CHAPTER XVII
FRIEND AND BROTHER
“Wisdom is good with an inheritance, and by it there is profit to them that see the sun.”—ECCLESIASTES.
Mariposa’s sixteen dollars a month had been augmented to twenty-eight by the accession of three new pupils. These had been acquired through Isaac Pierpont, who was glad to find a cheap teacher for his potential prima donnas, who were frequently lacking in the simplest knowledge of instrumental music.
Mariposa was impressed and flattered by her extended clientele, and at first felt some embarrassment in finding that one of the pupils was a woman ten years older than herself. The worry she had felt on the score of her living was now at rest, for Pierpont had promised her his continued aid, and her new scholars professed themselves much pleased with her efforts.
Her monthly earnings were sufficient to cover her exceedingly modest living expenses. The remnants of her fortune—the few dollars left after her mother’s funeral and the money realized by the sale of the jewelry and furniture that were the last relics of their beaux jours—made up the amount of three hundred and twenty dollars. This was in the bank. In the little desk that stood on a table in her room was the five hundred dollars in gold Shackleton had sent her. She had not touched it and never intended to, seeming to repudiate its possession by keeping it thus secret and apart from her other store.
The time was wearing on toward mid-December. Christmas was beginning to figure in the conversation of Miguel and Benito, and with an eye to its approach they had both joined a Sunday-school, to which they piously repaired every Sabbath morn. They had introduced the question of presents in their conversations with Mariposa with such smiling persistence that she had finally promised them that, on her first free afternoon, she would go down town and price certain articles they coveted. The afternoon came within a few days after her promise, one of her pupils sending her word that she was invited out of town for the holidays, and her lessons would cease till after New Year’s.
The pricing had evidently been satisfactory, for, late in the afternoon, Mariposa turned her face homeward, her hands full of small packages. It was one of the clear, hazeless days of thin atmosphere, with an edge of cold, that are scattered through the San Francisco winter. There is no frost in the air, but the chill has a searching quality which suggests winter, as does the wild radiance of the sunset spread over the west in a transparent wash of red. The invigorating breath of cold made the young girl’s blood glow, and she walked rapidly along Kearney Street, the exercise in the sharp air causing a faint, unusual pink to tint her cheeks. Her intention was to walk to Clay Street and then take the cable-car, which in those days slid slowly up the long hills, past the Plaza and through Chinatown.
She was near the Plaza, when a hail behind her fell on her ear, and turning, she saw Barron close on her heels, his hands also full of small packages. He had been at the mines for two weeks, and she could but notice the unaffected gladness of his greeting. She felt glad, too, a circumstance of which, for some occult reason, she was ashamed, and the shame and the gladness combined lent a reserved and yet conscious quality to her smile and kindled a charming embarrassment in her eye. They stood by the curb, he looking at her with glances of naïve admiration, while she looked down at her parcels. Passers-by noticed them, setting them down, she in her humble dress, he in his unmetropolitan roughness of aspect, as a couple from the country, a rancher or miner and his handsome sweetheart.
He took her parcels away from her, and they started forward toward the Plaza.
“Do you hear me panting?” he said, laying his free hand on his chest.
“No, why should you pant?”
“Because I’ve been running all down Kearney Street for blocks after you. I never knew any one to walk as fast in my life. I thought even if I didn’t catch you you’d hear me panting behind you and think it was some new kind of fire-engine and turn round and look. But you never wavered—simply went on like a racer headed for the goal. Did you walk so fast because you knew I was behind you?”
She looked at him quickly with a side glance of protest and met his eyes full of quizzical humor and yet with a gleam of something eager and earnest in them.
“I like to walk fast in this cold air. It makes me feel so alive. For a long time I’ve felt as though I were half dead, and you don’t know how exhilarating it is to feel life come creeping back. It’s like being able to breathe freely after you’ve been almost suffocated. But where did you see me on Kearney Street?”
“I was in a place buying things for the boys. I was looking at a drum for Benito, and I just happened to glance up, and there you were passing. I dropped the drum and ran.”
“A drum for Benito! Oh, Mr. Barron, don’t get Benito a drum!”
