“Praised be the fathomless universe
For life and for joy and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise, praise, praise,
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death,
The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I hear,
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veiled Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.”
—WHITMAN.
From the day when Mrs. Willers had appeared with the news of Shackleton’s interest in her daughter, Lucy’s health had steadily waned. The process of decay was so quiet, albeit so sure and swift, that Mariposa, accustomed to the ups and downs of her mother’s invalid condition, was unaware that the elder woman’s sands were almost run. The pale intensity, the coldness of the hand gripped round hers, that had greeted her account of the recital at the Opera-House, seemed to the girl only the reflection of her own eager exultation. She was blind, not only from ignorance, but from the egotistic preoccupations of her youth. It seemed impossible to think of her mother’s failing in her loving response, now that the sun was rising on their dark horizon.
But Lucy knew that she was dying. Her feeble body had received its coup de grâce on the day that Mrs. Willers brought the news of Shackleton’s wish to see his child. Since then she had spent long hours in thought. When her mind was clear enough she had pondered on the situation trying to see what was best to do for Mariposa’s welfare. The problem that faced her terrified her. The dying woman was having the last struggle with herself.
One week after the recital at the Opera-House she had grown so much worse that Mariposa had called in the doctor they had had in attendance, off and on, since their arrival. He was grave and there was a consultation. When she saw their faces the cold dread that had been slowly growing in the girl’s heart seemed suddenly to expand and chill her whole being. Mrs. Moreau was undoubtedly very ill, though there was still hope. Yet their looks were sober and pitying as they listened to the daughter’s reiterated asseverations that her mother had often been worse and made a successful rally.
An atmosphere of illness settled down like a fog on the little cottage. A nurse appeared; the doctors seemed to be in the house many times a day. Mrs. Willers, as soon as she heard, came up, no longer over-dressed and foolish, but grave and helpful. After a half-hour spent at Lucy’s bedside, wherein the sick woman had spoken little, and then only about her daughter, Mrs. Willers had gone to the office of The Trumpet, frowning in her sympathetic pain. It was Saturday, and Shackleton had already left for Menlo Park when she reached the office. But she determined to see him early on Monday and tell him of the straits of his old friend’s widow and child. Mrs. Willers knew the signs of the scarcity of money, and knew also the overwhelming expenses of sickness. What she did not know was that on Friday morning Mariposa had wept over her check-book, and then gone out and sold the diamond brooch.
The long Sunday—the interminable day of strained anxiety—passed, shrouded in rain. When her mother fell into the light sleep that now marked her condition, Mariposa mechanically went to the window of the bedroom and looked out. It was one of those blinding rains that usher in the San Francisco winter, the water falling in straight lances that show against the light like thin tubes of glass, and strike the pavement with a vicious impact, which splinters them into spray. It drummed on the tin roof above the bedroom with an incessant hollow sound, and ran in a torn ribbon of water from the gutter on the eaves.
The prospect that the window commanded seemed in dreariness to match the girl’s thoughts. That part of Pine Street was still in the unfinished condition described by the words “far out.” Vacant lots yawned between the houses; the badly paved roadbed was an expanse of deeply rutted mud, with yellow ponds of rain at the sewer mouths. The broken wooden sidewalk gleamed with moisture and was evenly striped with lines of vivid green where the grass sprouted between the boards. Now and then a wayfarer hurried by, crouched under the dome of an umbrella spouting water from every rib.
The gray twilight settled early, and Mariposa, dropping the curtain, turned to the room behind her. The light of a small fire and a shaded lamp sent a softened glow over the apartment, which, despite its poverty, bespoke the taste of gentlewomen in the simple prettiness of its furnishings. The nurse, a middle-aged woman of a kindly and capable aspect, sat by the fire in a wicker rocking-chair, reading a paper. Beside her, on a table, stood the sick-room paraphernalia of glasses and bottles. The regular creak of the rocking-chair, and an occasional snap from the fire, were the only sounds that punctuated the steady drumming of the rain on the tin roof.
A Japanese screen was half-way about the bed, shutting it from the drafts of the door, and in its shelter Lucy lay sleeping her light, breathless sleep. In this shaded light, in the relaxed attitude of unconsciousness, she presented the appearance of a young girl hardly older than her daughter. Yet the hand of death was plainly on her, as even Mariposa could now see.
