“Constant you are,
But yet a woman; and for secrecy,
No lady closer, for I will believe
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know.”
—SHAKESPEARE.
Win found his mother in her boudoir and delivered Mrs. Willers’ letter to her without comment. He saw her read it and then sit silent, her brows drawn, looking into the fire beside which she sat. It was impossible just then for him to allude to the subject of the letter, and, after standing by the mantelpiece awkwardly warming his wet feet, he went upstairs to his own rooms.
At dinner the family trio was unusually quiet. Under the blaze of light that fell from the great crystal chandelier over the table with its weight of glass and silver, the three participants looked preoccupied and stupid. The two Chinese servants, soft-footed as cats, and spotless in their crisp white, moved about the table noiselessly, offering dish after dish to their impassive employers.
It was one of those irritating occasions when everything seems to combine for the purpose of exasperating. Bessie, annoyed by the contents of Mrs. Willers’ letter, found her annoyance augmented by the fact that Maud looked particularly plain that evening, and the Count de Lamolle was expected after dinner. Worry had robbed her face of such sparkle as it possessed and had accentuated its ungirlish heaviness. She felt that her engagement to Latimer must be announced, for the Count de Lamolle was exhibiting those signs of a coming proposal that she knew well, and what excuse could she give her mother for rejecting him? She must tell the truth, and the thought alarmed her shrinking and peaceable soul. She sat silent, crumbling her bread with a nervous hand and wondering how she could possibly avert the offer if the count showed symptoms of making it that evening.
After dinner her mother left her in the small reception-room, a rich and ornate apartment, furnished in an oriental manner with divans, cushions, and Moorish hangings. The zeal for chaperonage had not yet penetrated to the West, and Bessie considered that to leave her daughter thus alone was to discharge her duties as a parent with delicate correctness. She retired to the adjoining library, where the count, on entering, had a glimpse of her sitting in a low chair, languidly turning the pages of a magazine. He, on his part, had lived in the West long enough to know that the disposal of the family in these segregated units was what custom and conventionality dictated.
The count was a clever man and had studied the United States from other points of vantage than the window of a Pullman car.
With the murmur of his greetings to Maud in her ears, Bessie rose from her chair. She found the library chill and cheerless after her cozy boudoir on the floor above, and decided to go there. Glancing over her shoulder, as she mounted the stairs, she could see the count standing with his back to the fire, discoursing with a smile—a handsome, personable man, with his dark face and pointed beard looking darker than ever over his gleaming expanse of shirt bosom. It would be an entirely desirable marriage for Maud. Bessie had found out all about the count’s position and title in his native land, and both were all that he said they were, which had satisfied and surprised her.
In her own room she sat down before the fire to think. Maud’s future was in her own hands now, molding itself into shape downstairs in the reception-room. Bessie could do no more toward directing it than she had already done, and her active mind immediately seized on the other subject that had been engrossing it. She drew out Mrs. Willers’ letter and read it again. Then crumpling it in her hand, she looked into the fire with eyes of somber perplexity.
What was the matter with the girl? Mrs. Willers stated positively that, as far as she could ascertain, there was no man that had the slightest influence over Mariposa Moreau’s affections. She was acting entirely on her own volition. But what had made her change her mind, Mrs. Willers did not know. Something had undoubtedly occurred, she thought, that had influenced Mariposa to a total reversal of opinion. Mrs. Willers said she could not imagine what this was, but it had changed the girl, not only in ambition and point of view, but in character.
The letter frightened Bessie. It had made her silent all through dinner, and now brooding over the fire, she thought of what it might mean and felt a cold apprehension seize her. Could Mariposa know? Her behavior and conduct since Shackleton’s death suggested such a possibility. It was incredible to think of, but Lucy might have told. And also, might not the girl, in arranging her mother’s effects after her death, have come on something, letters or papers, which had revealed the past?
A memory rose up in Bessie’s mind of the girl wife she had supplanted, clinging to the marriage certificate, which was all that remained to remind her of the days when she had been the one lawful wife. Bessie knew that this paper had been carefully tied in the bundle which held Lucy’s few possessions when they left Salt Lake. She knew it was still in the bundle when she, herself, had handed it to the deserted girl in front of Moreau’s cabin. Might not Mariposa have found it?