He could not control his laughter at the sight of her expression of horrified protest. He laughed so loudly that people looked at him. She smiled herself, not quite knowing why, and insensibly, both feeling curiously light-hearted, they drew closer together.
“What can I get?” he said. “I looked at knives and guns, and I knew that they wouldn’t do. Benito would certainly kill Miguel and probably grandma. I thought of a bat and ball, and then I knew he’d break all the windows. The man in the store wanted me to buy a bow and arrow, but I saw him taking his revenge on the crab lady. Benito’s a serious problem any way you take him.”
They had come to the Plaza, once an open space of sand, round which the wild, pioneer city swept in whirlpool currents, now already showing the lichened brick and dropping plaster, the sober line of house-fronts, of an aging locality. Where Chinatown backed on the square the houses had grown oriental, their western ugliness, disguised by the touch of gilding that, here and there, incrusted their fronts, the swaying of crimson lanterns, the green zigzags of dwarf trees. Over the top of the Clay Street hill the west shone red through smoke which filled the air with a keen, acrid smell. It told of hearth-fires. And oozing out of a thousand chimneys and streaming across the twilight city it told of homes where the good wife made ready for her man.
“Let’s not take the cars,” said Barron. “Let’s walk home. Can you manage those hills?”
She gave a laughing assent, and they turned upward, walking slowly as befitted the climb. Chinatown opened before them like the mysterious, medieval haunt of robbers in an old drawing. The murky night was settling on it, shot through with red gleams at the end of streets, where the sunset pried into its peopled darkness. The blackness of yawning doorway and stealthy alley succeeded the brilliancy of a gilded interior, or a lantern-lit balcony. Strange smells were in the air, aromatic and noisome, as though the dwellers in this domain were concocting their wizard brews. There was a sound of shifting feet, a chatter of guttural voices, and a vision of faces passing from light to shadow, marked by a weird similarity, and with eyes like bits of onyx let into the tight-drawn skin.
It was an alien city, a bit of the oldest civilization in the world, imbedded in the heart of the newest. Touches of bizarre, of sinister picturesqueness filled it with arresting interest. On the window-sills lilies, their stalks bound with strips of crimson paper, grew in blue and white china bowls filled with pebbles round which their white roots clung. Miniature pine-trees, in pots of brass, thrust their boughs between the rusty ironwork of old balconies. Through an open doorway a glimpse was given down a dark hallway, narrow, black, a gas-jet, like a tiny golden tear, diffusing a frightened gleam of light. From some dim angle the glow of a blood-red lantern mottled a space of leprous wall. On a tottering balcony a woman’s face, rounded like a child’s, crimson lipped, crowned with peach blossoms, looked down from shadows, the light of a lantern catching and loosening the golden traceries of her rich robe, the trail of peach blossoms against her cheek.
The ascent was long and steep, and they walked slowly, talking in a desultory fashion. Mariposa recounted the trivial incidents that had taken place in the Garcia house during her companion’s absence. As they breasted the last hill the light grew brighter, for the sunset still lingered in a reluctant glow.
“Take my arm,” said Barron. “You’re out of breath.”
She took it, and they began slowly to mount the last steep blocks. She glanced up at him to smile her thanks for his support, and met his eyes, looking intently at her. The red light strengthened on her face as they ascended.
“You’ve the strangest eyes,” he said suddenly. “Do you know what they’re the color of?”
“My father used to say they were like a dog’s,” she answered, feeling unable to drop them and yet uneasy under his unflinching gaze.
“They’re the color of sherry—exactly the same.”
“I won’t let you see them any more if that’s the best you can say of them,” she said, dropping them.
“I could say they were the color of beer,” he answered, “but I thought sherry sounded better.”
“Beer!” she exclaimed, averting not only her eyes, but her face. “That’s an insult.”
“Well, then, I’ll only say in the simplest way what I think. I’m not the kind of man who makes fine speeches—they’re the most beautiful eyes in the world.”
“That’s the worst of all,” she answered, extremely confused and not made more comfortable by the thought that she had brought it on herself. “Let’s leave my eyes out of the question.”
“All right, I’ll not speak of them again. But I’ll want to see them now and then.”
