CHAPTER VITHE OLD LOVE
At half-past four he was walking through the dust toward the cottage. The main feeling in his heart was dread. But he could not disregard Alice’s summons—Alice’s dying summons, he felt them to be. He tried to prepare himself by thinking that nearly a quarter of a century had passed, and what havoc it must have wrought. But he saw only the face of the girl he had loved, fresh and sweet, as it had been when he had bidden her good-by on the steamer on a morning full of sun and hope, twenty-one years ago.
He had left the town’s main street behind and was now walking on a narrow footpath beside the road which, on one side, skirted his own land. A still, scorching warmth had possession of the hour. The landscape, glazed with heat, seemed to faint under the unwinking glare of sun. From the parched grassland and the thickets of chaparral, pungent scents arose—the ardent odors that the woods of foot-hill California exhale in the hot, breathless quiescence of summer afternoons.
His unseeing eye passed over the rise and fall of the rich tract he had held so negligently. The brokenfence beside him divided an ocher-colored expanse of uncultivated land from the road. The air came over it in glassy waves, carrying its dry, aromatic perfume to his nostrils. On its burnt expanse a few huge live-oaks rose dark and dome-like, their shadows, black and irregular, staining the ground beneath them. Beyond the chaparral swept up the hillside, a close growing wall of variegated green where the manzanita glittered amid duller foliage. A splintered edge of rock broke slantingly through the thicket, rose and passed like a bristling crest over the top of the hill, where the pines lifted their plumy heads. It was the “outcrop” of the ledge—that inconsistent and ill-regulated ledge, the promises of which had made a town of Foleys and then, being unfulfilled, had left the town to ruin.
But the Colonel saw none of these things. His eyes were fixed on the turn of the road just beyond. As he remembered, you could see the cottage from there. And as he gained and passed it, the low bulk of the little house broke upon his sight. It was shrouded in vines, carefully trained over the projecting roof of its balcony so that they hung from its edge in a fringe of waving tendrils. Around and beyond it, the juicy, violent green of a vineyard ran into the dryness of the untilled land, and the even emerald rows and dark, loamy stripes of a garden lay like a piece of carpeting between the vineyard and the house. Its look of thrifty habitation came like a shock upon his memory of its ruinousneglect when he had last seen it. Even the gate, that he remembered hung dejected from one hinge, had been mended; the rose bushes that had thrown long festoons across the path had been clipped and tied to restraining poles. These were “the improvements” upon which the squatter based part of his claim.
The Colonel’s hand, trembling, raised the gate latch with a click. As he did so he heard a sound from the balcony, and the younger girl, who had introduced herself to him as Rosamund Allen, ran down the steps that led from it and advanced along the path to meet him. Her hat was off and he saw that she had thick, fair hair, its ashen blondness streaked with strands of a coarse, bright gold.
“Here you are,” she cried with her easy, friendly manner. “We had just begun to expect you. Isn’t it hot?”
She fell into step beside him and they walked slowly up the little path. The cottage at first presented to his gaze only one end cut into by a single window. As they drew nearer he saw the length of its balcony, and that the vine he had noticed was a grape, its thick-twisted stalk running up to the roof like a pillar, its leafage engarlanding the balustrade. A few steps led to the balcony from the walk. He saw the black square of an open doorway and near this, sitting close to the leaf-trimmed balustrade, a shawled female figure in a lounging chair.
His eye fell on it and he involuntarily stopped. The girl beside him suddenly jerked his sleeve.
“That’s mother,” she said in a hurried whisper. “Take care. She can see us. Now don’t look surprised—” then raising her voice a little she said:
“Mother dear, here’s Colonel Parrish.”
The Colonel, as he mounted the stairs, took off his hat and held it. The woman in the chair was facing him. From the descending folds of the many loose wrappings that hung about her emaciated figure, her head rose, the face looking at him with still, eager interest. She gave a little smile and a waxen hand of skeleton thinness emerged from the folds of her shawls.
