RETROSPECT
“Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream
dreams.”--THE ACTS.
After he had put Mariposa on her car, Essex went down town to the
paper with some copy. He was making a fair living on _The Trumpet_,
and the work he was doing suited him. He thought it might last the
winter and he had no objections to passing the winter in San Francisco.
Like many of his kind, he felt the lazy Bohemian charm of the diverse,
many-colored, cosmopolitan city sprawled on its sand dunes. The
restaurants alone made life more worth while than anywhere else in the
country except New York.
To-night he went to one, for dinner, that stood in Clay Street, a short
distance below Kearney. He had a word to say to the white-clothed
chef, who cooked the dinner in plain sight, on a small oven and grill,
beneath which the charcoal gleamed redly. He stopped for a moment’s
badinage with the buxom, fresh-faced French woman who sat at the desk.
She was the chef’s wife, Madame Bertrand, and liked “Monsieur Esseex,”
who spoke her natal tongue as well as she did. There was evidently
truth in one piece of Essex’s autobiography. Only a childhood spent in
France could teach the kind of French he spoke with Madame Bertrand.
He sat long over his dinner, smoking and reading the evening papers. It
was so late when he left that Bertrand himself came out of his cooking
corner and talked with him about Paris. “Monsieur Esseex” knew Paris as
well as Bertrand, some parts of it better. He had been educated there
at one of the large _lycées_, and had gone back many times, living now
on one side of the river, now on the other. Bertrand, in his white cap
and apron, conversing with his guest, retained a curious manner of
deference unusual in California.
“Monsieur is a gentleman of some kind or other,” he told madame.
“There are many different kinds of gentlemen in California,” returned
that lady, oracularly.
It was nearly nine when Essex left the restaurant, and passing down
Kearney Street for a few blocks, turned to his right and began to mount
the ascending sidewalk that led to his lodgings. These were in an
humble and unfashionable neighborhood in Bush Street. The house was of
a kind whence gentility has departed. It stood back on the top of two
small terraces, up which mounted two wooden flights of stairs, one with
a list to starboard so pronounced that Essex had, once or twice, while
ascending, thought the city in the throes of an earthquake.
The darkness of night wrapped it now. As it was early a light within
shone out dimly through two narrow panes of glass flanking the hall
door. He let himself in and mounted a dirtily carpeted stairway. The
place smelled evilly of old cooking and the smoke of many and various
cigarettes, cigars and pipes. It was a man’s rooming-house, and the men
evidently smoked where and what they listed. Essex had no idea who they
were and had seen only one of them: a man on the same floor with him
who, he surmised, by the occasional boisterousness of his entrances,
frequently came home drunk.
His room was one of the best in the house, on the front, and with a
large bay window commanding the street. It was fairly comfortable and
well furnished, and the draft of soft, chill air that crossed it from
the opened window kept it fresh. Essex, after lighting the gases in the
pendent chandelier, bent and kindled the fire laid in the grate. Like
many foreigners he found San Francisco cold, and after the manner of
his bringing up would no more have denied himself a fire when he was
chilly, than a glass of wine when he was thirsty. Different nations
have their different extravagances, and Essex’s French boyhood had
stamped him with respect for the little comforts of that intelligent
race.
He pulled up an easy-chair and sat down in front of the small blaze,
with his hands out. Its warmth was pleasant, and he stayed thus,
thinking. Presently he smiled slightly, his ear having caught the
sounds of his fellow lodger’s stumbling ascent of the stairs. The man
was evidently drunk again, and he wondered vaguely how he ever managed
to mount the terrace steps with the list to starboard.
The lodger’s door opened, shut, and there was silence. Essex--an
earnest reader--was soon deep in his book. From this he was interrupted
by a step in the passage and a light knock on the door. In response
to his “Come in,” the door opened hesitantly, and the man from across
the hall thrust in his head. It was a head of wild gray hair, with an
old yellow face, seamed and shriveled beneath it. The eyes, which were
beadily dark and set close to the nose, were bloodshot, the lips slack
and uncertain. A very dirty hand was curled round the edge of the door.
