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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Argonauts of North Liberty, by Bret Harte
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Argonauts of North Liberty
+
+Author: Bret Harte
+
+Release Date: May 25, 2006 [EBook #2703]
+Last Updated: March 5, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ARGONAUTS OF NORTH LIBERTY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Donald Lainson
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ARGONAUTS OF NORTH LIBERTY
+
+
+By Bret Harte
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The bell of the North Liberty Second Presbyterian Church had just ceased
+ringing. North Liberty, Connecticut, never on any day a cheerful town,
+was always bleaker and more cheerless on the seventh, when the Sabbath
+sun, after vainly trying to coax a smile of reciprocal kindliness from
+the drawn curtains and half-closed shutters of the austere dwellings and
+the equally sealed and hard-set churchgoing faces of the people, at last
+settled down into a blank stare of stony astonishment. On this chilly
+March evening of the year 1850, that stare had kindled into an offended
+sunset and an angry night that furiously spat sleet and hail in the
+faces of the worshippers, and made them fight their way to the church,
+step by step, with bent heads and fiercely compressed lips, until they
+seemed to be carrying its forbidding portals at the point of their
+umbrellas.
+
+Within that sacred but graceless edifice, the rigors of the hour and
+occasion reached their climax. The shivering gas-jets lit up the austere
+pallor of the bare walls, and the hollow, shell-like sweep of colorless
+vacuity behind the cold communion table. The chill of despair and
+hopeless renunciation was in the air, untempered by any glow from
+the sealed air-tight stove that seemed only to bring out a lukewarm
+exhalation of wet clothes and cheaply dyed umbrellas. Nor did the
+presence of the worshippers themselves impart any life to the dreary
+apartment. Scattered throughout the white pews, in dull, shapeless,
+neutral blotches, rigidly separated from each other, they seemed only
+to accent the colorless church and the emptiness of all things. A few
+children, who had huddled together for warmth in one of the back
+benches and who had became glutinous and adherent through moisture, were
+laboriously drawn out and painfully picked apart by a watchful deacon.
+
+The dry, monotonous disturbance of the bell had given way to the strain
+of a bass viol, that had been apparently pitched to the key of the east
+wind without, and the crude complaint of a new harmonium that seemed to
+bewail its limited prospect of ever becoming seasoned or mellowed in its
+earthly tabernacle, and then the singing began. Here and there a human
+voice soared and struggled above the narrow text and the monotonous
+cadence with a cry of individual longing, but was borne down by the
+dull, trampling precision of the others' formal chant. This and
+a certain muffled raking of the stove by the sexton brought the
+temperature down still lower. A sermon, in keeping with the previous
+performance, in which the chill east wind of doctrine was not tempered
+to any shorn lamb within that dreary fold, followed. A spark of human
+and vulgar interest was momentarily kindled by the collection and the
+simultaneous movement of reluctant hands towards their owners' pockets;
+but the coins fell on the baize-covered plates with a dull thud, like
+clods on a coffin, and the dreariness returned. Then there was another
+hymn and a prolonged moan from the harmonium, to which mysterious
+suggestion the congregation rose and began slowly to file into the
+aisle. For a moment they mingled; there was the silent grasping of damp
+woollen mittens and cold black gloves, and the whispered interchange
+of each other's names with the prefix of “Brother” or “Sister,” and
+an utter absence of fraternal geniality, and then the meeting slowly
+dispersed.
+
+The few who had waited until the minister had resumed his hat, overcoat,
+and overshoes, and accompanied him to the door, had already passed out;
+the sexton was turning out the flickering gas jets one by one, when the
+cold and austere silence was broken by a sound--the unmistakable echo of
+a kiss of human passion.
+
+As the horror-stricken official turned angrily, the figure of a man
+glided from the shadow of the stairs below the organ loft, and vanished
+through the open door. Before the sexton could follow, the figure of a
+woman slipped out of the same portal and with a hurried glance after the
+first retreating figure, turned in the opposite direction and was lost
+in the darkness. By the time the indignant and scandalized custodian had
+reached the portal, they had both melted in the troubled sea of
+tossing umbrellas already to the right and left of him, and pursuit and
+recognition were hopeless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The male figure, however, after mingling with his fellow-worshippers
+to the corner of the block, stopped a moment under the lamp-post as if
+uncertain as to the turning, but really to cast a long, scrutinizing
+look towards the scattered umbrellas now almost lost in the opposite
+direction. He was still gazing and apparently hesitating whether to
+retrace his steps, when a horse and buggy rapidly driven down the side
+street passed him. In a brief glance he evidently recognized the driver,
+and stepping over the curbstone called in a brief authoritative voice:
+
+“Ned!”
+
+The occupant of the vehicle pulled up suddenly, leaned from the buggy,
+and said in an astonished tone:
+
+“Dick Demorest! Well! I declare! hold on, and I'll drive up to the
+curb.”
+
+“No; stay where you are.”
+
+The speaker approached the buggy, jumped in beside the occupant,
+refastened the apron, and coolly taking the reins from his companion's
+hand, started the horse forward. The action was that of an habitually
+imperious man; and the only recognition he made of the other's ownership
+was the question:
+
+“Where were you going?”
+
+“Home--to see Joan,” replied the other. “Just drove over from Warensboro
+Station. But what on earth are YOU doing here?”
+
+Without answering the question, Demorest turned to his companion with
+the same good-natured, half humorous authority. “Let your wife wait;
+take a drive with me. I want to talk to you. She'll be just as glad to
+see you an hour later, and it's her fault if I can't come home with you
+now.”
+
+“I know it,” returned his companion, in a tone of half-annoyed apology.
+“She still sticks to her old compact when we first married, that she
+shouldn't be obliged to receive my old worldly friends. And, see here,
+Dick, I thought I'd talked her out of it as regards YOU at least, but
+Parson Thomas has been raking up all the old stories about you--you
+know that affair of the Fall River widow, and that breaking off of Garry
+Spofferth's match--and about your horse-racing--until--you know, she's
+more set than ever against knowing you.”
+
+“That's not a bad sort of horse you've got there,” interrupted Demorest,
+who usually conducted conversation without reference to alien topics
+suggested by others. “Where did you get him? He's good yet for a spin
+down the turnpike and over the bridge. We'll do it, and I'll bring you
+home safely to Mrs. Blandford inside the hour.”
+
+Blandford knew little of horseflesh, but like all men he was not
+superior to this implied compliment to his knowledge. He resigned
+himself to his companion as he had been in the habit of doing, and
+Demorest hurried the horse at a rapid gait down the street until they
+left the lamps behind, and were fully on the dark turnpike. The sleet
+rattled against the hood and leathern apron of the buggy, gusts of
+fierce wind filled the vehicle and seemed to hold it back, but Demorest
+did not appear to mind it. Blandford thrust his hands deeply into
+his pockets for warmth, and contracted his shoulders as if in dogged
+patience. Yet, in spite of the fact that he was tired, cold, and anxious
+to see his wife, he was conscious of a secret satisfaction in submitting
+to the caprices of this old friend of his boyhood. After all, Dick
+Demorest knew what he was about, and had never led him astray by his
+autocratic will. It was safe to let Dick have his way. It was true it
+was generally Dick's own way--but he made others think it was theirs
+too--or would have been theirs had they had the will and the knowledge
+to project it. He looked up comfortably at the handsome, resolute
+profile of the man who had taken selfish possession of him. Many women
+had done the same.
+
+“Suppose if you were to tell your wife I was going to reform,” said
+Demorest, “it might be different, eh? She'd want to take me into the
+church--'another sinner saved,' and all that, eh?”
+
+“No,” said Blandford, earnestly. “Joan isn't as rigid as all that, Dick.
+What she's got against you is the common report of your free way of
+living, and that--come now, you know yourself, Dick, that isn't exactly
+the thing a woman brought up in her style can stand. Why, she thinks
+I'm unregenerate, and--well, a man can't carry on business always like a
+class meeting. But are you thinking of reforming?” he continued, trying
+to get a glimpse of his companion's eyes.
+
+“Perhaps. It depends. Now--there's a woman I know--”
+
+“What, another? and you call this going to reform?” interrupted
+Blandford, yet not without a certain curiosity in his manner.
+
+“Yes; that's just why I think of reforming. For this one isn't exactly
+like any other--at least as far as I know.”
+
+“That means you don't know anything about her.”
+
+“Wait, and I'll tell you.” He drew the reins tightly to accelerate the
+horse's speed, and, half turning to his companion, without, however,
+moving his eyes from the darkness before him, spoke quickly between the
+blasts: “I've seen her only half a dozen times. Met her first in 6.40
+train out from Boston last fall. She sat next to me. Covered up with
+wraps and veils; never looked twice at her. She spoke first--kind of
+half bold, half frightened way. Then got more comfortable and unwound
+herself, you know, and I saw she was young and not bad-looking.
+Thought she was some school-girl out for a lark--but rather new at it.
+Inexperienced, you know, but quite able to take care of herself, by
+George! and although she looked and acted as if she'd never spoken to
+a stranger all her life, didn't mind the kind of stuff I talked to her.
+Rather encouraged it; and laughed--such a pretty little odd laugh, as
+if laughing wasn't in her usual line, either, and she didn't know how to
+manage it. Well, it ended in her slipping out at one end of the car when
+we arrived, while I was looking out for a cab for her at the other.” He
+stopped to recover from a stronger gust of wind. “I--I thought it a good
+joke on me, and let the thing drop out of my mind, although, mind you,
+she'd promised to meet me a month afterwards at the same time and place.
+Well, when the day came I happened to be in Boston, and went to the
+station. Don't know why I went, for I didn't for a moment think she'd
+keep her appointment. First, I couldn't find her in the train, but after
+we'd started she came along out of some seat in the corner, prettier
+than ever, holding out her hand.” He drew a long inspiration. “You can
+bet your life, Ned, I didn't let go that little hand the rest of the
+journey.”
+
+His passion, or what passed for it, seemed to impart its warmth to the
+vehicle, and even stirred the chilled pulses of the man beside him.
+
+“Well, who and what was she?”
+
+“Didn't find out; don't know now. For the first thing she made me
+promise was not to follow her, nor to try to know her name. In return
+she said she would meet me again on another train near Hartford. She
+did--and again and again--but always on the train for about an hour,
+going or coming. Then she missed an appointment. I was regularly cut up,
+I tell you, and swore as she hadn't kept her word, I wouldn't keep mine,
+and began to hunt for her. In the midst of it I saw her accidentally; no
+matter where; I followed her to--well, that's no matter to you, either.
+Enough that I saw her again--and, well, Ned, such is the influence of
+that girl over me that, by George! she made me make the same promise
+again!”
+
+Blandford, a little disappointed at his friend's dogmatic suppression of
+certain material facts, shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“If that's all your story,” he said, “I must say I see no prospect of
+your reforming. It's the old thing over again, only this time you are
+evidently the victim. She's some designing creature who will have you if
+she hasn't already got you completely in her power.”
+
+“You don't know what you're talking about, Ned, and you'd better quit,”
+ returned Demorest, with cheerful authoritativeness. “I tell you that
+that's the sort of girl I'm going to marry, if I can, and settle down
+upon. You can make a memorandum of that, old man, if you like.”
+
+“Then I don't really see why you want to talk to ME about it. And if you
+are thinking that such a story would go down for a moment with Joan as
+an evidence of your reformation, you're completely out, Dick. Was that
+your idea?”
+
+“Yes--and I can tell you, you're wrong again, Ned. You don't know
+anything about women. You do just as I say--do you understand?--and
+don't interfere with your own wrong-headed opinions of what other people
+will think, and I'll take the risks of Mrs. Blandford giving me good
+advice. Your wife has got a heap more sense on these subjects than you
+have, you bet. You just tell her that I want to marry the girl and want
+her to help me--that I mean business, this time--and you'll see how
+quick she'll come down. That's all I want of you. Will you or won't
+you?”
+
+With an outward expression of sceptical consideration and an inward
+suspicion of the peculiar force of this man's dogmatic insight,
+Blandford assented, with, I fear, the mental reservation of telling
+the story to his wife in his own way. He was surprised when his friend
+suddenly drew the horse up sharply, and after a moment's pause began
+to back him, cramp the wheels of the buggy and then skilfully, in the
+almost profound darkness, turn the vehicle and horse completely round to
+the opposite direction.
+
+“Then you are not going over the bridge?” said Blandford.
+
+Demorest made an imperative gesture of silence. The tumultuous rush
+and roar of swollen and rapid water came from the darkness behind them.
+“There's been another break-out somewhere, and I reckon the bridge has
+got all it can do to-night to keep itself out of water without taking us
+over. At least, as I promised to set you down at your wife's door inside
+of the hour, I don't propose to try.” As the horse now travelled more
+easily with the wind behind him, Demorest, dismissing abruptly all other
+subjects, laid his hand with brusque familiarity on his companion's
+knee, and as if the hour for social and confidential greeting had only
+just then arrived, said: “Well, Neddy, old boy, how are you getting on?”
+
+“So, so,” said Blandford, dubiously. “You see,” he began,
+argumentatively, “in my business there's a good deal of competition, and
+I was only saying this morning--”
+
+But either Demorest was already familiar with his friend's arguments,
+or had as usual exhausted his topic, for without paying the slightest
+attention to him, he again demanded abruptly, “Why don't you go to
+California? Here everything's played out. That's the country for a young
+man like you--just starting into life, and without incumbrances. If I
+was free and fixed in my family affairs like you I'd go to-morrow.”
+
+There was such an occult positivism in Demorest's manner that for an
+instant Blandford, who had been married two years, and was transacting
+a steady and fairly profitable manufacturing business in the adjacent
+town, actually believed he was more fitted for adventurous speculation
+than the grimly erratic man of energetic impulses and pleasures beside
+him. He managed to stammer hesitatingly:
+
+“But there's Joan--she--”
+
+“Nonsense! Let her stay with her mother; you sell out your interest
+in the business, put the money into an assorted cargo, and clap it and
+yourself into the first ship out of Boston--and there you are. You've
+been married going on two years now, and a little separation until
+you've built up a business out there, won't do either of you any harm.”
+
+Blandford, who was very much in love with his wife, was not, however,
+above putting the onus of embarrassing affection upon HER. “You don't
+know, Joan, Dick,” he replied. “She'd never consent to a separation,
+even for a short time.”
+
+“Try her. She's a sensible woman--a deuced sight more than you are. You
+don't understand women, Ned. That's what's the matter with you.”
+
+It required all of Blandford's fond memories of his wife's conservative
+habits, Puritan practicality, religious domesticity, and strong family
+attachments, to withstand Demorest's dogmatic convictions. He smiled,
+however, with a certain complacency, as he also recalled the previous
+autumn when the first news of the California gold discovery had
+penetrated North Liberty, and he had expressed to her his belief that it
+would offer an outlet to Demorest's adventurous energy. She had received
+it with ill-disguised satisfaction, and the remark that if this exodus
+of Mammon cleared the community of the godless and unregenerate it would
+only be another proof of God's mysterious providence.
+
+With the tumultuous wind at their backs it was not long before the
+buggy rattled once more over the cobble-stones of the town. Under the
+direction of his friend, Demorest, who still retained possession of the
+reins, drove briskly down a side street of more pretentious dwellings,
+where Blandford lived. One or two wayfarers looked up.
+
+“Not so fast, Dick.”
+
+“Why? I want to bring you up to your door in style.”
+
+“Yes--but--it's Sunday. That's my house, the corner one.”
+
+They had stopped before a square, two-storied brick house, with an
+equally square wooden porch supported by two plain, rigid wooden
+columns, and a hollow sweep of dull concavity above the door, evidently
+of the same architectural order as the church. There was no corner or
+projection to break the force of the wind that swept its smooth glacial
+surface; there was no indication of light or warmth behind its six
+closed windows.
+
+“There seems to be nobody at home,” said Demorest, briefly. “Come along
+with me to the hotel.”
+
+“Joan sits in the back parlor, Sundays,” explained the husband.
+
+“Shall I drive round to the barn and leave the horse and buggy there
+while you go in?” continued Demorest, good-humoredly, pointing to the
+stable gate at the side.
+
+“No, thank you,” returned Blandford, “it's locked, and I'll have to open
+it from the other side after I go in. The horse will stand until then.
+I think I'll have to say good-night, now,” he added, with a sudden
+half-ashamed consciousness of the forbidding aspect of the house, and
+his own inhospitality. “I'm sorry I can't ask you in--but you understand
+why.”
+
+“All right,” returned Demorest, stoutly, turning up his coat-collar, and
+unfurling his umbrella. “The hotel is only four blocks away--you'll find
+me there to-morrow morning if you call. But mind you tell your wife just
+what I told you--and no meandering of your own--you hear! She'll strike
+out some idea with her woman's wits, you bet. Good-night, old man!” He
+reached out his hand, pressed Blandford's strongly and potentially, and
+strode down the street.
+
+Blandford hitched his steaming horse to a sleet-covered horse block
+with a quick sigh of impatient sympathy over the animal and himself, and
+after fumbling in his pocket for a latchkey, opened the front door.
+A vista of well-ordered obscurity with shadowy trestle-like objects
+against the walls, and an odor of chill decorum, as if of a damp but
+respectable funeral, greeted him on entering. A faint light, like a cold
+dawn, broke through the glass pane of a door leading to the kitchen.
+Blandford paused in the mid-darkness and hesitated. Should he first go
+to his wife in the back parlor, or pass silently through the kitchen,
+open the back gate, and mercifully bestow his sweating beast in the
+stable? With the reflection that an immediate conjugal greeting, while
+his horse was still exposed to the fury of the blast in the street,
+would necessarily be curtailed and limited, he compromised by quickly
+passing through the kitchen into the stable yard, opening the gate,
+and driving horse and vehicle under the shed to await later and more
+thorough ministration. As he entered the back door, a faint hope that
+his wife might have heard him and would be waiting for him in the hall
+for an instant thrilled him; but he remembered it was Sunday, and that
+she was probably engaged in some devotional reading or exercise.
+He hesitatingly opened the back-parlor door with a consciousness of
+committing some unreasonable trespass, and entered.
+
+She was there, sitting quietly before a large, round, shining
+centre-table, whose sterile emptiness was relieved only by a shaded lamp
+and a large black and gilt open volume. A single picture on the
+opposite wall--the portrait of an elderly gentleman stiffened over a
+corresponding volume, which he held in invincible mortmain in his rigid
+hand, and apparently defied posterity to take from him--seemed to offer
+a not uncongenial companionship. Yet the greenish light of the shade
+fell upon a young and pretty face, despite the color it extracted from
+it, and the hand that supported her low white forehead over which
+her full hair was simply parted, like a brown curtain, was slim and
+gentle-womanly. In spite of her plain lustreless silk dress, in spite of
+the formal frame of sombre heavy horsehair and mahogany furniture that
+seemed to set her off, she diffused an atmosphere of cleanly grace and
+prim refinement through the apartment. The priestess of this ascetic
+temple, the femininity of her closely covered arms, her pink ears, and
+a little serviceable morocco house-shoe that was visible lower down,
+resting on the carved lion's paw that upheld the centre-table, appeared
+to be only the more accented. And the precisely rounded but softly
+heaving bosom, that was pressed upon the edges of the open book of
+sermons before her, seemed to assert itself triumphantly over the rigors
+of the volume.
+
+At least so her husband and lover thought, as he moved tenderly
+towards her. She met his first kiss on her forehead; the second, a
+supererogatory one, based on some supposed inefficiency in the first,
+fell upon a shining band of her hair, beside her neck. She reached up
+her slim hands, caught his wrists firmly, and, slightly putting him
+aside, said:
+
+“There, Edward?”
+
+“I drove out from Warensboro, so as to get here to-night, as I have to
+return to the city on Tuesday. I thought it would give me a little
+more time with you, Joan,” he said, looking around him, and, at last,
+hesitatingly drawing an apparently reluctant chair from its formal
+position at the window. The remembrance that he had ever dared to occupy
+the same chair with her, now seemed hardly possible of credence.
+
+“If it was a question of your travelling on the Lord's Day, Edward, I
+would rather you should have waited until to-morrow,” she said, with
+slow precision.
+
+“But--I--I thought I'd get here in time for the meeting,” he said,
+weakly.
+
+“And instead, you have driven through the town, I suppose, where
+everybody will see you and talk about it. But,” she added, raising her
+dark eyes suddenly to his, “where else have you been? The train gets
+into Warensboro at six, and it's only half an hour's drive from there.
+What have you been doing, Edward?”
+
+It was scarcely a felicitous moment for the introduction of Demorest's
+name, and he would have avoided it. But he reflected that he had been
+seen, and he was naturally truthful. “I met Dick Demorest near the
+church, and as he had something to tell me, we drove down the turnpike a
+little way--so as to be out of the town, you know, Joan--and--and--”
+
+He stopped. Her face had taken upon itself that appalling and
+exasperating calmness of very good people who never get angry, but drive
+others to frenzy by the simple occlusion of an adamantine veil between
+their own feelings and their opponents'. “I'll tell you all about it
+after I've put up the horse,” he said hurriedly, glad to escape until
+the veil was lifted again. “I suppose the hired man is out.”
+
+“I should hope he was in church, Edward, but I trust YOU won't delay
+taking care of that poor dumb brute who has been obliged to minister to
+your and Mr. Demorest's Sabbath pleasures.”