He saw her color mounting, and in the joy of her close proximity, loitering arm in arm up the sordid street, he laughed again in his happiness and said:
“When a person owns something that’s rare and beautiful he oughtn’t to be mean about it.”
“I suppose not,” said the owner of the rare and beautiful possessions, keeping them sternly out of sight.
He continued to look ardently at her, not conscious of what he was doing, his step growing slower and slower.
“It’s a long climb,” he said at length.
“Yes,” she assented. “Is that why you’re going so slowly?”
“Are we going so slowly?” he asked, and as if to demonstrate how slow had been their progress, they both came to a stop like a piece of run-down machinery.
They looked at each other for a questioning moment, then burst into simultaneous peals of laughter.
One of the last and daintiest charms that nature can give a woman is a lovely laugh. It suggests unexplored riches of tenderness and sweetness, unrevealed capacity for joy and pain, as a harsh and unmusical laugh tells of an arid nature, hard, without juice, devoid of imagination, mystery and passion. Like her mother before her, Mariposa possessed this charm in its highest form. The ripple of sound that flowed from her lips was music, and it cast a spell over the man at whose side she stood, as Lucy’s laugh, twenty-five years before, had cast one over Dan Moreau.
“I never heard you laugh before,” he said in delight. “What can I say to make you do it again?”
“You didn’t say anything that time,” said Mariposa. “So I suppose the best way is for you to be silent.”
Barron took her advice and surveyed her mutely with dancing eyes. For a moment her lips, puckered into a tremulous pout, twitched with the premonitory symptoms of a second outburst. But she controlled them, moved by some perverse instinct of coquetry, while the laughter welled up in the eyes that were fixed on him.
“I see I’ll have to make a joke,” he said, “and I can’t think of any.”
“Mrs. Garcia’s got a book full. You might borrow it.”
“Couldn’t you tell me one that’s made you laugh before and loan it to me?”
“But it mightn’t work a second time. I might take it quite solemnly. A sense of humor’s a very capricious thing.”
“I think the lady who’s got it is even more so,” he said.
And then once again they laughed in concert, foolishly and gaily and without knowing why.
They had gained the top of the hill, and the blaze of red that swept across the west shone on their faces. They were within a few minutes’ walk of the house now and they continued, arm in arm, as was the custom of the day, and at the same loitering gait.
“Didn’t you tell me your people came originally from Eldorado County, somewhere up near Hangtown?” he asked. “I’ve just been up that way, and if I’d known the place I might have stopped there.”
“Oh, you never could have found it,” said Mariposa hastily. “It was only a cabin miles back in the foothills. My mother often told me of it—just a cabin by a stream. It has probably disappeared now. My father and mother met and were married there among the mines, and—and—I was born there,” she ended, stammeringly, hating the lies upon which her youthful traditions had been built.
“If I’d known you had been born there I’d have gone on a pilgrimage to find that cabin if it had taken a month.”
“But I tell you it can’t be standing yet. I’m twenty-four years old—” she suddenly realized that this, too, was part of the necessary web of misstatement in which she was caught. The color deepened on her face into a conscious blush. She dropped her eyes, then raising them to his with a curious defiance, said:
“No—that’s a mistake. I’m—I’m—more than that, I’m twenty-five, nearly twenty-six.”
Barron, who saw nothing in the equivocation but a girl’s foolish desire to understate her age, burst into delighted laughter, and pressing the hand on his arm against his side, said:
“Why, I always thought you were years older than that—thirty to thirty-five at least.”
And he looked with teasing eyes into her face. But this time Mariposa did not laugh, nor even smile. The joy had suddenly gone out of her, and she walked on in silence, her head drooped, seeming in some mysterious way to have grown suddenly anxious and preoccupied.
“There’s the house,” she said at length. “I was getting tired.”
“There’s a light in the parlor,” said Barron, as he opened the gate. “What can be the matter? Has Benito killed grandma, or is there a party?”
Their doubts on this point were soon set at rest. Their approaching footsteps evidently were heard by a listening ear within, for the hall door opened and Benito appeared in the aperture.
“There’s a man to see you in the parlor,” he announced to Mariposa.