“Well, what is it?” said Essex.
“I’ve lost my matches agin,” said the man, in a whiningly apologetic
tone.
“There are some,” said Essex, designating his box on the mantelpiece.
“Take what you want.”
The stranger shambled in, and after scratching about the box with a
tremulous hand, secured a bunch. Essex looked at him with cynical
interest. He was miserably dressed, dirty and ragged. He walked with an
apologetic slouch, as if continually expecting a kick in the rear. He
was evidently very drunk, and the odor of the liquids he had imbibed
compassed him in an ambulating reek.
“Thanks to you, Doc,” he said, as he went out. “So long.”
A few minutes later Essex heard a crash from his neighbor’s room, and
then exclamations of anger and dole. These continuing with an increased
volume, Essex rose and went to the source of sound. The room was pitch
dark, and from it, as from the entrance to the cave of the damned,
imprecations and lamentations were issuing in a strenuous flood. With
the match he had brought he lit the gas, and turning, saw his late
visitor holding by the foot-board of the bed, having overturned a
small stand, which had evidently been surmounted by a nickel clock.
“What the devil do you mean by making such a noise?” he said angrily.
“Pardon, pardon!” said the other humbly, “but I couldn’t find the gas
this time, Doc. This is a small room, but things do get away somehow.”
He looked stupidly about with his bleared eyes. The room was small and
miserably dirty and uninviting.
“There’s a room,” he said suddenly in a loud, dramatic tone and with a
sweep of his arm, “for a man who might er been a bonanza king!”
Essex turned to go.
“If you make any more of this row to-night I’ll see that you’re turned
out to-morrow,” he said haughtily.
He wheeled about on the drunkard as he spoke. The man’s sodden face
was lit with a flash of malevolent intelligence, to be superseded
immediately by a wheedling smile.
“I seen you before to-day,” he said.
“Well, you’ll see me again to-night if you don’t keep quiet, and this
time you won’t like it.”
“You was with a lady, a fine-looking lady.”
“Here--no more of that talk,” said Essex threateningly.
The man stopped, looking furtively at him as if half expecting to be
struck. Essex turned toward the door and passed out. As he did so he
heard him mutter: “And I’d seen her before, too.”
Back in his room the young man took up his book again, but the thread
of his interest was broken. His mind refused to return to the
prescribed channels before it, but began to drift here and there on the
wayward currents of memory.
The house was now perfectly quiet. The little fire had fallen together
into a pleasant core of warmth that genially diffused its heat through
the room. Essex, sprawling in his chair, his long arms following its
arms, his finely-formed, loose-jointed hands depending over the rounded
ends, let his dreaming gaze rest on this red heart of living coal,
while his pipe smoke lay between it and his face in delicate layers.
His thoughts slipped back over childish memories to his first ones,
when he had lived a French boy’s life with his mother in Paris.
He remembered her far back in the days when he sat on her knee and was
read to out of fairy books. She had been very pretty then and very
happy, and had always talked English with him while every one else
spoke French. She had been an Englishwoman, an actress of beauty and
promise, who in the zenith of her popularity had made what the world
called a fine marriage with a rich Venezuelan, who lived in Paris. The
stories of Essex’s doubtful paternity were false. Rose Barry--Rose
Essex, on the stage--had been the lawful wife of Antonio Perez, and for
ten years was the happy wife as well.
They were very prosperous in those days. Barry had gone to the _lycée_
all week and come back every Friday to the beautiful apartment in the
Rue de Ponthieu. There were lovely spring Sundays when they drove in
the Bois and sometimes got out of the carriage and walked down the
sun-flecked _allées_ under the budding trees. And there were even
lovelier winter Sundays when they loitered along the boulevards in the
crisp, clear cold, with the sky showing leaden gray through the barring
of black boughs, and when they came home to a parlor lit with fire and
lamplight and had oranges and hard green grapes after dinner.
