The Southern Pacific Railway passes, today, not far from the site of
General Trednoke’s ranch. But the events now to be narrated occurred
some years before the era of transcontinental railroads: they were in
the air, but not yet bolted down to the earth. The general, therefore,
was a pioneer, and was by no means overrun with friends from the East in
search of an agreeable winter climate. The easiest way to reach him--if
you were not pressed for time--was round the cape which forms the
southernmost point of South America and sticks its sharp snout
inquiringly into the Antarctic solitudes, as if it scented something
questionable there. The speediest route, though open to strange
discomforts, was by way of the Isthmus; and then there were always
the saddle, the wagon, and the stage, with the accompaniments of
road-agents, tornadoes, deserts, and starvation.
Miss Grace Parsloe came via the Isthmus; and the latter part of her
journey had been alleviated by the society of a young gentleman from New
York, Freeman by name. There were other passengers on the vessel; but
these two discovered sympathies of origin and education which made
companionship natural. They sat together at table, leaned side by side
over the taffrail, discussed their fellow-travellers, and investigated
each other. As he lolled on the bench with folded arms and straw hat
tilted back from his forehead she, glancing side-long, as her manner
was, saw a sunburnt aquiline nose, a moustache of a lighter brown than
the visage which it decorated, a lean, strong jaw, and a muscular neck.
His forehead, square and impending, was as white as ivory in comparison
with the face below; his hair, in accordance with the fashion introduced
by the late war, was cropped close. But what especially moved Miss Grace
were those long, lazy blue eyes, which seemed to tolerate everything,
but to be interested in nothing,--hardly even in her. Now, Grace could
not help knowing she was a pretty girl, and it was somewhat of a novelty
to her that Freeman should appear so indifferent. It would have been
difficult to devise a better opportunity than this to monopolize
masculine admiration, and she fell to speculating as to what sort of
an experience Mr. Freeman must have had, so to panoply him against her
magic. On the other hand, she was the recipient of whatever attentions
he could bring himself to detach from the horizon-line, or from his
own thoughts (which appeared to amount, practically, to about the same
thing). She had no other rivals; and a woman will submit amiably to a
good deal of indifference, provided she be assured that no other woman
is enjoying what she lacks.
Freeman, for his part, had nothing to complain of. Grace Parsloe was
a singularly pretty girl. Singular properly qualifies her. She was not
like the others,--by which phrase he epitomized the numerous comely
young women whom he had, at various times and in several countries,
attended, teased, and kissed. Both physically and mentally, she was very
fine-wrought. Her bones were small; her body and limbs were slender, but
beautifully fashioned. She was supple and vigorous. Grace is a product
of brain as well as an effect of bodily symmetry: Grace had the quality
on both counts. She answered to one’s conception of Mahomet’s houris,
assuming that the conception is not of a fat person. Her head was small,
but well proportioned,--compact as to the forehead, rather broad across
the cheek-bones, thence tapering to the chin. Her eyes were blue, but of
an Eastern strangeness of shape and setting; they were subject to great
and sudden changes of expression, depending, apparently, on the varying
state of her emotions, and betraying an intensity more akin to the
Oriental temperament than to ours. There was in her something subtle
and fierce; yet overlaying it, like a smooth and silken skin, were the
conventional polish and bearing of an American school graduate. She was,
in deed, noticeably artificial and self-conscious in manner and in the
intonations of her speech; though it was an aesthetic delight to see
her move or pose, and the quality of her voice was music’s self. But
Freeman, after due meditation, came to the conclusion that this was the
outcome of her recognition of her own singularity: in trying to be like
other people, she fell into caricature. Freeman, somehow, liked her
the better for it. Like most men of brain and pith, who have seen and
thought much, he was thankful for a new thing, because, so far as it
went, it renewed him. It pleased him to imagine that he could, with a
word or a look, cause this veil of artifice to be thrown aside, and the
primitive passion and fierceness behind it to start forth. He allowed
himself to imagine, with a certain satisfaction, that were he to make
this young woman jealous she would think nothing of thrusting a dagger
between his ribs. Reality,--what a delight it is! The actual touch and
feeling of the spontaneous natural creature have been so buried beneath
centuries of hypocrisy and humbug that we have ceased to believe in them
save as a metaphysical abstraction. But even as water, long depressed
under-ground in perverse channels, surges up to the surface, and above
it, at last, in a fountain of relief, so Nature, after enduring ages
of outrage and banishment, leaps back to her rightful domain in some
individual whom we call extraordinary because he or she is natural.
