Part 7

"But you don't seem to believe me."

"You mustn't jump at such hasty conclusions."

"Have you heard anything about me that would make you think I was deceitful?"

"I have never spoken of you to any one except your father."

"I can't understand you at all to-day. You're so changeable and moody, and sometimes so ill-humored."

"What a dreadful afternoon you've had! I'm sorry." Then, with an abrupt change of tone: "Who picks up the leaves of the deodar and ties them up in those neat little bundles?"

"I do--do you believe me?" She spoke with a sharpness he had never heard her use before.

He broke out into sudden laughter that this time sounded genuine. Turning from the window, he came toward her and took her hand.

"Are you angry?" he asked. "I don't wonder. Say the most disagreeable things you can think of, and they won't be more than I deserve."

For the second time this afternoon she beamed over his restoration to good humor.

"I'm not a very good person to quarrel with," she said, looking at him with soft, forgiving eyes, "though, as you see, I've got a temper."

He gave her hand a little pressure and relinquished it, taking up his hat.

"Accept a hundred apologies from me for my rudeness. Good-by."

"You _were_ disagreeable," she admitted, as they went together into the hall. "You seemed as if you didn't believe half I said to you, and actually as if our good luck made you angry."

Gault had opened the door, and his face was turned from her.

"Oh, don't think that," he answered, as he stepped out on to the porch; "whatever gives you happiness adds to mine. Adios, señorita."

The door closed after him, and Viola stood alone in the hall, smiling to herself. She made as if to watch him through one of the narrow panes of glass which formed small windows on either side of the portal, then suddenly drew back and shook her head.

"That would be bad luck," she said, "and I'm too happy to risk bad luck."

* * * * *

It was a few days later than this that an opera company of some fame in southern France was encouraged by a successful Mexican season to run up to San Francisco. Californians are notoriously fond of music, and the small opera companies which wander through the West, not daring to measure their talents with the Eastern stars, generally can count on a profitable season by the Golden Gate. Bad scenery, absurd costumes, and indifferent acting do not damp the ardor of the Californian, who will go anywhere and undergo any small discomfort to hear passable singing.

Mrs. Gault, who went every year or two to New York and found her ideas there, as she did her hats and dresses, derided the local taste for hearing unknown prima donnas as Leonora and Gilda. But her husband and Letitia overruled her in at least this one particular, and when opera came up from Mexico or across from New Orleans, she always went with them, and tried to look as bored as her animated features and lively style would permit.

This particular season, a short one of three weeks given by an Italian company that had been touring Mexico during the winter, opened with a performance of "Rigoletto." For the first night Mortimer Gault procured one of the lower boxes, leaving it to his wife to fill it with such company as she desired, provided a seat was left for him in the background, where he could hear and would not have to talk. The party, which consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Gault, Letitia, John, Tod McCormick, and his sister Pearl, was late in arriving, and it was not until the interval between the second and third acts that they found time to look about the house. Letitia and Pearl were in the front of the box, the latter on the inner side nearest the audience, with John Gault sitting behind her in the shadow of the curtain. While Letitia looked about the house through her lorgnon she could hear the animated chatter of Pearl, interspersed with comments from Maud Gault and Tod.

"Do you see that woman in the box opposite--the pale one with the piece of blue velvet twisted in her hair? She came up with the company, and her husband is a professional gambler in Mexico and makes heaps of money. You can ask Tod if you don't believe me."

Tod said it was all true, and that she was a "peach," a form of encomium that, in his vast appreciation, he was fond of applying to every member of the other sex that came within range of his admiring eye.

"In the box above, where the two good-looking men are, that little red, squeezed-looking woman is Lady Jervis, who used to be Tiny Madison ever so long ago. She went abroad and married Sir Somebody or other Jervis, and she's out here now with a syndicate."

"What is she doing with a syndicate?" Mrs. Gault asked. "Is she going on the stage?"

"No; they're buying mines or railroads or something. Her husband's in it, and all the others, they say, are English lords. That's part of the syndicate with her now, in the box."

