“Nicanor lay dead in his harness.”
—MACCABEES.
The day broke overcast and damp, one of those depressing days of still, soft grayness that usher in the early rains, when the air has a heavy closeness and the skies seem to sag with the weight of moisture that is slow to fall.
There was much to do yet in the rifled cottage. Mariposa rose to it wan and heavy-eyed. The whirl of her own thoughts during the long, sleepless night had not soothed her shame and distress. She found herself working doggedly, with her heart like lead in her breast, and her mouth feeling dry as the scene of the evening before pressed forward to her attention. She tried to keep it in the background, but it would not down. Words, looks, sentences kept welling up to the surface of her mind, coloring her cheeks with a miserable crimson, filling her being with a sickness of despair. The memory of the kisses followed her from room to room, and task to task. She felt them on her lips as she moved about, the lips that had never known the kiss of a lover, and now seemed soiled and smirched forever.
After luncheon the red lacquer cabinet went away. She watched it off as the last remnant of the old life. She felt strangely indifferent to what yesterday she thought would be so many unbearable wrenches. Finally nothing was left but her own few possessions, gathered together in a corner of the front room—two trunks, a screen, a table, a long, old-fashioned mirror and some pictures. Yesterday morning she had bargained with a cheap carter, picked up on the street corner, to take them for a dollar, and now she sat waiting for him, while the day grew duller outside, and the fog began to sift itself into fine rain.
The servant, who was to close and lock the cottage, begged her to go, promising to see to the shipping of the last load. Mariposa needed no special urging. She felt that an afternoon spent in that dim little parlor, looking out through the bay window at the fine slant of the rain would drive her mad. There was no promise of cheer at the Garcia boarding-house, but it was, at least, not haunted with memories.
A half-hour later, with the precious desk, containing the marriage certificates and Shackleton’s gift of money, under her arm, she was climbing the hills from Sutter Street to that part of Hyde Street in which the Garcia house stood. She eyed it with deepening gloom as it revealed itself through the thin rain. It was a house which even then was getting old, standing back from the street on top of a bank, which was held in place by a wooden bulk-head, surmounted by a low balustrade. A gate gave access through this, and a flight of rotting wooden steps led by zigzags to the house. The lower story was skirted in front by a balcony, which, after the fashion of early San Francisco architecture, was encased in glass. Its roof above slanted up to the two long windows of the front bedroom. The pepper-tree, of which Mariposa had spoken to Essex, was sufficient to tell of the age of the property and to give beauty and picturesqueness to the ramshackle old place. It had reached an unusual growth and threw a fountain of drooping foliage over the balustrade and one long limb upon the balcony roof.
To-day it dripped with the rest of the world. As Mariposa let the gate bang the impact shook a shower from the tree, which fell on her as she passed beneath. It seemed to her a bad omen and added to the almost terrifying sensation of gloom that was invading her.
Her ring at the bell brought the whole Garcia family to the door and the hall. A child of ten—the elder of the young Mrs. Garcia’s boys—opened it. He was in the condition of moisture and mud consequent on a game of baseball on the way home from school. Behind him crowded a smaller boy—of a cherubic beauty—arrayed in a very dirty sailor blouse, with a still dirtier wide white collar, upon which hung locks of wispy yellow hair. Mrs. Garcia, the younger, came drearily forward. She was a thin, pretty, slatternly, young woman, very baggy about the waist, and with the same wispy yellow hair as her son, which she wore in the popular bang. It had been smartly curled in the morning, but the damp had shown it no respect, and it hung down limply nearly into her eyes. Back of her, in the dim reaches of the hall, Mariposa saw the grandmother, the strange old Spanish woman, who spoke no English. She looked very old, and small, and was wrinkled like a walnut. But as she encountered the girl’s miserable gaze she gave her a gentle reassuring smile, full of that curious, patient sweetness which comes in the faces of the old who have lived kindly.
