“He looked at her as a lover can;
She looked at him as one who awakes.”
—BROWNING.
From his first meeting with her, Barry Essex had conceived a deep interest in Mariposa. He had known women of many and divers sorts, and loved a few after the manner of his kind, which was to foster indolently a selfish caprice. Marriage was out of the question for him unless with money, and some instinct, perhaps inherited from his romantic and deeply-loving mother, made this singularly repugnant to his nature, which was neither sensitive nor scrupulous. The mystery and hazard of life appealed passionately to him, and to exchange this for the dull monotony of a rich marriage was an unbearably irksome thought to his unrestrained and adventurous spirit.
Mariposa’s charm had struck him deep. He had never before met that combination of extreme simplicity of character with the unconscious majesty of appearance which marked the child of the far West. He saw her in that Europe, which was his home, as a conquering queen; and he thought proudly of himself as the owner of such a woman. Moreover he was certain that her voice, properly trained and directed, would be a source of wealth. She seemed to him the real vocal artist, stupid in all but one great gift; in that, preëminent.
Mariposa was trembling on the verge of a first love. She had never seen any one like Essex and regarded him as the most distinguished and brilliant of beings. His attentions flattered her as she had never been flattered before, and she found herself constantly wondering what he saw in a girl who must appear to him so raw.
Her experience of men was small. Once in Sacramento, when she was eighteen, she had received an offer from a young lawyer, and two years ago, in Santa Barbara, she had been the recipient of a second, from a prosperous rancher. Both had been refused without hesitation, and had left no mark on imagination or heart. Then, at a critical period of her life—lonely, poor, a stranger in a strange city—she had fallen in with Essex, and for the first time felt the thrill at the sound of a footstep, the quickening pulse and flushing cheek at the touch of a hand, that she had read of in novels. She thought that nobody had seen this; but the eyes of the dangerous man under whose spell she had fallen were watching her with wary yet ardent interest.
He had known her now for three months and had seen her frequently. His visits at the Pine Street cottage were augmented by occasional meetings at Mrs. Willers’, when that lady was at home and receiving company, and by walks together. Of late, too, he had asked her to go to the theater with him. Lucy was always included in these invitations, but was unable to go. The theater was an untarnished delight to Mariposa, and to refuse her the joy of an evening spent there was not in the mother’s heart. Moreover, Lucy, in her agony at the thought of leaving the girl alone in the world, watched Essex with a desperate anxiety trying to fathom his feelings. It seemed to the unworldly woman, that this attractive gentleman might have been sent by fate to be the husband who was to love and guard the child when the mother was gone.
A few days after the party at Mrs. Willers’ rooms Essex had invited Mariposa to go with him to a performance of “Il Trovatore,” to be given at Wade’s opera-house. The company, managed by a Frenchman called Lepine, was one of those small foreign ones that in those days toured the West to their own profit and the pleasure of their audiences. The star was advertised as a French diva of European renown. Essex had heard her on the continent, and pronounced her well worth hearing, if rather too fat to be satisfying to the esthetic demands of the part of Leonora. Grand opera was still something of a rarity in San Francisco and it promised to be an occasion. The papers printed the names of those who had bought boxes. Mariposa had read that evening that Jacob Shackleton would occupy the left-hand proscenium box with his wife and family.
“His daughter,” said Mariposa, standing in front of the glass as she put on finishing touches, “is ugly, Mrs. Willers says. I think that’s the way it ought to be. It wouldn’t be fair to be an heiress and handsome.”
“It wouldn’t be fair for you to be an heiress, certainly,” commented the mother from her armchair.
“You don’t think I abuse the privilege a penniless girl has of being good-looking?” said Mariposa, turning from the glass with a twinkling eye.
She looked her best and knew it. Relics of better days lingered in the bureau drawers and jewel boxes of these ladies as they did in the small parlor. That night they had been mustered in their might for Mariposa’s decking. She was proud in the consciousness that the dress of fine black lace she wore, through the meshes of which her statuesque arms and neck gleamed like ivory, was made from a shawl that in its day had been a costly possession. Her throat was bare, the lace leaving it free and closing below it. Where the black edges came together over the white skin a small brooch of diamonds was fastened. Below the rim of her hat, her hair glowed like copper, and the coloring of her lips and cheeks was deepened by excitement into varying shades of coral.
