CHAPTER XII."Most sacrilegious murder hath broke opeThe Lord's anointed temple, and stole thenceThe life o' the building."The breakfast table at the San Rosario Ranch was usually a merry one; but on the morning after what Hal had called Millicent's "magnetic exhibition," the usual good spirits were missing. Millicent took her accustomed place at Deering's side; and Galbraith marked the extraordinary change which she had suffered since she had bade him good-night the evening before. Her face had blanched to a whiteness which made the ebon lines of eyebrows and lashes seem unnatural. Her mouth was pale and contracted, and her expression of horrified anticipation reminded him of the look in the eyes of a deer at bay. What could have come to the girl? he asked himself in dismay; with a strange consciousness that whatever should befall her of good or evil from that time forth would have to him an interest beyond all else in the world. She ate her breakfast mechanically, and answered all that was said in which she could be supposed to have an interest. She laughed once, too, at one of Hal's jokes; but the sound was rough and strained. Mrs. Deering and Barbara, occupied with some household complication, merely noticed that Millicent seemed tired; and Hal put her odd look and manner down to the score of her being in love, which in his eyes accounted for every freak or unexplained symptom of hers.It had been proposed that the day should be spent out-of-doors, at a place which Millicent had long wished to visit,--the little island in the river, below the deserted mill. Galbraith had remained to be of the party; and his two friends had promised to ride over from the camp and join them at the appointed place. Just before they started, old John arrived with a note to Mrs. Deering from Graham, who wrote that he should not be able to be of the party. Hal and Millicent drove together, as they had done on that day when Graham, in accordance with California etiquette, had stopped to kill the rattlesnakes. Old Sphinx was doing his best to keep up with the mule team, when Millicent's sensitive ears detected the sound of horses' hoofs behind them. Presently, through the thick cloud of dust, she descried two horsemen riding at full gallop towards them. The sunlight and the veil of dust made it impossible to see what manner of men they were until Millicent observed that each carried over his shoulder a long object, which glittered in the sunlight."Have you brought your pistols?" she asked."Yes, Princess, but they are in the wagon. I expected till the last moment that Graham would turn up to take you, and that I should drive the team. Why do you ask? There is no danger of our being molested.""Look at those men. Are not those gun barrels I see on their shoulders?""Yes; but they are probably peaceful hunters."The young man spoke in a perfectly careless tone, to reassure his companion; but Millicent noticed that he occasionally looked behind him as the riders gained on them. Finally, as the men drew near, Millicent saw the rider nearest her shift the gun from his shoulder and rest it across the saddle-bow, as if preparing to take aim. Hal, who had seen the action, instantly called to Millicent to catch the reins, and held up both his hands. By this time the men were close upon them, and the one who had shifted his weapon called out in a rough voice,--"All right, boss; we know you ain't got no money, and we don't want your life to-day." His companion laughed aloud, and striking spurs to their horses, they galloped down the high-road. Hal laughed as heartily as the supposed highwayman, saying,--"Well, that's a greaser's idea of a joke, I suppose. Adventure number one has befallen us with few bad consequences. I don't think you were half as frightened as you were the other day by the snakes.""No, I fancy I was not. I should not much mind being killed to-day." This with a little, bitter laugh."And why? Let us wait till after luncheon. Barbara has put up a capital venison pasty,--a real English one, out of the Queen's own receipt book.""Well, we will wait for the pie, to please you."The drive was accomplished with the usual desultory chit-chat, Hal doing rather more than his share of the joking. As they passed the little hovel, the wild children ran out, as they had upon the day when they had visited the camp in the woods; and soon the gray bridge and the little island were reached. The baskets were unpacked and the luncheon spread upon the grass by the time the guests arrived. Among them were O'Neil, Hartley, Ferrara, and Mrs. Shallop, who had come over by the train; with a party of people from the village, in whom Millicent had never taken much interest. Galbraith never left Millicent's side; sparing her the necessity of talking by keeping up an incessant stream of conversation which she heard vaguely, and of which she understood not one word. In after days the import of all the young man said came back to her; and she remembered the quaint Indian legends, the reminiscences of life on the two edges of the continent, with which Maurice Galbraith kept the others of the party from her side. She realized what he was doing, and knew that he only, in all the company, understood and sympathized with her half-dazed mood; and for his efforts he received more than one little smile, sadder than tears.This is one of the stories which the lawyer told her:--"In the old days, when Father Junipero and his small band of priests and soldiers came into the wilderness of California, with the cross uplifted in one hand, the sword grasped in the other, there lived on this island where we now sit, a beautiful Indian maiden. Her name was a very long one, and its meaning in our language is the Smile of the Morning. She lived with the old chief, her father, in a wigwam, where also lived her sisters and brothers and various of her cousins and distant relatives. The old chief had many daughters, but the Smile of the Morning was his favorite child; and she it was who cooked his food for him, when he did not eat it raw, and brought him his bow and arrows when he started on a hunting party. The sisters of the favorite daughter all found mates among the sons of the tribe, but she lived alone with only the wild bird in the madrone tree for her lover. Her sisters, each of whom carried a pappoose upon her back, laughed at the Smile of the Morning, and said that she would die without a husband; but the girl did not mind them. She was taller, by a head, than any woman of the tribe; she could charm the wild birds, and draw the feathers from their tails to make head-dresses for the old chief and ornaments for herself; she could dance war-dances like one of the braves, only with more grace; and when she told the stories which the fishes in the river whispered to her, the old chieftain nodded his head wisely and patted the girl on the shoulder. She should find a husband in good time; but he must be as much taller and stronger than the other men of the tribe, as she was fairer and wiser than her sisters."When the missionary priests came, with their white faces and strange garments fashioned neither from the skin of any animal nor from the feathers of any bird, and made friendly overtures to the old chief, the Smile of the Morning fell upon her face in terror. The Indians would have worshipped the men with the white faces and strange tongue; but to prove to them that they too were men and adored a God, the priests held their services and kneeled to the Great Spirit whom they reverenced. When the new-comers had learned the language of the Indians, and had built themselves a house and a greater house to their God, the daughter of the chief grew to be no longer afraid of the black-robed figures. She eagerly learned the simple lessons which they set for the people; and it was because of the wonderful learning that they gave her that she studied so industriously, and not, like her brothers and sisters, to gain the daily rations of corn. When the early bell called the Indians to the church of the San Rosario Mission, the Smile of the Morning was the first to answer the summons; and when the other Indians were squabbling over their breakfast of maize, she lingered in the sanctuary, trying to fathom the strange rites which were so much holier than those of her people, looking into the painted faces in the pictures over the rude altar, and feeling curiously behind them to ascertain whether the backs also were painted."The soldiers who upheld the authority of the priests were encouraged by large bounties and grants of land to marry the converted squaws; and in the course of time several such unions were solemnized at the Mission. Among the stern old pioneer priests was one young man dear to the Father Junipero, whose pupil he had been, and who had followed the famous man on his great mission of converting the heathen Indians. His name was Fra Antonio. His voice was soft and low, and his eyes open and sad, with shadows in them, which the Indian maiden had never seen in other eyes,--shadows like those cast by the white clouds floating before the sun's face on hot summer afternoons. Fra Antonio was very kind to the tall beauty of the tribe, and with a never-failing patience strove to make the doctrines of his religion clear to her simple understanding. Strange were the means by which the fathers learned to expound their religion to the savages. To express the great hope of the resurrection, they put a number of insects in a vessel of water, leaving them there till they were apparently quite dead. Then the creatures were placed in a bank of hot ashes, which warmed their frozen, half-dead bodies back to life. When the gauzy wings were spread, carrying the insects up into the sunshine again, the fathers marked the words ejaculated by the Indians, and by that term they called the resurrection."New and beautiful were the thoughts which now possessed the mind of the Indian girl. She learned that to forgive was nobler than to avenge,--strangest of all doctrines taught by the priests to the red men. She learned that the stars, pale and fiery, were great worlds like the one in which she lived, and not the hearts of the brave chiefs placed in the heavens after death as she had always been taught. Only the simplest of the great truths which lie like jewels in the tawdry setting of the Mother Church, did Fra Antonio instil into her childish mind, which with an unquestioning faith accepted all the young priest taught. Few among the tribe--perhaps, indeed, no one of the Indians beside the Smile of the Morning--understood or believed the new doctrines taught by the priests. These were satisfied that the rites of baptism and of extreme unction were administered, and that the daily services were attended, quite conscious that their most potent weapon of conversion was the ration ofatole, or prepared corn, which they served out to the lazy braves. As soon as he became a member of the church, every redskin was cared for, and a gentle slavery was the result, in which the priests exacted a certain amount of labor from the Indian, in turn feeding him and caring for his wants. The art of weaving was taught, together with civilized agriculture; and the fruit of the vines was fermented into strong, rough wine, this being reserved for the service of the altar and the table of the priests. In the eyes of the zealous missionaries the Indian was the rightful owner of the soil; and there was no thought of disputing his claim to it. It was that he might better and more wisely enjoy the fruits of his own land, and in the next life enter the happier home prepared for all true followers of the Church of Rome, that the Father Junipero and his band of soldiers and priests lived and died in the wilderness of California. How their treatment of the original inhabitants of the soil differed from that adopted by the enlightened race which now claims the country, you have seen enough, or at any rate heard enough, of our Indian policy to appreciate. Instead of improving the land for its owners, as did the brave missionary priests, we have wrested it from them, driving the children of those who for centuries have owned the Pacific coast away from the choicest spots to rocky, desolate lands which have again been taken from them by the greedy gold-hunters. But all this has happened since the time when the Smile-of the Morning lived upon this pretty island, and decked her glossy hair with a coronet of blue-jays' feathers, that she might be fair in the eyes of one whom she loved. But a year had passed since the arrival of Fra Antonio, when the old chieftain noticed that his daughter's step had grown heavy and slow; that her great eyes danced no more; that her countenance no longer merited the name of the morning's smile. He was a wise old man for an Indian; and after thinking the matter over for a week, during which time he smoked an unusual number of pipes of tobacco, he came to the conclusion that the girl had been bewitched by one of the strange priests. Calling her to him, he questioned her as to the cause of her altered behavior; and from her downcast face and embarrassed replies he quickly surmised her secret. The Smile of the Morning loved the fair young priest, and it was for his sake that her tears flowed. The old chief at first scoffed at her