+
+Blandford did not wait for a further suggestion. When the door had
+closed behind him, Mrs. Blandford went to the mantel-shelf, where a
+grimly allegorical clock cut down the hours and minutes of men with a
+scythe, and consulted it with a slight knitting of her pretty eyebrows.
+Then she fell into a vague abstraction, standing before the open book
+on the centre-table. Then she closed it with a snap, and methodically
+putting it exactly in the middle of the top of a black cabinet in the
+corner, lifted the shaded lamp in her hand and passed slowly with it up
+the stairs to her bedroom, where her light steps were heard moving to
+and fro. In a few moments she reappeared, stopping for a moment in the
+hall with the lighted lamp as if to watch and listen for her husband's
+return. Seen in that favorable light, her cheeks had caught a delicate
+color, and her dark eyes shone softly. Putting the lamp down in exactly
+the same place as before, she returned to the cabinet for the book,
+brought it again to the table, opened it at the page where she had
+placed her perforated cardboard book-marker, sat down beside it, and
+with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the page began abstractedly to
+tear a small piece of paper into tiny fragments. When she had reduced it
+to the smallest shreds, she scraped the pieces out of her silk lap and
+again collected them in the pink hollow of her little hand, kneeling
+down on the scrupulously well-swept carpet to peck up with a bird-like
+action of her thumb and forefinger an escaped atom here and there. These
+and the contents of her hand she poured into the chilly cavity of a
+sepulchral-looking alabaster vase that stood on the etagere. Returning
+to her old seat, and making a nest for her clasped fingers in the lap
+of her dress, she remained in that attitude, her shoulders a little
+narrowed and bent forward, until her husband returned.
+
+“I've lit the fire in the bedroom for you to change your clothes by,”
+ she said, as he entered; then evading the caress which this wifely
+attention provoked, by bending still more primly over her book, she
+added, “Go at once. You're making everything quite damp here.”
+
+He returned in a few moments in his slippers and jacket, but evidently
+found the same difficulty in securing a conjugal and confidential
+contiguity to his wife. There was no apparent social centre or nucleus
+of comfort in the apartment; its fireplace, sealed by an iron ornament
+like a monumental tablet over dead ashes, had its functions superseded
+by an air-tight drum in the corner, warmed at second-hand from the
+dining-room below, and offered no attractive seclusion; the sofa against
+the wall was immovable and formally repellent. He was obliged to draw
+a chair beside the table, whose every curve seemed to facilitate his
+wife's easy withdrawal from side-by-side familiarity.
+
+“Demorest has been urging me very strongly to go to California, but, of
+course, I spoke of you,” he said, stealing his hand into his wife's lap,
+and possessing himself of her fingers.
+
+Mrs. Blandford slowly lifted her fingers enclosed in his clasping hand
+and placed them in shameless publicity on the volume before her. This
+implied desecration was too much for Blandford; he withdrew his hand.
+
+“Does that man propose to go with you?” asked Mrs. Blandford, coldly.
+
+“No; he's preoccupied with other matters that he wanted me to talk to
+you about,” said her husband, hesitatingly. “He is--”
+
+“Because”--continued Mrs. Blandford in the same measured tone, “if he
+does not add his own evil company to his advice, it is the best he has
+ever given yet. I think he might have taken another day than the Lord's
+to talk about it, but we must not despise the means nor the hour whence
+the truth comes. Father wanted me to take some reasonable moment to
+prepare you to consider it seriously, and I thought of talking to you
+about it to-morrow. He thinks it would be a very judicious plan. Even
+Deacon Truesdail--”
+
+“Having sold his invoice of damaged sugar kettles for mining purposes,
+is converted,” said Blandford, goaded into momentary testiness by his
+wife's unexpected acquiescence and a sudden recollection of Demorest's
+prophecy. “You have changed your opinion, Joan, since last fall, when
+you couldn't bear to think of my leaving you,” he added reproachfully.
+
+“I couldn't bear to think of your joining the mob of lawless and sinful
+men who use that as an excuse for leaving their wives and families. As
+for my own feelings, Edward, I have never allowed them to stand between
+me and what I believed best for our home and your Christian welfare.
+Though I have no cause to admire the influence that I find this man,
+Demorest, still holds over you, I am willing to acquiesce, as you see,
+in what he advises for your good. You can hardly reproach ME, Edward,
+for worldly or selfish motives.”
+
+Blandford felt keenly the bitter truth of his wife's speech. For the
+moment he would gladly have exchanged it for a more illogical and
+selfish affection, but he reflected that he had married this religious
+girl for the security of an affection which he felt was not subject to
+the temptations of the world--or even its own weakness--as was too often
+the case with the giddy maidens whom he had known through Demorest's
+companionship. It was, therefore, more with a sense of recalling this
+distinctive quality of his wife than any loyalty to Demorest that he
+suddenly resolved to confide to her the latter's fatuous folly.
+
+“I know it, dear,” he said, apologetically, “and we'll talk it over
+to-morrow, and it may be possible to arrange it so that you shall go
+with me. But, speaking of Demorest, I think you don't quite do HIM
+justice. He really respects YOUR feelings and your knowledge of right
+and wrong more than you imagine. I actually believe he came here
+to-night merely to get me to interest you in an extraordinary love
+affair of his. I mean, Joan,” he added hastily, seeing the same look of
+dull repression come over her face, “I mean, Joan--that is, you know,
+from all I can judge--it is something really serious this time. He
+intends to reform. And this is because he has become violently smitten
+with a young woman whom he has only seen half a dozen times, at long
+intervals, whom he first met in a railway train, and whose name and
+residence he don't even know.”
+
+There was an ominous silence--so hushed that the ticking of the
+allegorical clock came like a grim monitor. “Then,” said Mrs. Blandford,
+in a hard, dry voice that her alarmed husband scarcely recognized,
+“he proposed to insult your wife by taking her into his shameful
+confidence.”
+
+“Good heavens! Joan, no--you don't understand. At the worst, this is
+some virtuous but silly school-girl, who, though she may be intending
+only an innocent flirtation with him, has made this man actually and
+deeply in love with her. Yes; it is a fact, Joan. I know Dick Demorest,
+and if ever there was a man honestly in love, it is he.”
+
+“Then you mean to say that this man--an utter stranger to me--a man
+whom I've never laid my eyes on--whom I wouldn't know if I met in the
+street--expects me to advise him--to--to--” She stopped. Blandford could
+scarcely believe his senses. There were tears in her eyes--this woman
+who never cried; her voice trembled--she who had always controlled her
+emotions.
+
+He took advantage of this odd but opportune melting. He placed his
+arm around her shoulders. She tried to escape it, but with a coy, shy
+movement, half hysterical, half girlish, unlike her usual stony, moral
+precision. “Yes, Joan,” he repeated, laughingly, “but whose fault is it?
+Not HIS, remember! And I firmly believe he thinks you can do him good.”
+
+“But he has never seen me,” she continued, with a nervous little laugh,
+“and probably considers me some old Gorgon--like--like--Sister Jemima
+Skerret.”
+
+Blandford smiled with the complacency of far-reaching masculine
+intuition. Ah! that shrewd fellow, Demorest, was right. Joan, dear Joan,
+was only a woman after all.
+
+“Then he'll be the more agreeably astonished,” he returned, gayly, “and
+I think YOU will, too, Joan. For Dick isn't a bad-looking fellow; most
+women like him. It's true,” he continued, much amused at the novelty
+of the perfectly natural toss and grimace with which Mrs. Blandford
+received this statement.
+
+“I think he's been pointed out to me somewhere,” she said, thoughtfully;
+“he's a tall, dark, dissipated-looking man.”
+
+“Nothing of the kind,” laughed her husband. “He's middle-sized and as
+blond as your cousin Joe, only he's got a long yellow moustache, and
+has a quick, abrupt way of talking. He isn't at all fancy-looking; you'd
+take him for an energetic business man or a doctor, if you didn't know
+him. So you see, Joan, this correct little wife of mine has been a
+little, just a little, prejudiced.”
+
+He drew her again gently backwards and nearer his seat, but she caught
+his wrists in her slim hands, and rising from the chair at the same
+moment, dexterously slipped from his embrace with her back towards him.
+“I do not know why I should be unprejudiced by anything you've told me,”
+ she said, sharply closing the book of sermons, and, with her back still
+to her husband, reinstating it formally in its place on the cabinet.
+“It's probably one of his many scandalous pursuits of defenceless and
+believing women, and he, no doubt, goes off to Boston, laughing at you
+for thinking him in earnest; and as ready to tell his story to anybody
+else and boast of his double deceit.” Her voice had a touch of human
+asperity in it now, which he had never before noticed, but recognizing,
+as he thought, the human cause, it was far from exciting his
+displeasure.
+
+“Wrong again, Joan; he's waiting here at the Independence House for me
+to see him to-morrow,” he returned, cheerfully. “And I believe him so
+much in earnest that I would be ready to swear that not another person
+will ever know the story but you and I and he. No, it is a real thing
+with him; he's dead in love, and it's your duty as a Christian to help
+him.”
+
+There was a moment of silence. Mrs. Blandford remained by the cabinet,
+methodically arranging some small articles displaced by the return of
+the book. “Well,” she said, suddenly, “you don't tell me what mother had
+to say. Of course, as you came home earlier than you expected, you had
+time to stop THERE--only four doors from this house.”
+
+“Well, no, Joan,” replied Blandford, in awkward discomfiture. “You see I
+met Dick first, and then--then I hurried here to you--and--and--I clean
+forgot it. I'm very sorry,” he added, dejectedly.
+
+“And I more deeply so,” she returned, with her previous bloodless moral
+precision, “for she probably knows by this time, Edward, why you have
+omitted your usual Sabbath visit, and with WHOM you were.”
+
+“But I can pull on my boots again and run in there for a moment,” he
+suggested, dubiously, “if you think it necessary. It won't take me a
+moment.”
+
+“No,” she said, positively; “it is so late now that your visit would
+only show it to be a second thought. I will go myself--it will be a call
+for us both.”
+
+“But shall I go with you to the door? It is dark and sleeting,”
+ suggested Blandford, eagerly.
+
+“No,” she replied, peremptorily. “Stay where you are, and when Ezekiel
+and Bridget come in send them to bed, for I have made everything fast in
+the kitchen. Don't wait up for me.”
+
+She left the room, and in a few moments returned, wrapped from head to
+foot in an enormous plaid shawl. A white woollen scarf thrown over her
+bare brown head, and twice rolled around her neck, almost concealed her
+face from view. When she had parted from her husband, and reached the
+darkened hall below, she drew from beneath the folds of her shawl a
+thick blue veil, with which she completely enveloped her features. As
+she opened the front door and peered out into the night, her own husband
+would have scarcely recognized her.
+
+With her head lowered against the keen wind she walked rapidly down
+the street and stopped for an instant at the door of the fourth house.
+Glancing quickly back at the house she had left and then at the closed
+windows of the one she had halted before, she gathered her skirts with
+one hand and sped away from both, never stopping until she reached the
+door of the Independence Hotel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Mrs. Blandford entered the side door boldly. Luckily for her, the
+austerities of the Sabbath were manifest even here; the bar-room was
+closed, and the usual loungers in the passages were absent. Without
+risking the recognition of her voice in an inquiry to the clerk, she
+slipped past the office, still muffled in her veil, and quickly mounted
+the narrow staircase. For an instant she hesitated before the public
+parlor, and glanced dubiously along the half-lit corridor. Chance
+befriended her; the door of a bedroom opened at that moment, and Richard
+Demorest, with his overcoat and hat on, stepped out in the hall.
+
+With a quick and nervous gesture of her hand she beckoned him to
+approach. He came towards her leisurely, with an amused curiosity that
+suddenly changed to utter astonishment as she hurriedly lifted her veil,
+dropped it, turned, and glided down the staircase into the street again.
+He followed rapidly, but did not overtake her until she had reached the
+corner, when she slackened her pace an instant for him to join her.
+
+“Lulu,” he said eagerly; “is it you?”
+
+“Not a word here,” she said, breathlessly. “Follow me at a distance.”
+
+She started forward again in the direction of her own house. He followed
+her at a sufficient interval to keep her faintly distinguishable figure
+in sight until she had crossed three streets, and near the end of the
+next block glided up the steps of a house not far from the one where
+he remembered to have left Blandford. As he joined her, she had just
+succeeded in opening the door with a pass-key, and was awaiting him.
+With a gesture of silence she took his hand in her cold fingers, and
+leading him softly through the dark hall and passage, quickly entered
+the kitchen. Here she lit a candle, turned, and faced him. He could see
+that the outside shutters were bolted, and the kitchen evidently closed
+for the night.
+
+As she removed the veil from her face he made a movement as if to regain
+her hand again, but she drew it away.
+
+“You have forced this upon me,” she said hurriedly, “and it may be ruin
+to us both. Why have you betrayed me?”
+
+“Betrayed you, Lulu--Good God! what do you mean?”
+
+She looked him full in the eye, and then said slowly, “Do you mean to
+say that you have told no one of our meetings?”
+
+“Only one--my old friend Blandford, who lives--Ah, yes! I see it now.
+You are neighbors. He has betrayed me. This house is--”
+
+“My father's!” she replied boldly.
+
+The momentary uneasiness passed from Demorest's resolute face. His old
+self-sufficiency returned. “Good,” he said, with a frank laugh, “that
+will do for me. Open the door there, Lulu, and take me to him. I'm not
+ashamed of anything I've done, my girl, nor need you be. I'll tell him
+my real name is Dick Demorest, as I ought to have told you before, and
+that I want to marry you, fairly and squarely, and let him make the
+conditions. I'm not a vagabond nor a thief, Lulu, if I have met you on
+the sly. Come, dear, let us end this now. Come--”
+
+But she had thrown herself before him and placed her hand upon his lips.
+“Hush! are you mad? Listen to me, I tell you--please--oh, do--no you
+must not!” He had covered her hand with kisses and was drawing her face
+towards his own. “No--not again, it was wrong then, it is monstrous now.
+I implore you, listen, if you love me, stop.”
+
+He released her. She sank into a chair by the kitchen-table, and buried
+her flushed face in her hands.
+
+He stood for a moment motionless before her. “Lulu, if that is your
+name,” he said slowly, but gently, “tell me all now. Be frank with me,
+and trust me. If there is anything stands in the way, let me know what
+it is and I can overcome it. If it is my telling Ned Blandford, don't
+let that worry you, he's as loyal a fellow as ever breathed, and I'm a
+dog to ever think he willingly betrayed us. His wife, well, she's one of
+those pious saints--but no, she would not be such a cursed hypocrite and
+bigot as this.”
+
+“Hush, I tell you! WILL you hush,” she said, in a frantic whisper,
+springing to her feet and grasping him convulsively by the lapels of
+his overcoat. “Not a word more, or I'll kill myself. Listen! Do you know
+what I brought you here for? why I left my--this house and dragged you
+out of your hotel? Well, it was to tell you that you must leave me,
+leave HERE--go out of this house and out of this town at once, to-night!
+And never look on it or me again! There! you have said we must end this
+now. It is ended, as only it could and ever would end. And if you open
+that door except to go, or if you attempt to--to touch me again, I'll do
+something desperate. There!”
+
+She threw him off again and stepped back, strangely beautiful in the
+loosened shackles of her long repressed human emotion. It was as if the
+passion-rent robes of the priestess had laid bare the flesh of the woman
+dazzling and victorious. Demorest was fascinated and frightened.
+
+“Then you do not love me?” he said with a constrained smile, “and I am a
+fool?”
+
+“Love you!” she repeated. “Love you,” she continued, bowing her brown
+head over her hanging arms and clasped hands. “What then has brought me
+to this? Oh,” she said suddenly, again seizing him by his two arms, and
+holding him from her with a half-prudish, half-passionate gesture, “why
+could you not have left things as they were; why could we not have met
+in the same old way we used to meet, when I was so foolish and so happy?
+Why could you spoil that one dream I have clung to? Why didn't you leave
+me those few days of my wretched life when I was weak, silly, vain, but
+not the unhappy woman I am now. You were satisfied to sit beside me and
+talk to me then. You respected my secret, my reserve. My God! I used
+to think you loved me as I loved you--for THAT! Why did you break your
+promise and follow me here? I believed you the first day we met, when
+you said there was no wrong in my listening to you; that it should go no
+further; that you would never seek to renew it without my consent. You
+tell me I don't love you, and I tell you now that we must part, that
+frightened as I was, foolish as I was, that day was the first day I had
+ever lived and felt as other women live and feel. If I ran away from you
+then it was because I was running away from my old self too. Don't you
+understand me? Could you not have trusted me as I trusted you?”
+
+“I broke my promise only when you broke yours. When you would not meet
+me I followed you here, because I loved you.”
+
+“And that is why you must leave me now,” she said, starting from his
+outstretched arms again. “Do not ask me why, but go, I implore you. You
+must leave this town to-night, to-morrow will be too late.”
+
+He cast a hurried glance around him, as if seeking to gather some reason
+for this mysterious haste, or a clue for future identification. He saw
+only the Sabbath-sealed cupboards, the cold white china on the dresser,
+and the flicker of the candle on the partly-opened glass transom above
+the door. “As you wish,” he said, with quiet sadness. “I will go now,
+and leave the town to-night; but”--his voice struck its old imperative
+note--“this shall not end here, Lulu. There will be a next time, and I
+am bound to win you yet, in spite of all and everything.”
+
+She looked at him with a half-frightened, half-hysterical light in her
+eyes. “God knows!”
+
+“And you will be frank with me then, and tell me all?”
+
+“Yes, yes, another time; but go now.” She had extinguished the candle,
+turned the handle of the door noiselessly, and was holding it open. A
+faint light stole through the dark passage. She drew back hastily.
+“You have left the front door open,” she said in a frightened voice. “I
+thought you had shut it behind me,” he returned quickly. “Good night.”
+ He drew her towards him. She resisted slightly. They were for an instant
+clasped in a passionate embrace; then there was a sudden collapse of the
+light and a dull jar. The front door had swung to.
+
+With a desperate bound she darted into the passage and through the hall,
+dragging him by the hand, and threw the front door open. Without, the
+street was silent and empty.
+
+“Go,” she whispered frantically.
+
+Demorest passed quickly down the steps and disappeared. At the same
+moment a voice came from the banisters of the landing above. “Who's
+there?”
+
+“It's I, mother.”
+
+“I thought so. And it's like Edward to bring you and sneak off in that
+fashion.”
+
+Mrs. Blandford gave a quick sigh of relief. Demorest's flight had been
+mistaken for her husband's habitual evasion. Knowing that her mother
+would not refer to the subject again, she did not reply, but slowly
+mounted the dark staircase with an assumption of more than usual
+hesitating precaution, in order to recover her equanimity.
+
+
+The clocks were striking eleven when she left her mother's house and
+re-entered her own. She was surprised to find a light burning in the
+kitchen, and Ezekiel, their hired man, awaiting her in a dominant and
+nasal key of religious and practical disapprobation. “Pity you wern't
+tu hum afore, ma'am, considerin' the doins that's goin' on in perfessed
+Christians' houses arter meetin' on the Sabbath Day.”
+
+“What's the difficulty now, Ezekiel?” said Mrs. Blandford, who had
+regained her rigorous precision once more under the decorous security of
+her own roof.
+
+“Wa'al, here comes an entire stranger axin for Squire Blandford. And
+when I tells he warn't tu hum--”
+
+“Not at home?” interrupted Mrs. Blandford, with a slight start. “I left
+him here.”
+
+“Mebbee so, but folks nowadays don't 'pear to keer much whether they
+break the Sabbath or not, trapsen' raound town in and arter meetin'
+hours, ez if 'twor gin'ral tranin' day--and hez gone out agin.”
+
+“Go on,” said Mrs. Blandford, curtly.
+
+“Wa'al, the stranger sez, sez he, 'Show me the way to the stables,' sez
+he, and without taken' no for an answer, ups and meanders through the
+hall, outer the kitchen inter the yard, ez if he was justice of the
+peace; and when he gets there he sez, 'Fetch out his hoss and harness
+up, and be blamed quick about it, and tell Ned Blandford that Dick
+Demorest hez got to leave town to-night, and ez ther ain't a blamed
+puritanical shadbelly in this hull town ez would let a hoss go on hire
+Sunday night, he guesses he'll hev to borry his.' And afore I could
+say Jack Robinson, he tackles the hoss up and drives outer the yard,
+flinging this two-dollar-and-a-half-piece behind him ez if I wur a
+Virginia slave and he was John C. Calhoun hisself. I'd a chucked it
+after him if it hadn't been the Lord's Day, and it mout hev provoked
+disturbance.”
+
+“Mr. Demorest is worldly, but one of Edward's old friends,” said Mrs.
+Blandford, with a slight kindling of her eyes, “and he would not have
+refused to aid him in what might be an errand of grace or necessity. You
+can keep the money, Ezekiel, as a gift, not as a wage. And go to bed. I
+will sit up for Mr. Blandford.”
+
+She passed out and up the staircase into her bedroom, pausing on her way
+to glance into the empty back parlor and take the lamp from the table.
+Here she noticed that her husband had evidently changed his clothes
+again and taken a heavier overcoat from the closet. Removing her own
+wraps she again descended to the lower apartment, brought out the volume
+of sermons, placed it and the lamp in the old position, and with
+her abstracted eyes on the page fell into her former attitude. Every
+suggestion of the passionate, half-frenzied woman in the kitchen of the
+house only four doors away, had vanished; one would scarcely believe she
+had ever stirred from the chair in which she had formally received
+her husband two hours before. And yet she was thinking of herself and
+Demorest in that kitchen.