He had loved his pretty mother devotedly in those happy days, but for
his saturnine, dark-visaged father he had only a sentiment of uneasy
fear. He was twelve, when at his mother’s request he was sent to
England to school. He could remember, looking back afterward, that his
mother had not been so pretty or so happy then.
When he came home from school for vacations she was living at
Versailles in a little house that presented a secret, non-committal
front to the stony street, but that in the back had a delightful garden
full of miniature fountains and summer-houses and grottoes. From the
wall he could see the mossy trees and stretches of sun-bathed sward of
the Trianon. His father was not always there when he came. One Easter
vacation he was not there at all, and when he had asked his mother why,
she had burst into sudden, terrible tears that frightened him.
During the long summer holidays after that Antonio Perez was only there
once over a Sunday. Then he did not come again, and Barry was glad, for
he had never cared for his father. He passed delightful days in the
Trianon Park with his mother, who was very silent and had gray hair on
her temples. She walked beside him with a slow step, dragging her rich
lace skirts and with her parasol hanging indolently over her shoulder.
It pleased him to see that many people looked at her, but she took no
notice of them.
When Barry went back to England to school that year he began to feel
that he knew what was coming. It came the next vacation. His mother
had not dared to tell him by letter. Her husband had deserted her and
disappeared, leaving her with a few thousand francs in the bank, and
not a friend.
After that there were three miserable years when they lived in a little
apartment on the Rue de Sèvres, up four flights of stairs with a _bonne
à tout faire_. His mother had had to conquer the extravagant habits
of a lifetime, and she did it ill. During the last year of her life
the sale of her jewels kept them. Barry was eighteen when she died,
and those long last days when she lay on the sofa in the remnants of
the rich and splendid clothes she found it so hard to do without were
burned into his memory forever.
Their furniture--some of which was rare and handsome--brought them in
a few hundred francs, and on this he lived for another year, eking out
his substance with his first tentative attempts at journalism. When
he was twenty-one he received a legal notice that his father had died
in Venezuela, leaving him all he possessed, which, debts paid and the
estate settled, amounted to about ten thousand dollars.
This might have been a fortune to the youth, but the bitter bread he
had eaten had soured the best in him. He took his legacy and resolved
to taste of the joy of life. For several years he lived on the crest
of the wave, now and then diverting himself with journalism, the only
profession that attracted him and one in which his talents were
readily recognized. He saw much of the world and its ways, living in
many cities and among many peoples. He tried to cut himself off from
the past, adopting, after his mother’s death, her old stage name of
Essex.
Then, his money spent, there had been a dark interval of bad luck and
despondency, when Barry Essex, the brilliant amateur journalist, had
fallen out of the ranks of people that are seen and talked about.
Without means, he sank to the level of a battered and out-at-elbows
Bohemian. There was a year or two when he swung between London and
Paris, making money as he could and not always frequenting creditable
company. Then the tide of change struck him and he went to New York,
worked there successfully till once again the _Wanderlust_ carried him
farther afield.
He had now arrived at the crucial point of his career. In his vagabond
past there were many episodes best left in darkness, but nothing that
stamped him as an outcast by individual selection. Shady things were
behind him in that dark, morose year when he found disreputable company
to his taste. But he had never stepped quite outside the pale. There
had always been a margin.
Now he stood on that margin. He was thirty years old with shame and
bitterness behind him, and before him the dead monotony of a lifetime
of work. He hated it all. No memory sustained him. The past was as sore
to dwell on as the future was sterile. It was the parting of the ways.
And where they parted he saw Mariposa standing drawing him by the hand
one way, while he gently but persistently drew her the other.
In his softly lit library in his great house at Menlo Park another man
was at that time also thinking of Mariposa. He had been thinking of her
off and on ever since he had bidden her good by that afternoon at Mrs.
Willers’.
