The extravagant supper party by which Mr. James Farendell celebrated the
last day of his bachelorhood was protracted so far into the night,
that the last guest who parted from him at the door of the principal
Sacramento restaurant was for a moment impressed with the belief that
a certain ruddy glow in the sky was already the dawn. But Mr. Farendell
had kept his head clear enough to recognize it as the light of some
burning building in a remote business district, a not infrequent
occurrence in the dry season. When he had dismissed his guest he turned
away in that direction for further information. His own counting-house
was not in that immediate neighborhood, but Sacramento had been once
before visited by a rapid and far-sweeping conflagration, and it
behooved him to be on the alert even on this night of festivity.
Perhaps also a certain anxiety arose out of the occasion. He was to be
married to-morrow to the widow of his late partner, and the
marriage, besides being an attractive one, would settle many business
difficulties. He had been a fortunate man, but, like many more fortunate
men, was not blind to the possibilities of a change of luck. The death
of his partner in a successful business had at first seemed to betoken
that change, but his successful, though hasty, courtship of the
inexperienced widow had restored his chances without greatly shocking
the decorum of a pioneer community. Nevertheless, he was not a contented
man, and hardly a determined--although an energetic one.
A walk of a few moments brought him to the levee of the river,--a
favored district, where his counting-house, with many others, was
conveniently situated. In these early days only a few of these buildings
could be said to be permanent,--fire and flood perpetually threatened
them. They were merely temporary structures of wood, or in the case
of Mr. Farendell's office, a shell of corrugated iron, sheathing
a one-storied wooden frame, more or less elaborate in its interior
decorations. By the time he had reached it, the distant fire had
increased. On his way he had met and recognized many of his business
acquaintances hurrying thither,--some to save their own property, or
to assist the imperfectly equipped volunteer fire department in their
unselfish labors. It was probably Mr. Farendell's peculiar preoccupation
on that particular night which had prevented his joining in their
brotherly zeal.
He unlocked the iron door, and lit the hanging lamp that was used in
all-night sittings on steamer days. It revealed a smartly furnished
office, with a high desk for his clerks, and a smaller one for himself
in one corner. In the centre of the wall stood a large safe. This he
also unlocked and took out a few important books, as well as a small
drawer containing gold coin and dust to the amount of about five hundred
dollars, the large balance having been deposited in bank on the previous
day. The act was only precautionary, as he did not exhibit any haste in
removing them to a place of safety, and remained meditatively absorbed
in looking over a packet of papers taken from the same drawer. The
closely shuttered building, almost hermetically sealed against light,
and perhaps sound, prevented his observing the steadily increasing light
of the conflagration, or hearing the nearer tumult of the firemen, and
the invasion of his quiet district by other equally solicitous tenants.
The papers seemed also to possess some importance, for, the stillness
being suddenly broken by the turning of the handle of the heavy door he
had just closed, and its opening with difficulty, his first act was
to hurriedly conceal them, without apparently paying a thought to the
exposed gold before him. And his expression and attitude in facing
round towards the door was quite as much of nervous secretiveness as of
indignation at the interruption.
Yet the intruder appeared, though singular, by no means formidable. He
was a man slightly past the middle age, with a thin face, hollowed at
the cheeks and temples as if by illness or asceticism, and a grayish
beard that encircled his throat like a soiled worsted “comforter” below
his clean-shaven chin and mouth. His manner was slow and methodical, and
even when he shot the bolt of the door behind him, the act did not seem
aggressive. Nevertheless Mr. Farendell half rose with his hand on
his pistol-pocket, but the stranger merely lifted his own hand with
a gesture of indifferent warning, and, drawing a chair towards him,
dropped into it deliberately.
Mr. Farendell's angry stare changed suddenly to one of surprised
recognition. “Josh Scranton,” he said hesitatingly.
“I reckon,” responded the stranger slowly. “That's the name I allus
bore, and YOU called yourself Farendell. Well, we ain't seen each other
sens the spring o' '50, when ye left me lying nigh petered out with
chills and fever on the Stanislaus River, and sold the claim that me and
Duffy worked under our very feet, and skedaddled for 'Frisco!”
“I only exercised my right as principal owner, and to secure my
advances,” began the late Mr. Farendell sharply.
But again the thin hand was raised, this time with a slow, scornful
waiving of any explanations. “It ain't that in partickler that I've kem
to see ye for to-night,” said the stranger slowly, “nor it ain't about
your takin' the name o' 'Farendell,' that friend o' yours who died on
the passage here with ye, and whose papers ye borrowed! Nor it ain't
on account o' that wife of yours ye left behind in Missouri, and whose
letters you never answered. It's them things all together--and suthin'
else!”
“What the d---l do you want, then?” said Farendell, with a desperate
directness that was, however, a tacit confession of the truth of these
accusations.
“Yer allowin' that ye'll get married tomorrow?” said Scranton slowly.
“Yes, and be d----d to you,” said Farendell fiercely.
“Yer NOT,” returned Scranton. “Not if I knows it. Yer goin' to climb
down. Yer goin' to get up and get! Yer goin' to step down and out! Yer
goin' to shut up your desk and your books and this hull consarn inside
of an hour, and vamose the ranch. Arter an hour from now thar won't be
any Mr. Farendell, and no weddin' to-morrow.”
“If that's your game--perhaps you'd like to murder me at once?” said
Farendell with a shifting eye, as his hand again moved towards his
revolver.