The younger members of the family escorted the new arrival upstairs. She had seen her room before, had already placed therein her piano and many of her smaller ornaments, but its bleakness struck her anew. She stopped on the threshold, looking at its chill, half-furnished extent with a sudden throttling sense of homesickness. It was a large room, evidently once the state bedroom of the house, signs of its past glory lingering in the elaborate gilt chandelier, the white wall-paper, strewed with golden wheat-ears, and the marble mantelpiece, with carvings of fruit at the sides. Now she saw with renewed clearness of vision the threadbare carpet, with a large ink-stain by the table, the rocking-chair with one arm gone, the place on the wall behind the sofa where the heads of previous boarders had left their mark.
“Your clock don’t go,” said the cherubic boy in a loud voice. “I’ve tried to make it, but it only ticks a minute and then stops.”
“There!” said Mrs. Garcia, with a gesture of collapsed hopelessness, “he’s been at your clock! I knew he would. Have you broken her clock?” fiercely to the boy.
“No, I ain’t,” he returned, not in the least overawed by the maternal onslaught. “It were broke when it came.”
“He did break it,” said the other boy suddenly. “He opened the back door of it and stuck a hairpin in.”
Mrs. Garcia made a rush at her son with the evident intention of administering corporal punishment on the spot. But with a loud, derisive shout, he eluded her and dashed through the doorway. Safe on the stairs, he cried defiantly:
“I ain’t done it, and no one can prove it.”
“That’s the way they always act,” said Mrs. Garcia despondently, pushing up her bang so that she could the better see her new guest. “It’s no picnic having no husband and having to slave for everybody.”
“Grandma slaves, too,” said the rebel on the stairway; “she slaves more’n you do, and Uncle Gam slaves the most.”
Further revelations were stopped by another ring at the bell. Visitors were evidently rare, for everybody but Mariposa flew to the hall and precipitated themselves down the stairs. In the general interest the recent battle was forgotten, the rebel earning his pardon by getting to the door before any one else. The new-comer was Mariposa’s expressman. She had already seen through her window the uncovered cart with her few belongings glistening with rain.
The driver, a grimy youth in a steaming blouse, was standing in the doorway with the wet receipt flapping in his hand.
“It’s your things,” yelled the boys.
“Tell him to bring them up,” said Mariposa, who was now at the stair-head herself.
The man stepped into the hall and looked up at her. He had a singularly red and impudent face.
“Not till I get my two dollars and a half,” he said.
“Two dollars and a half!” echoed Mariposa in alarm, for a dollar was beginning to look larger to her than it ever had done before. “It was only a dollar.”
“A dollar!” he shouted. “A dollar for that load!”—pointing to the street—“say, you’ve got a gall!”
Mariposa flushed. She had never been spoken to this way before in her life. She leaned over the balustrade and said haughtily:
“Bring in my things, and when they’re up here I will give you the dollar you agreed upon.”
The man gave a loud, derisive laugh.
“That beats anything!” he said, and then roared through the door to his pard: “Say, she wants to give us a dollar for that load. Ain’t that rich?”
There was a moment’s silence in the hall. A vulgar wrangle was almost impossible to the girl at the juncture to which the depressing and hideous events of the last few weeks had brought her. Yet she had still a glimmer of spirit left, and her gorge rose at the impudent swindle.
“I won’t pay you two dollars and a half, and I will have my things,” she said. “Bring them up at once.”
The man laughed again, this time with an uglier note.
“I guess not, young woman,” he said, lounging against the balustrade. “I guess you’ll have to fork out the two fifty or whistle for your things.”
Mariposa made no answer. Her hand shaking with rage, she began to fumble in her pocket for her purse. The whole Garcia family, assembled in the hallway beneath, breathed audibly in the tense excitement of the moment, and kept moving their eyes from her to the expressman and back again. The Chinaman from the kitchen had joined them, listening with the charmed smile which the menials of that race always wear on occasions of domestic strife.
“Say,” said the man, coming a step up the stairs and assuming a suddenly threatening air, “I can’t stay fooling round here all day. I want my money, and I want it quick. D’ye hear?”
Mariposa’s hand closed on the purse. She would have now paid anything to escape from this hateful scene. At the same moment she heard a door open behind her, a quick step in the hall, and a man suddenly stood beside her at the stair-head. He was in his shirt-sleeves and he had a pen in his hand.
