THE VISION AND THE DREAM
“For a dream cometh through the multitude of business.”
--ECCLESIASTES.
As the carriage turned the corner into Third Street, Shackleton and
Mrs. Willers, bidding their adieux to Lepine, started toward _The
Trumpet_ office. The building was not ten minutes’ walk away, and both
the proprietor and the woman reporter had work there that called them.
In their different ways each was exceedingly elated. The man, with
his hard, bearded face, the upper half shaded by the brim of his soft
felt hat, gave no evidence in appearance or manner of the exultation
that possessed him. But the woman, with her more febrile and less
self-contained nature, showed her excited gratification in her reddened
cheeks and the sparkling animation of her tired eyes. Her state of
joyous triumph was witnessed even in her walk, in the way she swished
her skirts over the pavements, in the something youthful and buoyant
that had crept into the tones of her voice.
“Well,” she said, “that _was_ an experience worth having! I never heard
her sing so before. She just outdid herself.”
“She certainly seemed to me to sing well. I was doubtful at the
beginning, not knowing any more about singing than I do about Sanskrit,
as to whether she really had as fine a voice as we thought. But there
don’t seem to me to be any doubt about it now.”
“Lepine is quite certain, is he?” queried Mrs. Willers, who had tried
to listen to the conversation between her chief and the impresario on
the way out, but had been foiled by Mariposa’s excited chatter.
“He says that she has an unusually fine voice, which, with proper
training, would, as far as they can say now, be perfectly suitable
for grand opera. It’s what they call a dramatic mezzo-soprano, with
something particularly good about the lower notes. Lepine is to see me
again before he goes.”
“Did he suggest what she ought to do?”
“Yes; he spoke of Paris as the best place to send her. He knows some
famous teacher there that he says is the proper person for her to study
with. He seemed to think that two years of study would be sufficient
for her. She’d be ready to make her appearance in grand opera after
that time.”
“Good heavens!” breathed Mrs. Willers in a transport of pious triumph,
“just think of it! And now up in that cottage on Pine Street getting
fifty cents a lesson, and with only four pupils.”
“In two years,” said Shackleton, who was speaking more to himself than
to her, “she’ll be twenty-seven years old--just in her prime.”
“She’ll be twenty-six,” corrected Mrs. Willers; “she’s only twenty-four
now.”
He raised his brows with a little air of amused apology.
“Twenty-four, is it?” he said. “Well, that’s all the better. Twenty-six
is one year better than twenty-seven.”
“It’ll be like the ‘Innocents Abroad’ to see her and her mother
in Paris,” said Mrs. Willers. “They’re just two of the most
unsophisticated females that ever strayed out of the golden age.”
The man vouchsafed no answer to this remark for a moment; then he said:
“The mother’s health is very delicate? She’s quite an invalid, you say?”
“Quite. But she’s one of the sweetest, most uncomplaining women you
ever laid eyes on. You’d understand the daughter better if you knew the
mother. She’s so gentle and girlish. And then they’ve lived round in
such a sort of quiet, secluded way. It’s funny to me because they had
plenty of money when Mr. Moreau was alive. But they never seemed to go
into society, or know many people; they just seemed enough for each
other, especially when the father was with them. They simply adored
him, and he must have been a fine man. They--”
“Is Mrs. Moreau’s state of health too bad to allow her to travel?” said
Shackleton, interrupting suddenly and rudely.
Mrs. Willers colored slightly. She knew her chief well enough to
realize that his tone indicated annoyance. Why did he so dislike to
hear anything about the late Dan Moreau?
“As to that I don’t know,” she said. “She’s so much of an invalid that
she rarely goes out. But with good care she might be able to take a
journey and benefit by it. A sea trip sometimes cures people.”
“Miss Moreau couldn’t, and, I have no doubt, wouldn’t leave her. It’ll
therefore be necessary for the mother to go to Paris with the girl, and
if she is so complete and helpless an invalid she’ll certainly be of no
assistance to her daughter--only a care.”