But again the thin hand of the stranger was also lifted. “We ain't in
the business o' murderin' or bein' murdered, or we might hev kem here
together, me and Duffy. Now if anything happens to me Duffy will be
left, and HE'S got the proofs.”
Farendell seemed to recognize the fact with the same directness. “That's
it, is it?” he said bluntly. “Well, how much do you want? Only, I warn
you that I haven't much to give.”
“Wotever you've got, if it was millions, it ain't enough to buy us up,
and ye ought to know that by this time,” responded Scranton, with
a momentary flash in his eyes. But the next moment his previous
passionless deliberation returned, and leaning his arm on the desk of
the man before him he picked up a paperweight carelessly and turned it
over as he said slowly, “The fact is, Mr. Farendell, you've been making
us, me and Duffy, tired. We've bin watchin' you and your doin's, lyin'
low and sayin' nothin', till we concluded that it was about time you
handed in your checks and left the board. We ain't wanted nothin' of
ye, we ain't begrudged ye nothin', but we've allowed that this yer thing
must stop.”
“And what if I refuse?” said Farendell.
“Thar'll be some cussin' and a big row from YOU, I kalkilate--and maybe
some fightin' all round,” said Scranton dispassionately. “But it will be
all the same in the end. The hull thing will come out, and you'll hev
to slide just the same. T'otherwise, ef ye slide out NOW, it's without a
row.”
“And do you suppose a business man like me can disappear without a fuss
over it?” said Farendell angrily. “Are you mad?”
“I reckon the hole YOU'LL make kin be filled up,” said Scranton dryly.
“But ef ye go NOW, you won't be bothered by the fuss, while if you stay
you'll have to face the music, and go too!”
Farendell was silent. Possibly the truth of this had long since been
borne upon him. No one but himself knew the incessant strain of these
years of evasion and concealment, and how he often had been near to
some such desperate culmination. The sacrifice offered to him was not,
therefore, so great as it might have seemed. The knowledge of this
might have given him a momentary superiority over his antagonist had
Scranton's motive been a purely selfish or malignant one, but as it was
not, and as he may have had some instinctive idea of Farendell's feeling
also, it made his ultimatum appear the more passionless and fateful.
And it was this quality which perhaps caused Farendell to burst out with
desperate abruptness,--
“What in h-ll ever put you up to this!”
Scranton folded his arms upon Farendell's desk, and slowly wiping his
clean jaw with one hand, repeated deliberately, “Wall--I reckon I told
ye that before! You've been making us--me and Duffy--tired!” He paused
for a moment, and then, rising abruptly, with a careless gesture towards
the uncovered tray of gold, said, “Come! ye kin take enuff o' that to
get away with; the less ye take, though, the less likely you'll be to be
followed!”
He went to the door, unlocked and opened it. A strange light, as of
a lurid storm interspersed by sheet-like lightning, filled the outer
darkness, and the silence was now broken by dull crashes and nearer
cries and shouting. A few figures were also dimly flitting around the
neighboring empty offices, some of which, like Farendell's, had been
entered by their now alarmed owners.
“You've got a good chance now,” continued Scranton; “ye couldn't hev a
better. It's a big fire--a scorcher--and jest the time for a man to wipe
himself out and not be missed. Make tracks where the crowd is thickest
and whar ye're likely to be seen, ez ef ye were helpin'! Ther' 'll be
other men missed tomorrow beside you,” he added with grim significance;
“but nobody'll know that you was one who really got away.”
Where the imperturbable logic of the strange man might have failed,
the noise, the tumult, the suggestion of swift-coming disaster, and
the necessity for some immediate action of any kind, was convincing.
Farendell hastily stuffed his pockets with gold and the papers he had
found, and moved to the door. Already he fancied he felt the hot
breath of the leaping conflagration beyond. “And you?” he said, turning
suspiciously to Scranton.
“When you're shut of this and clean off, I'll fix things and leave
too--but not before. I reckon,” he added grimly, with a glance at the
sky, now streaming with sparks like a meteoric shower, “thar won't be
much left here in the morning.”
A few dull embers pattered on the iron roof of the low building and
bounded off in ashes. Farendell cast a final glance around him, and then
darted from the building. The iron door clanged behind him--he was gone.
Evidently not too soon, for the other buildings were already deserted by
their would-be salvors, who had filled the streets with piles of books
and valuables waiting to be carried away. Then occurred a terrible
phenomenon, which had once before in such disasters paralyzed the
efforts of the firemen. A large wooden warehouse in the centre of
the block of offices, many hundred feet from the scene of active
conflagration--which had hitherto remained intact--suddenly became
enveloped in clouds of smoke, and without warning burst as suddenly
from roof and upper story into vivid flame. There were eye-witnesses who
declared that a stream of living fire seemed to leap upon it from the
burning district, and connected the space between them with an arch of
luminous heat. In another instant the whole district was involved in
a whirlwind of smoke and flame, out of whose seething vortex the
corrugated iron buildings occasionally showed their shriveling or
glowing outlines. And then the fire swept on and away.