As they entered the theater, Essex was aware that many heads were turned in their direction. But Mariposa was too imbued with the joyous unusualness of the moment to notice it. She had forgotten herself entirely, and sitting a little forward, her lips parted, surveyed the rustling and fast-filling house.
The glow of the days of Comstock glory was still in the air. San Francisco was still the city of gold and silver. The bonanza kings had not left it, but were trying to accommodate themselves to the palaces they were rearing with their loose millions. Society yet retained its cosmopolitan tone, careless, brilliant, and unconventional. There were figures in it that had made it famous—men who began life with a pick and shovel and ended it in an orgy of luxury; women, whose habits of early poverty dropped from them like a garment, and who, carried away by their power, displayed the barbaric caprices of Roman empresses.
The sudden possession of vast wealth had intoxicated this people, lifting them from the level of the commonplace into a saturnalia of extravagance. Poverty, the only restraint many of them had ever felt, was gone. Money had made them lawless, whimsical, bizarre. It had developed all-conquering personalities, potent individualities. They were still playing with it, wondering at it, throwing it about.
Essex let his glance roam over the audience, that filled the parquet, and the three horseshoes above it. It struck him as being more Latin than American. That foreignness which has always clung to California was curiously pronounced in this gathering of varied classes. He saw many faces with the ebon hair and olive skins of the Spanish Californians, lovely women, languid and fawn-eyed, badly dressed—for they were almost all poor now, who once were lords of the soil.
The great Southern element which, in its day, set the tone of the city and contributed much to its traditions of birth and breeding, was already falling into the background. Many of its women had only their beauty left, and this they had adorned, as Mariposa had hers, with such remnants of the days when Plancus was consul, as remained—bits of jewelry, old and unmodish but cumbrously handsome, edgings of lace, a pale-colored feather in an old hat, a crape shawl worn with an air, a string of beads carried bravely, though beads were no longer in the mode.
An arrogant air of triumph marked the Irish Californians. With the opening up of the Comstock they had stuck their flag on the summit of the heights. They had always found California kindly, but by the discovery of that mountain of silver they had become kings where they were once content to serve. The Irish face, sometimes in its primeval, monkey-like ugliness, sometimes showing the fresh colored, blowsy prettiness of the colleens by their native bogs, repeated itself on every side. Now and then one of them shone out like a painting by Titian—the Hibernian of the red-gold hair and milk-white skin, refined by luxury and delicate surroundings into a sumptuous and arresting beauty. Many showed the metal that had carried their fathers on to victory. Others were only sleek, smooth-skinned animals, lazy, sensuous, and sly. And these women, whose mothers had run barefoot, were dressed with the careless splendor of those to whom a diamond is a detail.
Essex raised his glass from the perusal of the sea of faces, to the box which the Shackleton party had just entered. There was no question about the Americanism of this group, the young man thought, as he stared at Jake Shackleton. Square-set and unadorned, in the evening dress which Bessie made him wear, he sat back from the velvet railing, an uncompromising figure of dynamic force, unbeautiful, shrewd, the most puissant presence in that brilliant assemblage.
The two ladies in the front of the box were Mrs. and Miss Shackleton. The former was floridly handsome, almost aristocratic, the gazer thought, looking at her firmly-modeled, composed face under its roll of gray hair. The daughter was very like her father, but ugly. Even in the costly French costume she wore, with the gleam of diamonds in her hair, about her neck, in the lace on her bosom, she was ugly. Essex, with that thought of marrying money in the background of his mind, scrutinized her. To rectify his fortune in such a way became more repugnant than ever. If Mariposa had only been Jake Shackleton’s daughter instead!
He turned and looked at her. She met his glance with eyes darkened by excitement.
“There’s Mr. Shackleton in the box,” she said eagerly, in a half-whisper. “Did you see?”
“Yes, I’ve been looking, and that’s his daughter, Maud Shackleton, in the white with diamonds.”
“Is it? Oh, what a beautiful dress! and quantities of diamonds. Almost too many; they twinkle like water, as if some one had squeezed a sponge over her.”
“What can you do when you’re a bonanza king’s daughter and as ugly as that? You’ve got to keep up your end of the line some way. She evidently thinks diamonds are the best way.”
Essex took the glass and looked at the bedecked heiress again. After some moments he put it down and turned to Mariposa with a quizzical smile.
“Do you know I’m going to say something very funny, but look at her well. Does she look like anybody you know?”
The girl looked and shook her head:
“Like her father a little,” she said, “but no one else I can think of.”
