A First Family of Tasajara

CHAPER XI

“Readers of the ‘Clarion’ will have noticed that allusion has been frequently made in these columns to certain rumors concerning the early history of Tasajara which were supposed to affect the pioneer record of Daniel Harcourt. It was deemed by the conductors of this journal to be only consistent with the fearless and independent duty undertaken by the ‘Clarion’ that these rumors should be fully chronicled as part of the information required by the readers of a first-class newspaper, unbiased by any consideration of the social position of the parties, but simply as a matter of news. For this the ‘Clarion’ does not deem it necessary to utter a word of apology. But for that editorial comment or attitude which the proprietors felt was justified by the reliable sources of their information they now consider it only due in honor to themselves, their readers, and Mr. Harcourt to fully and freely apologize. A patient and laborious investigation enables them to state that the alleged facts published by the ‘Clarion’ and copied by other journals are utterly unsupported by testimony, and the charges—although more or less vague—which were based upon them are equally untenable. We are now satisfied that one ‘Elijah Curtis,’ a former pioneer of Tasajara who disappeared five years ago, and was supposed to be drowned, has not only made no claim to the Tasajara property, as alleged, but has given no sign of his equally alleged resuscitation and present existence, and that on the minutest investigation there appears nothing either in his disappearance, or the transfer of his property to Daniel Harcourt, that could in any way disturb the uncontested title to Tasajara or the unimpeachable character of its present owner. The whole story now seems to have been the outcome of one of those stupid rural hoaxes too common in California.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Ashwood, laying aside the ‘Clarion’ with a skeptical shrug of her pretty shoulders, as she glanced up at her brother; “I suppose this means that you are going to propose again to the young lady?”

“I have,” said Jack Shipley, “that’s the worst of it—and got my answer before this came out.”

“Jack!” said Mrs. Ashwood, thoroughly surprised.

“Yes! You see, Conny, as I told you three weeks ago, she said she wanted time to consider,—that she scarcely knew me, and all that! Well, I thought it wasn’t exactly a gentleman’s business to seem to stand off after that last attack on her father, and so, last week, I went down to San Jose, where she was staying, and begged her not to keep me in suspense. And, by Jove! she froze me with a look, and said that with these aspersions on her father’s character, she preferred not to be under obligations to any one.”

“And you believed her?”

“Oh, hang it all! Look here, Conny,—I wish you’d just try for once to find out some good in that family, besides what that sentimental young widower John Milton may have. You seem to think because they’ve quarreled with HIM there isn’t a virtue left among them.”

Far from seeming to offer any suggestion of feminine retaliation, Mrs. Ashwood smiled sweetly. “My dear Jack, I have no desire to keep you from trying your luck again with Miss Clementina, if that’s what you mean, and indeed I shouldn’t be surprised if a family who felt a mesalliance as sensitively as the Harcourts felt that affair of their son’s, would be as keenly alive to the advantages of a good match for their daughter. As to young Mr. Harcourt, he never talked to me of the vices of his family, nor has he lately troubled me much with the presence of his own virtues. I haven’t heard from him since we came here.”

“I suppose he is satisfied with the government berth you got for him,” returned her brother dryly.

“He was very grateful to Senator Flynn, who appreciates his talents, but who offered it to him as a mere question of fitness,” replied Mrs. Ashwood with great precision of statement. “But you don’t seem to know he declined it on account of his other work.”

“Preferred his old Bohemian ways, eh? You can’t change those fellows, Conny. They can’t get over the fascinations of vagabondage. Sorry your lady-patroness scheme didn’t work. Pity you couldn’t have promoted him in the line of his profession, as the Grand Duchess of Girolstein did Fritz.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Jack, go to Clementina! You may not be successful, but there at least the perfect gentlemanliness and good taste of your illustrations will not be thrown away.”

“I think of going to San Francisco tomorrow, anyway,” returned Jack with affected carelessness. “I’m getting rather bored with this wild seaside watering place and its glitter of ocean and hopeless background of mountain. It’s nothing to me that ‘there’s no land nearer than Japan’ out there. It may be very healthful to the tissues, but it’s weariness to the spirit, and I don’t see why we can’t wait at San Francisco till the rains send us further south, as well as here.”

