A GALA NIGHT
“He looked at her as a lover can;
She looked at him as one who awakes.”
--BROWNING.
From his first meeting with her, Barry Essex had conceived a deep
interest in Mariposa. He had known women of many and divers sorts,
and loved a few after the manner of his kind, which was to foster
indolently a selfish caprice. Marriage was out of the question for
him unless with money, and some instinct, perhaps inherited from his
romantic and deeply-loving mother, made this singularly repugnant to
his nature, which was neither sensitive nor scrupulous. The mystery and
hazard of life appealed passionately to him, and to exchange this for
the dull monotony of a rich marriage was an unbearably irksome thought
to his unrestrained and adventurous spirit.
Mariposa’s charm had struck him deep. He had never before met that
combination of extreme simplicity of character with the unconscious
majesty of appearance which marked the child of the far West. He saw
her in that Europe, which was his home, as a conquering queen; and he
thought proudly of himself as the owner of such a woman. Moreover he
was certain that her voice, properly trained and directed, would be a
source of wealth. She seemed to him the real vocal artist, stupid in
all but one great gift; in that, preëminent.
Mariposa was trembling on the verge of a first love. She had never
seen any one like Essex and regarded him as the most distinguished and
brilliant of beings. His attentions flattered her as she had never been
flattered before, and she found herself constantly wondering what he
saw in a girl who must appear to him so raw.
Her experience of men was small. Once in Sacramento, when she was
eighteen, she had received an offer from a young lawyer, and two years
ago, in Santa Barbara, she had been the recipient of a second, from a
prosperous rancher. Both had been refused without hesitation, and had
left no mark on imagination or heart. Then, at a critical period of
her life--lonely, poor, a stranger in a strange city--she had fallen
in with Essex, and for the first time felt the thrill at the sound of
a footstep, the quickening pulse and flushing cheek at the touch of
a hand, that she had read of in novels. She thought that nobody had
seen this; but the eyes of the dangerous man under whose spell she had
fallen were watching her with wary yet ardent interest.
He had known her now for three months and had seen her frequently. His
visits at the Pine Street cottage were augmented by occasional meetings
at Mrs. Willers’, when that lady was at home and receiving company, and
by walks together. Of late, too, he had asked her to go to the theater
with him. Lucy was always included in these invitations, but was
unable to go. The theater was an untarnished delight to Mariposa, and
to refuse her the joy of an evening spent there was not in the mother’s
heart. Moreover, Lucy, in her agony at the thought of leaving the girl
alone in the world, watched Essex with a desperate anxiety trying
to fathom his feelings. It seemed to the unworldly woman, that this
attractive gentleman might have been sent by fate to be the husband who
was to love and guard the child when the mother was gone.
A few days after the party at Mrs. Willers’ rooms Essex had invited
Mariposa to go with him to a performance of “Il Trovatore,” to be given
at Wade’s opera-house. The company, managed by a Frenchman called
Lepine, was one of those small foreign ones that in those days toured
the West to their own profit and the pleasure of their audiences. The
star was advertised as a French diva of European renown. Essex had
heard her on the continent, and pronounced her well worth hearing, if
rather too fat to be satisfying to the esthetic demands of the part of
Leonora. Grand opera was still something of a rarity in San Francisco
and it promised to be an occasion. The papers printed the names of
those who had bought boxes. Mariposa had read that evening that Jacob
Shackleton would occupy the left-hand proscenium box with his wife and
family.
“His daughter,” said Mariposa, standing in front of the glass as she
put on finishing touches, “is ugly, Mrs. Willers says. I think that’s
the way it ought to be. It wouldn’t be fair to be an heiress and
handsome.”
“It wouldn’t be fair for you to be an heiress, certainly,” commented
the mother from her armchair.
“You don’t think I abuse the privilege a penniless girl has of being
good-looking?” said Mariposa, turning from the glass with a twinkling
eye.
She looked her best and knew it. Relics of better days lingered in
the bureau drawers and jewel boxes of these ladies as they did in the
small parlor. That night they had been mustered in their might for
Mariposa’s decking. She was proud in the consciousness that the dress
of fine black lace she wore, through the meshes of which her statuesque
arms and neck gleamed like ivory, was made from a shawl that in its day
had been a costly possession. Her throat was bare, the lace leaving it
free and closing below it. Where the black edges came together over the
white skin a small brooch of diamonds was fastened. Below the rim of
her hat, her hair glowed like copper, and the coloring of her lips and
cheeks was deepened by excitement into varying shades of coral.