Inside the hallway the door on the left that led to Mrs. Garcia’s apartments opened and the young woman thrust out her head, and said in a hissing whisper:
“There’s a gentleman waiting for you in the parlor, Miss Moreau.”
At the same time Miguel imparted similar information from the top of the stairs, and the Chinaman appeared at the kitchen door and cried from thence, with the laconic dryness peculiar to his race:
“One man see you, parlor.”
Mariposa stood looking from one to the other with the raised eyebrows of inquiring astonishment. The only person who had visitors in the Garcia house was Pierpont, and they did not come at such a fashionably late hour.
“He’s a thin, consumpted-looking young man with eye-glasses,” said Mrs. Garcia, curling round the door the better to project the hissing whisper she employed, “and he said he’d wait till you came in.”
Mariposa turned toward the parlor door, leaving the family, with Barron, on the stairs, and the Chinaman, peering from the kitchen regions, watching her with tense interest, as if they half expected they would never see her again.
Two of the gases in the old chandelier were lit and cast a sickly light over the large room, which had the close, musty smell of an unaired apartment. The last relics of Señora Garcia’s grandeur were congregated here—bronzes that once had cost large sums of money, a gilt console that had been brought from a rifled French château round the Horn in a sailing ship, a buhl cabinet with its delicate silvery inlaying gleaming in the half-light, and two huge Japanese vases, with blue and white dragons crawling round their necks, flanking the fireplace.
On the edge of a chair, just under the chandelier, sat a young man. He had his hat in his hand, and his head drooped so that the light fell smoothly on the crown of blond hair. He looked small and meager in the surrounding folds of a very large and loose ulster. As the sound of the approaching step caught his ear he started and looked up, with the narrowed eyes of the near-sighted, and then jumped to his feet.
“Miss Moreau?” he said inquiringly, and extended a long, thin hand which, closing on hers, felt to her warm, soft grasp like a bunch of chilled sticks. She had not the slightest idea who he was, and looking at him under the wan light, saw he was some one from that world of wealth with which she had so few affiliations. Something about him—the coldness of his hand, an indescribable trepidation of manner—suggested to her that he was exceedingly ill at ease. She looked at him wonderingly, and said:
“Won’t you sit down?”
He sat at her bidding on the chair he had risen from, subsiding into the small, shrunken figure in the middle of enveloping folds of overcoat. One hand hung down between his knees holding his hat. He looked at Mariposa and then looked down at the hat.
“Cold afternoon, isn’t it?” he said.
“Very cold,” she responded, “but I like it. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“Not very,” he looked up at her, blinking near-sightedly through the glasses; “I don’t know whether you know what my name is, Miss Moreau? It’s Shackleton—Winslow Shackleton. I forgot my card.”
Mariposa felt a lightning-like change come over her face, in which there was a sudden stiffening of her features into something hard and repellent. To Win, at that moment, she looked very like his father.
“Oh!” she said, hearing her voice drop at the end of the interjection with a note of vague disapproval and uneasiness.
“I’ve seen you,” continued Win, “once at The Trumpet office, when you were there with Mrs. Willers. I don’t think you saw me. I was back in the corner, near the table where Jack—that’s the boy—sits.”
Mariposa murmured:
“No, I didn’t see you.”
She hardly knew what he said or what she responded. What did this mean? What was going to happen now?
“You must excuse my coming this way, without an introduction or anything, but as you knew my father and mother, I—I—thought you wouldn’t mind.”
He glanced at her again, anxiously, she thought, and she said suddenly, with her habitual directness:
“Did you come from your mother?”
“No, I came on—on—my own hook. I wanted”—he looked vaguely about and then laid his hat on a table near him—“I wanted to see you on business of my own.”
The nervousness from which he was evidently suffering began to communicate itself to Mariposa. The Shackleton family had come to mean everything that was painful and agitating to her, and here was a new one wanting to talk to her about business that she knew, past a doubt, was of some unusual character.
“If you’ve come to talk to me about going to Europe,” she said desperately, “I may as well tell you, there’s no use. I won’t go to Paris now, as I once said I would, and there’s no good trying to make me change my mind. Your mother and Mrs. Willers have both tried to, and it’s very kind of them, but I—can’t.”