He had walked to the balcony of their sitting-room in the little seaside hotel where this conversation took place, and gazed discontentedly over the curving bay and sandy shore before him. After a slight pause Mrs. Ashwood stepped out beside him.

“Very likely I may go with you,” she said, with a perceptible tone of weariness. “We will see after the post arrives.”

“By the way, there is a little package for you in my room, that came this morning. I brought it up, but forgot to give it to you. You’ll find it on my table.”

Mrs. Ashwood abstractedly turned away and entered her brother’s room from the same balcony. The forgotten parcel, which looked like a roll of manuscript, was lying on his dressing-table. She gazed attentively at the handwriting on the wrapper and then gave a quick glance around her. A sudden and subtle change came over her. She neither flushed nor paled, nor did the delicate lines of expression in her face quiver or change. But as she held the parcel in her hand her whole being seemed to undergo some exquisite suffusion. As the medicines which the Arabian physician had concealed in the hollow handle of the mallet permeated the languid royal blood of Persia, so some volatile balm of youth seemed to flow in upon her with the contact of that strange missive and transform her weary spirit.

“Jack!” she called, in a high clear voice. But Jack had already gone from the balcony when she reached it with an elastic step and a quick youthful swirl and rustling of her skirt. He was lighting his cigar in the garden.

“Jack,” she said, leaning half over the railing, “come back here in an hour and we’ll talk over that matter of yours again.”

Jack looked up eagerly and as if he might even come up then, but she added quickly, “In about an hour—I must think it over,” and withdrew.

She re-entered the sitting-room, shut the door carefully and locked it, half pulled down the blind, walking once or twice around the table on which the parcel lay, with one eye on it like a graceful cat. Then she suddenly sat down, took it up with a grave practical face, examined the postmark curiously, and opened it with severe deliberation. It contained a manuscript and a letter of four closely written pages. She glanced at the manuscript with bright approving eyes, ran her fingers through its leaves and then laid it carefully and somewhat ostentatiously on the table beside her. Then, still holding the letter in her hand, she rose and glanced out of the window at her bored brother lounging towards the beach and at the heaving billows beyond, and returned to her seat. This apparently important preliminary concluded, she began to read.

There were, as already stated, four blessed pages of it! All vital, earnest, palpitating with youthful energy, preposterous in premises, precipitate in conclusions,—yet irresistible and convincing to every woman in their illogical sincerity. There was not a word of love in it, yet every page breathed a wholesome adoration; there was not an epithet or expression that a greater prude than Mrs. Ashwood would have objected to, yet every sentence seemed to end in a caress. There was not a line of poetry in it, and scarcely a figure or simile, and yet it was poetical. Boyishly egotistic as it was in attitude, it seemed to be written less OF himself than TO her; in its delicate because unconscious flattery, it made her at once the provocation and excuse. And yet so potent was its individuality that it required no signature. No one but John Milton Harcourt could have written it. His personality stood out of it so strongly that once or twice Mrs. Ashwood almost unconsciously put up her little hand before her face with a half mischievous, half-deprecating smile, as if the big honest eyes of its writer were upon her.

It began by an elaborate apology for declining the appointment offered him by one of her friends, which he was bold enough to think had been prompted by her kind heart. That was like her, but yet what she might do to any one; and he preferred to think of her as the sweet and gentle lady who had recognized his merit without knowing him, rather than the powerful and gracious benefactress who wanted to reward him when she did know him. The crown that she had all unconsciously placed upon his head that afternoon at the little hotel at Crystal Spring was more to him than the Senator’s appointment; perhaps he was selfish, but he could not bear that she who had given so much should believe that he could accept a lesser gift. All this and much more! Some of it he had wanted to say to her in San Francisco at times when they had met, but he could not find the words. But she had given him the courage to go on and do the only thing he was fit for, and he had resolved to stick to that, and perhaps do something once more that might make him hear again her voice as he had heard it that day, and again see the light that had shone in her eyes as she sat there and read. And this was why he was sending her a manuscript. She might have forgotten that she had told him a strange story of her cousin who had disappeared—which she thought he might at some time work up. Here it was. Perhaps she might not recognize it again, in the way he had written it here; perhaps she did not really mean it when she had given him permission to use it, but he remembered her truthful eyes and believed her—and in any event it was hers to do with what she liked. It had been a great pleasure for him to write it and think that she would see it; it was like seeing her himself—that was in HIS BETTER SELF—more worthy the companionship of a beautiful and noble woman than the poor young man she would have helped. This was why he had not called the week before she went away. But for all that, she had made his life less lonely, and he should be ever grateful to her. He could never forget how she unconsciously sympathized with him that day over the loss that had blighted his life forever,—yet even then he did not know that she, herself, had passed through the same suffering. But just here the stricken widow of thirty, after a vain attempt to keep up the knitted gravity of her eyebrows, bowed her dimpling face over the letter of the blighted widower of twenty, and laughed so long and silently that the tears stood out like dew on her light-brown eyelashes.