As they entered the theater, Essex was aware that many heads were
turned in their direction. But Mariposa was too imbued with the joyous
unusualness of the moment to notice it. She had forgotten herself
entirely, and sitting a little forward, her lips parted, surveyed the
rustling and fast-filling house.
The glow of the days of Comstock glory was still in the air. San
Francisco was still the city of gold and silver. The bonanza kings had
not left it, but were trying to accommodate themselves to the palaces
they were rearing with their loose millions. Society yet retained its
cosmopolitan tone, careless, brilliant, and unconventional. There were
figures in it that had made it famous--men who began life with a pick
and shovel and ended it in an orgy of luxury; women, whose habits of
early poverty dropped from them like a garment, and who, carried away
by their power, displayed the barbaric caprices of Roman empresses.
The sudden possession of vast wealth had intoxicated this people,
lifting them from the level of the commonplace into a saturnalia of
extravagance. Poverty, the only restraint many of them had ever felt,
was gone. Money had made them lawless, whimsical, bizarre. It had
developed all-conquering personalities, potent individualities. They
were still playing with it, wondering at it, throwing it about.
Essex let his glance roam over the audience, that filled the parquet,
and the three horseshoes above it. It struck him as being more Latin
than American. That foreignness which has always clung to California
was curiously pronounced in this gathering of varied classes. He
saw many faces with the ebon hair and olive skins of the Spanish
Californians, lovely women, languid and fawn-eyed, badly dressed--for
they were almost all poor now, who once were lords of the soil.
The great Southern element which, in its day, set the tone of the city
and contributed much to its traditions of birth and breeding, was
already falling into the background. Many of its women had only their
beauty left, and this they had adorned, as Mariposa had hers, with such
remnants of the days when Plancus was consul, as remained--bits of
jewelry, old and unmodish but cumbrously handsome, edgings of lace,
a pale-colored feather in an old hat, a crape shawl worn with an air,
a string of beads carried bravely, though beads were no longer in the
mode.
An arrogant air of triumph marked the Irish Californians. With the
opening up of the Comstock they had stuck their flag on the summit
of the heights. They had always found California kindly, but by the
discovery of that mountain of silver they had become kings where they
were once content to serve. The Irish face, sometimes in its primeval,
monkey-like ugliness, sometimes showing the fresh colored, blowsy
prettiness of the colleens by their native bogs, repeated itself
on every side. Now and then one of them shone out like a painting
by Titian--the Hibernian of the red-gold hair and milk-white skin,
refined by luxury and delicate surroundings into a sumptuous and
arresting beauty. Many showed the metal that had carried their fathers
on to victory. Others were only sleek, smooth-skinned animals, lazy,
sensuous, and sly. And these women, whose mothers had run barefoot,
were dressed with the careless splendor of those to whom a diamond is a
detail.
Essex raised his glass from the perusal of the sea of faces, to the
box which the Shackleton party had just entered. There was no question
about the Americanism of this group, the young man thought, as he
stared at Jake Shackleton. Square-set and unadorned, in the evening
dress which Bessie made him wear, he sat back from the velvet railing,
an uncompromising figure of dynamic force, unbeautiful, shrewd, the
most puissant presence in that brilliant assemblage.
The two ladies in the front of the box were Mrs. and Miss Shackleton.
The former was floridly handsome, almost aristocratic, the gazer
thought, looking at her firmly-modeled, composed face under its roll
of gray hair. The daughter was very like her father, but ugly. Even
in the costly French costume she wore, with the gleam of diamonds in
her hair, about her neck, in the lace on her bosom, she was ugly.
Essex, with that thought of marrying money in the background of his
mind, scrutinized her. To rectify his fortune in such a way became
more repugnant than ever. If Mariposa had only been Jake Shackleton’s
daughter instead!
He turned and looked at her. She met his glance with eyes darkened by
excitement.
“There’s Mr. Shackleton in the box,” she said eagerly, in a
half-whisper. “Did you see?”
“Yes, I’ve been looking, and that’s his daughter, Maud Shackleton, in
the white with diamonds.”
“Is it? Oh, what a beautiful dress! and quantities of diamonds. Almost
too many; they twinkle like water, as if some one had squeezed a sponge
over her.”
“What can you do when you’re a bonanza king’s daughter and as ugly
as that? You’ve got to keep up your end of the line some way. She
evidently thinks diamonds are the best way.”
Essex took the glass and looked at the bedecked heiress again. After
some moments he put it down and turned to Mariposa with a quizzical
smile.
“Do you know I’m going to say something very funny, but look at her
well. Does she look like anybody you know?”