“Jim Parrish!” she said in a sweet, husky voice, then looking into his face with eyes of mild, unconscious friendliness, she said softly, “Jim.”
He would never have known her till he heard the voice and saw the smile. They were the same. The old dimple had disappeared and a wrinkle had taken its place. The eyes, the clear, greenish-brown eyes, were sunken into dark caverns, the satiny skin grown loose and sallow. Yet it was Alice, Alice old before her time, Alice sick, Alice dying.
He turned round and found a chair, for the moment not daring to speak. He was conscious of the figure of Rosamund walking toward the garden dragging a serpent-like length of hose behind her. Then he placed the chair close to the sick woman and sat down. To him it was a moment that he had thought of in dark reveries, and even in thought found too painful. Now he was conscious that there was a tranquillity about it, an absence of tension, which was due to Alice. Her manner suggested nothing but a peacefulrecollection of old friendship. Was it that the near approach of death was wiping out all the disturbing and cruel emotions, all the biting memories, that belonged to life?
She looked at him with her little affectionate smile as a sick sister might.
“It’s so queer it being you,” she said. “When June told me I couldn’t believe it. After—after—how long is it, Jim?”
“Twenty-one years,” he said.
“Yes, twenty-one years,” she repeated. “How time flies! And what a lot has happened in those twenty-one years. You’re rich, they say. And your hair’s quite white, but I’d have known you anywhere. You’re not much changed.”
She continued to look at him with the same gentle, softly exploring air. He had had an idea that even in death he would see shame and remorse in her eyes, but they were as devoid of either as though he had never been other than a girlhood friend.
“It was so odd your just happening on June that way. She says you were so kind to her, she felt immediately you were her friend. Poor little June! It was such an amusement for her that evening. She’s not had much pleasure of that kind. And she’s twenty now, just the age when a girl longs for a little of the good times of life.”
“She’s very like you,” he answered, “it—it—” he was going to say “shocked me,” but he had a feeling she would not understand him. “It surprised me,” he said instead.
“Oh, she’s very like me. Every one sees it. Herfather says she is just areplicaof what I was when he first knew me. And she’s such a sweet, loving little thing. You don’t know how they work here—and with me to take care of. God has blessed me in my children, Jim.”
She turned her large, sunken eyes on him, their somberness lit by the fire of her maternal passion.
“They are the best girls in the world,” she said.
“Then you’ve been happy, Alice?” he suddenly asked.
“Happy!” she echoed. “Oh, yes, always happy except when our boy died. That was our sorrow. I don’t know whether you ever heard of it. He was just a baby, but he was our only son. A beautiful boy. He was John Beauregard Allen, too.”
The Colonel made no comment, but she did not notice it, engrossed in her own recital.
“Of course we’ve not been very successful, especially of late years. But poverty’s not so bad when you’ve got those you love around you. And we’ve been like a little company, close together, always marching shoulder to shoulder—‘a close corporation,’ Beau calls it. We’ve had bad luck of all kinds, but you can bear bad luck when you’re all together.”
The past, the bitter, terrible past was dead to her. She had probably never understood what it had been to him. Now twenty years of love and struggle had almost obliterated it from her memory, and the coming of death had wiped away its last faint traces.
“Youhavebeen blessed, Alice,” he said in a low voice. “Life has fulfilled all your expectations.”
“Not all,” she answered. “What doesn’t matterfor yourself matters for your children. It’s hard for me to see them living here, and this way—” she made a gesture which swept the garden and the vineyard. “That’s hard for a mother, a mother who was bred differently and bred them for something different. I educated them myself, Jim. They’re not like the country girls around us. They’re—” she paused a moment and then said with an air of sad solemnity—“the children of a lady and a gentleman.”
“Any one can see that,” he murmured, “and they’re happy too.”
He did not know what else to say. He could not condole with her. In her poverty and sickness she had fulfilled the purposes of her life, lived it with a passionate completeness as he had never done. The fullness of it, compared to the barren emptiness of his, augmented the sense of bleak loneliness that lay heavy at his heart.
