CHAPTER VI
THE VISION AND THE DREAM
“For a dream cometh through the multitude of business.”
—ECCLESIASTES.
As the carriage turned the corner into Third Street, Shackleton and Mrs. Willers, bidding their adieux to Lepine, started toward The Trumpet office. The building was not ten minutes’ walk away, and both the proprietor and the woman reporter had work there that called them.
In their different ways each was exceedingly elated. The man, with his hard, bearded face, the upper half shaded by the brim of his soft felt hat, gave no evidence in appearance or manner of the exultation that possessed him. But the woman, with her more febrile and less self-contained nature, showed her excited gratification in her reddened cheeks and the sparkling animation of her tired eyes. Her state of joyous triumph was witnessed even in her walk, in the way she swished her skirts over the pavements, in the something youthful and buoyant that had crept into the tones of her voice.
“Well,” she said, “that was an experience worth having! I never heard her sing so before. She just outdid herself.”
“She certainly seemed to me to sing well. I was doubtful at the beginning, not knowing any more about singing than I do about Sanskrit, as to whether she really had as fine a voice as we thought. But there don’t seem to me to be any doubt about it now.”
“Lepine is quite certain, is he?” queried Mrs. Willers, who had tried to listen to the conversation between her chief and the impresario on the way out, but had been foiled by Mariposa’s excited chatter.
“He says that she has an unusually fine voice, which, with proper training, would, as far as they can say now, be perfectly suitable for grand opera. It’s what they call a dramatic mezzo-soprano, with something particularly good about the lower notes. Lepine is to see me again before he goes.”
“Did he suggest what she ought to do?”
“Yes; he spoke of Paris as the best place to send her. He knows some famous teacher there that he says is the proper person for her to study with. He seemed to think that two years of study would be sufficient for her. She’d be ready to make her appearance in grand opera after that time.”
“Good heavens!” breathed Mrs. Willers in a transport of pious triumph, “just think of it! And now up in that cottage on Pine Street getting fifty cents a lesson, and with only four pupils.”
“In two years,” said Shackleton, who was speaking more to himself than to her, “she’ll be twenty-seven years old—just in her prime.”
“She’ll be twenty-six,” corrected Mrs. Willers; “she’s only twenty-four now.”
He raised his brows with a little air of amused apology.
“Twenty-four, is it?” he said. “Well, that’s all the better. Twenty-six is one year better than twenty-seven.”
“It’ll be like the ‘Innocents Abroad’ to see her and her mother in Paris,” said Mrs. Willers. “They’re just two of the most unsophisticated females that ever strayed out of the golden age.”
The man vouchsafed no answer to this remark for a moment; then he said:
“The mother’s health is very delicate? She’s quite an invalid, you say?”
“Quite. But she’s one of the sweetest, most uncomplaining women you ever laid eyes on. You’d understand the daughter better if you knew the mother. She’s so gentle and girlish. And then they’ve lived round in such a sort of quiet, secluded way. It’s funny to me because they had plenty of money when Mr. Moreau was alive. But they never seemed to go into society, or know many people; they just seemed enough for each other, especially when the father was with them. They simply adored him, and he must have been a fine man. They—”
“Is Mrs. Moreau’s state of health too bad to allow her to travel?” said Shackleton, interrupting suddenly and rudely.
Mrs. Willers colored slightly. She knew her chief well enough to realize that his tone indicated annoyance. Why did he so dislike to hear anything about the late Dan Moreau?
“As to that I don’t know,” she said. “She’s so much of an invalid that she rarely goes out. But with good care she might be able to take a journey and benefit by it. A sea trip sometimes cures people.”
“Miss Moreau couldn’t, and, I have no doubt, wouldn’t leave her. It’ll therefore be necessary for the mother to go to Paris with the girl, and if she is so complete and helpless an invalid she’ll certainly be of no assistance to her daughter—only a care.”
“She’d undoubtedly be a care. But a person couldn’t separate those two. They’re wrapped up in each other. It’s a pity you don’t know Mrs. Moreau, Mr. Shackleton.”
For the second time that afternoon Mrs. Willers was conscious that words she had intended to be gently ingratiating had given mysterious offense to her employer. Now he said, with more than an edge of sharpness to his words:
“I’ve no doubt it’s a pity, Mrs. Willers. But there are so many things and people it’s a pity I don’t know, that if I came to think it over I’d probably fall into a state of melancholia. Also, let me assure you, that I haven’t the least intention of trying to separate Mrs. Moreau and her daughter. What I’m just now bothered about is the fact that this lady is hardly of sufficient worldly experience, and certainly has not sufficient strength to take care of the girl in a strange country.”
“Well, no,” said Mrs. Willers with slow reluctance, “it would be the other way round, the girl would be taking care of her.”
“That’s exactly what I thought. The only way out of it will be to send some one with them. A woman who could take care of them both, chaperone the daughter and look after the mother.”
There was a silence. Mrs. Willers began to understand why Mr. Shackleton had walked down to The Trumpet office with her. The walk was over, for they were at the office door, and the conversation had reached the point to which he had evidently intended to bring it before they parted.
As they turned into the arched doorway and began the ascent of the stairs, Mrs. Willers replied:
“I think that would be a very good idea, Mr. Shackleton. That is, if you can find the right woman.”
“Oh, I’ve got her now,” he answered, giving her a quick, side-long glance. “I think it would be a good arrangement for all parties. The Trumpet wants a Paris correspondent.”
The door leading into the press-rooms opened off the landing they had reached, and he turned into this with a word of farewell, and a hand lifted to his hat brim. Mrs. Willers continued the ascent alone. As she mounted upward she said to herself:
“The best thing for me to do is to get a French phrase book on the way home this evening, and begin studying: ‘Have you the green pantaloons of the miller’s mother?’”