The girl looked and shook her head:
“Like her father a little,” she said, “but no one else I can think of.”
“No, not her father. Some one you know intimately and see often--very
often, if you’re as vain as you ought to be.”
“Who?” she demanded, frowning and looking puzzled; “I can’t think whom
you mean.”
“Yourself; she looks like you.”
Mariposa gave a quick look at the girl and then at Essex. For the
moment she thought he was mocking her, but with her second look at the
box, the likeness suddenly struck her.
“She is,” she said slowly, reaching for the glass; “yes,” putting it
down, “I see it--she is. How funny! and fancy your telling me on top of
the statement that she was so ugly! I don’t see how I can smile again
this evening.”
She smiled with the words on her lips, the charming smile of a woman
who knows her silliest phrases are delightful to one man at least.
“I’m not entirely like her?” she asked, with a somewhat anxious air; “I
haven’t got those pale-gray, prominent eyes, have I?”
“No, you’ve got mysterious dark eyes, as deep as wells, and when I look
into them, down, down, I sometimes wonder if I can see your heart at
the bottom. Can I? Let me see.”
He leaned forward as if to look straight into her eyes. Mariposa
suddenly flushing and feeling uncomfortable, dropped them. The
sensation she so often experienced with Essex, of being awkward and
raw, was intensified now by the annoyed embarrassment provoked by the
florid gallantry of his words. But she was too inexperienced a little
fly to deal with this cunning spider, and tangled herself worse in the
web by saying nervously:
“And my nose! I haven’t got that kind of nose? Oh, surely not,” putting
up a gloved hand to feel of its unsatisfactoriness.
“You have the dearest little nose in the world, straight as a Greek
statue’s. It’s a little bit haughty, but I like it that way. And your
mouth,” he dropped his voice slightly, “your mouth--”
Mariposa made a sudden movement of annoyance. She threw up her head and
looked at the curtain with frowning brows.
“Don’t,” she said sharply, “I don’t like you to talk about me like
that.”
Essex was silent, regarding her profile with a deliberating eye and
a slight, amused smile. How crude she was and how handsome! After a
moment’s silence, he leaned toward her and said in a voice full of
good-humored banter:
“Butterfly! Butterfly! Why did they call you Butterfly?”
The change in his tone and manner put her back at once on the old
footing of gay bonhomie.
“In English, that way, it sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? Fancy me being
called Butterfly! I was called after the flower. My whole name is
Mariposa Lily.”
“Mariposa Lily!” he repeated in amused amazement; “what an absurd name!”
“Absurd!” said Mariposa indignantly. “I don’t see anything absurd
about it. I think it very pretty. My mother called me after the flower,
the first time she saw it. They couldn’t find a suitable name for me
for a long time, and then when she saw the flower she decided at once
to call me after it. It’s the most beautiful wild flower in California.”
“It’s fortunate you were not called Eschscholtzia,” said Essex, who
thought the name extremely ridiculous, and who found a somewhat mean
amusement in teasing the girl; “you might just as well have been called
Eschscholtzia Poppy.”
The spirited reply which was on Mariposa’s lips was stopped by the
rising of the curtain. The crowded, rustling house settled itself into
silence, the orchestra’s subdued notes rolled out with the voices
swelling above them into the listening auditorium.
The rest of the evening was an enchanted dream to her. She had never
seen an opera, and for the first time realized what it might mean to
possess a voice. She heard the house thunder its applause to Leonora,
and thought of herself as singing thus, standing alone on that dim
stage, looking out over the sea of faces, all listening, all staring,
all spellbound, hanging on the notes that fell, sweet and rich,
thrilling and passionate, from her lips. Could there ever be such a
life for her? Did they tell the truth when they spoke so admiringly
of her voice? Could she ever sing like this? A surge of exultant
conviction rose in her, and sent its whisper of hope and ambition to
her throbbing brain.
As the opera progressed she grew pale and motionless. The wild thought
was gaining possession of her, that she, Mariposa Moreau, with her
four pupils and her sixteen dollars a month, could sing as well as this
woman of European renown, for whom Essex, the critical, the vastly
experienced, had words of praise. Once or twice it seemed to her as
if the notes were swelling in her own throat, were pressing to burst
out and soar up, higher, fuller, richer than the woman’s on the stage.
Oh, the rapture of being able to pour out one’s voice, to give wild,
melodious expression to love or despair, while a thousand people hung
this way on one’s lips!
As the curtain fell for the third time she turned to Essex, pale and
large-eyed, and said breathlessly:
“I could sing as well as that woman if I had more lessons; I know I
could! I know it!”