“They’re young,” she continued, “they’ve not known much better. Our bad times began when they were still little. But I—well, before I was sick it was different. I helped them and I was a companion, not a care. Virginia City, too, was a place where, as they grew older there would have been more amusement for them. They’d have had a better chance.”
She paused, her lids drooping, an air of musing melancholy on her face. Then she raised her eyes and looked at him.
“Who is there for them to marry here?” she asked.
“Marry!”—the Colonel had not thought of that.“They’re very young for that yet, aren’t they?” he stammered.
“Young? Yes, perhaps. But June is twenty now.”
She let her head drop back on the cushions behind it, and turned it slightly away from him so that he could see her in profile. Her hair was dressed in the fashion of her youth, parted and drawn down sleekly over the tips of her ears. Seen thus, the emaciation of her cheeks partly concealed, her face caught him with its sudden look of familiarity. For a moment the veil of years was jerked back and he saw his old sweetheart. He gave a murmured exclamation and leaned nearer to her, a word of tenderness trembling on his lips. Simultaneously she turned toward him, absorbed in her own thoughts.
“I was twenty-four when I married,” she said. “People then thought that was quite old.”
He turned away his head, unable to reply, and she went on in her unconscious egotism.
“I want them to marry. It’s the only life for a woman. And I have been so happy in my married life, always, from the first till now.”
A slight smile touched her lips as her eyes, softened with memories, looked back over a life that love had ennobled.
Suddenly she turned to him. For the first time in the conversation she seemed to transfer her interest from her own affairs to his.
“You never married?” she said. “That was a pity. Life’s only half lived without those ties.”
“Oh, Alice!” he answered with a groan, and rising he moved to the top of the steps.
“I was mean to you that time, long ago,” she said behind him. “But that was all in the past. That’s all forgotten now—forgotten and forgiven, isn’t it?”
For the moment he made no reply and she repeated in what seemed an absent tone,
“Forgotten and forgiven. It’s all so far away now; such years ago. So much has happened in between. It’s like another life, looking back on it.”
“Yes, all forgiven,” he said, “there’s no anger with real love.”
“Of course not,” she agreed, “and time smooths away everything. Isn’t it pretty now, with the shadows lengthening out that way?”
They looked over the expanse where the low sun’s rays were painting the already brilliant-hued landscape with a wild flare of color. The darkness of the oaks was overlaid with a golden gilding, the dry grass looked orange.
“Have you seen the girls’ garden?” she asked. “They did it all themselves and they raise enough vegetables for us and some to sell. They sell the grapes, too. Last summer they made fifty dollars with their grapes.”
So “the improvements” were of some practical good. The Colonel saw the word dancing in the air before him.
“But it’s hard to see them working so. In summer they’re up and out at six. It doesn’t seem right to me—their father’s daughters. Their grandmother—Beau’s mother—had six house-slaves for her own private use, and I, before my father’s death, had a French governess.”
A step on the path prevented him from replying. Rosamund came around the corner of the house, her face flushed, a hoe in her hand, which he now saw to be earthy. She had an anxious air.
“Mother, are you tired, dear?” she said, mounting the steps. Then turning to the visitor:
“Mother goes in before the sun sets. It gets cool so suddenly. Just the moment the edge of the sun gets down behind the hill, the night comes up, and it’s bad for her to breathe that air.”
The Colonel assured her he was just about to take his leave. The invalid made no demand for him to stay. Sitting huddled among her shawls she looked wan and shrunken. He felt that the calm interest of her attitude toward him had now, from fatigue, turned suddenly into indifference. He faltered some words of farewell to her, his hand out. Hers, feeling in his warm, strong grasp like a bundle of twigs, was extended and then limply withdrawn.
“Good-by,” she said, turning to follow her daughter’s movements with a waiting, dependent eye, “won’t you come again before you go?”