The elation of his mood was still with Shackleton when, two hours later, he alighted from the carriage at the steps of his country house. He went upstairs to his own rooms with a buoyant tread. In his library, with the windows thrown open to the soft, scented air, he sat smoking and thinking. The October dusk was closing in, when he heard the wheels of a carriage on the drive and the sound of voices. His women-folk with the second of the Thurston girls—the one guest the house now contained—were returning from the afternoon round of visits that was the main diversion of their life during the summer months, and swept the country houses from Redwood City to Menlo Park.
It was a small dinner table that evening. Winslow had stayed in town over night, and Shackleton sat at the head of a shrunken board, with Bessie opposite him, his daughter to the left, and Pussy Thurston on his right. Pussy was Maud’s best friend and was one of the beauties of San Francisco. To-night she looked especially pretty in a pale green crape dress, with green leaves in her fair hair. Her skin was of a shell-like purity of pink and white, her face was small, with regular features and a sweet, childish smile.
She and her sister were the only children of the famous Judge Beauregard Thurston, in his day one of those brilliant lawyers who brought glory to the California bar. He had made a fortune, lived on it recklessly and magnificently, and died leaving his daughters almost penniless. He had been in the heyday of his splendor when Jake Shackleton, just struggling into the public eye, had come to San Francisco, and the proud Southerner had not scrupled to treat the raw mining man with careless scorn. Shackleton evened the score before Thurston’s death, and he still soothed his wounded pride with the thought that the two daughters of the man who had once despised him were largely dependent on his wife’s charity. Bessie took them to balls and parties, dressed them, almost fed them. The very green crape gown in which Pussy looked so pretty to-night had been included in Maud’s bill at a fashionable dressmaker’s.
Personally he liked Pussy, whose beauty and winning manners lent a luster to his house. Once or twice to-night she caught him looking at her with a cold, debating glance in which there was little of the admiration she was accustomed to receiving since the days of her first long dress.
He was in truth regarding her critically for the first time, for the Bonanza King was a man on whom the beauty of women cast no spell. He was comparing her with another and a more regally handsome girl. Pussy Thurston would look insipid and insignificant before the stately splendor of his own daughter.
He smiled as he realized Mariposa’s superiority. The young girl saw the smile, and said with the privileged coquetry of a maid who all her life has known herself favored above her fellows:
“Why are you smiling all to yourself, Mr. Shackleton? Can’t we know if it is something pleasant?”
“I was looking at something pretty,” he answered, his eyes full of amusement as they rested on her charming face. “That generally makes people smile.”
She was so used to such remarks that her rose-leaf color did not vary the fraction of a shade. Maud, to whom no one ever paid compliments, looked at her with wistful admiration.
“Is that all?” she said with an air of disappointment. “I hoped it was something that would make us all smile.”
“Well, I have an idea that may make you all smile”—he turned to his wife—“how would you like to go to Europe next spring, Bessie?”
Mrs. Shackleton looked surprised and not greatly elated. On their last trip to Europe, two years before, her husband had been so bored by the joys of foreign travel that she had made up her mind she would never ask him to go again. Now she said:
“But you don’t want to go to Europe. You said last time you hated it.”
“Did I? Yes, I guess I did. Well, I’m prepared to like it this time. We could take a spin over in the spring to London and Paris. We’d make quite a stay in Paris, and you women could buy clothes. You’d come, too, Pussy, wouldn’t you?” he said, turning to the girl.
Her color rose now and her eyes sparkled. She had never been even to New York.
“Wouldn’t I?” she said. “That does make me smile.”
“I thought so,” he answered good-humoredly—“and Maud, you’d like it, of course?”
Maud did not like the thought of going at all. In this little party of four, two were moved in their actions by secret predilections of which the others were ignorant. Maud thought of leaving her love affair at the critical point it had reached, and, with anguish at her heart, looked heavily indifferent.
“I don’t know,” she said, crumbling her bread, “I don’t think it’s such fun in Europe. You just travel round in little stuffy trains, and have to live in hotels without baths.”
“Well, you and I, Pussy,” said Shackleton, “seem to be the only two who’ve got any enthusiasm. You’ll have to try and put some into Maud, and if the worst comes to the worst we can kidnap the old lady.”
He was in an unusually good temper, and the dinner was animated and merry. Only Maud, after the European suggestion, grew more stolidly quiet than ever. But she cheered herself by the thought that the spring was six months off yet, and who could tell what might happen in six months?
After dinner the ladies repaired to the music room, and Shackleton, following a custom of his, passed through one of the long windows into the garden, there to pace up and down while he smoked his cigar.
The night was warm and odorous with the scent of hidden blossoms. Now and then his foot crunched the gravel of a path, as his walk took him back and forth over the long stretch of lawn broken by flower-beds and narrow walks. The great bulk of the house, its black mass illumined by congeries of lit windows, showed an inky, irregular outline against the star-strewn sky.
Presently the sound of a piano floated out from the music room. The man stopped his pacing, listened for an instant, and then passed round to the side of the house. The French windows of the music room were opened, throwing elongated squares of light over the balcony and the grass beyond. He paused in the darkness and looked through one of them. There, like a painting framed by the window casing, was Pussy Thurston seated at the piano singing, while Maud sat near by listening. One of Miss Thurston’s most admired social graces was the gift of song. She had a small agreeable voice, and had been well taught; but the light, frail tones sounded thin in the wide silence of the night. It was the feebly pretty performance of the “accomplished young lady.”
Shackleton listened with a slight smile that increased as the song drew to a close. As it ceased he moved away, the red light of his cigar coming and going in the darkness.
“Singing!” he said to himself, “they call that singing! Wait till they hear my daughter!”