The Golden Fleece Part 2

"Why, you seem to have given this thing a good deal of thought, Trednoke."

"Well, yes: it has been my hobby for a year past; and I have made some investigations myself. But this is the first time I have spoken of it to any one."

"I understand. And what of the investigations?"

"I can say that I found enough to interest me. I'll tell you about it some time. I should be glad to leave Miriam something to make her independent."

"I should say that her Creator had already done that!" said Meschines.

"By the way, I know a young fellow--if he were only here--who is just the man you want, and can be trusted. He's a civil engineer,--Harvey Freeman: the Lord only knows in what part of the world he is at this speaking. He has made a special study of these subterranean matters."

"Don't you remember, papa, Coleridge's poem of Kubla Khan?--

"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea!"

"Our sacred river, when we find it, shall be named Miriam."

"It ought to be Kamaiakan," she rejoined; "for, if anybody finds it, it will be he."

"I think I hear the wings of the angel of whom we have been speaking,"

said the general. "Yes, here he is; and he has got the letters. Let us see! One for you Meschines. And this, I see, is from our friend Miss Parsloe, postmarked Santa Barbara. Why, she'll be here to-morrow, at that rate."

"Here's a queer coincidence!" exclaimed the professor, who had meanwhile opened his envelope and glanced through the contents. "The very man I was speaking of,--Harvey Freeman! Says he is in this neighborhood, has heard I'm here, and is coming down to pay me a visit. Methinks I hear the rolling of the sacred river!"

"But you won't mention it to him, until----"

"Bless me! Of course not. I'll bring him over here, in the course of human events, and you can take a look at him, and act on your own intuitions. I won't say on Princess Miriam's, for Harvey is a very fine-looking fellow, and her intuitions might get confused."

"A civil engineer!" said Miriam, with an intonation worthy of the daughter of a West-Pointer and the descendant of an Aztec prince.

Kamaiakan (who spoke only Spanish) had been gathering up some cushions that had fallen out of the hammock. Having replaced them, and cast a quick glance at Meschines, he withdrew.

CHAPTER II.

The Southern Pacific Railway pa.s.ses, today, not far from the site of General Trednoke's ranch. But the events now to be narrated occurred some years before the era of transcontinental railroads: they were in the air, but not yet bolted down to the earth. The general, therefore, was a pioneer, and was by no means overrun with friends from the East in search of an agreeable winter climate. The easiest way to reach him--if you were not pressed for time--was round the cape which forms the southernmost point of South America and sticks its sharp snout inquiringly into the Antarctic solitudes, as if it scented something questionable there. The speediest route, though open to strange discomforts, was by way of the Isthmus; and then there were always the saddle, the wagon, and the stage, with the accompaniments of road-agents, tornadoes, deserts, and starvation.

Miss Grace Parsloe came via the Isthmus; and the latter part of her journey had been alleviated by the society of a young gentleman from New York, Freeman by name. There were other pa.s.sengers on the vessel; but these two discovered sympathies of origin and education which made companionship natural. They sat together at table, leaned side by side over the taffrail, discussed their fellow-travellers, and investigated each other. As he lolled on the bench with folded arms and straw hat tilted back from his forehead she, glancing side-long, as her manner was, saw a sunburnt aquiline nose, a moustache of a lighter brown than the visage which it decorated, a lean, strong jaw, and a muscular neck.

His forehead, square and impending, was as white as ivory in comparison with the face below; his hair, in accordance with the fashion introduced by the late war, was cropped close. But what especially moved Miss Grace were those long, lazy blue eyes, which seemed to tolerate everything, but to be interested in nothing,--hardly even in her. Now, Grace could not help knowing she was a pretty girl, and it was somewhat of a novelty to her that Freeman should appear so indifferent. It would have been difficult to devise a better opportunity than this to monopolize masculine admiration, and she fell to speculating as to what sort of an experience Mr. Freeman must have had, so to panoply him against her magic. On the other hand, she was the recipient of whatever attentions he could bring himself to detach from the horizon-line, or from his own thoughts (which appeared to amount, practically, to about the same thing). She had no other rivals; and a woman will submit amiably to a good deal of indifference, provided she be a.s.sured that no other woman is enjoying what she lacks.

