CHAPTER XXI
THE MEETING IN THE RAIN
“A time to love and a time to hate.”
—ECCLESIASTES.
It was the afternoon of Edna Willers’ music lesson. Over a week had elapsed since Mariposa’s interview with Essex, yet to-day, as she stood at her window looking out at the threatening sky, her fears of him were as active as ever. Though he had made no further sign, her woman’s intuitions warned her that this was but a temporary lull in his campaign. She was living under an exhausting tension. She went out with the fear of meeting him driving her into unfrequented side streets, and returned, her eyes straining through the foliage of the pepper-tree to watch for a light in the parlor windows.
This afternoon, standing at the window drumming on the pane with her finger-tips, she looked at the dun, low-hanging clouds, and thought with shrinking of her walk to Sutter Street, at any turn of which she might meet him.
“Well, and if I do?” she said to herself, trying to whip up her dwindling courage, “he can’t do any more than threaten me with telling all he knows. He can’t make a scene on the street proposing to me.”
She felt somewhat cheered by these assurances and began putting on her outdoor things. The day was darkening curiously early, she thought, for, though it was not yet four, the long mirror, with its top-heavy gold ornaments, gave back but a dim reflection of her. There had been fine weather for two weeks, and now rain was coming. She put on her long cloak, the enveloping “circular” of the mode which fastened at the throat with a metal clasp, and took her umbrella, a black cotton one, which seemed to her quite elegant enough for a humble teacher of music. A small black bonnet, trimmed with loops of ribbon, crowned her head and showed her rich hair, rippling loosely back from her forehead.
The air on the outside was warm and at the same time was softly and stilly humid. There was not a breath of wind, and in this motionless, tepid atmosphere the gardens exhaled moist earth-odors as if breathing out their strength in panting expectation of the rain. From the high places of the city one could see the bay, flat and oily, with its surrounding hills and its circular sweep of houses, a picture in shaded grays. The smoke, trailing lazily upward, was the palest tint in this study in monochrome, while the pall of the sky, leaden and lowering, was the darkest. A faint light diffused itself from the rim of sky, visible round the edges of the pall, and cast an unearthly yellowish gleam on people’s faces.
Mariposa walked rapidly downward from street to street. She kept a furtive lookout for the well-known figure in its long overcoat and high hat, but saw no one, and her troubled heart-beats began to moderate. The damp air on her face refreshed her. She had been keeping in the house too much of late, and did not realize that this was still further irritating her already jangled nerves. The angle of the building in which Mrs. Willers housed herself broke on her view just as the first sullen drops of rain began to spot the pavement—slow, reluctant drops, falling far apart.
The music lesson had hardly begun when the rain was lashing the window and pouring down the panes in fury. Darkness fell with it. The night seemed to drop on the city in an instant, coming with a whirling rush of wind and falling waters. The housewifely little Edna drew the curtains and lit the gas, saying as she settled back on her music-stool:
“You’d better stay to dinner with me, Mariposa. Mommer won’t be home till late because it’s Wednesday and the back part of the woman’s page goes to press.”
“Oh, I couldn’t stay to-night,” said Mariposa hurriedly, affrighted by the thought of the walk home alone at ten o’clock, which she had often before taken without a tremor; “I must go quite soon. I forgot it was the day when the back sheet goes to press. Go on, Edna, it will be like the middle of the night by the time we finish.”
This was indeed the case. When the lesson was over, the evening outside was shrouded in a midnight darkness to an accompaniment of roaring rain. It was a torrential downpour. The two girls, peering out into the street, could see by the blurred rays of the lamps a swimming highway, down which a car dashed at intervals, spattering the blackness with the broken lights of its windows. Despite the child’s urgings to remain, Mariposa insisted on going. She was well prepared for wet she said, folding her circular about her and removing the elastic band that held together her disreputable umbrella.
But she did not realize the force of the storm till she found herself in the street. By keeping in the lee of the houses on the right-hand side, she could escape the full fury of the wind, and she began slowly making her way upward.