infatuation, and bade her take up with one of her dusky suitors. But the girl was obstinate; and finally yielding to her whim, the old chief himself offered his daughter's hand to Fra Antonio. The young priest, in holy horror, took counsel with his superiors; and it was explained to the chieftain that though the white soldiers were free to mate with the maidens of the tribe, the priests were vowed to celibacy. If the pious young priest had unwittingly mingled an unwise fervor in his exhortations to the Indian girl, he bitterly regretted his fault. As day by day he saw her elastic figure grow more feeble, and marked her hollow cheeks and her sad eyes fixed reproachfully on him whilst he served the mass or taught the new converts, a tenderness for her, which her savage health and perfections had failed to arouse, awoke in his breast. When he saw the young braves, each with his dusky partner, and the sisters of the Smile of the Morning with their children in their arms, he sometimes cursed the priestly habit which proclaimed him a thing apart from all other of God's creatures, doomed to live unmated and alone. Long vigils and heavy penances failed to ease the grief in his heart, or to set at rest its yearning toward the child who had been redeemed from barbarism, through his teaching, to live a Christian life and die in the hope of his faith."At last the battle between the spirit and the heart grew too terrible for him to bear; he was not strong enough; and he begged the fathers to send him to another Mission far to the northward. When the Smile of the Morning learned that Fra Antonio was to leave the Mission on the morrow, she decked herself in all her jewels, hung her long shell necklaces about her throat, wound her bead bracelets about her arms, and placed her coronet of blue-jays' feathers upon her brow. She was not to be found that night when the old chief lay down to rest; and when the sun rose on the day which should see Fra Antonio far on his long journey, her sisters found the maiden lying in the cool waters of the river which washes this island, with the little rosary the priest had given her locked in her cold fingers, and the smile upon her face that had been missing for so many weeks. They called the fathers to come and look upon her; and Fra Antonio prayed long beside her, with streaming eyes and broken voice. The kiss which his sad lips laid reverently on her brow was felt perhaps, for all those who stood near heard the sigh which came rustling through the trees near by. As she had wilfully taken her own life, the poor girl could not be buried with the ceremonies of the church to which she had been admitted; so she was interred by her people near the spot where they had found her, on this little island where we now sit. When the good fathers sat together of an evening and discussed questions spiritual and temporal touching the welfare of their little flock, Fra Antonio was often missing from their midst. Sometimes the faint sound was heard of the church bell softly struck by a tender hand, and the priests crossed themselves silently, knowing for whose soul it was that Fra Antonio solemnized the mass for the dead."A silence followed Galbraith's story, which was broken by Millicent, who said,--"I have a sketch in an old Italian book of a beautiful young monk, Fra Antonio by name. Could it be the same, I wonder?""Who knows? Some of the priests were Italians. Would the dates agree?""The portrait was dated some time in the latter part of the last century.""It could not have been far from that time that the Smile of the Morning met her sad fate.""Sad,--do you call her fate sad?" queried Millicent."Who could think it otherwise?""I surely do. Was it sad to die for the man she loved?""It would have been happier if she could have lived for him.""Happiness! Who spoke of happiness? Why talk about a thing so mythical? I think her lot was an enviable one. To her simple mind the thought that suicide is sinful could never have occurred. She might not follow the man she loved; she believed that the soul now prisoned in her breast might always be near him; so she opened the cage and let the bird fly.""You speak as seriously as if you had known the Smile of the Morning and sympathized with her.""It is the privilege of those who have greatly suffered, that the grief of others can be felt and understood by them." Millicent spoke absently, dreamily, checking her speech at the pained expression which her words brought to Galbraith's face.Later in the afternoon the party left the island and wandered about the old bridge. Some of them climbed the high hill; others struck into the woods. By some chance Millicent found herself left alone near the mill with no one of the party near her save Ah Lam. Calling the faithful creature to her side, she made him prepare her a comfortable seat, and leaning back against the wall, she entered into a desultory conversation with her pupil. Ah Lam often told her stories in his broken English, descriptive of the power and character of the most august personages of the Chinese mythology. To-day he found an inattentive listener in his kind friend and teacher; but he had been bidden to speak, and so he talked on patiently, describing rites of death and feasts of marriages, recalling the great riverfêtewhich he had witnessed shortly before sailing from his native city. As the Chinaman paused after this last tale, Millicent heard a step approaching the door of the old mill. She looked up carelessly, expecting to see one of the gentlemen. The man who stood before her was a stranger. His face was somewhat flushed, and he looked as if he had travelled some distance."Second time, my lady, I've see'd yer purty face to-day."Millicent bowed her head and turned away, looking anxiously toward the wood, where she had seen Hal disappear a few moments before."Sha'n't let yer off ser aisy this time. I've took a fancy to see the color of yer eyes."The look of angry indignation with which the gray orbs were turned upon the man was enough to have abashed any sensitive person, but to this class the stranger did not belong. He was a rough-looking fellow of large stature, with a heavy animal face, crossed by a deep scar running from the chin to the forehead on the right side. In his belt he wore a pair of pistols, at which the Chinaman looked uneasily."Say, do yer belong in these parts?""Yes," answered the girl in a low voice."Well, I am leavin' 'em for good; we're not likely to meet again. I 'm a gentleman, and I don't want to trouble you for them rings o' yourn, but a kiss won't cost you nothin'."Suiting the action to the word, the man threw an arm about the girl's slender waist, and quick as a thought began to drag her toward the spot where a couple of horses were tethered. With a sudden wrench, she shook herself free from his rude clasp, and sped down the path calling for help. Help was nearer to her than she had thought, and a humble friend sprang to her aid. As the insolent creature started in pursuit of the swift-footed girl, Ah Lam adroitly tripped him up, bringing him to the ground with a heavy fall. The man was somewhat bruised by his tumble, a sharp stone having struck his arm. He arose with difficulty, pouring out a volley of oaths the like of which had never before desecrated Millicent's ears. The Chinaman, knowing full well the danger which his temerity had brought upon him, ran quickly after his young mistress. The path brought them to the border of the stream, and their flight was stopped by this obstacle. By this time, the man, blind with rage, had caught up with the two fugitives; he seemed in doubt which of them to molest first. Millicent stood with flashing eyes and curling lip, her head thrown back, her arms folded across her breast, looking at him with an expression of scorn that seemed to awe him for a moment. He drew back, as if afraid to touch so beautiful and wrathful a creature, and in his rage clutched the Chinaman by the throat. In the scuffle which ensued, Ah Lam's hat was thrown off, and the long cue coiled about his head fell down. Quick as thought, the ruffian seized the braid, and drawing a sharp knife from his boot, cut it from the head of the Chinaman. With a shriek which had the despair of a double death, the Chinaman turned and implanted his finger-nails in the face of his adversary, inflicting ten long scratches on the cheeks. The crushed worm will turn at last; and the poor soul, damned for eternity by the cutting of his hair, had turned upon the ruffian. Quick as the fast-drawn breath of the terrified girl, the villain lifted his long knife and, with a horrible oath, plunged it into the side of the Chinaman. The shrieks of the victim, the horror-stricken screams of the girl, the sight of the blood, seemed to madden the wretch; for he tore the quivering knife from the wound and stabbed him again and again. At last the rage for blood seemed satiated; he threw the mutilated body, still breathing, to ebb out its life on the soil, and turned with bloody hands and seared eyes toward Millicent, who had sunk upon her knees, lifting the head of the dying Chinaman to her young breast.The closed lids fluttered open, the dimmed eyes looked gratefully for the last time into the face of the girl who had been kinder to him than any other creature in this strange land where he had worked so faithfully, where he had been so cruelly oppressed in life, and so foully murdered; hope of Heaven being closed to him before his miserable breath had been taken. The horror of his crime must have overcome the ruffian for a moment, for he paused and silently watched the death-agonies of his victim. To that moment's feeling of horror or remorse, what might not Millicent owe? For soon, to her it seemed an eternity, the men, whose answering shouts she had not heard, appeared close at hand. The murderer saw them none too quickly for his safety, and springing upon his horse, which stood near by, clapped spurs to the flank and rode off at a hand gallop in the opposite direction.Galbraith rushed to Millicent's side and lifted the dying creature from her breast. They placed him gently upon the bank, and Hal put his flask to his lips; but it was too late. With one last struggle Ah Lam yielded up his miserable life; and Millicent's cry of pity sounded his death-knell. Then she lifted her hands to Heaven and prayed for the soul of the poor creature who had so bravely defended her. An hour ago she had smiled at Fra Antonio's masses for the repose of the Smile of the Morning. In moments like these the strong instincts of men and women overcome the reasons and doctrines of education; Millicent prayed, believing that she should be heard.When it became evident to the little group which had silently assembled about the spot, that poor Ah Lam was beyond human help, Maurice Galbraith and Henry Deering lifted the lifeless body and laid it in the great wagon. Millicent followed and drew over the dead face the white cloak which she had worn all that day. Pedro, climbing to his seat, touched the mules into motion; and the wagon, which had carried so merry a freight to the gray bridge that morning, returned at sunset over the same path with its ghastly burden,--a very funeral car.Maurice Galbraith gently placed Millicent beside Barbara and her mother in the smaller carriage, which was driven back to the Ranch under the escort of Ferrara, O'Neil, and Hartley. Then the young lawyer, with Henry Deering to bear him company, started in pursuit of the murderer. He had sworn a silent oath, as he stood by the dying man, and learned that his life had been given to protect Millicent, that Ah Lam should be avenged. If there were law and justice in the broad land of California, the murderer should surfer the extreme penalty for wilful and wicked shedding of innocent blood. In pursuit rode the two young men, with stern faces; and it was well for the fugitive that he had a long start of them, for they rode as men do when time must be gained at all costs. Along the narrow bridle-path, over which the murderer had passed, they took their way, and were soon lost to the view of the three women sitting close together in troubled silence. Barbara's strong hands held the reins and plied the whip, while streams of tears coursed down her cheeks. Mrs. Deering patted her daughter's shoulder; but it was on Millicent her attention was most firmly fixed. The girl had not moved since Galbraith had placed her in the carriage. Her eyes were strained wide open, and the expression in their depths was one which the gentle woman never forgot,--a look as of an endless despair and horror. Back to the happy valley they drove silently, no joyous young voices carolling out ballads of love, songs of battle, as was their wont; in silence and grief they passed over the familiar road through the gap between the guardian hills, back to the quiet house, to herald the advent of the humble dead to those who had been his fellow-servants.No one told Millicent that standing near the spot where the ruffian's horse had been tethered was a second steed. A strong mustang saddled and bridled was found there. A heavy leading-rein passed through the bit, and a stout rope lying over the saddle, gave a sinister significance to the fact. For whom had that horse been brought?CHAPTER XIII."Abroad it rushed,My