THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
“Thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment. Thou hast
showed thy people hard things.”--PSALMS.
The third boarder at the Garcias’ was Isaac Pierpont, the teacher of
singing. The Garcia house offered, at least, the one recommendation
of being a place wherein musically inclined lodgers might make the
welkin ring with the sounds of their industry and no voice be raised
in protest. Between the pounding of her own pupils Mariposa could hear
the voices of Pierpont’s as they performed vocal prodigies under their
teacher’s goadings.
The young man was unusual and interesting. He had a “method” which he
expounded to Mariposa during the process of meals. It was founded on a
large experience of voices in general and a close anatomical study of
the vocal chords. All he wanted, he said, to demonstrate its excellence
to the world was a voice. Mrs. Garcia, who used to drop in on Mariposa
with her head tied up in white swathings and a broom in her hand, had
early in their acquaintance given her a life history of the two other
boarders, with a running accompaniment of her own comments. Pierpont
had not her highest approval, as he was exasperatingly indifferent
to money, being bound, to the exclusion of all lesser interests, on
the search for his voice. Half his pupils were taught for nothing and
the other half forgot to pay, or Pierpont forgot to send in his bills,
which was the same thing in the end, Mrs. Garcia thought.
“I can’t see what’s the good of working,” she said, daintily brushing
the surface of the carpet with her broom, “if you don’t make anything
by your work. What’s the sense of it, I’d like to know?”
As soon as the singing teacher heard that Mariposa had a voice he had
espied in her the object of his search and begged her to sing for him.
But she had refused. She had not sung a note since her mother’s death.
The series of unforeseen and disastrous developments that had followed
the opening scene of the drama in which she found herself the central
figure had robbed her of all desire to use the gift which was her one
source of fortune. Sometimes, alone in her room, her fingers running
over the keys of the piano, she wondered dreamily what it would be
like once again to hear the full, vibrating sounds booming out from
her chest. Now and then she had tried a note or two or an old familiar
strain, then had stopped, repelled and disenchanted. Her voice sounded
coarse and strange. And while it quivered on the air there came a rush
of exquisitely painful memories.
But one afternoon, a few days after her encounter with Essex, she had
come in early to find the lower hall full of the sound of a high,
crystal clear soprano, which was pouring from the teacher’s room. She
listened interested, held in a spell of envious attention. It was
evidently a girl of whom Pierpont had spoken to her, who possessed the
one voice of promise he had yet found, and who was studying for the
stage. Leaning over the stair-rail, Mariposa felt, with a tingling
at her heart, that this singing had a finish and poise hers entirely
lacked, and yet the voice was thin, colorless and fragile compared with
her own. With all its flawless ease and fluency it had not the same
splendor of tone, the same passionate thrill.
She went slowly upstairs, pursued by the beautiful sounds, bending over
the railing to catch them more fully, with, for the first time since
her mother’s death, the desire to emulate, to be up and doing, to hear
once more the rich notes swelling from her throat.
“Some day _I’ll_ sing for him,” she said to herself, with her head up
and her eyes bright, “and he’ll see that none of them has a voice like
mine.”
The stir of enthusiasm was still on her when she shut the door of her
own room. It was hard to settle to anything with this sudden welling
up of old ambitions disturbing the apathy following on grief. She was
standing, looking down on the garden--a prospect which had long lost
its forlornness to her accustomed eyes--when a knock at the door fell
gratefully on her ears. Even the society of Mrs. Garcia, with her head
tied up in the white duster, had its advantages now and then.
But it was not Mrs. Garcia, but Mrs. Willers whom the opening door
revealed. Mariposa’s welcome was warmed not only by the desire for
companionship but by genuine affection. She had come to regard Mrs.
Willers as her best friend.
They did not see each other as often as formerly, for the newspaper
woman found all her time occupied by her new work. To-day being Monday,
she had managed to get off for the afternoon, as it was in the Sunday
edition that the Woman’s Page attained its most imposing proportions.
Monday was a day off. But Mrs. Willers did not always avail herself of
it. She was having the first real chance of her life and was working
harder than she had ever done before. Her bank account was mounting
weekly. On the occasions when she had time to consult the little book
she saw through the line of figures Edna going to a fine school in
New York, and then, perhaps, a still finer one abroad, and back of
that again--dimly, as became a blissful vision--Edna grown a woman,
accomplished, graceful, beautiful, a glorified figure in a haze of
wealth and success.