But she became presently severe again, and finished her reading of the letter gravely. Then she folded it carefully, deposited it in a box on her table, which she locked. After a few minutes, however, she unlocked the box again and transferred the letter to her pocket. The serenity of her features did not relax again, although her previous pretty prepossession of youthful spirit was still indicated in her movements. Going into her bedroom, she reappeared in a few minutes with a light cloak thrown over her shoulders and a white-trimmed broad-brimmed hat. Then she rolled up the manuscript in a paper, and called her French maid. As she stood there awaiting her with the roll in her hand, she might have been some young girl on her way to her music lesson.

“If my brother returns before I do, tell him to wait.”

“Madame is going”—

“Out,” said Mrs. Ashwood blithely, and tripped downstairs.

She made her way directly to the shore where she remembered there was a group of rocks affording a shelter from the northwest trade winds. It was reached at low water by a narrow ridge of sand, and here she had often basked in the sun with her book. It was here that she now unrolled John Milton’s manuscript and read.

It was the story she had told him, but interpreted by his poetry and adorned by his fancy until the facts as she remembered them seemed to be no longer hers, or indeed truths at all. She had always believed her cousin’s unhappy temperament to have been the result of a moral and physical idiosyncrasy,—she found it here to be the effect of a lifelong and hopeless passion for herself! The ingenious John Milton had given a poet’s precocity to the youth whom she had only known as a suspicious, moody boy, had idealized him as a sensitive but songless Byron, had given him the added infirmity of pulmonary weakness, and a handkerchief that in moments of great excitement, after having been hurriedly pressed to his pale lips, was withdrawn “with a crimson stain.” Opposed to this interesting figure—the more striking to her as she had been hitherto haunted by the impression that her cousin during his boyhood had been subject to facial eruption and boils—was her own equally idealized self. Cruelly kind to her cousin and gentle with his weaknesses while calmly ignoring their cause, leading him unconsciously step by step in his fatal passion, he only became aware by accident that she nourished an ideal hero in the person of a hard, proud, middle-aged practical man of the world,—her future husband! At this picture of the late Mr. Ashwood, who had really been an indistinctive social bon vivant, his amiable relict grew somewhat hysterical. The discovery of her real feelings drove the consumptive cousin into a secret, self-imposed exile on the shores of the Pacific, where he hoped to find a grave. But the complete and sudden change of life and scene, the balm of the wild woods and the wholesome barbarism of nature, wrought a magical change in his physical health and a philosophical rest in his mind. He married the daughter of an Indian chief. Years passed, the heroine—a rich and still young and beautiful widow—unwittingly sought the same medicinal solitude. Here in the depth of the forest she encountered her former playmate; the passion which he had fondly supposed was dead revived in her presence, and for the first time she learned from his bearded lips the secret of his passion. Alas! not SHE alone! The contiguous forest could not be bolted out, and the Indian wife heard all. Recognizing the situation with aboriginal directness of purpose, she committed suicide in the fond belief that it would reunite the survivors. But in vain; the cousins parted on the spot to meet no more.

