CHAPTER IV
THE ENCHANTED WINTER
“I choose to be yours for my proper part,
Yours, leave me or take, or mar or make;
If I acquiesce, why should you be teased
With the conscience prick and the memory smart?”
—BROWNING.
Fletcher had gone silently and without leaving a trace, and with him the money. It was a startling situation for Moreau. From comparative affluence he suddenly found himself without a cent or an ounce of dust. This, had he had only himself to look after, would not have affected his free and jovial spirit, but now the woman and the child he had so carelessly come into possession of loomed before him in their true light of a heavy responsibility. Lucy, as far as supporting herself went, was still a long way off from the state of health where that would be possible. And at the thought of sending her forth, even though she were cured of her infirmities, Moreau experienced a sensation of depression. He felt that the cabin would be unbearably lonely when she and the baby were gone.
That night under the pine he turned over the situation in his mind. The conclusion he arrived at was that there was nothing better to be done than stay by the stream bed and work it for all it was worth. Lucy would continue to improve in the fine air and the child was thriving. If the snows would hold off till late, as they had done in the open winter of ’50, he could amass a fair share of dust before it would be necessary to move Lucy and the baby to the superior accommodations of Hangtown or Sacramento. It was now October. In November one might expect the first snows.
He must do a good deal in the next six weeks. This he started to do. The next day he spent in raising a brush shed against the back of the cabin where the chimney would offer warmth on cold nights. Into this he moved such few belongings as he had retained after Lucy and the baby had taken possession of the cabin. Then the working of the stream bed went on with renewed vigor. The water was low, hardly more than a thread, rendering the washing of the dirt harder labor than during the earlier summer when the watercourses were still full. But he toiled mightily, rejoicing in the splendor of his man’s work, not with the same knightly freedom that he felt when he had been that king of men, the miner with his pick on his shoulder and all the world before him, but with the soberer joy of the man into whose life others have entered to lay hold upon it with light, clinging hands.
Against the complete and perfect loneliness of his life the woman and child, who had started up from nowhere, stood out as figures of vital significance. They had grown closer to him in that one month’s isolation than they would have done in a year of city life. The child became the object of his secret but deep devotion. He had been ashamed to let Fletcher see it. Now that Fletcher was gone, Moreau often stole up from his work in the creek to look at it as it slept in a box by the open door. It was as fresh as a rosebud, its skin clean and satiny, its tiny hands, crumpled, white and pink, like the petals of flowers. The big man leaned on his shovel to watch it adoringly. The miracle of its growth in beauty never lost its wonder for him.
Lucy, too, grew and bloomed in these quiet autumn days. Never talkative, she became less laconic after the departure of Fletcher. She seemed relieved by his absence. Moreau began to understand, as he saw her daily increase in freshness and youthful charm, that she was as young in nature as she was in years. Points of character that were touchingly childish appeared in her. Her casting of all responsibility on him was as absolute as if she had been ten years of age. She obeyed him with trustful obedience and waited on him silently, her eyes always on him to try to read his unexpressed wish. Sometimes he caught these watching eyes and read in them something that vaguely disturbed him.
One day, coming up from the creek for one of his surreptitious views of the baby, he found its cradle empty, and was about to return to his work, when he heard a laugh rising from a small knoll among the aspens. It was a laugh of the most infectious, fresh sweetness, and made Moreau’s own lips part. He stole in its direction, and as he advanced it sounded again, rippling deliciously on the crystal air. He brushed through the aspens and came on Lucy and her baby. She was holding it in her lap, one hand on the back of its head. Something had touched its unknown sense of the ludicrous, and its lips were parting in a slow but intensely amused smile over its toothless gums. Each smile was answered by its mother with a run of the laughter Moreau had heard.
He looked at them for a moment, and then, advancing, his foot cracked a dry branch, and Lucy turned. Her face was flushed, her eyes still full of their past merriment, her smiling lips looked a coral red against the whiteness of her small, even teeth. Her sunbonnet was off and her rich hair glowed like copper in the sun. He had never seen her look like this, and stopped, regarding her with a curious, sudden gravity. The thought was in his heart:
“She’s only a girl, and—and—almost beautiful.”
Lucy looked confused.
“Oh, I was just laughing at the baby,” she said apologetically; “she looked so sorter cute smiling that way.”
