“And one man in his time plays many parts.”
—SHAKESPEARE.
At two o’clock on the afternoon of her party Mrs. Willers was giving the finishing touches to her rooms. These were a sitting and bedroom in one of the large boarding-houses that already had begun to make their appearance along Sutter Street. “To reside” on Sutter Street, as she would have expressed it, was a step in fashion for Mrs. Willers, who previously had lived in such ignominious localities as North Beach and upper Market Street, renting the surplus rooms in dingy “private families.” Her rise to fairer fortunes was signalized by the move to Sutter Street. Her parlor announced it in its over-furnished brilliancy. All the best furniture of the poor lady’s many migrations had been squeezed into the little room. The Japanese fans and umbrellas, flattened against the walls with pins, were accumulated at some cost, for they represented one of those strange and unaccountable vagaries of popular taste that from time to time seize a community with blighting force. Silk scarfs were twisted about everything whereon they could twist.
The “lunch,” as the hostess called it, had already been prepared and stood on a side table. Edna, Mrs. Willers’ daughter, had made many trips up and down the street that morning collecting its component parts and bringing them home in paper bags. The ladies in the lower windows of the house had been aware of these goings and comings, and so were partly prepared when, at luncheon, Mrs. Willers casually told them of the distinguished guest she expected. The newspaper woman had not lived her life with her eyes shut and her ears closed, and she knew the value to the fraction of a hair of this information, and just how much it would add to her prestige.
She was now fluttering about in a wrapper, and with a piece of black net tied tight over her forehead. Through this the forms of dark circular curls outlined themselves like silhouettes. Mrs. Willers had no war-paint on, and though she looked a trifle worn, was much more attractive in appearance than when decorated with her pink and white complexion and her spotted veil. Edna, who was already dressed, was a beautiful, fair-haired child of twelve. The struggles she had seen her mother pass through, with her eyes bright and her head high, had developed in her a precocity of mind that had not spoiled the sweet childishness of a charming nature. It would be many years yet before Edna would understand that she had been the sheet-anchor of the mother who was to her so clever and so brave; the mother, who, in her moments of weakness and temptation, had found her child the one rock to cling to in the welter of life.
Mrs. Willers retired to the bedroom to dress, occasionally coming to the doorway in various stages of déshabille to give instructions to the child. Her toilet was accomplished with mutilated rites, and by the time the sacrificial moment came of laying on the rouge her cheeks were too flushed with excitement to need it. When she did appear it would have been difficult to recognize her as the woman of an hour earlier. Even the black silhouettes had passed through a metamorphosis and appeared as a fluff of careless curls.
The first guest to arrive was the man she had spoken of as Essex. The ladies at the windows below had been struck into whispering surprise by his appearance. San Francisco was still enjoying its original reputation as a land of picturesque millionaires, who lived lives of lawlessness and splendor. Men of position still wore soft felt hats and buttoned themselves tight into prince-albert coats when they went down to business in the morning. Perhaps in the traveled circles, where the Bonanza kings and their associates lived after European models, there were men who bore the stamp of metropolitan finish, as Barry Essex did. But they did not visit Sutter Street boarding-houses nor wear silk hats when they paid afternoon calls. San Francisco was still in that stage when this form of headgear was principally associated in its mind with the men who drew teeth and sold patent medicines on the sand lots behind the city hall.
Barry Essex, anywhere, would have been a striking figure. He was a handsome man of some thirty years, tall and spare, and with a dark, smooth-shaven face where the nose was high and the eyes veiled and cold. He looked like a person of high birth, and there were stories that he was, though by the left hand. He spoke with an English accent, and, when asked his nationality, shrugged his shoulders and said it was hard to say what it was—his father had been a Spaniard, his mother an Englishwoman, and he had been born and reared in France.
That he was a man of ability and education, superior to the work he was doing as special writer on Jake Shackleton’s paper, The Trumpet, was obvious. But San Francisco had become so used to mysteriously interesting strangers, that come from no one knows where, and suggest an attractively unconventional history, that the particular curiosity excited by Essex soon died, and he was merely of moment as the author of some excellent articles on art, literature and music in The Sunday Trumpet.