frolic soul, for it had sightOf something half-way, which was knownAs mine at once, yet not mine own."It was early in the morning for Millicent, usually a late sleeper, to be in the garden among the flowers. There Graham found her, white as the gown she wore, standing with her arms filled with dark-red roses,--standing with the sunlight touching her pretty hair, and shining in her cool gray eyes. He stared at her, as at one risen from the dead; he touched her hand before he spoke to her, to make sure that it was really she, alive, with softly heaving breast and warm, clinging fingers. Alive, and not as he had pictured her a thousand times during that terrible ride,--cold and dead, with the stain which had dyed her kerchief, on brow and bosom. For a long time they stood silently looking into each other's faces; and then the man laid her hand gently on his arm, and together they passed down the orchard road, across a space of sunburnt meadow, to a spot they both knew,--Millicent's boudoir, hanging over the narrow stream, walled by six tall redwoods grown from the seeds of some giant predecessor, carpeted with thick green moss, furnished with two rough seats. Here they rested silently for a time,--Graham drawing long breaths of the morning air to relax his tired lungs; Millicent resting her wearied heart with looking at him, all her soul shining through her eyes. Graham first broke the silence with questions of all that had happened since they had parted. She told him of her danger, and of the murder of the Chinaman, in a low voice, full of awe. It had been her first knowledge of death; and the chill reality, the only certain thing which men look forward to, had first been known by her now that she was a woman grown, and could fully understand its dreadful significance. Hitherto, death had been a phrase only; a thing which must come to all creatures, as a matter of course. That she should sometime die she knew, but only by tradition; it had meant nothing to her. Now she understood it all, and the terrible knowledge had chilled her life-blood. Could she ever again think of anything but that dead face? One stronger than the King of Terrors was driving it from her thoughts: love was swiftly painting out the grim picture from her memory.Step by step they went over the ground of their mutual experiences since the time when they had parted: the picnic, and its tragic ending; the night which Graham had passed in the cabin with Ah Lam's murderer,--for there could be no doubt it was he who had dropped Millicent's handkerchief in the hut. Of the little journal Graham spoke sadly, gently, without anger, as if it were a thing which concerned neither of them. Then Millicent brokenly told the story which the written words had simply indicated. She told it with a sense of thankfulness that the weight of the secret rested no longer on her heart alone; that its pain was shared, and that at last her lover understood and saw her absolutely as she was. No reservation did she make, but bared to him the inmost chambers of her heart, sure of no misunderstanding, and upheld by a sympathy she had never before known. Then her confidence was returned, and Graham spoke to her of many things of which he had never spoken before; of the hopes and aspirations which had sometimes made his life glorious; of the quicksands and hidden rocks which had often made his way dangerous.A wonderful confession,--solemn as those first confessions made by men and women who at maturity join the Roman Catholic Church, and unflinchingly reveal to the confessor every temptation to which they have yielded in the course of their lives. To no mumbling, inattentive priest, with store of penances and absolutions in his pocket, was the confession made; in no stifling confessional, with throng of penitents outside, grudging every moment of delay. Each spoke to a tender human heart, that filled out the broken sentences, and echoed the deep sighs. The roof of their temple swayed in the light breeze, and the wild birds chanted the hymn of praise which consecrated it.As Millicent at last sat silent, not knowing whether her lover still spoke to her in words, or if that finer language of the spirit made his thoughts clear to her, came at once a strange consciousness that she was no longer a creature of this earth, with material senses and shape. The last words which she had spoken she remembered as one dimly recalls what has happened in another life. They were these:--"Are you sorry for me?"There had been no answer in words or in looks; for the power of sight had been left behind with the outer case, now shaken off for the first time since life upon the earth had begun. She was a thing apart no longer; her existence had become merged in that of a stronger soul, to which she was an all-important part. Folded in this spirit-embrace time was not, nor past nor future; nothing but the perfect ecstasy of a union which eternity should consecrate. Floating on a celestial ether, the double soul mounted ever higher and higher. Was it toward eternal bliss that it was wafted? Was the long waiting at an end?Again she saw the sunlight; again she heard the ripple of the water; again she felt the earthly tenement closing about the divine spirit. Before her, framed in the green leaves, was a face dear indeed, the face of her lover. With solemn eyes they looked at each other; and a broken voice whispered to her,--"Dear, what is it?"She answered softly,--"I have never been so near to you before."Then a flood of feeling swept over her, and she would have knelt to him, her other self; but he was already at her feet, moved by that same instinct to do homage to the human form which held his counter soul, and on her white feet he laid a reverent embrace.Strengthened and uplifted by that mystic union whose memory should never leave her, whose bonds should ever bind her, was Millicent. In every existence comes one supreme, all-important moment, which thenceforth is the landmark by which life is measured; the climacteric point to which the past merely served to lead, the future availing only to enshrine its memory. To some men and women the significance of that moment is known only when it has long passed; to Millicent, the knowledge that her whole after life should be controlled by that hour was not wanting. And her lover,--would he be faithful to that unspoken vow? The thought never crossed her mind; she was irrevocably bound to him; priest and rite could but make a poor, earthy contract between what was mortal in them both; the spiritual union was not for this world, and might not be broken by either.CHAPTER XIV."Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."It was a pitiful story which the little journal had made known to John Graham,--the story of a woman grievously wronged, cruelly deceived.Millicent Almsford's life had not been a happy one. Her childhood had been lonely, and she had none of those early recollections which are so comforting in after years to people more fortunately bred. Her father was an invalid and a bookworm, and looked upon his only daughter as a creature to be fed, clothed, educated, and kept quiet. Her feeding he intrusted to her faithful nurse, who had promised her dying mother never to leave the child till she should be grown to womanhood. Her wardrobe was ordered by a relative who lived in Paris, and who twice a year overlooked the making and packing of her clothes, from her first baby wrappings to the ball dress in which she was presented at the court of St. James. Her education he left very much to chance and her own taste, simply locking up thelivres defendusof his library, and telling her English governess to order any necessary volumes from Mudie's. The young woman in whose charge Millicent was placed, was more eager to learn Italian than to teach English; to explore the literature of Dante than to familiarize her pupil with the British authors. When Millicent was sixteen years old, the feeble protection of this governess was taken from her; the woman returning to England to keep a long protracted marriage engagement with her own cousin. The same year old Nina died; and then it was that the lonely girl fell under the influence which was to darken her destiny and turn aside the natural current of her life. Millicent Almsford, at that age, was a very peculiar and interesting study. Her mind had eagerly grasped much more material than it could master. Her vivid imagination and great talent for music were, with a love of beauty, the most strongly developed traits in her nature, whose intellectual growth was destined to be slow and late; whose spiritual existence had not yet begun. An exquisite native refinement and a perfect taste were among her most interesting qualities. Singularly attractive and strangely incomplete, she had formed few relations; and her friendship with Edward Holworthy, the man whose influence so marred her life, was the first strong feeling which she had known. He was her opposite in character, and knew life only through people, while she had lived purely in ideas. Her complex nature, unfathomable to herself, was to him a novel and engrossing study, and it was through him that she learned to understand one side of it. The man found a great heart which had never loved; a strong power for working good or evil; a bold mind, that feared not to grapple with the deepest problems of life; and a possibility of absolute devotion to a resolution once formed, which is rarely found among young women. He became her mental guide, and directed her readings; with a certain clever intuition bringing her under the influence of minds as sophistical and frivolous as his own. Sympathetic to an extreme degree, her nature quickly took from his the color of an exaggerated cynicism, which was sometimes strongly shaken by the inner spirit which still slept under the untouched heart. Platonics, where the man is of the world wise, and the woman foolish with the innocence of childhood, are dangerous things, as he knew full well, and she did not. In pointing out the forces which mould the lives of men and women, what theme is so often upon the lips of two life students of opposite sexes as that of love? To the girl it seemed a strange, rather interesting force, whose power it would not be unpleasant to test; and when one day her mentor confessed to her that she had bound him irrevocably by those bonds which he had taught her were but ropes of sand, she smiled half sadly, but in her heart laughed with childish merriment. She now should see the actual workings of that strange hallucination; she should learn something of what love was. She was as unfeeling as a young lioness, and learned the lesson of making him turn pale and red by turns, as quickly as she had learned the knack of touching the chords of her mandolin. She looked upon her quondam friend in the light of an invalid, suffering from a dangerous but non-contagious malady. And so things went on; the man gaining every day a firmer hold over the girl, intoxicated by the new power in herself and a growing consciousness of her beauty and charms. During the long mornings at the Palazzo Fortunio, the two friends read and talked together, while the Italian governess, understanding no word of their intercourse, sat sewing patiently beside them. In the cool afternoons, when they were rowed by the strong-armed gondolier, Girolomo, out into the glory of the sunset, the same stolid companion always accompanied them. One day, Mr. Almsford, selfish old epicurean, perceived for the first time that his daughter had grown to a tall and fair womanhood. His attention had, perhaps, been first called to the fact by the increasing size of the half-yearly coffer which found its way from Fashion's capital to the Fortunio Palace, and by the proportionate lengthening of the account which accompanied it. Yes, Millicent was certainly grown to be a young lady. They were beginning to send her little, demure bonnets, and close-fitting, simple woollen dresses, made with more of an idea of displaying her graceful figure than heretofore. The girl was heiress to her mother's fortune; and it behooved him to see about finding a suitable husband for her. Whom should he consult in this matter, but their most intimate friend; the man who seemed at once his contemporary and hers; the handsome, clever fellow-countryman, who had been on the most intimate footing in his house for the last ten years? Edward Holworthy had started unaccountably when, in the midst of one of the solemn pauses of their game of chess, Mr. Almsford had propounded the unexpected question to him:--"How shall I find Millicent a husband?"The elder gentleman, for the first time in many months, checkmated his adversary in two moves, and won the game in an unprecedentedly short space of time.Holworthy's advice was given after a week's deliberation. It was in favor of sending Miss Almsford to her father's sister, who lived in London, in order that she might be presented at court and introduced to English society. Mr. Almsford thought over the advice, which appeared to him wise. He consulted Millicent, who eagerly accepted the chance to see something of the world; and finally, after six months' exchange of letters upon the subject, the girl was taken to London by her father, and comfortably established, with