Grace Parsloe did not seem (regarded as to her temperament and quality)
to belong where she was: therefore she was a delightful incident there.
Had she been met with in the days of the Old Testament, or in the depths
of Persia or India at the present time, even, she might have appeared
commonplace. But here she was in conventional costume, with conventional
manners. And, just as the nautch-girls, and other Oriental dancers and
posturers, wear a costume which suggests nature more effectively than
does nature itself, so did Grace’s conventionality suggest to Freeman
the essential absence of conventionality more forcibly than if he had
seen her clad in a turban and translucent caftan, dancing off John the
Baptist’s head, or driving a nail into that of Sisera. Grace certainly
owed much of her importance to her situation, which rendered her foreign
and piquante. But, then, everything, in this world, is relative.
Racial types seem to be a failure: when they become very marked, the
race deteriorates or vanishes. In the counties of England, after only
a thousand years, the women you meet in the rural districts and country
towns all look like sisters. The Asiatics, of course, are much more
sunk in type than the Anglo-Saxons; and they show us the way we would be
going. Only, there is hope in rapid transit and the cosmopolitan spirit,
and especially in these United States, which bring together the ends
of the earth, and place side by side a descendant of the Puritans like
Freeman, and a daughter of Irak-Ajemi.
“What are you coming to California for, Mr. Freeman?”
Freeman had already told her what he had been in the Isthmus for,--to
paddle in miasmatic swamps with a view to the possibility of a canal
in the remote, speculative future. He had given her a graphic and
entertaining picture of the hideous and inconceivable life he had led
there for six months, from which he had emerged the only member of a
party of nineteen (whites, blacks, and yellows) who was not either dead
by disease, by violence, or by misadventure, or had barely escaped with
life and a shattered constitution. Freeman, after emerging from the
miasmatic hell and lake of Gehenna, had taken a succession of baths,
with soap and friction, had been attended by a barber and a tailor, and
had himself attended the best table to be found for love or money in the
charming town of Panama. He had also spent more than half of the week
of his sojourn there in sleep; and he was now in the best possible
condition, physical and mental,--though not, he admitted, pecuniary. As
to morals, they had not reached that discussion yet. But, in all that
he did say, Freeman exhibited perfect unreserve and frankness, answering
without hesitation or embarrassment any question she chose to ask (and
she asked some curious ones).
But when she asked him such an innocent thing as what he was after in
California--an inquiry, by the way, put more in idleness than out of
curiosity--Freeman stroked his yellow moustache with the thumb of the
hand that held his Cuban cigarette, gazed with narrowed eyelids at the
horizon, and for some time made no reply at all. Finally he said that
California was a place he had never visited, and that it would be a pity
to have been so near it and yet not have improved the opportunity of
taking a look at it.
Grace instantly scented a mystery, and was not less promptly resolved
to fathom it. And what must be the nature of a mystery attaching to a
handsome man, unmarried, and evidently no stranger to the gentler sex?
Of course there must be a woman in it! Her eyes glowed with azure fire.
“You have some acquaintances in California, I suppose?” she said, with
an air of laborious indifference.
“Well,--yes; I believe I have,” Freeman admitted.
“Have they lived there long?”
“No; not over a few months. I accidentally heard from a person in
Panama. I dropped a line to say I might turn up.”
“She----you haven’t had time to get an answer, then?”
Freeman inhaled a deep breath through his cigarette, tilted his head
back, and allowed the smoke to escape slowly through his nostrils. In
this manner, familiar to his deep-designing sex, he concealed a smile.
Grace was, in some respects, as transparent as she was subtle. So long
as the matter in hand did not touch her emotions, she had no difficulty
in maintaining a deceptive surface; but emotion she could not disguise,
though she was probably not aware of the fact; for emotion has a
tendency to shut one’s own eyes and open what they can no longer see in
one’s self to the gaze of outsiders.