He greeted Mrs. Willers with a friendly fellowship, then let a quick, surreptitious glance sweep the room. She saw it, knew what he was looking for, but affected unconsciousness. His manner was touched by the slightest suggestion of something elaborate and theatrical, which, in Mrs. Willers’ mind, seemed to have some esoteric connection with the silk hat. This he now—after slowly looking about for a safe place of deposit—handed to Edna with the careless remark: “Will you put this down somewhere, Edna?”
The child took it, flushing slightly. She was accustomed to being made much of by her mother’s guests, and Essex’s manner stung her little girl’s pride. But she put the hat on the piano and retired to her corner, behind the refreshment table.
A few moments later she opened the door to Jake Shackleton. Mrs. Willers, red-cheeked and triumphant, felt that this was indeed a proud moment for her. She said as much, drawing an amused laugh from her second guest. He, too, had swept the room with a quick, investigating glance. This time Mrs. Willers did not affect unconsciousness, and said briskly:
“No, our young lady hasn’t come yet. You’ll have to try and put up with me for a while.”
It would have been difficult for the eye of the deepest affection to see in the Comstock millionaire the emigrant of twenty-five years before. A mother might have been deceived. The lean figure had grown chunky and heavy. The drawn face was now not full—it was the type of face that would never be full—but was lacking in the seams that had then furrowed it. The hair was gray, worn thin on the temples, and the beard, trimmed and well-tended, was gray, too. Perhaps the strongest tie with the past was that the man suggested the same hard, fine-drawn, wiry energy. It still shone in his narrow, light-colored eyes, and still was to be seen in his lean, muscular hand, that was frequently used in gesticulation.
In manner the change was equally apparent. Though colloquial, his speech showed none of the coarse illiterateness of the past. His manner was quiet, abruptly natural, and not lacking in a sort of easy dignity, the dignity of the man who has won his place among men. He was dressed with the utmost simplicity. His soft felt wide-awake was not new, his black prince-albert coat did not fit him with anything like the elegance with which Barry Essex’s outlined his fine shape. A little purple cravat tied in a bow appeared from beneath his turned-down collar. It was somewhat shiny from the brushing of his beard.
“You must suppose I’m anxious to see this young lady,” he said, “after what you’ve told me about her.”
“Well, ask Mr. Essex if I’ve exaggerated,” said Mrs. Willers. “He knows her, too.”
“I don’t know what you’ve said,” he returned, “but I don’t think anything could be too complimentary that was said of Miss Moreau.”
“Eh!—better and better,” said the elder man. “I didn’t know you knew her, Essex?”
He turned his gray eyes, absolutely cold and non-committal on Essex, who answered them with an equally expressionless gaze.
“I’ve known Miss Moreau for three months,” he replied. “I met her here.”
Shackleton turned back to Mrs. Willers.
“I understand from you, Mrs. Willers, that these ladies are left extremely badly off. Are they absolutely without means?”
“No-o,” she answered, “not exactly that. Mr. Moreau left a life insurance policy of five thousand dollars. Mariposa tells me that three thousand of that went to pay his doctors’ bills and funeral expenses. He was sick a long time. They are now living on their capital, and they’ve been here four months, and Mrs. Moreau has constant medical attendance.”
The millionaire gave a little click of his tongue significant of annoyance.
“Moreau had a dozen chances of making his pile, as every man did in those days,” he said. “He was the sort of man who is predestined to leave his family poor.”
“Yet they worship his memory,” said Mrs. Willers. “He must have been very good to them.”
Shackleton made no answer. She was used to reading his expression, and the odd thought crossed her mind that this remark of hers was unpleasant to him.
Before she had time to reply a knock at the door announced the arrival of Mariposa. As she entered the two men stood up, both looking at her with veiled eagerness. To Essex his feeling for her was making her every appearance an event. To Shackleton it was a moment of quivering interest in a career full of tumultuous moments.
A slight flush mounted to his face as he met her eyes. She instinctively looked at him first, with a charming look, girlish, shy, and deprecating. Her likeness to her mother struck him like a blow, but she was an Amazonian Lucy, with all that Lucy had lacked. He saw himself in the stronger jaw and the firm lips. Physically she was molded of them both. His heart swelled with a passionate pride. This, indeed, was his own child, bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh.