+
+His prompt and decisive response to her appeal, as shown in this last
+bold and characteristic action, relieved, while it half piqued her. But
+the overruling destiny which had enabled her to bring him from his hotel
+to her mother's house unnoticed, had protected them while there, had
+arrested a dangerous meeting between him and herself and her husband in
+her own house, impressed her more than all. It imparted to her a hideous
+tranquillity born of the doctrines of her youth--Predestination! She
+reflected with secret exultation that her moral resolution to fly from
+him and her conscientiously broken promise had been the direct means of
+bringing him there; that step by step circumstances not in themselves
+evil or to be combated had led her along; that even her husband and
+mother had felt it their duty to assist towards this fateful climax! If
+Edward had never kept up his worldly friendship, if she had never been
+restricted and compassed in her own; if she had ever known the freedom
+of other girls,--all this might not have happened. She had been elected
+to share with Demorest and her husband the effects of their ungodliness.
+She was no longer a free agent; what availed her resolutions? To
+Demorest's imperious hope, she had said, “God knows.” What more could
+she say? Her small red lips grew white and compressed; her face rigid,
+her eyes hollow and abstracted; she looked like the genius of asceticism
+as she sat there, grimly formulating a dogmatic explanation of her
+lawless and unlicensed passion.
+
+The wind had risen to a gale without, and stirred even the sealed
+sepulchre of the fireplace with dull rumblings and muffled moans. At
+times the hot-air drum in the corner seemed to expand as with some
+pent-up emotion. Strange currents of air crossed the empty room like the
+passage of unseen spirits, and she even fancied she heard whispers at
+the window. This caused her to rise and open it, when she found that the
+sleet had given way to a dry feathery snow that was swarming through
+the slits of the shutter; a faint reflection from the already whitened
+fences glimmered in the panes. She shut the window hastily, with a
+little shiver of cold. Where was Demorest in this storm? Would it
+stop him? She thought with pride now of the dominant energy that had
+frightened her, and knew it would not. But her husband?--what kept him?
+It was twelve o'clock; he had seldom stayed out so late before. During
+the first half hour of her reflections she had been relieved by his
+absence; she had even believed that he had met Demorest in the town,
+and was not alarmed by it, for she knew that the latter would avoid
+any further confidence, and cut short any return to it. But why had not
+Edward returned? For an instant the terrible thought that something had
+happened, and that they might both return together, took possession
+of her, and she trembled. But no; Demorest, who had already taken such
+extreme measures, could not consistently listen to any suggestion for
+delay. As her only danger lay in Demorest's presence, the absence of her
+husband caused her more undefinable uneasiness than actual alarm.
+
+The room had become cold with the dying out of the dining-room fire that
+warmed the drum. She would go to bed. She nevertheless arranged the room
+again with a singular impression that she was doing it for the last time
+in her present existing circumstances, and placing the lamp on the table
+in the hall, went up to her own room. By the light of a single candle
+she undressed herself hastily, said her prayers punctiliously, and got
+into bed, with an unexpected relief at finding herself still occupying
+it alone. Then she fell asleep and dreamed of Demorest.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+When Edward Blandford found himself alone after his wife had undertaken
+to fulfil his abandoned filial duty at her parents' house, he felt a
+slight twinge of self-reproach. He could not deny that this was not
+the first time he had evaded the sterile Sabbath evenings at his
+mother-in-law's, or that even at other times he was not in accord with
+the cold and colorless sanctity of the family. Yet he remembered that
+when he picked out from the budding womanhood of North Liberty
+this pure, scentless blossom, he had endured the privations of its
+surroundings with a sense of security in inhaling the atmosphere in
+which it grew, and knowing the integrity of its descent. There was a
+certain pleasure also in invading this seclusion with human passion; the
+first pressure of her hand when they were kneeling together at family
+prayers had the zest without the sin of a forbidden pleasure; the first
+kiss he had given her with their heads over the family Bible had fairly
+intoxicated him in the thin, rarefied air of their surroundings. In
+transplanting this blossom to his own home with the fond belief that it
+would eventually borrow the hues and color of his own passion, he had
+no further interest in the house he had left behind. When he found,
+however, that the ancestral influence was stronger than he expected,
+that the young wife, instead of assimilating to his conditions, had
+imported into their little household the rigors of her youthful home,
+he had been chilled and disappointed. But he could not help also
+remembering that his own boyhood had been spent in an atmosphere like
+her own in everything but its sincerity and deep conviction. His father
+had recognized the business value of placating the narrow tyranny of the
+respectable well-to-do religious community, and had become a conscious
+hypocrite and a popular citizen. He had himself been under that
+influence, and it was partly a conviction of this that had drawn him
+towards her as something genuine and real. It occurred to him now for
+the first time, as he looked around upon that compromise of their two
+lives in this chilly artificial home, that it was only natural that she
+would prefer the more truthful austerities of her mother's house. Had
+she detected the sham, and did she despise him for it?
+
+These were questions which seemed to bring another self-accusing doubt
+in his own mind, although, without his being conscious of it, they had
+been really the outcome of that doubt. He could not help dwelling on the
+singular human interest she had taken in Demorest's love affair, and
+the utterly unexpected emotion she had shown. He had never seen her as
+charmingly illogical, capricious, and bewitchingly feminine. Had he not
+made a radical mistake in not giving her a frequent provocation for this
+innocent emotion--in fact, in not taking her out into a world of broader
+sympathies and experiences? What a household they might have had--if
+necessary in some other town--away from those cramped prejudices and
+limitations! What friends she might have been with Dick and his other
+worldly acquaintances; what social pleasures--guiltless amusements
+for her pure mind--in theatres, parties, and concerts! Would she have
+objected to them?--had he ever seriously proposed them to her? No! if
+she had objected there would have been time enough to have made this
+present compromise; she would have at least respected and understood his
+sacrifice--and his friends.
+
+Even the artificial externals of his household had never before so
+visibly impressed him. Now that she was no longer in the room it did not
+even bear a trace of her habitation, it certainly bore no suggestion of
+his own. Why had he bought that hideous horsehair furniture? To remind
+her of the old provincial heirlooms of her father's sitting-room. Did
+it remind her of it? The stiff and stony emptiness of this room had
+been fashioned upon the decorous respectability of his own father's
+parlor--in which his father, who usually spent his slippered leisure
+in the family sitting-room, never entered except on visits from the
+minister. It had chilled his own youthful soul--why had he perpetuated
+it here?
+
+He could only answer these questions by moodily wandering about the
+house, and regretting he had not gone with her. After a vain attempt to
+establish social and domestic relations with the hot-air drum by putting
+his feet upon it--after an equally futile attempt to extract interest
+from the book of sermons by opening its pages at random--he glanced at
+the clock and suddenly resolved to go and fetch her. It would remind him
+of the old times when he used to accompany her from church, and, after
+her parents had retired, spend a blissful half-hour alone with her. With
+what a mingling of fear and childish curiosity she used to accept his
+equally timid caresses! Yes, he would go and fetch her; and he would
+recall it to her in a whisper while they were there.
+
+Filled with this idea, when he changed his clothes again he put on a
+certain heavy beaver overcoat, on whose shaggy sleeve her little, hand
+had so often rested when he escorted her from meeting; and he even
+selected the gray muffler she had knit for him in the old ante-nuptial
+days. It was lying in the half-opened drawer from where she had not long
+before taken her disguising veil.
+
+It was still blowing in sudden, capricious gusts; and when he opened the
+front door the wind charged fiercely upon him, as if to drive him back.
+When he had finally forced his way into the street, a return current
+closed the door as suddenly and sharply behind him as if it had ejected
+him from his home for ever.
+
+He reached the fourth house quickly, and as quickly ran up the steps;
+his hand was upon the bell when his eye suddenly caught sight of his
+wife's pass-key still in the lock. She had evidently forgotten it. Here
+was a chance to mischievously banter that habitually careful little
+woman! He slipped it into his pocket and quietly entered the dark but
+perfectly familiar hall. He reached the staircase without a stumble
+and began to ascend softly. Halfway up he heard the sound of his wife's
+hurried voice and another that startled him. He ascended hastily two
+steps, which brought him to the level of the half-opened transom of
+the kitchen. A candle was burning on the kitchen table; he could see
+everything that passed in the room; he could hear distinctly every word
+that was uttered.
+
+He did not utter a cry or sound; he did not even tremble. He remained
+so rigid and motionless, clutching the banisters with his stiffened
+fingers, that when he did attempt to move, all life, as well as all that
+had made life possible to him, seemed to have died from him for
+ever. There was no nervous illusion, no dimming of his senses; he saw
+everything with a hideous clarity of perception. By some diabolical
+instantaneous photography of the brain, little actions, peculiarities,
+touches of gesture, expression and attitude never before noted by him in
+his wife, were clearly fixed and bitten in his consciousness. He saw the
+color of his friend's overcoat, the reddish tinge of his wife's brown
+hair, till then unnoticed; in that supreme moment he was aware of a
+sudden likeness to her mother; but more terrible than all, there seemed
+to be a nameless sympathetic resemblance that the guilty pair had to
+each other in gesture and movement as of some unhallowed relationship
+beyond his ken. He knew not how long he stood there without breath,
+without reflection, without one connected thought. He saw her suddenly
+put her hand on the handle of the door. He knew that in another moment
+they would pass almost before him. He made a convulsive effort to move,
+with an inward cry to God for support, and succeeded in staggering with
+outstretched palms against the wall, down the staircase, and blindly
+forward through the hall to the front door. As yet he had been able to
+formulate only one idea--to escape before them, for it seemed to him
+that their contact meant the ruin of them both, of that house, of all
+that was near to him--a catastrophe that struck blindly at his whole
+visible world. He had reached the door and opened it at the moment that
+the handle of the kitchen-door was turned. He mechanically fell back
+behind the open door that hid him, while it let the cruel light glimmer
+for a moment on their clasped figures. The door slipped from his
+nerveless fingers and swung to with a dull sound. Crouching still in the
+corner, he heard the quick rush of hurrying feet in the darkness, saw
+the door open and Demorest glide out--saw her glance hurriedly after
+him, close the door, and involve herself and him in the blackness of the
+hall. Her dress almost touched him in his corner; he could feel the
+near scent of her clothes, and the air stirred by her figure retreating
+towards the stairs; could hear the unlocking of a door above and the
+voice of her mother from the landing, his wife's reply, the slow fading
+of her footsteps on the stairs and overhead, the closing of a door, and
+all was quiet again. Still stooping, he groped for the handle of the
+door, opened it, and the next moment reeled like a drunken man down the
+steps into the street.
+
+It was well for him that a fierce onset of wind and sleet at that
+instant caught him savagely--stirred his stagnated blood into action,
+and beat thought once more into his brain. He had mechanically turned
+towards his own home; his first effort of recovering will hurried
+him furiously past it and into a side street. He walked rapidly, but
+undeviatingly on to escape observation and secure some solitude for his
+returning thoughts. Almost before he knew it he was in the open fields.
+
+The idea of vengeance had never crossed his mind. He was neither a
+physical nor a moral coward, but he had never felt the merely animal
+fury of disputed animal possession which the world has chosen to
+recognize as a proof of outraged sentiment, nor had North Liberty
+accepted the ethics that an exchange of shots equalized a transferred
+affection. His love had been too pure and too real to be moved like
+the beasts of the field, to seek in one brutal passion compensation for
+another. Killing--what was there to kill? All that he had to live for
+had been already slain. With the love that was in him--in them--already
+dead at his feet, what was it to him whether these two hollow lives
+moved on and passed him, or mingled their emptiness elsewhere? Only let
+them henceforth keep out of his way!
+
+For in his first feverish flow of thought--the reaction to his benumbed
+will within and the beating sleet without--he believed Demorest as
+treacherous as his wife. He recalled his sudden and unexpected intrusion
+into the buggy only a few hours before, his mysterious confidences, his
+assurance of Joan's favorable reception of his secret, and her consent
+to the Californian trip. What had all this meant if not that Demorest
+was using him, the husband, to assist his intrigue, and carry the news
+of his presence in the town to her? And this boldness, this assurance,
+this audacity of conception was like Demorest! While only certain
+passages of the guilty meeting he had just seen and overheard were
+distinctly impressed on his mind, he remembered now, with hideous
+and terrible clearness, all that had gone before. It was part of the
+disturbed and unequal exaltation of his faculties that he dwelt more
+upon this and his wife's previous deceit and manifest hypocrisy, than
+upon the actual evidence he had witnessed of her unfaithfulness. The
+corroboration of the fact was stronger to him than the fact itself. He
+understood the coldness, the uncongeniality now--the simulated increase
+of her aversion to Demorest--her journeys to Boston and Hartford to
+see her relatives, her acquiescence to his frequent absences; not an
+incident, not a characteristic of her married life was inconsistent with
+her guilt and her deceit. He went even back to her maidenhood: how did
+he know this was not the legitimate sequence of other secret schoolgirl
+escapades. The bitter worldly light that had been forced upon his simple
+ingenuous nature had dazzled and blinded him. He passed from fatuous
+credulity to equally fatuous distrust.
+
+He stopped suddenly with the roaring of water before him. In the furious
+following of his rapid thought through storm and darkness he had come,
+he knew not how, upon the bank of the swollen river, whose endangered
+bridge Demorest had turned from that evening. A few steps more and he
+would have fallen into it. He drew nearer and looked at it with vague
+curiosity. Had he come there with any definite intention? The thought
+sobered without frightening him. There was always THAT culmination
+possible, and to be considered coolly.
+
+He turned and began to retrace his steps. On his way thither he had been
+fighting the elements step by step; now they seemed to him to have taken
+possession of him and were hurrying him quickly away. But where? and to
+what? He was always thinking of the past. He had wandered he knew not
+how long, always thinking of that. It was the future he had to consider.
+What was to be done?
+
+He had heard of such cases before; he had read of them in newspapers
+and talked of them with cold curiosity. But they were of worldly, sinful
+people, of dissolute men whose characters he could not conceive--of
+silly, vain, frivolous, and abandoned women whom he had never even met.
+But Joan--O God! It was the first time since his mute prayer on the
+staircase that the Divine name had been wrested from his lips. It came
+with his wife's--and his first tears! But the wind swept the one away
+and dried the others upon his hot cheeks.
+
+It had ceased to rain, and the wind, which was still high, had shifted
+more to the north and was bitterly cold. He could feel the roadway
+stiffening under his feet. When he reached the pavement of the outskirts
+once more he was obliged to take the middle of the street, to avoid the
+treacherous films of ice that were beginning to glaze the sidewalks. Yet
+this very inclemency, added to the usual Sabbath seclusion, had left the
+streets deserted. He was obliged to proceed more slowly, but he met no
+one and could pursue his bewildering thoughts unchecked. As he passed
+between the lines of cold, colorless houses, from which all light and
+life had vanished, it seemed to him that their occupants were dead
+as his love, or had fled their ruined houses as he had. Why should he
+remain? Yet what was his duty now as a man--as a Christian? His eye fell
+on the hideous facade of the church he was passing--her church! He gave
+a bitter laugh and stumbled on again.
+
+With one of the gusts he fancied he heard a familiar sound--the rattling
+of buggy wheels over the stiffening road. Or was it merely the fanciful
+echo of an idea that only at that moment sprung up in his mind? If it
+was real it came from the street parallel with the one he was in. Who
+could be driving out at this time? What other buggy than his own could
+be found to desecrate this Christian Sabbath? An irresistible thought
+impelled him at the risk of recognition to quicken his pace and turn the
+corner as Richard Demorest drove up to the Independence Hotel, sprang
+from his buggy, throwing the reins over the dashboard, and disappeared
+into the hotel!
+
+Blandford stood still, but for an instant only. He had been wandering
+for an hour aimlessly, hopelessly, without consecutive idea, coherent
+thought or plan of action; without the faintest inspiration or
+suggestion of escape from his bewildering torment, without--he had begun
+to fear--even the power to conceive or the will to execute; when a wild
+idea flashed upon him with the rattle of his buggy wheels. And even
+as Demorest disappeared into the hotel, he had conceived his plan and
+executed it. He crossed the street swiftly, leaped into his buggy,
+lifted the reins and brought down the whip simultaneously, and the next
+instant was dashing down the street in the direction of the Warensboro
+turnpike. So sudden was the action that by the time the astonished hall
+porter had rushed into the street, horse and buggy had already vanished
+in the darkness.
+
+Presently it began to snow. So lightly at first that it seemed a mere
+passing whisper to the ear, the brush of some viewless insect upon the
+cheek, or the soft tap of unseen fingers on the shoulders. But by the
+time the porter returned from his hopeless and invisible chase of
+the “runaway,” he came in out of a swarming cloud of whirling flakes,
+blinded and whitened. There was a hurried consultation with the
+landlord, the exhibition of much imperious energy and some bank-notes
+from Demorest, and with a glance at the clock that marked the expiring
+limit of the Puritan Sabbath, the landlord at last consented. By the
+time the falling snow had muffled the street from the indiscreet clamor
+of Sabbath-breaking hoofs, the landlord's noiseless sledge was at the
+door and Demorest had departed.
+
+The snow fell all that night; with fierce gusts of wind that moaned in
+the chimneys of North Liberty and sorely troubled the Sabbath sleep of
+its decorous citizens; with deep, passionless silences, none the
+less fateful, that softly precipitated a spotless mantle of merciful
+obliteration equally over their precise or their straying footprints,
+that would have done them good to heed and to remember; and when morning
+broke upon a world of week-day labor, it was covered as far as their
+eyes could reach as with a clear and unwritten tablet, on which they
+might record their lives anew. Near the wreck of the broken bridge on
+the Warensboro turnpike an overturned buggy lay imbedded in the drift
+and debris of the river hurrying silently towards the sea, and a horse
+with fragments of broken and icy harness still clinging to him was found
+standing before the stable-door of Edward Blandford. But to any further
+knowledge of the fate of its owner, North Liberty awoke never again.
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The last note of the Angelus had just rung out of the crumbling fissures
+in the tower of the mission chapel of San Buena-ventura. The sun which
+had beamed that day and indeed every day for the whole dry season over
+the red-tiled roofs of that old and happily ventured pueblo seemed to
+broaden to a smile as it dipped below the horizon, as if in undiminished
+enjoyment of its old practical joke of suddenly plunging the Southern
+California coast in darkness without any preliminary twilight. The olive
+and fig trees at once lost their characteristic outlines in formless
+masses of shadow; only the twisted trunks of the old pear trees in the
+mission garden retained their grotesque shapes and became gruesome in
+the gathering gloom. The encircling pines beyond closed up their serried
+files; a cool breeze swept down from the coast range and, passing
+through them, sent their day-long heated spices through the town.
+
+If there was any truth in the local belief that the pious incantation of
+the Angelus bell had the power of excluding all evil influence abroad
+at that perilous hour within its audible radius, and comfortably keeping
+all unbelieving wickedness at a distance, it was presumably ineffective
+as regarded the innovating stage-coach from Monterey that twice a
+week at that hour brought its question-asking, revolver-persuading and
+fortune-seeking load of passengers through the sleepy Spanish town. On
+the night of the 3d of August, 1856, it had not only brought but set
+down at the Posada one of those passengers. It was a Mr. Ezekiel
+Corwin, formerly known to these pages as “hired man” to the late Squire
+Blandford, of North Liberty, Connecticut, but now a shrewd, practical,
+self-sufficient, and self-asserting unit of the more cautious later
+Californian immigration. As the stage rattled away again with more or
+less humorous and open disparagement of the town and the Posada from its
+“outsiders,” he lounged with lazy but systematic deliberation towards
+Mateo Morez, the proprietor.
+
+“I guess that some of your folks here couldn't direct me to Dick
+Demorest's house, could ye?”
+
+The Senor Mateo Morez was at once perplexed and pained. Pained at the
+ignorance thus forced upon him by a caballero; perplexed as to its
+intention. Between the two he smiled apologetically but gravely, and
+said: “No sabe, Senor. I 'ave not understood.”
+
+“No more hev I,” returned Ezekiel, with patronizing recognition of his
+obtuseness. “I guess ez heow you ain't much on American. You folks orter
+learn the language if you kalkilate to keep a hotel.”
+
+But the momentary vision of a waistless woman with a shawl gathered over
+her head and shoulders at the back door attracted his attention. She
+said something to Mateo in Spanish, and the yellowish-white of Mateo's
+eyes glistened with intelligent comprehension.
+
+“Ah, posiblemente; it is Don Ricardo Demorest you wish?”
+
+Mr. Ezekiel's face and manner expressed a mingling of grateful curiosity
+and some scorn at the discovery. “Wa'al,” he said, looking around as if
+to take the entire Posada into his confidence, “way up in North Liberty,
+where I kem from, he was allus known as Dick Demorest, and didn't
+tack any forrin titles to his name. Et wouldn't hev gone down there, I
+reckon, 'mongst free-born Merikin citizens, no mor'n aliases would in
+court--and I kinder guess for the same reason. But folks get peart
+and sassy when they're way from hum, and put on ez many airs as a buck
+nigger. And so he calls hisself Don Ricardo here, does he?”