"What part of the syndicate?" said Tod. "The head, or the feet, or the middle?"

"Don't get gay, Tod," said his sister, severely; "I don't like small boys when they're too funny. Down there in the audience, near the middle of the parquet, is the woman whose husband is something or other in Central America. He's enormously rich, and she comes up here once a year and buys clothes. They say she used to be on the stage, and she looks just like it; she has such a lot of paint round her eyes and such vaudeville hair. But you ought to see her children! They're quite black, just like little negroes. Major Conway, who lived down there a good deal, says that Central American children are all dark when they're young, and then it wears off as they grow older."

"Do they use sapolio?" inquired Tod.

Pearl treated this inquiry with fitting scorn, and continued:

"There's Bertha Lajaune, over there by the pillar. Do you think she's so beautiful? I must say I don't. I heard the other day that she was a Jewess, and that her mother had one of those pawnbroking places south of Market Street, and that they'd only just moved away a few years when she married old Marcel Lajaune."

As Pearl rattled on thus, assisted by Tod and Mrs. Gault, Letitia let her lorgnon follow on the track of their comments, idly passing from face to face as their light talk touched on it.

She looked curiously at the wife of the Mexican gambler, a romantically handsome woman, with a skin like a magnolia-petal, and a frame of ebony hair setting off a face of Madonna-like softness. The lady in the box above was not pretty at all, Letitia thought. She had a broad, good-humored red face, an impudent nose, and a frizz of blond hair crimped far down on her forehead in the English fashion. Her black evening dress showed a section of white neck, and a piece of reddened arm was visible between her short sleeves and the edge of her long gloves. Letitia had been too young to remember her as Tiny Madison, and wondered how a Californian could come to look so like a British princess.

The Central American lady was much more interesting. She was like a lily among the gipsy-looking dark women and small, beady-eyed men of her suite. She was thin, pale, and haggard, with artificially reddened hair and heavy eyelids much painted. Her eyes from under these looked out with an air of languid world-weariness. She had some immense diamonds round her throat, and the fan she lazily moved twinkled with them.

Letitia studied her for some interested minutes, then passed on to Bertha Lajaune, of whom everybody had heard and most people were talking. She was accounted by many the most beautiful woman in San Francisco, and had risen from an unpenetrated obscurity by her marriage with a rich French wine merchant. Letitia disagreed with Pearl. She thought Mme. Lajaune quite as beautiful as people said she was. To-night, in a gorgeous toilet of pale lavender with a good deal of silver and lace about it, she had the appearance of an ennuyéd princess. Her pale skin, classic features, and large light eyes, with an extraordinarily wide sweep of lid, seemed to stamp her as one designed by nature to wear a crown. Letitia was about to turn and draw John Gault's attention to her, when the lorgnon, in its transit, suddenly commanded two faces just below--Colonel Reed's and Viola's.

They were not looking her way, and Letitia riveted the glass on them. The colonel was sitting up and looking about alertly. He was instinct with life, enjoyment, and animation. With his neck craned out of his collar, he was surveying the audience, now and then turning to impart some hasty comment to Viola. He had the eager, happy air of a man who is in his element.

Viola was sitting back rather listlessly, with her hands clasped in her lap. She was dressed simply but prettily in gray, and wore no hat. The color was the one most perfectly suited to harmonize with her eyes and hair. Among the handsome and well-dressed women that surrounded her, she preserved the same suggestion of distinction and superiority that Letitia had recognized when she saw her in her own ragged drawing-room.

Holding out the glass, Letitia turned to Gault, who was sitting silent in the shelter of the curtain, and said:

"Colonel Reed's sitting down there."

He gave the slightest possible start, and moving forward, looked in the direction she indicated.

"So he is," he said in an uninterested tone, "and with his daughter."

Unfortunately, Tod McCormick, who had drawn up as close to Letitia as his chair would permit, heard this short dialogue and pricked up his ears.

"Colonel Reed," he said vivaciously, "and his daughter? Where?"

He bent forward, his lean neck stretched out, his weazened visage full of a curiosity that was only naïvely boyish, but that on his ugly and insignificant features acquired a mean and disagreeable air.