The introductions over, they resettled themselves, and Mariposa found herself beside this quiet, gray-haired man, talking quite volubly. She was not shy nor nervous, as she had expected to be, but felt peculiarly at her ease. Looking at her with intent eyes, he spoke to her of the early days in California, when he and her parents had come across.
“You know, I knew your father in the Sierra, long ago,” he said.
“TO SHACKLETON IT WAS A MOMENT OF QUIVERING INTEREST”
“Yes,” she answered rather hurriedly, fearful lest he should ask her if her father had not spoken of him, “so Mrs. Willers said. It must have been a long time ago. Was I there?” she added with a little smile.
He was taken aback by the question and said, stammeringly:
“Well, really now, I—I—don’t quite remember.”
“I guess I wasn’t,” she said laughing. “You must have known father before that. He came over in forty-nine, you know. I was born twenty-four years ago up in the mountains, in Eldorado County, in a little cabin miles above Placerville. Mother’s often described the place to me. They left soon after.”
He lowered his eyes. He was a man of no sentiment or tenderness, yet something in this false statement, uttered so innocently by these fresh young lips, and taught with all the solicitude of love to this simple nature, pierced like an arrow to the live spot in his deadened conscience.
“It was more than twenty-five years ago that I was there,” he said. “You evidently were not born then.”
“But my mother was there then. Do you think I look like her? My father thought I was wonderfully like her.”
He looked into the candid face. Memories of Lucy before his own harsh treatment and the hardships of her life had broken her, stirred in him.
“Yes,” he said slowly, “you’re very like her. But you’re like your father, too.”
“Am I?” she cried, evidently delighted. “Do you really think so? I do want to look like my father.”
“Why?” he could not help asking.
“Wouldn’t you like to look like both your parents, if they were the two finest people in the world?”
Here Mrs. Willers cut short the conversation by asking Mariposa to sing. The girl rose and went directly to the piano. For days this moment had been looming before her in nightmare proportions. She was feverishly anxious to do her best and sickeningly fearful of failure. Now her confidence was unshaken. Something—impossible to say just what—had reassured her. Her hands were trembling a little as she struck the keys, and her first notes showed the oscillation of nervousness, but soon the powerful voice began to come more under her control, and she poured it out exultantly. She never sang better. Her voice, much too large for the small space, was almost painful in its resonant force.
Of the two men the elder was without musical knowledge of any kind. He was amazed and delighted at what seemed to him an astonishing performance. But Essex knew that with the proper training and guidance there were possibilities of a brilliant future for this handsome and penniless young woman. He had lived much among professional singers, and he knew that Mariposa Moreau possessed an unusual voice. For reasons of his own he did not desire her to know her own power, and he was secretly irritated that she had sung so well.
She continued, Shackleton requesting another, and yet another song. Only the clock chiming four roused him to the fact that he must go. He was living at his country place at Menlo Park and had to catch a train. He left them with assurances of his delight in the performance. To Mariposa, as he pressed her hand in farewell, he said:
“I’ll see you again. You’ve a wonderful voice, there’s no mistake about that. It’s a gift, a great gift, and it must have its chance.”
The girl, carried away with the triumph of the afternoon, said gaily:
“I’ll sing for you whenever you like. Could you never come up to our cottage on Pine Street and meet my mother? I know she would like to see you.”
The slightest possible look of surprise passed over his face, gone almost as soon as it had come. Mariposa saw it, however, and felt embarrassed. She evidently had been too forward, and looked down, blushing and uncomfortable. He recovered himself immediately, and said:
“Not now, much as I should like to, Miss Moreau. I am living at Menlo Park, and all my spare time when business is over is spent in catching trains. But give your mother my compliments on the possession of such a daughter.”
Mariposa and Essex stayed chatting with Mrs. Willers for some time after Shackleton’s departure. The clock had chimed more than once, when finally they left, and their hostess, exhausted, but exultant, threw herself back in a chair and watched Edna gather up the remains of the lunch.
“Put the cakes in the tin, dearie. They’ll do for to-morrow, and be sure and cork the bottle tight. There’s enough for another time.”
