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Updated: August 9, 2024
"That's the chap." "Who? Who?" they cried. But neither Jim nor Josephine would vouchsafe an answer. The next was the long interval. Jim and Josephine gazed down at the orchestra. The musicians were laying aside their instruments and rising. The ugly fire-curtain began slowly to descend. Jim suddenly bolted out. "Is it that man Aaron Sisson?" asked Robert. "Where? Where?" cried Julia.
The news spread that "there was a man on the mountain," and he must surely have perished, and Sisson was blamed for allowing any one to attempt climbing in such weather; while I was as safe as anybody in the lowlands, lying like a squirrel in a warm, fluffy nest, busied about my own affairs and wishing only to be let alone.
Sir William was a small, clean old man with a thin, white beard and a courtly deportment, wearing a black velvet dinner jacket faced with purple silk. "How do you do, Mr. Sisson. You come straight from England?" Sir William held out his hand courteously and benevolently, smiling an old man's smile of hospitality. "Mr. Lilly has gone away?" said Aaron. "Yes. He left us several days ago."
Sisson put his money on kindly fortune, I believe," said Arthur, who rosy and fresh with wine, looked as if he would make a marvelous bonne bouchee for a finely-discriminating cannibal. "Ah, yes, indeed! A much more ingratiating lady to lift our glasses to. Mr. Sisson's kindly fortune. Fortuna gentil-issima! Well, Mr. Sisson, and may your Lady Fortune ever smile on you."
"You're a bloody young sucking pig, you are," said Jim. "Even at that age, I've learned my manners," replied Robert. Jim looked round the party. Then he turned to Aaron Sisson. "What do you make of 'em, eh?" he said. Aaron shook his head, and laughed. "Me?" he said. But Jim did not wait for an answer. "I've had enough," said Tanny suddenly rising. "I think you're all silly.
Our capital host and hostess became our personal friends; and all that they did for us was so heartily kind and so cheerily comfortable, that, if we were asked where, on the whole, we passed the pleasantest, as distinct from the grandest, week in California, I think we should answer, "At Sisson's, in Strawberry Valley." Sisson was, without exception, the best rifle-shot I ever saw.
"Women waste nothing they couldn't if they tried," said Aaron Sisson. There was a lull for some minutes. The men were all stimulated by drink. The landlady kept them going. She herself sipped a glass of brandy but slowly. She sat near to Sisson and the great fierce warmth of her presence enveloped him particularly. He loved so to luxuriate, like a cat, in the presence of a violent woman.
Away in the street itself, a boy was calling the newspaper: " 'NING POST! 'NING PO-O-ST!" It was a long, melancholy howl, and seemed to epitomise the whole of the dark, wet, secretive, thickly-inhabited night. A figure passed the window of Aaron's own house, entered, and stood inside the room talking to Mrs. Sisson. It was a young woman in a brown mackintosh and a black hat.
The party hurried through the rainy narrow streets down to the Embankment station. Robert and Julia and Clariss were going west, Lilly and his wife were going to Hampstead, Josephine and Aaron Sisson were going both to Bloomsbury. "I suppose," said Robert, on the stairs "Mr. Sisson will see you to your door, Josephine. He lives your way." "There's no need at all," said Josephine.
With a certain sense of triumph over that unpleasant and dissuasive child, we saw a lantern gleam from a corral about ten P. M., and had our interrogative hail of "Sisson's?" answered in welcome affirmative by Sisson himself. At Sisson's, or exploring with him in the neighborhood of Shasta, we passed one of the most delightful weeks in our diary of travel through any land.
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