When the sun again arose over the panic-stricken and devastated city,
all personal incident and disaster was forgotten in the larger
calamity. It was two or three days before the full particulars could be
gathered--even while the dominant and resistless energy of the people
was erecting new buildings upon the still-smoking ruins. It was only on
the third day afterwards that James Farendell, on the deck of a coasting
steamer, creeping out through the fogs of the Golden Gate, read the
latest news in a San Francisco paper brought by the pilot. As he
hurriedly comprehended the magnitude of the loss, which was far beyond
his previous conception, he experienced a certain satisfaction in
finding his position no worse materially than that of many of his fellow
workers. THEY were ruined like himself; THEY must begin their life
afresh--but then! Ah! there was still that terrible difference. He drew
his breath quickly, and read on. Suddenly he stopped, transfixed by
a later paragraph. For an instant he failed to grasp its full
significance. Then he read it again, the words imprinting themselves on
his senses with a slow deliberation that seemed to him as passionless as
Scranton's utterances on that fateful night.
“The loss of life, it is now feared, is much greater than at first
imagined. To the list that has been already published we must add the
name of James Farendell, the energetic contractor so well known to
our citizens, who was missing the morning after the fire. His calcined
remains were found this afternoon in the warped and twisted iron shell
of his counting-house, the wooden frame having been reduced to charcoal
in the intense heat. The unfortunate man seems to have gone there to
remove his books and papers,--as was evidenced by the iron safe being
found open,--but to have been caught and imprisoned in the building
through the heat causing the metal sheathing to hermetically seal the
doors and windows. He was seen by some neighbors to enter the building
while the fire was still distant, and his remains were identified by his
keys, which were found beneath him. A poignant interest is added to his
untimely fate by the circumstance that he was to have been married on
the following day to the widow of his late partner, and that he had,
at the call of duty, that very evening left a dinner party given to
celebrate the last day of his bachelorhood--or, as it has indeed proved,
of his earthly existence. Two families are thus placed in mourning, and
it is a singular sequel that by this untoward calamity the well-known
firm of Farendell & Cutler may be said to have ceased to exist.”
Mr. Farendell started to his feet. But a lurch of the schooner as she
rose on the long swell of the Pacific sent him staggering dizzily back
to his seat, and checked his first wild impulse to return. He saw it all
now,--the fire had avenged him by wiping out his persecutor, Scranton,
but in the eyes of his contemporaries it had only erased HIM! He might
return to refute the story in his own person, but the dead man's partner
still lived with his secret, and his own rehabilitation could only
revive his former peril.
*****
Four years elapsed before the late Mr. Farendell again set foot in the
levee of Sacramento. The steamboat that brought him from San Francisco
was a marvel to him in size, elegance, and comfort; so different from
the little, crowded, tri-weekly packet he remembered; and it might, in a
manner, have prepared him for the greater change in the city. But he was
astounded to find nothing to remind him of the past,--no landmark, nor
even ruin, of the place he had known. Blocks of brick buildings, with
thoroughfares having strange titles, occupied the district where his
counting-house had stood, and even obliterated its site; equally strange
names were upon the shops and warehouses. In his four years' wanderings
he had scarcely found a place as unfamiliar. He had trusted to the
great change in his own appearance--the full beard that he wore and the
tanning of a tropical sun--to prevent recognition; but the precaution
was unnecessary, there were none to recognize him in the new faces which
were the only ones he saw in the transformed city. A cautious allusion
to the past which he had made on the boat to a fellow passenger had
brought only the surprised rejoinder, “Oh, that must have been before
the big fire,” as if it was an historic epoch. There was something of
pain even in this assured security of his loneliness. His obliteration
was complete.
For the late Mr. Farendell had suffered some change of mind with his
other mutations. He had been singularly lucky. The schooner in which he
had escaped brought him to Acapulco, where, as a returning Californian,
and a presumably successful one, his services and experience were
eagerly sought by an English party engaged in developing certain disused
Mexican mines. As the post, however, was perilously near the route
of regular emigration, as soon as he had gained a sufficient sum he
embarked with some goods to Callao, where he presently established
himself in business, resuming his REAL name--the unambitious but
indistinctive one of “Smith.” It is highly probable that this prudential
act was also his first step towards rectitude. For whether the change
was a question of moral ethics, or merely a superstitious essay in luck,
he was thereafter strictly honest in business. He became prosperous.
He had been sustained in his flight by the intention that, if he
were successful elsewhere, he would endeavor to communicate with his
abandoned fiancee, and ask her to join him, and share not his name but
fortune in exile. But as he grew rich, the difficulties of carrying out
this intention became more apparent; he was by no means certain of her
loyalty surviving the deceit he had practiced and the revelation he
would have to make; he was doubtful of the success of any story which
at other times he would have glibly invented to take the place of truth.
Already several months had elapsed since his supposed death; could he
expect her to be less accessible to premature advances now than when
she had been a widow? Perhaps this made him think of the wife he had
deserted so long ago. He had been quite content to live without regret
or affection, forgetting and forgotten, but in his present prosperity
he felt there was some need of putting his domestic affairs into a more
secure and legitimate shape, to avert any catastrophe like the last.
HERE at least would be no difficulty; husbands had deserted their wives
before this in Californian emigration, and had been heard of only after
they had made their fortune. Any plausible story would be accepted by
HER in the joy of his reappearance; or if, indeed, as he reflected
with equal complacency, she was dead or divorced from him through his
desertion--a sufficient cause in her own State--and re-married, he
would at least be more secure. He began, without committing himself,
by inquiry and anonymous correspondence. His wife, he learnt, had left
Missouri for Sacramento only a month or two after his own disappearance
from that place, and her address was unknown!
A complication so unlooked for disquieted him, and yet whetted his
curiosity. The only person she might meet in California who could
possibly identify him with the late Mr. Farendell was Duffy; he had
often wondered if that mysterious partner of Scranton's had been
deceived with the others, or had ever suspected that the body discovered
in the counting-house was Scranton's. If not, he must have accepted the
strange coincidence that Scranton had disappeared also the same night.