She had gone some distance when the roll of music she carried slipped from under her arm and fell into water and darkness. She groped for it, clutched its saturated cover, and brought it up dripping. The music was of value to her, and she moved forward to where the light of an uncurtained window cut the darkness, revealing the top of a wall. Here she rested the roll and tried to wipe it dry with her handkerchief. Her face, down-bent and earnest, was distinctly visible in the shaft of light. A man, standing opposite, who had been patrolling these streets for the past hour, saw it, gave a smothered exclamation, and crossed the street. He was at her side before she saw him.
Several hours earlier Essex had been passing down a thoroughfare in that neighborhood, when he had met Benito, slowly wending his way homeward from school. The child recognized him and smiled, and with the smile, Essex recollected the face and saw that fate was still on his side.
Pressing a quarter into Benito’s readily extended palm, he had inquired if the boy knew where Miss Moreau was.
“Mariposa?” said Benito, with easy familiarity; “she’s at Mrs. Willers’ giving Edna her lesson. This is Wednesday, ain’t it? Well, Edna gets her lesson on Wednesday from half-past four till half-past five, and so that’s where Mariposa is. But she’s generally late ’cause she stays and talks to Mrs. Willers.”
At five o’clock, sheltered by the dripping dark, Essex began his furtive watch of the streets along which she might pass. He knew that every day was precious to him now, with Mrs. Willers among his enemies and ready to enlist Winslow Shackleton against him. Here was an opportunity to see the girl, better than the parlor of the Garcia house offered, with its officious boarders. There was absolute seclusion in these black and rain-swept streets.
He had been prowling about for an hour when he finally saw her. A dozen times he had cursed under his breath fearing she had escaped him; now his relief was such that he ran toward her, and with a rough hand swept aside her umbrella. In the clear light of the uncurtained pane she saw his face, and shrank back against the wall as if she had been struck. Then a second impulse seized her and she tried to dash past him. He seemed prepared for this and caught her by the arm through her cloak, swinging her violently back to her place against the wall.
Keeping his grip on her he said, trying to smile:
“What are you afraid of? Don’t you know me?”
“Let me go,” she said, struggling, “you’re hurting me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he answered, “but I mean to keep you for a moment. I want to talk to you. And I’m going to talk to you.”
“I won’t listen to you. Let me go at once. How cowardly to hold me in this way against my will!”
She tried again to wrench her arm out of his grasp, but he held her like a vise. Her resistance of him and the repugnance in face and voice maddened him. He felt for a moment that he would like to batter her against the wall.
“There’s no use trying to get away, and telling me how much you hate me. I’ve got you here at last. I’ll not let you go till I’ve had my say.”
He put his face down under the tent of her umbrella and gazed at her with menacing eyes and tight lips. In the light of the window and against the inky blackness around them the two faces were distinct as cameos hung on a velvet background. He saw the whiteness of her chin on the bow beneath it, and her mouth, with the lips that all the anger in the world could not make hard or unlovely.
“You’ve got to listen to me,” he said, shaking her arm as if trying to shake some passion into the set antagonism of her face; “you’ve got to be my wife.”
She suddenly seized her umbrella and, turning it toward him, pressed it down between them. The action was so quick and unexpected that the man did not move back, and the ferrule striking him on the cheek, furrowed a long scratch on the smooth skin. A drop of blood rose to the surface.
With an oath he seized the umbrella and, tearing it from her grasp, sent it flying into the street. Here the wind snatched it, and its inverted shape, like a large black mushroom, went sweeping forward, tilted and already half full of water, before the angry gusts.
Essex tried to keep his own over her, still retaining his hold on her arm.
“Come, be reasonable,” he said; “there’s no use angering me for nothing. This is a wet place for lovers to have meetings. Give me my answer, and I swear I’ll not detain you. When will you marry me?”
“What’s the good of talking that way? You know perfectly what I’ll say. It will always be the same.”
