CHAPTER IVDANGER SIGNALS
Jerome Barclay lived with his mother in a new house on Taylor Street, near Jackson. They had only been there a short time. Before that South Park had been their home. But within the last year or two the fortunes of South Park had shown symptoms of decline, and when this happened Mrs. Simeon Barclay had felt that she must move.
Since her arrival in San Francisco in the early fifties, Mrs. Barclay had made many moves. These were not undertaken because her habitats had been uncomfortable, but because the fashionable element of the city had shown from the first a migratory tendency which was exceedingly inconvenient for those who followed it. Mrs. Barclay had followed it assiduously from the day she had landed from the steamer, and had in consequence lived in many localities, ranging from what was now Chinatown and in the fifties had been the most perfectly genteel and exclusive region, to the quietly dignified purlieus of Taylor Street.
Simeon Barclay had crossed the plains in an emigrant train in forty-nine, and between that and sixty-four, when he died, had made a fair fortune, first asa contractor and afterward as a speculator in real estate. In St. Louis, his native place, he had begun life as a carpenter, seen but little prosperity, and married a pretty servant girl, whose mind was full of distinctly formed ambitions. When he went to California in the first gold rush he left his wife and son behind him, and when, from the carpentering that he did with his own hands in forty-nine, he passed to the affluent stage of being a contractor in a large way of business, he sent for her to join him. This she did, found him with what to their small experience were flourishing fortunes, and immediately started out on that career of ambulating fashion which she had followed ever since.
Barclay senior’s fifteen years of California life were full to the brim. He made fortunes and lost them, lived hard, had his loves and his hates openly and unblushingly, as men did in those wild days, and became a prominent man in the San Francisco of the early sixties. He had but the one child, and in him the ambitions of both parents centered. The Missouri carpenter had never been educated. He was always, even at the end of his life, uncertain in his grammar, and his wife had found it difficult to teach him what she called “table manners.”
Father and mother had early resolved that their son should be handicapped by no such deficiencies. They sent him to the best schools there were in San Francisco and later to Harvard. There he was well supplied with money, developed the tastes for luxurious living that were natural to him, forgathered with the richest and fastest men of his class, and lefta record of which collegians talked for years. After his graduation he traveled in Europe for a twelve-month, as a coping stone to the education his parents had resolved should be as complete as money could compass.
Shortly after his son’s return Simeon Barclay died in the South Park house. When it came to settling up the estate it was found that he had left much less than had been expected. The house and the income of a prudently invested eighty thousand dollars was all the widow and son had to their credit when the outlying debts were paid. It was not a mean fortune for the place and the time, but both were querulous and felt themselves aggrieved by this sudden lightening of what had been for fifteen years a well-filled purse.
Jerry, to whom a pecuniary stringency was one of the greatest of trials, attempted to relieve the situation by speculating in “feet on the lode” in Virginia City, and quickly lost the major part of his inheritance. Even then there was no need for worry, as the son had been taken into the business the father had built up, which still flourished. But Jerry showed none of the devotion to commercial life that had distinguished the elder man. In his hands the fortunes of Barclay and Son, Real Estate Brokers, rapidly declined. He neglected the office, as he did his home, his mother, his friends. A devotion, more urgently engrossing and intoxicating than business could ever be, had monopolized his thoughts, his interests and his time.
He was twenty-four when he returned from Europe,handsome, warm-blooded, soft-tongued, a youth framed for the love of women. It speedily found him. He had not been home six months when his infatuation for the wife of William Newbury was common talk.
She was three years his senior, mismated to a man nearly double her age, dry, hard, and precise. She was a woman of tragedy and passion, suffering in her downfall. She had at first struggled fiercely against it, sunk to her fall in anguish, and after it, known contending conflicts of flesh and spirit, when she had tried to break from its bondage and ever sunk again with bowed head and sickened heart. People had wondered to see the figure of Lupé Newbury bent in prayer before the altars of her church. In her girlhood she had not been noted for her piety. Waking at night, her husband often heard her soft padding footfall as she paced back and forth through the suite of rooms she occupied. He had never understood her, but he loved her in a sober, admiring way, showered money on her, believed in her implicitly. This fond and unquestioning belief was the salt that her conscience rubbed oftenest and most deeply into the wound.
In those first years Jerry had given her his promise never to marry. He told her repeatedly that he regarded her as his wife; if she were ever free it would be his first care to make her so before the eyes of the world. But six years had passed since then, years during which the man’s love had slowly cooled, while the woman’s burned deeper with an ever-increasing fervid glow. The promise which had been given in the heat of a passion that sought extravagant termsin which to express itself, was now her chief hold upon him. In the scenes of recrimination that constantly took place between them she beat it about his ears and flourished it in his eyes. As she had no cunning to deceive him in the beginning, she had no subtilities to reawake old tenderness, rekindle old fires. She was as tempestuously dark in her despair as she was furious in her upbraidings, melting in her love. He was sorry for her and he was also afraid of her. He tried to please her, to keep her in a good temper, and he refrained from looking into the future where his promise and his fear of her, were writ large across his life.