He murmured an assent from the top steps, but he would leave in a day or two at the longest.
“The girls like seeing you so much;” now she looked at him with some animation. “And they have so little pleasure.”
“Why, mother,” said Rosamund in half-laughing protest, “that sounds as if Colonel Parrish was a sort of circus, just here to amuse us.”
The Colonel was nearly at the bottom of the steps. With some last conventional sentences of farewell, heraised his hat and turned toward mother and daughter for a final glance. They were smiling at Rosamund’s words, both looking at him to return his bow with perfunctory politeness. When he turned from them he could hear their voices, low and full of a close and different form of interest, speaking of the adjustment of the invalid’s shawls, the window by which her chair should be placed.
He was half-way down the path to the gate when a sound of suppressed singing caught his ear. Turning in its direction he saw coming down through a narrow path in the chaparral a fine red and white cow, and following it, June Allen. She was singing in a crooning, absent-minded way, at intervals flicking the flanks of the cow with a long alder branch she carried, stripped of all its leaves save two at the top. As she approached him she stopped singing, struck the cow with the branch, and began in a thoughtful way to talk to herself.
The attraction she had exercised over him fell on him again the moment he saw her. The very way she appeared to be conversing to herself seemed to him to be imbued with a quaint, unconscious charm, such as a child possesses. With his mind full of the gloom and pain of his interview with Alice, he yet paused, eying the approaching figure. As he stood watching her, she looked up and saw him.
She gave a loud exclamation and her face became illumined with pleasure. Administering to the cow a smart stroke with her switch, she crowded by it and ran forward over the dry grass into which the verdure of the garden intruded.
“Oh, how lovely for me to meet you!” she cried as she came up to him with an extended hand. “I never thought I’d have such luck.”
Her hand nestled into his; her face smiling at him was charged with an almost fond delight.
“I’m afraid you’re a flatterer, young woman,” he said, again noting the astonishing likeness that had so shaken him the evening before. “I don’t think you’re really glad to see me, or why should you, when you knew I was coming, go off with the cow?”
“That was a bargain,” she said, “I wanted to stay and see you just as much as Rosamund did. But as I had the party last night we agreed that it was only fair I should go after Bloss this evening, and Rosamund should stay and take care of mother and see you.”
If any commentary was needed on the deadly monotony of their existence, the Colonel felt that it was now given. That two young and attractive girls should regard him as a matter of such deep interest was proof to him of the unrelieved dreariness of their lives.
“So you went for Bloss,” he said, looking at the cow which had now passed them and was moving forward with a lurching swing toward a shed in the background.
“Yes, we go for her alternate nights. She wanders all over the tract by day and in the evening we’ve sometimes a hunt before we can get her.”
They were both looking at Bloss, who suddenlystopped, stepped heavily on the garden border, and began to bite a hole in a row of neat, green leaves.
“Bloss!” his companion almost shrieked, “you impudent, desperate cow! Did you ever see such an impertinent thing?”
And she ran toward Bloss, who, feeling the switch suddenly on her flanks gave up the happy dream of an evening feast of young lettuce and directed her course once more toward the shed. June followed her, calling imploringly over her shoulder,
“Please don’t go yet, oh,pleasedon’t! I do want to see you for a moment, but I’ve got to put this miserable animal in her stable, or she’ll spoil the garden.Pleasewait.”
To which he called back:
“All right. Don’t hurry. I’ll stroll down to the gate.”
And he moved slowly down the path between the pinioned rose bushes, looking through the barring of the old gate at the dusty road.
He had not to wait long. He was standing there gazing down the road when he heard her light step and hurried breathing as she ran toward him.
“It was too bad,” she said as she came to a panting stand beside him, her alder switch still in her hand, “but I couldn’t let her eat those lettuces. We’ve had a lot of trouble with them and when they’re good we can sell them as far as Sonora.”
She said this with an air of pride, as one who vaunts an admired accomplishment.