She rose and walked about the room, feeling sick at the thought. She was no longer young, and her iron nerve had been permanently shaken by the suddenness of her husband’s death. Mariposa, with her mother’s marriage certificate, might be plotting some desperate coup. No wonder she refused to go to Paris! If she could establish her claim as Shackleton’s eldest and only legitimate child, she would not only sweep from Win and Maud the lion’s share of their inheritance, but, equally unbearable, she would drag to the light the ugly story—the terrible story that Jake Shackleton and his second wife had so successfully hidden.
Her thoughts were suddenly broken in on by the bang of the front door. She looked at the clock and saw it was only nine. If it was the count who was going he had stayed less than an hour. What had happened? She moved to the door and listened.
She heard a light step, slowly and furtively mounting the stairs. It was Maud, for, though she could attempt to deaden her footfall, she could not hush the rustling of her silken skirts. As the sweeping sound reached the stair-head, Bessie opened her door. Maud stopped short, her black dress fading into the darkness about her, so that her white face seemed to be floating unattached through the air like an optical delusion.
“Why, mommer,” she said, falteringly, “I thought you were in bed.”
“Has the count gone?” queried her mother, with an unusual sternness of tone.
“Yes,” said the girl, “he’s gone. He—he—went early to-night.”
“Why did he go so early?”
“He didn’t want to stay any longer.”
Maud was terrified. Her hand clutching the balustrade was trembling and icy. In her father’s lifetime she had known that she would never dare to tell of her engagement to Latimer. She would have ended by eloping. Now, the fear of her mother, who had always been the gentler parent, froze her timid soul, and even the joy of her love seemed swamped in this dreadful moment of confession.
“Did the count ask you to marry him?” said Bessie.
“Yes! and—” with tremulous desperation, “I said no, I couldn’t.”
“You said no! that’s not possible. You couldn’t be such a fool.”
“Well, I was, and I said it.”
“Come in here, Maud,” said her mother, standing back from the doorway; “we can’t talk sensibly this way.”
But Maud did not move.
“No, I don’t want to go in there,” she said, like a naughty child; “there’s nothing to talk about. I don’t want to marry him and I told him so and he’s gone, and that’s the end of it.”
“The end of it! That’s nonsense. I want you to marry Count de Lamolle. I don’t want to hear silly talk like this. I’ll write to him to-morrow.”
“Well, it won’t do you or him any good,” said Maud, to whom fear was giving courage, “for I won’t marry him, and neither you nor he can drag me to the altar if I won’t go. It’s not the time of the Crusades.”
If Maud’s allusion was not precisely illuminating, her mother understood it.
“It may not be the time of the Crusades,” she said, grimly, “but neither is it a time when girls can be fools and no one hold out a hand to check them. Do you realize what this marriage means for you? Position, title, an entrance into society that you never in any other way could put as much as the end of your nose into.”
“If I don’t want to put even the end of my nose into it, what good does it do me? You know I hate society. I hate going to dinners and sitting beside people who talk to me about things I don’t understand or care for. I hate going to balls and dancing round and round like a teetotum with men I don’t like. And if it’s bad here, what would it be over there where I don’t speak their language or know their ways, and they’d think I was just something queer and savage the count had caught over here with a lasso.”
Fears and doubts she had never spoken of to any one but Latimer came glibly to her lips in this moment of misery. Her mother was surprised at her fluency.
“You’re piling up objections out of nothing,” she said. “When those people over in France know what your fortune is, make no mistake, they’ll be only too glad to know you and be your friend. They’ll not think you queer and savage. You’ll be on the top of everything over there, not just one of a bunch of bonanza heiresses, as you are here. And the count? Do you know any one so handsome, so gentlemanly, so elegant and polite in San Francisco?”
“I know a man I like better,” said Maud, in a muffled voice.
The white face, with its dimly suggested figure, looked whiter than ever.
“What do you mean by that?” said her mother, stiffening.
“I mean Jack Latimer.”
“Jack Latimer? One of your father’s clerks! Maud, come in here at once. I can’t stand talking in the hall of things like this.”
“No, I won’t come in,” cried Maud, backing away against the baluster, and feeling as she used to do in her juvenile days, when she was hauled by the hand to the scene of punishment. “There’s nothing more to talk about. I’m engaged to Jack Latimer, and I’m going to marry him, and that’s the beginning and the end of it all.”