“I never heard you laugh like that before. Why don’t you do it oftener?”
She seemed embarrassed and murmured:
“I didn’t think you’d like to hear me.”
“I think you’re sometimes afraid of me,” he said; “is that true?”
She bent her face over the baby and said very low:
“I’m afraid as how you might get mad at me. I don’t know much and—I’m different, and you’ve been more good to me than—”
She stopped, her face hidden over the child. Moreau felt a sudden sense of embarrassed discomfort.
“Oh, don’t talk that way,” he said, hastily, “or I may get mad. That’s the sort of talk that annoys me. Laugh and be happy—that’s the way I want you to be. Enjoy yourself; that’s the way to please me.”
He swung himself down from the knoll into the creek bed and went back to his rocker. He found it hard to collect his thoughts. The music of Lucy’s laugh haunted him.
A week, and then two, passed away. The golden days slipped by, still warm, still scented with the healing pine balsam. The nights were white with great stars, which Moreau could see between the pine boughs, for it was still warm enough to sleep on the knoll. His nights’ rests were now often disturbed. A change had come over the situation in the cabin. The peace and serenity of the first days after Fletcher’s departure had gone, leaving a sense of constraint and uneasiness in their stead. Moreau now looked up at the stars not with the calm content of the days when Lucy had first come, but with the trouble of a man who begins to realize menace in what he thought were harmless things.
Nearly a month had passed since Fletcher’s departure when one day, walking down the stream with an idea of trying diggings farther down, he came upon Lucy washing in a pool of water enlarged by a rough dam she herself had constructed. She was kneeling on a flat stone on the bank, her sunbonnet off, her sleeves rolled up, laving in the water the few articles of dress that made up the baby’s wardrobe. Her arms above the sunburned wrists shone snow-white, her roughened hair lay low on her forehead in damp, curly strands. The sight of her engaged in this menial toil irritated Moreau and he called:
“What are you doing there, Lucy? Get up.”
She started with one of her old nervous movements and sat back on the stone. Then, seeing who it was, smiled confidently, and brushed the hair back from her forehead with one wet hand.
“I was washing the baby’s things. That’s the dam I made.”
Moreau stood looking, not at the dam, but at the woman, flushed, breathless and smiling, a blooming girl.
“No one would ever think you were the same woman who came here two months ago,” he said, more to himself than to her.
“I don’t feel like the same,” she answered, beginning to wring her clothes. “I don’t feel now as if that was me.”
“I thought you were quite an old woman then. Do you know that? I’d no idea you were young.”
“I felt old. Oh, God—!” she said, suddenly dropping her hands and looking across the pool with darkly reminiscent eyes—“how awful I felt!”
“But you’re quite well now? You’re really well, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m all right,” she said, returning to her tone of gaiety. “I ain’t never been like this before. Not sence I was married, anyway.”
The allusion to her marriage made Moreau wince. Of late the subject had become hateful to him. Standing, leaning on his shovel, he said:
“You know it’ll be winter here soon, so it’s a good thing we’ve got you well and nicely rested up.”
“Yes, I guess ’twill be winter soon,” she said, looking vaguely round; “does it snow?”
“Sometimes tons of it, if it’s a hard winter. But we’ve got to get out before that. Or you have, anyhow. Can’t run any risks with the baby. Got to get her out and into some decent shelter before the snow falls.”
For a moment Lucy made no answer. She had stopped wringing the clothes and was kneeling on the stone, her eyes on the water, a faint line drawn between her brows.
“Where to—? What sort o’ place?” she said slowly.
Moreau shifted his eyes from her face to the earth in which the point of his shovel had imbedded itself.
“I told you as soon as you got well I’d take you to Hangtown or Sacramento, or even ’Frisco if they didn’t suit. Now I haven’t got dust enough to do that. Fletcher put that spoke in my wheel. But I’ll take you and the baby into Hangtown.”
“Hangtown?” she repeated faintly.
“Yes; it’s quite a ways off. I’ll have to go in myself and get a horse first, and then I’ll take you both in on that. I thought I’d go to Mrs. Wingate. Her husband runs the Eldorado Hotel, and she isn’t strong, and told me last time I was there she’d give a fancy salary if she could get a housekeeper. How’d you like to try that? It would be a first-class home for you and the baby.”