"By gracious!" he said, after surveying the colonel with a knowing grin. "At the opera, in the best seats, dressed like the lilies of the field--oh, you old rascal!"

He wagged his head at the colonel with a look of wicked knowledge that he was extremely fond of assuming.

"What do you mean?" said Letitia, twisting round on her chair so that she could see him. "What makes you call him a rascal?"

"Oh, old rogue! old rogue!" repeated Tod, as though he had secret and masonic intelligence of serious misdeeds in the colonel's past. "And that's his daughter? Ain't she a peach!"

John Gault moved uneasily and looked back into the shadows of the box. Letitia, feeling uncomfortable, said hurriedly:

"Yes, indeed. She's prettier than anybody here, I think."

"Except you, Tishy," said Tod, but, it must be admitted, in an absent tone. He leaned farther forward, his eyes on the girl in the seat below, the smile on his face changing from one of whimsical malice to the slow, pleased grin of affected admiration.

"Well, she can draw my salary! She can have the key of my trunk!"

"Have you ever seen her before?" asked Letitia.

"No, but I've heard of her. Everybody's heard of her."

"It's very odd; I never did till the other day."

"You mightn't have. The boys, I mean. All of a sudden, every feller's begun askin' every other feller if he knows Colonel Reed's daughter. She's sort of in the air, like microbes."

"Why should she be?"

Tod shrugged.

"Oh, a girl as pretty as that can't be expected to blush unseen down in South Park forever."

John Gault rose suddenly and went to the back of the box, where he joined his brother, who was silently digesting his pleasure in the music. Tod, quite unconscious of any offense, was glad to be left in sole possession of Letitia, and rambled on, repeating tag-ends of gossip that had lodged in his shallow brain.

"The colonel's a great old chap. He likes the 'long green.' He once had plenty of it, and once you get the habit of having it, it's worse than morphine to get cured of. The colonel ain't got cured."

"He hasn't got a cent," said Letitia, "so I don't see but that he's got to get cured."

"There's two good ways of getting money when you ain't got it--just two," said Tod, oracularly.

"And what are those?"

"Stealing and borrowing. And if you steal you know there's always a risk about being an expense to your country; and no self-respecting man wants that. But borrowing! Get a good, quiet, peaceable victim,--the kind that don't make a fuss, likes to have his leg pulled, thrives on it, misses it when you leave off,--and you're on velvet. I should judge the colonel had found just the right kind."

"What a horrid thing to say, Tod!"

"Horrid! The colonel doesn't think it's horrid. I wonder who he's corralled. Three years ago he took hold of my father. It was great, the way he worked the old man. You know, people haven't been able to trace Jerry McCormick through life by the quarters he's dropped. It did my heart good to see the way the colonel managed him. I guess he must have got nearly a thou' out of him before my father shut down."

"I shouldn't think his daughter would like that," said Letitia, feeling a chill at her heart.

Tod raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. His faith in the pride and fine feelings of young women who were poor did not appear strong. But in spite of his assumption of a blasé cynicism, he was a kindly soul at heart.

"Oh, she mightn't know," he said; "it's so easy to fool women."

Letitia was silent for a moment. Then she commented, as if speaking to herself:

"I suppose it would be easy for her father to fool her?"

"Easy as lying."

"Do you suppose he borrows that way from other men?"

Tod directed upon her an incredulous side glance. Then, meeting the anxious inquiry of her eyes, he broke into a broad smile.

"Well, I should snicker," he said, in an amused tone.

The curtain rose here, and further dialogue was cut off, for Letitia was a lover of singing, and when the music began again, sank into a rapt and immovable silence. During the other entr'actes the conversation was general, and any more confidences on the subject of Colonel Reed and his daughter were impossible.

In the foyer, on the way out, the party became scattered. Crowds surging from the main aisle pressed forward and separated Mrs. Gault, her husband, and Pearl McCormick from the other three, who had stopped in an angle of space near the stairway for Letitia to adjust her cloak. As Gault was shaking it out preparatory to laying it across her shoulders, her attention was caught by the figures of Colonel Reed and Viola, who emerged from the entrance of a side aisle just in front of them.

