CHAPTER VIIINEW PLANETS
The year after the Crown Point collapse was a sad and chastened one. Money was tight on all sides. Large houses were closed, servants discharged, dressmakers’ bills cut down. Many families hitherto prominent dropped out of sight, preferring to hide their poverty in remote corners of the city, whence, in some cases, they never again emerged. The winter, shorn of its accustomed gaieties, was dull and quiet.
With the spring there came a revival of life and energy. The volatile spirit of the Californians began to rise. One of the chief causes of this was a new series of disturbing rumors from Virginia City. In February a strike was reported in the recently consolidated group of claims known as the California and Consolidated Virginia. A vein of ore seven feet wide and assaying sixty dollars to the ton had been uncovered. Talk of the Nevada camp was in the air. The San Franciscans were incredulous, as fearful of mining stock as the singed cat of the fire, but they listened and watched, feeling the first faint unrest of hope and temptation.
Socially too, the city showed signs of returningcheerfulness. This was due not only to the natural rebound after a period of depression, but to two new arrivals of the sort which those small segregated groups known as “society” delight to welcome and entertain.
The first of these was Mercedes Gracey. Glamour of many sorts clung about the name of this favorite of fortune. To her natural attractions were added those supposed to be acquired by a sojourn in older and more sophisticated localities. Mercedes had passed from her New York boarding-school to the finishing influences of a year “abroad.” She had traveled in Europe with a chaperone and taken on the polish of accomplishment under the guidance of experienced teachers. Such news of her as had drifted back to San Francisco was eagerly seized upon by the less fortunate home dwellers. From time to time the newspapers printed items about Miss Gracey’s triumphant career. Before her arrival San Francisco had already developed a possessive pride in her as a native daughter who would add to the glory of the Golden State.
Mercedes would not, probably, have been the object of such interest had not the fortunes of her father and uncle been for the past three years steadily ascending. The Gracey boys had of late risen from the position of a pair of well-known and capable mining men to that of two of the most prominent figures in the state. Their means were reported large. They had been among the few who had got out of the Crown Point excitement at the right moment, selling their stock at the top price. They were now developingtheir Cresta Plata property. Should this pan out as they expected there was no knowing where the Gracey boys’ successes would end. Mercedes was the only woman relative they possessed. It was no wonder that she was regarded with an almost reverential interest, and her return evoked as much curiosity as though it were that of an errant princess.
Black Dan, who had gone to New York to meet her, brought her back in triumph. His idolatrous love had known no abatement in the two years’ separation. To have her finally restored to him, in an even completer state of perfection, was a bewildering happiness to him. His primitive nature strove to show its gratitude and tenderness in extravagant ways. He showered presents on her, ordered the finest suite in the newly-completed Lick House to be prepared for her, offered to rent any country place she might choose. That she should accompany him to the rough life of Virginia, where he spent most of his time, he never expected. It would be enough for him to see her on his frequent visits to the coast.
The other notable visitor who arrived in the city almost simultaneously was a young Englishman, Lionel Harrower. He, too, took up his residence in the Lick House, and it was but natural that some of the interest evoked by the appearance of Black Dan’s daughter should be deflected toward him.
Young Harrower was a nephew of that Englishman who fifteen years before had married Mrs. Newbury’s sister, Carmen Romero. He was finishing his education by a trip around the world, and had decided to make a stop of some length in California,then aterra incognitato the traveling Briton. From his Spanish-Californian aunt he had brought letters to the Newburys, Mrs. Davenport, and other prominent San Franciscans.
The Englishman of Harrower’s class was at that time a rarity in the far West. Bonanza heiresses had not yet arisen to be the bait for well-born foreigners of all nations. California, outside its own borders, still enjoyed its original reputation as a land of picturesque gold-diggers and romantic gamblers, and the wandering noble of Anglo-Saxon or Gallic extraction avoided it as an unsafe place, where men were still free with the revolver and the bowie knife.
Harrower was an even more engrossing object of local curiosity than Mercedes. He was a good-looking young man of five and twenty, quiet in manner, non-committal and brief of speech, deeply interested in all he saw, and very shy. He was the heir to a baronetcy and fine country place in Warwickshire. His grandfather, the present baronet, was in his eighty-first year, and, though a hale old man, could not be expected to live much longer. When he died Lionel Harrower would inherit the title and lands, thereby coming into possession of one of the oldest and most beautiful estates in the county. The young man neither looked nor hinted any of these matters. But they were all carefully set down in the letters that Carmen Romero wrote to her sister and her friends, and they passed from mouth to mouth, accumulating material as they progressed. San Francisco had not had enough experience in the visiting patrician to be familiar with all the delicate gradationsof rank, and Harrower was regarded as of hardly less distinction than a reigning Grand Duke.
With the appearance of these two interesting strangers the city emerged from its apathy of depression. A desire to impress the new-comers hospitably took possession of it. Both Mercedes and Harrower were caught in the whirl of a round of entertainments, during which they constantly encountered each other. Thrown thus together their acquaintance rapidly grew. Harrower had not been a month in San Francisco when the little world about him was speculating on his interest in the daughter of Black Dan Gracey.