In the first six months of his exile he had searched the Californian
papers thoroughly, but had found no record of any doubt having been
thrown on the accepted belief. It was these circumstances, and perhaps
a vague fascination not unlike that which impels the malefactor to haunt
the scene of his crime, that, at the end of four years, had brought him,
a man of middle age and assured occupation and fortune, back to the city
he had fled from.
A few days at one of the new hotels convinced him thoroughly that he was
in no danger of recognition, and gave him the assurance to take rooms
more in keeping with his circumstances and his own frankly
avowed position as the head of a South American house. A cautious
acquaintance--through the agency of his banker--with a few business men
gave him some occupation, and the fact of his South American letters
being addressed to Don Diego Smith gave a foreign flavor to his
individuality, which his tanned face and dark beard had materially
helped. A stronger test convinced him how complete was the obliteration
of his former identity. One day at the bank he was startled at being
introduced by the manager to a man whom he at once recognized as a
former business acquaintance. But the shock was his alone; the formal
approach and unfamiliar manner of the man showed that he had failed to
recognize even a resemblance. But would he equally escape detection by
his wife if he met her as accidentally,--an encounter not to be thought
of until he knew something more of her? He became more cautious in going
to public places, but luckily for him the proportion of women to men was
still small in California, and they were more observed than observing.
A month elapsed; in that time he had thoroughly exhausted the local
Directories in his cautious researches among the “Smiths,” for in his
fear of precipitating a premature disclosure he had given up his former
anonymous advertising. And there was a certain occupation in this
personal quest that filled his business time. He was in no hurry. He had
a singular faith that he would eventually discover her whereabouts, be
able to make all necessary inquiries into her conduct and habits, and
perhaps even enjoy a brief season of unsuspected personal observation
before revealing himself. And this faith was as singularly rewarded.
Having occasion to get his watch repaired one day he entered a large
jeweler's shop, and while waiting its examination his attention was
attracted by an ordinary old-fashioned daguerreotype case in the form of
a heart-shaped locket lying on the counter with other articles left for
repairs. Something in its appearance touched a chord in his memory; he
lifted the half-opened case and saw a much faded daguerreotype
portrait of himself taken in Missouri before he left in the Californian
emigration. He recognized it at once as one he had given to his wife;
the faded likeness was so little like his present self that he boldly
examined it and asked the jeweler one or two questions. The man was
communicative. Yes, it was an old-fashioned affair which had been left
for repairs a few days ago by a lady whose name and address, written by
herself, were on the card tied to it.
Mr. James Smith had by this time fully controlled the emotion he felt as
he recognized his wife's name and handwriting, and knew that at last
the clue was found! He laid down the case carelessly, gave the final
directions for the repairs of his watch, and left the shop. The address,
of which he had taken a mental note, was, to his surprise, very near
his own lodgings; but he went straight home. Here a few inquiries of
his janitor elicited the information that the building indicated in the
address was a large one of furnished apartments and offices like his
own, and that the “Mrs. Smith” must be simply the housekeeper of the
landlord, whose name appeared in the Directory, but not her own. Yet
he waited until evening before he ventured to reconnoitre the premises;
with the possession of his clue came a slight cooling of his ardor and
extreme caution in his further proceedings. The house--a reconstructed
wooden building--offered no external indication of the rooms she
occupied in the uniformly curtained windows that front the street.
Yet he felt an odd and pleasurable excitement in passing once or twice
before those walls that hid the goal of his quest. As yet he had not
seen her, and there was naturally the added zest of expectation. He
noticed that there was a new building opposite, with vacant offices to
let. A project suddenly occurred to him, which by morning he had fully
matured. He hired a front room in the first floor of the new building,
had it hurriedly furnished as a private office, and on the second
morning of his discovery was installed behind his desk at the window
commanding a full view of the opposite house. There was nothing strange
in the South American capitalist selecting a private office in so
popular a locality.
Two or three days elapsed without any result from his espionage. He came
to know by sight the various tenants, the two Chinese servants, and the
solitary Irish housemaid, but as yet had no glimpse of the housekeeper.
She evidently led a secluded life among her duties; it occurred to him
that perhaps she went out, possibly to market, earlier than he came,
or later, after he had left the office. In this belief he arrived one
morning after an early walk in a smart spring shower, the lingering
straggler of the winter rains. There were few people astir, yet he had
been preceded for two or three blocks by a tall woman whose umbrella
partly concealed her head and shoulders from view. He had noticed,
however, even in his abstraction, that she walked well, and managed the
lifting of her skirt over her trim ankles and well-booted feet with some
grace and cleverness. Yet it was only on her unexpectedly turning the
corner of his own street that he became interested. She continued on
until within a few doors of his office, when she stopped to give an
order to a tradesman, who was just taking down his shutters. He heard
her voice distinctly; in the quick emotion it gave him he brushed
hurriedly past her without lifting his eyes. Gaining his own doorway
he rushed upstairs to his office, hastily unlocked it, and ran to the
window. The lady was already crossing the street. He saw her pause
before the door of the opposite house, open it with a latchkey, and
caught a full view of her profile in the single moment that she turned
to furl her umbrella and enter. It was his wife's voice he had heard; it
was his wife's face that he had seen in profile.
