The Golden Fleece Part 4

"I see! The poor old professor! And he has remained a bachelor all his life."

"Mamma has often told me the story, and that the Trednoke boy went to West Point, and distinguished himself in the Mexican war, and married a Mexican woman, and the Meschines boy became a professor in Yale College.

And now I am going to see one of them, and you to see the other. Isn't that a coincidence?"

"The first of a long series, I trust. Is this West-Pointer a permanent settler here?"

"Yes, for ever so long,--twenty years. He's a widower, but he has a daughter---- Oh, I know you'll fall in love with her!"

"Is she like you?"

"I don't know. I've never seen her, or General Trednoke either."

"Come to think of it, though, n.o.body is like you, Grace. Now, will you be so good as to apologize again?"

"Don't you think you're rather exacting, Harvey?"

However, the apology was finally repeated, and continued, more or less, during the rest of the voyage; and Grace quite forgot that she had never made Harvey tell what was really the cause of his coming to California.

But she, on her side, had a secret. She never allowed him to suspect that the past eighteen months of her life had been pa.s.sed as employee in a New York dry-goods store.

CHAPTER III.

General Trednoke's house was built by Spanish missionaries in the sixteenth century; and in its main features it was little altered in three hundred years. In a climate where there is no frost, walls of adobe last as long as granite. The house consisted, practically, of but one story; for although there were rooms under the roof, they were used only for storage; no one slept in them. The plan of the building was not unlike that of a train of railway-cars,--or, it might be more appropriate to say, of emigrant-wagons. There was a series of rooms, ranged in a line, access to them being had from a narrow corridor, which opened on the rear veranda. Several of the rooms also communicated directly with each other, and, through low windows, gave on the veranda in front; for the house was merely a comparatively narrow array of apartments between two broad verandas, where most of the living, including much of the sleeping, was done.

Logically, there can be nothing uglier than a Spanish-American dwelling of this type. But, as a matter of fact, they appear seductively beautiful. The thick white walls acquire a certain softness of tone; the surface scales off here and there, and cracks and crevices appear. In a damp country, like England, they would soon become covered with moss; but moss is not to be had in this region, though one were to offer for it the price of the silk velvet, triple ply, which so much resembles it. Nevertheless, there are compensations. The soil is inexhaustibly fertile, and its fertility expresses itself in the most inveterate beauty. Such colors and varieties of flowers exist nowhere else, and they continue all the year round. Climbing vines storm the walls, and toss their green ladders all over it, for beauty to walk up and down.

Huge jars, standing on the verandas, emit volcanoes of lovely blossoms; and vases swung from the roof drip and overflow with others, as if water had turned to flowers. In the garden, which extends over several acres at the front of the house, and, as it were, makes it an island in a gorgeous sea of petals, there are roses, almonds, oranges, vines, pomegranates, and a hundred rivals whose names are unknown to the present historian, marching joyfully and triumphantly through the seasons, as the symphony moves through changes along its central theme.

Everything that is not an animal or a mineral seems to be a flower.

There are too many flowers,--or, rather, there is not enough of anything else. The faculty of appreciation wearies, and at last ceases to take note. It is like conversing with a person whose every word is an epigram. The senses have their limitations, and imagination and expectation are half of beauty and delight, and the better half; otherwise we should have no souls. A single violet, discovered by chance in the by-ways of an April forest in New England, gives a pleasure as poignant as, and more spiritual than, the miles upon miles of Californian splendors.

Monotony is the ruling characteristic,--monotony of beauty, monotony of desolation, monotony even of variety. The glorious blue overhead is monotonous: as for the thermometer, it paces up and down within the narrowest limits, like a prisoner in his cell, or a meadow-lark hopping to and fro in a seven-inch cage. The plan and aspect of the buildings are monotonous, and so is the way of life of those who inhabit them.

Fortunately, the sun does rise and set in Southern California: otherwise life there would be at an absolute stand-still, with no past and no future. But, as it is, one can look forward to morning, and remember the evening.

Then, there are the not infrequent but seldom very destructive earthquakes; the occasional cloud-bursts and tornadoes, sudden and violent as a gunpowder-explosion; and, finally, the astounding contrast between the fertile regions and the desert. There are places where you can stand with one foot planted in everlasting sterility and the other in immortal verdure. In the midst of an arid and hopeless waste, you come suddenly upon the brink of a narrow ravine, sharply defined as if cut out with an axe, and packed to the brim with enchanting and voluptuous fertility. Or you will come upon mountains which sweep upward out of burning death into sumptuous life. When the monotony of life meets the monotony of death, Southern California becomes a land of contrasts; and the contrasts themselves become monotonous.

General Trednoke's ranch was very near the borders of these two mighty forces. An hour's easy ride would carry him to a region as barren and apparently as irreclaimable as that through which Childe Roland journeyed in quest of the Dark Tower; lying, too, in a temperature so fiery that it coagulated the blood in the veins, and stopped the beating of the heart. Underfoot were fine dust, and whitened bones; the air was prismatic and magical, ever conjuring up phantom pictures, whose characteristic was that they were at the farthest remove from any possible reality. The azure sky descended and became a lake; the pulsations of the atmosphere translated themselves into the rhythmic lapse of waves; spikes of sage-brush and blades of cactus became sylvan glades, and hamlets cheerful with inhabitants. Only, all was silent; and as you drew near, the scene trembled, altered, and was gone!