“No,” he said, when he had recovered his composure. “But that won’t make
any difference. We are on rather intimate terms, you see.”
“Oh! Is it long since you have met?”
“Pretty long; at least it seems so to me.”
Grace turned, and looked full at her companion. He did not meet her
glance, but kept his profile steadily opposed, and went on smoking with
a dreamy air, as if lost in memories and anticipations, sad, yet sweet.
“Really, Mr. Freeman, I hardly thought--you have always seemed to care
so little about anything--I didn’t suspect you of so much sentiment.”
“I am like other men,” he returned, with a sigh. “My affections are
not given indiscriminately; but when they are given,--you
understand,--I----”
“Oh, I understand: pray don’t think it necessary to explain. I’m
sure I’m very far from wishing to listen to confidences about
another,--to----”
“Yes, but I like to talk about it,” interposed Freeman, earnestly.
“I haven’t had a chance to open my heart, you know, for at least six
months. And though you and I haven’t known each other long, I believe
you to be capable of appreciating what a man feels when he is on his way
to meet some one who----”
“Thank you! You are most considerate! But I shall be additionally
obliged if you would tell me in what respect I can have so far forgotten
myself as to lead you to think me likely to appreciate anything of the
kind. I assure you, Mr. Freeman, I have never cared for any one; and
nothing I have seen since I left home makes it probable that I shall
begin now.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” said Freeman, slowly drawing another
cigarette out of his bundle, and beginning to re-roll it with a dejected
air.
“Indeed!”
“Yes: the fact is, I had hoped that you had begun to have a little
friendly feeling for me. I am more than ready to reciprocate.”
“I hope you will spare me any insults, sir. I have no one to protect me,
but----”
“I assure you, I mean no insult. You cannot help knowing that I think
you as beautiful and fascinating a woman as I have ever met; but of
course you can’t help being beautiful and fascinating. Do I insult you
by having eyes? If so, I am sorry, but you will have to make the best of
it.”
With this, he turned in his seat, and calmly confronted her. Beautiful
she certainly was, at that moment; but it was the beauty of an angry
serpent. She had a pencil in her hand, with which, a little while
before, she had been sketching heads of some of the passengers in her
little notebook. She was now handling this inoffensive object in such
a way as to justify the fancy that, had it been charged with a deadly
poison in its point, instead of with a bit of plumbago of the HH
quality, she would have driven it into Freeman’s heart then and there.
“Is it no insult,” said she, in a sibilant voice, “to talk to me as you
are doing, when you have just told me that you love another woman, and
are going to meet her?”
Freeman’s brows gradually knitted themselves in a frown of apparent
perplexity. “I must say I don’t understand you,” he observed, at length.
“I am quite sure I have said nothing of the sort. How could I?”
“If you wish to quibble about words, perhaps not. But was not that your
meaning?”
“No, it wasn’t. You are the only woman who has been in my thoughts
to-day.”
“Mr. Freeman!”
“Well?”
“You have intimated very clearly that you are engaged--married, for
aught I know--to a woman whom you are now on your way to meet----”
At this point she stopped. Freeman had interrupted her with a shout of
laughter.
She had been very pale. She now flushed all over her face, and jumped to
her feet.
“Sit down,” he said, laying a hand on her dress and (aided by a lurch of
the vessel) pulling her into her seat again, “and listen to me. And then
I shall insist upon an apology. This is too much!”
“I shall ask the captain----”
“You will not, I promise you. Look here! When I was in Panama, I met
there a fellow I used to know in New York. He told me that he had
recently crossed the continent with Professor Meschines, who used to
teach geology and botany at Yale College, when he and I were students
there. The professor had come over partly for the fun of the thing, and
partly to look for specimens in the line of his profession. My friend
parted from him at San Francisco: the professor was going farther
south.”
“What has all this to do with the woman who----”
“It has this to do with it,--that the professor is the woman! He is over
sixty years old, and has always been a good friend of mine; but I am not
going to marry him. I am not engaged to him, he is not beautiful, nor
even fascinating, except in the way of an elderly man of science. And
he is the only human being, besides yourself, that I know or have ever
heard of on the Pacific coast. Now for your apology!”