The colonel's eye fell on Gault, his face beamed with recognition and pleasure, and, with a word to Viola, he started forward to greet him. Viola gave a vexed exclamation and caught him by the arm, evidently with the intention of deterring him. But the old man, flushed with the excitement of once more finding himself in the familiar scenes of light and revelry, seized her hand, and, drawing her with him, came forward. Viola, thus forcibly overruled, advanced, her face full of distressed embarrassment.

Gault, who had been occupied with the cloak, had not seen this little pantomime, and the first intimation he had of the colonel's proximity was his loud and patronizing greeting. He turned quickly and saw the old man, bland and majestic as ever, and beside him Viola, pained and uncomfortable, the object of Tod's admiring stares, and only too plainly dragged forward by her ill-inspired father. His face flushed with annoyance, aroused alike by the false position in which the girl was placed, and by the revelation thus made to Letitia that he had not been frank when he had led her to believe that he did not know Colonel Reed's daughter.

His indignation found expression in his cold and almost curt reply to the colonel's greeting. There was no mistaking its import. It spoke so plainly of annoyance that even the easy affability of the old man was disturbed. He looked taken aback, and for a moment evidently did not know what to say. Tod looked from one man to the other, grinning at the embarrassment of a situation he did not understand. For a moment there was a most disagreeable pause. Letitia knew that recognition would betray the fact that she had met Viola, but the mortification of the girl's position made her bold.

"How do you do, Miss Reed?" she said; and then, as a brilliant afterthought, "Do you like music?"

"Very much," Viola managed to answer; "and it was good, wasn't it?"

"It was A1," said Tod, not by any means intending to be left out; "and that prima donna, ain't she a peach?"

"Mme. Foedor is a lovely Gilda. She looks so young. Most of them are too old and matronly," continued Letitia, fastening the clasps of her cloak, and wondering if this exceedingly uncomfortable conversation was to be prolonged.

Viola's reply put an end to her uneasiness:

"Lovely! I never saw her before, or the opera, either. But we must go. Father, we'll miss the car if we don't hurry. Good night. Good night, Mr. Gault."

She took the old man by the arm and tried to draw him toward the side entrance. But the vision of Letitia in all the glory of evening dress had been the last touch to the colonel's enjoyment on this momentous evening. He seemed to have forgotten the repulse he had just received, and hung back from his daughter's persuasive hand, looking with courtly admiration at Miss Mason. She was keen enough to see that he would again overrule his daughter and add further to the embarrassment of the meeting, and sweeping her cloak round her, she said:

"We must go too, or we'll never find the others. Good night." And with a little smiling nod she turned with her attendant cavaliers and plunged into the crowd.

Tod, squeezing along beside her in the throng, said querulously:

"Why didn't you introduce me? I'd have given that old man a song and dance, and he'd have asked me down there."

But Gault, on her other side, said nothing. Once, as the crowd jostled her against him, she stole a glance in his direction, and found him looking away with frowning brows and a morose expression. She wondered if he had realized that her remarks to Viola indicated a previous acquaintance. If he had he would certainly be angry with her.

Pearl and Tod were dropped on the way back, but Gault drove home with the others. He said he had been suffering from insomnia lately, and a walk would tire him out. Once in the house, Mortimer led him back into the dining-room to try a new wine that had been made on the vineyard of a mutual friend. Letitia and Maud were left alone in the drawing-room, where the former, expressing fatigue, threw herself down in a long chair, and the latter moved about turning down lamps, and here and there arranging with a housewife's hand the disarray of tumbled cushions and carelessly disposed draperies. Finally she passed out of the room, and Letitia, still sitting where she had dropped, heard her skirts rustling softly as she ascended the stairway.