It was for his protection from scenes of jealousy and tears that he had conducted his friendship with June in a surreptitious manner. He had the caution of selfish natures, and the underhand course that his intrigue necessitated had further developed it. He wanted to please himself always and to hurt no one, because people, when they are hurt, disturb the joyous tenor of life. Now, where June was concerned, he was not doing any harm. He saw the girl in a perfectly open manner except that he did not see her in her own house. He had a right to spare himself the railings to which he knew Lupé would subject him, and which he dreaded as only a man can who hears them from the lips of a woman he has ruined and no longer loves.
That it was unfair to June he would not permit himself to think. He liked seeing her too much to give it up, so he assured himself that it was a harmless pleasure for both of them. Of course he could notmarry her. Even if he were free to do so he had no such feeling for her. They were only friends. Their conversation had never passed the nicely designated limits of friendship. He had never touched her hand save in the perfunctory pressure of greeting and farewell. His respect for June was genuine, only it was not as strong as his regard for his own pleasure and amusement.
Yet, despite the assurances of the platonic coolness of his sentiments, his desire for her society grew with what it fed on. When by some engagement, impossible to be evaded, they could not take their accustomed walk together, he was filled with an unreasonable disappointment, and was almost angry with her till she should appear again.
On the last occasion the Colonel had interrupted them only a few minutes after they had met. Jerry, cheated of the hour he had intended spending on the park bench with her, left them in a rage. And so imperative was his wish to see her that the next evening, indifferent to the fact that he would probably find the Colonel there, he made up his mind to go to the house on Folsom Street and pay one of his rare calls.
Rion Gracey and Barney Sullivan were dining with the Allens that night. There was much to talk about and the party sat long over the end of dinner, the smoke of the men’s cigars lying in light layers across the glittering expanse of the table. There were champagne glasses beside each plate, the bubbles rising in the slender stems to cluster along the rim. These had appeared midway in the dinner, when, with muchstumbling and after repeated promptings and urgings from Rion, Barney Sullivan had announced his engagement to Summit Bruce.
With glasses held aloft the party pledged Mitty and her lover. The encomiums of his fiancée which followed made Barney even redder than the champagne did.
“Oh, there’s nothin’ the matter with Mitt,” he said with a lover’s modesty, “I ain’t gone it blind choosin’ her.”
“Mitty Bruce!” the Colonel exclaimed. “Mitty Bruce is the finest girl in the California foot-hills!”
“I guess Barney thinks just about that way,” Rion answered, forbearing to stare at the blushing face of his superintendent.
“Oh, Mitt’s all there!” Barney repeated, allowing himself a slight access of enthusiasm. “She’s just about on top of the heap.”
Greatly to his relief the conversation soon left his immediate affairs and branched out to the other members of the little Foleys group. Black Dan was still at the Buckeye Belle. His daughter was at school in New York where she had been sent in the autumn at her own request. The girls asked anxiously after her. The few glimpses they had had of the spoiled beauty had inflamed their imaginations. It seemed part of the elegant unusualness which appertained to her that she should be sent to New York to finish her education, with beyond that a polishing year or two of European travel.
“How wonderful she’ll be when she comes back,”Rosamund had said with an unenvious sigh. “Perfectly beautiful and knowing everything like the heroine of a novel.”
A slight trace of bitterness was noticeable in Rion’s answer.
“I think she’d have been a good deal more wonderful if she’d stayed here. She’s just the apple of her father’s eye, the thing he lives for. And now, unless he goes East, and that’s almost impossible with things waking up this way in Virginia, he may not see her for a year or two.”
The mention of Virginia broke the spell of gossip and small talk and the conversation settled down to the discussion of the business, which, in different degrees, absorbed the four men. It was curious to notice the change wrought in them by this congenial theme. Sullivan’s uncouthness and embarrassment fell from him with the first words. His whole bearing was transformed; it became infused with alertness and gained in poise and weight. The heaviness of his visage gave place to a look of sharpened concentration. His very voice took on different tones, quick, sure and decisive.
But it was to Rion Gracey that the others deferred. June, sitting silent in her chair, noticed that when he spoke they listened, Sullivan with foxlike keenness of face, the Colonel with narrowed eyes, ponderingly attentive over his cigar, her father with a motionless interest showing in knit brows and debating glance. Leaning back in an attitude of careless ease, Rion spoke simply but with a natural dominance, forhere he was master. A thrill of surprised admiration passed through the girl. He was a man among men, a leader by weight of authority, to whom the others unconsciously yielded the foremost place.
The room was dim with smoke when they finally rose from the table. The mining discussion was still in progress, but Rion dropped out of it to turn to his hostess and draw back her chair. As he did so he leaned over her shoulder and said in a lowered voice:
“It’s too bad I’ve got to go on to-morrow. I wanted to see you again. I wanted to talk to you.”