She had no war-paint on to-day, but was in her working clothes, dark
and serviceable, showing lapses between skirt and waist-band, and tag
ends of tape appearing in unexpected places. She had dressed in such a
hurry that morning that only three buttons of each boot were fastened,
though the evening before Edna had seen to it that they were all on.
She had come up the hill on what she would have called “a dead run,”
and was still fetching her breath with gasps.
Sitting opposite Mariposa, in the bright light of the window, she let
her eyes dwell fondly on the girl’s face.
“Well, young woman, do you know I’ve come up here on the full jump to
lecture you?”
“Lecture me?” said Mariposa, laughing and bending forward to give Mrs.
Willers’ hand a friendly squeeze. “What have I been doing now?”
“That’s just what I’ve come to find out. Left a desk full of work, and
Miss Peebles hopping round like a chicken with its head off, to find
out what you’ve been doing. I’d have come up before only I couldn’t get
away. Mariposa, my dear, I’ve had a letter from Mrs. Shackleton.”
Mariposa’s color deepened. A line appeared between her eyebrows, and
she looked out of the window.
“Well,” she said; “and did she say anything about me?”
“That’s what she did--a lot. A lot that sorter stumped me. And I’ve
come up here to-day to find out what’s the matter with you. What is it
that’s making you act like several different kinds of fool all at once?”
“What do you mean?” said Mariposa weakly, trying to gain time. “What
did she tell you?”
“My dear, you know as well as I do what she told me. And I can’t make
head or tail of it. What’s come over you?”
“I don’t know,” said the girl in a low voice. “I suppose I’ve changed.”
“Stuff!” observed Mrs. Willers briskly. “Don’t try to tell lies;
you don’t know how. One’s got to have some natural capacity for it.
You’ve had an offer that makes it possible for you to go to Europe,
educate your voice, study French and German, and become a prima donna.
Everything’s to be paid--no limit set on time or money. Now, what in
heaven’s name made you refuse that?”
Facing her in the bright light, the questioner’s eyes were like gimlets
on her face. Mrs. Willers saw its distressed uneasiness, but could
read no further. Three days before she had received Mrs. Shackleton’s
letter, and had been amazed by its contents. She could neither assign
to herself nor to Mrs. Shackleton a reason for the girl’s unexplainable
conduct.
“I can’t explain it to you,” said Mariposa. “I--I--didn’t want to go.
That was all.”
“But you wanted to go only a month or two before, when Shackleton
himself made you the offer?”
Mariposa nodded without answering.
“But why? That’s the part that’s so extraordinary. You’d take it from
him, but not from his wife.”
“A person might change her mind, mightn’t she?”
“A fool might, but a reasonable woman, without a cent, with hardly a
friend, how could she?”
“Well, she has.”
“Mariposa, look me in the eye.”
Mrs. Willers met the amber-clear eyes and saw, with an uneasy thrill,
that there was knowledge in them there had not been before. It was not
the limpid glance of the candid, unspoiled youth it had once been. She
felt a contraction of pain at her heart, as though she had read the
same change in Edna’s eyes.
“What made you change your mind?--that’s what I want to know.”
Mariposa lowered her lids.
“I can’t tell. What makes anybody change his mind? You think
differently. Things happen that make you think differently.”
“Well, what’s happened to make _you_ think differently?”
The lines appeared again on the smooth forehead. She shifted her glance
to the window and then back to the hands on her lap.
“Suppose I don’t want to tell? I’m not a little girl like Edna, to have
to tell every thought I have. Mayn’t I have a secret, Mrs. Willers?”
She looked at her interlocutor with an attempt at a coaxing smile. Mrs.
Willers saw that it was an effort, and remained grave.
“I don’t want you to have secrets from me, dear, no more than I would
Edna. Mariposa,” she said in a lowered voice, leaning forward and
putting her hand on the girl’s knee, “is it because of some man?”
Mariposa looked up quickly. The elder woman saw that, for a moment, she
was startled.
“Some man!” she exclaimed. “What man?”
“You haven’t changed your mind because of Essex?”
“Essex!” She slowly crimsoned, and Mrs. Willers kept her pitiless eyes
on the rising flood of color.
“Oh, my dear girl,” she said almost in an agony, “don’t say you’ve got
fond of him.”
“I don’t like Mr. Essex. I--I--can’t bear him.”
Mrs. Willers knew enough of human nature not to be at all convinced by
this remark.
“He’s not the man for any woman to give her heart to. He’s not the man
to take seriously. He’s never loved anything in his life but himself.
Don’t let yourself be fooled by him. He’s handsome, and he’s about the
smoothest talker I ever ran up against. But don’t you be crazy enough
to fall in love with him.”