Letitia did not move. She wanted to see John before he left. If he had noticed her greeting of Viola Reed he would undoubtedly speak of it, and she would be given a chance to explain. With any other man but John it would have been nothing. But John was so peculiar, so reserved about his own affairs, so resentful, so terribly resentful, of anything like intrusion or interference. Letitia as she waited felt, much to her own surprise, that she was growing nervous, that her heart was beginning to beat uncomfortably hard and her breath to come uncomfortably short.

Suddenly she heard his voice, in the room beyond, bidding Mortimer good night. She sat up quickly, and then as quickly looked down so as to give her figure the air of repose and indifference which was so far from her state of mind. He entered the room, and seeing her, said:

"Oh, Tishy, are you still there?"

The tone of his voice struck on her ear as singularly cold and aloof. Her nervousness increased, for she sincerely feared his anger.

"Yes," she answered; "I--I--wanted to speak to you."

"What had you to say?" he asked, stopping before her, but not sitting down.

It did not occur to her, in her state of trepidation, that the obvious abstraction and coldness of his manner might be the result of causes that she did not know. She at once leaped to the conclusion that he had realized she had made Viola's acquaintance in some underhand way, and that he was now bitterly incensed with her.

"I wanted to explain to you how--how--I came to know Viola Reed."

The remark dispelled all his indifference in an instant. The sudden concentrating of his attention upon her in a piercing look and a sharp, penetrating fixity of observation added a hundredfold to Letitia's agitation.

"I--I--knew you'd be angry and probably misunderstand. You're always so--so reticent and queer about your own affairs. I didn't see any harm in trying to know Miss Reed. It was better, anyway, than letting Maud go, and she was so set upon it."

Letitia raised her eyes pleadingly, then dropped them quickly. His were blazing. But it was too late to go back now. He took a chair, drew it up before her, and sat down.

"Just explain to me what you mean," he said quietly. "You and Maud have been trying to make the acquaintance of Miss Reed--is that it?"

"We did more than try. We did it--I did it. I wouldn't let Maud. I was afraid she'd do something. Maud sometimes hasn't got as much tact--as much tact as she ought to have."

"How did you do it?"

"I just went there."

"You went there? You went into that lady's house--intruded, without invitation or acquaintance--forced your way in as if you were a peddler? I can't believe that of you, Letitia. You had some excuse for going there."

Letitia rose to her feet. She did it unconsciously.

"I didn't exactly intrude; though I'll tell you the truth, John--I'll not hide anything. I do think it was mean. I thought it after I got in and saw how--how poor and miserable everything was. I felt mortified at what I'd done. I wouldn't have gone in the beginning if I'd thought it was as bad as that. But I had an excuse. I bought jam and four plants. That's one of them on the stand."

"Bought jam and plants! What are you talking about? I don't understand you."

"She sells them,--jam and plants,--and I bought three dozen pots and four plants."

"You went there and bought these things from her in her own house?"

"Yes," Letitia answered, and went on helplessly, in order to say something: "Four plants for two dollars. It was very cheap."

There was a moment's pause. Then the man said in a suppressed voice:

"You patronized her in her poverty--pried into her home, bought things from her, gave her money! Good God!"

He dropped his voice and turned away, unable to finish. Letitia came toward him. She knew that in this interview the happiness of her life was at stake, and yet that she must be true to herself.

"I did give her money, but not as you mean. I was sorry for her and wanted to help her. I wouldn't have hurt her any more than you would. It was because of you I went there. It was because we heard you were so interested in her. But after I got there I was ashamed and sorry, and I tried not to make her feel it."

"So you gave her two dollars for four plants! It takes a woman to know how to humiliate a woman!"

"I saw she wasn't the kind of person Maud thought she was," continued Letitia, going blindly on. "I was certain they made a mistake in saying the things they did about her. Even if you were giving them money, even if you were supporting them, she wasn't that kind."

"Who told you I was supporting them?"

"Oh, I don't know--people say it. And maybe I did do her an injustice in going there and spying on her, as you say. But you are the one who has done her a real injustice--the kind of injustice that hurts."

"I!" he exclaimed, too surprised to defend himself. "What have I done?"

"You've kept it all so secret that you made people think there was something wrong about it."