her aunt, in a pretty Kensington villa, for which her poorly circumstanced relative gladly forsook a small house in an unfashionable quarter of the town. Having married a younger son of a great house, with no portion but debts on his part and beauty on hers, Millicent's aunt, with the matchless tact of our countrywomen, had secured herself a prominent and agreeable position in London society. In mere worldly advantages the young girl could have had no better chaperone than the pretty young woman, still occupied with bets, beaux, and bon-bons. She took her niece to all the best houses; and soon Millicent's extreme beauty, and the widely noised, somewhat exaggerated accounts of her worldly goods, brought her scores of invitations and admirers on her own account.Six months after her departure, Millicent Almsford returned to the Palazzo Fortunio, where the report of her great social success had preceded her and tickled the ears of her parent, proud of the child for whose sake he had never sacrificed a whim of his own. Edward Holworthy, who had accompanied the father and daughter to London, and remained there during the period of the latter's stay, did not return to Venice, but sailed for Australia, from whence he never returned either to his native or to his adopted country. The change which her half year's absence had wrought in Millicent, her father attributed to her social experience. She had left him half a child, with a thousand absurd, whimsical ways, which had amused him, and endeared her to him more than any other trait in her character. Few things diverted him; and he counted every laugh which Millicent provoked from him as a positive good, which he set down to her credit in their joint account. Her stay in London had given Millicent a certain poise and manner which suited her marvellously well; but all the sparkle and freshness seemed to have left her. She was like a fresh, white lily which has been broken and wilted by a violent storm of wind and rain. For months she never smiled. Her life seemed to have come to a standstill; she suffered dumbly, hopelessly, with sad, deep eyes, made more beautiful by the trouble in them. A sceptic and a materialist, she found nothing in this world worth suffering for, and smiled incredulously when the old curé, her Latin teacher, tried to help her from the slough of earthly despair by promises of a glorious future, for whose attainment the life-battle should be bravely fought. She was conscious of no ethereal essence which should outlive the graceful body, whose beauty she sometimes cursed. Did it not reduce her to the level of all hunted creatures? Was she not a thing to be pursued by men, like a tall deer or a fleet, timid hare?"Something had come to the Signorina," said Girolomo, the gondolier; "and the Signor Holworthy, where was he?" And he shook his head gravely, the wise old creature, guessing, as did no other soul, that Edward Holworthy was in some way connected with Millicent's changed face and listless demeanor.Something had come to her; but she never confided to priest or friend the trouble which robbed her young face of its childish curves, which killed the youth in her, and made her a woman in grief, while she was still a child in years. Only one confidant had she,--the little journal; the gold-clasped tome which all those years after had fallen into John Graham's hands. The story of the first passion she had ever roused, read by the only man she had ever loved.It was the pitiful story of a grievous wrong which had darkened more than one life. The miserable consequences of a wicked act are infinite; its influence spreads wider and wider every day, like the broadening rings which circle on the surface of a still pool disturbed by a stone which a careless hand has tossed. The black deed may be hidden from the sight of men, but its baleful effects are felt afar off in the lives of those who have known nought of its perpetration. Let not the sinner comfort himself in that his soul alone is damned for his crime. It darkens innocent lives with its evil; and in sinning against himself he sins against mankind.In the strange country whither Millicent had gone, Holworthy was the only link which bound her to her home, the one being who understood and cared for her. The dominion which he had always held over her was now strengthened into a powerful magnetic force. The little journal told how that influence had been exerted in compelling her to a secret marriage against her own will and judgment. She had been tricked into an elopement,--it might better be called an abduction,--and all unwillingly became his wife. Then all too soon, ere a week had passed, came the terrible discovery that the marriage was no marriage. For then came to her the mother of the man whom she was striving to love with wifely duty, an old woman, bowed with grief and years. She had come very far, across half a continent, to break to the girl whose name she had heard linked with that of her only son, the news that he was not free to marry, that she must give him up. When the tall girl with the childish, flower face fell stricken to the earth like a broken lily, at the feet of the older woman, she had made no cry; in the hours that followed, she said no word. When the man who had wrecked her life came and knelt beside her, prayed her to be patient and her wrongs should be righted, spoke of his remorse, told her of his terrible mad wife from whom the law would set him free, and make him really hers, prayed, besought, and worshipped at her feet, she answered him with one terrible word only. She rose and stood before him white and cruel in her agony, relentless as Fate."Go!" was the one syllable which her frozen lips uttered; and with a gesture of command, majestic and beautiful, she had banished him from her presence. The secret was kept, even from the old woman, grown more sorrowful at the sight of the girl's dumb agony and of her son's grief, which she could not soothe. The secret was kept; and that very night Millicent's face, pale and clouded, shone out amidst a group of fair women who sat languidly chatting through the music ofFaustat the opera. He kept her secret, poor wretch, and shielded her as best he might, forcing her to speak to him and see him before others, that no sudden breaking of their relations might be remarked. Save in the world, she never saw him again. That one word of command was the last syllable which he ever heard her speak to him directly. Not without a struggle did he give her up, but she was implacable. She yielded to him, and played her part in the little comedy which the world thought it understood. The beautiful Miss Almsford had found Holworthy a pleasant admirer, but her delicate American beauty and her solid American fortune would certainly win her a higher place in the world than that of the wife of Mr. Edward Holworthy, her countryman and old friend.Youth and health are great physicians; and as the years passed, Millicent recovered something of her old spring and elasticity. She was infinitely more interesting, if something colder and harder, than she had been in the old days. Her unquenchable vigor of temperament came to her help, and gave her a keen pleasure in her studies and in the work and thought of the people about her. Always self-reliant, she grew to live entirely without support from man or woman. She was a friend to many people, but was herself friendless. The Palazzo Fortunio, under her reign, grew to be the centre of a charming social circle. Musicians and painters were made welcome by the young hostess. At once an artist and a patron of the arts, she stood in a peculiar relation to the men who frequented hersalon. If she had been without fortune she would have made music her profession. As it was, she studied it as faithfully as if self-support had been her aim; and she claimed that sympathy from her artistic friends which a mere connoisseur, be he ever so enthusiastic, can never arouse. To her small world she was all-important. Her sympathy helped many a timiddebutante, and her counsel cheered the black days of more than one disheartened artist. Always gracious and kind, she had drawn about her a group of people, to all of whom she was a sort of exalted fellow-worker, who knew but the poetry of art, and helped them to forget its prose. Her heart was quite empty, but her mind was keenly interested and fully occupied by the men and women among whom she lived. Happiness she had forgotten to look for, but in enjoyment her days were not wanting. It was a terrible blow to her when this pleasant, quiet life was suddenly broken up by her father's marriage. To her imperious nature the presence of the inferior woman whom Mr. Almsford had brought home to the Palazzo was intolerable. Where could she go? For the first time in her life she felt the power which her fortune gave her. She could establish herself wherever she liked. Her father's sister proposed a repetition of their joint establishment in London, but at the very mention of her returning to England Millicent's face blanched. She would never again set foot in that country. It was while she was in a state of doubt concerning her future movements that her half-brother wrote her a long and affectionate letter, urging her to come and dwell for a time among his people, to visit her mother's country before she decided the important question of where she should establish herself for life. The idea seemed a just one to her; and acting on a tender impulse roused by the loving words of her unknown brother, she had telegraphed her departure, and forthwith started on her long journey accompanied by her capable French maid. The Abigail discharged her trust faithfully, as far as San Francisco, from which city she turned her face on the very day of her arrival, unwilling to remain longer in what she called "le plus triste pays du monde." If the truth could have been known, Millicent would have signed away ten years of her life to have gone back with the woman to the Old World, the only home she had ever known.Graham had not been mistaken when he predicted to Millicent that she would grow more in sympathy with the race from which she drew her inheritance of character and temperament than at first seemed possible. Nature is stronger than habit, well called second nature; and as the surface roughness became familiar to her, she began to feel the strong life and vigor of the young Western land quickening her pulses and stimulating her whole being. The poverty of intellectual intercourse was more than compensated by the tremendous power of work, the electrical force which accomplishes so rapidly in this new land what in other countries has been the slow growth of centuries.An answering glow of enthusiasm flushed her with hope, with a keener, fuller, more intense life than she had ever known before. She had clung at first to her traditions, and fought against the tide which seemed to be sweeping this people on and on and ever on. But nature was too strong for habit; her upright, fearless mind acknowledged kinship with these hard-working men and women, to whom pleasure is not save in toil, whose whole life is one long unconscious sacrifice to their country. On the eastern margins of our land the austere simplicity and purity have become infested with plague-spots brought--ay, imported with care and expense--from the Old World, and fostered like exotics on the clean soil. But from the great Western prairie comes a fresh, strong breeze which sweetens all the foulness of the Atlantic cities, and makes the breath of Columbia still pure and fragrant.With this new sentiment for her new-found country came the first passionate love to the heart of the beautiful and unhappy young woman. She had breathed the spicy air of the Californian forests, bracing and sweet, and her cheek had grown fuller and fairer in the perfect climate. Her empty, hollow heart was filled by a great love and strength, all-sustaining and soothing.When Graham had first seen her lying in the fire-light, with cool, deep eyes, before the light of love had dawned in her flower face, she had seemed to him like a perfect white rose. Then the rose flushed palely, as the love-light trembled to a flame; and he brought her flowers of the color of the sea-shells, and she wore them in her hair. Last of all, he laid at her feet deep-red damask rosebuds; and these she placed on her white breast, where they bloomed and died in a single night. He had painted her by the waves, as he had once seen her on that strange day when death had seemed so near and life so beautiful. He had painted her standing at the sea edge with pallid roses in her little hands, her graceful head set about with the same soft-hued flowers, and a single crimson rose lying lightly over her heart. He had hung the sketch against the wall where the sunlight fell upon it early in the morning; and Millicent had bade him remember, while he slept or waked, that she was near him.
CHAPTER XII.
"Most sacrilegious murder hath broke opeThe Lord's anointed temple, and stole thenceThe life o' the building."
"Most sacrilegious murder hath broke opeThe Lord's anointed temple, and stole thenceThe life o' the building."
"Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord's anointed temple, and stole thence
The life o' the building."
