“Flower o’ the peach,
Death for us all, and his own life for each.”
—BROWNING.
Jake Shackleton did not come up from San Mateo on Monday, as Mrs. Willers expected, and the first intimation he had of Lucy’s death was the short notice in the paper.
He had come down the stairs early on Tuesday morning into the wide hall, with its doors thrown open to the fragrant air. With the paper in his hand, he stood on the balcony looking about and inhaling the freshness of the morning. The rain had washed the country clean of every fleck of dust, burnished every leaf, and had called into being blossoms that had been awaiting its summons.
From beneath the shade made by the long, gnarled limbs of the live-oaks, the perfume of the violets rose delicately, their crowding clusters of leaves a clear green against the base of the hoary trunks. The air that drifted in from the idle, yellow fields beyond was impregnated with the breath of the tar-weed—one of the most pungent and impassioned odors Nature has manufactured in her vast laboratory, characteristic scent to rise from the dry, yet fecund grass-lands of California. In the perfect, crystalline stillness these mingled perfumes rose like incense to the new day.
Shackleton looked about him, the paper in his hand. He had little love for Nature, but the tranquil-scented freshness of the hour wrung its tribute of admiration from him. What an irony that the one child he had, worth having gained all this for, should be denied it. Mariposa, thus framed, would have added the last touch to the triumphs of his life.
With an exclamation of impatience he sat down on the top step, and opening the paper, ran his glance down its columns. He had been looking over it for several minutes before the death notice of Lucy struck his eye. It took away his breath. He read it again, at first not crediting it. He was entirely unprepared, having merely thought of Lucy as “delicate.” Now she was dead.
He dropped the paper on his knee and sat staring out into the garden. The news was more of a shock than he could have imagined it would be. Was it the lately roused pride in his child that had reawakened some old tenderness for the mother? Or was it that the thought of Lucy, dead, called back memories of that shameful past?
He sat, staring, till a step on the balcony roused him, and turning, he saw his son. Win, though only twenty-three, was of the order of beings who do not look well in the morning. He was slightly built and thin and had a rasped, pink appearance, as though he felt cold. Stories were abroad that Win was dissipated, stories, by the way, that were largely manufactured by himself. He was at that age when a reputation for deviltry has its attractions. In fact, he was amiable, gentle and far too lacking in spirit to be the desperate rake he liked to represent himself. He had a wholesome fear of his father, whose impatience against him was not concealed by surface politeness as in Maud’s case.
Standing with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, his chest hollowed, his red-rimmed eyes half shut behind the pince-nez he always wore, and his slight mustache not sufficient to hide a smile, the foolishness of which rose from embarrassment, he was not a son to fill a father’s heart with pride.
“Howdy, Governor,” he said, trying to be easy; then, seeing the paper in his father’s hand, folded back at the death notices, “anybody new born, dead, or married this morning?”
His voice rasped unbearably on his father’s mood. The older man gave him a look over his shoulder, with a face that made the boy quail.
“Get away,” he said, savagely; “get in the house and leave me alone.”
Win turned and entered the house. The foolish smile was still on his lips. Pride kept it there, but at heart he was bitterly wounded.
At the foot of the stairway he met his mother.
“You’d better not go out there,” he said, with a movement of his head in the direction of his father; “it’s as much as your life’s worth. The old man’ll bite your nose off if you do.”
“Is your father cross?” asked Bessie.
“Cross? He oughtn’t to be let loose when he’s like that.”
“Something in the paper must have upset him,” said Bessie. “He was all right this morning before he came down. Something on the stock market’s bothered him.”
“Maybe so,” said his son, with a certain feeling. “But that’s no reason why he should speak to me like a dog. He goes too far when he speaks to me that way. There isn’t a servant in the house would stand it.”
He balanced back and forth on his toes and heels, looking down, his face flushed. It would have been hard to say—such was the characterless insignificance of his appearance—whether he was really hurt, as a man would be in his heart and his pride, or only momentarily stung by a scornful word.
Bessie passed him and went out on the balcony. Her husband was still sitting on the steps, the paper in his hand.
“What is it, Jake?” she said. “Win says you’re cross. Something gone wrong?”
“Lucy’s dead,” he answered, rising to his feet and handing her the paper.
She paled a little as she read the notice. Then, raising her eyes, they met his. In this look was their knowledge of the secret that both had struggled to keep, and that now, at last, was theirs.
For the second time in a half-year, Death had stepped in and claimed one of the four whose lives had touched so briefly and so momentously twenty-five years before.
“Poor Lucy!” said Bessie, in a low voice. “But they say she was very happy with Moreau. You can do something for your—for the girl now.”
“Yes,” he said; “I’ll think it over. I won’t be down to breakfast. Send up some coffee.”
He went upstairs and locked himself in his library. He could not understand why the news had affected him so deeply. It seemed to make him feel sick. He did not tell Bessie that he had gone upstairs because he felt too ill and shaken to see any one.