Without sound the girl passed from the room to her own beyond. Her grief had seized her, and the truth, fought against with the desperate inexperience of youth, forced itself on her. She threw herself on her bed and lay there battling with the sickness of despair that such knowledge brings. Twilight faded and darkness came. In answer to the servant’s tap on the door, and announcement of dinner, she called back that she desired none. The room was as dark about her as her own thoughts. From the door that led into the sick chamber, only partly closed, a shaft of light cut the blackness, and on this light she fastened her eyes, swollen with tears, feeling herself stupefied with sorrow.
As she lay thus on the bed, she heard the creaking of the wicker-chair as the nurse arose, then came the clink of the spoon and the glass, and the woman’s low voice, and then her mother’s, stronger and clearer than it had been for some days. There was an interchange of remarks between nurse and patient, the sound of careful steps, and the crack of light suddenly expanded as the door was opened. Against this background, clear and smoothly yellow as gold leaf, the nurse’s figure was revealed in sharp silhouette.
“Are you there, Miss Moreau?” she said in a low voice. Mariposa started with a hurried reply.
“Well, your mother wants to see you and you’d better come. Her mind seems much clearer and it may not be so again.”
The girl rose from the bed trying to compose her face. In the light of the open door the woman saw its distress and looked at her pityingly.
“Don’t tire her,” she said, “but I advise you to say all you have to say. She may not be this way again.”
Mariposa crossed the room to the bed. Her mother was lying on her side, pinched, pale and with darkly circled eyes.
“Have you just waked up, darling?” said the girl, tenderly.
“No,” she answered, with a curious lack of response in manner and tone; “I have been awake some time. I was thinking.”
“Why didn’t you send Mrs. Brown for me? I was in my room passing the time till you woke up.”
“I was thinking and I wanted to finish. I have been thinking a long time, days and weeks.”
Mariposa thought her mind was wandering, and sitting down on a chair by the bedside, took her hand and pressed it gently without speaking. Her mother lay in the same attitude, her profile toward her, her eyes looking vacantly at the screen. Suddenly she said:
“You know my old desk, the little rose-wood one Dan gave me? Take my keys and open it, and in the bottom you’ll see two envelopes, with no writing. One looks dirty and old. Bring them to me here.”
Mariposa rose wondering, and looking anxiously at her mother. The elder woman saw the look, and said weakly and almost peevishly:
“Go; be quick. I am not strong enough to talk long. The keys are in the work-box.”
The girl obeyed as quickly as possible. The desk was a small one resting on the center-table. It had been a present of her father’s to her mother, and she remembered it from her earliest childhood in a prominent position in her mother’s room. She opened it, and in a few moments, under old letters, memoranda and souvenirs, found the two envelopes. Carrying them to the bed she gave them to her mother.
Lucy took them with an unsteady hand, and for a moment lay staring at her daughter and not moving. Then she said:
“Put the pillows under my head. It’s easier to breathe when I’m higher,” and as Mariposa arranged them, she added, in a lower voice: “And tell Mrs. Brown to go; I want to be alone with you.”
Mariposa looked out beyond the screen, and seeing the nurse still reading the paper, told her to go to the kitchen and get her dinner. The woman rose with alacrity, and asking Mariposa to call her if the invalid showed signs of fatigue, or any change, left the room.
The girl turned back to the bedside and took the chair. Lucy had taken from the dirty envelope a worn and faded paper, which she slowly unfolded. As she did so, she looked at her daughter with sunken eyes and said:
“These are my marriage certificates.”
Mariposa, again thinking that her mind was wandering, tried to smile, and answered gently:
“Your marriage certificate, dear. You were only married once.”
“I was married twice,” said Lucy, and handed the girl the two papers.
Still supposing her mother slightly delirious, the daughter took the papers and looked at them. The one her eye first fell on was that of the original marriage. She read the names without at first realizing whose they were. Then the significance of the “Lucy Fraser” came upon her. Her glance leaped to the second paper, and at the first sweep of her eyes over it she saw it was the marriage certificate of her father and mother, Daniel Moreau and Lucy Fraser, dated at Placerville twenty-five years before. She turned back to the other paper, now more than bewildered. She held it near her face, as though it were difficult to read, and in the dead silence of the room it began to rustle with the trembling of her hand. A fear of something hideous and overwhelming seized her. With pale lips she read the names, and the date, antedating by five years the other certificate.
“Mother!” she cried, in a wild voice of inquiry, dropping the paper on the bed.
Lucy, raised on her pillows, was looking at her with a haggard intentness. All the vitality left in her expiring body seemed concentrated in her eyes.