The expressman, who had mounted two or three steps, saw him and recoiled, looking startled.
“What’s the matter with you?” said the new-comer shortly.
“I want my money,” said the man doggedly, but retreating.
“Who owes you money? And what do you mean by making a row like this in this house?”
“I owe him money,” said Mariposa. “I agreed to pay him a dollar for carrying my things here, and now he wants two and a half and won’t give me my things unless I pay it. But I’ll pay what he wants rather than fight this way.”
She was conscious of a slight, amused smile in the very keen and clear gray eyes the man beside her fastened for one listening moment on her face.
“Get your dollar,” he said, “and don’t bother any more.” Then in a loud voice down the stairway: “Here, step out and get the trunks and don’t let’s have any more talk about it. Ching,” to the Chinaman, “go out and help that man with this lady’s things.”
The Chinaman came forward, still grinning. The expressman for a moment hesitated.
“Look here,” said the man in the shirt-sleeves, “I don’t want to have to come downstairs, I’m busy.”
The expressman, with Ching behind him, hurried out.
Mariposa’s deliverer stood at the stair-head watching them and slightly smiling. Then he turned to her. She was again conscious of how gray and clear his eyes looked in his sunburned face.
“I was writing a letter in my room, and I heard the sound of strife long before I realized what was happening. Why didn’t you call me?”
“I didn’t know there was any one there,” she answered.
“Well, the boys ought to have known. Why didn’t one of you little beggars come for me?” he said to the two boys, who were clambering slowly up the outside of the balustrade staring from the deliverer to the expressman, now advancing up the steps with Mariposa’s belongings.
“I liked to see ’em fight,” said the smaller. “I liked it.”
“You little scamp,” said the man, and, leaning over the stair-rail, caught the ascending cherub by the slack of his knickerbockers and drew him upward, shrieking delightedly. On the landing he gave him a slight shake, and said:
“I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of talk. Next time there’s a fight, call me.”
The expressman and Ching had now entered laden with the luggage. They came staggering up the stairs, scraping the walls with the corners of the trunks and softly swearing. Mariposa started for her room, followed by the strange man and the two boys.
Her deliverer was evidently a person to whom the usages of society were matters of indifference. He entered the room without permission or apology and stood looking inquiringly about him, his glance passing from the bed to the wide, old-fashioned bureau, the rocking-chair with its arm off and the ink-stain on the carpet. As the men entered with their burdens, he said:
“You look as if you’d be short of chairs here. I’ll see that you get another rocker to-morrow.”
Mariposa wondered if Mrs. Garcia was about to end her widowhood and this was the happy man.
He stood about as the men set down the luggage, and watched the transfer of the dollar from Mariposa’s white hand to the dingy one of her late enemy. The boys also eyed this transaction with speechless attention, evidently anticipating a second outbreak of hostilities. But peace had been restored and would evidently rule as long as the sunburned man in the shirt-sleeves remained.
This he appeared to intend doing. He suggested a change in the places of one or two of Mariposa’s pieces of furniture, and showed her how she could use her screen to hide the bed. He looked annoyed over a torn strip of loose wall-paper that hung dejected, revealing a long seam of plaster like a seared scar. Then he went to the window and pushed back the curtains of faded rep.
“There’s a nice view from here on sunny days down into the garden.”
Mariposa felt she must show interest, and went to the window, too. The pane was not clean, and the view commanded nothing but the splendid fountain-like foliage of the pepper-tree and below a sodden strip of garden in which limp chrysanthemums hung their heads, while a ragged nasturtium vine tried to protest its vigor by flaunting a few blossoms from the top of the fence. It seemed to her the acme of forlornness. The crescendo of the afternoon’s unutterable despondency had reached its climax. Her sense of desolation welled suddenly up into overwhelming life. It caught her by the throat. She made a supreme effort, and said in a shaken voice:
“It looks rather damp now.”
Her companion turned from the window.