The breakfast table at the San Rosario Ranch was usually a merry one; but on the morning after what Hal had called Millicent's "magnetic exhibition," the usual good spirits were missing. Millicent took her accustomed place at Deering's side; and Galbraith marked the extraordinary change which she had suffered since she had bade him good-night the evening before. Her face had blanched to a whiteness which made the ebon lines of eyebrows and lashes seem unnatural. Her mouth was pale and contracted, and her expression of horrified anticipation reminded him of the look in the eyes of a deer at bay. What could have come to the girl? he asked himself in dismay; with a strange consciousness that whatever should befall her of good or evil from that time forth would have to him an interest beyond all else in the world. She ate her breakfast mechanically, and answered all that was said in which she could be supposed to have an interest. She laughed once, too, at one of Hal's jokes; but the sound was rough and strained. Mrs. Deering and Barbara, occupied with some household complication, merely noticed that Millicent seemed tired; and Hal put her odd look and manner down to the score of her being in love, which in his eyes accounted for every freak or unexplained symptom of hers.
It had been proposed that the day should be spent out-of-doors, at a place which Millicent had long wished to visit,--the little island in the river, below the deserted mill. Galbraith had remained to be of the party; and his two friends had promised to ride over from the camp and join them at the appointed place. Just before they started, old John arrived with a note to Mrs. Deering from Graham, who wrote that he should not be able to be of the party. Hal and Millicent drove together, as they had done on that day when Graham, in accordance with California etiquette, had stopped to kill the rattlesnakes. Old Sphinx was doing his best to keep up with the mule team, when Millicent's sensitive ears detected the sound of horses' hoofs behind them. Presently, through the thick cloud of dust, she descried two horsemen riding at full gallop towards them. The sunlight and the veil of dust made it impossible to see what manner of men they were until Millicent observed that each carried over his shoulder a long object, which glittered in the sunlight.
"Have you brought your pistols?" she asked.
"Yes, Princess, but they are in the wagon. I expected till the last moment that Graham would turn up to take you, and that I should drive the team. Why do you ask? There is no danger of our being molested."
"Look at those men. Are not those gun barrels I see on their shoulders?"
"Yes; but they are probably peaceful hunters."
The young man spoke in a perfectly careless tone, to reassure his companion; but Millicent noticed that he occasionally looked behind him as the riders gained on them. Finally, as the men drew near, Millicent saw the rider nearest her shift the gun from his shoulder and rest it across the saddle-bow, as if preparing to take aim. Hal, who had seen the action, instantly called to Millicent to catch the reins, and held up both his hands. By this time the men were close upon them, and the one who had shifted his weapon called out in a rough voice,--
"All right, boss; we know you ain't got no money, and we don't want your life to-day." His companion laughed aloud, and striking spurs to their horses, they galloped down the high-road. Hal laughed as heartily as the supposed highwayman, saying,--
"Well, that's a greaser's idea of a joke, I suppose. Adventure number one has befallen us with few bad consequences. I don't think you were half as frightened as you were the other day by the snakes."
"No, I fancy I was not. I should not much mind being killed to-day." This with a little, bitter laugh.
"And why? Let us wait till after luncheon. Barbara has put up a capital venison pasty,--a real English one, out of the Queen's own receipt book."
"Well, we will wait for the pie, to please you."
The drive was accomplished with the usual desultory chit-chat, Hal doing rather more than his share of the joking. As they passed the little hovel, the wild children ran out, as they had upon the day when they had visited the camp in the woods; and soon the gray bridge and the little island were reached. The baskets were unpacked and the luncheon spread upon the grass by the time the guests arrived. Among them were O'Neil, Hartley, Ferrara, and Mrs. Shallop, who had come over by the train; with a party of people from the village, in whom Millicent had never taken much interest. Galbraith never left Millicent's side; sparing her the necessity of talking by keeping up an incessant stream of conversation which she heard vaguely, and of which she understood not one word. In after days the import of all the young man said came back to her; and she remembered the quaint Indian legends, the reminiscences of life on the two edges of the continent, with which Maurice Galbraith kept the others of the party from her side. She realized what he was doing, and knew that he only, in all the company, understood and sympathized with her half-dazed mood; and for his efforts he received more than one little smile, sadder than tears.
This is one of the stories which the lawyer told her:--
"In the old days, when Father Junipero and his small band of priests and soldiers came into the wilderness of California, with the cross uplifted in one hand, the sword grasped in the other, there lived on this island where we now sit, a beautiful Indian maiden. Her name was a very long one, and its meaning in our language is the Smile of the Morning. She lived with the old chief, her father, in a wigwam, where also lived her sisters and brothers and various of her cousins and distant relatives. The old chief had many daughters, but the Smile of the Morning was his favorite child; and she it was who cooked his food for him, when he did not eat it raw, and brought him his bow and arrows when he started on a hunting party. The sisters of the favorite daughter all found mates among the sons of the tribe, but she lived alone with only the wild bird in the madrone tree for her lover. Her sisters, each of whom carried a pappoose upon her back, laughed at the Smile of the Morning, and said that she would die without a husband; but the girl did not mind them. She was taller, by a head, than any woman of the tribe; she could charm the wild birds, and draw the feathers from their tails to make head-dresses for the old chief and ornaments for herself; she could dance war-dances like one of the braves, only with more grace; and when she told the stories which the fishes in the river whispered to her, the old chieftain nodded his head wisely and patted the girl on the shoulder. She should find a husband in good time; but he must be as much taller and stronger than the other men of the tribe, as she was fairer and wiser than her sisters.
"When the missionary priests came, with their white faces and strange garments fashioned neither from the skin of any animal nor from the feathers of any bird, and made friendly overtures to the old chief, the Smile of the Morning fell upon her face in terror. The Indians would have worshipped the men with the white faces and strange tongue; but to prove to them that they too were men and adored a God, the priests held their services and kneeled to the Great Spirit whom they reverenced. When the new-comers had learned the language of the Indians, and had built themselves a house and a greater house to their God, the daughter of the chief grew to be no longer afraid of the black-robed figures. She eagerly learned the simple lessons which they set for the people; and it was because of the wonderful learning that they gave her that she studied so industriously, and not, like her brothers and sisters, to gain the daily rations of corn. When the early bell called the Indians to the church of the San Rosario Mission, the Smile of the Morning was the first to answer the summons; and when the other Indians were squabbling over their breakfast of maize, she lingered in the sanctuary, trying to fathom the strange rites which were so much holier than those of her people, looking into the painted faces in the pictures over the rude altar, and feeling curiously behind them to ascertain whether the backs also were painted.
"The soldiers who upheld the authority of the priests were encouraged by large bounties and grants of land to marry the converted squaws; and in the course of time several such unions were solemnized at the Mission. Among the stern old pioneer priests was one young man dear to the Father Junipero, whose pupil he had been, and who had followed the famous man on his great mission of converting the heathen Indians. His name was Fra Antonio. His voice was soft and low, and his eyes open and sad, with shadows in them, which the Indian maiden had never seen in other eyes,--shadows like those cast by the white clouds floating before the sun's face on hot summer afternoons. Fra Antonio was very kind to the tall beauty of the tribe, and with a never-failing patience strove to make the doctrines of his religion clear to her simple understanding. Strange were the means by which the fathers learned to expound their religion to the savages. To express the great hope of the resurrection, they put a number of insects in a vessel of water, leaving them there till they were apparently quite dead. Then the creatures were placed in a bank of hot ashes, which warmed their frozen, half-dead bodies back to life. When the gauzy wings were spread, carrying the insects up into the sunshine again, the fathers marked the words ejaculated by the Indians, and by that term they called the resurrection.
"New and beautiful were the thoughts which now possessed the mind of the Indian girl. She learned that to forgive was nobler than to avenge,--strangest of all doctrines taught by the priests to the red men. She learned that the stars, pale and fiery, were great worlds like the one in which she lived, and not the hearts of the brave chiefs placed in the heavens after death as she had always been taught. Only the simplest of the great truths which lie like jewels in the tawdry setting of the Mother Church, did Fra Antonio instil into her childish mind, which with an unquestioning faith accepted all the young priest taught. Few among the tribe--perhaps, indeed, no one of the Indians beside the Smile of the Morning--understood or believed the new doctrines taught by the priests. These were satisfied that the rites of baptism and of extreme unction were administered, and that the daily services were attended, quite conscious that their most potent weapon of conversion was the ration ofatole, or prepared corn, which they served out to the lazy braves. As soon as he became a member of the church, every redskin was cared for, and a gentle slavery was the result, in which the priests exacted a certain amount of labor from the Indian, in turn feeding him and caring for his wants. The art of weaving was taught, together with civilized agriculture; and the fruit of the vines was fermented into strong, rough wine, this being reserved for the service of the altar and the table of the priests. In the eyes of the zealous missionaries the Indian was the rightful owner of the soil; and there was no thought of disputing his claim to it. It was that he might better and more wisely enjoy the fruits of his own land, and in the next life enter the happier home prepared for all true followers of the Church of Rome, that the Father Junipero and his band of soldiers and priests lived and died in the wilderness of California. How their treatment of the original inhabitants of the soil differed from that adopted by the enlightened race which now claims the country, you have seen enough, or at any rate heard enough, of our Indian policy to appreciate. Instead of improving the land for its owners, as did the brave missionary priests, we have wrested it from them, driving the children of those who for centuries have owned the Pacific coast away from the choicest spots to rocky, desolate lands which have again been taken from them by the greedy gold-hunters. But all this has happened since the time when the Smile-of the Morning lived upon this pretty island, and decked her glossy hair with a coronet of blue-jays' feathers, that she might be fair in the eyes of one whom she loved. But a year had passed since the arrival of Fra Antonio, when the old chieftain noticed that his daughter's step had grown heavy and slow; that her great eyes danced no more; that her countenance no longer merited the name of the morning's smile. He was a wise old man for an Indian; and after thinking the matter over for a week, during which time he smoked an unusual number of pipes of tobacco, he came to the conclusion that the girl had been bewitched by one of the strange priests. Calling her to him, he questioned her as to the cause of her altered behavior; and from her downcast face and embarrassed replies he quickly surmised her secret. The Smile of the Morning loved the fair young priest, and it was for his sake that her tears flowed. The old chief at first scoffed at her infatuation, and bade her take up with one of her dusky suitors. But the girl was obstinate; and finally yielding to her whim, the old chief himself offered his daughter's hand to Fra Antonio. The young priest, in holy horror, took counsel with his superiors; and it was explained to the chieftain that though the white soldiers were free to mate with the maidens of the tribe, the priests were vowed to celibacy. If the pious young priest had unwittingly mingled an unwise fervor in his exhortations to the Indian girl, he bitterly regretted his fault. As day by day he saw her elastic figure grow more feeble, and marked her hollow cheeks and her sad eyes fixed reproachfully on him whilst he served the mass or taught the new converts, a tenderness for her, which her savage health and perfections had failed to arouse, awoke in his breast. When he saw the young braves, each with his dusky partner, and the sisters of the Smile of the Morning with their children in their arms, he sometimes cursed the priestly habit which proclaimed him a thing apart from all other of God's creatures, doomed to live unmated and alone. Long vigils and heavy penances failed to ease the grief in his heart, or to set at rest its yearning toward the child who had been redeemed from barbarism, through his teaching, to live a Christian life and die in the hope of his faith.
