THE CHOICE OF MAIDS
During the months of summer, dwellers along the line of the railway
became familiar with the figure of Lionel Harrower. He constantly went
down to San Mateo on Sunday afternoons and returned to town on Sunday
evening. This, at first, was regarded as the outward and visible sign
of his devotion to Miss Gracey, but by and by it was remarked that
he did not take the Gracey carriage which so often stood under the
live-oaks at the depot, but mounted a hired hack and was driven off in
the direction of the De Soto house.
It was a Sunday or two after Mercedes had driven him there that the
young Englishman had appeared on the balcony steps, very red and warm
from the heat of the afternoon, and paid a long call, which extended so
far into the twilight that he was bidden to dinner and did not go back
to town till a late evening train.
It had evidently been an enjoyable afternoon, for he repeated it, and
then again repeated it, and finally let it develop into a habit. He
wrote to his relations in England that he was deeply interested in
California and was studying the mining industry of that remarkable
state. And it is true that once in the middle of the summer he
went to Virginia for a few days and came back with his mind full of
excellent material for a letter to his grandfather which should prove
how profound had been his study of the American mining and engineering
methods.
The first afternoon that Mercedes found him on the Allens’ balcony she
was openly surprised. The second she was sweet and gracious, but her
rose-leaf color deepened at the sight of him, and it was noticeable
that, for one who was usually so completely mistress of herself, she
was distrait and lacking in repose. On leaving, she had asked him if
she could drive him back to the station, as her road lay that way,
to which the young man had answered, with the stiff politeness of
embarrassment, that he was to stay to dinner--“he always did on Sunday.”
This was the inception of a situation that, before the summer was over,
had caused more heart-burnings, more wakeful nights and distressed
days, than the peaceful valley had known in many years.
For the first time in an existence of triumph and adulation Mercedes
knew defeat. She had been certain of her attraction for Harrower,
and confident that by her beauty and her wiles she could, before his
departure, fan his interest to a warmer flame. Yet July was not spent
before she realized that a force more potent than any she could put
forth was leading the young man in another direction. His visits to the
Allens’ grew more and more frequent as those to Tres Pinos became less
so. Curiosity in his interest in the occupants of the De Soto house
evolved itself into curiosity in his interest in Rosamund Allen. He
forgot the tours he had intended to take into the interior, showed no
more interest in Virginia City, and gave up his plan of a horseback
expedition to the Yosemite. He spent the summer in town, making trips
to San Mateo that grew more and more frequent.
It was difficult for Mercedes to believe it, but when she did it
kindled sleeping fires in her. She was doubly wounded; heart and
pride were hurt. Her overmastering vanity had received its first
blow. Not only had she lost the man for whom her feeling was daily
growing warmer, but it would be known of all men that he had withdrawn
his affections from her to place them on a girl far her inferior in
looks, education and feminine charm. That he should have preferred
Rosamund was particularly maddening--Rosamund, whom she had regarded as
commonplace and countrified. She looked in her glass, and furious tears
gathered in her eyes. It was staggering, incomprehensible, but it was
true. She was discarded, and people were laughing at her.
Two instincts--strong in women of her type--rose within her. One
demanded revenge and the other protection of her pride. She burned with
the desire to strike back at those who had hurt her, and at the same
to hide the wounds to her self-love. She knew of but one way to do
the latter, and it came upon her--not suddenly, but with a gradually
uplifting illumination--that it could be successfully combined with the
execution of the former.
Mercedes, who liked gossip, had heard the story of Jerry Barclay’s
complication with Mrs. Newbury, and of how it was popularly supposed to
have prevented his marriage to June Allen. The busy scandal-hunters of
the city had somehow unearthed the story that Jerry and June would have
married had the former been free. Mercedes, with her woman’s quickness,
guessed that June was the sort of girl who would remain constant in
such a situation. But Jerry was a being of another stripe, a man of an
unusual attraction for women and of a light and errant fancy. She had
not met him half a dozen times when she came to the conclusion that his
love for June was on the wane, his roving eye ready to be caught, his
ear held, by the first soft glance and flattering tongue he encountered.
Thus the way of protecting herself and of hitting back at one at least
of the Allens was put into her hand. She did not care for Jerry, save
as he was useful to her, though he had the value of the thing which is
highly prized by others. She used every weapon in her armory to attract
and subjugate him. Jerry himself, versed in the wiles of women as he
was, was deceived by her girlishly open pleasure in his attentions, her
fluttered embarrassment when he paid her compliments.