Yet she was changed from the lanky young schoolgirl he had wedded ten
years ago, or, at least, compared to what his recollection of her had
been. Had he ever seen her as she really was? Surely somewhere in that
timid, freckled, half-grown bride he had known in the first year of
their marriage the germ of this self-possessed, matured woman was
hidden. There was the tone of her voice; he had never recalled it before
as a lover might, yet now it touched him; her profile he certainly
remembered, but not with the feeling it now produced in him. Would he
have ever abandoned her had she been like that? Or had HE changed, and
was this no longer his old self?--perhaps even a self SHE would never
recognize again? James Smith had the superstitions of a gambler, and
that vague idea of fate that comes to weak men; a sudden fright seized
him, and he half withdrew from the window lest she should observe him,
recognize him, and by some act precipitate that fate.
By lingering beyond the usual hour for his departure he saw her again,
and had even a full view of her face as she crossed the street. The
years had certainly improved her; he wondered with a certain nervousness
if she would think they had done the same for him. The complacency with
which he had at first contemplated her probable joy at recovering him
had become seriously shaken since he had seen her; a woman as well
preserved and good-looking as that, holding a certain responsible
and, no doubt, lucrative position, must have many admirers and be
independent. He longed to tell her now of his fortune, and yet shrank
from the test its exposure implied. He waited for her return until
darkness had gathered, and then went back to his lodgings a little
chagrined and ill at ease. It was rather late for her to be out alone!
After all, what did he know of her habits or associations? He recalled
the freedom of Californian life, and the old scandals relating to the
lapses of many women who had previously led blameless lives in the
Atlantic States. Clearly it behooved him to be cautious. Yet he
walked late that night before the house again, eager to see if she had
returned, and with WHOM? He was restricted in his eagerness by the
fear of detection, but he gathered very little knowledge of her habits;
singularly enough nobody seemed to care. A little piqued at this, he
began to wonder if he were not thinking too much of this woman to whom
he still hesitated to reveal himself. Nevertheless, he found himself
that night again wandering around the house, and even watching with some
anxiety the shadow which he believed to be hers on the window-blind
of the room where he had by discreet inquiry located her. Whether his
memory was stimulated by his quest he never knew, but presently he was
able to recall step by step and incident by incident his early courtship
of her and the brief days of their married life. He even remembered the
day she accepted him, and even dwelt upon it with a sentimental thrill
that he probably never felt at the time, and it was a distinct feature
of his extraordinary state of mind and its concentration upon this
particular subject that he presently began to look upon HIMSELF as the
abandoned and deserted conjugal partner, and to nurse a feeling of deep
injury at her hands! The fact that he was thinking of her, and she,
probably, contented with her lot, was undisturbed by any memory of him,
seemed to him a logical deduction of his superior affection.
It was, therefore, quite as much in the attitude of a reproachful and
avenging husband as of a merely curious one that, one afternoon, seeing
her issue from her house at an early hour, he slipped down the stairs
and began to follow her at a secure distance. She turned into the
principal thoroughfare, and presently made one of the crowd who were
entering a popular place of amusement where there was an afternoon
performance. So complete was his selfish hallucination, that he smiled
bitterly at this proof of heartless indifference, and even so far
overcame his previous caution as to actually brush by her somewhat
rudely as he entered the building at the same moment. He was conscious
that she lifted her eyes a little impatiently to the face of the awkward
stranger; he was equally, but more bitterly, conscious that she had not
recognized him! He dropped into a seat behind her; she did not look at
him again with even a sense of disturbance; the momentary contact had
evidently left no impression upon her. She glanced casually at
her neighbors on either side, and presently became absorbed in the
performance. When it was over she rose, and on her way out recognized
and exchanged a few words with one or two acquaintances. Again he
heard her familiar voice, almost at his elbow, raised with no more
consciousness of her contiguity to him than if he were a mere ghost.
The thought struck him for the first time with a hideous and appalling
significance. What was he but a ghost to her--to every one! A man dead,
buried, and forgotten! His vanity and self-complacency vanished before
this crushing realization of the hopelessness of his existence. Dazed
and bewildered, he mingled blindly and blunderingly with the departing
crowd, tossed here and there as if he were an invisible presence,
stumbling over the impeding skirts of women with a vague apology they
heeded not, and which seemed in his frightened ears as hollow as a voice
from the grave.
When he at last reached the street he did not look back, but wandered
abstractedly through by-streets in the falling rain, scarcely realizing
where he was, until he found himself drenched through, with his closed
umbrella in his tremulous hand, standing at the half-submerged levee
beside the overflowed river. Here again he realized how completely he
had been absorbed and concentrated in his search for his wife during the
last three weeks; he had never been on the levee since his arrival. He
had taken no note of the excitement of the citizens over the alarming
reports of terrible floods in the mountains, and the daily and hourly
fear that they experienced of disastrous inundation from the surcharged
river. He had never thought of it, yet he had read of it, and even
talked, and yet now for the first time in his selfish, blind absorption
was certain of it. He stood still for some time, watching doggedly the
enormous yellow stream laboring with its burden and drift from many
a mountain town and camp, moving steadily and fatefully towards the
distant bay, and still more distant and inevitable ocean. For a few
moments it vaguely fascinated and diverted him; then it as vaguely lent
itself to his one dominant, haunting thought. Yes, it was pointing him
the only way out,--the path to the distant ocean and utter forgetfulness
again!
The chill of his saturated clothing brought him to himself once more,
he turned and hurried home. He went tiredly to his bedroom, and while
changing his garments there came a knock at the door. It was the
porter to say that a lady had called, and was waiting for him in the
sitting-room. She had not given her name.