Grace emitted a long breath, and sank back in her seat, with her hands
clasped in her lap. She raised her hands and covered her face with them.
She removed them, sat erect, and bent an open-eyed, intent gaze upon her
companion.
After this pantomime, she exclaimed, in the lowest and most musical of
tones, “Oh! how hateful you are!” Then she cried out with animation,
“I believe you did it on purpose!” Finally, she sank back again, with a
soft laugh and sparkling eyes, at the same time stretching out her right
arm towards him and placing her hand on his, with a whispered, “There,
then!”
Freeman, accepting the hand for the apology, kissed it, and continued to
hold it afterwards.
“Am I not a little goose?” she murmured.
“You certainly are,” replied Freeman.
“You mustn’t hold my hand any more.”
“Do you mean to withdraw your apology?”
“N--no; but it doesn’t follow that----”
“Oh, yes, it does. Besides, when a man receives such a delicate,
refined, graceful, exquisite apology as this,”--here he lifted the hand,
looked at it critically, and bestowed another kiss upon it,--“he would
be a fool not to make the most of it.”
“Ah, I’m afraid you’re dangerous. You are well named--Freeman!”
“My name is Harvey: won’t you call me by it?”
“Oh, I can’t!”
“Try! Would it make it easier if I were to call you by yours?”
“Mine is Miss Parsloe.”
“Pooh! How can that be your name which you are going to change so soon?
When I look at you, I see your name; when I think of you, I say it to
myself,--Grace!”
“How do you know I am going to change my name soon--or ever?”
“Whom are you talking to?”
“To you,--Harvey! Oh!” She snatched her hand away and pressed it over
her lips.
“How do I know you are beautiful, Grace, and--irresistible?”
“But I’m not! You’re making fun of me! Besides, I’m twenty.”
“How many times have you been engaged?”
“Never. Nobody wants to be engaged to a poor girl. Oh me!”
“Do you know what you are made of, Grace? Fire and flowers! Few men in
the world are men enough to be a match for you. But what have you been
doing with yourself all this time? Why do you come to a place like
this?”
“Maybe I had a presentiment that... What nonsense we are talking! But
what you said reminds me. It’s the strangest coincidence!”
“What is it?”
“Your Professor Meschines----”
“On the contrary, he is a most matter-of-fact old gentleman.”
“Do be quiet, and listen to me! When my mamma was a girl in school,
there were two boys there,--it was a boy-and-girls’ school,--and they
were great friends. But they both fell in love with my mamma----”
“I can understand that,” put in Freeman.
“How do you know I am like my mamma? Well, as I was saying, they both
fell in love with her, and quarrelled with each other, and had a fight.
The boy that won the fight is the man to whose house I am going.”
“Then he didn’t marry your mamma?”
“Oh, no; that was only a childish affair, and she married another man.”
“The one who got thrashed?”
“Of course not. But the one who got thrashed is your Professor
Meschines.”
“I see! The poor old professor! And he has remained a bachelor all his
life.”
“Mamma has often told me the story, and that the Trednoke boy went to
West Point, and distinguished himself in the Mexican war, and married a
Mexican woman, and the Meschines boy became a professor in Yale College.
And now I am going to see one of them, and you to see the other. Isn’t
that a coincidence?”
“The first of a long series, I trust. Is this West-Pointer a permanent
settler here?”
“Yes, for ever so long,--twenty years. He’s a widower, but he has a
daughter---- Oh, I know you’ll fall in love with her!”
“Is she like you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her, or General Trednoke either.”
“Come to think of it, though, nobody is like you, Grace. Now, will you
be so good as to apologize again?”
“Don’t you think you’re rather exacting, Harvey?”
However, the apology was finally repeated, and continued, more or less,
during the rest of the voyage; and Grace quite forgot that she had never
made Harvey tell what was really the cause of his coming to California.
But she, on her side, had a secret. She never allowed him to suspect
that the past eighteen months of her life had been passed as employee in
a New York dry-goods store.