“Here, boys, scoot,” he said to the two boys who were attempting to open the trunks with the clock key. “You’ve got no business hanging round here. Go down and study your lessons.”
They obediently left the room. Mariposa heard their jubilantly clamorous descent of the stairs. She made no attempt to leave the window, or to speak to the man, who still remained moving about as if looking for something. The light was growing dim in the dark wintry day, but the girl still stood with her face to the pane. She knew that if the tears against which she fought should come there would be a deluge of them. Biting her lips and clenching her hands, she stood peering out, speechless, overwhelmed by her wretchedness.
Presently the man said, as if speaking to himself:
“Where the devil are the matches? Elsie’s too careless for anything.”
She heard him feeling about on shelves and tables, and after a moment he said:
“Did you see where the matches were? I want to light the gas.”
“There aren’t any,” she answered without turning.
He gave a suppressed exclamation, and, opening the door, left the room.
With the withdrawal of his restraining presence the tension snapped. Mariposa sank down in the chair near the window and the tears poured from her eyes, tears in torrential volume, such as her mother had shed twenty-five years before in front of Dan Moreau’s cabin.
Her grief seized her and swept her away. She shook with it. Why could she not die and escape from this hideous world? It bowed her like a reed before a wind, and she bent her face on the chair arm and trembled and throbbed.
She did not hear the door open, nor know that her solitude was again invaded, till she heard the man’s step beside her. Then she started up, strangled with sobs and indignation.
“Is it you again?” she cried. “Can’t you see how miserable I am?”
“I saw it the moment I came out of my room this afternoon,” he answered quietly. “I’m sorry I disturb you. I only wanted to light the gas and get the place a little more cheerful and warm. It’s too cold in here. You go on crying. Don’t bother about me; I’m going to light the fire.”
She obeyed him, too abject in her misery to care. He lit all the gases in the gilt chandelier, and then knelt before the fireplace. Soon the snapping of the wood contested the silence with the small, pathetic noises of the woman’s weeping. She felt—at first without consciousness—the grateful warmth of the blaze. Presently she removed the wad of saturated handkerchief from her face. The room was inundated by a flood of light, the leaping gleam of the flames licking the glaze of the few old-fashioned ornaments and evoking uncertain gleams from the long mirror standing on the floor in the corner. The man was sitting before the fire. He had his coat on now, and Mariposa could see that he was tall and powerful, a bronzed and muscular man of about thirty-five years of age, with a face tanned to mahogany color, thick-brown hair and a brown mustache. His hand, as it rested on his knee, caught her eye; it was well formed, but worn as a laborer’s.
“Don’t you want to come and sit near the fire?” he said, without moving his head.
She murmured a negative.
“I see that your clock is all off,” he continued. “There’s something the matter with it. I’ll fix it for you this evening.”
He rose and lifted the clock from the mantelpiece. It was a small timepiece of French gilt, one of the many presents her father had given her mother in their days of affluence.
As he lifted it Mariposa suddenly experienced a return of misery at the thought that he was going. At the idea of being again left to herself her wretchedness rushed back upon her with redoubled force. She felt that the flood of tears would begin again.
“Oh, don’t go,” she said, with the imploring urgency of old friendship. “I’m so terribly depressed. Don’t go.”
Her lips trembled, her swollen eyes were without light or beauty. She was as distinctly unlovely as a handsome woman can be. The man, however, did not look at her. He had opened the door of the clock and was studying its internal machinery. He answered quietly:
“I’ll have to go now for a while. I must finish my letter. It’s got to go out to-night, but I was going to ask you if you wouldn’t like to have your supper up here? It’s now a little after five; at six o’clock I’ll bring it, and if you don’t mind, I’ll bring mine up, too. I just take tea and some bread and butter and jam or stuff—whatever Elsie happens to have round. If you’d like it, you fix up the table and get things into some sort of shape.”
He walked toward the door. With the handle in his hand he said:
“You don’t mind my taking mine up here, too, do you? If you do, just say so.”
“No, I don’t mind,” said Mariposa, in the stifled voice of the weeper.