His first feeling toward her was an unbounded admiration for her
physical perfections, to which was added a complacent vanity at her
obvious predilection for him. But the woman that he regarded as a naïve
ingenue was a being of a more complex brain, a more daring initiative,
and a cooler head than he had ever possessed. Vain and self-indulgent,
the slave of his passions, he was in reality a puppet in the hands of a
girl fifteen years his junior, who, under an exterior of flower-like
delicacy, had been eaten into by the acids of rage and revenge.
While he still thought himself a trifler in the outer court of
sentiment he was already under her dominion. He thought of himself as
taking an impersonally admiring interest in her when he was continually
haunted by the thought of her, and hastened to spend his spare hours
beside her, his eyes drinking in her beauty, his vanity fostered and
stimulated by the flattery she so cunningly administered. Like Paris,
he felt himself beloved by goddesses. June’s image faded. Two years
had passed since his confession in the wood. He had seen her only at
intervals and then under a perpetual ban of restraint. He was not the
man to remain constant to a memory. June hovered on the edges of his
consciousness like a sad-eyed shadow, looking at him with a pleading
protest that made him feel angry with her. She was a dim, unappealing
figure beside the radiant youthfulness, the sophisticated coquetries of
Black Dan’s daughter.
During the early part of the summer June was in ignorance of the
momentous shuffling of the cards of her destiny. She lived quietly,
rarely going to the city, and spending most of her time in the gardens
or on the balcony. Rosamund, who went about more, marketed in the
village and shopped in town, began to hear rumors of Jerry’s interest
in Miss Gracey. She met them riding together in the hot solitude of the
country roads, saw them meet on the trains to the city. Finally the
rumors passed to San Francisco and the Colonel heard them. He came down
to San Mateo that Saturday to talk things over with Rosamund. They
were worried and uneasy, a sense of calamity weighing on them both.
Though June was one of those women who obstinately adhere to the bright
side, who cling to hope till it crumbles in their hands, she felt,
during the summer, premonitions of ill fortune. Those inexplicable
shadows of approaching evil that Nature throws forward over the path of
sensitive temperaments had darkened her outlook. She questioned herself
as to her heaviness of heart, assuring herself that there was no new
cloud on her horizon. In the constancy of her own nature she did not
realize, as a more experienced woman would, that her hold on Jerry was
a silken thread which would wear very thin in the passage of years, and
be ready to snap at the first strain.
But the moods of apprehension and gloom began to be augmented by
ripples from the pool of gossip without. She heard that Jerry was
oftener in San Mateo than ever before, and she saw him less frequently.
One afternoon she met him driving with Mercedes, and the girl’s radiant
smile of recognition had something of malicious triumph under its
beaming sweetness. June drove home silent and pale. In her room she
tried to argue herself out of her depression. But it stayed with her,
made her preoccupied and quiet all the evening, lay down with her at
night, and was heavy and cold at her heart in the morning.
At the end of September they returned to town. They had been back a few
weeks when one afternoon she met Jerry on the street and they stopped
for a few moments’ conversation. It was nothing more than the ordinary
interchange of commonplaces between old friends, but when he had passed
on, the girl walked forward looking wan and feeling a deadly sense of
blankness. He was the same man, gay, handsome, suave, and yet he seemed
suddenly far removed from her, to be smiling with the perfunctory
politeness of a stranger. The chill exhaled by a dying love penetrated
her, pierced her to the core. She did not understand it, him, or
herself. All that she knew was that the sense of despondency became
suddenly overpowering, and closed like an iron clutch on her heart.
It was an overcast autumn that year, with much gray weather and early
fogs. The city had never looked to June so cheerless. She was a great
deal alone, Rosamund’s time being more and more claimed by Lionel
Harrower. He was her first lover, and it was a part of Rosamund’s fate
that he should have come to her unexpected and unasked for. She was of
the order of women who stand where they are placed, doing what comes
under their hand, demanding little of life, and to whom life’s gifts
come as a surprise.