“Several other times,” said Edna, holding the bottle of port wine up to the light and squinting at it with her head on one side. “It was a cheap party—they hardly drank anything.”
Mariposa and her companion walked up Sutter Street with the lagging step of people who find each other excellent company.
It was the end of a warm afternoon in September, one of those still, deeply flushed evenings when the air is tepid and smells of distant fires, and the winged ants come out of the rotting sidewalks by the thousand. The west was a clear, thin red smudged with brown smoke. The houses grew dark and ever darker, and seemed to loom more solidly black every moment. They looked dreamlike and mysterious against the fiery background.
“How did you like it?” said Mariposa, as they loitered on, “my singing, I mean?”
“It was excellent, of course. You’ve got a voice. But the room was too small—and such a room to sing in, all crowded with ridiculous things.”
Mariposa felt hurt. She thought Essex was the finest, the most elegant and finished person she had ever met. He seemed to her to breathe the atmosphere of those great sophisticated cities she had never seen. In his talks with her he now and then chilled her by his suggestion of belonging to another and a wiser world, to which she was a provincial outsider.
This quality was in his manner now, and she began to feel how raw her poor performance must have seemed to the man who had heard the great prima donnas of London and Paris.
“It was a small room, of course,” she assented, “but I had to sing somewhere, and I couldn’t hire a place.”
“Shackleton wanted to hear you, as I understand it. Mrs. Willers said something about his knowing your father.”
There was no question about the coldness of his voice now. Had Mariposa known more about men she would have seen he was irritated.
She repeated the fable of her father’s early acquaintance with Jake Shackleton, and of the latter’s desire expressed to Mrs. Willers, of hearing her sing.
“Mrs. Willers is such an ass!” he said suddenly and vindictively.
Mariposa was this time hurt for her friend and spoke up:
“I don’t see why you say that. I don’t think a woman’s an ass who can support herself and a child as she does,”—she thought of her sixteen dollars and added: “It’s very hard for a woman to make money.”
“Oh, she’s not an ass that way,” he answered. “She’s an ass to try and work Shackleton up to the point of becoming a patron of the arts—as represented by you.”
He turned on her with a slight smile, that brought no suggestion of amusement to his somewhat saturnine face.
“Isn’t that her idea?” he asked.
Mariposa felt her hopes as to the training of her voice becoming mean and vulgar.
“He said he wanted to hear me,” she said stumblingly, “and she said it would be a good thing. And I have no money to educate my voice, and it’s all I have. Why do you seem to disapprove of it?”
“I?—disapprove? That would hardly do. Why even if I wanted to, I have not the right to, have I?”
Mariposa’s face flushed. She felt now, that she had presupposed an intimacy between them which he wanted politely to suggest did not exist. This was not by any means the first time Essex had baffled and embarrassed her. It amused him to do it, but to-day he was in a bad temper and did it from spleen.
“Somehow Jake Shackleton doesn’t suggest himself to me as a patron of the arts,” he said. “I don’t think he knows Yankee Doodle from God Save the Queen.”
Mariposa thought of the brilliant article on the Italian opera, from Bellini to Verdi, that the man beside her had contributed to last Sunday’s Trumpet, and Jake Shackleton’s enthusiastic admiration of her singing immediately seemed the worthless praise of sodden ignorance.
“Then,” she said desperately, “you wouldn’t attach any importance, if you were I, to his liking my singing? It was just the way some people like a street organ simply because it plays tunes.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think that. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t know a good voice when he hears it.”
“Do you think I’ve got a good voice?” said Mariposa, stopping in the street and staring morosely at him.
“Of course I do, dear lady.”
“Do you, really?”
“Yes, really.”
She smiled, and tried to hide it by looking down.
It was hardly in man to continue bad-humored before this naïve display of pleasure at his commending word.
“You really think I might some day become a singer, a professional singer?”
“I really do.”
The smile broadened and lit her face.
“You always make me feel so stupid—and—and—as if I didn’t amount to anything,” she murmured.
It was so sweet, so childishly candid, that it melted the last remnant of his bad temper.
“You little goose,” he said softly, “don’t you know I think more of you than I do of any one in San Francisco? It’s getting dark; take my arm till we get to the car.”
She did so and they moved forward.
“Or anywhere else,” he murmured.