Even Mrs. Ashwood’s predilection for the youthful writer could not overlook the fact that the denouement was by no means novel nor the situation human, but yet it was here that she was most interested and fascinated. The description of the forest was a description of the wood where she had first met Harcourt; the charm of it returned, until she almost seemed to again inhale its balsamic freshness in the pages before her. Now, as then, her youth came back with the same longing and regret. But more bewildering than all, it was herself that moved there, painted with the loving hand of the narrator. For the first time she experienced the delicious flattery of seeing herself as only a lover could see her. The smallest detail of her costume was suggested with an accuracy that pleasantly thrilled her feminine sense. The grace of her figure slowly moving through the shadow, the curves of her arm and the delicacy of her hand that held the bridle rein, the gentle glow of her softly rounded cheek, the sweet mystery of her veiled eyes and forehead, and the escaping gold of her lovely hair beneath her hat were all in turn masterfully touched or tenderly suggested. And when to this was added the faint perfume of her nearer presence—the scent she always used—the delicate revelations of her withdrawn gauntlet, the bracelet clasping her white wrist, and at last the thrilling contact of her soft hand on his arm,—she put down the manuscript and blushed like a very girl. Then she started.

A shout!—HIS voice surely!—and the sound of oars in their rowlocks.

An instant revulsion of feeling overtook her. With a quick movement she instantly hid the manuscript beneath her cloak and stood up erect and indignant. Not twenty yards away, apparently advancing from the opposite shore of the bay, was a boat. It contained only John Milton, resting on his oars and scanning the group of rocks anxiously. His face, which was quite strained with anxiety, suddenly flushed when he saw her, and then recognizing the unmistakable significance of her look and attitude, paled once more. He bent over his oars again; a few strokes brought him close to the rock.

“I beg your pardon,” he said hesitatingly, as he turned towards her and laid aside his oars, “but—I thought—you were—in danger.”

She glanced quickly round her. She had forgotten the tide! The ledge between her and the shore was already a foot under brown sea-water. Yet if she had not thought that it would look ridiculous, she would have leaped down even then and waded ashore.

“It’s nothing,” she said coldly, with the air of one to whom the situation was an everyday occurrence; “it’s only a few steps and a slight wetting—and my brother would have been here in a moment more.”

John Milton’s frank eyes made no secret of his mortification. “I ought not to have disturbed you, I know,” he said quickly, “I had no right. But I was on the other shore opposite and I saw you come down here—that is”—he blushed prodigiously—“I thought it MIGHT BE you—and I ventured—I mean—won’t you let me row you ashore?”

There seemed to be no reasonable excuse for refusing. She slipped quickly into the boat without waiting for his helping hand, avoiding that contact which only a moment ago she was trying to recall.

A few strokes brought them ashore. He continued his explanation with the hopeless frankness and persistency of youth and inexperience. “I only came here the day before yesterday. I would not have come, but Mr. Fletcher, who has a cottage on the other shore, sent for me to offer me my old place on the ‘Clarion.’ I had no idea of intruding upon your privacy by calling here without permission.”

Mrs. Ashwood had resumed her conventional courtesy without however losing her feminine desire to make her companion pay for the agitation he had caused her. “We would have been always pleased to see you,” she said vaguely, “and I hope, as you are here now, you will come with me to the hotel. My brother”—

But he still retained his hold of the boat-rope without moving, and continued, “I saw you yesterday, through the telescope, sitting in your balcony; and later at night I think it was your shadow I saw near the blue shaded lamp in the sitting-room by the window,—I don’t mean the RED LAMP that you have in your own room. I watched you until you put out the blue lamp and lit the red one. I tell you this—because—because—I thought you might be reading a manuscript I sent you. At least,” he smiled faintly, “I LIKED to think it so.”

In her present mood this struck her only as persistent and somewhat egotistical. But she felt herself now on ground where she could deal firmly with him.

“Oh, yes,” she said gravely. “I got it and thank you very much for it. I intended to write to you.”

“Don’t,” he said, looking at her fixedly. “I can see you don’t like it.”

“On the contrary,” she said promptly, “I think it beautifully written, and very ingenious in plot and situation. Of course it isn’t the story I told you—I didn’t expect that, for I’m not a genius. The man is not at all like my cousin, you know, and the woman—well really, to tell the truth, SHE is simply inconceivable!”

“You think so?” he said gravely. He had been gazing abstractedly at some shining brown seaweed in the water, and when he raised his eyes to hers they seemed to have caught its color.

“Think so? I’m positive! There’s no such a woman; she isn’t HUMAN. But let us walk to the hotel.”