“No, not her father. Some one you know intimately and see often—very often, if you’re as vain as you ought to be.”
“Who?” she demanded, frowning and looking puzzled; “I can’t think whom you mean.”
“Yourself; she looks like you.”
Mariposa gave a quick look at the girl and then at Essex. For the moment she thought he was mocking her, but with her second look at the box, the likeness suddenly struck her.
“She is,” she said slowly, reaching for the glass; “yes,” putting it down, “I see it—she is. How funny! and fancy your telling me on top of the statement that she was so ugly! I don’t see how I can smile again this evening.”
She smiled with the words on her lips, the charming smile of a woman who knows her silliest phrases are delightful to one man at least.
“I’m not entirely like her?” she asked, with a somewhat anxious air; “I haven’t got those pale-gray, prominent eyes, have I?”
“No, you’ve got mysterious dark eyes, as deep as wells, and when I look into them, down, down, I sometimes wonder if I can see your heart at the bottom. Can I? Let me see.”
He leaned forward as if to look straight into her eyes. Mariposa suddenly flushing and feeling uncomfortable, dropped them. The sensation she so often experienced with Essex, of being awkward and raw, was intensified now by the annoyed embarrassment provoked by the florid gallantry of his words. But she was too inexperienced a little fly to deal with this cunning spider, and tangled herself worse in the web by saying nervously:
“And my nose! I haven’t got that kind of nose? Oh, surely not,” putting up a gloved hand to feel of its unsatisfactoriness.
“You have the dearest little nose in the world, straight as a Greek statue’s. It’s a little bit haughty, but I like it that way. And your mouth,” he dropped his voice slightly, “your mouth—”
Mariposa made a sudden movement of annoyance. She threw up her head and looked at the curtain with frowning brows.
“Don’t,” she said sharply, “I don’t like you to talk about me like that.”
Essex was silent, regarding her profile with a deliberating eye and a slight, amused smile. How crude she was and how handsome! After a moment’s silence, he leaned toward her and said in a voice full of good-humored banter:
“Butterfly! Butterfly! Why did they call you Butterfly?”
The change in his tone and manner put her back at once on the old footing of gay bonhomie.
“In English, that way, it sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? Fancy me being called Butterfly! I was called after the flower. My whole name is Mariposa Lily.”
“Mariposa Lily!” he repeated in amused amazement; “what an absurd name!”
“Absurd!” said Mariposa indignantly. “I don’t see anything absurd about it. I think it very pretty. My mother called me after the flower, the first time she saw it. They couldn’t find a suitable name for me for a long time, and then when she saw the flower she decided at once to call me after it. It’s the most beautiful wild flower in California.”
“It’s fortunate you were not called Eschscholtzia,” said Essex, who thought the name extremely ridiculous, and who found a somewhat mean amusement in teasing the girl; “you might just as well have been called Eschscholtzia Poppy.”
The spirited reply which was on Mariposa’s lips was stopped by the rising of the curtain. The crowded, rustling house settled itself into silence, the orchestra’s subdued notes rolled out with the voices swelling above them into the listening auditorium.
The rest of the evening was an enchanted dream to her. She had never seen an opera, and for the first time realized what it might mean to possess a voice. She heard the house thunder its applause to Leonora, and thought of herself as singing thus, standing alone on that dim stage, looking out over the sea of faces, all listening, all staring, all spellbound, hanging on the notes that fell, sweet and rich, thrilling and passionate, from her lips. Could there ever be such a life for her? Did they tell the truth when they spoke so admiringly of her voice? Could she ever sing like this? A surge of exultant conviction rose in her, and sent its whisper of hope and ambition to her throbbing brain.
As the opera progressed she grew pale and motionless. The wild thought was gaining possession of her, that she, Mariposa Moreau, with her four pupils and her sixteen dollars a month, could sing as well as this woman of European renown, for whom Essex, the critical, the vastly experienced, had words of praise. Once or twice it seemed to her as if the notes were swelling in her own throat, were pressing to burst out and soar up, higher, fuller, richer than the woman’s on the stage. Oh, the rapture of being able to pour out one’s voice, to give wild, melodious expression to love or despair, while a thousand people hung this way on one’s lips!
As the curtain fell for the third time she turned to Essex, pale and large-eyed, and said breathlessly:
“I could sing as well as that woman if I had more lessons; I know I could! I know it!”