She felt desperately defiant, standing there in the darkness looking at her mother’s massive shape against the glow of the lit doorway.
“Jack Latimer!” reiterated Mrs. Shackleton, “who only gets a hundred and fifty dollars a month and has to give some of it to his people.”
“Well, haven’t I got enough for two?”
“Maud, you’ve gone crazy. All I know is that I’ll not let you spoil your future. I’ll write to Count de Lamolle to-morrow, and I’ll write to Jack Latimer, too.”
“What good will that do anybody? Count de Lamolle can’t marry me if I don’t want to. And why should Jack Latimer throw me over because you ask him to? He,” she made a tremulous hesitation that would have touched a softer heart, and then added, “he likes me.”
“Likes you!” repeated her mother, with furious scorn, “he likes the five million dollars.”
“It’s me,” said Maud, passionately; “it isn’t the money. And he’s the only person in the world except Win who has ever really liked me. I don’t feel when I’m with him that I’m so ugly and stupid, the way I feel with everybody else. He likes to hear me talk, and when he looks at me I don’t feel as if he was saying to himself, ‘What an ugly girl she is, anyway.’ But I feel that he doesn’t know whether I’m pretty or ugly. He only knows he loves me the way I am.”
She burst into wild tears, and before her mother could answer or arrest her, had brushed past her and fled up the next flight of stairs, the sound of her sobs floating down from the upper darkness to the listener’s ears. Bessie retreated into the boudoir and shut the door.
Maud ran on and burst into her own room, there to throw herself on the bed and weep despairingly for hours. She thought of her lover, the one human being besides her brother who had never made her feel her inferiority, and lying limp and shaken among the pillows, thought, with a wild thrill of longing of the time when she would be free to creep into his arms and hide the ugly face he found so satisfactory upon his heart.
In the morning, before she was up, Bessie visited her and renewed the conversation of the night before. Poor Maud, with a throbbing head and heavy eyes, lay helpless, answering questions that probed the tender secrets of the clandestine courtship, which had been to her an oasis of almost terrifying happiness in the lonely repression of her life. Finally, unable longer to endure her mother’s sarcastic allusions to Latimer’s disingenuousness, she sprang out of bed and ran into the bath-room, which was part of the suite she occupied. Here she turned on both taps, the sound of the rushing water completely drowning her mother’s voice, and sitting on the side of the tub, looked drearily down into the bath, while Bessie’s concluding and indignant sentences rose from the outer side of the door.
Mrs. Shackleton lunched alone that day. Win generally went to his club for his midday meal, and Maud had gone out early and found hospitality at the house of Pussy Thurston. Bessie had done more thinking that morning in the intervals of her domestic duties—she was a notable housekeeper and personally superintended every department of her establishment—and had decided to dedicate part of the afternoon to the society of Mrs. Willers. One of the secrets of Mrs. Shackleton’s success in life had been her power to control and retain interests in divers matters at the same time. Maud’s unpleasant news had not pushed the even more weighty subject of Mariposa into abeyance. It was as prominent as ever in the widow’s mind.
She drove down to The Trumpet office soon after lunch and slowly mounted the long stairs. It would have been a hardship for any other woman of her years and weight, but Bessie’s bodily energy was still remarkable, and she had never indulged herself in the luxury of laziness. At the top of the fourth flight she paused, panting, while the astonished office boy stared at her, recognizing her as the chief’s mother.
Mrs. Willers was in her cubby-hole, with a drop-light sending a little circle of yellow radiance over the middle of the desk. A litter of newspaper cuttings surrounded her, and Miss Peebles, at the moment of Mrs. Shackleton’s entrance, was in the cane-bottomed chair, in which aspirants for journalistic honors usually sat. The rustle of Mrs. Shackleton’s silks and the faint advancing perfume that preceded her, announced an arrival of unusual distinction, and Miss Peebles had turned uneasily in the chair and Mrs. Willers was peering out from the circle of the drop-light, when the lady entered the room.
Miss Peebles rose with a flurried haste and thrust forward the chair, and Mrs. Willers extricated herself from the heaped up newspapers and extended a welcoming hand. The greetings ended, the younger woman bowed herself out, her opinion of Mrs. Willers, if possible, higher even than it had been before.