+
+“The Senor knows Don Ricardo?” said Mateo politely.
+
+“Ef you mean me--wa'al, yes--I should say so. He was a partiklar friend
+of a man I've known since he was knee-high to a grasshopper.”
+
+Ezekiel had actually never seen Demorest but once in his life. He would
+have scorned to lie, but strict accuracy was not essential with an
+ignorant foreign audience.
+
+He took up his carpet-bag.
+
+“I reckon I kin find his house, ef it's anyway handy.”
+
+But the Senor Mateo was again politely troubled. The house of Don
+Ricardo was of a truth not more than a mile distant. It was even
+possible that the Senor had observed it above a wall and vineyard as he
+came into the pueblo. But it was late--it was also dark, as the Senor
+would himself perceive--and there was still to-morrow. To-morrow--ah, it
+was always there! Meanwhile there were beds of a miraculous quality
+at the Posada, and a supper such as a caballero might order in his own
+house. Health, discretion, solicitude for oneself--all pointed clearly
+to to-morrow.
+
+What part of this speech Ezekiel understood affected him only as an
+innkeeper's bid for custom, and as such to be steadily exposed and
+disposed of. With the remark that he guessed Dick Demorest's was “a good
+enough hotel for HIM,” and that he'd better be “getting along there,” he
+walked down the steps, carpet-bag in hand, and coolly departed, leaving
+Mateo pained, but smiling, on the doorstep.
+
+“An animal with a pig's head--without doubt,” said Mateo, sententiously.
+
+“Clearly a brigand with the liver of a chicken,” responded his wife.
+
+The subject of this ambiguous criticism, happily oblivious, meantime
+walked doggedly back along the road the stage-coach had just brought
+him. It was badly paved and hollowed in the middle with the worn ruts of
+a century of slow undeviating ox carts, and the passage of water
+during the rainy season. The low adobe houses on each side, with bright
+cinnamon-colored tiles relieving their dark-brown walls, had the regular
+outlines of their doors and windows obliterated by the crumbling of
+years, until they looked as if they had been afterthoughts of the
+builder, rudely opened by pick and crowbar, and finished by the gentle
+auxiliary architecture of birds and squirrels. Yet these openings at
+times permitted glimpses of a picturesque past in the occasional view
+of a lace-edged pillow or silken counterpane, striped hangings, or dyed
+Indian rugs, the flitting of a flounced petticoat or flower-covered
+head, or the indolent leaning figure framed in a doorway of a man in
+wide velvet trousers and crimson-barred serape, whose brown face
+was partly hidden in a yellow nimbus of cigarette smoke. Even in the
+semi-darkness, Ezekiel's penetrating and impertinent eyes took eager
+note of these facts with superior complacency, quite unmindful, after
+the fashion of most critical travellers, of the hideous contrast of his
+own long shapeless nankeen duster, his stiff half-clerical brown straw
+hat, his wisp of gingham necktie, his dusty boots, his outrageous
+carpet-bag, and his straggling goat-like beard. A few looked at him in
+grave, discreet wonder. Whether they recognized in him the advent of a
+civilization that was destined to supplant their own ignorant, sensuous,
+colorful life with austere intelligence and rigid practical improvement,
+did not appear. He walked steadily on. As he passed the low arched door
+of the mission church and saw a faint light glimmering from the side
+windows, he had indeed a weak human desire to go in and oppose in his
+own person a debased and idolatrous superstition with some happily
+chosen question that would necessarily make the officiating priest and
+his congregation exceedingly uncomfortable. But he resisted; partly in
+the hope of meeting some idolater on his way to Benediction, and, in
+the guise of a stranger seeking information, dropping a few unpalatable
+truths; and partly because he could unbosom himself later to Demorest,
+who he was not unwilling to believe had embraced Popery with his
+adoption of a Spanish surname and title.
+
+It had become quite dark when he reached the long wall that enclosed
+Demorest's premises. The wall itself excited his resentment, not only
+as indicating an exclusiveness highly objectionable in a man who
+had emigrated from a free State, but because he, Ezekiel Corwin, had
+difficulty in discovering the entrance. When he succeeded, he found
+himself before an iron gate, happily open, but savoring offensively of
+feudalism and tyrannical proprietorship, and passed through and entered
+an avenue of trees scarcely distinguishable in the darkness, whose
+mysterious shapes and feathery plumes were unknown to him. Numberless
+odors equally vague and mysterious were heavy in the air, strange and
+delicate plants rose dimly on either hand; enormous blossoms, like
+ghostly faces, seemed to peer at him from the shadows. For an instant
+Ezekiel succumbed to an unprofitable sense of beauty, and acquiesced in
+this reckless extravagance of Nature that was so unlike North Liberty.
+But the next moment he recovered himself, with the reflection that it
+was probably unhealthy, and doggedly approached the house. It was a
+long, one-storied, structure, apparently all roof, vine, and pillared
+veranda. Every window and door was open; the two or three grass hammocks
+swung emptily between the columns; the bamboo chairs and settees were
+vacant; his heavy footsteps on the floor had summoned no attendant; not
+even a dog had barked as he approached the house. It was shiftless, it
+was sinful--it boded no good to the future of Demorest.
+
+He put down his carpet-bag on the veranda and entered the broad hall,
+where an old-fashioned lantern was burning on a stand. Here, too, the
+doors of the various apartments were open, and the rooms themselves
+empty of occupants. An opportunity not to be lost by Ezekiel's inquiring
+mind thus offered itself. He took the lantern and deliberately examined
+the several apartments, the furniture, the bedding, and even the small
+articles that were on the tables and mantels. When he had completed the
+round--including a corridor opening on a dark courtyard, which he did
+not penetrate--he returned to the hall, and set down the lantern again.
+
+“Well,” said a voice in his own familiar vernacular, “I hope you like
+it.”
+
+Ezekiel was surprised, but not disconcerted. What he had taken in the
+shadow for a bundle of serapes lying on the floor of the veranda,
+was the recumbent figure of a man who now raised himself to a sitting
+posture.
+
+“Ez to that,” drawled Ezekiel, with unshaken self-possession, “whether
+I like it or not ez only a question betwixt kempany manners and
+truth-telling. Beggars hadn't oughter be choosers, and transient
+visitors like myself needn't allus speak their mind. But if you mean to
+signify that with every door and window open and universal shiftlessness
+lying round everywhere temptin' Providence, you ain't lucky in havin' a
+feller-citizen of yours drop in on ye instead of some Mexican thief, I
+don't agree with ye--that's all.”
+
+The man laughed shortly and rose up. In spite of his careless yet
+picturesque Mexican dress, Ezekiel instantly recognized Demorest. With
+his usual instincts he was naturally pleased to observe that he looked
+older and more careworn. The softer, sensuous climate had perhaps
+imparted a heaviness to his figure and a deliberation to his manner that
+was quite unlike his own potential energy.
+
+“That don't tell me who you are, and what you want,” he said, coldly.
+
+“Wa'al then, I'm Ezekiel Corwin of North Liberty, ez used to live with
+my friend and YOURS too, I guess--seein' how the friendship was swapped
+into relationship--Squire Blandford.”
+
+A slight shade passed over Demorest's face. “Well,” he said,
+impatiently, “I don't remember you; what then?”
+
+“You don't remember me; that's likely,” returned Ezekiel imperturbably,
+combing his straggling chin beard with three fingers, “but whether it's
+NAT'RAL or not, considerin' the sukumstances when we last met, ez a
+matter of op-pinion. You got me to harness up the hoss and buggy the
+night Squire Blandford left home, and never was heard of again. It's
+true that it kem out on enquiry that the hoss and buggy ran away from
+the hotel, and that you had to go out to Warensboro in a sleigh, and
+the theory is that poor Squire Blandford must have stopped the hoss
+and buggy somewhere, got in and got run away agin, and pitched over the
+bridge. But seein' your relationship to both Squire and Mrs. Blandford,
+and all the sukumstances, I reckoned you'd remember it.”
+
+“I heard of it in Boston a month afterwards,” said Demorest, dryly, “but
+I don't think I'd have recognized you. So you were the hired man who
+gave me the buggy. Well, I don't suppose they discharged you for it.”
+
+“No,” said Ezekiel, with undisturbed equanimity. “I kalkilate Joan would
+have stopped that. Considerin', too, that I knew her when she was Deacon
+Salisbury's darter, and our fam'lies waz thick az peas. She knew me well
+enough when I met her in Frisco the other day.”
+
+“Have you seen Mrs. Demorest already?” said Demorest, with sudden
+vivacity. “Why didn't you say so before?” It was wonderful how quickly
+his face had lighted up with an earnestness that was not, however,
+without some undefinable uneasiness. The alert Ezekiel noticed it and
+observed that it was as totally unlike the irresistible dominance of the
+man of five years ago as it was different from the heavy abstraction of
+the man of five minutes before.
+
+“I reckon you didn't ax me,” he returned coolly. “She told me where you
+were, and as I had business down this way she guessed I might drop in.”
+
+“Yes, yes--it's all right, Mr. Corwin; glad you did,” said Demorest,
+kindly but half nervously. “And you saw Mrs. Demorest? Where did you see
+her, and how did you think she was looking? As pretty as ever, eh?”
+
+But the coldly literal Ezekiel was not to be beguiled into polite or
+ambiguous fiction. He even went to the extent of insulting deliberation
+before he replied. “I've seen Joan Salisbury lookin' healthier and
+ez far ez I kin judge doin' more credit to her stock and raisin'
+gin'rally,” he said, thoughtfully combing his beard, “and I've seen her
+when she was too poor to get the silks and satins, furbelows, fineries
+and vanities she's flauntin' in now, and that was in Squire Blandford's
+time, too, I reckon. Ez to her purtiness, that's a matter of taste. You
+think her purty, and I guess them fellows ez was escortin' and squirin'
+her round Frisco thought so too, or SHE thought they did to hev allowed
+it.”
+
+“You are not very merciful to your townsfolk, Mr. Corwin,” said
+Demorest, with a forced smile; “but what can I do for you?”
+
+It was the turn for Ezekiel's face to brighten, or rather to break up,
+like a cold passionless mirror suddenly cracked, into various amusing
+but distorted reflections on the person before him. “Townies ain't to
+be fooled by other townies, Mr. Demorest; at least that ain't my idea
+o' marcy, he-he! But seen you're pressin', I don't mind tellen you MY
+business. I'm the only agent of Seventeen Patent Medicine Proprietors
+in Connecticut represented by the firm of Dilworth & Dusenberry, of San
+Francisco. Mebbe you heard of 'em afore--A1 druggists and importers.
+Wa'al, I'm openin' a field for 'em and spreadin' 'em gin'rally through
+these air benighted and onhealthy districts, havin' the contract for
+the hull State--especially for Wozun's Universal Injin Panacea ez cures
+everything--bein' had from a recipe given by a Sachem to Dr. Wozun's
+gran'ther. That bag--leavin' out a dozen paper collars and socks--is all
+the rest samples. That's me, Ezekiel Corwin--only agent for Californy,
+and that's my mission.”
+
+“Very well; but look here, Corwin,” said Demorest, with a slight return
+of his old off-hand manner,--“I'd advise you to adopt a little more
+caution, and a little less criticism in your speech to the people about
+here, or I'm afraid you'll need the Universal Panacea for yourself.
+Better men than you have been shot in my presence for half your
+freedom.”
+
+“I guess you've just hit the bull's-eye there,” replied Ezekiel, coolly,
+“for it's that HALF-freedom and HALF-truth that doesn't pay. I kalkilate
+gin'rally to speak my hull mind--and I DO. Wot's the consequence? Why,
+when folks find I ain't afeard to speak my mind on their affairs, they
+kinder guess I'm tellin' the truth about my own. Folks don't like the
+man that truckles to 'em, whether it's in the sellin' of a box of pills
+or a principle. When they re-cognize Ezekiel Corwin ain't goin' to lie
+about 'em to curry favor with 'em, they're ready to believe he ain't
+goin' to lie about Jones' Bitters or Wozun's Panacea. And, wa'al, I've
+been on the road just about a fortnit, and I haven't yet discovered that
+the original independent style introduced by Ezekiel Corwin ever broke
+anybody's bones or didn't pay.”
+
+And he told the truth. That remarkably unfair and unpleasant spoken man
+had actually frozen Hanley's Ford into icy astonishment at his
+audacity, and he had sold them an invoice of the Panacea before they had
+recovered; he had insulted Chipitas into giving an extensive order in
+bitters; he had left Hayward's Creek pledged to Burne's pills--with
+drawn revolvers still in their hands.
+
+At another time Demorest might have been amused at his guest's audacity,
+or have combated it with his old imperiousness, but he only remained
+looking at him in a dull sort of way as if yielding to his influence.
+It was part of the phenomenon that the two men seemed to have changed
+character since they last met, and when Ezekiel said confidentially: “I
+reckon you're goin' to show me what room I ken stow these duds o' mine
+in,” Demorest replied hurriedly, “Yes, certainly,” and taking up
+his guest's carpet-bag preceded him through the hall to one of the
+apartments.
+
+“I'll send Manuel to you presently,” he said, putting down the bag
+mechanically; “the servants are not back from church, it's some saint's
+festival to-day.”
+
+“And so you keep a pack of lazy idolaters to leave your house to take
+care of itself, whilst they worship graven images,” said Ezekiel,
+delighted at this opportunity to improve the occasion.
+
+“If my memory isn't bad, Mr. Corwin,” said Demorest dryly, “when I
+accompanied Mr. Blandford home the night he returned from his journey,
+we found YOU at church, and he had to put up his horse himself.”
+
+“But that was the Sabbath--the seventh day of the command,” retorted
+Ezekiel.
+
+“And here the Sabbath doesn't consist of only ONE day to serve God in,”
+ said Demorest, sententiously.
+
+Ezekiel glanced under his white lashes at Demorest's thoughtful face.
+His fondest fears appeared to be confirmed; Demorest had evidently
+become a Papist. But that gentleman stopped any theological discussion
+by the abrupt inquiry:
+
+“Did Mrs. Demorest say when she thought of returning?”
+
+“She allowed she mout kem to-morrow--but--” added Ezekiel dubiously.
+
+“But what?”
+
+“Wa'al, wot with her enjyments of the vanities of this life and
+the kempany she keeps, I reckon she's in no hurry,” said Ezekiel,
+cheerfully.
+
+The entrance of Manuel here cut short any response from Demorest,
+who after a few directions in Spanish to the peon, left his guest to
+himself.
+
+He walked to the veranda with the same dull preoccupation that Ezekiel
+had noticed as so different from his old decisive manner, and remained
+for a few moments abstractedly gazing into the dark garden. The strange
+and mystic shapes which had impressed even the practical Ezekiel, had
+become even more weird and ghost-like in the faint radiance of a rising
+moon.
+
+What memories evoked by his rude guest seemed to take form and outline
+in that dreamy and unreal expanse!
+
+He saw his wife again, standing as she had stood that night in her
+mother's house, with the white muffler around her head, and white face,
+imploring him to fly; he saw himself again hurrying through the driving
+storm to Warensboro, and reaching the train that bore him swiftly and
+safely miles away--that same night when her husband was perishing in the
+swollen river. He remembered with what strangely mingled sensations he
+had read the account of Blandford's death in the newspapers, and how the
+loss of his old friend was forgotten in the associations conjured up by
+his singular meeting that very night with the mysterious woman he had
+loved. He remembered that he had never dreamed how near and fateful
+were these associations; and how he had kept his promise not to seek
+her without her permission, until six months after, when she appointed
+a meeting, and revealed to him the whole truth. He could see her now,
+as he had seen her then, more beautiful and fascinating than ever in her
+black dress, and the pensive grace of refined suffering and restrained
+passion in her delicate face. He remembered, too, how the shock of
+her disclosure--the knowledge that she had been his old friend's
+wife--seemed only to accent her purity and suffering and his own wilful
+recklessness, and how it had stirred all the chivalry, generosity, and
+affection of his easy nature to take the whole responsibility of this
+innocent but compromising intrigue on his own shoulders. He had had no
+self-accusing sense of disloyalty to Blandford in his practical nature;
+he had never suspected the shy, proper girl of being his wife; he was
+willing to believe now, that had he known it, even that night, he would
+never have seen her again; he had been very foolish; he had made this
+poor woman participate in his folly; but he had never been dishonest or
+treacherous in thought or action. If Blandford had lived, even he
+would have admitted it. Yet he was guiltily conscious of a material
+satisfaction in Blandford's death, without his wife's religious
+conviction of the saving graces of predestination.
+
+They had been married quietly when the two years of her widowhood
+had expired; his former relations with her husband and the straitened
+circumstances in which Blandford's death had left her having been deemed
+sufficient excuse in the eyes of North Liberty for her more worldly
+union. They had come to California at her suggestion “to begin life
+anew,” for she had not hesitated to make this dislocation of all her
+antecedent surroundings as a reason as well as a condition of this
+marriage. She wished to see the world of which he had been a passing
+glimpse; to expand under his protection beyond the limits of her
+fettered youth. He had bought this old Spanish estate, with its near
+vineyard and its outlying leagues covered with wild cattle, partly from
+that strange contradictory predilection for peaceful husbandry common to
+men who have led a roving life, and partly as a check to her growing and
+feverish desire for change and excitement. He had at first enjoyed with
+an almost parental affection her childish unsophisticated delight in
+that world he had already wearied of, and which he had been prepared
+to gladly resign for her. But as the months and even years had passed
+without any apparent diminution in her zest for these pleasures, he
+tried uneasily to resume his old interest in them, and spent ten months
+with her in the chaotic freedom of San Francisco hotel life. But to his
+discomfiture he found that they no longer diverted him; to his horror he
+discovered that those easy gallantries in which he had spent his youth,
+and in which he had seen no harm, were intolerable when exhibited to his
+wife, and he trembled between inquietude and indignation at the copies
+of his former self, whom he met in hotel parlors, at theatres, and
+in public conveyances. The next time she visited some friends in San
+Francisco he did not accompany her. Though he fondly cherished his
+experience of her power to resist even stronger temptation, he was too
+practical to subject himself to the annoyance of witnessing it. In her
+absence he trusted her completely; his scant imagination conjured up no
+disturbing picture of possibilities beyond what he actually knew. In his
+recent questions of Ezekiel he did not expect to learn anything more.
+Even his guest's uncomfortable comments added no sting that he had not
+already felt.
+
+With these thoughts called up by the unlooked-for advent of Ezekiel
+under his roof, he continued to gaze moodily into the garden. Near the
+house were scattered several uncouth varieties of cacti which seemed to
+have lost all semblance of vegetable growth, and had taken rude likeness
+to beasts and human figures. One high-shouldered specimen, partly hidden
+in the shadow, had the appearance of a man with a cloak or serape thrown
+over his left shoulder. As Demorest's wandering eyes at last became
+fixed upon it, he fancied he could trace the faint outlines of a pale
+face, the lower part of which was hidden by the folds of the serape.
+There certainly was the forehead, the curve of the dark eyebrows, the
+shadow of a nose, and even as he looked more steadily, a glistening of
+the eyes upturned to the moonlight. A sudden chill seized him. It was
+a horrible fancy, but it looked as might have looked the dead face
+of Edward Blandford! He started and ran quickly down the steps of the
+veranda. A slight wind at the same moment moved the long leaves and
+tendrils of a vine nearest him and sent a faint wave through the garden.
+He reached the cactus; its fantastic bulk stood plainly before him, but
+nothing more.
+
+“Whar are ye runnin' to?” said the inquiring voice of Ezekiel from the
+veranda.
+
+“I thought I saw some one in the garden,” returned Demorest, quietly,
+satisfied of the illusion of his senses, “but it was a mistake.”
+
+“It mout and it moutn't,” said Ezekiel, dryly. “Thar's nothin' to keep
+any one out. It's only a wonder that you ain't overrun with thieves and
+sich like.”
+
+“There are usually servants about the place,” said Demorest, carelessly.
+
+“Ef they're the same breed ez that Manuel, I reckon I'd almost as leave
+take my chances in the road. Ef it's all the same to you I kalkilate to
+put a paytent fastener to my door and winder to-night. I allus travel
+with them.” Seeing that Demorest only shrugged his shoulders without
+replying, he continued, “Et ain't far from here that some folks allow is
+the headquarters of that cattle-stealing gang. The driver of the coach
+went ez far ez to say that some of these high and mighty Dons hereabouts
+knows more of it than they keer to tell.”
+
+“That's simply a yarn for greenhorns,” said Demorest, contemptuously.
+“I know all the ranch proprietors for twenty leagues around, and they've
+lost as many cattle and horses as I have.”
+
+“I wanter know,” said Ezekiel, with grim interest. “Then you've already
+had consid'ble losses, eh? I kalkilate them cattle are vally'ble--about
+wot figger do you reckon yer out and injured?”
+
+“Three or four thousand dollars, I suppose, altogether,” replied
+Demorest, shortly.
+
+“Then you don't take any stock in them yer yarns about the gang being
+run and protected by some first-class men in Frisco?” said Ezekiel,
+regretfully.
+
+“Not much,” responded Demorest, dryly; “but if people choose to believe
+this bluff gotten up by the petty thieves themselves to increase their
+importance and secure their immunity--they can. But here's Manuel to
+tell us supper is ready.”