“She’d undoubtedly be a care. But a person couldn’t separate those
two. They’re wrapped up in each other. It’s a pity you don’t know Mrs.
Moreau, Mr. Shackleton.”
For the second time that afternoon Mrs. Willers was conscious that
words she had intended to be gently ingratiating had given mysterious
offense to her employer. Now he said, with more than an edge of
sharpness to his words:
“I’ve no doubt it’s a pity, Mrs. Willers. But there are so many things
and people it’s a pity I don’t know, that if I came to think it over
I’d probably fall into a state of melancholia. Also, let me assure you,
that I haven’t the least intention of trying to separate Mrs. Moreau
and her daughter. What I’m just now bothered about is the fact that
this lady is hardly of sufficient worldly experience, and certainly has
not sufficient strength to take care of the girl in a strange country.”
“Well, no,” said Mrs. Willers with slow reluctance, “it would be the
other way round, the girl would be taking care of her.”
“That’s exactly what I thought. The only way out of it will be to send
some one with them. A woman who could take care of them both, chaperone
the daughter and look after the mother.”
There was a silence. Mrs. Willers began to understand why Mr.
Shackleton had walked down to _The Trumpet_ office with her. The walk
was over, for they were at the office door, and the conversation had
reached the point to which he had evidently intended to bring it before
they parted.
As they turned into the arched doorway and began the ascent of the
stairs, Mrs. Willers replied:
“I think that would be a very good idea, Mr. Shackleton. That is, if
you can find the right woman.”
“Oh, I’ve got her now,” he answered, giving her a quick, side-long
glance. “I think it would be a good arrangement for all parties. _The
Trumpet_ wants a Paris correspondent.”
The door leading into the press-rooms opened off the landing they had
reached, and he turned into this with a word of farewell, and a hand
lifted to his hat brim. Mrs. Willers continued the ascent alone. As she
mounted upward she said to herself:
“The best thing for me to do is to get a French phrase book on the way
home this evening, and begin studying: ‘Have you the green pantaloons
of the miller’s mother?’”
The elation of his mood was still with Shackleton when, two hours
later, he alighted from the carriage at the steps of his country
house. He went upstairs to his own rooms with a buoyant tread. In his
library, with the windows thrown open to the soft, scented air, he sat
smoking and thinking. The October dusk was closing in, when he heard
the wheels of a carriage on the drive and the sound of voices. His
women-folk with the second of the Thurston girls--the one guest the
house now contained--were returning from the afternoon round of visits
that was the main diversion of their life during the summer months, and
swept the country houses from Redwood City to Menlo Park.
It was a small dinner table that evening. Winslow had stayed in town
over night, and Shackleton sat at the head of a shrunken board, with
Bessie opposite him, his daughter to the left, and Pussy Thurston on
his right. Pussy was Maud’s best friend and was one of the beauties of
San Francisco. To-night she looked especially pretty in a pale green
crape dress, with green leaves in her fair hair. Her skin was of a
shell-like purity of pink and white, her face was small, with regular
features and a sweet, childish smile.
She and her sister were the only children of the famous Judge
Beauregard Thurston, in his day one of those brilliant lawyers who
brought glory to the California bar. He had made a fortune, lived
on it recklessly and magnificently, and died leaving his daughters
almost penniless. He had been in the heyday of his splendor when Jake
Shackleton, just struggling into the public eye, had come to San
Francisco, and the proud Southerner had not scrupled to treat the raw
mining man with careless scorn. Shackleton evened the score before
Thurston’s death, and he still soothed his wounded pride with the
thought that the two daughters of the man who had once despised him
were largely dependent on his wife’s charity. Bessie took them to balls
and parties, dressed them, almost fed them. The very green crape gown
in which Pussy looked so pretty to-night had been included in Maud’s
bill at a fashionable dressmaker’s.
Personally he liked Pussy, whose beauty and winning manners lent a
luster to his house. Once or twice to-night she caught him looking
at her with a cold, debating glance in which there was little of the
admiration she was accustomed to receiving since the days of her first
long dress.