As the train had whirled him over the parched, thirsty country, burnt
to a leathern dryness by the summer’s drouth, he had no thought for
anything but his newly discovered daughter. His glance dwelt unseeing
on the tanned fields with their belts of olive eucalyptus woods, and
the turquoise blue of the bay beyond the painted marsh. Men descending
at way stations raised their hats to him as they mounted into the
handsome carriages drawn up by the platform. His return to their
salutes was a preoccupied nod. His mind was full of his child--his
splendid daughter.
Jake Shackleton had not forgotten his first wife and child, as Dan
Moreau and Lucy had always hoped. He was a man of many and secret
interests, pulling many wires, following many trails. He knew their
movements and fortunes from the period of their marriage in Hangtown.
At first this secret espionage was due to fear of their betraying him.
He had begun to prosper shortly after his entrance into the state, and
with prosperity and the slackening of the strain of the trip across the
desert came a realization of what he had done. He saw quickly how the
selling of his wife would appeal to the California mind in those days
fantastically chivalrous to women. He would be undone.
With stealthy persistence he followed the steps of the peaceful couple
who had it in their power to ruin him. Serenity began to come to him as
he heard that the union was singularly happy; that Moreau, confident
no one would molest them, had gone through a ceremony of marriage with
Lucy, and that the child was being brought up as their own.
As wealth came to Shackleton he thought of them with a sort of jealous
triumph. With his remarkable insight into men he knew that Dan Moreau
would never make money; that he was one of the world’s predestined poor
men. Then as riches grew and grew, and the emigrant of the fifties
became the bonanza king of the seventies, he wondered if the time might
not come when they would turn to him.
He would have liked it, for under the cold indifference of his manner
the transaction at the cabin in the Sierra forever haunted him with its
savage shamelessness. It was the one debasing blot on a career which,
hard, selfish, often unprincipled, had yet never, before or after, sunk
to the level of that base action.
When Moreau died at Santa Barbara Shackleton heard it with a sense of
relief. He was secretly becoming very anxious to see his child. Bessie
had borne him two children, a boy and a girl, and it was partly the
disappointment in these that made him desirous of seeing Mariposa. He
knew and Bessie knew that she was his only legitimate child. Though he
had virtually entered California with but one wife, and the blot of
Mormonism had been wiped from his record before he had been two days in
the state, the rumor that he had once been a Mormon still carelessly
passed from mouth to mouth. Should it ever become known that there had
been a former wife, Bessie and her children would have no lawful claim
on him, though the children, as acknowledged and brought up by him,
would inherit part of his estate.
With his great wealth the pride that was one of the dominant
characteristics of his hard and driving nature grew apace. He had
money by millions, but no one to do it credit. It would have been the
crowning delight of his tumultuous career to have a beautiful daughter
or talented son to grace the luxury that surrounded him. But Bessie’s
children were neither of these things. They were dull and commonplace.
Maud was fat and heavy both in mind and body, while Winslow was, to
his father, a slow-witted, characterless youth, without the will,
energy or initiative of either of his parents. Affection not grounded
on admiration was impossible to Shackleton, who sometimes in his
exasperation,--for the successful man bore disappointment ill,--would
say to himself:
“But they are not my real children; I have only one child--Dan Moreau’s
daughter.”
After the death of Moreau he learned that Lucy and Mariposa were in
San Francisco. There he lost trace of them and was forced to consult
a private detective who had done work for him before. It was an easy
matter to find them, and only a few letters passed between him and the
detective. In these the man gave the address and financial condition
of the ladies and added that the daughter was said to be “a beautiful,
estimable and accomplished young woman.” This fired still further
the father’s desire to see her. He learned, too, of their crippled
means and it pleased him to think that now they might be dependent on
him. But he shrank with an unspeakable repugnance from the thought of
seeing Lucy again, and he was for weeks trying to find some way of
meeting Mariposa and not meeting her mother. It was at this stage that,
purely by accident, he learned that Mrs. Willers’ daughter was one of
Mariposa’s pupils. A day or two after he summoned Mrs. Willers to the
interview that finally brought about the meeting.