Mrs. Willers was surprised, but discreetly refrained from showing it. She had known Mrs. Shackleton for several years, and had once heard, from her late chief, that his wife approved her matter and counseled her advancement.
But to have her appear thus unannounced in the intimate heat and burden of office hours was decidedly unexpected. Mrs. Shackleton knew this and proceeded to explain.
“You must think it queer, my coming down on you this way, when you’re up to your neck in work, but I won’t keep you ten minutes.” She looked at the small nickel clock that ticked aggressively in the middle of the desk. “And I know you are too busy a woman to ask you to come all the way up to my house. So I’ve come down to you.”
“Pleased and flattered,” murmured Mrs. Willers, pushing back her chair, and kicking a space in the newspapers, so that she could cross her knees at ease. “But, don’t hurry, Mrs. Shackleton. Work’s well on and I’m at your disposal for a good many ten minutes.”
“It’s just to talk over that letter you sent me by Win. What do you understand by Miss Moreau’s behavior, Mrs. Willers?”
“I don’t understand anything by it. I don’t understand it at all.”
“That’s the way it seems to me. There’s only one explanation of it that I can see, and you say that isn’t the right one.”
“What was that?”
“That there’s some man here she’s interested in. When a girl of that age, without a cent, or a friend or a prospect, refuses an offer that means a successful and maybe a famous future, what’s a person to think? Something’s stopping her. And the only thing I know of that would stop her is that she’s fallen in love. But you say she hasn’t.”
“She don’t strike me as being so. She don’t talk like a girl in love.”
“Is there any man who is interested in her and sees her continually?”
Mrs. Willers was naturally a truthful woman, but a hard experience of life had taught her to prevaricate with skill and coolness when she thought the occasion demanded it. She saw no menace now, however, and was entirely in sympathy with Mrs. Shackleton in her annoyance at Mariposa’s irritating behavior.
“Yes,” she said, nodding with grave eyes, “there is a man.”
“Oh, there is,” said the other, bending forward with a sudden eager interest that was not lost upon Mrs. Willers. “Who?”
“One of our men here, Barry Essex.”
“Essex!” exclaimed the widow, with a sudden light of relieved comprehension suffusing her glance. “Of course. I know him. That dark, foreign-looking man that nobody knows anything about. Mr. Shackleton thought a great deal of him; said he was thrown away on The Trumpet. He’s not a bit an ordinary sort of person.”
“That’s the one,” said Mrs. Willers, nodding her head in somber acquiescence. “And you’re right about nobody knowing anything about him. He’s a dark mystery, I think.”
“And you say he’s in love with her?”
“That’s what I’d infer from what she tells me.”
“What does she tell you?”
“He’s asked her to marry him.”
“Then they’re engaged. That accounts for the whole thing.”
“No, they’re not engaged. She’s refused him.”
“Refused him? That girl who’s been living in an adobe at Santa Barbara, refuse that fine-looking fellow? Why, she’ll never see a man like that again in her life. She’s not refused him? Of course, she’s engaged to him.”
“No, you’re mistaken. She’s not. She doesn’t like him.”
“That’s what she tells you. Girls always say that sort of thing. That explains the way she’s acted from the start. He hadn’t asked her when Mr. Shackleton was alive. She’s engaged to him now and doesn’t want to leave him. She struck me as just that soft, sentimental sort.”
“You’re wrong, Mrs. Shackleton; I know Mariposa Moreau. She tells the truth; all of it. That’s why it’s so hard sometimes to understand what she means. We’re not used to it. She doesn’t like that man, and she wouldn’t marry him if he was hung all over with diamonds and was going to give her the Con Virginia for a wedding present.”
“Bosh!” ejaculated her companion, with sudden, sharp irritation. “That’s what she says. They have no money to marry on, I suppose, and she’s trying to keep her engagement secret. It explains everything. I must say I’m relieved. I had the girl on my mind, and it seemed to me she was so senseless and fly-away that you didn’t know where she’d fetch up.”
Mrs. Willers was annoyed. It was not pleasant to her to hear Mariposa spoken of this way. But a long life of struggle and misfortune had taught her, among other valuable things, the art of hiding unprofitable anger under a bland smile.
