ITS EFFECT
“Flower o’ the peach,
Death for us all, and his own life for each.”
--BROWNING.
Jake Shackleton did not come up from San Mateo on Monday, as Mrs.
Willers expected, and the first intimation he had of Lucy’s death was
the short notice in the paper.
He had come down the stairs early on Tuesday morning into the wide
hall, with its doors thrown open to the fragrant air. With the paper
in his hand, he stood on the balcony looking about and inhaling the
freshness of the morning. The rain had washed the country clean of
every fleck of dust, burnished every leaf, and had called into being
blossoms that had been awaiting its summons.
From beneath the shade made by the long, gnarled limbs of the
live-oaks, the perfume of the violets rose delicately, their crowding
clusters of leaves a clear green against the base of the hoary trunks.
The air that drifted in from the idle, yellow fields beyond was
impregnated with the breath of the tar-weed--one of the most pungent
and impassioned odors Nature has manufactured in her vast laboratory,
characteristic scent to rise from the dry, yet fecund grass-lands
of California. In the perfect, crystalline stillness these mingled
perfumes rose like incense to the new day.
Shackleton looked about him, the paper in his hand. He had little love
for Nature, but the tranquil-scented freshness of the hour wrung its
tribute of admiration from him. What an irony that the one child he
had, worth having gained all this for, should be denied it. Mariposa,
thus framed, would have added the last touch to the triumphs of his
life.
With an exclamation of impatience he sat down on the top step, and
opening the paper, ran his glance down its columns. He had been looking
over it for several minutes before the death notice of Lucy struck his
eye. It took away his breath. He read it again, at first not crediting
it. He was entirely unprepared, having merely thought of Lucy as
“delicate.” Now she was dead.
He dropped the paper on his knee and sat staring out into the garden.
The news was more of a shock than he could have imagined it would be.
Was it the lately roused pride in his child that had reawakened some
old tenderness for the mother? Or was it that the thought of Lucy,
dead, called back memories of that shameful past?
He sat, staring, till a step on the balcony roused him, and turning, he
saw his son. Win, though only twenty-three, was of the order of beings
who do not look well in the morning. He was slightly built and thin and
had a rasped, pink appearance, as though he felt cold. Stories were
abroad that Win was dissipated, stories, by the way, that were largely
manufactured by himself. He was at that age when a reputation for
deviltry has its attractions. In fact, he was amiable, gentle and far
too lacking in spirit to be the desperate rake he liked to represent
himself. He had a wholesome fear of his father, whose impatience
against him was not concealed by surface politeness as in Maud’s case.
Standing with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, his chest hollowed,
his red-rimmed eyes half shut behind the _pince-nez_ he always wore,
and his slight mustache not sufficient to hide a smile, the foolishness
of which rose from embarrassment, he was not a son to fill a father’s
heart with pride.
“Howdy, Governor,” he said, trying to be easy; then, seeing the paper
in his father’s hand, folded back at the death notices, “anybody new
born, dead, or married this morning?”
His voice rasped unbearably on his father’s mood. The older man gave
him a look over his shoulder, with a face that made the boy quail.
“Get away,” he said, savagely; “get in the house and leave me alone.”
Win turned and entered the house. The foolish smile was still on his
lips. Pride kept it there, but at heart he was bitterly wounded.
At the foot of the stairway he met his mother.
“You’d better not go out there,” he said, with a movement of his head
in the direction of his father; “it’s as much as your life’s worth. The
old man’ll bite your nose off if you do.”
“Is your father cross?” asked Bessie.
“Cross? He oughtn’t to be let loose when he’s like that.”
“Something in the paper must have upset him,” said Bessie. “He was all
right this morning before he came down. Something on the stock market’s
bothered him.”
“Maybe so,” said his son, with a certain feeling. “But that’s no reason
why he should speak to me like a dog. He goes too far when he speaks to
me that way. There isn’t a servant in the house would stand it.”
He balanced back and forth on his toes and heels, looking down,
his face flushed. It would have been hard to say--such was the
characterless insignificance of his appearance--whether he was really
hurt, as a man would be in his heart and his pride, or only momentarily
stung by a scornful word.
Bessie passed him and went out on the balcony. Her husband was still
sitting on the steps, the paper in his hand.
“What is it, Jake?” she said. “Win says you’re cross. Something gone
wrong?”
“Lucy’s dead,” he answered, rising to his feet and handing her the
paper.
She paled a little as she read the notice. Then, raising her eyes, they
met his. In this look was their knowledge of the secret that both had
struggled to keep, and that now, at last, was theirs.
For the second time in a half-year, Death had stepped in and claimed
one of the four whose lives had touched so briefly and so momentously
twenty-five years before.
“Poor Lucy!” said Bessie, in a low voice. “But they say she was very
happy with Moreau. You can do something for your--for the girl now.”
“Yes,” he said; “I’ll think it over. I won’t be down to breakfast. Send
up some coffee.”
He went upstairs and locked himself in his library. He could not
understand why the news had affected him so deeply. It seemed to make
him feel sick. He did not tell Bessie that he had gone upstairs because
he felt too ill and shaken to see any one.
All morning he sat in the library, with frowning brows, thinking.
