The Black Pearl Part 23

"Yes, I love them because they are so beautiful, but I love them, too, because they are valuable."

"Well, there is no question about your making all the money you wish,"

he said, a slight weariness in his tone, "thousands and thousands. The world will fling it at you. It will cover you with jewels."

She smiled, a faint, secretive smile of triumph. Ah, so he recognized that. She had made him feel and admit that she was one of the few great dancers.

Then, she, too, sighed. "If only," she said, forgetful of him and following out her train of thought aloud, "if only when I get what I want, I wouldn't always want something else! Did you ever feel if you could just be free, really free, you wouldn't want anything else in the world?"

"How could any one be more free than you are?" he laughed down at her.

"I know, I know," she agreed, still speaking wistfully, "but I'd like to be free of myself; myself is so strange, and there's so many of me."

Then the veil of her instinctive reticence fell over her again and she began to talk of her recent attempts to get about on snow-shoes, Jose and Hugh having been her instructors, so far. Harry immediately offered his services, and she accepted them, agreeing to go out with him the next morning.

And as they talked Jose glanced at them from time to time, a touch of malicious laughter in his odd glancing eyes; there were few things that escaped Jose.

That evening, after Seagreave had gone home, when Jose and Gallito and Mrs. Thomas and Mrs. Nitschkan had sat late over their cards, Gallito had risen after a final game, mended the fire, poured himself a gla.s.s of cognac, lighted another cigarette and, stretching himself in an easy-chair, entered into one of those confidential talks which he occasionally permitted himself with his chosen cronies. The earlier part of the evening Jose and Pearl had danced for a time together, and then Pearl had danced for a time alone and in a manner to please even her father's critical taste. Now, in commenting on this, he remarked:

"You see the change in my daughter. She is now cheerful, obedient and industrious. When she came she was none of those things. She is, you see, a good girl at heart, but her mother had almost ruined her. If men but had the time they should always bring up the children of the family.

It is only in that way that they can ever be a credit to one."

Mrs. Thomas, who had been bending over the stove brewing a pot of coffee which she and Mrs. Nitschkan drank at all hours of the day and night, raised herself at the utterance of these revolutionary sentiments and looked at Gallito in grieved and bewildered surprise; but Mrs.

Nitschkan, who had been pouring cream into the cup of steaming coffee which Jose had just handed to her, first took a long draught and then remarked with cool impartiality:

"The trouble with you, Gallito, is that you can't bear for n.o.body, man, woman, child or devil, to get ahead of you. I guess I know somep'n'

about the bringin' up of young ones myself."

Here Mrs. Thomas sighed and shook her head with that exasperated incomprehension which all women displayed when the subject of Mrs.

Nitschkan's children came up for discussion. Educators discourse much upon the proper environment and training of the young of the human species, but theories aside, practical results seem rather in favor of casting the bantling on the rocks. For, in spite of Mrs. Nitschkan's joyous lack of responsibility, her daughters had grown up the ant.i.theses of herself, thoroughly feminine little creatures, already famous for those womanly accomplishments for which their mother had ever shown a marked distaste, while the sons were steady, hard-working, reputable young fellows, always to be depended upon by their employers.

"It's nothing but your pizen luck, Sadie," murmured Mrs. Thomas.

"We must allow that Providence has been kinder to you than most,"

remarked Gallito sardonically.

"It's a reward," said Mrs. Nitschkan with calm a.s.surance, refilling her pipe with more care than she had ever bestowed upon her children. "It's 'cause I ain't ever shirked an' left the Lord to do all my work for me."

At this Mrs. Thomas, too overcome to speak, tottered feebly back from the stove and fell weakly into a chair.

"No, sir," continued the gypsy with arrogant virtue, "the trouble with all the parents I know, includin' present company, is that they're too easy. I don't work no claim expectin' to get nothin' out of it, do I?

And I don't bring a lot of kids into the world and spend years teachin'

'em manners--"

She was interrupted here by a brief and scornful laugh from Mrs. Thomas, who, on observing that her friend was gazing at her earnestly and ominously, hastily converted it into a fit of coughing.

"Spend years teachin' 'em manners an' sacrifice myself to stay at home and punish 'em when I might be jantin' 'round myself, not to have 'em turn out a credit to me."

There was a finality about the statements which seemed to admit of no further discussion, but after Jose had escorted the two women to their cabin, he had returned for one of those midnight conferences with Gallito over which they loved to linger, and the Spaniard had again expressed his satisfaction in Pearl's changed demeanor.

Jose's laughter pealed to the roof. "You have eyes but for mines and cards, Gallito. Though the world changes under your nose, you do not see it. The moles of the earth--they are funny!"

"Bah!" casting at him a scornful glance from under his beetling brows, "your eyes see so far, Jose, that you see all manner of things which do not exist."

"I have far sight and near sight and the sight which comes to the seventh child," returned Jose with pride. "Therefore, seeing what I see, I say my prayers each day, now."

A bleak smile wrinkled Gallito's parchment-like cheeks. "And to whom do you pray, Jose, your patron saint, or rather sinner, the Devil?"

Jose looked shocked. "You are a blasphemer, Gallito," he reproved, and then added piously, "I say my prayers each day that I may, by example, help Saint Harry."

"And why is Harry in need of your example?" said Gallito, holding up his gla.s.s between himself and the fire and watching the deep reflections of ruby light in the amber liquid.

