Tomorrow’s Tangle by Geraldine Bonner - HTML preview

CHAPTER I
 THE PRIMA DONNA

“And thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness.”
—OMAR KHAYYAM.

The plant of the Silver Star Mine lay scattered along the edge of a mountain river on the site of one of the camps of forty-nine. Where the pioneers had scratched the surface with their picks, their successors had torn wounds in the Sierra’s mighty flank. Where once the miners’ shouts had broken the quiet harmonies of stirred pine boughs, and singing river, the throb of engines now beat on the air, thick with the dust, noisy with the strife of toiling men.

It was a morning in the end of May. The mountain wall was dark against the rising sun; tall fir and giant pine stood along its crest in inky silhouette thrown out by a background of gold leaf. Here and there, far and aërial in the clear, cool dawn, a white peak of the high Sierra floated above the shadows, a rosy pinnacle. The air was chill and faintly touched with woodland odors. The expectant hush of Nature awaiting the miracle of sunrise, held this world of huge, primordial forms, grouped in colossal indifference round the swarm of men who delved in its rock-ribbed breast.

In the stillness the camp’s awakening movements rose upon the morning air with curious distinctness. Through the blue shadows in which it swam the tall chimneys soared aloft, sending their feathers of smoke up to the new day. It lay in its hollow like a picture, all transparent washes of amethyst and gray, overlaid by clear mountain shadows. The world was in this waiting stage of flushed sky and shaded earth when the superintendent’s wife pushed open the door of her house and with the cautious tread of one who fears to wake a sleeper, stepped out on the balcony.

With her hand on the rail she stood, deeply inhaling the freshness of the hour. The superintendent’s house, a one-story cottage, painted white, and skirted by a broad balcony, stood on an eminence above the camp. From its front steps she looked down on the slant of many roofs, the car tracks, and the red wagon roads that wound along the slopes. Raising her eyes, they swept the ramparts of the everlasting hills, and looking higher still, her face met the radiance of the dawn.

She stepped off the balcony with the same cautious tread, and along the beaten footpath that led through the patch of garden in front of the house. Beyond this the path wound through a growth of chaparral to where the pines ascended the slopes in climbing files. As she approached she saw the sky barred with their trunks, arrow-straight and bare of branches to a great height. Farther on she could see the long dim aisles, held in the cloistral silence of the California forest, shot through with the golden glimmer of sunrise.

The joy of the morning was in her heart, and she walked forward with a light step, humming to herself. Two months before she had come here, a bride from San Francisco, weak from illness, pale, hollow-eyed, a shadow of her former self. She had only crept about at first, swung for hours on the balcony in her hammock, or sat under the trees looking down on the hive of men, where her husband worked among his laborers. As her mother had grown back to the fullness of life in the healing breath of the mountains, so Mariposa slowly regained her old beauty, with an added touch of subtlety, and found her old beliefs returned to her with a new significance.

To-day she had awakened with the first glimmer of dawn, and stirred by a sudden desire for the air of the morning on her face and in her lungs, had stolen up and out. Breathing in the resinous atmosphere a new influx of life seemed to run like sap along her limbs, and lend her step the buoyancy of a wood-nymph’s. Her eye lingered with a look that was a caress on flower and tree and shrub. The song she had been humming passed from tune to words, and she sang softly as she brushed through the chaparral, snipping off a leaf, bending to pluck a wild flower, pausing to admire the glossy green of a manzanita bush. Under the shadow of the pines she halted by a rugged trunk, a point of vantage she had early discovered, and leaning her hand on the bark, surveyed the wild prospect.

The sense of expectancy in the air seemed intensified. The quivering radiance of pink and gold pulsed up the sky from a point of concentration which every moment brightened. The blue shadows in the camp grew thinner, the little wisps of mist that hung over the river more threadlike and phantasmal. A throwback to unremembered days came suddenly upon her with a mysterious sense of familiarity. She seemed to be repeating a dear, long dead experience. The vision and the dream of days of exquisite well-being, carefree, cherished, were with her again. Faint recurring glimpses of such mornings, strong of balsam of pine and fir, musical with the sleepy murmur of a river, serene and sweet with an enfolding passion of love in which she rested secure, rose out of the dim places of memory. The perfect content of her childhood spoke to her across the gulf of years, finding itself repeated in her womanhood. The old joy in living, the old thrill of wonder and mystery, the old sense of safety in a surrounding, watchful love, were hers once more.

The song on her lips passed from its absent undertone to notes gradually full and fuller. It was the aria from “Mignon,” and, as she stood, her hand on the tree trunk, looking down into the swimming shadows of the camp, it swelled outward in tones strong and rich, vibrating with their lost force.