Mercedes was now nearly nineteen years of age. With her Spanish blood to round and ripen her, that corresponded to the Anglo-Saxon woman’s twenty-five. For all her American birth and education she was at heart a Latin, subtile, complex, and revengeful. There was little of her father in her. She had none of his simple largeness of temperament, but was made up of feline intricacies of caprice, vanity, and passion. At the present stage in her life her strongest instinct was love of admiration. She had early comprehended the power of her beauty, and to exercise this power was to her a delight which never lost its zest. To throw a spell over men was the thing Mercedes loved best to do, and could do with remarkable proficiency, considering her years and inexperience.
So far she had had few opportunities. Mrs. Campbell, the chaperone to whom her father had intrusted her, was a capable New England woman who had early recognized the responsibilities of her position.Mercedes, rich and beautiful, was a prize for which princes might have sued. But Mrs. Campbell had received instructions from Black Dan that he did not want his daughter taken from him by marriage with a foreigner, and Mercedes, during her year in Europe, was guarded like a princess traveling incognito. When she returned to San Francisco she had never yet received an offer of marriage, and even her admirers had been restricted in number and kept sternly at bay.
To Mercedes, Lionel Harrower represented all that was most choice in position and rank. Through her travels she knew more of the class he stood for than the admiring San Franciscans, and it was a class in which she ardently desired to install herself. She questioned the young man of his country and his people, prevailed upon him to show her a photograph of the stately Elizabethan manor house which was his home, and to talk to her of the life he led upon his ancestral acres. It was like an English novel, and Mercedes saw herself moving through it, lovely, proud and desired, as its conquering heroine.
In June she left the Lick House for the country place in the Santa Clara Valley that Black Dan had taken for her. This was the estate of Tres Pinos, one of the show places of the great valley, recently thrown upon the market by the death of its owner.
Tres Pinos soon became the focusing point of the region’s summer life. The wide balconies were constantly filled with visitors, the velvet turf of the croquet grounds was swept by the crisp flounces of women’s dresses, the bedrooms in the big house werealways occupied. Mrs. Campbell, precise, darkly clad, and primly well-bred, presided with an all-seeing eye, astonishing the Californians by her rigid observance of the smaller conventionalities. Through all Mercedes flitted, clad in French dresses, more ornate and elegant than any ever seen before in California, a smilingly gracious and finished person, evoking fear and jealousy in her own sex, and eliciting a rather awed admiration from the other.
That Lionel Narrower was a constant visitor at Tres Pinos the gossips were quick to note. When the young man announced his intention of spending the summer in California it seemed to them that there was no more doubt as to the state of his feelings. What they did not know was that his presence at Tres Pinos was evoked by a constant flutter of scented notes from the chatelaine. There were many times when he had refused the invitations with which Miss Gracey showered him. He had found California, its scenery and people, of so much interest, that a single segregated interest in one particular human being had had no time to develop in him. But Mercedes did not think this. She felt quite sure that Lionel Harrower was remaining in California because of an engrossing and unconquerable sentiment for her.
One Sunday, late in June, he made one of the party which was spending the week-end at Tres Pinos. In the warm middle of the Sabbath afternoon, her visitors scattered over the croquet ground or enjoying the siesta in the shuttered gloom of their bed chambers, Mercedes started out to find him. She slipped down the wide staircase, peeped into the dimdrawing-room, cooled by closed blinds and filled with the scent of cut flowers, and then slipped out on to the balcony.
A spiral of cigarette smoke rising from a steamer chair betrayed his presence. He was comfortably outstretched in loose-jointed ease, a novel raised before a pair of eyes which looked suspiciously sleepy, his cigarette caught between his lips. At the sound of her voice he sprang up, but she motioned him back into his chair, and sitting down opposite began to rally him on his laziness. He looked at her with drowsy good humor, his lids drooping. Her figure in its pale colored muslin dress was thrown out against a background of velvety lawns and the massed, juicy greens of summer shrubbery. It was the middle of the afternoon, hot and still. From the croquet ground came the soft, occasional striking of balls.
“Just listen to them,” said the young man, “they’re actually playing croquet!”
“Lots of people play croquet on Sunday,” said Mercedes with some haste, as she disliked to have it thought that she was ignorant of any intricacy of etiquette. “I don’t see anything wrong in it.”
“It’s not the Sunday part of it. It’s the energy. Fancy standing out in that sun of your own free will!”
“You’re horribly lazy,” said the young girl. “It’s your worst fault. You do nothing all day but lie about on the balcony and drink lemonade.”
“Icoulddrink beer,” said Harrower dreamily, “but I’ve never seen anything but lemonade.”
“Well, I’ve come to tell you that I’m going to insist on your being more energetic. I want you to take me for a drive.”
“A drive! Now? But, my dear Miss Gracey, the sun’s simply scorching.”
Mercedes flushed slightly. Her cavalier’s manner of accepting the suggestion did not please her.
“If you’re afraid of your complexion,” she said, “you can hold my parasol over your head. I’ll drive.”
