Bram Stoker - Bram Stoker - The Complete Novels

Dick was distinctly an interesting invalid. There are men who look their worst under such circumstances, and whose natural petulance under pain or restraint destroys any charm which their weakness may have for the feminine mind, but Dick was not such. There was about him a large-hearted patience and a masculine dominance, on which illness seemed to have no effect. Miss Gimp, who was a born nurse, kept him so clean, and his room so picturesque with summer flowers, that even the memory of his personal carelessness died away from Esse’s mind. More than ever the man who had saved her, and whom she had saved, and with whom she had undergone the adventure so sweet to look back upon, became idealised in all those smaller details with which the romantic simulacrum in a woman’s mind is in some degree built up. His great amusement at this time was to polish the bears’ claws, and to drill them in a particular way, until finally he made a magnificent necklace of them, which he handed over to Esse, telling her that they were fairly hers as she had won them.

When the time of convalescence came, Esse became herself head-nurse. At least, all the labour of amusing the patient seemed to devolve on her. She sat by his side in the veranda reading to him and playing draughts or chess, all of which pastimes were dangerous enough; or often listening to his stories of adventure, which was a thousand times more dangerous. After a while Mrs. Elstree came to understand something of the feelings of Brabantio, as he afterwards reflected on the method of Desdemona’s wooing by Othello — with the exception that she assured herself that in no way had Dick the smallest intention of making love. Had she known the deeper strata of human passion she would not have so easily thrown aside her fears with a sigh of relief, for the very indifference of the man to the girl’s preference, so palpable to the mother’s eye, was perhaps the one element remaining to complete the daughter’s fascination. Mrs. Elstree was, however, a wise woman within her own limitations, and as the summer was drawing to a close she determined not to take any notice at present of what was going on, but to let affairs run their course till the return to San Francisco. She felt that it would be a less dangerous course than doing anything whilst there was present the opportunity, in the shape of Dick, of matters coming to a head prematurely.

At this time there were two surly people on Shasta: one, Miss Gimp, who seemed never to get farther in her love-making to Dick; and the other, Heap Hungry, whose offerings to the parrot had been cut short by Esse, lest their continuous presence should lead to some awkward revelation.

One morning when Esse looked out of her window she saw the whole plateau white with snow. It was but a tiny dusting of the ground, and had vanished before the sun was high. But it was a warning that the summer had gone, and that Shasta was henceforth to be, for a time, at any rate, but a sweet memory. When departure had been decided upon, all the mother and guardian became awake in Mrs. Elstree; day and night she watched, and waited, and bestirred herself so, that there was never an opportunity for Esse to have a sentimental leave-taking. To this end, Dick’s natural imperturbability aided, and it was with only a hearty handshake, and a last wave of his cap, that Dick took leave of Esse at the railway station at Edgewood.

Esse herself was too sorry to be very demonstrative. She knew her own secret now, and it took her all her time and effort to so bear herself as to deceive her mother.

The change from Shasta to San Francisco for a time altered the course of Esse’s thoughts. It was not merely that the atmosphere was different or that the duties of life, in great and little degree, were not the same, but that there were compensations for the loss of the bracing air, the natural exhilaration which is given by a rarefied atmosphere, and the unconventional companionship of Grizzly Dick. There were shops! Shops whose contents were to be investigated thoroughly and their new treasures displayed. There were concerts with divine possibilities, and Esse was a musician cultivated far beyond the opportunities of even San Francisco. Hollander, and Paderewski, and Sarasate were all personal friends of her mother, and from each of them she had friendly counsel. Now that she was come again in touch with all these delightful results of civilization, she began to feel as though the Shoulder of Shasta were barren of the higher delights of life — of some of them at least. Then there were the theatres, for to Esse a theatre was a veritable wonderland. Like all persons of pure imagination, the theatre itself was but a means to an end. She did not think of a play as a play, but as a reality, and so her higher education — the education of the heart, the brain, and the soul — was pursued; and by the sequence of her own emotion and her memory of them, she became, each time she saw a play, to know herself a little better, and so to better know the world and its dwellers. Visits, too, and dances, and the thousand and one harmless frivolities which go to make up a woman’s life, claimed her time and her passing interest.

And so it was that within a few weeks of return to San Francisco, Grizzly Dick and all his romantic environment became for the time only a distant memory. But out of this very state of things, in which her mother had a new sense of security, there came a new danger. Since Dick was only a memory, he became one with that particular nimbus of softening effects which is apt to accompany and environ a memory which is a pleasant one — that which is to a memory what a halo is to a pictorial saint, at once a distinguishing trait and an aid to fancy. Esse began to feel that since Dick was a memory he was one that could be shared; and so each dearest friend of the hour became in turn the recipient of her confidence. It is an easy matter to sympathise with a misplaced affection; and the slaughtering of grizzlies and the saving and being saved by picturesque hunters, massive of limb and quaint of speech, has a charm for young ladies unaccustomed to the shedding of blood. Esse began to hear nothing but praise of Dick, and envious wishes, sighingly expressed by susceptible companions, that her chance of love had been theirs. Thus by a subtle process, which the Fates so thoroughly understood, Esse began to look into her own heart with the eyes of her friends. What she found there she did not quite know. All was nebulous, inchoate and dim of outline; but it — whatever it was — had a living, breathing charm which touched her imagination, fired afresh all the impulses of her virgin heart, and made her very nerves tingle at all sweet unknown possibilities. When a girl gets thus far into the dark forests of love she seems to realise — historically, but last of all by herself — the truth of that master of the craft who said that “a woman loves for the sake of loving.” There is something in feminine nature which seems to have a distinct need of expressing itself in some form of self-abnegation. It may be that there is a bacillus of love, which, when once it finds an entry into the human heart, goes on multiplying itself, as other microbes do when finding their ‘final’ destination; or it may be that it is a virus which can affect all around it in ever-widening area. But be it what it may, and work how it will, one thing is certain, that when once this idea has become conscious to a woman and she can locate its cause, the process of its growth is a natural one, and nothing in the world can stop it. Thus Esse, having begun the new phase of her feeling towards Dick by finding in him a sort of hero of romance, began to exaggerate her own feelings towards him; and finally grew to believe that she had acted rather badly towards him.