Lucy had bent her face over the wet clothes.
“Ain’t it all right here?” she said in a scarcely audible voice.
“No,” said Moreau irritably; “I just told you there was danger of being snowed in after the first of November. You don’t want to be snowed in here with the baby, do you?”
“I don’t care,” said Lucy.
“If you don’t feel strong enough to do work like that,” he continued, “you can stay on in the hotel. I can make the dust for that easily. Then in the spring, when the streams are full, I’ll have enough to send you to Sacramento or San Francisco, and you can look about you and see how you’d like it there.”
“Why can’t I stay here?” she said suddenly, her voice quavering, but full of protest.
Its note thrilled Moreau.
“I’ve just told you why,” he said quietly.
“Well, I’m not afraid. I don’t mind snow. You can get things to eat from Hangtown. Oh, let me stay.”
She turned toward him, still kneeling on the stone. Her face was quivering with the most violent emotions he had ever seen on it. The dead apathy was gone forever, at least as far as he was concerned.
“Oh, let me stay,” she implored; “don’t send me away from you.”
“Oh, Lucy,” he almost groaned, “don’t you see that won’t do?”
“Let me stay,” she reiterated, and stretched out her hands toward him. The tears began to pour down her cheeks, and suddenly with the outstretched hands she seized him, and burst forth into a stream of impassioned words:
“Let me stay. Let me be with you. Don’t send me away. There ain’t no use in anything if I’m not with you. Let me work for you. Let me be where I can see you—that’s all I want. I don’t want no money nor clothes. If you’ll just let me be near by! And I kin always work and cook, and you know you like things clean, and I kin keep ’em clean. Oh, you can’t mean to send me off. I ain’t never been happy before. I ain’t never had no one treat me so kind before. I ain’t never known what it was like to be treated decent. I can’t leave you—I can’t—I can’t—”
She sank down at his feet in a quivering heap.
Moreau raised her and held her in his arms, pressed against his breast, his cheek against her hair. He had no thought for the moment but an ecstasy of pity and joy. Clinging close to him, she reiterated between broken breaths:
“I kin stay? Oh! I kin stay?”
“Lucy,” he said, “how can you? Do you know what you’re asking?”
“But I kin stay?” she repeated.
She slid one arm round his neck, and he felt her wet cheek against his.
“Let me just stay and work,” she whispered, “just where I can see you.”
“Do you forget that you’re married?” he said huskily.
“I’ll not be in your way. I’ll not ask for anything or be any trouble,” was her whispered answer, “so long’s you let me be near you.”
They walked back to the cabin silently. Lucy knew that she had gained her point and would stay. Her childish nature invaded and possessed by a great passion built on gratitude and reverence, asked no more than to be allowed to work for and worship the man who was to her a god. She did not look into the future, nor demand its secrets. The perfect joy of the present filled her. In the days that followed she grew in beauty, and in some subtile way acquired a new girlishness. Her past seemed wiped out. The blighting effects of the four previous years fell away from her and she seemed to revert to the sweet and simple youthfulness that had been hers when Jake Shackleton had married her at St. Louis. Silent and gentle as ever, it was plain to be seen that whatever Moreau asked for—service, friendship, love—she would unquestioningly give.
Early in November a cold evening came with a red sunset and a sharpening of every outline. For the first time they were driven into the cabin for supper. A fire of boughs and dried cones burned in the chimney and before this, supper being over, they sat, Lucy in the rocker made of a barrel, Moreau on the end of an upturned box, staring at the flames.
Finally the man broke the silence by telling her that he was going to take his dust and walk into Hangtown the next day, remaining there over night and returning in the morning with fresh supplies and a burro.
“Lucy,” he said, drawing his box nearer to her, “I want to talk to you of something.”
She looked up, saw that the moment both had been dreading had come, and paled.
“Lucy, the winter’s coming. The snow may be here now at any moment. Have you thought of what we’re to do?”
She shook her head and began to tremble. His words called up the specter of separation—what she feared most in the world.
“You know we can’t live on this way. Will you, if I go into Hangtown and bring back a mule, ride there with me the day after to-morrow and marry me? There are two or three preachers there who will do it.”
She looked at him with surprised eyes.
“I’m married already to Jake,” she said. “How kin I get married again?”