Harrower laughed. When she said things of this kind he thought her what he would have called “great fun.” Still he would have much preferred remaining on the balcony with his novel and his cigarette, to braving the heat of the afternoon, even in Miss Gracey’s smart new pony phaeton, with Miss Gracey in the driver’s seat. He sat up, rubbing his eyes into a more wakeful brightness and smothering a yawn.
“Where are we to drive to? Menlo Park again?”
“No, I’m going to take you back in the hills to the De Soto place. It was originally an old Spanish grant and part of the place is just the way it used to be. The Allens live there. They moved down early this year, so I don’t think you met them in town. Some people think the girls are very pretty.”
“Pretty girls!” said Harrower, pricking up his ears. “By all means let’s go.”
He looked at her laughing, for he thought she would enjoy the humor of his sudden enthusiasm. Instead, for a fleeting second, her face was clouded with annoyance. Then she recovered herself and rose to her feet, moving away from him.
“The horses are ready now,” she said. “I’ll go up for my hat and parasol and I’ll expect to find you at the steps when I come down.”
The heat was waning, the live-oak shadows lying dark and irregular over the drive, when the phaeton approached the Allens’ balcony. The light dresses of the Allen girls were thrown up by the darker gown of dignified middle age. Mrs. Barclay was sitting in a wicker arm-chair near the balustrade fanning herself with a palm-leaf fan. Mercedes muttered annoyance to her companion, and then her glance was charged with a sudden infusion of interest as it fell on a graceful masculine back bending over a table set with plates and glasses, behind which June Allen was standing.
“That must be Jerry Barclay,” she murmured to Harrower, as, with dexterous exactness she brought up the phaeton wheels against the mounting block. “I’ve not met him yet. He’s been in Virginia City, like everybody else.”
“Ah—aw! Yes, of course,” Harrower murmured vaguely, not knowing or caring in the least about Jerry Barclay, but filled with sudden admiration for the fresh-faced, blonde girl who rose at their approach and came to the top of the steps. Though she had never seen him before she included him in the sweet frank smile and friendly glance with which she greeted Mercedes.
“Rosamund,” said Mercedes, throwing the reins around the whip with the easy flourish of the expert, “I’ve brought over Mr. Harrower. He’s making a collection of Californian specimens, and Ithought perhaps he’d like to see you. He’ll put you down under the head of vertebrate fauna, I suppose.”
The stranger, whose face had grown exceedingly red, did not know whether in the free, untrammeled West this constituted an introduction. The young woman, however, solved the difficulty by coming down a step or two and extending a welcoming hand. He looked into a pair of gray eyes, unusually honest and direct, and heard her saying in a voice, not low-keyed, but clear and full,
“I’m glad you came, Mr. Harrower. It was very kind of Mercedes to bring you.”
On the balcony above Mrs. Barclay had risen and was looking at the new-comers with avid curiosity. She had already talked them threadbare in every drawing-room from Millbrae to Menlo Park. Her personal acquaintance with both was very slight and this was a good opportunity to improve it and arrive at conclusions, to air which she could once again make a tour of the country houses and be sure of eager attention.
Behind her, at a table laden with a silver pitcher, glasses and plates, June was standing. She was pouring out a glass of lemonade, which Jerry was waiting to take to his mother, when the phaeton drove up. The glass was filled and the pitcher set down, before either of them looked at the new arrivals. Then Jerry turned and his eyes fell on them. He stopped short, the glass in his hand. Mercedes, a smile of greeting on her lips, was just mounting the steps.
“Heavens, what a girl!” he said in a whisper, turning to June.
“Yes,” she answered in an equally low voice, “she’s very pretty.”
“Pretty! pretty!” he ejaculated, mechanically setting the glass down. “Why she’s a dream!”
He turned again and looked at Mercedes, who was speaking to his mother. His face was staring with admiration, a slight fixed smile on his lips. It was the look of the male suddenly stricken by the physical charm of the female. June dropped her eyes to the table with a sensation of feeling cold, insignificant and small.
“Your mother’s lemonade,” she said, pushing the glass toward him. “You were going to take it to her.”
He did not appear to hear her. His eyes were fastened on Mercedes, the slight smile still on his lips. Forgetful of the glass with which June had touched his hand, he slowly walked across the balcony to where Mrs. Barclay stood and said gaily,
“Mother, won’t you introduce me to Miss Gracey? We came very near meeting at Foleys three years ago and just missed it. I don’t want that to happen again.”
When June had welcomed her guests she went back to her seat behind the table. Presently Mrs. Barclay drew her chair nearer to her, for Mrs. Barclay began to feel that to be a fifth among four young people so well pleased with one another was not entertaining. So she moved up toward June and talked to her about the dishonesty of the new butcher at San Mateo as compared with that of the old butcher at Menlo Park.
June listened and now and then spoke. She didnot seem to know much about either butcher, and Mrs. Barclay made a mental note of the fact that she must be a poor housekeeper. Once or twice she looked at the elder woman with eyes that were disconcertingly empty of attention. When that lady rose to go she remarked that the girl looked pale and tired. She said this to Jerry on the way home.
“Did she?” he answered absently. “Poor little June! She’s just the dearest little woman in the world. But isn’t that Gracey girl a wonder? I never saw a more beautiful face.”