“I’m not so sure of that. I’ve got something to say that may make you change your mind.”
He pushed the umbrella back that the light might fall directly on her. It fell on him also. She saw his face under the brim of his soaked hat, shining with rain, pallidly sinister, the trickle of blood on one cheek.
“Nothing that you can say will ever make me change my mind. Mr. Essex, I am wet and tired; won’t you, please, let me go?”
She tried to eliminate dislike and fear from her voice and spoke with a gentleness that she hoped would soften him. He heard it with a thrill; but it had an exactly contrary effect to what she had desired.
“I would like never to let you go. Just to hold you here and look at you. Mariposa, you don’t know what this love is I have for you. It grows with absence, and then when I see you it grows again with the sight of you. It’s eating into me like a poison. I can’t get away from it. You loved me once, why have you changed? What has come over you to take all that out of you? Is it because I made a foolish mistake? I’m ready to do anything you suggest—crawl in the dust, kneel now in the rain, and ask you to forgive it. Don’t be hard and revengeful. It’s not like you. Be kind, be merciful to a man who, if he said what hurt you, has repented it with all his soul ever since. I am ready to give you my whole life to make amends. Say you forgive me. Say you love me.”
He was speaking the truth. Passion had outrun cupidity. Mariposa, poor or rich, had become the end and aim of his existence.
“It’s not a question of forgiveness,” she answered, seeing he still persisted in the thought that she was hiding her love from wounded pride; “it’s not a question of love. I—I—don’t like you. Can’t you understand that? I don’t like you.”
“It’s not true—it’s not true,” he vociferated. “You love me—say you do.”
He shook her by the arm as though to shake the words out of her reluctant lips. The brutal roughness of the action spurred her from fear to indignation.
“It’s not love. It’s not even hate. It’s just repulsion and dislike. I can’t bear to look at you, or have you come near me, and to have you hold me, as you’re doing now, is as if some horrible thing, like a spider or a snake, was crawling on me.”
Amid the rustling and the splashing of the rain they again looked at each other for a fierce, pallid moment. Another drop of blood on his cheek detached itself and ran down. He had no free hand with which to wipe it off.
“Yet you’re going to marry me,” he said softly.
“I’ve heard enough of this,” she cried. “I’m not going to stand here talking to a madman. It’s early yet and these houses are full of people. If I give one cry every window will go up. I don’t want to make a scene here on the street, but if you detain me any longer talking in this crazy way, that’s what I’ll have to do.”
“Just wait one moment before you take such desperate measures. I want to ask a question before you call out the neighborhood to protect you. How do you think the story of your mother’s and father’s early history will look on the front page of The Era?”
In the light of the window that fell across them both he had the satisfaction of seeing her face freeze into horrified amazement.
“It will be the greatest scoop The Era’s had since The Trumpet became Shackleton’s property. There’s not a soul here that even suspects it. It will be a bombshell to the city, involving people of the highest position, like the Shackletons, and people of the most unquestioned respectability, like the Moreaus. Oh—it will be good reading!”
Her eyes, fastened on him, were full of anguish, but it had not bewildered her. In the stress of the moment her mind remained clear and active.
“Is the world interested in stories of the dead?” she heard herself saying in a cold voice.
“Everybody’s interested in scandals. And what a scandal it is! How people will smack their lips over it! Shackleton a Mormon, and you his only legitimate child. Your mother and father, that all the world honored, common free-lovers. Your mother sold to your father for a pair of horses, and living with him in a cabin in the Sierra for six months before they even attempted to straighten things out by a bogus marriage ceremony. Why, it’s a splendid story! The Era’s had nothing with as much ginger as that for months!”
“And who’d believe you? Who are you, to know about the early histories of the pioneer families? Who’d believe the words of a man who comes from nobody knows where, whose very name people doubt? If Mrs. Shackleton and I deny the truth of your story, who’d believe you then?”
“You forget that I have under my hand the man who was witness of the transaction whereby Moreau bought your mother from Shackleton for a pair of horses.”