“I was married twice,” she said slowly.
“But how? When? What does it mean? Mother, what does it mean?”
“I was married twice,” she repeated. “In St. Louis to Jake Shackleton, and in Placerville, five years after, to Dan Moreau. And I was never divorced from Jake. It was not according to the law. I was never Dan’s lawful wife.”
The girl sat staring, the meaning of the words slowly penetrating her brain. She was too stunned to speak. Her face was as white as her mother’s. For a tragic moment these two white faces looked at each other. The mother’s, with death waiting to claim her, was void of all stress or emotion. The daughter’s, waking to life, was rigid with horrified amaze.
Propped by her pillows, Lucy spoke again; her sentences were short and with pauses between:
“Jake Shackleton married me in St. Louis when I was fifteen. He was soon tired of me. We went to Salt Lake City. He became a Mormon there, and took a second wife. She was a waitress in a hotel. She’s his wife now. He brought us both to California twenty-five years ago. On the way across, on the plains of Utah, you were born. He is your father, Mariposa.”
She made an effort and sat up. Her breathing was becoming difficult, but her purpose gave her strength. This was the information that for weeks she had been nerving herself to impart.
“He is your father,” she repeated. “That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
Mariposa made no answer, and again she repeated:
“He is your father. Do you understand? Answer me.”
“Yes—I don’t know. Oh, mother, it’s so strange and horrible. And you sitting there and looking at me like that, and telling it to me! Oh,—mother!”
She put her hands over her face for an instant, and then dropping them, leaned over on the bed and grasped her mother’s wrists.
“You’re wandering in your mind. It’s just some hideous dream you’ve had in your fever. Dearest, tell me it’s not true. It can’t be true. Why, think of you and me and father always together and with no dreadful secret behind us like that. Oh—it can’t be true!”
Lucy looked at the papers lying brown and torn on the white quilt. Mariposa’s eyes followed the same direction, and with a groan her head sank on her arms extended along the bed. Her mother’s hand, cold and light, was laid on one of hers, but the dying woman’s face was held in its quiet, unstirred apathy, as she spoke again:
“Jake was hard to me on the trip. He was a hard man and he never loved me. After Bessie came he got to dislike me. I was always a drag, he said. I couldn’t seem to get well after you were born. Coming over the Sierras we stopped at a cabin. Dan was there with another man, a miner, called Fletcher. That was the first time I ever saw Dan.”
Mariposa lifted her head and her eyes fastened on her mother’s face. The indifference that had held it seemed breaking. A faint smile was on her lips, a light of reminiscence lit its gray pallor.
“He was always good to anything that was sick or weak. He was sorry for me. He tried to make Jake stop longer, so I could get rested. But Jake wouldn’t. He said I had to go on. I couldn’t, but knew I must, if he said it. We were going to start when Jake said he’d exchange me for the pair of horses the two miners had in the shed. So he left me and took the horses.”
“Exchanged you for the horses? Left you there sick and alone?”
“Yes, Jake and Bessie went on with the horses. I stayed. I was too sick to care.”
She made a slight pause, either from weakness, or in an effort to arrange the next part of her story.
“I lived there with them for a month. I was sick and they took care of me. Then one day Fletcher stole all the money and the only horse and never came back. We were alone there then, Dan and I. I got better. I came to love him more each day. We were snowed in all winter, and we lived as man and wife. In the spring we rode into Hangtown and were married.”
She stopped, a look of ineffable sweetness passed over her face, and she said in a low voice, as if speaking to herself:
“Oh, that beautiful winter! There is a God, to be so good to women who have suffered as I had.”
Mariposa sat dumbly regarding her. It was like a frightful nightmare. Everything was strange, the sick-room, the bed with the screen around it, her mother’s face with its hollow eyes and pinched nose. Only the two old dirty papers on the white counterpane seemed to say that this was real.
Lucy’s eyes, which had been looking back into that glorified past of love and youth, returned to her daughter’s face.
“But Jake is your father,” she said. “That’s what I had to tell you. He’ll be good to you. That was why he wanted to find you and help you.”
“Yes,” said Mariposa, dully, “I understand that now; that was why he wanted to help me.”
“He’ll be good to you,” went on the low, weak voice, interrupted by quick breaths. “I know Jake. He’ll be proud of you. You’re handsome and talented, not weak and poor spirited, as I was. You’re his only legitimate child; the others are not; they were born in California. They’re Bessie’s children, and I was his only real wife. You’ll let him take care of you? Oh, Mariposa, my darling, I’ve told you all this that you might understand and let him take care of you.”