He was in truth regarding her critically for the first time, for the
Bonanza King was a man on whom the beauty of women cast no spell.
He was comparing her with another and a more regally handsome girl.
Pussy Thurston would look insipid and insignificant before the stately
splendor of his own daughter.
He smiled as he realized Mariposa’s superiority. The young girl saw the
smile, and said with the privileged coquetry of a maid who all her life
has known herself favored above her fellows:
“Why are you smiling all to yourself, Mr. Shackleton? Can’t we know if
it is something pleasant?”
“I was looking at something pretty,” he answered, his eyes full of
amusement as they rested on her charming face. “That generally makes
people smile.”
She was so used to such remarks that her rose-leaf color did not vary
the fraction of a shade. Maud, to whom no one ever paid compliments,
looked at her with wistful admiration.
“Is that all?” she said with an air of disappointment. “I hoped it was
something that would make us all smile.”
“Well, I have an idea that may make you all smile”--he turned to his
wife--“how would you like to go to Europe next spring, Bessie?”
Mrs. Shackleton looked surprised and not greatly elated. On their last
trip to Europe, two years before, her husband had been so bored by the
joys of foreign travel that she had made up her mind she would never
ask him to go again. Now she said:
“But you don’t want to go to Europe. You said last time you hated it.”
“Did I? Yes, I guess I did. Well, I’m prepared to like it this time.
We could take a spin over in the spring to London and Paris. We’d make
quite a stay in Paris, and you women could buy clothes. You’d come,
too, Pussy, wouldn’t you?” he said, turning to the girl.
Her color rose now and her eyes sparkled. She had never been even to
New York.
“Wouldn’t I?” she said. “That _does_ make me smile.”
“I thought so,” he answered good-humoredly--“and Maud, you’d like it,
of course?”
Maud did not like the thought of going at all. In this little party of
four, two were moved in their actions by secret predilections of which
the others were ignorant. Maud thought of leaving her love affair at
the critical point it had reached, and, with anguish at her heart,
looked heavily indifferent.
“I don’t know,” she said, crumbling her bread, “I don’t think it’s such
fun in Europe. You just travel round in little stuffy trains, and have
to live in hotels without baths.”
“Well, you and I, Pussy,” said Shackleton, “seem to be the only two
who’ve got any enthusiasm. You’ll have to try and put some into Maud,
and if the worst comes to the worst we can kidnap the old lady.”
He was in an unusually good temper, and the dinner was animated and
merry. Only Maud, after the European suggestion, grew more stolidly
quiet than ever. But she cheered herself by the thought that the spring
was six months off yet, and who could tell what might happen in six
months?
After dinner the ladies repaired to the music room, and Shackleton,
following a custom of his, passed through one of the long windows into
the garden, there to pace up and down while he smoked his cigar.
The night was warm and odorous with the scent of hidden blossoms. Now
and then his foot crunched the gravel of a path, as his walk took him
back and forth over the long stretch of lawn broken by flower-beds and
narrow walks. The great bulk of the house, its black mass illumined by
congeries of lit windows, showed an inky, irregular outline against the
star-strewn sky.
Presently the sound of a piano floated out from the music room. The
man stopped his pacing, listened for an instant, and then passed round
to the side of the house. The French windows of the music room were
opened, throwing elongated squares of light over the balcony and the
grass beyond. He paused in the darkness and looked through one of them.
There, like a painting framed by the window casing, was Pussy Thurston
seated at the piano singing, while Maud sat near by listening. One of
Miss Thurston’s most admired social graces was the gift of song. She
had a small agreeable voice, and had been well taught; but the light,
frail tones sounded thin in the wide silence of the night. It was the
feebly pretty performance of the “accomplished young lady.”
Shackleton listened with a slight smile that increased as the song drew
to a close. As it ceased he moved away, the red light of his cigar
coming and going in the darkness.
“Singing!” he said to himself, “they call that singing! Wait till they
hear my daughter!”