“It is a very strange thing!” said she.
“Indeed?”
“Yes, my dear; and the worst of it is that it is so embarrassing. One doesn’t wish to make anyone unhappy, much less to ruin their lives!”
After a pause, which Esse filled up with another “Indeed,” Miss Gimp went on:
“I have been told that young men take such matters so to heart that they grow wild, and go out and drink, and do all manner of dreadful things!”
Esse’s curiosity was now becoming interested; she had a vague idea that Miss Gimp had some kind of hallucination as to a love affair, but she could not quite make out yet what was its special direction. She felt herself thinking a phrase which she had several times heard Dick use, “How many kinds of a durn’d fool was it that she was makin’ of herself?” Her monotonous “Indeed” was hardly adequate to the situation, so she added with as little tendency towards laughter as she could manage.
“Poor young man! You must not let him suffer too much!”
Miss Gimp sighed and wiped a phantom tear from her cheek as she said in a far-away manner.
“Oh, poor Dick! Poor dear Dick! I fear he has much suffering before him! — Did you speak?” she added in a different tone, for Esse had on the instant been taken with a sudden and very violent cough which made her in a short space of time grow almost purple in the face.
The shock was too much when Miss Gimp apostrophised the man who was the victim of unhappy attachment, and in her mind’s eye rose the burly figure of Grizzly Dick, driven crazed for love, painting red spots all over the town of Sacramento. The figure changed instantly to the same man sitting amongst the forest trees, slapping his thighs and roaring with laughter as he thought of Miss Gimp and the parrot, and the relative places which they held in Indian esteem. Miss Gimp bridled somewhat, and seemed more than ever to justify her Indian name; but Esse, who really liked her, found her risibility checked by her genuine concern for her, apologised for the interruption, and asked her to go on. So, with as many “flirts and flutters” as Poe’s famous bird of ill omen, Miss Gimp began her story.
“It has surprised — surprised me very much, to find little offerings placed outside my window. Most odd things, my dear — wild turkeys and young fawns, hare, bear-meat, and sometimes fruit of an edible kind, potatoes, honey, and such like. I wondered who could have put them there!”
Here she simpered in a way that would have looked artificial in a girls’ school on the day when male relatives are received. Then she went on with marked inconsequentiality:
“It would be a sin — a perfect sin to drive to desperation such a fine figure of a man!”
Esse had expected to find her laughter uncontrollable as the story went on, but instead she felt something beginning to overpower her which was much nigher akin to tears. How could she but feel sorrow for the poor, dear old thing who with all her oddities was as loyal and as true as the sunlight. She knew that whatever was the cause of her error, there was no possibility of her manifest wishes being carried out. Then came a doubt. “How did she herself know this?” with the consequent answer, “Because Dick was already” — the thought was completed in her mind with an overpowering rush of blood to her face, which Miss Gimp must have noticed only that she was coyly turning away and simpering all to herself.
It is commonly thought that men and women become transformed and glorified in and by great moments. This may be so, but the common idea of great moments is not so true to Nature. There are great moments for all the Children of Adam; but they are not always great through the force of external facts. The dramatic moment in real life does not always come amongst picturesque and suitable surroundings. It is the conjuncture of spiritual and mundane suitabilities which makes the opportunity of the dramatist; but to others, who are the puppets of the great dramatic poet Nature, the moments of transfiguration come as they came to St Paul. The Great Light which turns the thoughts of men inwards, and reveals to themselves the secret springs of their own actions, has many moral and psychical and intellectual manifestations. The pagans whose imagination wrought into existence the whole theology of Olympus, had a subtle insight into the human heart when they showed the familiar figure of Cupid shooting his sweetly poisoned arrows at them that slept.
Such a crucial moment was now for Esse. She had come to that great temple of the hillside to laugh — to laugh at the brain-sick, love-sick fancies of an old woman whose whole being seemed a mockery of the possibilities of love; and she had remained to pray, with a bitter pang of hope and fear. In the whirling of her thought she got glimpses into her own soul which made her cheeks burn, even while half in a fainting mood she felt the solid earth slipping beneath her feet. Her mind must have been earnestly occupied, for she did not hear Miss Gimp go on with her story. It was strange to her that after a pause of mental blankness, during which she sat still, she felt the roaring in her ears pass away and realised that Miss Gimp was speaking — speaking with the volubility of one who has entered on a congenial theme and is under its sway:
“Of course, my dear, Dick being a hunter thinks that he should make his — he! he! — offerings of a suitable kind. It is most embarrassing, for a girl can’t put a leg of a deer, or a bear ham, or a wild turkey, into a jewel case, or lock it up in a drawer, so that she can take it out when no one is looking and kiss it. In fact there is no sense in kissing a ham or a leg of raw meat at all, and if you lock it up in a drawer it doesn’t smell very nice, even if it does not go bad altogether. The matter is now getting serious. I assure you, my dear, that my room is beginning to get into a shocking state. I am positively afraid to open the lower section of my chest of drawers, for I put the first of the — the offerings in there; and there’s a very suspicious odour from it already. I wish you’d advise me, my dear, what I ought to do!”
There was such a delightful air of seriousness about Miss Gimp as she made her strange disclosure, and it seemed so absolutely out of harmony with the ridiculous matter, that Esse felt once more an almost overpowering desire to laugh. She felt that she could not overcome it if she remained where she was, so she started up briskly, and, taking Miss Gimp by the arm, called out:
“Come along quick! — We must look over the jewel casket, and see what can be done.”
Miss Gimp would rather have sat still and nursed her sentiment, but she was overborne by Esse’s spirits and energy; and so hand in hand, like a pair of children, they raced to the house.
When they went into Miss Gimp’s room there was no possibility of mistaking the odour. Even a properly arranged larder is not always the most pleasant of places, but a lady’s bedroom is in no way adapted for the storage of dead flesh. Esse for a moment felt qualmish, and would have decamped at once only that Miss Gimp had silently and mysteriously locked the door, and so she remained, supported solely by the humour of the situation. Miss Gimp walked on tip-toe over to the chest of drawers and opened the top drawer.
“Here is the last,” she said