+
+He led the way to the corridor and courtyard which Ezekiel had not
+penetrated on account of its obscurity and solitude, but which now
+seemed to be peopled with peons and household servants of both sexes. At
+the end of a long low-ceilinged room a table was spread with omelettes,
+chupa, cakes, chocolate, grapes, and melons, around which half a dozen
+attendants stood gravely in waiting. The size of the room, which to
+Ezekiel's eyes looked as large as the church at North Liberty, the
+profusion of the viands, the six attendants for the host and solitary
+guest, deeply impressed him. Morally rebelling against this feudal
+display and extravagance, he, who had disdained to even assist the
+Blandfords' servant-in-waiting at table and had always made his
+solitary meal on the kitchen dresser, was not above feeling a material
+satisfaction in sitting on equal terms with his master's friend and
+being served by these menials he despised. He did full justice to
+the victuals of which Demorest partook in sparing abstraction, and
+particularly to the fruit, which Demorest did not touch at all.
+Observant of his servants' eyes fixed in wonder on the strange guest who
+had just disposed of a second melon at supper, Demorest could not help
+remarking that he would lose credit as a medico with the natives unless
+he restrained a public exhibition of his tastes.
+
+“Ez ha'aw?” queried Ezekiel.
+
+“They have a proverb here that fruit is gold in the morning, silver at
+noon, and lead at night.”
+
+“That'll do for lazy stomicks,” said the unabashed Ezekiel. “When
+they're once fortified by Jones' bitters and hard work, they'll be able
+to tackle the Lord's nat'ral gifts of the airth at any time.”
+
+Declining the cigarettes offered him by Demorest for a quid of
+tobacco, which he gravely took from a tin box in his pocket, and to
+the astonished eyes of the servants apparently obliterated any further
+remembrance of the meal, he accompanied his host to the veranda again,
+where, tilting his chair back and putting his feet on the railing, he
+gave himself up to unwonted and silent rumination.
+
+The silence was broken at last by Demorest, who, half-reclining on a
+settee, had once or twice glanced towards the misshapen cactus.
+
+“Was there any trace discovered of Blandford, other than we knew before
+we left the States?”
+
+“Wa'al, no,” said Ezekiel, thoughtfully. “The last idea was that he'd
+got control of the hoss after passin' the bridge, and had managed to
+turn him back, for there was marks of buggy wheels on the snow on the
+far side, and that fearin' to trust the hoss or the bridge he tried to
+lead him over when the bridge gave way, and he was caught in the wreck
+and carried off down stream. That would account for his body not bein'
+found; they do tell that chunks of that bridge were picked up on the
+Sound beach near the mouth o' the river, nigh unto sixty miles away.
+That's about the last idea they had of it at North Liberty.” He paused
+and then cleverly directing a stream of tobacco juice at an accurate
+curve over the railing, wiped his lips with the back of his hand,
+and added, slowly: “Thar's another idea--but I reckon it's only mine.
+Leastways I ain't heard it argued by anybody.”
+
+“What is that?” asked Demorest.
+
+“Wa'al, it ain't exakly complimentary to E. Blandford, Esq., and it mout
+be orkard for YOU.”
+
+“I don't think you're in the habit of letting such trifles interfere
+with your opinion,” said Demorest, with a slightly forced laugh; “but
+what is your idea?”
+
+“That thar wasn't any accident.”
+
+“No accident?” replied Demorest, raising himself on his elbow.
+
+“Nary accident,” continued Ezekiel, deliberately, “and, if it comes to
+that, not much of a dead body either.”
+
+“What the devil do you mean?” said Demorest, sitting up.
+
+“I mean,” said Ezekiel, with momentous deliberation, “that E. Blandford,
+of the Winnipeg Mills, was in March, '50, ez nigh bein' bust up ez any
+man kin be without actually failin'; that he'd been down to Boston that
+day to get some extensions; that old Deacon Salisbury knew it, and had
+been pesterin' Mrs. Blandford to induce him to sell out and leave the
+place; and that the night he left he took about two hundred and fifty
+dollars in bank bills that they allus kept in the house, and Mrs.
+Blandford was in the habit o' hidin' in the breast-pocket of one of his
+old overcoats hangin' up in the closet. I mean that that air money and
+that air overcoat went off with him, ez Mrs. Blandford knows, for I
+heard her tell her ma about it. And when his affairs were wound up and
+his debts paid, I reckon that the two hundred and fifty was all there
+was left--and he scooted with it. It's orkard for you--ez I said
+afore--but I don't see wot on earth you need get riled for. Ef he ran
+off on account of only two hundred and fifty dollars he ain't goin'
+to run back again for the mere matter o' your marrying Joan. Ef he
+had--he'd a done it afore this. It's orkard ez I said--but the only
+orkardness is your feelin's. I reckon Joan's got used to hers.”
+
+Demorest had risen angrily to his feet. But the next moment the utter
+impossibility of reaching this man's hidebound moral perception by even
+physical force hopelessly overcame him. It would only impress him with
+the effect of his own disturbing power, that to Ezekiel was equal to
+a proof of the truth of his opinions. It might even encourage him to
+repeat this absurd story elsewhere with his own construction upon his
+reception of it. After all it was only Ezekiel's opinion--an opinion too
+preposterous for even a moment's serious consideration. Blandford
+alive, and a petty defaulter! Blandford above the earth and complacently
+abandoning his wife and home to another! Blandford--perhaps a sneaking,
+cowardly Nemesis--hiding in the shadow for future--impossible! It really
+was enough to make him laugh.
+
+He did laugh, albeit with an uneasy sense that only a few years ago
+he would have struck down the man who had thus traduced his friend's
+memory.
+
+“You've been overtaxing your brain in patent-medicine circulars,
+Corwin,” he said in a roughly rallying manner, “and you've got rather
+too much highfalutin and bitters mixed with your opinions. After that
+yarn of yours you must be dry. What'll you take? I haven't got any New
+England rum, but I can give you some ten-year-old aguardiente made on
+the place.”
+
+As he spoke he lifted a decanter and glass from a small table which
+Manuel had placed in the veranda.
+
+“I guess not,” said Ezekiel dryly. “It's now goin' on five years since
+I've been a consistent temperance man.”
+
+“In everything but melons, and criticism of your neighbor, eh?” said
+Demorest, pouring out a glass of the liquor.
+
+“I hev my convictions,” said Ezekiel with affected meekness.
+
+“And I have mine,” said Demorest, tossing off the fiery liquor at a
+draft, “and it's that this is devilish good stuff. Sorry you can't take
+some. I'm afraid I'll have to get you to excuse me for a while. I have
+to take a ride over the ranch before turning in, to see if everything's
+right. The house is 'at your disposition,' as we say here. I'll see you
+later.”
+
+He walked away with a slight exaggeration of unconcern. Ezekiel watched
+him narrowly with colorless eyes beneath his white lashes. When he
+had gone he examined the thoroughly emptied glass of aguardiente,
+and, taking the decanter, sniffed critically at its sharp and potent
+contents. A smile of gratified discernment followed. It was clear to him
+that Demorest was a heavy drinker.
+
+Contrary to his prognostication, however, Mrs. Demorest DID arrive the
+next day. But although he was to depart from Buenaventura by the same
+coach that had set her down at the gate of the casa, he had already left
+the house armed with some letters of introduction which Demorest had
+generously given him, to certain small traders in the pueblo and along
+the route. Demorest was not displeased to part with him before the
+arrival of his wife, and thus spare her the awkwardness of a repetition
+of Ezekiel's effrontery in her presence. Nor was he willing to have the
+impediment of a guest in the house to any explanation he might have to
+seek from her, or to the confidences that hereafter must be fuller
+and more mutual. For with all his deep affection for his wife, Richard
+Demorest unconsciously feared her. The strong man whose dominance over
+men and women alike had been his salient characteristic, had begun to
+feel an undefinable sense of some unrecognized quality in the woman he
+loved. He had once or twice detected it in a tone of her voice, in a
+remembered and perhaps even once idolized gesture, or in the accidental
+lapse of some bewildering word. With the generosity of a large nature he
+had put the thought aside, referring it to some selfish weakness of
+his own, or--more fatuous than all--to a possible diminution of his own
+affection.
+
+He was standing on the steps ready to receive her. Few of her
+appreciative sex could have remained indifferent to the tender and
+touching significance of his silent and subdued welcome. He had that
+piteous wistfulness of eye seen in some dogs and the husbands of many
+charming women--the affection that pardons beforehand the indifference
+it has learned to expect. She approached him smiling in her turn,
+meeting the sublime patience of being unloved with the equally resigned
+patience of being loved, and feeling that comforting sense of virtue
+which might become a bore, but never a self-reproach. For the rest, she
+was prettier than ever; her five years of expanded life had slightly
+rounded the elongated oval of her face, filled up the ascetic hollows
+of her temples, and freed the repression of her mouth and chin. A more
+genial climate had quickened the circulation that North Liberty had
+arrested, and suffused the transparent beauty of her skin with eloquent
+life. It seemed as if the long, protracted northern spring of her youth
+had suddenly burst into a summer of womanhood under those gentle skies;
+and yet enough of her puritan precision of manner, movement, and gesture
+remained to temper her fuller and more exuberant life and give it
+repose. In a community of pretty women more or less given to the license
+and extravagance of the epoch, she always looked like a lady.
+
+He took her in his arms and half-lifted her up the last step of the
+veranda. She resisted slightly with her characteristic action of
+catching his wrists in both her hands and holding him off with an
+awkward primness, and almost in the same tone that she had used to
+Edward Blandford five years before, said:
+
+“There, Dick, that will do.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Demorest's dream of a few days' conjugal seclusion and confidences with
+his wife was quickly dispelled by that lady. “I came down with Rosita
+Pico, whose father, you know, once owned this property,” she said.
+“She's gone on to her cousins at Los Osos Rancho to-night, but comes
+here to-morrow for a visit. She knows the place well; in fact, she once
+had a romantic love affair here. But she is very entertaining. It will
+be a little change for us,” she added, naively.
+
+Demorest kept back a sigh, without changing his gentle smile. “I'm glad
+for your sake, dear. But is she not a little flighty and inclined to
+flirt a good deal? I think I've heard so.”
+
+“She's a young girl who has been severely tried, Richard, and perhaps is
+not to blame for endeavoring to forget it in such distraction as she can
+find,” said Mrs. Demorest, with a slight return of her old manner. “I
+can understand her feelings perfectly.” She looked pointedly at her
+husband as she spoke, it being one of her late habits to openly refer to
+their ante-nuptial acquaintance as a natural reaction from the martyrdom
+of her first marriage, with a quiet indifference that seemed almost
+an indelicacy. But her husband only said: “As you like, dear,” vaguely
+remembering Dona Rosita as the alleged heroine of a forgotten romance
+with some earlier American adventurer who had disappeared, and trying
+vainly to reconcile his wife's sentimental description of her with his
+own recollection of the buxom, pretty, laughing, but dangerous-eyed
+Spanish girl he had, however, seen but once.
+
+She arrived the next day, flying into a protracted embrace of Joan,
+which included a smiling recognition of Demorest with an unoccupied blue
+eye, and a shake of her fan over his wife's shoulder. Then she drew
+back and seemed to take in the whole veranda and garden in another long
+caress of her eyes. “Ah-yess! I have recognized it, mooch. It es ze
+same. Of no change--not even of a leetle. No, she ess always--esso.”
+ She stopped, looked unutterable things at Joan, pressed her fan below
+a spray of roses on her full bodice as if to indicate some thrilling
+memory beneath it, shook her head again, suddenly caught sight of
+Demorest's serious face, said: “Ah, that brigand of our husband laughs
+himself at me,” and then herself broke into a charming ripple of
+laughter.
+
+“But I was not laughing, Dona Rosita,” said Demorest, smiling sadly,
+however, in spite of himself.
+
+She made a little grimace, and then raised her elbows, slightly lifting
+her shoulders. “As it shall please you, Senor. But he is gone--thees
+passion. Yess--what you shall call thees sentiment of lof--zo--as he
+came!” She threw her fingers in the air as if to illustrate the volatile
+and transitory passage of her affections, and then turned again to Joan
+with her back towards Demorest.
+
+“Do please go on--Dona Rosita,” said he, “I never heard the real story.
+If there is any romance about my house, I'd like to know it,” he added
+with a faint sigh.
+
+Dona Rosita wheeled upon him with an inquiring little look. “Ah, you
+have the sentiment, and YOU,” she continued, taking Joan by the arms,
+“YOU have not. Eet ess good so. When a--the wife,” she continued boldly,
+hazarding an extended English abstraction, “he has the sentimente and
+the hoosband he has nothing, eet is not good--for a-him--ze wife,” she
+concluded triumphantly.
+
+“But I have great appreciation and I am dying to hear it,” said
+Demorest, trying to laugh.
+
+“Well, poor one, you look so. But you shall lif till another time,” said
+Dona Rosita, with a mock courtesy, gliding with Joan away.
+
+The “other time” came that evening when chocolate was served on the
+veranda, where Dona Rosita, mantilla-draped against the dry, clear,
+moonlit air, sat at the feet of Joan on the lowest step. Demorest,
+uneasily observant of the influence of the giddy foreigner on his wife,
+and conscious of certain confidences between them from which he was
+excluded, leaned against a pillar of the porch in half abstracted
+resignation; Joan, under the tutelage of Rosita, lit a cigarette;
+Demorest gazed at her wonderingly, trying to recall, in her fuller and
+more animated face, some memory of the pale, refined profile of the
+Puritan girl he had first met in the Boston train, the faint aurora of
+whose cheek in that northern clime seemed to come and go with his words.
+Becoming conscious at last of the eyes of Dona Rosita watching him from
+below, with an effort he recalled his duty as her host and gallantly
+reminded her that moonlight and the hour seemed expressly fitted for her
+promised love story.
+
+“Do tell it,” said Joan, “I don't mind hearing it again.”
+
+“Then you know it already?” said Demorest, surprised.
+
+Joan took the cigarette from her lips, laughed complacently, and
+exchanged a familiar glance with Rosita. “She told it me a year ago,
+when we first knew each other,” she replied. “Go on, dear,” to Rosita.
+
+Thus encouraged, Dona Rosita began, addressing herself first in Spanish
+to Demorest, who understood the language better than his wife, and
+lapsing into her characteristic English as she appealed to them both.
+It was really very little to interest Don Ricardo--this story of a silly
+muchacha like herself and a strange caballero. He would go to sleep
+while she was talking, and to-night he would say to his wife, “Mother of
+God! why have you brought here this chattering parrot who speaks but of
+one thing?” But she would go on always like the windmill, whether there
+was grain to grind or no. “It was four years ago. Ah! Don Ricardo did
+not remember the country then--it was when the first Americans came--now
+it is different. Then there were no coaches--in truth one travelled
+very little, and always on horseback, only to see one's neighbors. And
+suddenly, as if in one day, it was changed; there were strange men on
+the roads, and one was frightened, and one shut the gates of the pateo
+and drove the horses into the corral. One did not know much of the
+Americans then--for why? They were always going, going--never stopping,
+hurrying on to the gold mines, hurrying away from the gold mines,
+hurrying to look for other gold mines: but always going on foot, on
+horseback, in queer wagons--hurrying, pushing everywhere. Ah, it took
+away the breath. All, except one American--he did not hurry, he did not
+go with the others, he came and stayed here at Buenaventura. He was
+very quiet, very civil, very sad, and very discreet. He was not like
+the others, and always kept aloof from them. He came to see Don Andreas
+Pico, and wanted to beg a piece of land and an old vaquero's hut near
+the road for a trifle. Don Andreas would have given it, or a better
+house, to him, or have had him live at the casa here; but he would not.
+He was very proud and shy, so he took the vaquero's hut, a mere adobe
+affair, and lived in it, though a caballero like yourself, with white
+hands that knew not labor, and small feet that had seldom walked. In
+good time he learned to ride like the best vaquero, and helped Don
+Andreas to find the lost mustangs, and showed him how to improve the old
+mill. And his pride and his shyness wore off, and he would come to
+the casa sometimes. And Don Andreas got to love him very much, and his
+daughter, Dona Rosita--ah, well, yes truly--a leetle.
+
+“But he had strange moods and ways, this American, and at times they
+would have thought him a lunatico had they not believed it to be an
+American fashion. He would be very kind and gentle like one of the
+family, coming to the casa every day, playing with the children,
+advising Don Andreas and--yes--having a devotion--very discreet, very
+ceremonious, for Dona Rosita. And then, all in a moment, he would become
+as ill, without a word or gesture, until he would stalk out of the
+house, gallop away furiously, and for a week not be heard of. The first
+time it happened, Dona Rosita was piqued by his rudeness, Don Andreas
+was alarmed, for it was on an evening like the present, and Dona Rosita
+was teaching him a little song on the guitar when the fit came on him.
+And he snapped the guitar strings like thread and threw it down, and got
+up like a bear and walked away without a word.”
+
+“I see it all,” said Demorest, half seriously: “you were coquetting with
+him, and he was jealous.”
+
+But Dona Rosita shook her head and turned impetuously, and said in
+English to Joan:
+
+“No, it was astutcia--a trick, a ruse. Because when my father have
+arrived at his house, he is agone. And so every time. When he have the
+fit he goes not to his house. No. And it ees not until after one time
+when he comes back never again, that we have comprehend what he do at
+these times. And what do you think? I shall tell to you.”
+
+She composed herself comfortably, with her plump elbows on her knees,
+and her fan crossed on the palm of her hand before her, and began again:
+
+“It is a year he has gone, and the stagecoach is attack of brigands.
+Tiburcio, our vaquero, have that night made himself a pasear on the
+road, and he have seen HIM. He have seen, one, two, three men came from
+the wood with something on the face, and HE is of them. He has nothing
+on his face, and Tiburcio have recognize him. We have laugh at Tiburcio.
+We believe him not. It is improbable that this Senor Huanson--”
+
+“Senor who?” said Demorest.
+
+“Huanson--eet is the name of him. Ah, Carr!--posiblemente it is
+nothing--a Don Fulano--or an apodo--Huanson.”
+
+“Oh, I see, JOHNSON, very likely.”
+
+“We have said it is not possible that this good man, who have come to
+the house and ride on his back the children, is a thief and a brigand.
+And one night my father have come from the Monterey in the coach, and it
+was stopped. And the brigands have take from the passengers the money,
+the rings from the finger, and the watch--and my father was of the same.
+And my father, he have great dissatisfaction and anguish, for his watch
+is given to him of an old friend, and it is not like the other watch.
+But the watch he go all the same. And then when the robbers have made a
+finish comes to the window of the coach a mascara and have say, 'Who
+is the Don Andreas Pico?' And my father have say, 'It is I who am Don
+Andreas Pico.' And the mask have say, 'Behold, your watch is
+restore!' and he gif it to him. And my father say, 'To whom have I the
+distinguished honor to thank?' And the mask say--”
+
+“Johnson,” interrupted Demorest.
+
+“No,” said Dona Rosita in grave triumph, “he say Essmith. For this
+Essmith is like Huanson--an apodo--nothing.”
+
+“Then you really think this man was your old friend?” asked Demorest.
+
+“I think.”
+
+“And that he was a robber even when living here--and that it was not
+your cruelty that really drove him to take the road?”
+
+Dona Rosita shrugged her plump shoulders. “You will not comprehend. It
+was because of his being a brigand that he stayed not with us. My father
+would not have object if he have present himself to me for marriage in
+these times. I would not have object, for I was young, and we have knew
+nothing. It was he who have object. For why? Inside of his heart he have
+feel he was a brigand.”
+
+“But you might have reformed him in time,” said Demorest.
+
+She again shrugged her shoulders. “Quien sabe.” After a pause she added
+with infinite gravity: “And before he have reform, it is bad for the
+menage. I should invite to my house some friend. They arrive, and one
+say, 'I have not the watch of my pocket,' and another, 'The ring of my
+finger, he is gone,' and another, 'My earrings, she is loss.' And I am
+obliged to say, 'They reside now in the pocket of my hoosband; patience!
+a little while--perhaps to-morrow--he will restore.' No,” she continued,
+with an air of infinite conviction, “it is not good for the menage--the
+necessity of those explanation.”
+
+“You told me he was handsome,” said Joan, passing her arm carelessly
+around Dona Rosita's comfortable waist. “How did he look?”
+
+“As an angel! He have long curls to his back. His moustache was as
+silk, for he have had never a barber to his face. And his eyes--Santa
+Maria!--so soft and so--so melankoly. When he smile it is like the
+moonlight. But,” she added, rising to her feet and tossing the end
+of her lace mantilla over her shoulder with a little laugh--“it is
+finish--Adelante! Dr-rrive on!”
+
+“I don't want to destroy your belief in the connection of your friend
+with the road agents,” said Demorest grimly, “but if he belongs to
+their band it is in an inferior capacity. Most of them are known to
+the authorities, and I have heard it even said that their leader or
+organizer is a very unromantic speculator in San Francisco.”
+
+But this suggestion was received coldly by the ladies, who
+superciliously turned their backs upon it and the suggester. Joan
+dropped her voice to a lower tone and turned to Dona Rosita. “And you
+have never seen him since?”
+
+“Never.”
+
+“I should--at least, I wouldn't have let it end in THAT way,” said Joan
+in a positive whisper.