"At last the battle between the spirit and the heart grew too terrible for him to bear; he was not strong enough; and he begged the fathers to send him to another Mission far to the northward. When the Smile of the Morning learned that Fra Antonio was to leave the Mission on the morrow, she decked herself in all her jewels, hung her long shell necklaces about her throat, wound her bead bracelets about her arms, and placed her coronet of blue-jays' feathers upon her brow. She was not to be found that night when the old chief lay down to rest; and when the sun rose on the day which should see Fra Antonio far on his long journey, her sisters found the maiden lying in the cool waters of the river which washes this island, with the little rosary the priest had given her locked in her cold fingers, and the smile upon her face that had been missing for so many weeks. They called the fathers to come and look upon her; and Fra Antonio prayed long beside her, with streaming eyes and broken voice. The kiss which his sad lips laid reverently on her brow was felt perhaps, for all those who stood near heard the sigh which came rustling through the trees near by. As she had wilfully taken her own life, the poor girl could not be buried with the ceremonies of the church to which she had been admitted; so she was interred by her people near the spot where they had found her, on this little island where we now sit. When the good fathers sat together of an evening and discussed questions spiritual and temporal touching the welfare of their little flock, Fra Antonio was often missing from their midst. Sometimes the faint sound was heard of the church bell softly struck by a tender hand, and the priests crossed themselves silently, knowing for whose soul it was that Fra Antonio solemnized the mass for the dead."
A silence followed Galbraith's story, which was broken by Millicent, who said,--
"I have a sketch in an old Italian book of a beautiful young monk, Fra Antonio by name. Could it be the same, I wonder?"
"Who knows? Some of the priests were Italians. Would the dates agree?"
"The portrait was dated some time in the latter part of the last century."
"It could not have been far from that time that the Smile of the Morning met her sad fate."
"Sad,--do you call her fate sad?" queried Millicent.
"Who could think it otherwise?"
"I surely do. Was it sad to die for the man she loved?"
"It would have been happier if she could have lived for him."
"Happiness! Who spoke of happiness? Why talk about a thing so mythical? I think her lot was an enviable one. To her simple mind the thought that suicide is sinful could never have occurred. She might not follow the man she loved; she believed that the soul now prisoned in her breast might always be near him; so she opened the cage and let the bird fly."
"You speak as seriously as if you had known the Smile of the Morning and sympathized with her."
"It is the privilege of those who have greatly suffered, that the grief of others can be felt and understood by them." Millicent spoke absently, dreamily, checking her speech at the pained expression which her words brought to Galbraith's face.
Later in the afternoon the party left the island and wandered about the old bridge. Some of them climbed the high hill; others struck into the woods. By some chance Millicent found herself left alone near the mill with no one of the party near her save Ah Lam. Calling the faithful creature to her side, she made him prepare her a comfortable seat, and leaning back against the wall, she entered into a desultory conversation with her pupil. Ah Lam often told her stories in his broken English, descriptive of the power and character of the most august personages of the Chinese mythology. To-day he found an inattentive listener in his kind friend and teacher; but he had been bidden to speak, and so he talked on patiently, describing rites of death and feasts of marriages, recalling the great riverfêtewhich he had witnessed shortly before sailing from his native city. As the Chinaman paused after this last tale, Millicent heard a step approaching the door of the old mill. She looked up carelessly, expecting to see one of the gentlemen. The man who stood before her was a stranger. His face was somewhat flushed, and he looked as if he had travelled some distance.
"Second time, my lady, I've see'd yer purty face to-day."
Millicent bowed her head and turned away, looking anxiously toward the wood, where she had seen Hal disappear a few moments before.
"Sha'n't let yer off ser aisy this time. I've took a fancy to see the color of yer eyes."
The look of angry indignation with which the gray orbs were turned upon the man was enough to have abashed any sensitive person, but to this class the stranger did not belong. He was a rough-looking fellow of large stature, with a heavy animal face, crossed by a deep scar running from the chin to the forehead on the right side. In his belt he wore a pair of pistols, at which the Chinaman looked uneasily.
"Say, do yer belong in these parts?"
"Yes," answered the girl in a low voice.
"Well, I am leavin' 'em for good; we're not likely to meet again. I 'm a gentleman, and I don't want to trouble you for them rings o' yourn, but a kiss won't cost you nothin'."
Suiting the action to the word, the man threw an arm about the girl's slender waist, and quick as a thought began to drag her toward the spot where a couple of horses were tethered. With a sudden wrench, she shook herself free from his rude clasp, and sped down the path calling for help. Help was nearer to her than she had thought, and a humble friend sprang to her aid. As the insolent creature started in pursuit of the swift-footed girl, Ah Lam adroitly tripped him up, bringing him to the ground with a heavy fall. The man was somewhat bruised by his tumble, a sharp stone having struck his arm. He arose with difficulty, pouring out a volley of oaths the like of which had never before desecrated Millicent's ears. The Chinaman, knowing full well the danger which his temerity had brought upon him, ran quickly after his young mistress. The path brought them to the border of the stream, and their flight was stopped by this obstacle. By this time, the man, blind with rage, had caught up with the two fugitives; he seemed in doubt which of them to molest first. Millicent stood with flashing eyes and curling lip, her head thrown back, her arms folded across her breast, looking at him with an expression of scorn that seemed to awe him for a moment. He drew back, as if afraid to touch so beautiful and wrathful a creature, and in his rage clutched the Chinaman by the throat. In the scuffle which ensued, Ah Lam's hat was thrown off, and the long cue coiled about his head fell down. Quick as thought, the ruffian seized the braid, and drawing a sharp knife from his boot, cut it from the head of the Chinaman. With a shriek which had the despair of a double death, the Chinaman turned and implanted his finger-nails in the face of his adversary, inflicting ten long scratches on the cheeks. The crushed worm will turn at last; and the poor soul, damned for eternity by the cutting of his hair, had turned upon the ruffian. Quick as the fast-drawn breath of the terrified girl, the villain lifted his long knife and, with a horrible oath, plunged it into the side of the Chinaman. The shrieks of the victim, the horror-stricken screams of the girl, the sight of the blood, seemed to madden the wretch; for he tore the quivering knife from the wound and stabbed him again and again. At last the rage for blood seemed satiated; he threw the mutilated body, still breathing, to ebb out its life on the soil, and turned with bloody hands and seared eyes toward Millicent, who had sunk upon her knees, lifting the head of the dying Chinaman to her young breast.
The closed lids fluttered open, the dimmed eyes looked gratefully for the last time into the face of the girl who had been kinder to him than any other creature in this strange land where he had worked so faithfully, where he had been so cruelly oppressed in life, and so foully murdered; hope of Heaven being closed to him before his miserable breath had been taken. The horror of his crime must have overcome the ruffian for a moment, for he paused and silently watched the death-agonies of his victim. To that moment's feeling of horror or remorse, what might not Millicent owe? For soon, to her it seemed an eternity, the men, whose answering shouts she had not heard, appeared close at hand. The murderer saw them none too quickly for his safety, and springing upon his horse, which stood near by, clapped spurs to the flank and rode off at a hand gallop in the opposite direction.
Galbraith rushed to Millicent's side and lifted the dying creature from her breast. They placed him gently upon the bank, and Hal put his flask to his lips; but it was too late. With one last struggle Ah Lam yielded up his miserable life; and Millicent's cry of pity sounded his death-knell. Then she lifted her hands to Heaven and prayed for the soul of the poor creature who had so bravely defended her. An hour ago she had smiled at Fra Antonio's masses for the repose of the Smile of the Morning. In moments like these the strong instincts of men and women overcome the reasons and doctrines of education; Millicent prayed, believing that she should be heard.
When it became evident to the little group which had silently assembled about the spot, that poor Ah Lam was beyond human help, Maurice Galbraith and Henry Deering lifted the lifeless body and laid it in the great wagon. Millicent followed and drew over the dead face the white cloak which she had worn all that day. Pedro, climbing to his seat, touched the mules into motion; and the wagon, which had carried so merry a freight to the gray bridge that morning, returned at sunset over the same path with its ghastly burden,--a very funeral car.
Maurice Galbraith gently placed Millicent beside Barbara and her mother in the smaller carriage, which was driven back to the Ranch under the escort of Ferrara, O'Neil, and Hartley. Then the young lawyer, with Henry Deering to bear him company, started in pursuit of the murderer. He had sworn a silent oath, as he stood by the dying man, and learned that his life had been given to protect Millicent, that Ah Lam should be avenged. If there were law and justice in the broad land of California, the murderer should surfer the extreme penalty for wilful and wicked shedding of innocent blood. In pursuit rode the two young men, with stern faces; and it was well for the fugitive that he had a long start of them, for they rode as men do when time must be gained at all costs. Along the narrow bridle-path, over which the murderer had passed, they took their way, and were soon lost to the view of the three women sitting close together in troubled silence. Barbara's strong hands held the reins and plied the whip, while streams of tears coursed down her cheeks. Mrs. Deering patted her daughter's shoulder; but it was on Millicent her attention was most firmly fixed. The girl had not moved since Galbraith had placed her in the carriage. Her eyes were strained wide open, and the expression in their depths was one which the gentle woman never forgot,--a look as of an endless despair and horror. Back to the happy valley they drove silently, no joyous young voices carolling out ballads of love, songs of battle, as was their wont; in silence and grief they passed over the familiar road through the gap between the guardian hills, back to the quiet house, to herald the advent of the humble dead to those who had been his fellow-servants.