That such a man as the young Briton should prefer her to her sister,
whose superior charm she had always acknowledged and been proud of,
was to her astonishing. She was sobered and softened in these days of
awakening love. One could see the woman, the mother, ripe, soft, full
of a quiet devotion, slowly dawning. Sometimes she was irritable, a
thing previously unknown. She could not believe that Harrower loved
her, and yet as the days passed, and she found the hours spent with him
growing ever more disturbingly sweet, she wondered how she could ever
support a life in which he did not figure, and the thought filled her
with torturing fears.
One gray afternoon, Rosamund having left for a walk in the park with
Harrower, June, after wandering about the empty house for a dreary
hour, resolved that she too would go out for a stroll. She had felt
more cheerful lately. Jerry had come to call two days before, when
she was out, and this fact had seemed to her a proof of his unwaned
interest. She had written him a brief note, stating her regrets at
missing him and her hopes that he would repeat the visit soon. This was
only polite and proper, she assured herself.
Her walk took her to Van Ness Avenue and then up the side street toward
the little Turk Street plaza. For the past two years it had been a
favorite promenade of hers. The present was not sufficiently fraught
with pain to render memories of a happier past unbearable. She strolled
through the small park and then returned and walked back toward the
avenue. As she turned the corner into the great thoroughfare, she
stopped, the color dying from her face, the softness of its outlines
stiffening.
Walking slowly toward her were Jerry and Mercedes Gracey. They were
close together, Mercedes lightly touching with the tips of her fingers
the top of the ornamental fence beside her. Her eyes were down-drooped,
her whole air one of maidenly modesty, which yet had in it something
coyly encouraging. Jerry, close at her shoulder, was looking down at
her, with the eyes of a lover.
For the first moment June was too stricken to move. She stood
spellbound, poised in mid-flight, hungrily staring. Then the desire for
concealment seized her, and she was about to turn and steal back to
the corner whence she had come, when Mercedes raised her eyes and saw
her. She threw a short, quick phrase at Jerry, and he started and drew
himself up. June moved forward, and as she approached them forced her
lips into a smile and bowed. She was conscious that Jerry had flushed
and looked angry as he raised his hat. But Mercedes enveloped her in
a glance of fascinating cordiality, inclining her head in a graceful
salutation.
A half-hour later June gained her room and sank into an arm-chair. For
some time she sat motionless, gazing at the gray oblongs of the two
windows with their shadowy upper draperies. As the look in Jerry’s face
kept rising upon her mental vision, she experienced a slight sensation
of nausea and feebleness. But even in this hour of revelation she kept
whispering to herself,
“He couldn’t! He couldn’t! He couldn’t have the heart! He couldn’t hurt
me so!”
The few poor memories she had of moments of tenderness between them,
the meager words of love that she had regarded as binding vows, rose
in her mind. It had seemed to her he could no more disregard them than
she could. She thought of herself responding to the love of another
man--of its impossibility--and sat bowed together in her chair,
for the first time catching a revealing gleam of the difference in
their attitudes. Then the memory of Mrs. Newbury came to her, and
with it a strengthening sense of his unbreakable obligation. Nearly
three years ago, when June had first heard of this, it had seemed so
degraded and repulsive that she had shrunk from the thought of it.
Now, sitting lonely in the twilight, her eyes staring at the gray
panes, she recalled it with relief, found it a thing to be glad of, to
congratulate herself upon. The city had put its stain upon her. Her
maidenly fastidiousness was smirched with its mud.
Plunged in these dark thoughts she did not hear the door open, nor
see Rosamund’s head gently inserted. It was not till the rustling of
her advancing skirts was distinct on the silence that June started
and turned. The last light of day fell through the long window on
the younger girl’s face, rosy with exercise, and shining with a new
happiness. She paused by June’s chair and stood there, looking down.
For the first time in her life the preoccupation of her own affairs
prevented her from noticing her sister’s sickly appearance.
“It’s all arranged, June,” she said in a low voice.
“Arranged!” repeated June, looking up quickly, her ear struck by
something unusual in her sister’s tone. “What’s arranged?”
“Everything between Mr. Harrower and me. We’re--we’re--”
“You’re engaged?” said June, almost solemnly.
Rosamund, looking into the upturned face, nodded. There was a sudden
pricking of tears under her eyelids, an unexpected quivering of her
lips. She bent down and laid her cheek against her sister’s, and in
the dim room they clung together for a silent moment, one in the first
flush of her woman’s happiness, the other in the dawning realization of
her desertion.