+
+“Eh?” said Dona Rosita, laughing. “So eet is YOU, Juanita, that have the
+romance--eh? Ah, bueno! 'you have the house--so I gif to you the lover
+also.' I place him at your disposition.” She made a mock gesture of
+elaborate and complete abnegation. “But,” she added in Joan's ear, with
+a quick glance at Demorest, “do not let our hoosband eat him. Even now
+he have the look to strangle ME. Make to him a little lof, quickly, when
+I shall walk in the garden.” She turned away with a pretty wave of her
+fan to Demorest, and calling out, “I go to make an assignation with my
+memory,” laughed again, and lazily passed into the shadow. An ominous
+silence on the veranda followed, broken finally by Mrs. Demorest.
+
+“I don't think it was necessary for you to show your dislike to Dona
+Rosita quite so plainly,” she said, coldly, slightly accenting the
+Puritan stiffness, which any conjugal tete-a-tete lately revived in her
+manner.
+
+“I show dislike of Dona Rosita?” stammered Demorest, in surprise. “Come,
+Joan,” he added, with a forgiving smile, “you don't mean to imply that
+I dislike her because I couldn't get up a thrilling interest in an old
+story I've heard from every gossip in the pueblo since I can remember.”
+
+“It's not an old story to HER,” said Joan, dryly, “and even if it were,
+you might reflect that all people are not as anxious to forget the past
+as you are.”
+
+Demorest drew back to let the shaft glance by. “The story is old enough,
+at least for her to have had a dozen flirtations, as you know, since
+then,” he returned gently, “and I don't think she herself seriously
+believes in it. But let that pass. I am sorry I offended her. I had no
+idea of doing so. As a rule, I think she is not so easily offended. But
+I shall apologize to her.” He stopped and approached nearer his wife in
+a half-timid, half-tentative affection. “As to my forgetfulness of the
+past, Joan, even if it were true, I have had little cause to forget it
+lately. Your friend, Corwin--”
+
+“I must insist upon your not calling him MY friend, Richard,”
+ interrupted Joan, sharply, “considering that it was through YOUR
+indiscretion in coming to us for the buggy that night, that he
+suspected--”
+
+She stopped suddenly, for at that moment a startled little shriek,
+quickly subdued, rang through the garden. Demorest ran hurriedly down
+the steps in the direction of the outcry. Joan followed more cautiously.
+At the first turning of the path Dona Rosita almost fell into his arms.
+She was breathless and trembling, but broke into a hysterical laugh.
+
+“I have such a fear come to me--I cry out! I think I have seen a man;
+but it was nothing--nothing! I am a fool. It is no one here.”
+
+“But where did you see anything?” said Joan, coming up.
+
+Rosita flew to her side. “Where? Oh, here!--everywhere! Ah, I am a
+fool!” She was laughing now, albeit there were tears glistening on her
+lashes when she laid her head on Joan's shoulder.
+
+“It was some fancy--some resemblance you saw in that queer cactus,” said
+Demorest, gently. “It is quite natural, I was myself deceived the other
+night. But I'll look around to satisfy you. Take Dona Rosita back to the
+veranda, Joan. But don't be alarmed, dear--it was only an illusion.”
+
+He turned away. When his figure was lost in the entwining foliage, Dona
+Rosita seized Joan's shoulder and dragged her face down to a level with
+her own.
+
+“It was something!” she whispered quickly.
+
+“Who?”
+
+“It was--HIM!”
+
+“Nonsense,” groaned Joan, nevertheless casting a hurried glance around
+her.
+
+“Have no fear,” said Dona Rosita quickly, “he is gone--I saw him pass
+away--so! But it was HE--Huanson. I recognize him. I forget him never.”
+
+“Are you sure?”
+
+“Have I the eyes? the memory? Madre de Dios! Am I a lunatico too? Look!
+He have stood there--so.”
+
+“Then you think he knew you were here?”
+
+“Quien sabe?”
+
+“And that he came here to see you?”
+
+Dona Rosita caught her again by the shoulders, and with her lips to
+Joan's ear, said with the intensest and most deliberate of emphasis:
+
+“NO!”
+
+“What in Heaven's name brought him here then?”
+
+“You!”
+
+“Are you crazy?”
+
+“You! you! YOU!” repeated Dona Rosita, with crescendo energy. “I have
+come upon him here; where he stood and look at the veranda, absorrrb of
+YOU. You move--he fly.”
+
+“Hush!”
+
+“Ah, yes! I have said I give him to you. And he came, Bueno,” murmured
+Dona Rosita, with a half-resigned, half-superstitious gesture.
+
+“WILL you be quiet!”
+
+It was the sound of Demorest's feet on the gravel path, returning
+from his fruitless search. He had seen nothing. It must have been Dona
+Rosita's fancy.
+
+“She was just saying she thought she had been mistaken,” said Joan,
+quietly. “Let us go in--it is rather chilly here, and I begin to feel
+creepy too.”
+
+Nevertheless, as they entered the house again, and the light of the
+hall lantern fell upon her face, Demorest thought he had never but once
+before seen her look so nervously and animatedly beautiful.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The following day, when Mr. Ezekiel Corwin had delivered his letters of
+introduction, and thoroughly canvassed the scant mercantile community of
+San Buenaventura with considerable success, he deposited his carpet-bag
+at the stage office in the posada, and found to his chagrin that he had
+still two hours to wait before the coach arrived. After a vain attempt
+to impart cheerful but disparaging criticism of the pueblo and its
+people to Senor Mateo and his wife--whose external courtesy had been
+visibly increased by a line from Demorest, but whose confidence towards
+the stranger had not been extended in the same proportion--he gave it
+up, and threw himself lazily on a wooden bench in the veranda, already
+hacked with the initials of his countrymen, and drawing a jack-knife
+from his pocket, he began to add to that emblazonry the trade-mark of
+the Panacea--as a casual advertisement. During its progress, however,
+he was struck by the fact that while no one seemed to enter the posada
+through the stage office, the number of voices in the adjoining room
+seemed to increase, and the ministrations of Mateo and his wife became
+more feverishly occupied with their invisible guests. It seemed to
+Ezekiel that consequently there must be a second entrance which he had
+not seen, and this added to the circumstance that one or two lounging
+figures who had been approaching unaccountably disappeared before
+reaching the veranda, induced him to rise and examine the locality. A
+few paces beyond was an alley, but it appeared to be already blocked by
+several cigarette-smoking, short-jacketed men who were leaning against
+its walls, and showed no inclination to make way for him. Checked, but
+not daunted, Ezekiel coolly returned to the stage office, and taking the
+first opportunity when Mateo passed through the rear door, followed him.
+As he expected, the innkeeper turned to the left and entered a large
+room filled with tobacco smoke and the local habitues of the posada.
+But Ezekiel, shrewdly surmising that the private entrance must be in the
+opposite direction, turned to the right along the passage until he came
+unexpectedly upon the corridor of the usual courtyard, or patio, of
+every Mexican hostelry, closed at one end by a low adobe wall, in which
+there was a door. The free passage around the corridor was interrupted
+by wide partitions, fitted up with tables and benches, like stalls,
+opening upon the courtyard where a few stunted fig and orange trees
+still grew. As the courtyard seemed to be the only communication between
+the passage he had left and the door in the wall, he was about to cross
+it, when the voices of two men in the compartment struck his ears.
+Although one was evidently an American's, Ezekiel was instinctively
+convinced that they were speaking in English only for greater security
+against being understood by the frequenters of the posada. It is
+unnecessary to say that this was an innocent challenge to the curiosity
+of Ezekiel that he instantly accepted. He drew back carefully into the
+shadow of the partition as one of the voices asked--
+
+“Wasn't that Johnson just come in?”
+
+There was a movement as if some one had risen to look over the
+compartment, but the gathering twilight completely hid Ezekiel.
+
+“No!”
+
+“He's late. Suppose he don't come--or back out?”
+
+The other man broke into a grim laugh. “I reckon you don't know Johnson
+yet, or you'd understand this yer little game o' his is just the one
+idea o' his life. He's been two years on that man's track, and he ain't
+goin' to back out now that he's got a dead sure thing on him.”
+
+“But why is he so keen about it, anyway? It don't seem nat'ral for a
+business man built after Johnson's style, and a rich man to boot, to go
+into this detective business. It ain't the reward, we know that. Is it
+an old grudge?”
+
+“You bet!” The speaker paused, and then in a lower voice, which taxed
+Ezekial's keen ear to the uttermost, resumed: “It's said up in Frisco
+that Cherokee Bob knew suthin' agin Johnson way back in the States;
+anyhow, I believe it's understood that they came across the plains
+together in '50--and Bob hounded Johnson and blackmailed him here where
+he was livin', even to the point of makin' him help him on the road or
+give information, until one day Johnson bucked against it--kicked over
+the traces--and swore he'd be revenged on Bob, and then just settled
+himself down to that business. Wotever he'd been and done himself he
+made it all right with the sheriff here; and I've heard ez it wasn't
+anything criminal or that sort, but that it was o' some private trouble
+that he'd confided to that hound Bob, and Bob had threatened to tell
+agen him. That's the grudge they say Johnson has, and that's why he's
+allowed to be the head devil in this yer affair. It's an understood
+thing, too, that the sheriff and the police ain't goin' to interfere if
+Johnson accidentally blows the top of Bob's head off in the scrimmage of
+a capter.”
+
+“And I reckon Bob wouldn't hesitate to do the same thing to him when he
+finds out that Johnson has given him away?”
+
+“I reckon,” said the other, sententiously, “for it's Johnson's knowledge
+of the country and the hoss-stealers that are in with Bob's gang of road
+agents that made it easy for him to buy up and win over Bob's friends
+here, so that they'd help to trap him.”
+
+“It's pretty rough on Bob to be sold out in that way,” said the second
+speaker, sympathizingly.
+
+“If they were white men, p'rhaps,” returned his companion,
+contemptuously, “but this yer's a case of Injin agen Injin, ez the men
+are Mexican half-breeds just as Bob's a half Cherokee. The sooner that
+kind o' cross cattle exterminate each other the better it'll be for the
+country. It takes a white man like Johnson to set 'em by the ears.”
+
+A silence followed. Ezekiel, beginning to be slightly bored with his
+cheaply acquired but rather impractical information, was about to slip
+back into the passage again when he was arrested by a laugh from the
+first speaker.
+
+“What's the matter?” growled the other. “Do you want to bring the whole
+posada out here?”
+
+“I was only thinkin' what a skeer them innocent greenhorn passengers
+will get just ez they're snoozing off for the night, ten miles from
+here,” responded his friend, with a chuckle. “Wonder ef anybody's goin'
+up from here besides that patent medicine softy.”
+
+Ezekiel stopped as if petrified.
+
+“Ef the ---- fools keep quiet they won't be hurt, for our men will be
+ready to chip in the moment of the attack. But we've got to let the
+attack be made for the sake of the evidence. And if we warn off the
+passengers from going this trip, and let the stage go up empty, Bob
+would suspect something and vamose. But here's Johnson!”
+
+The door in the adobe wall had suddenly opened, and a figure in a serape
+entered the patio. Ezekiel, whose curiosity was whetted with indignation
+at the ignominious part assigned to him in this comedy, forgot even
+his risk of detection by the newcomer, who advanced quickly towards the
+compartment. When he had reached it he said, in a tone of bitterness:
+
+“The game is up, gentlemen, and the whole thing is blown. The scoundrel
+has got some confederate here--for he's been seen openly on the road
+near Demorest's ranch, and the band have had warning and dispersed. We
+must find out the traitor, and take our precautions for the next time.
+Who is that there? I don't know him.”
+
+He was pointing to Ezekiel, who had started eagerly forward at the first
+sound of his voice. The two occupants of the compartment rose at
+the same moment, leaped into the courtyard, and confronted Ezekiel.
+Surrounded by the three menacing figures he did not quail, but remained
+intently gazing upon the newcomer. Then his mouth opened, and he drawled
+lazily:
+
+“Wa'al, ef it ain't Squire Blandford, of North Liberty, Connecticut, I'm
+a treed coon. Squire Blandford, how DO you do?”
+
+The stranger drew back in undisguised amazement; the two men glanced
+hurriedly at each other; Ezekiel alone remained cool, smiling,
+imperturbable, and triumphant.
+
+“Who are YOU, sir? I do not know you,” demanded the newcomer, roughly.
+
+“Like ez not,” said Corwin dryly, “it's a matter o' four year sense I
+lived in your house. Even Dick Demorest--you knew Dick?--didn't know me;
+but I reckon that Mrs. Blandford as used to be--”
+
+“That's enough,” said Blandford--for it was he--suddenly mastering both
+himself and Corwin by a supreme emphasis of will and gesture. “Wait!”
+ Then turning to the two others who were discreetly regarding the
+blank adobe wall before them, he said: “Excuse me for a few minutes,
+gentlemen. There is no hurry now. I will see you later;” and with an
+imperative wave of his hand motioned Ezekiel to precede him into the
+passage, and followed him.
+
+He did not speak until they entered the stage office, when, passing
+through it, he said peremptorily: “Follow me.” The few loungers, who
+seemed to recognize him, made way for him with a singular deference that
+impressed Ezekiel, already dominated by his manner. The first perception
+in his mind was that Blandford had in some strange way succeeded to
+Demorest's former imperious character. There was no trace left of the
+old, gentle subjection to Joan's prim precision. Ezekiel followed him
+out of the office as unresistingly as he had followed Demorest into the
+stables on that eventful night. They passed down the narrow street until
+Blandford suddenly stopped short and turned into the crumbling doorway
+of one of the low adobe buildings and entered an apartment. It seemed
+to be the ordinary living-room of the house, made more domestic by
+the presence of a silk counterpaned bed in one corner, a prie Dieu and
+crucifix, and one or two articles of bedchamber furniture. A woman
+was sitting in deshabille by the window; a man was smoking on a lounge
+against the wall. Blandford, in the same peremptory manner, addressed
+a command in Spanish to the inmates, who immediately abandoned the
+apartment to the seeming trespasser.
+
+Motioning his companion to a seat on the lounge just vacated, Blandford
+folded his arms and stood erect before him.
+
+“Well,” he said, with quick, business conciseness, “what do you want?”
+
+Ezekiel was staggered out of his complacency.
+
+“Wa'al,” he stammered, “I only reckoned to ask the news, ez we are old
+friends--I--”
+
+“How much do you want?” repeated Blandford, impatiently.
+
+Ezekiel was mystified, yet expectant. “I can't say ez I exakly
+understand,” he began.
+
+“How--much--money--do--you--want,” continued Blandford, with frigid
+accuracy, “to get up and get out of this place?”
+
+“Wa'al, consideren ez I'm travellin' here ez the only authorized agent
+of a first-class Frisco Drug House,” said Ezekiel, with a mingling of
+mortification, pride, and hopefulness, “unless you're travellin' in the
+opposition business, I don't see what's that to you.”
+
+Blandford regarded him searchingly for an instant. “Who sent you here?”
+
+“Dilworth & Dusenberry, Battery Street, San Francisco. Hev their card?”
+ said Ezekiel, taking one from his waistcoat pocket.
+
+“Corwin,” said Blandford, sternly, “whatever your business is here
+you'll find it will pay you better, a ---- sight, to be frank with
+me and stop this Yankee shuffling. You say you have been with
+Demorest--what has HE got to do with your business here?”
+
+“Nothin',” said Ezekiel. “I reckon he wos ez astonished to see me ez you
+are.”
+
+“And didn't he send you here to seek me?” said Blandford, impatiently.
+
+“Considerin' he believes you a dead man, I reckon not.”
+
+Blandford gave a hard, constrained laugh. After a pause, still keeping
+his eyes fixed on Ezekiel, he said:
+
+“Then your recognition of me was accidental?”
+
+“Wa'al, yes. And ez I never took much stock in the stories that you were
+washed off the Warensboro Bridge, I ain't much astonished at finding you
+agin.”
+
+“What did you believe happened to me?” said Blandford, less brusquely.
+
+Ezekiel noticed the softening; he felt his own turn coming. “I
+kalkilated you had reasons for going off, leaving no address behind
+you,” he drawled.
+
+“What reasons?” asked Blandford, with a sudden relapse of his former
+harshness.
+
+“Wa'al, Squire Blandford, sens you wanter know--I reckon your business
+wasn't payin', and there was a matter of two hundred and fifty dollars
+ye took with ye, that your creditors would hev liked to hev back.”
+
+“Who dare say that?” demanded Blandford, angrily.
+
+“Your wife that was--Mrs. Demorest ez is--told it to her mother,”
+ returned Ezekiel, lazily.
+
+The blow struck deeper than even Ezekiel's dry malice imagined. For an
+instant, Blandford remained stupefied. In the five years' retrospect of
+his resolution on that fatal night, whatever doubt of its wisdom might
+have obtruded itself upon him, he had never thought of THIS. He had been
+willing to believe that his wife had quietly forgotten him as well as
+her treachery to him, he had passively acquiesced in the results of that
+forgetfulness and his own silence; he had been conscious that his
+wound had healed sooner than he expected, but if this consciousness
+had enabled him to extend a certain passive forgiveness to his wife
+and Demorest, it was always with the conviction that his mysterious
+effacement had left an inexplicable shadow upon them which their
+consciences alone could explain. But for this unjust, vulgar, and
+degrading interpretation of his own act of expiation, he was totally
+unprepared. It completely crushed whatever sentiment remained of that
+act in the horrible irony of finding himself put upon his defence before
+the world, without being able now to offer the real cause. The anguish
+of that night had gone forever; but the ridiculous interpretation of it
+had survived, and would survive it. In the eyes of the man before him
+he was not a wronged husband, but an absconding petty defaulter, whom he
+had just detected!
+
+His mind was quickly made up. In that instant he had resolved upon a
+step as fateful as his former one, and a fitting climax to its results.
+For five years he had clearly misunderstood his attitude towards his
+treacherous wife and perjured friend. Thanks to this practical, selfish
+machine before him, he knew it now.
+
+“Look here, Corwin,” he said, turning upon Ezekiel a colorless face,
+but a steady, merciless eye. “I can guess, without your telling me, what
+lies may be circulated about me by the man and woman who know that I
+have only to declare myself alive to convict them of infamy--perhaps
+even of criminality before the law. You are not MY friend, or you would
+not have believed them; if you are THEIRS, you have two courses open to
+you now. Keep this meeting to yourself and trust to my mercy to keep it
+a secret also; or, tell Mrs. Demorest that you have seen Mr. Johnson,
+who is not afraid to come forward at any moment and proclaim that he
+is Edward Blandford, her only lawful husband. Choose which course you
+like--it is nothing more to me.”
+
+“Wa'al, I reckon that, as far as I know Mrs. Demorest,” said Ezekiel,
+dryly, “it don't make the least difference to her either; but if you
+want to know my opinion o' this matter, it is that neither you nor
+Demorest exactly understand that woman. I've known Joan Salisbury since
+she was so high, but if ye expected me to tell you wot she was goin' to
+do next, I'd be able to tell ye where the next flash o' lightnin' would
+strike. It's wot you don't expect of Joan Salisbury that she does. And
+the best proof of it is that she filed papers for a divorce agin you
+in Chicago and got it by default a few weeks afore she married
+Demorest--and you don't know it.”
+
+Blandford recoiled. “Impossible,” he said, but his voice too plainly
+showed how clearly its possibility struck him now.
+
+“It's so, but it was kept secret by Deacon Salisbury. I overheerd it.
+Wa'al, that's a proof that you don't understand Joan, I reckon. And
+considerin' that Demorest HIMSELF don't know it, ez I found out only the
+other day in talking to him, I kalkilate I'm safe in sayin' that
+you're neither o' you quite up to Deacon Salisbury's darter in nat'ral
+cuteness. I don't like to obtrude my opinion, Squire Blandford, ez we're
+old friends, but I do say, that wot with Demorest's prematooriness and
+yer own hangfiredness, it's a good thing that you two worldly men hev
+got Joan Salisbury to stand up for North Liberty and keep it from bein'
+scandalized by the ungodly. Ef it hadn't been for her smartness, whar
+y'd both be landed now? There's a heap in Christian bringin' up, and a
+power in grace, Squire Blandford.”
+
+His hard, dry face was for an instant transfigured by a grim fealty and
+the dull glow of some sectarian clannishness. Or was it possible that
+this woman's personality had in some mysterious way disturbed his rooted
+selfishness?
+
+During his speech Blandford had walked to the window. When Corwin had
+ceased speaking, Blandford turned towards him with an equally changed
+face and cold imperturbability that astonished him, and held out his
+hand. “Let bygones be bygones, Corwin--whether we ever meet again or
+not. Yet if I can do anything for you for the sake of old times, I
+am ready to do it. I have some power here and in San Francisco,” he
+continued, with a slight touch of pride, “that isn't dependent upon the
+mere name I may travel under. I have a purpose in coming here.”
+
+“I know it,” said Ezekiel, dryly. “I heard it all from your two friends.
+You're huntin' some man that did you an injury.”
+
+“I'm hunting down a dog who, suspecting I had some secret in emigrating
+here, tried to blackmail and ruin me,” said Blandford, with a sudden
+expression of hatred that seemed inconsistent with anything that Ezekiel
+had ever known of his old master's character--“a scoundrel who tried to
+break up my new life as another had broken up the old.” He stopped and
+recovered himself with a short laugh. “Well, Ezekiel, I don't know as
+his opinion of me was any worse than yours or HERS. And until I catch
+HIM to clear my name again, I let the other slanderers go.”