Pervaded by a sense of dreamy happiness, she at first failed to notice the unexpected volume of sound. Then, as note rose upon note, welling from her chest with the old-time, vibrant facility, as she felt once again the uplifting sense of triumph possess her, she realized what it meant. Dropping her hand from the tree trunk she stood upright, and facing the dawn, with squared shoulders and raised chin, let her voice roll out into the void before her.

The song swelled triumphant like a hymn of some pagan goddess to the rising sun. In the stillness of the dawn-hush, with the columns of the monumental pines behind her, the mountain wall and the glowing sky in front, she might have been the spirit of youth and love chanting her joy in a primeval world.

When the last note had died away she stood for a moment staring before her. Then suddenly she wheeled, and, catching up her skirts with one hand, ran back toward the house, brushing between the tree-trunks and through the chaparral with breathless haste. As she emerged from the thicket, she saw her husband, in his rough mining clothes, standing on the top step of the balcony.

“Gam,” she cried, “Gam!”

He started, saw her, and then waited smiling as she came running up the garden path toward him, the blaze of the sky behind her, her face alight with life and color.

“Why, dearest, I didn’t know what had happened to you,” he cried. “Where did you go?”

Her unslackened speed carried her up the stairs and into his arms. Standing on the step below him she flung hers round his shoulders, and holding him tight, said breathlessly:

“What do you think has happened?”

“You met a bear in the wood.”

“My voice has come back.”

The two pairs of eyes, the woman’s looking up, the man’s down, gazed deeply into each other. There was a moment of silence, the silence of people who are still unused to and a little overawed by their happiness.

“I heard you,” he said.

“You did? From here?”

“Yes. I heard some one singing and stood here listening, watching the light coming up.”

“Was it good?” she asked, anxiously.

“Very. I had never heard you sing before. You’re a prima donna.”

“That’s what I was going to be. You remember hearing us talking about it at the Garcias’?”

He nodded, looking down at the face where health was coming back in delicate degrees of coral to lips and cheeks.

“And it really did sound good?” she queried again.

“Lovely.”

“Quite soft and full, not harsh and with all the sound of music gone out of it?”

“Not a bit. It was fine.”

She continued to hold him around the shoulders, but her eyes dropped away from his, which regarded her with immovable earnestness, touched by a slight, tender humor. She appeared to become suddenly thoughtful.

“You can be a prima donna still,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered, nodding slightly. “I suppose I can.”

“And it’s a great career.”

“Yes, a splendid career.”

“You travel everywhere and make a fortune.”

“If you’re a success.”

“Oh, you’d be a success all right.”

She drew away from him, letting one hand rest on his shoulder. Her face had grown serious. She looked disappointed.

“Well, do you want me to be a prima donna?” she asked, looking at her hand.

He continued to regard her without answering, the gleam of amusement dying out of his eyes.

“Of course,” she added in a small voice, “if you’ve set your heart on it, I will.”

“What do you think about it yourself?” he asked.

She gave him a swift, side look, just a raising and dropping of the lashes.

“Say what you think first,” she coaxed.

“Well, then, I will.”

He put his two hands suddenly on her shoulders, big, bronzed hands, hard and muscular, that seemed to seize upon her delicate flesh with a master’s grip.

“Look at me,” he commanded.

She obeyed. The gray eyes held hers like a magnet.

“I think no. You don’t belong to the public, you belong to me.”

The color ran up into her face to the edge of her hair.

“Oh, Gam,” she whispered on a rising breath, “I’m so relieved.”

He dropped his hands from her shoulders and drew her close to him. With his cheek against hers he said softly:

“You didn’t think I was that kind of a fool, did you?”

The sun had risen as they talked, at first slowly peering with a radiant eye over the mountain’s shoulder, then shaking itself free of tree-top and rock-point, and swimming up into the blue. The top of the range stood all glowing and golden, with here and there a white peak, snowily enameled. The rows of pines were overlaid with a rosy brilliance, their long shadows slanting down the slopes as if scurrying away from the flood of heat and light. The clear blues and amethysts that veiled the hollow of the camp were dispersed; the films of mist melted; a quivering silvery sparkle played over the river shallows.

In the clearing beams the life of the hive below seemed to swarm and fill the air with the clamor of its awakening. The man and woman, looking down, saw the toiling world turning to its day’s work—the red dust rising beneath grinding hoof and wheel, the cars sliding swiftly on their narrow tracks, heard the shouts of men, the hum of machinery, and through all and over all, the regular throb of the engines like the heart which animated this isolated world of labor.

Barron looked at his domain for an attentive moment.

“There,” he said, pointing down, “is where I belong. That’s my life,—to work in wild places with men. And yours is with me, my prima donna. We go together, side by side, I working and you singing by the way.”