The closed door prevented the servant from seeing the extraordinary
effect produced by this simple announcement upon the tenant. For
one instant James Smith remained spellbound in his chair. It was
characteristic of his weak nature and singular prepossession that
he passed in an instant from the extreme of doubt to the extreme of
certainty and conviction. It was his wife! She had recognized him in
that moment of encounter at the entertainment; had found his address,
and had followed him here! He dressed himself with feverish haste, not,
however, without a certain care of his appearance and some selection of
apparel, and quickly forecast the forthcoming interview in his mind.
For the pendulum had swung back; Mr. James Smith was once more the
self-satisfied, self-complacent, and discreetly cautious husband that he
had been at the beginning of his quest, perhaps with a certain sense
of grievance superadded. He should require the fullest explanations and
guarantees before committing himself,--indeed, her present call might be
an advance that it would be necessary for him to check. He even pictured
her pleading at his feet; a very little stronger effort of his Alnaschar
imagination would have made him reject her like the fatuous Persian
glass peddler.
He opened the door of the sitting-room deliberately, and walked in with
a certain formal precision. But the figure of a woman arose from the
sofa, and with a slight outcry, half playful, half hysterical, threw
herself upon his breast with the single exclamation, “Jim!” He started
back from the double shock. For the woman was NOT his wife! A woman
extravagantly dressed, still young, but bearing, even through her
artificially heightened color, a face worn with excitement, excess, and
premature age. Yet a face that as he disengaged himself from her arms
grew upon him with a terrible recognition, a face that he had once
thought pretty, inexperienced, and innocent,--the face of the widow of
his former partner, Cutler, the woman he was to have married on the day
he fled. The bitter revulsion of feeling and astonishment was evidently
visible in his face, for she, too, drew back for a moment as they
separated. But she had evidently been prepared, if not pathetically
inured to such experiences. She dropped into a chair again with a dry
laugh, and a hard metallic voice, as she said,--
“Well, it's YOU, anyway--and you can't get out of it.”
As he still stared at her, in her inconsistent finery, draggled and
wet by the storm, at her limp ribbons and ostentatious jewelry, she
continued, in the same hard voice,--
“I thought I spotted you once or twice before; but you took no notice of
me, and I reckoned I was mistaken. But this afternoon at the Temple of
Music”--
“Where?” said James Smith harshly.
“At the Temple--the San Francisco Troupe performance--where you brushed
by me, and I heard your voice saying, 'Beg pardon!' I says, 'That's Jim
Farendell.'”
“Farendell!” burst out James Smith, half in simulated astonishment, half
in real alarm.
“Well! Smith, then, if you like better,” said the woman impatiently;
“though it's about the sickest and most played-out dodge of a name you
could have pitched upon. James Smith, Don Diego Smith!” she repeated,
with a hysteric laugh. “Why, it beats the nigger minstrels all hollow!
Well, when I saw you there, I said, 'That's Jim Farendell, or his twin
brother;' I didn't say 'his ghost,' mind you; for, from the beginning,
even before I knew it all, I never took any stock in that fool yarn
about your burnt bones being found in your office.”
“Knew all, knew what?” demanded the man, with a bravado which he
nevertheless felt was hopeless.
She rose, crossed the room, and, standing before him, placed one hand
upon her hip as she looked at him with half-pitying effrontery.
“Look here, Jim,” she began slowly, “do you know what you're doing?
Well, you're making me tired!” In spite of himself, a half-superstitious
thrill went through him as her words and attitude recalled the dead
Scranton. “Do you suppose that I don't know that you ran away the night
of the fire? Do you suppose that I don't know that you were next to
ruined that night, and that you took that opportunity of skedaddling
out of the country with all the money you had left, and leaving folks
to imagine you were burnt up with the books you had falsified and the
accounts you had doctored! It was a mean thing for you to do to me, Jim,
for I loved you then, and would have been fool enough to run off with
you if you'd told me all, and not left me to find out that you had lost
MY money--every cent Cutler had left me in the business--with the rest.”
With the fatuousness of a weak man cornered, he clung to unimportant
details. “But the body was believed to be mine by every one,” he
stammered angrily. “My papers and books were burnt,--there was no
evidence.”
“And why was there not?” she said witheringly, staring doggedly in his
face. “Because I stopped it! Because when I knew those bones and rags
shut up in that office weren't yours, and was beginning to make a row
about it, a strange man came to me and said they were the remains of a
friend of his who knew your bankruptcy and had come that night to warn
you,--a man whom you had half ruined once, a man who had probably lost
his life in helping you away. He said if I went on making a fuss he'd
come out with the whole truth--how you were a thief and a forger,
and”--she stopped.
“And what else?” he asked desperately, dreading to hear his wife's name
next fall from her lips.
“And that--as it could be proved that his friend knew your secrets,”
she went on in a frightened, embarrassed voice, “you might be accused of
making away with him.”
For a moment James Smith was appalled; he had never thought of this. As
in all his past villainy he was too cowardly to contemplate murder,
he was frightened at the mere accusation of it. “But,” he stammered,
forgetful of all save this new terror, “he KNEW I wouldn't be such a
fool, for the man himself told me Duffy had the papers, and killing him
wouldn't have helped me.”
Mrs. Cutler stared at him a moment searchingly, and then turned wearily
away. “Well,” she said, sinking into her chair again, “he said if I'd
shut my mouth he'd shut his--and--I did. And this,” she added,
throwing her hands from her lap, a gesture half of reproach and half of
contempt,--“this is what I get for it.”