No one told Millicent that standing near the spot where the ruffian's horse had been tethered was a second steed. A strong mustang saddled and bridled was found there. A heavy leading-rein passed through the bit, and a stout rope lying over the saddle, gave a sinister significance to the fact. For whom had that horse been brought?
CHAPTER XIII.
"Abroad it rushed,My frolic soul, for it had sightOf something half-way, which was knownAs mine at once, yet not mine own."
"Abroad it rushed,My frolic soul, for it had sightOf something half-way, which was knownAs mine at once, yet not mine own."
"Abroad it rushed,
My frolic soul, for it had sight
Of something half-way, which was known
As mine at once, yet not mine own."
It was early in the morning for Millicent, usually a late sleeper, to be in the garden among the flowers. There Graham found her, white as the gown she wore, standing with her arms filled with dark-red roses,--standing with the sunlight touching her pretty hair, and shining in her cool gray eyes. He stared at her, as at one risen from the dead; he touched her hand before he spoke to her, to make sure that it was really she, alive, with softly heaving breast and warm, clinging fingers. Alive, and not as he had pictured her a thousand times during that terrible ride,--cold and dead, with the stain which had dyed her kerchief, on brow and bosom. For a long time they stood silently looking into each other's faces; and then the man laid her hand gently on his arm, and together they passed down the orchard road, across a space of sunburnt meadow, to a spot they both knew,--Millicent's boudoir, hanging over the narrow stream, walled by six tall redwoods grown from the seeds of some giant predecessor, carpeted with thick green moss, furnished with two rough seats. Here they rested silently for a time,--Graham drawing long breaths of the morning air to relax his tired lungs; Millicent resting her wearied heart with looking at him, all her soul shining through her eyes. Graham first broke the silence with questions of all that had happened since they had parted. She told him of her danger, and of the murder of the Chinaman, in a low voice, full of awe. It had been her first knowledge of death; and the chill reality, the only certain thing which men look forward to, had first been known by her now that she was a woman grown, and could fully understand its dreadful significance. Hitherto, death had been a phrase only; a thing which must come to all creatures, as a matter of course. That she should sometime die she knew, but only by tradition; it had meant nothing to her. Now she understood it all, and the terrible knowledge had chilled her life-blood. Could she ever again think of anything but that dead face? One stronger than the King of Terrors was driving it from her thoughts: love was swiftly painting out the grim picture from her memory.
Step by step they went over the ground of their mutual experiences since the time when they had parted: the picnic, and its tragic ending; the night which Graham had passed in the cabin with Ah Lam's murderer,--for there could be no doubt it was he who had dropped Millicent's handkerchief in the hut. Of the little journal Graham spoke sadly, gently, without anger, as if it were a thing which concerned neither of them. Then Millicent brokenly told the story which the written words had simply indicated. She told it with a sense of thankfulness that the weight of the secret rested no longer on her heart alone; that its pain was shared, and that at last her lover understood and saw her absolutely as she was. No reservation did she make, but bared to him the inmost chambers of her heart, sure of no misunderstanding, and upheld by a sympathy she had never before known. Then her confidence was returned, and Graham spoke to her of many things of which he had never spoken before; of the hopes and aspirations which had sometimes made his life glorious; of the quicksands and hidden rocks which had often made his way dangerous.
A wonderful confession,--solemn as those first confessions made by men and women who at maturity join the Roman Catholic Church, and unflinchingly reveal to the confessor every temptation to which they have yielded in the course of their lives. To no mumbling, inattentive priest, with store of penances and absolutions in his pocket, was the confession made; in no stifling confessional, with throng of penitents outside, grudging every moment of delay. Each spoke to a tender human heart, that filled out the broken sentences, and echoed the deep sighs. The roof of their temple swayed in the light breeze, and the wild birds chanted the hymn of praise which consecrated it.
As Millicent at last sat silent, not knowing whether her lover still spoke to her in words, or if that finer language of the spirit made his thoughts clear to her, came at once a strange consciousness that she was no longer a creature of this earth, with material senses and shape. The last words which she had spoken she remembered as one dimly recalls what has happened in another life. They were these:--
"Are you sorry for me?"
There had been no answer in words or in looks; for the power of sight had been left behind with the outer case, now shaken off for the first time since life upon the earth had begun. She was a thing apart no longer; her existence had become merged in that of a stronger soul, to which she was an all-important part. Folded in this spirit-embrace time was not, nor past nor future; nothing but the perfect ecstasy of a union which eternity should consecrate. Floating on a celestial ether, the double soul mounted ever higher and higher. Was it toward eternal bliss that it was wafted? Was the long waiting at an end?
Again she saw the sunlight; again she heard the ripple of the water; again she felt the earthly tenement closing about the divine spirit. Before her, framed in the green leaves, was a face dear indeed, the face of her lover. With solemn eyes they looked at each other; and a broken voice whispered to her,--
"Dear, what is it?"
She answered softly,--
"I have never been so near to you before."
Then a flood of feeling swept over her, and she would have knelt to him, her other self; but he was already at her feet, moved by that same instinct to do homage to the human form which held his counter soul, and on her white feet he laid a reverent embrace.
Strengthened and uplifted by that mystic union whose memory should never leave her, whose bonds should ever bind her, was Millicent. In every existence comes one supreme, all-important moment, which thenceforth is the landmark by which life is measured; the climacteric point to which the past merely served to lead, the future availing only to enshrine its memory. To some men and women the significance of that moment is known only when it has long passed; to Millicent, the knowledge that her whole after life should be controlled by that hour was not wanting. And her lover,--would he be faithful to that unspoken vow? The thought never crossed her mind; she was irrevocably bound to him; priest and rite could but make a poor, earthy contract between what was mortal in them both; the spiritual union was not for this world, and might not be broken by either.
CHAPTER XIV.
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."
It was a pitiful story which the little journal had made known to John Graham,--the story of a woman grievously wronged, cruelly deceived.
Millicent Almsford's life had not been a happy one. Her childhood had been lonely, and she had none of those early recollections which are so comforting in after years to people more fortunately bred. Her father was an invalid and a bookworm, and looked upon his only daughter as a creature to be fed, clothed, educated, and kept quiet. Her feeding he intrusted to her faithful nurse, who had promised her dying mother never to leave the child till she should be grown to womanhood. Her wardrobe was ordered by a relative who lived in Paris, and who twice a year overlooked the making and packing of her clothes, from her first baby wrappings to the ball dress in which she was presented at the court of St. James. Her education he left very much to chance and her own taste, simply locking up thelivres defendusof his library, and telling her English governess to order any necessary volumes from Mudie's. The young woman in whose charge Millicent was placed, was more eager to learn Italian than to teach English; to explore the literature of Dante than to familiarize her pupil with the British authors. When Millicent was sixteen years old, the feeble protection of this governess was taken from her; the woman returning to England to keep a long protracted marriage engagement with her own cousin. The same year old Nina died; and then it was that the lonely girl fell under the influence which was to darken her destiny and turn aside the natural current of her life. Millicent Almsford, at that age, was a very peculiar and interesting study. Her mind had eagerly grasped much more material than it could master. Her vivid imagination and great talent for music were, with a love of beauty, the most strongly developed traits in her nature, whose intellectual growth was destined to be slow and late; whose spiritual existence had not yet begun. An exquisite native refinement and a perfect taste were among her most interesting qualities. Singularly attractive and strangely incomplete, she had formed few relations; and her friendship with Edward Holworthy, the man whose influence so marred her life, was the first strong feeling which she had known. He was her opposite in character, and knew life only through people, while she had lived purely in ideas. Her complex nature, unfathomable to herself, was to him a novel and engrossing study, and it was through him that she learned to understand one side of it. The man found a great heart which had never loved; a strong power for working good or evil; a bold mind, that feared not to grapple with the deepest problems of life; and a possibility of absolute devotion to a resolution once formed, which is rarely found among young women. He became her mental guide, and directed her readings; with a certain clever intuition bringing her under the influence of minds as sophistical and frivolous as his own. Sympathetic to an extreme degree, her nature quickly took from his the color of an exaggerated cynicism, which was sometimes strongly shaken by the inner spirit which still slept under the untouched heart. Platonics, where the man is of the world wise, and the woman foolish with the innocence of childhood, are dangerous things, as he knew full well, and she did not. In pointing out the forces which mould the lives of men and women, what theme is so often upon the lips of two life students of opposite sexes as that of love? To the girl it seemed a strange, rather interesting force, whose power it would not be unpleasant to test; and when one day her mentor confessed to her that she had bound him irrevocably by those bonds which he had taught her were but ropes of sand, she smiled half sadly, but in her heart laughed with childish merriment. She now should see the actual workings of that strange hallucination; she should learn something of what love was. She was as unfeeling as a young lioness, and learned the lesson of making him turn pale and red by turns, as quickly as she had learned the knack of touching the chords of her mandolin. She looked upon her quondam friend in the light of an invalid, suffering from a dangerous but non-contagious malady. And so things went on; the man gaining every day a firmer hold over the girl, intoxicated by the new power in herself and a growing consciousness of her beauty and charms. During the long mornings at the Palazzo Fortunio, the two friends read and talked together, while the Italian governess, understanding no word of their intercourse, sat sewing patiently beside them. In the cool afternoons, when they were rowed by the strong-armed gondolier, Girolomo, out into the glory of the sunset, the same stolid companion always accompanied them. One day, Mr. Almsford, selfish old epicurean, perceived for the first time that his daughter had grown to a tall and fair womanhood. His attention had, perhaps, been first called to the fact by the increasing size of the half-yearly coffer which found its way from Fashion's capital to the Fortunio Palace, and by the proportionate lengthening of the account which accompanied it. Yes, Millicent was certainly grown to be a young lady. They were beginning to send her little, demure bonnets, and close-fitting, simple woollen dresses, made with more of an idea of displaying her graceful figure than heretofore. The girl was heiress to her mother's fortune; and it behooved him to see about finding a suitable husband for her. Whom should he consult in this matter, but their most intimate friend; the man who seemed at once his contemporary and hers; the handsome, clever fellow-countryman, who had been on the most intimate footing in his house for the last ten years? Edward Holworthy had started unaccountably when, in the midst of one of the solemn pauses of their game of chess, Mr. Almsford had propounded the unexpected question to him:--
"How shall I find Millicent a husband?"