She made a last call on her strength and leaned forward. Her dying body was re-vivified; all her mother’s agony of love appeared on her face. In determining to destroy the illusions of her child to secure her future, she had made the one heroic effort of her life. It was done, and for a last moment of relief and triumph she was thrillingly alive.
Mariposa, in a spasm of despair, threw herself forward on the bed.
“Oh, why did you tell me? Why did you tell me?” she cried. “Why didn’t you let me think it was the way it used to be? Why did you tell me?”
Lucy laid her hand on the bowed head.
“Because I wanted you to understand and let him be your father.”
“My father! That man! Oh, no, no!”
“You must promise me. Oh, my beloved child, I couldn’t leave you alone. It seemed as if God had said to me, ‘Die in peace. Her father will care for her.’ I couldn’t go and leave you this way, without a friend. Now I can rest in peace. Promise to let him take care of you. Promise.”
“Oh, mother, don’t ask me. What have you just told me? That he sold you to a stranger for a pair of horses, left you to die in a cabin in the mountains! That’s not my father. My father was Dan Moreau. I can do nothing but hate that other man now.”
“Don’t blame him, dear, the past is over. Forgive him. Forgive me. If I sinned there were excuses for me. I had suffered too much. I loved too well.”
Her voice suddenly hesitated and broke. A gray pallor ran over her face and a look of terror transfixed her eyes. She straightened her arms out toward her daughter.
“Promise,” she gasped, “promise.”
With a spring Mariposa snatched the drooping body in her arms and cried into the face, settling into cold rigidity:
“Yes—yes—I promise! All—anything. Oh, mother, darling, look at me. I promise.”
She gently shook the limp form, but it was nerveless, only the head oscillated slightly from side to side.
“Mother, look at me,” she cried frantically. “Look at me, not past me. Come back to me. Speak to me, I promise everything.”
But there was no response. Lucy lay, limp and white-lipped, her head lolling back from the support of her daughter’s arm. Her strength was exhausted to the last drop. She was unconscious.
The wild figure of Mariposa at the kitchen door summoned Mrs. Brown. Lucy was not dead, but dying. A few moments later Mariposa found herself rushing hatless through the rain for the doctor, and then again, in what seemed a few more minutes, standing, soaked and breathless, by her mother’s side. She sat there throughout the night, holding the limp hand and watching for a glimmer of consciousness in the half-shut eyes.
It never came. There was no rally from the collapse which followed the mother’s confession. She had lived till this was done. Then, having accomplished the great action of her life, she had loosed her hold and let go. Once, Mrs. Brown being absent, Mariposa had leaned down on the pillow and passionately reiterated the assurance that she would give the promise Lucy had asked. There was a slight quiver of animation in the dying woman’s face and she opened her eyes as if startled, but made no other sign of having heard or understood. But Mariposa knew that she had promised.
On the evening of the day after her confession Lucy died, slipping away quietly as if in sleep. The death of the simple and unknown lady made no ripple on the surface of the city’s life. Mrs. Willers and a neighbor or two were Mariposa’s sole visitors, and the only flowers contributed to Lucy’s coffin were those sent by the newspaper woman and Barry Essex. The afternoon of the day on which her mother’s death was announced, Mariposa received a package from Jake Shackleton. With it came a short note of condolence, and the offer, kindly and simply worded, of the small sum of money contained in the package, which, it was hoped, Miss Moreau, for the sake of the writer’s early acquaintance with her parents and interest in herself, would accept. The packet contained five hundred dollars in coin.
Mariposa’s face flamed. The money fell through her fingers and rolled about on the floor. She would have liked to take it, piece by piece, and throw it through the window, into the mud of the street. She felt that her horror of Shackleton augmented with every passing moment, gripped her deeper with every memory of her mother’s words, and every moment’s perusal of the calm, dead face in its surrounding flowers.
But her promise had been given. She picked up the money and put it away. Her promise had been given. Already she was beginning dimly to realize that it would bind and cramp her for the rest of her life. She was too benumbed now fully to grasp its meaning, but she felt feebly that she would be its slave as long as he or she lived. But she had given it.
The money lay untouched throughout the next few days, Lucy’s simple funeral ceremonies being paid for with the proceeds of the sale of the diamond brooch, which Moreau had given her in the early days of their happiness.