CHAPTER VIREADJUSTMENT
June and July passed, and the life in the De Soto house was very uneventful. As soon as the group of guests left June requested her sister to ask no more visitors for a time, and the mid-summer days filed by, unoccupied in their opulent, sun-bathed splendor.
The blow at first crushed her. Despite the warnings she had received, it had come upon her with the stunning force of the entirely unexpected. The very fact that Jerry had been attacked by scandal had lent an exalted fervor to her belief in him. Even now, had there been a possibility of her continuing in this belief, she would have persisted. Weak, loving women have an extraordinary talent for self-deception, and June combined with weakness and love an irrepressible optimism. She tried to plead for him with herself, argued his case as before a stern judge, attempted in her ignorance to find extenuating circumstances for him, and then came face to face with the damning, incontrovertible fact that he himself had admitted.
It was a blasting experience. Had she known him less well, had their acquaintance been of shorter duration,the blow would probably have killed her love. But the period of acquaintance had been long, the growth of affection gradual. By the time the truth was forced upon her, her passion had struck its roots deep into her heart, and she was not strong enough to tear it out.
In the long summer days, wandering about the deserted, glowing gardens, she began the work of reconstructing her ideal. She told herself that she would always love him, but now it was with no confidence, no proud joy in a noble and uplifting thing. With agonizing throes of rebirth, her feeling for him passed from the soft, self-surrendering worship of a girl to the protective and forgiving passion of a woman. As it changed she changed with it. The suggestion of the child that had lingered in her vanished. The freshness of her youth went for ever. The evanescent beauty that happiness had given her, which on the day of Barclay’s declaration had reached its climax, shriveled like a flower in the heat of a fire. She looked pale, pinched, and thin. Eying her image in the glass, she marveled that any man could find her attractive.
In the first period of her wretchedness she was numbed. Then, the house swept of its guests and she and Rosamund once more alone, her silence broke and she poured out her sorrows to her sister. Rosamund heard the story from the first day at Foleys to its fateful termination in the Señora Kelley’s woodland bower.
She listened with unfailing sympathy, interrupted by moments of intense surprise. The revelations ofthe constant meetings with Barclay, which had been so skilfully kept secret, amazed and disconcerted her. She tried to conceal her astonishment, but now and then it broke out in startled queries. It was so hard to connect the unconscious and apparently candid June of the winter with this disclosure of a June who had been so far from candid. It was nearly impossible to include them in the same perspective. The culprit, engrossed in the recital of her griefs, was oblivious of her sister’s growing state of shocked amaze, which sometimes took the form of silence, and occasionally expressed itself in gently probing questions.
“But, June,” she could not help saying in protest, “didn’t you realize something wasn’t all right when you saw he’d rather meet you outside than see you at home?”
June turned on her an eye of cold disapproval.
“No. And I don’t see now that that’s got anything to do with it.”
Rosamund subsided meekly, unable to follow the intricacies of her sister’s mental processes.
She did not argue with June—it was hopeless in the sufferer’s present state of mind—and she made few comments on Barclay’s behavior. But she had her opinion of him, and it was that he was one of the darkest of villains. As to her opinion of June’s part in the story, she was a loyal soul and had none. All she felt was a flood of sympathy for the shocked and wounded girl, and a worried sense of responsibility in a position with which she felt herself unable to cope. It was with great relief that, towardthe end of July, she received a letter from the Colonel, who had been six weeks in Virginia City, telling her he would be with them on the following Sunday.
She drove down to the train to meet him with the intention of preparing him for the change in his favorite. She had written to him that June was not well. Driving back from the station she had ample time to expatiate on this theme and warn him not to exclaim unduly on her changed appearance. The Colonel began to be apprehensive and ask penetrative questions, to which she had no answer. He leaped out of the carriage at the veranda steps and ran up to the top, where June stood.
The change in her, flushed with welcome, was not strikingly apparent at the first glance. It was later that he began to realize it, to be startled and then alarmed. She sat quiet through dinner, nibbling musingly at her food, once or twice not answering him. The empty silence of the house struck chill on him, and when he had commented on the absence of visitors, she had said with sudden gusty irritation,
“There’s been nobody here for over a month. I don’t want anybody to come. I’ll go away if anybody’s asked. I like being alone this way.”
He looked at Rosamund with an almost terrified inquiry. She surreptitiously raised her brows and gave her head a warning shake.
It was late in the evening before he had a chance to speak to Rosamund alone. Then, June having gone to her room, and he and Rosamund being left alone in the sitting-room, he laid his hand on the young girl’s shoulder, and said in a voice of command,
“Now, Rosamund, I’ve got to hear all about this. What the devil’s been going on down here?”
She told him the whole story, greatly relieved to have a listener who could advise her.