“I tell you, I don’t like him.”
“My goodness, I wish there was somebody in this world to take care of
you. You’ve got no sense, and you’re so unfortunately good-looking.
Some day you’ll be fooled just as I was with Willers. Are you telling
the truth? It isn’t Essex that’s made you change your mind?”
These repeated accusations exasperated Mariposa.
“No, it is not,” she said angrily; and then, in the heat of her
annoyance, “if anything would make me accept Mrs. Shackleton’s offer it
would be the hope of getting away from that man.”
There was no doubt she was speaking the truth now. Mrs. Willers’ point
of view of the situation underwent a kaleidoscopic upsetting.
“Oh,” she said, in a subdued voice, “then it’s _he_ that’s in love?”
The girl made no answer. She felt hot and sore, pricked by this
insistent probing of spots that were still raw.
“Does he--does he--bother you?” the elder woman said in an incredulous
voice. Somehow she could not reconcile the picture of Essex as a
repulsed and suppliant wooer with her knowledge of him as such a very
self-assured and debonair person.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘bother me,’” said Mariposa, still
heated. “He makes love to me, and I don’t like it. I don’t like him.”
“Makes love to you? What do you mean by ‘makes love to you?’”
“He has asked me to be his wife,” said the victim, goaded to
desperation by this tormenting catechism.
She could not have confessed that Essex had entertained other designs
with regard to her, any more than she could have told her real reason
for refusing Mrs. Shackleton’s offer. But she felt ashamed and
miserable at these half-truths, which her friend was giving ear to with
the wide eyes of wonder.
“Humph!” said Mrs. Willers, “I never thought that man would want to
marry a poor girl. But that’s not as surprising as that you had sense
enough to refuse him.”
“I don’t like him. I know I’m stupid, but I know when I like a person
and when I don’t. And I’d rather stand on the corner of Kearney and
Sutter Streets with a tin cup begging for nickels than marry Mr. Essex,
or be sent to Europe by Mrs. Shackleton.”
“Well, you’re a combination of smartness and folly I never expect to
see beaten. You’ve got sense enough to refuse to marry a man who’s
bound to make you miserable. That’s astonishing in any girl. And then,
on the other hand, you throw up the chance of a lifetime for nothing.
That would be astonishing in a candidate for entrance into an asylum
for the feeble-minded.”
“Perhaps I am feeble-minded,” said Mariposa humbly. “I certainly don’t
think I’m very clever, especially now with everybody telling me what a
fool I am.”
“You’re only a fool on that one point, honey. And that’s what makes
it so aggravating. It’s just a kink in your brain, for you’ve got no
reason to act the way you do.”
She spoke positively, but her pleading look at Mariposa showed that she
was not yet willing to give up the search for a reason. Mariposa leaned
forward and took her hand.
“Oh, dear Mrs. Willers,” she said, “don’t ask me any more. Don’t tease
me. I do love you, and you’ve been so kind to me I can never stop
loving you, no matter what you did. But let me be. Perhaps I have a
reason, and perhaps I am only a fool, but whichever way it is, be sure
I haven’t acted hastily; and I’ve suffered, too, trying to do what
seemed to me right.”
Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she got up quickly to hide
them, and stood looking out of the window. Mrs. Willers rose, too, and,
putting an arm around her, kissed her cheek.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll try not to bother. But you want to tell
me whatever you think you can. You’re too good-looking, Mariposa, and
you’re such--a--”
She stopped.
“A fool,” came from Mariposa, in the stifled tones of imminent tears.
There was a moment’s pause, and then their simultaneous laughter filled
the room.
“You see you can’t help saying it,” said Mariposa, laughing foolishly,
with the tears hanging on her lashes. “It’s like any other bad
habit--its getting entire control of you.”
A few moments later Mrs. Willers was walking quickly down the hill
toward Sutter Street, her brows knit in thought. She had certainly
discovered nothing. In her pocket was Mrs. Shackleton’s letter telling
of Miss Moreau’s refusal of her offer and asking if Mrs. Willers
knew the reason of it. Mrs. Shackleton had wondered if Miss Moreau’s
affections had been engaged, which could perhaps account for her
otherwise unaccountable rejection of an opportunity upon which her
whole future might depend.
Mrs. Willers had been relieved to find there was certainly no man
influencing Miss Moreau’s decision. For unless it was Essex, it could
be no one. Mrs. Willers knew the paucity of Mariposa’s social circle.