Freeman, for his part, had nothing to complain of. Grace Parsloe was a singularly pretty girl. Singular properly qualifies her. She was not like the others,--by which phrase he epitomized the numerous comely young women whom he had, at various times and in several countries, attended, teased, and kissed. Both physically and mentally, she was very fine-wrought. Her bones were small; her body and limbs were slender, but beautifully fashioned. She was supple and vigorous. Grace is a product of brain as well as an effect of bodily symmetry: Grace had the quality on both counts. She answered to one's conception of Mahomet's houris, a.s.suming that the conception is not of a fat person. Her head was small, but well proportioned,--compact as to the forehead, rather broad across the cheek-bones, thence tapering to the chin. Her eyes were blue, but of an Eastern strangeness of shape and setting; they were subject to great and sudden changes of expression, depending, apparently, on the varying state of her emotions, and betraying an intensity more akin to the Oriental temperament than to ours. There was in her something subtle and fierce; yet overlaying it, like a smooth and silken skin, were the conventional polish and bearing of an American school graduate. She was, in deed, noticeably artificial and self-conscious in manner and in the intonations of her speech; though it was an aesthetic delight to see her move or pose, and the quality of her voice was music's self. But Freeman, after due meditation, came to the conclusion that this was the outcome of her recognition of her own singularity: in trying to be like other people, she fell into caricature. Freeman, somehow, liked her the better for it. Like most men of brain and pith, who have seen and thought much, he was thankful for a new thing, because, so far as it went, it renewed him. It pleased him to imagine that he could, with a word or a look, cause this veil of artifice to be thrown aside, and the primitive pa.s.sion and fierceness behind it to start forth. He allowed himself to imagine, with a certain satisfaction, that were he to make this young woman jealous she would think nothing of thrusting a dagger between his ribs. Reality,--what a delight it is! The actual touch and feeling of the spontaneous natural creature have been so buried beneath centuries of hypocrisy and humbug that we have ceased to believe in them save as a metaphysical abstraction. But even as water, long depressed under-ground in perverse channels, surges up to the surface, and above it, at last, in a fountain of relief, so Nature, after enduring ages of outrage and banishment, leaps back to her rightful domain in some individual whom we call extraordinary because he or she is natural.

Grace Parsloe did not seem (regarded as to her temperament and quality) to belong where she was: therefore she was a delightful incident there.

Had she been met with in the days of the Old Testament, or in the depths of Persia or India at the present time, even, she might have appeared commonplace. But here she was in conventional costume, with conventional manners. And, just as the nautch-girls, and other Oriental dancers and posturers, wear a costume which suggests nature more effectively than does nature itself, so did Grace's conventionality suggest to Freeman the essential absence of conventionality more forcibly than if he had seen her clad in a turban and translucent caftan, dancing off John the Baptist's head, or driving a nail into that of Sisera. Grace certainly owed much of her importance to her situation, which rendered her foreign and piquante. But, then, everything, in this world, is relative.

Racial types seem to be a failure: when they become very marked, the race deteriorates or vanishes. In the counties of England, after only a thousand years, the women you meet in the rural districts and country towns all look like sisters. The Asiatics, of course, are much more sunk in type than the Anglo-Saxons; and they show us the way we would be going. Only, there is hope in rapid transit and the cosmopolitan spirit, and especially in these United States, which bring together the ends of the earth, and place side by side a descendant of the Puritans like Freeman, and a daughter of Irak-Ajemi.

"What are you coming to California for, Mr. Freeman?"

Freeman had already told her what he had been in the Isthmus for,--to paddle in miasmatic swamps with a view to the possibility of a ca.n.a.l in the remote, speculative future. He had given her a graphic and entertaining picture of the hideous and inconceivable life he had led there for six months, from which he had emerged the only member of a party of nineteen (whites, blacks, and yellows) who was not either dead by disease, by violence, or by misadventure, or had barely escaped with life and a shattered const.i.tution. Freeman, after emerging from the miasmatic h.e.l.l and lake of Gehenna, had taken a succession of baths, with soap and friction, had been attended by a barber and a tailor, and had himself attended the best table to be found for love or money in the charming town of Panama. He had also spent more than half of the week of his sojourn there in sleep; and he was now in the best possible condition, physical and mental,--though not, he admitted, pecuniary. As to morals, they had not reached that discussion yet. But, in all that he did say, Freeman exhibited perfect unreserve and frankness, answering without hesitation or embarra.s.sment any question she chose to ask (and she asked some curious ones).