“I know it, and it’s no good trying to break that marriage. But in your eyes and mine that was none. You and your baby are mine to take care of and support and love for the rest of our lives. Though you can’t be my lawful wife, I can protect you from scandal and insult by making you what all the world will think is my lawful wife. Only you, and I and Jake and his second wife will know that there has been a previous marriage and not one of that four will ever tell.”
She put her rough hand out and felt his great fist close over it, like a symbol of the protection he was offering her.
“We can be married in Hangtown by your maiden name. If any one asks I can say I am marrying a young widow whose husband died on the Sierra. Your husband did die there when he sold you to me for a pair of horses.”
She nodded, not quite understanding his meaning.
“Kin Jake ever come and claim me?” she asked in a frightened voice.
“How could he? How could he dare tell the world how he left you and his child sick, almost dying, in the hut of an unknown miner in the foothills? This is California, where men don’t forgive that sort of thing.”
She was silent, and then said: “Yes, let’s go to Hangtown and be married.”
“Was your first marriage perfectly legal? Have you got the marriage certificate?”
She rose, dragged out the bundle she had brought with her, and from it drew a long dirty envelope which she handed to him.
He opened it and found the certificate. It was accurate in every detail. His eye ran over the ages and names of the contracting parties—Lucy Fraser, fifteen, to Jacob Shackleton, twenty-four, at St. Louis.
Twisting the paper in his hands he sat moodily eying the fire. The second marriage was the only way he could think of by which he could lend a semblance of right to the impossible position in which his generous action had placed him. Divorce, in that remote locality and at that early day of laws, half administered and chaotic, was impossible, and even had it been easily obtained he shrank from dragging into publicity the piteous story of how the woman he loved had been sold to him.
That a marriage with Jake Shackleton’s wife was a legal offense he knew, but with one of those strange whimsies of character which mark mankind, he felt that the reading of the marriage service over Lucy and himself would in some way sanctify what could never be a lawful tie.
In a spasm of rage and disgust he held out the paper to the flames, when Lucy, with a smothered cry sprang forward and seized it. It was the first violent action into which he had ever seen her betrayed. He looked in surprise into her flushed and alarmed face.
“Why not? Why not destroy everything that could connect you with such a past?” he said, almost angrily.
She hesitated, smoothing out the paper with trembling hands. Then she said falteringly:
“I don’t know—but—but—he was her father,” indicating the sleeping baby. “I was married to him all right.”
He understood the instinct that made her wish to keep the paper as a record of her child’s legitimacy, and made no further comment.
The next morning at dawn he started for his long walk into Hangtown, taking with him all the dust he had accumulated since Fletcher’s departure. He was absent till the afternoon of the following day, when he reappeared leading a small pack-mule, laden with supplies, among which were several articles of dress for Lucy and the baby, so that they might make a fitting appearance when they rode into camp for the wedding. Lucy was overjoyed at her finery, and arrayed in it looked so pretty and so girlish that Moreau, for the first time since the scene by the creek, took her in his arms and kissed her. It was the kiss of the bridegroom and the master.
The next morning when she woke the cabin was curiously dark. Going to the door to open it, she found it resisted, and went to the window. The world was wrapped in a blinding fall of snow. When Moreau came in for breakfast, he reported a blizzard outside. The cold was intense, the wind high, and the snow so fine and so torn by the gale that it was like a mist of whiteness enveloping the cabin. Already it was piled high about the walls and had to be shoveled from the door to permit of its opening. Fortunately they had collected a large amount of fire wood which was piled in the brush shed in which the man lived. During the morning Moreau took the animals from their shelter and stabled them in his. There was fodder for them and a bed of leaves, and the heat of the chimney warmed the fragile hut.
All day the storm raged, and in the evening, as he and Lucy sat before the fire, they could hear the turmoil of the tempest outside, moaning through the ranks of the sentinel pines. They were silent, listening to this shouting of the unloosed elements, and feeling an indescribably sweet sense of home and shelter in their rugged cabin and each other’s society.