The Colonel was staggered by it. He said little, but Rosamund was not half-way through when he began pacing up and down, his hands in his pockets, every now and then a low ejaculation breaking from him. He, too, was astounded by the account of June’s underhand behavior. He had thought the two girls as simple as children. That his own particular darling could have consented to, and then so dexterously carried out, a plan of procedure so far from what he had imagined a young girl would do, was painful and shocking to him. But as June’s love could not be killed by one sort of disagreeable revelation, so his could suffer no abatement from another kind. Manlike, he immediately began to make excuses for her.
“She was too young to be allowed to go round that way alone,” he burst out angrily. “There was nobody to take care of her. What good are two old Silurians like me and your father to look after girls? I told him six months ago he ought to get some kind of an old woman in the house who’d knit in corners and hang round after you.”
Rosamund continued her story and he went on with his walk. Now and then, as she alluded to Barclay’s part in the affair, suppressed phrases that were of a profane character broke from him. When she had concluded he stood for a moment by the window looking out.
“Well, the mischief’s been done. He’s made the poor little soul just about as miserable as she can be. I’d like to blow the top of his head off with one of my derringers, but as I can’t have that satisfaction there’s no good thinking of it. All we can do is to try and brace her up some way or other.”
Rosamund made no answer and after a moment of silence, he continued,
“And I suppose it lets poor Rion out?”
“Oh, yes,” breathed Rosamund with a melancholy sigh.
The Colonel walked to the other window muttering in his wrath.
“He was coming down here, Rosie, to ask her. They’ve made a pile of money up there, in this Crown Point business, and they’re buying up all the claims that might have clouded the title of the Cresta Plata. They believe there’s a bonanza there, and the Gracey boys don’t often make mistakes. They’ll be millionaires before they’re done. But that doesn’t count. What does is that Rion Gracey’s the finest man in California, bar none. The woman that he married would be loved and taken care of, the way—the way a woman ought to be. Good Lord, what fools we are and how we tear our lives to pieces for nothing!”
“Don’t blame her, Uncle Jim. She’s just got so fond of that man she hasn’t any sense left.”
“Blame her! Have I ever blamed her? Why, Rosie, I’d die for her. I’ll have to go up to Virginia and put Rion off. What can I say to him?”
“Tell him she doesn’t care for him,” said the truthful Rosamund.
The Colonel paused by the table, looking down and jingling the loose silver in his pockets.
“No,” he said, “I’m not going to tell him that. That would be harder on Rion than on most men. Women, you know, change. June’s very young. She’s still a child in many things.”
“She isn’t the same sort of child she was two months ago,” said Rosamund sadly.
“No, but she’s young in years—only twenty-one. Dear girl, that’s a baby. Your mother was older than that when I knew her, and—and—she changed.”
“How changed?” Rosamund asked with some curiosity.
“Her heart changed. She—other men cared for her before your father came along. She once cared for one of them.”
The Colonel paused and cleared his throat.
“Mother was engaged to some one else before father. She told me so once, but she didn’t say who.”
“Well, there was no doubt of her second love being deep. In fact, it was the deeper of the two.”
“I wish June would care for Rion Gracey. But if you’d hear her talk!”—with hopeless recollection of June’s sentimental transports. “It sounds as if she didn’t know there was a man in the world but that miserable Barclay. She’s just bewitched. What’s the matter with women that they’re always falling in love with the wrong man?”
There was another pause.
“I’ll do my best,” said the Colonel at length, “to keep Rion from coming down and trying his luck. He mustn’t see her now. She’d refuse him in sucha way that he’d never dare to come near her again. And you, Rosie, try and cheer her up and keep her from thinking of Barclay.”
On Monday morning the Colonel left for San Francisco, and a few days later was againen routefor Virginia City.
The rest of the summer slowly passed, idle and eventless. June brightened a little with the passage of the weeks, but was far from her old self. Now and then she saw Barclay at the station, in the house of friends, or met him in the village. At first he merely bowed and passed on. But before the summer was over he had spoken to her; in the beginning with the short and colorless politeness of early acquaintanceship, but later with something of his natural bonhomie.
Once at an afternoon garden fête she suddenly came out on a balcony and found him there alone. For a moment they stood dumb, eye full on eye, then began speaking of indifferent things, their hearts beating hard, their faces pale. It was the first conversation of any length they had had since the meeting in the wood. They parted, feeling for the moment poignantly disturbed and yet eased of the ache of separation. From that on they spoke at greater length, talking with an assumption of naturalness, till finally their fragmentary intercourse assumed a tone of simple friendliness, from which all sentiment was banished. This surface calm was all that each saw of the other’s heart, but each knew what the calm concealed.
In October the Allens returned to town. The Colonelhad managed to keep Rion Gracey from going to San Francisco “to try his luck” until this late date. It would have been impossible had not Fate been with him. In the growing excitement of the reawakened mining town Rion was continuously occupied, and he was a man to whom work was a paramount duty.
But in October he slipped his leash for a week and ran down to San Francisco. In four days he returned, as quiet as ever, and inclined to be harder with his men. The Colonel knew what had happened, and Black Dan guessed. Outside these two, no one understood why Rion Gracey had become a more silent and less lenient man after a four days’ visit to the coast.