“A drunken thief! He stole all my father had and ran away. Can his word carry the same weight as mine to whose interest it would be to prove myself Shackleton’s daughter? No. The only real proof in existence is the marriage certificate. And I have that. And so long as I have that any story you choose to publish I can get up and deny.”
He knew she was right. Even with Harney his story would be discredited, unbacked by the one piece of genuine evidence of the first marriage—the certificate which she possessed. Her unexpected recognition of the point staggered him. He had thought to break her resistance by threats which even to him seemed shameful, and only excusable because of the stress he found himself in. Now he saw her as defiantly unconquered as ever. In his rage he pushed her back against the wall, crying at her:
“Deny, deny all you like! Whether you deny or not, the thing will have been said. Next Sunday the whole city, the whole state will be reading it—how you’re Shackleton’s daughter and your mother was Dan Moreau’s mistress. But say one word—one little word to me, and not a syllable will be written, not a whisper spoken. On one side there’s happiness and luxury and love, and on the other disgrace and poverty—not your disgrace alone, but your father’s, your mother’s—”
With a cry of rage and despair Mariposa tried to tear herself from him. Nature aided her, for at the same moment a savage gust of wind seized the umbrella and wrenched it this way and that. Instinctively he loosened his hold on her to grasp it, and in that one moment she tore herself away from him. He gripped at the flapping wing of her cloak, and caught it. But the strain was too much for the cheap metal clasp, which broke, and Mariposa slipped out of it and flew into the fury of the rain, leaving the cloak in his hand.
The roar of many waters and the shouting of the wind obliterated the sound of her flying feet. The darkness, shot through with the blurred faces of lamps or the long rays from an occasional uncurtained pane, in a moment absorbed her black figure. Essex stood motionless, stunned at the suddenness of her escape, the sodden cloak trailing from his hand. Then shaken out of all reason by rage, not knowing what he intended doing, he started in pursuit.
She feared this and her burst of bravery was exhausted. As she ran up the steep street having only the darkness to hide her, her heart seemed shriveled with the fear of him.
Suddenly she heard the thud of his feet behind her. An agony of fright seized her. The Garcia house was at least two blocks farther on, and she knew he would overtake her before then. A black doorway with a huddle of little trees, formless and dark now, loomed close by, and toward this she darted, crouching down among the small wet trunks of the shrubs and parting their foliage with shaking hands.
There was a lamp not far off and in its rays she saw him running up, still holding the cloak in a black bunch over his arm. He stopped, just beyond where she cowered, and looked irresolutely up and down. The lamplight fell on his face, and in certain angles she saw it plainly, pale and glistening with moisture, all keen and alert with a look of attentive cunning. He moved his head this way and that, evidently trusting more to hearing than to sight. His eyes, no longer half veiled in cold indifference, swept her hiding-place with the preoccupation of one who listens intently. He looked to her like some thwarted animal harkening for the steps of his prey. Her terror grew with the sight of him. She thought if he had approached the bushes she would have swooned before he reached them.
Presently he turned and went down the hill. In the pause his reason had reasserted itself, and he felt that to hound her down with more threats and reproaches was useless folly.
But, with her, reason and judgment were hopelessly submerged by terror. She crept out from among the shrubs with white face and trembling limbs, and fled up the hill in a wild, breathless race, hearing Essex in every sound. The rain had dripped on her through the bushes, and these last two blocks under its unrestrained fury soaked her to the skin.
Her haunting terror did not leave her till she had rushed up the stairs and opened the door of the glass porch. She was fumbling in her pocket for the latch-key, when the inner door was opened and Barron stood in the aperture, the lighted hall behind him.
“What on earth has delayed you?” he said sharply. “They’re all at supper. I was just going down to Mrs. Willers’ to see what was keeping you.”
She stumbled in at the door, and stood in the revealing light of the hall, for the moment unable to answer, panting and drenched.