All morning he sat in the library, with frowning brows, thinking. At noon he took the train for the city and, soon after its arrival, despatched to Mariposa the five hundred dollars. He had no doubt of her accepting it, as it never crossed his mind that Lucy, at the last moment, might have told.
The days that followed her mother’s funeral passed to Mariposa like a series of gray dreams, dreadful, with an unfamiliar sense of wretchedness. The preoccupation of her mother’s illness was gone. There were idle hours, when she sat in her rooms and tried to realize the full meaning of Lucy’s last words. She would sit motionless, staring before her, her heart feeling shriveled in her breast. Her life seemed broken to pieces. She shrank from the future, with the impossibilities she had pledged herself to. And the strength and inspiration of the beautiful past were gone. All the memories of that happy childhood and young maidenhood were blasted. It was natural that the shock and the subsequent brooding should make her view of the subject morbid. The father that she had grown up to regard with reverential tenderness, had not been hers. The mother, who had been a cherished idol, had hidden a dark secret. And she, herself, was an outsider from the home she had so deeply loved—child of a brutal and tyrannical father—originally adopted and cared for out of pity.
It was a crucial period in her life. Old ideals were gone, and new ones not yet formed. There seemed only ruins about her, and amid these she sought for something to cling to, and believe in. With secret passion she nursed the thought of Essex—all she had left that had not been swept away in the deluge of this past week.
Fortunately for her, the business calls of the life of a woman left penniless shook her from her state of brooding idleness. The cottage was hers for a month longer, and despite the impoverished condition of the widow, there was a fair amount of furniture still left in it that was sufficiently valuable to be a bait to the larger dealers. Mariposa found her days varied by contentions with men, who came to stare at the great red lacquer cabinet and investigate the interior condition of the marquetry sideboard. When the month was up she was to move to a small boarding-house, kept by Spaniards called Garcia, that Mrs. Willers, in her varying course, included among her habitats. The Garcias would not object to her piano and practising, and it was amazingly cheap. Mrs. Willers herself had lived there in one of her periods of eclipse, and knew them to be respectable denizens of a somewhat battered Bohemia.
“But you’re going to be a Bohemian yourself, being a musical genius,” she said cheerfully. “So you won’t mind that.”
Mariposa did not think she would mind. In the chaotic dimness of the dismantled front parlor she looked like a listless goddess who would not mind anything.
Mrs. Willers thought her state of dreary apathy curious and spoke of it to Shackleton, whom she now recognized as the girl’s acknowledged guardian. He had listened to her account of Mariposa’s broken condition with expressionless attention.
“Isn’t it natural, all things considered, that a girl should be broken-hearted over the death of a devoted mother? And, as I understand it, Miss Moreau is absolutely alone. She has no relatives anywhere. It’s a pretty bleak outlook.”
“That’s true. I never saw a girl left so without connections. But she worries me. She’s so silent, and dull, and unlike herself. Of course, it’s been a terrible blow. I’d have thought she’d been more prepared.”
He shrugged his shoulders, stroking his short beard with his lean, heavily-veined hand. It amused him to see the way Mrs. Willers was quietly pushing him into the position of the girl’s sponsor. And at the same time it heightened his opinion of her as a woman of capacity and heart. She would be an ideal chaperone and companion for his unprotected daughter.
“When she feels better,” he said, “I wish you’d bring her down here again. Don’t bother her until she feels equal to it. But I want to talk to her about Lepine’s ideas for her. I saw him again and he gave me a lot of information about Paris and teachers and all the rest of it. Before we make any definite arrangements I’ll have to see her and talk it all over.”
Mrs. Willers went back triumphant to Mariposa to report this conversation. It really seemed to clinch matters. The Bonanza King had instituted himself her guardian and backer. It meant fortune for Mariposa Moreau, the penniless orphan.
To her intense surprise, Mariposa listened to her with a flushed and frowning face of indignation.
“I won’t go,” she said, with sudden violence.
“But, my dear!” expostulated Mrs. Willers, “your whole future depends on it. With such an influence to back you as that, your fortune’s made. And listen to me, honey, for I know,—it’s not an easy job for a woman to get on who’s alone and as good-looking as you are.”
“I won’t go,” repeated Mariposa, angry and obstinate.
“But why not, for goodness’ sake?”—in blank amaze. “What’s come over you? Is it your mourning? You know your mother’s the last person who’d want you to sit indoors, moping like a snail in a shell, when your future was waiting for you outside the door.”
Her promise rose up before Mariposa’s mental vision and checked the angry reiteration that was on her lips. She turned away, suddenly, tremulous and pale.
“Don’t talk about it any more,” she answered, “but I can’t go now. Perhaps later on, but not now—I can’t go now.”
Mrs. Willers shrugged her shoulders, and was wisely silent. Mariposa’s grief was making her unreasonable, that was all. To Shackleton she merely said that the girl was too ill and overwrought to see any one just yet. As soon as she was herself again Mrs. Willers would bring her to The Trumpet office for the interview that was to be the opening of the new era.