When he had gone she listlessly tried to create some kind of order in the chaotic room. She felt exhausted and indifferent. Once she found herself looking at her watch with a sort of heavy desire to have the time pass quickly. She dreaded her loneliness. She caught a glimpse of herself in the chimney-piece glass and felt neither shame nor disgust at her unsightly appearance.
At six o’clock she heard the quick, decisive step in the hall that earlier in the afternoon had broken in on her wrangle with the expressman. A knock came on the door that sounded exceedingly like a kick bestowed under difficulties. She opened it, and her new friend entered bearing a large tray set forth with the paraphernalia of a cold supper and with the evening paper laid on top. He put it on the cleared table, and together they lifted off its contents and set them forth. There was cold meat, jam, bread and butter, a brown pottery teapot with the sprout broken and two very beautiful cups, delicate and richly decorated. Then they sat down, one at each side of the table, and the meal began.
Mariposa did not care to eat. Sitting under the blaze of the gilt chandelier, with the firelight gilding one side of her flushed and disfigured face, she poured out the tea, while her companion attacked the cold meat with good appetite. The broken spout leaked, and she found herself guiltily regarding the man opposite, as she surreptitiously tried to sop up with a napkin the streams of tea it sent over the table-cloth.
He appeared to have the capacity for seeing anything that occurred in his vicinity.
“Never mind the teapot,” he said, with his mouth full; “it always does that. It’s no good getting a new one. I think the boys break them. Elsie says they play boats with them in the bath-tub.”
Mariposa made no reply, and the meal progressed in silence. Presently her vis-à-vis held out his cup for a second filling.
“What beautiful cups,” she said. “It would be a pity to break them.”
“They’re grandma’s. They’re the only two left. Grandma had some stunning things, brought round The Horn by her husband in the early days, before the Gringo came. He was a great man in his day, Don Manuel Garcia.”
“Is she your grandmother, too?” Mariposa asked. It seemed natural to put pointblank questions to this man, who so completely swept aside the smaller conventions.
“Mine? Oh, Lord, no. My poor old granny died crossing the plains in ’49. I was there, but I don’t remember it. I call old lady Garcia grandma, because I’m here so much, and because I look upon them as my family.”
“Do you live here always?” asked Mariposa, looking with extinguished eyes over the piece of bread she was nibbling.
“No, I live at the mines. I’m a miner. My stamping-ground’s the whole Sierra from Siskiyou to Tuolumne.”
He looked at her with a queer, whimsical smile. His strong white teeth gleamed for a moment from between his bearded lips.
“I’m up at the Sierra a lot of the time,” he continued, “and then I’m down here a lot more of the time. I come here to find my victims. I locate a good prospect in the Sierra, and I come down here to sell it. That’s my business.”
“What’s your name?” asked Mariposa suddenly, hearing herself ask this last and most pertinent question with the dry glibness of an interviewer.
“My name? Great Scott, you don’t know it!” he threw back his head and a jolly, sonorous laugh filled the room. “That’s great, you and I sitting here together over supper as if we’d grown up together in the same nursery, and you don’t know what my name is. It’s Gamaliel Barron. Do you like it?”
“Yes,” said Mariposa, gravely, “it’s a very nice name.”
“I’m glad you think so. I can’t say I’m much attached to the front end of it. It’s a Bible name. I haven’t the least idea who the gentleman was, or what he did, but he’s in the Bible somewhere.”
“Saul sat at his feet,” said Mariposa; “he was a great teacher.”
“Well, I’m afraid his namesake isn’t much like him. I never taught anybody anything, and certainly no one ever sat at my feet, and I’d hate it if they did.”
There was another pause, while Barron continued his supper with unabated gusto. He had finished the cold meat and was now spreading jam on bread and butter and eating it, with alternate mouthfuls of tea. Though he ate rapidly, as one accustomed to take his meals alone, he ate like a gentleman. She found herself regarding him with a listless curiosity, faintly wondering what manner of man he was.
Looking up he met her eyes and said:
“You’ll be very comfortable here. Don’t let the first glimpse discourage you. Elsie’s careless, and the boys are pretty wild, but they’re all right when you come to know them better, and grandma’s fine. There’s not many women in San Francisco to match old Señora Garcia. She’s the true kind.”