“What’s the matter?” he said suddenly in a different tone; and quickly stepping back he shut the door into the dining-room. “Has anything happened?”
“I’m—only—only—frightened,” she gasped between broken breaths. “Something frightened me.”
She reeled and caught against the door-post.
“I’m all wet,” she whispered with white lips; “don’t let them know. I don’t want any dinner.”
He put his arm round her and drew her toward the stairs. He could feel her trembling like a person with an ague and her saturated clothes left rillets along the stairs.
When they were half-way up he said:
“How did you get so wet? Have you been out in this storm without an umbrella?”
“I lost it,” she whispered.
“Lost it?” he replied. “Where’s your cloak?”
“Somewhere,” she said vaguely; “somewhere in the street. I lost that, too.”
They were at the top of the stairs. She suddenly turned toward him and pressed her face into his shoulder, trembling like a terrified animal.
“I’m frightened,” she whispered. “Don’t tell them downstairs. I’ll tell you to-morrow. Don’t ask me anything to-night.”
He took her into her room and placed her in an armchair by the fireplace. He lit the gas and drew the curtains, and then knelt by the hearth to kindle the fire, saying nothing and apparently taking little notice of her. She sat dully watching him, her hands in her lap, the water running off her skirts along the carpet.
When he had lit the fire he said:
“Now, I’ll go, and you take off your things. I’ll bring you up your supper in half an hour. Be quick, you’re soaking. I’ll tell them downstairs you’re too tired to come down.”
He went out, softly closing the door. She sat on in her wet clothes, feeling the growing warmth of the flames on her face and hands. She seemed to fall into a lethargy of exhaustion and sat thus motionless, the water running unheeded on the carpet, frissons of cold occasionally shaking her, till a knock at the door roused her. Then she suddenly remembered Barron and his command to take off her wet clothes. She had them on still and he would be angry.
“Put it down on the chair outside,” she called through the door; “I’m not ready.”
“Won’t you open the door and take this whisky and drink it at once?” came his answer.
She opened the door a crack and, putting her hand through the aperture, took the glass with the whisky.
“Are you warm and dry?” he said; all she could see of him was his big hand clasped round the glass.
“Yes, quite,” she answered, though she felt her skin quivering with cold against the damp garments that seemed glued to it.
“Well, drink this now, right off. And listen—” as the door began to close—“if you get nervous or anything just come to your door and call me. I’ll leave mine open, and I’m a very light sleeper.”
Then before she could answer she felt the door-handle pulled from the outside and the door was shut.
She hastily took off her things and put on dry ones, and then shrugged herself into the thick wrapper of black and white that had been her mother’s. Even her hair was wet, she found out as she undressed, and she mechanically undid it and shook the damp locks loose on her shoulders. She felt penetrated with cold, and still overmastered by fear. Every gust that made the long limb of the pepper-tree grate against the balcony roof caused her heart to leap. When she opened the door to get her supper, the glow of light that fell from Barron’s room, across the hallway, came to her with a hail of friendship and life. She stood listening, and heard the creak of his rocking-chair, then smelt the whiff of a cigar. He was close to her. She shut the door, feeling her terrors allayed.
She picked at her supper, but soon set the tray on the center-table and took the easy-chair before the fire. The sense of physical cold was passing off, but the indescribable oppression and apprehension remained. She did not know exactly what she dreaded, but she felt in some vague way that she would be safer sitting thus clad and wakeful before the fire than sleeping in her bed. Once or twice, as the hours passed and her fears strengthened in the silence and mystery of the night, she crept to her door, and opening it, looked up the hall. The square of light was still there, the scent of the cigar pungent on the air. She shut the door softly, each time feeling soothed as by the pressure of a strong, loving hand.
Sometime toward the middle of the night the heaviness of sleep came on her, and though she fought against it, feeling that the safety she was struggling to maintain against mysterious menace was only to be preserved by wakefulness, Nature overcame her. Curled in her chair before the crumbling fire, she finally slept—the deep, motionless sleep of physical and mental exhaustion.