The elder gentleman, for the first time in many months, checkmated his adversary in two moves, and won the game in an unprecedentedly short space of time.
Holworthy's advice was given after a week's deliberation. It was in favor of sending Miss Almsford to her father's sister, who lived in London, in order that she might be presented at court and introduced to English society. Mr. Almsford thought over the advice, which appeared to him wise. He consulted Millicent, who eagerly accepted the chance to see something of the world; and finally, after six months' exchange of letters upon the subject, the girl was taken to London by her father, and comfortably established, with her aunt, in a pretty Kensington villa, for which her poorly circumstanced relative gladly forsook a small house in an unfashionable quarter of the town. Having married a younger son of a great house, with no portion but debts on his part and beauty on hers, Millicent's aunt, with the matchless tact of our countrywomen, had secured herself a prominent and agreeable position in London society. In mere worldly advantages the young girl could have had no better chaperone than the pretty young woman, still occupied with bets, beaux, and bon-bons. She took her niece to all the best houses; and soon Millicent's extreme beauty, and the widely noised, somewhat exaggerated accounts of her worldly goods, brought her scores of invitations and admirers on her own account.
Six months after her departure, Millicent Almsford returned to the Palazzo Fortunio, where the report of her great social success had preceded her and tickled the ears of her parent, proud of the child for whose sake he had never sacrificed a whim of his own. Edward Holworthy, who had accompanied the father and daughter to London, and remained there during the period of the latter's stay, did not return to Venice, but sailed for Australia, from whence he never returned either to his native or to his adopted country. The change which her half year's absence had wrought in Millicent, her father attributed to her social experience. She had left him half a child, with a thousand absurd, whimsical ways, which had amused him, and endeared her to him more than any other trait in her character. Few things diverted him; and he counted every laugh which Millicent provoked from him as a positive good, which he set down to her credit in their joint account. Her stay in London had given Millicent a certain poise and manner which suited her marvellously well; but all the sparkle and freshness seemed to have left her. She was like a fresh, white lily which has been broken and wilted by a violent storm of wind and rain. For months she never smiled. Her life seemed to have come to a standstill; she suffered dumbly, hopelessly, with sad, deep eyes, made more beautiful by the trouble in them. A sceptic and a materialist, she found nothing in this world worth suffering for, and smiled incredulously when the old curé, her Latin teacher, tried to help her from the slough of earthly despair by promises of a glorious future, for whose attainment the life-battle should be bravely fought. She was conscious of no ethereal essence which should outlive the graceful body, whose beauty she sometimes cursed. Did it not reduce her to the level of all hunted creatures? Was she not a thing to be pursued by men, like a tall deer or a fleet, timid hare?
"Something had come to the Signorina," said Girolomo, the gondolier; "and the Signor Holworthy, where was he?" And he shook his head gravely, the wise old creature, guessing, as did no other soul, that Edward Holworthy was in some way connected with Millicent's changed face and listless demeanor.
Something had come to her; but she never confided to priest or friend the trouble which robbed her young face of its childish curves, which killed the youth in her, and made her a woman in grief, while she was still a child in years. Only one confidant had she,--the little journal; the gold-clasped tome which all those years after had fallen into John Graham's hands. The story of the first passion she had ever roused, read by the only man she had ever loved.
It was the pitiful story of a grievous wrong which had darkened more than one life. The miserable consequences of a wicked act are infinite; its influence spreads wider and wider every day, like the broadening rings which circle on the surface of a still pool disturbed by a stone which a careless hand has tossed. The black deed may be hidden from the sight of men, but its baleful effects are felt afar off in the lives of those who have known nought of its perpetration. Let not the sinner comfort himself in that his soul alone is damned for his crime. It darkens innocent lives with its evil; and in sinning against himself he sins against mankind.
In the strange country whither Millicent had gone, Holworthy was the only link which bound her to her home, the one being who understood and cared for her. The dominion which he had always held over her was now strengthened into a powerful magnetic force. The little journal told how that influence had been exerted in compelling her to a secret marriage against her own will and judgment. She had been tricked into an elopement,--it might better be called an abduction,--and all unwillingly became his wife. Then all too soon, ere a week had passed, came the terrible discovery that the marriage was no marriage. For then came to her the mother of the man whom she was striving to love with wifely duty, an old woman, bowed with grief and years. She had come very far, across half a continent, to break to the girl whose name she had heard linked with that of her only son, the news that he was not free to marry, that she must give him up. When the tall girl with the childish, flower face fell stricken to the earth like a broken lily, at the feet of the older woman, she had made no cry; in the hours that followed, she said no word. When the man who had wrecked her life came and knelt beside her, prayed her to be patient and her wrongs should be righted, spoke of his remorse, told her of his terrible mad wife from whom the law would set him free, and make him really hers, prayed, besought, and worshipped at her feet, she answered him with one terrible word only. She rose and stood before him white and cruel in her agony, relentless as Fate.
"Go!" was the one syllable which her frozen lips uttered; and with a gesture of command, majestic and beautiful, she had banished him from her presence. The secret was kept, even from the old woman, grown more sorrowful at the sight of the girl's dumb agony and of her son's grief, which she could not soothe. The secret was kept; and that very night Millicent's face, pale and clouded, shone out amidst a group of fair women who sat languidly chatting through the music ofFaustat the opera. He kept her secret, poor wretch, and shielded her as best he might, forcing her to speak to him and see him before others, that no sudden breaking of their relations might be remarked. Save in the world, she never saw him again. That one word of command was the last syllable which he ever heard her speak to him directly. Not without a struggle did he give her up, but she was implacable. She yielded to him, and played her part in the little comedy which the world thought it understood. The beautiful Miss Almsford had found Holworthy a pleasant admirer, but her delicate American beauty and her solid American fortune would certainly win her a higher place in the world than that of the wife of Mr. Edward Holworthy, her countryman and old friend.
Youth and health are great physicians; and as the years passed, Millicent recovered something of her old spring and elasticity. She was infinitely more interesting, if something colder and harder, than she had been in the old days. Her unquenchable vigor of temperament came to her help, and gave her a keen pleasure in her studies and in the work and thought of the people about her. Always self-reliant, she grew to live entirely without support from man or woman. She was a friend to many people, but was herself friendless. The Palazzo Fortunio, under her reign, grew to be the centre of a charming social circle. Musicians and painters were made welcome by the young hostess. At once an artist and a patron of the arts, she stood in a peculiar relation to the men who frequented hersalon. If she had been without fortune she would have made music her profession. As it was, she studied it as faithfully as if self-support had been her aim; and she claimed that sympathy from her artistic friends which a mere connoisseur, be he ever so enthusiastic, can never arouse. To her small world she was all-important. Her sympathy helped many a timiddebutante, and her counsel cheered the black days of more than one disheartened artist. Always gracious and kind, she had drawn about her a group of people, to all of whom she was a sort of exalted fellow-worker, who knew but the poetry of art, and helped them to forget its prose. Her heart was quite empty, but her mind was keenly interested and fully occupied by the men and women among whom she lived. Happiness she had forgotten to look for, but in enjoyment her days were not wanting. It was a terrible blow to her when this pleasant, quiet life was suddenly broken up by her father's marriage. To her imperious nature the presence of the inferior woman whom Mr. Almsford had brought home to the Palazzo was intolerable. Where could she go? For the first time in her life she felt the power which her fortune gave her. She could establish herself wherever she liked. Her father's sister proposed a repetition of their joint establishment in London, but at the very mention of her returning to England Millicent's face blanched. She would never again set foot in that country. It was while she was in a state of doubt concerning her future movements that her half-brother wrote her a long and affectionate letter, urging her to come and dwell for a time among his people, to visit her mother's country before she decided the important question of where she should establish herself for life. The idea seemed a just one to her; and acting on a tender impulse roused by the loving words of her unknown brother, she had telegraphed her departure, and forthwith started on her long journey accompanied by her capable French maid. The Abigail discharged her trust faithfully, as far as San Francisco, from which city she turned her face on the very day of her arrival, unwilling to remain longer in what she called "le plus triste pays du monde." If the truth could have been known, Millicent would have signed away ten years of her life to have gone back with the woman to the Old World, the only home she had ever known.
Graham had not been mistaken when he predicted to Millicent that she would grow more in sympathy with the race from which she drew her inheritance of character and temperament than at first seemed possible. Nature is stronger than habit, well called second nature; and as the surface roughness became familiar to her, she began to feel the strong life and vigor of the young Western land quickening her pulses and stimulating her whole being. The poverty of intellectual intercourse was more than compensated by the tremendous power of work, the electrical force which accomplishes so rapidly in this new land what in other countries has been the slow growth of centuries.
An answering glow of enthusiasm flushed her with hope, with a keener, fuller, more intense life than she had ever known before. She had clung at first to her traditions, and fought against the tide which seemed to be sweeping this people on and on and ever on. But nature was too strong for habit; her upright, fearless mind acknowledged kinship with these hard-working men and women, to whom pleasure is not save in toil, whose whole life is one long unconscious sacrifice to their country. On the eastern margins of our land the austere simplicity and purity have become infested with plague-spots brought--ay, imported with care and expense--from the Old World, and fostered like exotics on the clean soil. But from the great Western prairie comes a fresh, strong breeze which sweetens all the foulness of the Atlantic cities, and makes the breath of Columbia still pure and fragrant.
With this new sentiment for her new-found country came the first passionate love to the heart of the beautiful and unhappy young woman. She had breathed the spicy air of the Californian forests, bracing and sweet, and her cheek had grown fuller and fairer in the perfect climate. Her empty, hollow heart was filled by a great love and strength, all-sustaining and soothing.
When Graham had first seen her lying in the fire-light, with cool, deep eyes, before the light of love had dawned in her flower face, she had seemed to him like a perfect white rose. Then the rose flushed palely, as the love-light trembled to a flame; and he brought her flowers of the color of the sea-shells, and she wore them in her hair. Last of all, he laid at her feet deep-red damask rosebuds; and these she placed on her white breast, where they bloomed and died in a single night. He had painted her by the waves, as he had once seen her on that strange day when death had seemed so near and life so beautiful. He had painted her standing at the sea edge with pallid roses in her little hands, her graceful head set about with the same soft-hued flowers, and a single crimson rose lying lightly over her heart. He had hung the sketch against the wall where the sunlight fell upon it early in the morning; and Millicent had bade him remember, while he slept or waked, that she was near him.