She had an expression at once of fright and determination. The subject was becoming a nightmare to her, and she saw herself attacked again from a strange quarter, and with, she imagined, a new set of arguments.
“It’s nothing to do with going to Europe,” he said. “It’s—it’s”—he put up one of the long, bony hands, and with the two first fingers pressed his glasses back against his eyes, then dropped the hand and stared at Mariposa, the eyes looking strangely pale and prominent behind the powerful lenses.
“It’s something that’s just between you and me,” he said.
She surveyed him without answering, her brows drawn, her mind concentrated on him and on what he could mean.
“Do you want me to teach somebody music?” she said, wondering if this could be the pleasant solution of the enigma.
“No. The—er—the business I’ve come to talk to you about ought to do away altogether with the necessity of your giving lessons.”
They looked at each other silently for a moment. Win was conscious that his hands were trembling, and that his mouth was dry. He rose from his chair and mechanically reached for his hat. When he had started on his difficult errand he had been certain that she knew her relationship to his father. Now the dreadful thought entered his mind that perhaps she did not. And even if she did, it was evident that she was not going to give him the least help.
“What is the business you’ve come to see me about?” she asked.
“It’s a question of money,” he answered.
“Money!” ejaculated Mariposa, in baffled amaze. “What money? Why?”
He glanced desperately into his hat and then back at her. She saw the hat trembling in his hand and suddenly realized that this man was trying to say something that was agitating him to the marrow of his being.
“Mr. Shackleton,” she said, rising to her feet, “tell me what you mean. I don’t understand. I’m completely at sea. How can there be any question of money between us when I’ve never seen you or met you before? Explain it all.”
He dropped the hat to his side and said slowly, looking her straight in the face:
“I want to give you a share of the estate left me by my father. I look upon it as yours.”
There was a pause. He saw her paling under his gaze, and realized that, whatever she might pretend, she knew. His heart bled for her.
“As mine!” she said in a low, uncertain voice. “Why?”
“Because you have a right to it.”
There was another pause. He moved close to her and said, in a voice full of a man’s deep kindness:
“I can’t explain any more. Don’t ask it. Don’t let’s bother about anything in the background. It’s just the present that’s our affair.”
He suddenly dropped his hat and took her hand. It was as cold now as his had been. He pressed it, and Mariposa, looking dazedly at him, saw a gleam like tears behind the glasses.
“It’s hateful to have you living here like this, while we—that is, while other people—have everything. I can’t stand it. It’s too mean and unfair. I want you to share with me.”
She shook her head, looking down, a hundred thoughts bursting in upon her brain. What did he know? How had he found it out? In his grasp, her hand trembled pitifully.
“Don’t shake your head,” he pleaded, “it’s so hard to say it. Don’t turn it down before you’ve heard me out.”
“And it’s hard to hear it,” she murmured.
“No one knows anything of this but me,” he continued, “and I promise you that no other ever shall. It’ll be just between us as between”—he paused and then added with a voice that was husky—“as between brother and sister.”
She shook her head again, feeling for the moment too upset to speak, and tried to draw away from him. But he put his other hand on her shoulder and held her.
“I’ll go halves with you. I can have it all arranged so that no one will ever find out. I can’t make the regular partition of the property until the end of the year. But, until then, I’ll send you what would be your interest, monthly, and you can live where, or how, you like. I—I—can’t go on, knowing things, and thinking of you living in this sort of way and teaching music.”
“I can’t do it,” she said, in a strangled undertone, and pulling her hand out of his grasp. “I can’t. It’s not possible. I can’t take money that was your father’s.”
“But it’s not his—it’s mine now. Don’t let what’s dead and buried come up and interfere.”
She backed away from him, still shaking her head. She made an effort toward a cold composure, but her pain seemed to show more clearly through it. He looked at her, vexed, irresolute, wrung with pity, that he knew she would not permit him to express.
It was impossible for them to understand each other. She, with her secret knowledge of her mother’s lawful claim and her own legitimacy—he regarding her as the wronged child of his father’s sin. In her dazed distress she only half-grasped what he thought. The strongest feeling she had was once again to escape the toils that these terrible people, who had so wronged her mother, were spreading for her. They wanted to pay her to redeem the stain on their past.