At noon he took the train for the city and, soon after its arrival,
despatched to Mariposa the five hundred dollars. He had no doubt of
her accepting it, as it never crossed his mind that Lucy, at the last
moment, might have told.
* * * * *
The days that followed her mother’s funeral passed to Mariposa like
a series of gray dreams, dreadful, with an unfamiliar sense of
wretchedness. The preoccupation of her mother’s illness was gone. There
were idle hours, when she sat in her rooms and tried to realize the
full meaning of Lucy’s last words. She would sit motionless, staring
before her, her heart feeling shriveled in her breast. Her life seemed
broken to pieces. She shrank from the future, with the impossibilities
she had pledged herself to. And the strength and inspiration of the
beautiful past were gone. All the memories of that happy childhood
and young maidenhood were blasted. It was natural that the shock
and the subsequent brooding should make her view of the subject
morbid. The father that she had grown up to regard with reverential
tenderness, had not been hers. The mother, who had been a cherished
idol, had hidden a dark secret. And she, herself, was an outsider from
the home she had so deeply loved--child of a brutal and tyrannical
father--originally adopted and cared for out of pity.
It was a crucial period in her life. Old ideals were gone, and new ones
not yet formed. There seemed only ruins about her, and amid these she
sought for something to cling to, and believe in. With secret passion
she nursed the thought of Essex--all she had left that had not been
swept away in the deluge of this past week.
Fortunately for her, the business calls of the life of a woman left
penniless shook her from her state of brooding idleness. The cottage
was hers for a month longer, and despite the impoverished condition of
the widow, there was a fair amount of furniture still left in it that
was sufficiently valuable to be a bait to the larger dealers. Mariposa
found her days varied by contentions with men, who came to stare at the
great red lacquer cabinet and investigate the interior condition of the
marquetry sideboard. When the month was up she was to move to a small
boarding-house, kept by Spaniards called Garcia, that Mrs. Willers, in
her varying course, included among her habitats. The Garcias would not
object to her piano and practising, and it was amazingly cheap. Mrs.
Willers herself had lived there in one of her periods of eclipse, and
knew them to be respectable denizens of a somewhat battered Bohemia.
“But you’re going to be a Bohemian yourself, being a musical genius,”
she said cheerfully. “So you won’t mind that.”
Mariposa did not think she would mind. In the chaotic dimness of the
dismantled front parlor she looked like a listless goddess who would
not mind anything.
Mrs. Willers thought her state of dreary apathy curious and spoke of
it to Shackleton, whom she now recognized as the girl’s acknowledged
guardian. He had listened to her account of Mariposa’s broken condition
with expressionless attention.
“Isn’t it natural, all things considered, that a girl should be
broken-hearted over the death of a devoted mother? And, as I understand
it, Miss Moreau is absolutely alone. She has no relatives anywhere.
It’s a pretty bleak outlook.”
“That’s true. I never saw a girl left so without connections. But she
worries me. She’s so silent, and dull, and unlike herself. Of course,
it’s been a terrible blow. I’d have thought she’d been more prepared.”
He shrugged his shoulders, stroking his short beard with his lean,
heavily-veined hand. It amused him to see the way Mrs. Willers was
quietly pushing him into the position of the girl’s sponsor. And at
the same time it heightened his opinion of her as a woman of capacity
and heart. She would be an ideal chaperone and companion for his
unprotected daughter.
“When she feels better,” he said, “I wish you’d bring her down here
again. Don’t bother her until she feels equal to it. But I want to talk
to her about Lepine’s ideas for her. I saw him again and he gave me a
lot of information about Paris and teachers and all the rest of it.
Before we make any definite arrangements I’ll have to see her and talk
it all over.”
Mrs. Willers went back triumphant to Mariposa to report this
conversation. It really seemed to clinch matters. The Bonanza King
had instituted himself her guardian and backer. It meant fortune for
Mariposa Moreau, the penniless orphan.
To her intense surprise, Mariposa listened to her with a flushed and
frowning face of indignation.
“I won’t go,” she said, with sudden violence.
“But, my dear!” expostulated Mrs. Willers, “your whole future depends
on it. With such an influence to back you as that, your fortune’s made.
And listen to me, honey, for I know,--it’s not an easy job for a woman
to get on who’s alone and as good-looking as you are.”
“I won’t go,” repeated Mariposa, angry and obstinate.
“But why not, for goodness’ sake?”--in blank amaze. “What’s come over
you? Is it your mourning? You know your mother’s the last person who’d
want you to sit indoors, moping like a snail in a shell, when your
future was waiting for you outside the door.”
Her promise rose up before Mariposa’s mental vision and checked the
angry reiteration that was on her lips. She turned away, suddenly,
tremulous and pale.
“Don’t talk about it any more,” she answered, “but I _can’t_ go now.
Perhaps later on, but not now--I can’t go now.”
Mrs. Willers shrugged her shoulders, and was wisely silent. Mariposa’s
grief was making her unreasonable, that was all. To Shackleton she
merely said that the girl was too ill and overwrought to see any one
just yet. As soon as she was herself again Mrs. Willers would bring her
to _The Trumpet_ office for the interview that was to be the opening of
the new era.