That Essex had asked the girl to marry him and been refused was
astonishing. The rejection was only a little more surprising than the
offer. For a man like Essex to want to marry a penniless orphan was
only exceeded in singularity by a girl like Mariposa refusing a man of
Essex’s indisputable attractions. But there was always something to be
thankful for in the darkest situation, and Mariposa undoubtedly had no
intention of marrying him. Providence was guiding her, at least, in
that respect.
It was still early when Mrs. Willers approached _The Trumpet_ office.
The sky was leaden and hung with low clouds. As she drew near the
door the first few drops of rain fell, spotting the sidewalk here
and there as though they were slowly and reluctantly wrung from the
swollen heavens. It would be a storm, she thought, as she turned into
the doorway and began the ascent of the dark stairs with the lanterns
on the landings. In her own cubby-hole she answered Mrs. Shackleton’s
letter, and then passed along the passageway to the sanctum of the
proprietor, who was still in his office.
Win, in his father’s swivel chair, looked very small and insignificant.
The wide window behind him let a flood of pale light over his
bullet-shaped head with its thatch of limp, blond hair, and his thin
shoulders bowed over the desk. His eyes narrowed behind his glasses as
he looked up in answer to Mrs. Willers’ knock, and then, when he saw
who it was, he smiled, for Win liked Mrs. Willers.
She handed him the letter with the request that he give it to his
mother that evening, and sat down in the chair beside him, facing the
long white panes of the window, which the rain was beginning to lash.
“My mother and you seem to be having a lively correspondence,” said
Win, who had brought down Mrs. Shackleton’s letter some days before.
“Yes, we’ve got an untractable young lady on our hands, and it’s a
large order.”
“Miss Moreau?” said the proprietor of _The Trumpet_. “My mother told
me. She’s very independent, isn’t she?”
“She’s a strange girl. You can tell your mother, as I’ve told her in
this letter, that I don’t understand her at all. She’s got some idea in
her head, but I can’t make it out.”
“Mightn’t a girl just be independent?” said the young man, putting up a
long, thin hand to press his glasses against his nose with a first and
second finger. “Just independent, and nothing else?”
“There’s no knowing what a girl mightn’t be, Mr. Shackleton,” Mrs.
Willers responded gloomily. “I was one myself once, but it’s so long
ago I’ve forgotten what it’s like; and, thank heaven, it’s a stage
that’s soon passed.”
It so happened that this little conversation set Win’s mind once more
to thinking of the girl his father had been so determined to find and
benefit. As he left _The Trumpet_ office, shortly after the withdrawal
of Mrs. Willers, his mind was full of the queries the finding of
the letters had aroused in it. The handsome girl he had seen that
afternoon, three months ago, appeared before his mental vision, and
this time as her face flashed out on him from the dark places of memory
it had a sudden tantalizing suggestion of familiarity. The question
came that so often teases us with the sudden glimpse of a vaguely
recognized face: “Where have I seen it before?”
Win walked slowly up Third Street meditating under a spread umbrella.
It was raining hard now, a level downpour that beat pugnaciously on
the city, which gleamed and ran rillets of water under the onslaught.
People were scurrying away in every direction, women with umbrellas low
against their heads, one hand gripping up their skirts, from beneath
which came and went glimpses of muddy boots and wet petticoats. Loafers
were standing under eaves, looking out with yellow, apathetic faces.
The merchants of the quarter came to the doorways of the smaller shops
that Win passed, and stood looking out and then up into the sky with
musing smiles. It was a heavy rain, and no mistake.
Win had a commission to execute before he went home, and so passed
up Kearney Street to Post, where, a few doors from the corner, he
entered a photographer’s. He was having a copy made on ivory of an old
daguerreotype of his father, to be given as a present to his mother,
and to-day it was to be finished.
The photographer, a clever and capable man, had started the innovation
of having his studio roughly lined with burlaps, upon which photographs
of local belles and celebrities were fastened with brass-headed nails.
Win, waiting for his appearance, loitered round the room looking at
these, recognizing a friend here, and there a proud beauty who had
endured him as a partner at the cotillion because he was the only son
of Jake Shackleton. Farther on was one of Edna Willers, looking very
lovely and seraphic in her large-eyed innocence.
On a small slip of wall between two windows there was only one picture
fastened, and as his eye fell on this he started. It was Mariposa
Moreau, in the lace dress she had worn at the opera, the face looking
directly and gravely into his. At the moment that his glance, fresh
from other faces, fell on it, the haunting suggestion of familiarity,
of having some intimate connection with or memory of it, possessed him
with sudden, startling force. Of whom did she remind him?