“Well, all I can say,” she said, laughing quite naturally, “is that I hope you’re wrong. I’m sure I don’t want to see her married to that man.”
“Why not?” queried Mrs. Shackleton, with the sudden arrested glance of surprised curiosity. “What is there to object to in such a marriage?”
“Hundreds of things,” answered Mrs. Willers, feeling that there are many disadvantages in having to converse with your employer’s mother on the subject of one of your best friends. “Who knows anything about Barry Essex? No one knows where he comes from, or who he is, or even if Essex is his name. I don’t believe it is, at all. I think he just took it because it sounds like the aristocracy. And what’s his record? I’ll lay ten to one there are things behind him he wouldn’t like to see published on the front page of The Trumpet. He’s no man to make a girl happy.”
“You seem to be taking a good deal for granted. Because you don’t know anything about him, it’s no reason to suppose the worst. He certainly looks and acts like a gentleman, and he’s finely educated. And isn’t it better for a girl like Miss Moreau to have a husband to take care of her than to go roaming around by herself, throwing away every chance she gets, for some crazy notion? That young woman’s not able to take care of herself. The best thing for her is to get Barry Essex to do it for her.”
“I’ve known women,” said Mrs. Willers, judicially, “who thought that a bad husband was better than no husband at all. But I’m not of that opinion myself, having had one of the bad ones. Solomon said a corner of a housetop and a dinner of herbs was better than a wide house with a brawling woman. And I tell you that one room in Tar Flat and beef’s liver for every meal is better than a palace on Nob Hill with a husband that’s no account.”
“I’m afraid you’re inclined to look on the dark side of matrimony,” said Mrs. Shackleton, laughing, as she rose from her chair.
“May be so,” said the other; “but after my experience I don’t think it such a blissful state that I want to round up all my friends and drive them into the corral, whether they want to go or not.”
Mrs. Shackleton looked down for a pondering moment. She was evidently not listening. Raising her head she met Mrs. Willers’ half-sad, half-twinkling eyes with a gaze of keen scrutiny, and said:
“Then if it isn’t a love affair, what is it that’s made Miss Moreau change her mind?”
“Ah!” Mrs. Willers shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what I’d like to know as well as you. I can only say what it’s not.”
“And that’s Barry Essex. Well, Mrs. Willers, you’re a smart woman, but you know your business better than you do the vagaries of young girls. I don’t know Miss Moreau well, but I’d like to bet that I understand her this time better than you do.”
She smiled genially and held out her hand.
“My ten minutes are up,” nodding at the clock. “And I’m too much of a business woman to outstay my time limit. No”—in answer to Mrs. Willers’ polite demur—“I must go.”
She moved toward the door, then paused and said:
“Isn’t Essex a sort of Frenchman? Or wasn’t he, anyway, brought up in Paris, or had a French mother, or something?”
“As to his mother,” said Mrs. Willers, sourly, “the Lord alone knows who she was. I’ve heard she was everything from the daughter of a duke to a snake-charmer in a dime museum. But he told me he was born and partly educated in Paris, and Madame Bertrand, at the Rôtisserie, tells me he must have been, as he talks real French French, not the kind you learn out of a book.”
“He certainly looks like a Frenchman,” said the departing guest. “Well, good by. It’s a sort of bond between us to try to settle to her advantage this silly girl who doesn’t want to be settled. If you hear any more of her affair with Essex, you might let me know. In spite of my criticisms, I take the greatest interest in her. I wouldn’t criticize if I didn’t.”
As Mrs. Shackleton was slowly descending the long stairs, Mrs. Willers still stood beside her desk, thinking. The visit had surprised her in the beginning. Now it left her feeling puzzled and vaguely disturbed. Why did Mrs. Shackleton seem to be so desirous of thinking that Mariposa was betrothed to Essex? The bonanza king’s widow was a woman of large charities and carelessly magnificent generosities, but she was also a woman of keen insight and unwavering common sense. Her interest in Mariposa was as strong as her husband’s, and was entirely explainable as his had been, in the light of their old acquaintance with the girl’s father. What Mrs. Willers could not understand was how any person, who had Mariposa Moreau’s welfare at heart, could derive satisfaction from the thought of her marrying Barry Essex.