“Money can’t set right what was wrong,” she said. “Money can’t square things between your family and mine.”
“Money can’t square anything—I don’t want it to. I’m not trying to square things; I’ve not thought about it that way at all. I just wanted you to have it because it seemed all wrong for you not to. You had a right, just as I had, and Maud had. I don’t think I’ve thought much about it, anyway. It just came to me that you ought to have what was yours. I wouldn’t make you feel bad for the world.”
“Then remember, once and forever, that I take nothing from you or your people. I’d rather beg than take money that came from your father.”
“But he has nothing to do with it. It’s mine now. I’ve done you no injury, and it’s I that want you to take it. Won’t you take it from me?”
He spoke simply, almost wistfully, like a little boy. Mariposa answered:
“No—oh, Mr. Shackleton, why don’t you and your people let me alone? I won’t tell. I’ll keep it all a secret. But your mother torments me to go to Europe—and now you come! If I were starving, I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—take anything from any of you. I think you’re kind. I think you’ve just come to-day because you were sorry. But don’t talk about it any more. Let me be. Let me go along teaching here where I belong. Forget me. Forget that you ever saw me. Forget the miserable tie of blood there is between us.”
“That’s the thing I can’t forget. That’s the thing that worries me. It’s not the past. I’ve nothing to do with that. It’s the present that’s my affair. I can’t have everything while you have nothing. It don’t seem to me it’s like a man to act that way. It goes against me, anyhow. I don’t offer you this because of anything in the past; that’s my father’s affair. I don’t know anything about it. I offer it because I—I—I”—he stammered over the unfamiliar words and finally jerked out—“because I want to give back what belongs to you. That’s all there is to it. Please take it.”
She looked directly into his eyes and said, gravely:
“No. I’m sorry if it’s a disappointment, but I can’t.”
Then she suddenly looked down, her face began to quiver, and she said in a broken undertone:
“Don’t talk about it any more; it hurts me so.”
Win turned quickly away from her and picked up his hat. He was confused and disappointed, and relieved, too, for he had done the most difficult piece of work of his life. But, at the moment, his most engrossing feeling was sympathy for this girl, so bravely drawing her pride together over the bleeding of her heart.
She murmured a response in a steadier voice and he turned toward her. Had any of his society friends been by they would hardly have known him. The foolish manner behind which he sheltered his shy and sensitive nature was gone. He was grave and looked very much of a man.
“Well, of course, it’s for you to say what you want. But there’s one thing I’d like you to promise.”
“To promise?” she said uneasily.
“Yes, and to keep it, too. And that is, if you ever want anything—help in any way; if you get blue in your spirits, or some one’s not doing the straight thing by you, or gone back on you—to come to me. I’m not much in some ways, but I guess I could be of use. And, anyway, it’s good for a girl to have some friend that she can count on, who’s a man. And”—he paused with the door-handle in his hand—“and now you know me, anyway, and that’s something. Will you promise?”
“Yes, I’ll promise that,” said Mariposa, and moving toward him she gave him her hand.
He pressed it, dropped it, and opened the door. A moment later Mariposa heard the hall door bang behind him. She sat down in the chair from which she had risen, her hands lying idle in her lap, her eyes on a rose in the carpet, trying to think, to understand what it meant.
She did not hear the door open or notice Benito’s entrance, which was accomplished with some disturbance, as he was astride a cane. His spirited course round the room, the end of the cane coming in violent contact with the pieces of furniture that impeded his route, was of so boisterous a nature that it roused her. She looked absently at him, and saw him wreathed in smiles. Having gained her attention, he brought his steed toward her with some ornamental prancings. She noticed that he held a pair of gloves in his hands.
“That man what came to see you,” he said, “left this cane. It was in the hat-rack, and I came out first, so I swiped it. I took these for Miguel”—he flourished the gloves—“but the cane’s mine all right. Come in to supper.”
And he wheeled away with a bridling step, the end of his cane rasping on the worn ribs of the carpet. Mariposa, mechanically following him, heard his triumphant cries as he entered the dining-room and then his sudden wails of wrath as Miguel expressed his disapprobation of the division of the spoils in the vigorous manner of innocent childhood.