged for weeks previously, and was undertaken chiefly by the “Red Gulch Contingent,” as we were called, as a slight return to the Piper family for their frequent hospitality. The Piper sisters were expected to bring nothing but their own personal graces and attend to the ministration of such viands and delicacies as the boys had profusely supplied.

The site selected was Reservoir Canyon, a beautiful, triangular valley with very steep sides, one of which was crowned by the immense reservoir of the Pioneer Ditch Company. The sheer flanks of the canyon descended in furrowed lines of vines and clinging bushes, like folds of falling skirts, until they broke again into flounces of spangled shrubbery over a broad level carpet of monkshood, mariposas, lupines, poppies, and daisies. Tempered and secluded from the sun’s rays by its lofty shadows, the delicious obscurity of the canyon was in sharp contrast to the fiery mountain trail that in the full glare of the noonday sky made its tortuous way down the hillside, like a stream of lava, to plunge suddenly into the valley and extinguish itself in its coolness as in a lake. The heavy odors of wild honeysuckle, syringa, and ceanothus that hung over it were lightened and freshened by the sharp spicing of pine and bay. The mountain breeze which sometimes shook the serrated tops of the large redwoods above with a chill from the remote snow peaks even in the heart of summer, never reached the little valley.

It seemed an ideal place for a picnic. Everybody was therefore astonished to hear that an objection was suddenly raised to this perfect site. They were still more astonished to know that the objector was the youngest Miss Piper! Pressed to give her reasons, she had replied that the locality was dangerous; that the reservoir placed upon the mountain, notoriously old and worn out, had been rendered more unsafe by false economy in unskillful and hasty repairs to satisfy speculating stockbrokers, and that it had lately shown signs of leakage and sapping of its outer walls; that, in the event of an outbreak, the little triangular valley, from which there was no outlet, would be instantly flooded. Asked still more pressingly to give her authority for these details, she at first hesitated, and then gave the name of Tom Sparrell.