Satisfied pride was still seething in him when he alighted from the
train and entered the waiting carriage. This magnificent girl was
worthy of him, worthy of the millions that were really hers. She had
everything the others lacked--beauty, charm, talents. Her whole air,
that regalness of aspect which sometimes curiously distinguishes the
simple women of the West, appealed passionately to his ambition and
love of success. She was born to conquer, to be a queen of men. The
image of Maud rose beside her, and seemed clumsier and commoner than
ever. The father felt a slight movement of distaste and irritation
against his second daughter, who had supplanted in his home and in the
world’s regard his elder and fairer child.
The carriage turned in through a lofty gate and rolled at a slackened
pace up a long winding drive. Jacob Shackleton’s Menlo Park estate was
one of the showy ones of that gathering place of rich men’s mansions.
The road wound for some half mile through a stretch of uncultivated
land, dotted with the forms of huge live-oaks. The grass beneath them
was burnt gray and was brittle and slippery. The massive trees, some
round and compact and so densely leaved that they were as impervious
to rain as an umbrella, others throwing out long, gnarled arms as if
spellbound in some giant throe of pain, cast vast slanting shadows
upon the parched ground. Some seemed, like trees in Doré’s drawings,
to be endowed with a grotesque, weird humanness of aspect, as though
an imprisoned dryad or gnome were struggling to escape, causing the
mighty trunk to bow and writhe, and sending tremors of life along each
convulsed limb. A mellow hoariness marked them all, due to their own
richly subdued coloring and the long garlands of silvery moss that hung
from their boughs like an eldrich growth of hair.
A sudden greenness in the sward and brilliant glimpses of flower-beds
pieced in between dark tree-trunks, told of the proximity of the house.
It was a massive structure, architecturally ugly, but gaining a sort of
majesty from its own ponderous bulk and from the splendor of lawns and
trees about it. The last level rays of the sun were now flooding grass
and garden, piercing bosky thickets where greens melted into greens,
and sleeping on stretches of close-cropped emerald turf. From among the
smaller trees the lordly blue pines--that with the oaks were once the
only denizens of the long rich valley--soared up, lonely and somber.
Their crests, stirred by passing airs, emitted eolian murmurings,
infinitely mournful, as if repining for the days when they had ruled
alone.
At the bend in the drive where the road turned off to the stables
Shackleton alighted and walked over the grass toward the house. The
curious silence that is so marked a characteristic of the California
landscape wrapped the place and made it seem like an enchanted palace
held in a spell of sleep. Not a leaf nor pendent flower-bell stirred.
In this hour of warmth and stillness evanescent breaths of fragrance
rose from the carpets of violets that were beginning to bloom about the
roots of the live-oaks.
As he reached the house Maud and a young man came round the corner and
approached him. The girl was dressed in a delicate and elaborate gown
of pale pink frilled with much lace, and with the glint of falling
ribbons gleaming here and there. She carried a pink parasol over her
shoulder, and against the background of variegated greens her figure
looked modish as a fashion-plate. It was a very becoming and elegant
costume, and one in which most young girls would have looked their best.
Maud, who was not pretty, was the type of woman who looks least well in
handsome habiliments. Her irremediable commonness seemed thrown into
higher prominence by adornment. The softly-tinted dress robbed her pale
skin of all glow and made her lifeless brown hair look duller. She had
a round, expressionless face, prominent pale-blue eyes, and a chin that
receded slightly. She was not so plain as she was without vivacity,
interest, or sparkle of youth. With her matter-of-fact manner, heavy
figure, and large, unanimated face she might have been forty instead of
twenty-one.
She was somewhat laboriously coquetting with her companion, a tall,
handsome young Southerner, some six or seven years her senior, whom
her father recognized as one of his superior clerks and shrewdly
suspected of matrimonial designs. At sight of her parent a slight
change passed over her face. She smiled, but not so spontaneously; her
speech faltered, and she said, coming awkwardly forward:
“Oh, Popper! you’re late to-day; were you delayed?”
“Evidently, considering I’m an hour later than usual. Howdy, Latimer;
glad to see you down.”