+
+“Wa'al, I reckon you might lay hands on that devil yet, and not far
+away, either. I was up at Demorest's to-day, and I heard Joan and a
+skittish sort o' Mexican young lady talkin' about some tramp that had
+frightened her. And Miss Pico said--”
+
+“What! Who did you say?” demanded Blandford, with a violent start.
+
+“Wa'al, I reckoned I heerd the first name too--Rosita.”
+
+A quick flush crossed Blandford's face, and left it glowing like a
+boy's.
+
+“Is SHE there?”
+
+“Wa'al, I reckon she's visitin' Joan,” said Ezekiel, narrowly attentive
+of Blandford's strange excitement; “but wot of it?”
+
+But Blandford had utterly forgotten Ezekiel's presence. He had
+remained speechless and flushed. And then, as if suddenly dazzled by an
+inspiration, he abruptly dashed from the room. Ezekiel heard him call to
+his passive host with a Spanish oath, but before he could follow, they
+had both hurriedly left the house.
+
+Ezekiel glanced around him and contemplatively ran his fingers through
+his beard. “It ain't Joan Salisbury nor Dick Demorest ez giv' him that
+start! Humph! Wa'al--I wanter know!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Mrs. Demorest was so fascinated by the company of Dona Rosita Pico and
+her romantic memories, that she prevailed upon that heart-broken but
+scarcely attenuated young lady to prolong her visit beyond the fortnight
+she had allotted to communion with the past. For a day or two following
+her singular experience in the garden, Mrs. Demorest plied her with
+questions regarding the apparition she had seen, and finally extorted
+from her the admission that she could not positively swear to its being
+the real Johnson, or even a perfectly consistent shade of that faithless
+man. When Joan pointed out to her that such masculine perfections
+as curling raven locks, long silken mustachios, and dark eyes, were
+attributes by no means exclusive to her lover, but were occasionally
+seen among other less favored and even equally dangerous Americans, Dona
+Rosita assented with less objection than Joan anticipated. “Besides,
+dear,” said Joan, eying her with feline watchfulness, “it is four years
+since you've seen him, and surely the man has either shaved since, or
+else he took a ridiculous vow never to do it, and then he would be more
+fully bearded.”
+
+But Dona Rosita only shook her pretty head. “Ah, but he have an air--a
+something I know not what you call--so.” She threw her shawl over her
+left shoulder, and as far as a pair of soft blue eyes and comfortably
+pacific features would admit, endeavored to convey an idea of wicked and
+gloomy abstraction.
+
+“You child,” said Joan,--“that's nothing; they all of them do that. Why,
+there was a stranger at the Oriental Hotel whom I met twice when I was
+there--just as mysterious, romantic, and wicked-looking. And in fact
+they hinted terrible things about him. Well! so much so, that Mr.
+Demorest was quite foolish about my being barely civil to him--you
+understand--and--” She stopped suddenly, with a heightened color under
+the fire of Rosita's laughing eyes.
+
+“Ah--so--Dona Discretion! Tell to me all. Did our hoosband eat him?”
+
+Joan's features suddenly tightened to their old puritan rigidity. “Mr.
+Demorest has reasons--abundant reasons--to thoroughly understand and
+trust me,” she replied in an austere voice.
+
+Rosita looked at her a moment in mystification and then shrugged her
+shoulders. The conversation dropped. Nevertheless, it is worthy of being
+recorded that from that moment the usual familiar allusions, playful and
+serious, to Rosita's mysterious visitor began to diminish in frequency
+and finally ceased. Even the news brought by Demorest of some vague
+rumor in the pueblo that an intended attack on the stage-coach had been
+frustrated by the authorities, and that the vicinity had been haunted by
+incognitos of both parties, failed to revive the discussion.
+
+Meantime the slight excitement that had stirred the sluggish life of the
+pueblo of San Buenaventura had subsided. The posada of Senor Mateo
+had lost its feverish and perplexing dual life; the alley behind it
+no longer was congested by lounging cigarette smokers; the compartment
+looking upon the silent patio was unoccupied, and its chairs and tables
+were empty. The two deputy sheriffs, of whom Senor Mateo presumably
+knew very little, had fled; and the mysterious Senor Johnson, of whom
+he--still presumably--knew still less, had also disappeared. For Senor
+Mateo's knowledge of what transpired in and about his posada, and of
+the character and purposes of those who frequented it, was tinctured by
+grave and philosophical doubts. This courteous and dignified scepticism
+generally took the formula of quien sabe to all frivolous and mundane
+inquiry. He would affirm with strict verity that his omelettes were
+unapproachable, his beds miraculous, his aguardiente supreme, his house
+was even as your own. Beyond these were questions with which the simply
+finite and always discreet human intellect declined to grapple.
+
+The disturbing effect of Senor Corwin upon a mind thus gravely
+constituted may be easily imagined. Besides Ezekiel's inordinate
+capacity for useless or indiscreet information, it was undeniable that
+his patent medicines had effected a certain peaceful revolutionary
+movement in San Buenaventura. A simple and superstitious community that
+had steadily resisted the practical domestic and agricultural American
+improvements, succumbed to the occult healing influences of the Panacea
+and Jones's Bitters. The virtues of a mysterious balsam, more or less
+illuminated with a colored mythological label, deeply impressed them;
+and the exhibition of a circular, whereon a celestial visitant was
+represented as descending with a gross of Rogers' Pills to a suffering
+but admiring multitude, touched their religious sympathies to such an
+extent that the good Padre Jose was obliged to warn them from the pulpit
+of the diabolical character of their heresies of healing--with the
+natural result of yet more dangerously advertising Ezekiel. There were
+those too who spoke under their breath of the miraculous efficacy
+of these nostrums. Had not Don Victor Arguello, whose respectable
+digestion, exhausted by continuous pepper and garlic, failed him
+suddenly, received an unexpected and pleasurable stimulus from the
+New England rum, which was the basis of the Jones Bitters? Had not the
+baker, tremulous from excessive aguardiente, been soothed and sustained
+by the invisible morphia, judiciously hidden in Blogg's Nerve Tonic?
+Nor had the wily Ezekiel forgotten the weaker sex in their maiden
+and maternal requirements. Unguents, that made silken their black but
+somewhat coarsely fibrous tresses, opened charming possibilities to
+the Senoritas; while soothing syrups lent a peaceful repose to many a
+distracted mother's household. The success of Ezekiel was so marked as
+to justify his return at the end of three weeks with a fresh assortment
+and an undiminished audacity.
+
+It was on his second visit that the sceptical, non-committal policy of
+Senor Mateo was sorely tried. Arriving at the posada one night, Ezekiel
+became aware that his host was engaged in some mysterious conference
+with a visitor who had entered through the ordinary public room. The
+view which the acute Ezekiel managed to get of the stranger, however,
+was productive of no further discovery than that he bore a faint
+and disreputable resemblance to Blandford, and was handsome after a
+conscious, reckless fashion, with an air of mingled bravado and conceit.
+But an hour later, as Corwin was taking the cooler air of the veranda
+before retiring to one of the miraculous beds of the posada, he was
+amazed at seeing what was apparently Blandford himself emerge on
+horseback from the alley, and after a quick glance towards the veranda,
+canter rapidly up the street. Ezekiel's first impression was to call to
+him, but the sudden recollection that he parted from his old master on
+confidential terms only three days before in San Francisco, and that it
+was impossible for him to be in the pueblo, stopped him with his fingers
+meditatively in his beard. Then he turned in to the posada, and hastily
+summoned Mateo.
+
+The gentleman presented himself in a state of such profound scepticism
+that it seemed to have already communicated itself to his shoulders, and
+gave him the appearance of having shrugged himself into the room.
+
+“Ha'ow long ago did Mr. Johnson get here?” asked Corwin, lazily.
+
+“Ah--possibly--then there has been a Mr. Johnson?” This is a polite
+doubt of his own perceptions and a courteous acceptance of his
+questioner's.
+
+“Wa'al, I guess so. Considerin' I jest saw him with my own eyes,”
+ returned Ezekiel.
+
+“Ah!” Mateo was relieved. Might he congratulate the Senor Corwin, who
+must be also relieved, and shake his respected hand. Bueno. And then he
+had met this Senor Johnson? doubtless a friend? And he was well? and all
+were happy?
+
+“Look yer, Mattayo! What I wanter know ez THIS. When did that man, who
+has just ridden out of your alley, come here? Sabe that--it's a plain
+question.”
+
+Ah surely, of the clearest comprehension. Bueno. It may have been last
+week--or even this week--or perhaps yesterday--or of a possibility
+to-day. The Senor Corwin, who was wise and omniscient, would comprehend
+that the difficulty lay in deciding WHO was that man. Perhaps a friend
+of the Senor Corwin--perhaps only one who LOOKED like him. There
+existed--might Mateo point out--a doubt.
+
+Ezekiel regarded Mateo with a certain grim appreciation. “Wa'al, is
+there anybody here who looks like Johnson?”
+
+Again there were the difficulty of ascertaining perfectly how the Senor
+Johnson looked. If the Senor Johnson was Americano, doubtless there
+were other Americanos who had resembled him. It was possible. The Senor
+Corwin had doubtless observed for a little space a caballero who was
+here, as it were, in the instant of the appearance of Senor Johnson?
+Possibly there was a resemblance, and yet--
+
+Corwin had certainly noticed this resemblance, but it did not suit his
+cautious intellect to fall in with any prevailing scepticism of his
+host. Satisfied in his mind that Mateo was concealing something from
+him, and equally satisfied that he would sooner or later find it out,
+he grinned diabolically in the face of that worthy man, and sought the
+meditation of his miraculous couch. When he had departed, the sceptic
+turned to his wife:
+
+“This animal has been sniffing at the trail.”
+
+“Truly--but Mother of God--where is the discretion of our friend. If he
+will continue to haunt the pueblo like a lovesick chicken, he will get
+his neck wrung yet.”
+
+Following out an ingenious idea of his own, Ezekiel called the next day
+on the Demorests, and in some occult fashion obtained an invitation to
+stay under their hospitable roof during his sojourn in Buenaventura.
+Perfectly aware that he owed this courtesy more to Joan than to her
+husband, it is probable that his grim enjoyment was not diminished by
+the fact; while Joan, for reasons of her own, preferred the constraint
+which the presence of another visitor put upon Demorest's uxoriousness.
+Of late, too, there were times when Dona Rosita's naive intelligence,
+which was not unlike the embarrassing perceptions of a bright and
+half-spoiled child, was in her way, and she would willingly have
+shared the young lady's company with her husband had Demorest shown any
+sympathy for the girl. It was in the faint hope that Ezekiel might in
+some way beguile Rosita's wandering attention that she had invited him.
+The only difficulty lay in his uncouthness, and in presenting to the
+heiress of the Picos a man who had been formerly her own servant. Had
+she attempted to conceal that fact she was satisfied that Ezekiel's
+independence and natural predilection for embarrassing situations would
+have inevitably revealed it. She had even gone so far as to consider the
+propriety of investing him with a poor relationship to her family, when
+Dona Rosita herself happily stopped all further trouble. On her very
+first introduction to him, that charming young lady at once accepted him
+as a lunatic whose brains were turned by occult, scientific, and medical
+study! Ah! she, Rosita, had heard of such cases before. Had not a
+paternal ancestor of hers, one Don Diego Castro, believed he had
+discovered the elixir of youth. Had he not to that end refused even to
+wash him the hand, to cut him the nail of the finger and the hair of
+the head! Exalted by that discovery, had he not been unsparingly
+uncomplimentary to all humanity, especially to the weaker sex? Even as
+the Senor Corwin!
+
+Far from being offended at this ingenious interpretation of his
+character, Ezekiel exhibited a dry gratification over it, and even
+conceived an unwholesome admiration of the fair critic; he haunted her
+presence and preoccupied her society far beyond Joan's most sanguine
+expectations. He sat in open-mouthed enjoyment of her at the table,
+he waylaid her in the garden, he attempted to teach her English. Dona
+Rosita received these extraordinary advances in a no less extraordinary
+manner. In the scant masculine atmosphere of the house, and the somewhat
+rigid New England reserve that still pervaded it, perhaps she languished
+a little, and was not averse to a slight flirtation, even with a madman.
+Besides, she assumed the attitude of exercising a wholesome restraint
+over him. “If we are not found dead in our bed one morning, and
+extracted of our blood for a cordial, you shall thank to me for it,” she
+said to Joan. “Also for the not empoisoning of the coffee!”
+
+So she permitted him to carry a chair or hammock for her into the
+garden, to fetch the various articles which she was continually losing,
+and which he found with his usual penetration; and to supply her with
+information, in which, however, he exercised an unwonted caution. On
+the other hand, certain naive recollections and admissions, which in the
+quality of a voluble child she occasionally imparted to this “madman” in
+return, were in the proportion of three to one.
+
+It had been a hot day, and even the usual sunset breeze had failed that
+evening to rock the tops of the outlying pine-trees or cool the heated
+tiles of the pueblo roofs. There was a hush and latent expectancy in the
+air that reacted upon the people with feverish unrest and uneasiness;
+even a lull in the faintly whispering garden around the Demorests' casa
+had affected the spirits of its inmates, causing them to wander about
+in vague restlessness. Joan had disappeared; Dona Rosita, under an
+olive-tree in one of the deserted paths, and attended by the faithful
+Ezekiel, had said it was “earthquake weather,” and recalled, with a sign
+of the cross, a certain dreadful day of her childhood, when el temblor
+had shaken down one of the Mission towers. “You shall see it now, as
+he have left it so it has remain always,” she added with superstitious
+gravity.
+
+“That's just the lazy shiftlessness of your folks,” responded Ezekiel
+with prompt ungallantry. “It ain't no wonder the Lord Almighty hez to
+stir you up now and then to keep you goin'.”
+
+Dona Rosita gazed at him with simple childish pity. “Poor man; it have
+affect you also in the head, this weather. So! It was even so with
+the uncle of my father. Hush up yourself, and bring to me the box of
+chocolates of my table. I will gif to you one. You shall for one time
+have something pleasant on the end of your tongue, even if you must
+swallow him after.”
+
+Ezekiel grinned. “Ye ain't afraid o' bein' left alone with the ghost
+that haunts the garden, Miss Rosita?”
+
+“After YOU--never-r-r.”
+
+“I'll find Mrs. Demorest and send her to ye,” said Ezekiel,
+hesitatingly.
+
+“Eh, to attract here the ghost? Thank you, no, very mooch.”
+
+Ezekiel's face contracted until nothing but his bright peering gray eyes
+could be seen. “Attract the ghost!” he echoed. “Then you kalkilate that
+it's--” he stopped, insinuatingly.
+
+Rosita brought her fan sharply over his knuckles, and immediately opened
+it again over her half-embarrassed face. “I comprehend not anything to
+'ekalkilate.' WILL you go, Don Fantastico; or is it for me to bring to
+you?”
+
+Ezekiel flew. He quickly found the chocolates and returned, but was
+disconcerted on arriving under the olive-tree to find Dona Rosita no
+longer in the hammock. He turned into a by-path, where an extraordinary
+circumstance attracted his attention. The air was perfectly still, but
+the leaves of a manzanita bush near the misshapen cactus were slightly
+agitated. Presently Ezekiel saw the stealthy figure of a man emerge from
+behind it and approach the cactus. Reaching his hand cautiously towards
+the plant, the stranger detached something from one of its thorns, and
+instantly disappeared. The quick eyes of Ezekiel had seen that it was a
+letter, his unerring perception of faces recognized at the same moment
+that the intruder was none other than the handsome, reckless-looking man
+he had seen the other day in conference with Mateo.
+
+But Ezekiel was not the only witness of this strange intrusion. A few
+paces from him, Dona Rosita, unconscious of his return, was gazing in
+a half-frightened, breathless absorption in the direction of the
+stranger's flight.
+
+“Wa'al!” drawled Ezekiel lazily.
+
+She started and turned towards him. Her face was pale and alarmed, and
+yet to the critical eye of Ezekiel it seemed to wear an expression of
+gratified relief. She laughed faintly.
+
+“Ef that's the kind o' ghost you hev about yer, it's a healthy one,”
+ drawled Ezekiel. He turned and fixed his keen eyes on Rosita's face. “I
+wonder what kind o' fruit grows on the cactus that he's so fond of?”
+
+Either she had not seen the abstraction of the letter, or his acting was
+perfect, for she returned his look unwaveringly. “The fruit, eh? I have
+not comprehend.”
+
+“Wa'al, I reckon I will,” said Ezekiel. He walked towards the cactus;
+there was nothing to be seen but its thorny spikes. He was confronted,
+however, by the sudden apparition of Joan from behind the manzanita at
+its side. She looked up and glanced from Ezekiel to Dona Rosita with an
+agitated air.
+
+“Oh, you saw him too?” she said eagerly.
+
+“I reckon,” answered Ezekiel, with his eyes still on Rosita. “I was
+wondering what on airth he was so taken with that air cactus for.”
+
+Rosita had become slightly pale again in the presence of her friend.
+Joan quietly pushed Ezekiel aside and put her arm around her. “Are you
+frightened again?” she asked, in a low whisper.
+
+“Not mooch,” returned Rosita, without lifting her eyes.
+
+“It was only some peon, trespassing to pick blossoms for his
+sweetheart,” she said significantly, with a glance towards Ezekiel. “Let
+us go in.”
+
+She passed her hand through Rosita's passive arm and led her towards
+the house, Ezekiel's penetrating eyes still following Rosita with an
+expression of gratified doubt.
+
+For once, however, that astute observer was wrong. When Mrs. Demorest
+had reached the house she slipped into her own room, and, bolting the
+door, drew from her bosom a letter which SHE had picked from the cactus
+thorn, and read it with a flushed face and eager eyes.
+
+It may have been the effect of the phenomenal weather, but the next day
+a malign influence seemed to pervade the Demorest household. Dona Rosita
+was confined to her room by an attack of languid nerves, superinduced,
+as she was still voluble enough to declare, by the narcotic effect of
+some unknown herb which the lunatic Ezekiel had no doubt mysteriously
+administered to her with a view of experimenting on its properties. She
+even avowed that she must speedily return to Los Osos, before Ezekiel
+should further compromise her reputation by putting her on a colored
+label in place of the usual Celestial Distributer of the Panacea.
+Ezekiel himself, who had been singularly abstracted and reticent,
+and had absolutely foregone one or two opportunities of disagreeable
+criticism, had gone to the pueblo early that morning. The house was
+comparatively silent and deserted when Demorest walked into his wife's
+boudoir.
+
+It was a pretty room, looking upon the garden, furnished with a singular
+mingling of her own inherited formal tastes and the more sensuous
+coloring and abandon of her new life. There were a great many rugs
+and hangings scattered in disorder around the room, and apparently
+purposeless, except for color; there was a bamboo lounge as large as a
+divan, with two or three cushions disposed on it, and a low chair that
+seemed the incarnation of indolence. Opposed to this, on the wall, was
+the rigid picture of her grandfather, who had apparently retired with
+his volume further into the canvas before the spectacle of this ungodly
+opulence; a large Bible on a funereal trestle-like stand, and the
+primmest and barest of writing-tables, before which she was standing as
+at a sacrificial altar. With an almost mechanical movement she closed
+her portfolio as her husband entered, and also shut the lid of a
+small box with a slight snap. This suggested exclusion of him from her
+previous occupation, whatever it might have been, caused a faint shadow
+of pain to pass across his loving eyes. He cast a glance at his wife
+as if mutely asking her to sit beside him, but she drew a chair to the
+table, and with her elbow resting on the box, resignedly awaited his
+speech.
+
+“I don't mean to disturb you, darling,” he said, gently, “but as we were
+alone, I thought we might have one of our old-fashioned talks, and--”
+
+“Don't let it be so old-fashioned as to include North Liberty again,”
+ she interrupted, wearily. “We've had quite enough of that since I
+returned.”
+
+“I thought you found fault with me then for forgetting the past. But
+let that pass, dear; it is not OUR affairs I wanted to talk to you about
+now,” he said, stifling a sigh, “it's about your friend. Please don't
+misunderstand what I am going to say; nor that I interpose except from
+necessity.”
+
+She turned her dark brown eyes in his direction, but her glance passed
+abstractedly over his head into the garden.
+
+“It's a matter perfectly well known to me--and, I fear, to all our
+servants also--that somebody is making clandestine visits to our garden.
+I would not trouble you before, until I ascertained the object of these
+visits. It is quite plain to me now that Dona Rosita is that object, and
+that communications are secretly carried on between her and some unknown
+stranger. He has been here once or twice before; he was here again
+yesterday. Ezekiel saw him and saw her.”
+
+“Together?” asked Mrs. Demorest, sharply.
+
+“No; but it was evident that there was some understanding, and that some
+communication passed between them.”
+
+“Well?” said Mrs. Demorest, with repressed impatience.
+
+“It is equally evident, Joan, that this stranger is a man who does not
+dare to approach your friend in her own house, nor more openly in this;
+but who, with her connivance, uses us to carry on an intrigue which may
+be perfectly innocent, but is certainly compromising to all concerned.
+I am quite willing to believe that Dona Rosita is only romantic and
+reckless, but that will not prevent her from becoming a dupe of some
+rascal who dare not face us openly, and who certainly does not act as
+her equal.”
+
+“Well, Rosita is no chicken, and you are not her guardian.”