More frightened than touched by the woman's desperation, James Smith
stammered a vague apologetic disclaimer, even while he was loathing with
a revulsion new to him her draggled finery, her still more faded beauty,
and the half-distinct consciousness of guilt that linked her to him. But
she waved it away, a weary gesture that again reminded him of the dead
Scranton.
“Of course I ain't what I was, but who's to blame for it? When you left
me alone without a cent, face to face with a lie, I had to do something.
I wasn't brought up to work; I like good clothes, and you know it
better than anybody. I ain't one of your stage heroines that go out as
dependants and governesses and die of consumption, but I thought,” she
went on with a shrill, hysterical laugh, more painful than the weariness
which inevitably followed it, “I thought I might train myself to do it,
ON THE STAGE! and I joined Barker's Company. They said I had a face
and figure for the stage; that face and figure wore out before I had
anything more to show, and I wasn't big enough to make better terms with
the manager. They kept me nearly a year doing chambermaids and fairy
queens the other side of the footlights, where I saw you today. Then I
kicked! I suppose I might have married some fool for his money, but I
was soft enough to think you might be sending for me when you were safe.
You seem to be mighty comfortable here,” she continued, with a bitter
glance around his handsomely furnished room, “as 'Don Diego Smith.' I
reckon skedaddling pays better than staying behind.”
“I have only been here a few weeks,” he said hurriedly. “I never knew
what had become of you, or that you were still here”--
“Or you wouldn't have come,” she interrupted, with a bitter laugh.
“Speak out, Jim.”
“If there--is anything--I can do--for you,” he stammered, “I'm sure”--
“Anything you can do?” she repeated, slowly and scornfully. “Anything
you can do NOW? Yes!” she screamed, suddenly rising, crossing the
room, and grasping his arms convulsively. “Yes! Take me away from
here--anywhere--at once! Look, Jim,” she went on feverishly, “let
bygones be bygones--I won't peach! I won't tell on you--though I had it
in my heart when you gave me the go-by just now! I'll do anything you
say--go to your farthest hiding-place--work for you--only take me out of
this cursed place.”
Her passionate pleading stung even through his selfishness and loathing.
He thought of his wife's indifference! Yes, he might be driven to
this, and at least he must secure the only witness against his previous
misconduct. “We will see,” he said soothingly, gently loosening her
hands. “We must talk it over.” He stopped as his old suspiciousness
returned. “But you must have some friends,” he said searchingly, “some
one who has helped you.”
“None! Only one--he helped me at first,” she hesitated--“Duffy.”
“Duffy!” said James Smith, recoiling.
“Yes, when he had to tell me all,” she said in half-frightened tones,
“he was sorry for me. Listen, Jim! He was a square man, for all he was
devoted to his partner--and you can't blame him for that. I think he
helped me because I was alone; for nothing else, Jim. I swear it! He
helped me from time to time. Maybe he might have wanted to marry me if
he had not been waiting for another woman that he loved, a married woman
that had been deserted years ago by her husband, just as you might have
deserted me if we'd been married that day. He helped her and paid for
her journey here to seek her husband, and set her up in business.”
“What are you talking about--what woman?” stammered James Smith, with a
strange presentiment creeping over him.
“A Mrs. Smith. Yes,” she said quickly, as he started, “not a sham name
like yours, but really and truly SMITH--that was her husband's name!
I'm not lying, Jim,” she went on, evidently mistaking the cause of the
sudden contraction of the man's face. “I didn't invent her nor her name;
there IS such a woman, and Duffy loves her--and HER only, and he never,
NEVER was anything more than a friend to me. I swear it!”
The room seemed to swim around him. She was staring at him, but he could
see in her vacant eyes that she had no conception of his secret, nor
knew the extent of her revelation. Duffy had not dared to tell all! He
burst into a coarse laugh. “What matters Duffy or the silly woman he'd
try to steal away from other men.”
“But he didn't try to steal her, and she's only silly because she wants
to be true to her husband while he lives. She told Duffy she'd never
marry him until she saw her husband's dead face. More fool she,” she
added bitterly.
“Until she saw her husband's dead face,” was all that James Smith heard
of this speech. His wife's faithfulness through years of desertion, her
long waiting and truthfulness, even the bitter commentary of the equally
injured woman before him, were to him as nothing to what that single
sentence conjured up. He laughed again, but this time strangely and
vacantly. “Enough of this Duffy and his intrusion in my affairs until
I'm able to settle my account with him. Come,” he added brusquely, “if
we are going to cut out of this at once I've got much to do. Come here
again to-morrow, early. This Duffy--does he live here?”
“No. In Marysville.”
“Good! Come early to-morrow.”
As she seemed to hesitate, he opened a drawer of his table and took out
a handful of gold, and handed it to her. She glanced at it for a moment
with a strange expression, put it mechanically in her pocket, and then
looking up at him said, with a forced laugh, “I suppose that means I am
to clear out?”
“Until to-morrow,” he said shortly.
“If the Sacramento don't sweep us away before then,” she interrupted,
with a reckless laugh; “the river's broken through the levee--a clear
sweep in two places. Where I live the water's up to the doorstep. They
say it's going to be the biggest flood yet. You're all right here;
you're on higher ground.”
She seemed to utter these sentences abstractedly, disconnectedly, as if
to gain time. He made an impatient gesture.