But when she asked him such an innocent thing as what he was after in California--an inquiry, by the way, put more in idleness than out of curiosity--Freeman stroked his yellow moustache with the thumb of the hand that held his Cuban cigarette, gazed with narrowed eyelids at the horizon, and for some time made no reply at all. Finally he said that California was a place he had never visited, and that it would be a pity to have been so near it and yet not have improved the opportunity of taking a look at it.

Grace instantly scented a mystery, and was not less promptly resolved to fathom it. And what must be the nature of a mystery attaching to a handsome man, unmarried, and evidently no stranger to the gentler s.e.x?

Of course there must be a woman in it! Her eyes glowed with azure fire.

"You have some acquaintances in California, I suppose?" she said, with an air of laborious indifference.

"Well,--yes; I believe I have," Freeman admitted.

"Have they lived there long?"

"No; not over a few months. I accidentally heard from a person in Panama. I dropped a line to say I might turn up."

"She----you haven't had time to get an answer, then?"

Freeman inhaled a deep breath through his cigarette, tilted his head back, and allowed the smoke to escape slowly through his nostrils. In this manner, familiar to his deep-designing s.e.x, he concealed a smile.

Grace was, in some respects, as transparent as she was subtle. So long as the matter in hand did not touch her emotions, she had no difficulty in maintaining a deceptive surface; but emotion she could not disguise, though she was probably not aware of the fact; for emotion has a tendency to shut one's own eyes and open what they can no longer see in one's self to the gaze of outsiders.

"No," he said, when he had recovered his composure. "But that won't make any difference. We are on rather intimate terms, you see."

"Oh! Is it long since you have met?"

"Pretty long; at least it seems so to me."

Grace turned, and looked full at her companion. He did not meet her glance, but kept his profile steadily opposed, and went on smoking with a dreamy air, as if lost in memories and antic.i.p.ations, sad, yet sweet.

"Really, Mr. Freeman, I hardly thought--you have always seemed to care so little about anything--I didn't suspect you of so much sentiment."

"I am like other men," he returned, with a sigh. "My affections are not given indiscriminately; but when they are given,--you understand,--I----"

"Oh, I understand: pray don't think it necessary to explain. I'm sure I'm very far from wishing to listen to confidences about another,--to----"

"Yes, but I like to talk about it," interposed Freeman, earnestly.

"I haven't had a chance to open my heart, you know, for at least six months. And though you and I haven't known each other long, I believe you to be capable of appreciating what a man feels when he is on his way to meet some one who----"

"Thank you! You are most considerate! But I shall be additionally obliged if you would tell me in what respect I can have so far forgotten myself as to lead you to think me likely to appreciate anything of the kind. I a.s.sure you, Mr. Freeman, I have never cared for any one; and nothing I have seen since I left home makes it probable that I shall begin now."

"I am sorry to hear that," said Freeman, slowly drawing another cigarette out of his bundle, and beginning to re-roll it with a dejected air.

"Indeed!"

"Yes: the fact is, I had hoped that you had begun to have a little friendly feeling for me. I am more than ready to reciprocate."

"I hope you will spare me any insults, sir. I have no one to protect me, but----"

"I a.s.sure you, I mean no insult. You cannot help knowing that I think you as beautiful and fascinating a woman as I have ever met; but of course you can't help being beautiful and fascinating. Do I insult you by having eyes? If so, I am sorry, but you will have to make the best of it."

With this, he turned in his seat, and calmly confronted her. Beautiful she certainly was, at that moment; but it was the beauty of an angry serpent. She had a pencil in her hand, with which, a little while before, she had been sketching heads of some of the pa.s.sengers in her little notebook. She was now handling this inoffensive object in such a way as to justify the fancy that, had it been charged with a deadly poison in its point, instead of with a bit of plumbago of the HH quality, she would have driven it into Freeman's heart then and there.