The storm was one of those unexpected blizzards which sometimes visit the Sierras in the early winter. With brief intervals of sunshine, the snow fell off and on for nearly a month. Moreau had to exercise almost superhuman effort to keep the cabin from being buried, and, as it was, the drifts nearly covered the window. It was impossible to travel any distance, as the snow was of a fine, feathery texture which did not pack tight, and into which the wanderer sank to the arm-pits. Fortunately the last trip into Hangtown had stocked the cabin well with provisions. No cares menaced its inmates, who, warm and happy in the vast snow-buried solitudes of the mountains, led an enchanted existence, forgetting and forgotten by the world.
When the storm ended the miner attempted to get into the settlements with the mule. But the beast, exhausted by the insufficient food, as the best part of the fodder had to be given to the cow, fell by the way, dying in one of the drifts. This seemed to sever their last link with the world. Nature had drawn an unbroken circle of loneliness around them. Under its spell they were drawn closer together till their lives merged—the primitive man and woman living for and by love in the primitive wilderness.
So the enchanted winter passed. The man, at intervals, making his way into the settlements for food and the few articles of clothing that they needed. It was a terrible winter, nearly as fierce as that of ’46, but between the storms Moreau fitfully worked the stream, obtaining enough dust to pay for their provisions. The outside world seemed to fade from their lives, which were bounded by the walls of the cabin. Here, in the long fire-lit evenings, Moreau read to Lucy, taught her from his few books, strove to develop the mind that misfortune had almost crushed. She responded to his teachings with the quickness of love. Without much mental ability she improved because she lived only for what he desired. She smoothed the roughness of her speech and studied to correct her grammatical errors. She made him set her little tasks such as a child studies, and in the evenings he watched her with surreptitious amusement, as she conned over her spelling, or traced letters in her copy-book. She was passionately desirous of being worthy of him, and of leaving her old chrysalis behind her when she issued from the cabin.
This was not to be until the early spring. It was nearly six months from the time the emigrant wagon had stopped at his door, that Moreau, having accumulated enough dust to buy another mule and another outfit—took Lucy and the child into Hangtown for the marriage. This ceremony, about which in the beginning she had been somewhat apathetic, she now earnestly desired. It was accomplished without publicity or difficulty, Lucy assuming her maiden name of Fraser, and passing as a young widow. In the afternoon they started back for the cabin, Moreau on foot, with his wife and baby on the mule. They had decided to stay by their claim during the spring and early summer when the streams were high.
Thus the spring passed and the summer came. During this season Lucy, for the first time, saw that most lovely of Californian wild-flowers, the mariposa lily, and called her baby after it. As time went on and no other child was born, Moreau came to regard the little Mariposa as more and more his own. His affection for her became a paternal passion. It was decided between himself and Lucy that she should never know the secret of her parentage, but be called by his name and be brought up as his child. As the happiness of the union grew in depth and strength both the man and woman desired more ardently to forget beyond all recall the terrible past from which she had entered his life. It grew to be a subject to which Moreau could bear no allusion, and their life was purposely quiet and secluded, for fear of a chance encounter with some disturbing reminder.
So the time passed. In the course of the next few years Moreau moved from the smaller camps into Sacramento. Though a man of little commercial ability, he was always able, in those halcyon days, to make a good living for the woman and child to whom he had given his life. Years of prosperity made it possible to give to Mariposa every educational advantage the period and town offered. The child showed musical talent, and for the development of this he was keenly ambitious.
Across their tranquil life, now and then, came a lurid gleam from the career of the man who was Lucy Moreau’s lawful husband. Jake Shackleton was soon a marked figure in the new state. But his rise to sensational fortune began with the booming days of the Comstock. Then his star rose blazing above the horizon. He was one of the original exploiters of the great lode and was one of those who owned that solid cone of silver which has gone down to history as the Reydel Monte. Ten years from his entrance into the state he was a rich man. In twenty, he was one of that group of millionaires, whose names were sounded from end to end of an astonished country.
A quarter of a century from the time when he had crossed the desert in an emigrant wagon, with his two wives, he read in the paper he had recently bought as an occupation and investment, a notice of the death of Daniel Moreau in Santa Barbara. It was brief, as befitted a pioneer who had sunk so completely out of sight and memory, leaving neither vast wealth nor picturesque record. The paragraph stated that “the pioneer’s devoted wife and daughter attended his last hours, which were tranquil and free from pain. It is understood that the deceased leaves but little fortune, having during the last two or three years been incapacitated for work by enfeebled health.”