“All right, I'm going,” she said, compressing her lips slowly to keep
them from trembling. “You haven't forgotten anything?” As he turned half
angrily towards her she added, hurriedly and bitterly, “Anything--for
to-morrow?”
“No!”
She opened the door and passed out. He listened until the trail of
her wet skirt had descended the stairs, and the street door had closed
behind her. Then he went back to his table and began collecting his
papers and putting them away in his trunks, which he packed feverishly,
yet with a set and determined face. He wrote one or two letters, which
he sealed and left upon his table. He then went to his bedroom and
deliberately shaved off his disguising beard. Had he not been so
preoccupied in one thought, he might have been conscious of loud voices
in the street and a hurrying of feet on the wet sidewalk. But he was
possessed by only one idea. He must see his wife that evening! How, he
knew not yet, but the way would appear when he had reached his office
in the building opposite hers. Three hours had elapsed before he had
finished his preparations. On going downstairs he stopped to give some
directions to the porter, but his room was empty; passing into the
street he was surprised to find it quite deserted, and the shops closed;
even a drinking saloon at the corner was quite empty. He turned the
corner of the street, and began the slight descent towards his office.
To his amazement the lower end of the street, which was crossed by
the thoroughfare which was his destination, was blocked by a crowd of
people. As he hurried forward to join them he suddenly saw, moving
down that thoroughfare, what appeared to his startled eyes to be the
smokestacks of some small, flat-bottomed steamer. He rubbed his eyes; it
was no illusion, for the next moment he had reached the crowd, who were
standing half a block away from the thoroughfare, and on the edge of a
lagoon of yellow water, whose main current was the thoroughfare he was
seeking, and between whose houses, submerged to their first stories, a
steamboat was really paddling. Other boats and rafts were adrift on
its sluggish waters, and a boatman had just landed a passenger in the
backwater of the lower half of the street on which he stood with the
crowd.
Possessed of his one idea, he fought his way desperately to the water
edge and the boat, and demanded a passage to his office. The boatman
hesitated, but James Smith promptly offered him double the value of his
craft. The act was not deemed singular in that extravagant epoch, and
the sympathizing crowd cheered his solitary departure, as he declined
even the services of the boatman. The next moment he was off in
mid-stream of the thoroughfare, paddling his boat with a desperate but
inexperienced hand until he reached his office, which he entered by the
window. The building, which was new and of brick, showed very little
damage from the flood, but in far different case was the one opposite,
on which his eyes were eagerly bent, and whose cheap and insecure
foundations he could see the flood was already undermining. There were
boats around the house, and men hurriedly removing trunks and valuables,
but the one figure he expected to see was not there. He tied his own
boat to the window; there was evidently no chance of an interview now,
but if she were leaving there would be still the chance of following
her and knowing her destination. As he gazed she suddenly appeared at
a window, and was helped by a boatman into a flat-bottomed barge
containing trunks and furniture. She was evidently the last to leave.
The other boats put off at once, and none too soon; for there was a
warning cry, a quick swerving of the barge, and the end of the dwelling
slowly dropped into the flood, seeming to sink on its knees like a
stricken ox. A great undulation of yellow water swept across the street,
inundating his office through the open window and half swamping his boat
beside it. At the same time he could see that the current had changed
and increased in volume and velocity, and, from the cries and warning
of the boatmen, he knew that the river had burst its banks at its upper
bend. He had barely time to leap into his boat and cast it off before
there was a foot of water on his floor.
But the new current was carrying the boats away from the higher level,
which they had been eagerly seeking, and towards the channel of the
swollen river. The barge was first to feel its influence, and was
hurried towards the river against the strongest efforts of its boatmen.
One by one the other and smaller boats contrived to get into the slack
water of crossing streets, and one was swamped before his eyes. But
James Smith kept only the barge in view. His difficulty in following it
was increased by his inexperience in managing a boat, and the quantity
of drift which now charged the current. Trees torn by their roots from
some upland bank; sheds, logs, timber, and the bloated carcasses of
cattle choked the stream. All the ruin worked by the flood seemed to be
compressed in this disastrous current. Once or twice he narrowly escaped
collision with a heavy beam or the bed of some farmer's wagon. Once he
was swamped by a tree, and righted his frail boat while clinging to its
branches.
And then those who watched him from the barge and shore said afterwards
that a great apathy seemed to fall upon him. He no longer attempted to
guide the boat or struggle with the drift, but sat in the stern with
intent forward gaze and motionless paddles. Once they strove to warn
him, called to him to make an effort to reach the barge, and did what
they could, in spite of their own peril, to alter their course and help
him. But he neither answered nor heeded them. And then suddenly a great
log that they had just escaped seemed to rise up under the keel of his
boat, and it was gone. After a moment his face and head appeared above
the current, and so close to the stern of the barge that there was a
slight cry from the woman in it, but the next moment, and before the
boatman could reach him, he was drawn under it and disappeared. They lay
on their oars eagerly watching, but the body of James Smith was sucked
under the barge, and, in the mid-channel of the great river, was carried
out towards the distant sea.
*****
There was a strange meeting that night on the deck of a relief boat,
which had been sent out in search of the missing barge, between Mrs.
Smith and a grave and anxious passenger who had chartered it. When
he had comforted her, and pointed out, as, indeed, he had many times
before, the loneliness and insecurity of her unprotected life, she
yielded to his arguments. But it was not until many months after their
marriage that she confessed to him on that eventful night she thought
she had seen in a moment of great peril the vision of the dead face of
her husband uplifted to her through the water.