"It goes against me to see an unequal struggle," sighed Jose. "He is hanging on desperately to his ice-peak, but the Devil has almost succeeded in clawing him off."

Gallito frowned. "This talk of yours is nonsense, Jose; but if there is anything in it, Harry may understand that any interest he may have in my daughter can lead to nothing. She is a dancer before she is anything else, it is in her blood. Harry does not and never can understand her; only one of her own kind can do that. He is by nature a religious; his cabin is the cell of a monk."

Again Jose's eerie, malicious laughter echoed through the room.

"Aye, laugh," growled Gallito; "but you see my daughter for the first time. You think because she smiles at Harry that she loves him; you think because she is the only woman he talks to that he loves her; you do not know her. She is young, she is beautiful and a dancer. She has had many lovers ever since she put her hair up, and learned how she could make a fool of a man with her eyes and her smile, and she has made them pay toll. She always did that from the first." There was a note of fierce pride in his harsh, brief laughter. "Yes, she would smile and promise anything with her eyes, but she gave nothing. It is strange"--the old Spaniard, his austere spirit mellowed by his excellent cognac, fell into a mood of confidential musing, an indulgence which he rarely permitted himself--"that Hugh, the child of a woman I never saw, reaches my heart more than my own daughter does. But Pearl is a study to me. I say to myself, 'She cares for nothing but money, applause, admiration,' and yet, even while I say it, I am not sure; I do not know, I do not know."

Again he admired the glints of firelight reflected in his cognac gla.s.s.

"But this I do know, Jose, she is an actress before she is anything else."

Jose leered knowingly. "You think only of your daughter," he said. "What about Saint Harry? He has mad blood in him, too. It is only a few years that he has been a saint; before that the Devil held full sway over him.

And," he added pensively, after a moment's cogitation, "there are many lessons one learns from the Devil."

"You should know," returned Gallito, with his twisting, sardonic smile.

"Ah, the Devil is not all bad," said Jose defensively. "One can learn from him the lesson of perseverance, and perseverance is a virtue."

Gallito waved his hand with a polite gesture. "You know more of him and his lessons than I, Jose. I am always ready to grant that." He took another sip of cognac, blew a succession of smoke wreaths toward the ceiling, and again resumed his midnight philosophizings. "What puzzles me, Jose, is what is going to become of us in Heaven. We shall never be content. Content is a lesson that no one has ever learned. Look at Saint Harry. He has Heaven right here. His time to himself, enough to live on without working, no women to bother him, your cooking; and it may be on that that you will win an entrance to Heaven; it will certainly be on nothing else. But, if, as you say, he is interested in my daughter, he is throwing away all chance of keeping Paradise."

"Do we not all do that?" said Jose dismally. "It is because a man cannot conceive of a Heaven without a woman in it. He thinks in spite of all experience to the contrary that she is what makes it Heaven."

"Yes, experience counts for nothing," Gallito sighed for himself and his brothers.

But if Seagreave sat silent and absorbed when he came to Gallito's cabin in the evening, it did not bother Pearl. She was an expert in such symptoms. Sometimes he talked to her in a rather constrained fashion, but for the most part he sat on the other side of the room, listening to Hugh's music.

One evening when he sat listening he suddenly lifted his eyes and gazed at the Pearl, who sat almost the length of the room away from him. The cabin was lighted only by the great log fire, and the leaping, ardent flames of the pine, mingled with the soft, glowing radiance of burning birch, invested the room and its occupants with that atmosphere of mystery and glamour, essential in flame-illumined shadow. And Hugh was playing the music the masters dreamed in the twilight hours when silence and shadow permitted them, even wooed them to a more intimate revelation of the heart than the definite splendors of daylight inspired.

Beyond the zone of the firelight, the room was all in a warm gloom, rich and dim. Pearl and Hugh had gathered fir branches, even some young trees, and had placed them about the walls, and in the warmth their aromatic, delicious odor permeated and pervaded the cabin, and one discerning those half-defined branches might easily imagine that the walls stretched away into the dim forest.

Pearl lay back in an easy chair, her narrow, half-closed eyes on the leaping flames. The wind, low to-night, the wind of eternity which blows ever in the mountains, sang about the cabin and blended with Hugh's music like a faint violin obligato. But even in this soft twilight of blending and mingling and harmonizing, with pine branches above and beyond her and shadowed gloom about her, Pearl never for a moment seemed the spirit of the forest.

With its dim depths for a background, she shone on it, as brilliant and distinct from it as a flashing jewel on the breast of a nun. Her crimson frock caught a deeper warmth from the firelight, her black hair shone like a bird's wing, the jewels on her fingers sent out sparkles of light and flame. As Saint Harry continued to gaze at her the forest with all its haunting, dreaming witchery vanished, the high invitation of the mountains, "Come ye apart," ceased to echo in his ears. The world environed, encompa.s.sed her; he seemed to discern the yearning of her spirit for it, the airy rush of her winged feet toward it; and yet her eyes, those eyes which sometimes held the look of having gazed for ages on time's mutations, were turned toward the desert. Then Seagreave's moment of vision pa.s.sed and he turned to Hugh with an odd sinking of the heart.

Hugh had ceased to play and sat silent now on his piano stool with that motionless, concentrated air of his, as if listening to something afar.

"Hughie," said Seagreave softly, "what _are_ you and your sister, anyway?"