He stopped and looked at them with the slightest inquiring smile.
Though he said nothing to indicate it, both, knowing him in different
aspects, felt he was not pleased. His whole personality seemed to
radiate a cold antagonism.
“It’s good you got down anyhow,” said Maud constrainedly; “this is much
nicer than town, isn’t it, Mr. Latimer?”
All the joy had been taken out of Latimer by his chief’s obvious and
somewhat terrifying displeasure. Had he been alone with Maud, he would
have known well how to respond to her remark with Southern fervency of
phrase. But now he only said with stiff politeness:
“Oh, this is quite ideal!” and lapsed into uncomfortable silence.
“Was it some one interesting that made you late?” queried Maud, as her
father made no attempt to continue the conversation.
“Very,” he responded; “handsome and interesting.”
“Won’t you tell us about them?” the girl asked, feeling that the word
“handsome” contained a covert allusion to her own lack of beauty of
which she was extremely sensitive.
“Not now, and I don’t think it would interest you much, anyway. Is your
mother indoors?”
The girl nodded and he turned away and disappeared round the corner of
the house. She and Latimer sauntered on.
“The handsome and interesting person doesn’t seem to have made your
paternal any fuller than usual of the milk of human kindness,” said the
young man, whose suit had progressed further than people guessed.
“Popper’s often like that,” said Maud slowly,--and in a prettier and
more attractive girl the tone and manner of the remark would have been
charmingly plaintive,--“I don’t know what makes him so.”
“He can be more like a patent congealing ice-box when he wants to be
than anybody I ever saw. But I don’t see why he should be so to you.”
“I don’t, either, but he is often. He never says anything exactly
disagreeable, but he makes me feel sort of--of--mean. Sometimes I think
he doesn’t like me at all.”
“Oh, bosh!” said Latimer gallantly; “if that’s the case he’s ripe for a
commission of lunacy.”
Shackleton meantime had entered the house and ascended to his
dressing-room. He was in there making the small change which marked his
dinner from his business toilet when his wife entered.
The years had turned Bessie into a buxom, fine-looking matron,
fashionably dressed, but inclined to be very stout. Her eye and
its glance were sharp and keen-edged, still alight with vigor and
alertness. It was easy to see why Jake Shackleton, the reader of
character, had set aside his feeble first wife for this dominating and
forceful partner. He had been faithful to her; after a fashion had
loved her, and certainly admired her, for she had the characteristics
he most respected.
In his success she had been the same assistance that she had been in
his poverty. She had climbed the social heights and conquered the
impregnable position they now occupied. Her rich dress, her handsome
appearance, her agreeably modulated voice, all were in keeping with the
position and great wealth that were theirs. The house of which she was
the mistress was admirably ordered and sumptuously furnished. She had
only disappointed him in one way--her children.
“What made you late?” she, too, asked; “several people came down this
afternoon.”
“I was detained--a girl Mrs. Willers wanted me to see; who’s here?”
“Latimer, and Count de Lamolle, and George Herron and the Thurston
girls; and the Delanceys are coming over to dinner.”
He nodded at the names--Bessie knew well how to arrange her parties.
The Thurstons were two impoverished sisters of great beauty and that
proud Southern stock of which early California thought so highly
and rewarded in most cases with poverty. Count de Lamolle was a
distinguished foreigner that she was considering for Maud. The other
two young men filled in nicely. The Delanceys were a brother and
sister, claimants of the great Delancey Grant, which was now in
litigation. It had come into their possession by the marriage of their
grandmother, the Senorita Concepcion de Briones, in ’36, to the Yankee
skipper, Jeremiah Delancey.
“Who was the girl Mrs. Willers wanted you to see?” Bessie asked.
“Oh, I’ll tell you about her to-morrow. It’s a long story, and I don’t
want to be hurried over it.”
He had made up his mind that he would tell Bessie he had seen and
intended to assist his eldest child. He had always been frank with her
and he was not going to dissemble now. He knew that with all her faults
she was a generous woman.