The words were simple enough. The young girl, however, looking uneasy, turned to glance at him. She met his eyes, keen, deep-set, quiet, the eyes of the out-door man accustomed to range over airy distances. In them she saw a look which caused her to drop her own. Murmuring a word or two of reply she turned and passed through the doorway into the sitting-room just behind Rosamund. That young woman suddenly felt her arm pressed by a small, cold hand, and in her ear heard a whisper:
“Don’t leave me alone this evening with Rion Gracey. Please don’t.”
Rosamund turned and shot an inquiring side-glance at her sister’s perturbed face. She strolled toward the sitting-room bay-window and began to arrange the curtains, June at her heels.
“Why not?” she said in a whisper, pulling the heavy folds together.
“I’m afraid of what he’s going to say. Oh, please”—with as much urgency as the low tone employedpermitted—“if he suggests that we go into the drawing-room to look at photographs or albums or anything, you come along, too.”
“But why?”
“Rosie, don’t be such a fool!” in an angry whisper.
Rosamund was about to retort with some spirit when the click of the iron gate caught her ear. She drew back the curtains and peeped out. A step sounded on the flagged walk and a tall, masculine figure took shape through the density of the fog-thickened atmosphere. She closed the curtains and looked at June with an unsmiling eye.
“You needn’t be afraid of being left alone with anybody,” she said. “Here’s Jerry Barclay.”
June drew back, her eyebrows raised into exclamatory semi-circles, an irrepressible smile on her lips.
“Rosamund,” called Allen from the table, “where’s the ash receiver? Gracey’s got nothing to put his ashes in but the blue satin candy box one of June’s young men gave her for Christmas.”
The entrance of Jerry Barclay a moment later had a marked effect upon the company. He was known to the four men and not especially liked by any one of them. The Colonel had begun to feel for him a sharp, disquieted repugnance. The one person in the room to whom his entrance afforded pleasure was June, and this she made an effort to hide under a manner of cold politeness.
An immediate constraint fell on the party which the passage of the evening did not dispel. Gracey was angry that the advent of this man whom he mentallycharacterized as “a damned European dandy” had deprived him of a tête-à-tête with June. He had not intended, as the young girl feared, to ask her to marry him. He had the humility of a true lover and he felt that he dared not broach that subject yet. But he had hoped for an hour’s converse with her to take with him on his journey as a sweet, comforting memory. Sullivan detested Jerry, whose manner he found condescending, turned from him, and began talking with an aggressive indifference to his host. But the Colonel was the most disturbed of all. What worried him was the difference between June’s manner to Jerry to-day, when others were present, and June’s manner to Jerry yesterday, when they had been walking alone on Van Ness Avenue.
By eleven o’clock they had gone and Allen having stolen to bed, the sisters were left together in the sitting-room. They were silent for a space, Rosamund moving about to put out lights, give depressed cushions a restoring pat, and sweep the ashes of the fire into a careful heap beneath the grate, while June idly watched her from the depths of an arm-chair.
“Aren’t people funny?” said the younger sister suddenly, turning from her kneeling position on the rug, the hearth-brush in her hand. “They seem to be so different in different places.”
“How do you mean?” said June absently. “Who’s different in a different place?”
“Well, Barney is. He’s all right and looks just as good as anybody up at the mines. And down here he’s entirely different, he looks so red, and his feet are so big, and his hands never seem to know whereto go unless he’s talking about mining things. His clothes never looked so queer up at Foleys, did they? They seemed just like everybody else’s clothes up there.”
“Oh, Barney’s all right,” returned the other, evidently taking scant interest in the problem. “I’m glad he and Mitty are going to be married.”
“But Rion Gracey’s not like that,” continued Rosamund, pursuing her own line of thought. “He’s just the same everywhere. I think he looks better down here. He looks as if he were somebody, somebody of importance. He even makes other people, that look all right when he’s not by, seem sort of small and insignificant.”
“Whom did he make look small and insignificant?” said June suddenly in a key of pugnacious interest.
“Jerry Barclay. I thought Jerry Barclay looked quite ordinary and as if he didn’t amount to much beside Rion. The things he said seemed snappish and sometimes silly, like what a girl says when she’s cross and is trying to pretend she isn’t.”
“I don’t think it very polite, Rosamund,” said June in a coldly superior tone, “to criticize people and talk them over when they’ve hardly got out of the house.”
“Well, perhaps it isn’t,” said Rosamund contritely, returning to her hearth-brushing, “but like lots of other things that aren’t just right it’s awfully hard not to do it sometimes.”
The girls went up stairs and June was silent. Rosamund thought she was still annoyed by the criticism of her friend, and so she was. For deep in her own heart the thought that Rosamund had given voice tohad entered, paining and shocking her by its disloyalty, and making her feel a sense of resentment against Rion Gracey.