“Do you like gardening?” he asked, and then stopped. From the house came a sudden sound of coughing, a heavy, racking paroxysm. The girl’s eyes slanted sidewise as she stood motionless, listening. She remained thus, in a trance-like quietude of attention till the sound grew fitful and then ceased.
“How did mother strike you?” she asked in a low voice.
“I—she—” he blundered, and then said desperately: “Well, she’s changed, of course, but after a long period of illness—”
He stopped. Unfinished sentences save more occasions than the world wots of.
“Yes, of course,” she said eagerly, seizing on even such feeble encouragement. “And she’s been sick for such a dreadfully long time, ever since Virginia, more than four years now. She’s thin, though, isn’t she?”
She looked anxiously at him.
“Long illnesses are apt to make people thin,” he said, turning away his head.
“Yes, I suppose so, especially—” She too left her sentence unfinished. For a moment she stood looking down, flicking at an adjacent rose-tree with her switch.
“Tell me about the gardening,” he said, seizing on the subject as the one uppermost in his mind. “How do you get your things as far afield as Sonora?”
“I’ll tell you about that later;” she suddenly seemed to shake off her anxieties as a child might. Her clouded face turned on him sparkling with new animation,“I’ll tell you all about that another time. Now—”
He interrupted her:
“But there may not be another time. You know I’ll be leaving soon.”
She looked amazed, quite aghast.
“Leaving?” she exclaimed—“leaving Foleys?”
“Yes, I must be back in San Francisco in a few days. And it takes a day to ride from here to Sacramento.”
“But—” she stopped, looking thoroughly dashed. The Colonel wondered what was in her mind.
“But not to-morrow?” she asked, drawing near to him and speaking urgently, “you’ll be here to-morrow?”
“Yes, I’ll be here to-morrow. My horse won’t be able to take the ride till the day after. He’s gone tender on his forefoot.”
She was silent, looking down on the path and absently trailing the leaf-decked tip of her switch in the dust. He regarded her with tender amusement.
“You haven’t seen the spring yet,” she said abruptly without raising her eyes.
The remark was startling. It was the discovery of this spring which had led to the unpleasantness with the squatter. The Colonel would probably have gone on paying the taxes and letting the squatter live on his premises till the end of things, if the spring had not waked him to the possibilities of ownership. He colored a little. For the first time it seemed to him the young girl had shown bad taste.
“No,” he answered, “I haven’t seen it. I didn’t see that it was necessary. I’ve had the water analyzed. That was enough.”
“But you ought to see it,” she continued, still looking at the end of the switch. “It’s a wonderful spring. Everybody says so. I discovered it.”
Her face, as she began speaking, flushed faintly and then deeper. When she had finished the color was spread over it in a clear transparent blush.
“I doubt whether I’ll be able to get there,” he replied with just a trace of stiffness in his manner. “It’s quite a walk, I understand, and it’s so hot—”
She suddenly raised her eyes and moved toward him, her look one of flushed embarrassment, but her manner urgent and determined.
“I’ll take you there,” she said hurriedly. “I know a way that’s quite shady, a path hardly anybody knows of. I found it, the spring and the path both, and I would so like to show it to you.”
Her voice fell to the key of coaxing, which was belied by her countenance, full of a keen, waiting anxiousness. She seemed to the man to be tremulously hanging on his word of consent.
“I guess I’ll have to go,” he said, looking down at her with eyes from which all disapproval had gone. “I’ll come up here for you—let’s see! The late afternoon’s the best time because it’s cooler. Say five. How’s that?”
“Here?” she said, looking away uneasily. “No, don’t come here. You know—” she drew closer to him, and resting her finger-tips on the lapel of his coat pressed them gently against his chest, halfwhispering—“this is to be a secret expedition. No one must know about it but us two.”
The Colonel backed away, eying her with tragical gravity from under his down-drawn brows.
“Look here, young woman,” he said, “what are you up to? Are you trying to kidnap the Colonel?”