He backed away from it, and, as he did so, was conscious that he knew
exactly the way her lips would open if she had been going to speak, of
the precise manner she had of lifting her chin. Yet he had seen her
only twice in his life that he knew of, and then in the half-dark.
It was not she that was known to him, but some one that she looked
like--some one he knew well, that had some vague, yet close connection
with his life. He felt in an eery way that his mind was gropingly
approaching the solution, had almost seized it, when the photographer’s
voice behind him broke the thread.
“It will be ready in a moment, Mr. Shackleton,” he said. “You’re
looking at that picture. It’s a Miss Moreau, a young lady who, I
believe, is a singer. I put it there by itself, as I was just a little
proud of it.”
“It’s a stunning picture and no mistake,” said Win, arranging his
glasses, “but it must be easy to make a picture of a girl like that.”
“On the contrary, I think it’s hard. Miss Moreau’s handsome, but it’s
a beauty that’s more suitable to a painter than a photographer. It’s
the coloring that’s so remarkable, so rich and yet so refined--that
white skin and dark red hair. That’s why I am proud of the picture. It
suggests the coloring, I think. It seems to me there’s something warm
about that hair.”
Win said vaguely, yes, he guessed there must be, wondering what the
fellow meant about there being something warm about the hair. Further
comment was ended by an attendant coming forward with the picture and
handing it to the photographer.
The man held it out to Win with a proud smile. It was an enlargement
of a small daguerreotype, taken some twenty years previously, and
representing Shackleton in full face and without his beard. The work
had been excellently done. It was a faithful and spirited likeness.
As his eye fell on it Win suffered a sudden and amazing revelation.
It was like a dazzling flash of light tearing away the shadows of a
dark place. Through the obscurity of his mind enlightenment rent like
a current of electricity. That was what the memory was, that dim sense
of previous knowledge, that groping after something well known and yet
elusive.
He stared at the picture, and then turned and looked at Mariposa’s
hanging on the wall. The photographer, looking commiseratingly at him,
evidently mistaking his obvious perturbation of mind for a rush of
filial affection, recalled him to himself. He did not know that he was
pale, but he saw that the plate of ivory in his hand trembled.
“It’s--it’s--first-rate,” he said in a low voice. “I’m tremendously
pleased. Send it to _The Trumpet_ office to-morrow, and the bill with
it, please. You’ve done an A number one job.”
He turned away and went slowly out, the photographer and his assistant
looking curiously after him. There were steps to go down before he
regained the street, and he descended them in a maze, the rain pouring
on his head, his closed umbrella in his hand. It was all as clear as
daylight now--the secret searching out of the mother and daughter, the
interest taken by his father in the beautiful and talented girl, his
desire to educate and provide for her. It was all as plain as A, B, C.
“She was so different from Maud and me,” Win thought humbly, as he
moved forward in the blinding rain. “No wonder he was fond of her.”
It was so astonishing, so simple, and yet so hard to realize in the
first moment of discovery this way, that he stopped and stood staring
at the pavement.
Two of his friends, umbrellaed and mackintoshed, bore down on him, not
recognizing the motionless figure with the water running off its hat
brim till they were close on him.
“Win, gone crazy!” cried one gaily. “When did it come on, Winnie boy?”
He looked up startled, and had presence of mind enough not to open his
umbrella.
“Win’s trying to grow,” said the other, knowing that his insignificant
size was a mortification to the young man. “So he’s standing out in the
rain like a plant.”
“Rain’s all right,” said Win. “I like it.”
“No doubt about that, sonny. Only thing to doubt’s your sanity.”
“Cute little day, ain’t it?” said his companion.
“Win likes it,” said the first. “Keep it up, old chap, and you’ll be
six feet high before the winter’s over.”
And they went off cackling to the club to tell the story of Win, with
the water pouring off his hat and his glasses damp, standing staring at
the pavement on Post Street.
Win opened his umbrella and went on. He walked home slowly and by a
circuitous route. His mind traversed the subject back and forth, and
at each moment he became more convinced, as all the muddle of puzzling
circumstances fell into place in logical sequence.
She was his half-sister, older than he was--his father’s first-born.
By this accident of birth she was an outcast, penniless and
unacknowledged, from the home and fortune he and Maud had inherited.
At the very moment when the father had found her free to accept his
bounty he had been snatched away. And she knew it. That was the
explanation of her changeable conduct. She had found it out in some way
between the deaths of her mother and Shackleton. Some one had told her
or she had discovered it herself.
In the dripping dark Win pondered it all, going up and down the
ascending streets in a tortuous route homeward, wondering at fate,
communing with himself.