“What a pity her son died!” said Mariposa.
He raised his head instantly and an expression of pain passed over his face.
“You’re right, there,” he said in a low voice. “That was one of the hardest things that ever happened. If there’s a God I’d like to know why he let it happen. Juan Garcia was the salt of the earth—a great man. He was the best son, the best husband and the best friend I ever knew. And he was killed offhand, for no reason, by an unnecessary accident, leaving these poor, helpless creatures this way.”
He made a gesture with his head toward the door.
“You knew him well?” said Mariposa.
The gray eyes looked into hers very gravely.
“He was my best friend,” he answered; “the best friend any man ever had in the world.”
The girl saw he was moved.
“The people we love, and depend on, and live for always die,” she said gloomily.
“But others come up. They don’t quite take their places, but they fill up the holes in the ranks. We’re not expected always to love comfortably and be happy. We’re expected to work; that’s what we’re here for, and there’s plenty of it to do. Haven’t I got my work cut out for me,” suddenly laughing, “in those two boys?”
Mariposa’s pale lips showed the ripple of an assenting smile.
“They’re certainly a serious proposition,” he continued, “and poor Elsie can’t any more manage ’em than she could ride a bucking bronco. But they’ll pull out all right. Don’t you worry. Those boys are all right.”
He was about to return to the remnants of the supper when his eyes fell on the folded paper, which had been pushed to one side of the table.
“Oh, look!” he said; “we forgot the paper. You’ve finished; wouldn’t you like to see it?”
She shook her head. The paper had not much interest for her at the best of times.
“Well, then, if you don’t mind, I’ll run my eye over it, while you make me another cup of tea. Three cups are my limit—one lump and milk.”
He handed her the cup, already shaking the paper out of its folds. She was struggling with the leakage of the broken spout, when he gave a loud ejaculation:
“Great Scott! here’s news!”
“What is it?” she queried, the broken teapot suspended over the cup.
“Jake Shackleton’s dead!”
The teapot fell with a crash on the table. Her mouth opened, her face turned an amazing pallor, and she sat staring at the astonished man with horror-stricken eyes.
“Dead!” she gasped; “why everybody’s dead!”
Barron dropped the paper on the floor.
“I’m so awfully sorry; I didn’t know you knew him well. I didn’t know he was a friend.”
“Friend!” she echoed, almost with a shriek. “Friend! Why, he was my father.”
The voice ended in a wild peal of laughter, horrible, almost maniacal.
The man, paying no attention to her words, realized that the strain of the day and her overwhelming depression of spirits had completely unbalanced her. Her wild laughter suddenly gave way to wilder tears. In a moment he ran to the door to summon the señora, but in the next, remembered that Elsie and the boys would undoubtedly accompany her, and that the woman before him was in no state to be exposed to their uncomprehending stares.
Hysterics were new to him, but he had a vague idea that water administered suddenly from a pitcher was the only authorized cure. He seized the pitcher from the wash-stand, began to sprinkle her somewhat timidly with his fingers, and finally ended by pouring a fair amount on her head.
It had the desired effect. Gasping, saturated, but dragged back to some sort of control, by the chill current running from her head in rillets over her body, Mariposa sat up. The man was standing before her, anxiously regarding her, the pitcher held ready for another application. She pushed it away with an icy hand.
“I’m all right now,” she gasped. “You’d better go. And—and—if I said anything silly, you understand, I didn’t know what I was saying. I meant—that Mr. Shackleton was a friend of my father’s. He’s been very good to me. It gave me an awful shock. Please go.”
Barron set down the pitcher and went. He was overcome with pity for the broken creature, and furious with himself for the shock he had given her. The words she had uttered had made little impression on him at first. It was afterward, while he was in the silence of his own room, that they recurred to him with more significance. For a space he thought of the remark and her explanation of it with some wonder. But before he settled to sleep, he had pushed the matter from his mind, setting it down as the meaningless utterance of an hysterical woman.