Her dimple came, but no further indication of amusement disturbed the fluttered uneasiness of her countenance.
“No, no,” she said quickly; then tilting her head to one side and looking at him cajolingly, “but how I would like to!”
“I don’t think it’s safe for me to go,” he answered. “I’ve a suspicion you’re some kind of wood nymph or fairy who steals good-looking young men like me and keeps them in the woods for playmates. Can you give me any guaranty that I’ll reappear?”
“I’ll lead you back myself. And you will go? That’s settled. Well, listen:—down the road before you come to the turn there’s a break in the fence. It’s near the large oak that throws a limb over the road. I’ll be there waiting for you at half-past four. Five’s too late. And the path I spoke of goes up right behind the oak and is ever so much shorter than the one everybody takes. That’s this way, back of the cow-shed and the garden.”
She indicated it, and both turned to follow the direction of her pointing finger. As they stood with their backs to the road they heard a heavy, regular footfall padding through the dust. The girl turned first, and her quick, half-frightened ejaculation, “It’s father!” made the Colonel swerve round like aweathercock. It was too late for him to escape. Beauregard Allen was close to the gate and was looking at him with a somber, unmoving gaze.
He would have known his old enemy in a minute. But yet there was a change, subtile and demolishing as that which had made Alice a stranger to him. The debonair arrogance that he had once taken for a proud self-respect was gone. A destruction of the upholding sense of position and responsibility had bowed the upright shoulders and made the haughty hawk-eye heavy and evasive. John Beauregard Allen had failed in life, gone down step by step; not in one cataclysmic rush, but gradually, with a woman and children striving desperately to hold him back.
His drinking had been a habit of recent years, a weakness grown of ill-luck and despondency. It showed in a coarsened heaviness of feature, a reddened weight of eyelid. He wore a pair of loose, dusty trousers, thick, unbrushed boots, the blue-and-white cotton shirt of the country-man, and an unbuttoned sack-coat that sagged from his bent shoulders. A grizzled brown beard straggled over his breast, and the hat pushed back from his forehead showed hair of the same color. Yet there still lingered about him the suggestion of the man of breeding and education, and once again upright with the hope of life restored to him, he would have been a fine looking man.
He knew who the Colonel was before he turned, but he too realized there was no possibility of escape. In that one moment before his eye challenged that of his old adversary, he had recognized the situationand decided on his course. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat and tried to square his shoulders into their old proud poise. As his glance met the Colonel’s he withdrew one of his hands from his pocket and raised his hat.
“How d’ye do,” he said in a deep, easy voice; “how d’ye do, Parrish? I heard you were here.”
Thesavoir faireof his address was remarkable. His eyes, however, conscious and ashamed, showed his discomfort in the meeting. The Colonel returned the salute and the two men stood facing each other, the gate between them.
“Colonel Parrish,” said June in an embarrassed voice, “came to see mother. She had such a nice talk with him. He says he doesn’t think she’s so much changed.”
“I have to thank you,” said the father with a faint reminiscence of his old grand manner, “for your kindness to my little girl last evening. June tells me you introduced Rion Gracey and young Barclay to her. That’s the son of Simeon Barclay, I suppose?”
The Colonel said that it was. He was extremely uncomfortable, and after the manner of his sex, wanted to escape from this unpleasant position with the utmost speed. He opened the gate and stepped into the road. The squatter slowly passed through the aperture into the disputed domain.
“It was very kind of you, Parrish,” he said. “We appreciated it. June would have had a pretty dull time if it hadn’t been for you.”
The Colonel deprecated all thanks. He was now in the road, his hat raised in farewell. He had noticedthat Allen made no allusion to his wife and thanked Heaven that the man who had shown himself so dead to other decencies had enough left in him for that. A backward glance of final adieu showed him the father and daughter side by side by the gateway. The girl was smiling at him. The man stood with his ragged hat ceremoniously lifted over his heavy, hang-dog face.