+
+There was a vague heartlessness, more in her voice than in her words,
+that touched him as her cold indifference to himself had never done,
+and for an instant stung his crushed spirit to revolt. “No” he said,
+sternly, “but I am her father's FRIEND, and I shall not allow his
+daughter to be compromised under my roof.”
+
+Her eyes sprang up to meet his in hatred as promptly as they once had
+met in love. “And since when, Richard Demorest, have you become so
+particular?” she began, with dry asperity. “Since you lured ME from the
+side of my wedded husband? Since you met ME clandestinely in trains and
+made love to ME under an assumed name? Since you followed ME to my house
+under the pretext of being my husband's friend, and forced me--yes,
+forced me--to see you secretly under my mother's roof? Did you think of
+compromising ME then? Did you think of ruining my reputation, of driving
+my husband from his home in despair? Did you call yourself a rascal
+then? Did you--”
+
+“Stop!” he said, in a voice that shook the rafters; “I command you,
+stop!”
+
+She had gradually worked herself from a deliberately insulting precision
+into an hysterical, and it is to be feared a virtuous, conviction of
+her wrongs. Beginning only with the instinct to taunt and wound the man
+before her, she had been led by a secret consciousness of something else
+he did not know to anticipate his reproach and justify herself in a wild
+feminine abandonment of emotion. But she stopped at his words. For a
+moment she was even thrilled again by the strength and imperiousness she
+had loved.
+
+They were facing each other after five years of mistaken passion, even
+as they had faced each other that night in her mother's kitchen. But the
+grave of that dead passion yawned between them. It was Joan who broke
+the silence, that after her single outburst seemed to fill and oppress
+the room.
+
+“As far as Rosita is concerned,” she said, with affected calmness, “she
+is going to-night. And you probably will not be troubled any longer by
+your mysterious visitor.”
+
+Whether he heeded the sarcastic significance of her last sentence, or
+even heard her at all, he did not reply. For a moment he turned his
+blazing eyes full upon her, and then without a word strode from the
+room.
+
+She walked to the door and stood uneasily listening in the passage until
+she heard the clatter of hoofs in the paved patio, and knew that he had
+ordered his horse. Then she turned back relieved to her room.
+
+It was already sunset when Demorest drew rein again at the entrance
+of the corral, and the last stroke of the Angelus was ringing from
+the Mission tower. He looked haggard and exhausted, and his horse was
+flecked with foam and dirt. Wherever he had been, or for what object, or
+whether, objectless and dazed, he had simply sought to lose himself in
+aimlessly wandering over the dry yellow hills or in careering furiously
+among his own wild cattle on the arid, brittle plain; whether he had
+beaten all thought from his brain with the jarring leap of his horse, or
+whether he had pursued some vague and elusive determination to his own
+door, is not essential to this brief chronicle. Enough that when he
+dismounted he drew a pistol from his holster and replaced it in his
+pocket.
+
+He had just pushed open the gate of the corral as he led in his horse
+by the bridle, when he noticed another horse tethered among some cotton
+woods that shaded the outer wall of his garden. As he gazed, the figure
+of a man swung lightly from one of the upper boughs of a cotton-wood
+on the wall and disappeared on the other side. It was evidently the
+clandestine visitor. Demorest was in no mood for trifling. Hurriedly
+driving his horse into the enclosure with a sharp cut of his riata, he
+closed the gate upon him, slipped past the intervening space into the
+patio, and then unnoticed into the upper part of the garden. Taking a
+narrow by-path in the direction of the cotton woods that could be seen
+above the wall, he presently came in sight of the object of his search
+moving stealthily towards the house. It was the work of a moment only to
+dash forward and seize him, to find himself engaged in a sharp wrestle,
+to half draw his pistol as he struggled with his captive in the open.
+But once in the clearer light, he started, his grasp of the stranger
+relaxed, and he fell back in bewildered terror.
+
+“Edward Blandford! Good God!”
+
+The pistol had dropped from his hand as he leaned breathless against a
+tree. The stranger kicked the weapon contemptuously aside. Then quietly
+adjusting his disordered dress, and picking the brambles from his
+sleeve, he said with the same air of disdain, “Yes! Edward Blandford,
+whom you thought dead! There! I'm not a ghost--though you tried to make
+me one this time,” he said, pointing to the pistol.
+
+Demorest passed his hand across his white face. “Then it's you--and you
+have come here for--for--Joan?”
+
+“For Joan?” echoed Blandford, with a quick scornful laugh, that made the
+blood flow back into Demorest's face as from a blow, and recalled his
+scattered senses. “For Joan,” he repeated. “Not much!”
+
+The two men were facing each other in irreconcilable yet confused
+antagonism. Both were still excited and combative from their late
+physical struggle, but with feelings so widely different that it would
+have been impossible for either to have comprehended the other. In the
+figure that had apparently risen from the dead to confront him, Demorest
+only saw the man he had unconsciously wronged--the man who had it in his
+power to claim Joan and exact a terrible retribution! But it was part of
+this monstrous and irreconcilable situation that Blandford had ceased
+to contemplate it, and in his preoccupation only saw the actual
+interference of a man whom he no longer hated, but had begun to pity and
+despise.
+
+He glanced coolly around him. “Whatever we've got to say to each other,”
+ he said deliberately, “had better not be overheard. At least what I have
+got to say to you.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Demorest, now as self-possessed as his adversary, haughtily waved his
+hand towards the path. They walked on in silence, without even looking
+at each other, until they reached a small summer-house that stood in the
+angle of the wall. Demorest entered. “We cannot be heard here,” he said
+curtly.
+
+“And we can see what is going on. Good,” said Blandford, coolly
+following him. The summer-house contained a bench and a table. Blandford
+seated himself on the bench. Demorest remained standing beside the
+table. There was a moment's silence.
+
+“I came here with no desire to see you or avoid you,” said Blandford,
+with cold indifference. “A few weeks ago I might perhaps have avoided
+you, for your own sake. But since then I have learned that among the
+many things I owe to--to your wife is the fact that five years ago she
+secretly DIVORCED ME, and that consequently my living presence could
+neither be a danger nor a menace to you. I see,” he added, dryly, with
+a quick glance at Demorest's horror-stricken face, “that I was also told
+the truth when they said you were as ignorant of the divorce as I was.”
+
+He stopped, half in pity of his adversary's shame, half in surprise of
+his own calmness. Five years before, in the tumultuous consciousness of
+his wrongs, he would have scarcely trusted himself face to face with
+the cooler and more self-controlled Demorest. He wondered at and partly
+admired his own coolness now, in the presence of his enemy's confusion.
+
+“As your mind is at rest on that point,” he continued, sarcastically,
+“I don't suppose you care to know what became of ME when I left North
+Liberty. But as it happens to have something to do with my being here
+to-night, and is a part of my business with you, you'll have to listen
+to it. Sit down! Very well, then--stand up! It's your own house.”
+
+His half cynical, wholly contemptuous ignoring of the real issue between
+them was more crushing to Demorest than the keenest reproach or most
+tragic outburst. He did not lift his eyes as Blandford resumed in a dry,
+business-like way:
+
+“When I came across the plains to California, I fell in with a man about
+my own age--an emigrant also. I suppose I looked and acted like a crazy
+fool through all the journey, for he satisfied himself that I had some
+secret reason for leaving the States, and suspected that I was, like
+himself--a criminal. I afterwards learned that he was an escaped thief
+and assassin. Well, he played upon me all the way here, for I didn't
+care to reveal my real trouble to him, lest it should get back to North
+liberty--” He interrupted himself with a sarcastic laugh. “Of course,
+you understand that all this while Joan was getting her divorce unknown
+to me, and you were marrying her--yet as I didn't know anything about it
+I let him compromise me to save her. But”--he stopped, his eye kindled,
+and, losing his self-control in what to Demorest seemed some incoherent
+passion, went on excitedly: “that man continued his persecution
+HERE--yes, HERE, in this very house, where I was a trusted and honored
+guest, and threatened to expose me to a pure, innocent, simple girl
+who had taken pity on me--unless I helped him in a conspiracy of
+cattle-stealers and road agents, of which he was chief. I was such a
+cursed sentimental fool then, that believing him capable of doing this,
+believing myself still the husband of that woman, your wife, and to
+spare that innocent girl the shame of thinking me a villain, I purchased
+his silence by consenting. May God curse me for it!”
+
+He had started to his feet with flashing eyes, and the indication of an
+overmastering passion that to Demorest, absorbed only in the stupefying
+revelation of his wife's divorce and the horrible doubt it implied,
+seemed utterly vacant and unmeaning.
+
+He had often dreamed of Blandford as standing before him, reproachful,
+indignant, and even desperate over his wife's unfaithfulness; but
+this insane folly and fury over some trivial wrong done to that plump,
+baby-faced, flirting Dona Rosita, crushed him by its unconscious but
+degrading obliteration of Joan and himself more than the most violent
+denunciation. Dazed and bewildered, yet with the instinct of a helpless
+man, he clung only to that part of Blandford's story which indicated
+that he had come there for Rosita, and not to separate him from Joan,
+and even turned to his former friend with a half-embarrassed gesture of
+apology as he stammered--
+
+“Then it was YOU who were Rosita's lover, and you who have been here
+to see her. Forgive me, Ned--if I had only known it.” He stopped and
+timidly extended his hand. But Blandford put it aside with a cold
+gesture and folded his arms.
+
+“You have forgotten all you ever knew of me, Demorest! I am not in
+the habit of making clandestine appointments with helpless women whose
+natural protectors I dare not face. I have never pursued an innocent
+girl to the house I dared not enter. When I found that I could not
+honorably retain Dona Rosita's affection, I fled her roof. When I
+believed that even if I broke with this scoundrel--as I did--I was still
+legally if not morally tied to your wife, and could not marry Rosita, I
+left her never to return. And I tore my heart out to do it.”
+
+The tears were standing in his eyes. Demorest regarded him again with
+vacant wonder. Tears!--not for Joan's unfaithfulness to him--but for
+this silly girl's transitory sentimentalism. It was horrible!
+
+And yet what was Joan to Blandford now? Why should he weep for the woman
+who had never loved him--whom he loved no longer? The woman who had
+deceived him--who had deceived them BOTH. Yes! for Joan must have
+suspected that Blandford was living to have sought her secret
+divorce--and yet she had never told him--him--the man for whom she got
+it. Ah! he must not forget THAT! It was to marry him that she had taken
+that step. It was perhaps a foolish caution--a mistaken reservation; but
+it was the folly--the mistake of a loving woman. He hugged this belief
+the closer, albeit he was conscious at the same time of following
+Blandford's story of his alienated affection with a feeling of wonder
+and envy.
+
+“And what was the result of this touching sacrifice?” continued
+Blandford, trying to resume his former cynical indifference. “I'll tell
+you. This scoundrel set himself about to supplant me. Taking advantage
+of my absence, his knowledge that her affection for me was heightened by
+the mystery of my life, and trusting to profit by a personal resemblance
+he is said to bear to me, he began to haunt her. Lately he has grown
+bolder, and he dared even to communicate with her here. For it is he,”
+ he continued, again giving way to his passion, “this dog, this sneaking
+coward, who visits the place unknown to you, and thinks to entrap the
+poor girl through her memory of me. And it is he that I came here to
+prevent, to expose--if necessary to kill! Don't misunderstand me. I have
+made myself a deputy of the law for that purpose. I've a warrant in my
+pocket, and I shall take him, this mongrel, half-breed Cherokee Bob, by
+fair means or foul!”
+
+The energy and presence of his passion was so infectious that it
+momentarily swept away Demorest's doubts of the past. “And I will help
+you, before God, Blandford,” he said eagerly. “And Joan shall, too. She
+will find out from Rosita how far--”
+
+“Thank you,” interrupted Blandford, dryly; “but your wife has already
+interfered in this matter, to my cost. It is to her, I believe, I owe
+this wretch's following Rosita here. She already knows this man--has met
+him twice in San Francisco; he even boasts of YOUR jealousy. You know
+best how far he lied.”
+
+But Demorest had braced himself against the chill sensation that had
+begun to creep over him as Blandford spoke. He nerved himself and said,
+proudly, “I forbade her knowing him on account of his reputation solely.
+I have no reason to believe she has ever even wished to disobey me.”
+
+A smile of scorn that had kindled in Blandford's eyes, darkened with a
+swift shadow of compassion as he glanced at Demorest's hard, ashen
+face. He held out his hand with a sudden impulse. “Enough, I accept your
+offer, and shall put it to the test this very night. I know--if you do
+not--that Rosita is to leave here for Los Osos an hour from now in a
+private carriage, which your wife has ordered especially for her. The
+same information tells me that this villain and another of his gang will
+be in wait for the carriage three miles out of the pueblo to attack it
+and carry off the young girl.”
+
+“Are you mad!” said Demorest, in unfeigned amazement. “Do you believe
+them capable of attacking a private carriage and carrying off a
+solitary, defenceless woman? Come, Blandford, this is a school-girl
+romance--not an act of mercenary highwaymen--least of all Cherokee Bob
+and his gang. This is some madness of Rosita's, surely,” he continued
+with a forced laugh.
+
+“Does this mean that you think better of your promise?” asked Blandford,
+dryly.
+
+“I said I was at your service,” said Demorest, reproachfully.
+
+“Then hear my plan to prevent it, and yet take that dog in the act,”
+ said Blandford. “But we must first wait here till the last moment to
+ascertain if he makes any signal to show that his plan is altered,
+or that he has discovered he is watched.” He turned, and in his
+preoccupation laid his hand for an instant upon Demorest's shoulder with
+the absent familiarity of old days. Unconscious as the action was, it
+thrilled them both--from its very unconsciousness--and impelled them to
+throw themselves into the new alliance with such feverish and excited
+activity in order to preclude any dangerous alien reflection, that when
+they rose a few moments later and cautiously left the garden arm-in-arm
+through the outer gates, no one would have believed they had ever been
+estranged, least of all the clever woman who had separated them.
+
+
+It was nearly nine o'clock when the two friends, accompanied by the
+sheriff of the county, left San Buenaventura turnpike and turned into
+a thicket of alders to wait the coming of the carriage they were to
+henceforth follow cautiously and unseen in a parallel trail to the main
+road. The moon had risen, and with it the long withheld wind that now
+swept over the distant stretch of gleaming road and partly veiled it
+at times with flying dust unchecked by any dew from the clear cold sky.
+Demorest shivered even with his ready hand on his revolver. Suddenly the
+sheriff uttered an exclamation of disgust.
+
+“Blasted if thar ain't some one in the road between us and their
+ambush.”
+
+“It's one of their gang--scouting. Lie close.”
+
+“Scout be darned. Look at him bucking round there in the dust. He can't
+even ride! It's some blasted greenhorn taking a pasear on a hoss for the
+first time. Damnation! he's ruined everything. They'll take the alarm.”
+
+“I'll push on and clear him out,” said Blandford, excitedly. “Even if
+they're off, I may yet get a shot at the Cherokee.”
+
+“Quick then,” said Demorest, “for here comes the carriage.” He pointed
+to a dark spot on the road occasionally emerging from the driven dust
+clouds.
+
+In another moment Blandford was at the heels of the awkward horseman,
+who wheeled clumsily at his approach and revealed the lank figure of
+Ezekiel Corwin!
+
+“You here!” said Blandford, in stupefied fury.
+
+“Wa'al, yes, squire,” said Ezekiel lazily, in spite of his uneasy seat.
+“I kalkilated ef there was suthin' goin' on, I'd like to see it.”
+
+“You cursed prying fool! you've spoiled all. There!” he shouted
+despairingly, as the quick clatter of hoofs rang from the arroyo behind
+them, “there they go! That's your work, blockhead! Out of my way, or by
+God--” but the sentence was left unfinished as, joined by the sheriff,
+who had galloped up at the sound of the robbers' flight, he darted past
+the unconcerned Ezekiel. Demorest would have followed, but Blandford,
+with a warning cry to him to remain and protect the carriage, halted him
+at the side of Corwin as the vehicle now rapidly approached.
+
+But Ezekiel was before him even then, and as the driver pulled up, that
+inquiring man tumbled from his horse, ran to the door and opened it.
+Demorest rode up, glanced into the carriage, and fell back in blank
+amazement.
+
+It was his wife who was sitting there alone, pale, erect, and beautiful.
+By some illusion of the moonlight, her face and figure, covered with
+soft white wrappings for a journey, looked as he remembered to have seen
+her the first night they had met in the Boston train. The picture was
+completed by the traveling bag and rug that lay on the seat before her.
+Another terrible foreboding seized him; his brain reeled. Was he going
+mad?
+
+“Joan!” he stammered. “You? What is the meaning of this?”
+
+Ezekiel whom but for his dazed condition he might have seen
+violently contorting his features in Joan's face, presumably in equal
+astonishment--broke into a series of discordant chuckles.
+
+“Wa'al, ef that ain't Deacon Salisbury's darter all over. Ha! Here are
+ye two men folks makin' no end o' fuss to save that Mexican gal
+with pistols and ambushes and plots and counterplots, and yer's Joan
+Salisbury shows ye the way ha'ow to do it. And so, ma'am, you succeeded
+in fixin' it up with Dona Rosita to take her place and just sell them
+robbers cheap! Wa'al, ma'am, yer sold this yer party, too--for”--he
+advanced his face close to hers--“I never let on a word, though I knew
+it, and although they nearly knocked me off my hoss in their fuss and
+fury. Ha! ha! They wanted to know what I was doin' here, he-he! Tell
+'em, Joan, tell 'em.”
+
+Demorest gazed from one to another with a troubled face, yet one on
+which a faint relief was breaking.
+
+“What does he mean, Joan? Speak,” he said, almost imploringly.
+
+Joan, whose color was slightly returning, drew herself up with her old
+cold Puritan precision.
+
+“After the scene you made this morning, Richard, when you chose to
+accuse your wife of unfaithfulness to her friend, her guest, and even
+your reputation, I resolved to go myself with Dona Rosita to Los Osos
+and explain the matter to her father. Some rumor of the ridiculous farce
+I have just witnessed reached us through Ezekiel, and frightened the
+poor girl so that she declined--and properly, too to face the hoax which
+you and some nameless impersonator of a disgraced fugitive have gotten
+up for purposes of your own! I wish you joy of your work! If the play is
+over now, I presume I may be allowed to proceed on my journey?”
+
+“Not yet,” said Demorest slowly, with a face over which the chasing
+doubts had at last settled in a grayish pallor. “Believe what you like,
+misunderstand me if you will, laugh at the danger you perhaps comprehend
+better than I do, but upon this road, wherever or to whatever it was
+leading you--to-night you go no further!”
+
+“Then I suppose I may return home,” she said coldly. “Ezekiel will
+accompany me back to protect me from--robbers. Come, Ezekiel. Mr.
+Demorest and his friends can be safely trusted to take care of--your
+horse.”
+
+And as the grinning Ezekiel sprang into the carriage beside her, she
+pulled up the glass in the fateful and set face of her once trusting
+husband; the carriage turned and drove off, leaving him like a statue in
+the road.
+
+*****
+
+The bell of the North Liberty Second Presbyterian Church had just ceased
+ringing. But in the last five years it had rung out the bass viol and
+harmonium, and rung in an organ and choir; and the old austere interior
+had been subjected at the hands of the rising generation to an invasion
+of youthful warmth and color. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the
+choir itself, where the bright spring sunshine, piercing a newly-opened
+stained-glass window, picked out the new spring bonnet of Mrs. Demorest
+and settled upon it during the singing of the hymn. Perhaps that was
+the reason why a few eyes were curiously directed in that direction, and
+that even the minister himself strayed from the precise path of doctrine
+to allude with ecclesiastical vagueness to certain shining examples of
+the Christian virtues that were “again in our midst.” The shrewd face
+and white eyelashes of Ezekiel Corwin, junior partner in the firm of
+Dilworth & Dusenberry, of San Francisco, were momentarily raised
+towards the choir, and then relapsed into an expression of fatigued
+self-righteousness.
+
+When the service was over a few worshipers lingered near the choir
+staircase, mindful of the spring bonnet.
+
+“It looks quite nat'ral,” said Deacon Fairchild, “ter see Joan Salisbury
+attendin' the ministration of the Word agin. And I ain't sorry she
+didn't bring that second husband of hers with her. It kinder looks like
+old times--afore Edward Blandford was gathered to the Lord.”
+
+“That's so,” replied his auditor meekly, “and they do say ez ha'ow
+Demorest got more powerful worldly and unregenerate in that heathen
+country, and that Joan ez a professin' Christian had to leave him.
+I've heerd tell thet he'd got mixed up, out thar, with some half-breed
+outlaw, of the name o' Johnson, ez hez a purty, high-flyin' Mexican
+wife. It was fort'nit for Joan that she found a friend in grace in
+Brother Corwin to look arter her share in the property and bring her
+back tu hum.”
+
+“She's lookin' peart,” said Sister Bradley, “though to my mind that
+bonnet savors still o' heathen vanities.”
+
+“Et's the new idees--crept in with that organ,” groaned Deacon
+Fairchild; “but--sho--thar she comes.”
+
+She shone for an instant--a charming vision--out of the shadow of the
+choir stairs, and then glided primly into the street.
+
+The old sexton, still in waiting with his hand on the half-closed door,
+paused and looked after her with a troubled brow. A singular and utterly
+incomprehensible recollection and resemblance had just crossed his mind.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Argonauts of North Liberty, by Bret Harte
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