Hideous black lizards and horned toads crawl and hop amid this desolation; and the deadly little sidewinder rattlesnake lies basking in the blaze of sunshine, which it distils into venom. Sometimes the level plain is broken up into savage ridges and awful canons, along whose arid bottoms no water streams. As you stagger through their chaotic bottoms, you see vast boulders poised overhead, tottering to a fall; a shiver of earthquake, a breath of hurricane, and they come crashing and splintering in destruction down. Along the sides of these acclivities extend long, level lines and furrows, marks of where the ocean flowed ages ago. But sometimes the hills are but acc.u.mulations of desert dust, which shift slowly from place to place under the action of the wind, melting away here to be re-erected yonder; mounding themselves, perhaps, above a living and struggling human being, to move forward, anon, leaving where he was a little heap of withered bones. A fearful place is this broad abyss, where once murmured the waters of a prehistoric sea.

Let us return to the cool and fragrant security of the general's ranch.

At right angles to the main body of the house extend two wings, thus forming three sides of a square, the interior of which is the court-yard. Here the business of the establishment is conducted. It is the liveliest spot on the premises; though it is liveliness of a very indolent sort. The veranda built around these sides is twenty feet in breadth, paved with tiles that have been worn into hollows by innumerable lazy footsteps, mostly shoeless, for this side of the house is frequented chiefly by the servants of the place, who are Mexican Indians. Ancient wooden settles are bolted to the walls; from hooks hang Indian baskets of bright colors; in one corner are stretched raw hides, which serve as beds. Small brown children, half naked, trot, clamber, and crawl about. Black-haired, swarthy women squat on the tiled floor, pursuing their vocations, or, often, doing nothing at all beyond continuing a placid organic existence. Boys and men saunter in and out of the court-yard, chatting or calling in their musical patois; once in a while there is a thud and clatter of hoofs, a rider arriving or departing. It is an entertaining scene, charming in its monotony of small changes and evolutions; you can sit watching it in a half-doze for twenty years at a stretch, and it may seem only as many minutes, or vice versa.

Most of the rooms in the wings are used for the kitchens and other servants' quarters; but one large chamber is devoted to a special purpose of the general's own: it is a museum; the Curiosity-Room, he calls it. It is lighted by two windows opening on opposite sides, one on the court-yard, the other on an orange grove at the south end of the house. Besides being, in itself, a cool and pleasant spot, it is full of interest to any one who cares about the relics and antiquities of an ancient and vanishing race, concerning whom little is or ever will be known. There are two students in it at this moment; though whether they are studying antiquities is another matter. Let us give ear to their discourse and be instructed.

"But this was made for you to wear, Miss Trednoke. Try it. It fits you perfectly, you see. There can be no doubt about your being a princess, now!"

"I sometimes feel it,--here!" she said, putting her hand on her bosom.

She was looking at him as she said it, but her eyes, instead of any longer meeting his, seemed to turn their regard inward, and to traverse strange regions, not of this world. "I see some one who is myself, though I can never have been she: she is surrounded with brightness, and people not like ours; she thinks of things that I have never known. It is the memory of a dream, I suppose," she added, in another tone.

"Heredity is a queer thing. You may be Aztecan over again, in mind and temperament; and every one knows how impressions are transmitted.

If features and traits of character, why not particular thoughts and feelings?"

"I think it is better not to try to explain these things," said she, with the unconscious haughtiness which maidens acquire who have not seen the world and are adored by their family. "They are great mysteries,--or else nothing." She now removed from her head the curious cap or helmet, ornamented with gold and with the green feathers of the humming-bird, which her companion had crowned her with, and hung it on its nail in the cabinet. "Perhaps the thoughts came with the cap," she remarked, smiling slightly. "I don't feel that way any more. I ought not to have spoken of it."

"I hope the time will come when you will feel that you may trust me."

"You seem easy to know, Mr. Freeman," she replied, looking at him contemplatively as she spoke, "and yet you are not. There is one of you that thinks, and another that speaks. And you are not the same to my father, or to Professor Meschines, that you are to me."

"What is the use of human beings except to take one out of one's self?"

"But it is not your real self that comes out," said Miriam, after a little pause. She never spoke hurriedly, or until after the coming speech had pa.s.sed into her face.

Freeman laughed. "Well," he said, "if I'm a hypocrite, I'm one of those who are made and not born. As a boy, I was frank enough. But a good part of my life has been spent with people who couldn't be trusted; and perhaps the habit of protecting myself against them has grown upon me.

If I could only live here for a while it would be different.--Here's an odd-looking thing. What do you call that?"

"We call it the Golden Fleece."

"The Golden Fleece! I can imagine a Medea; but where is the Dragon?"

"If Jason came, the Dragon might appear."

"I remember reading somewhere that the Dragon was less to be feared than Medea's eyes. But this fleece seems to have lost most of its gold. There is only a little gold embroidery."

"It shows where the gold is hidden."

"It's you that are concealing something now, Miss Trednoke. How can a woollen garment be a talisman?"

"The secret might be woven into it, perhaps," replied Miriam, pa.s.sing her fingers caressingly over the soft tunic. "Then, when the right person puts it on, it would----But you don't believe in these things."

"I don't know: you don't give me a chance. But who is the right person?

The thing seems rather small. I'm sure I couldn't get it on."

"It can fit only the one it was made for," said Miriam, gravely. "And if you wanted to find the gold, you would trust to your science, rather than to this."

"Well, gold-hunting is not in my line, at present. Every nugget has been paid for more than once, before it is found. Besides, there is something better than gold in Southern California,--something worth any labor to get."

"What is it?" asked Miriam, turning her tranquil regard upon him.

Harvey Freeman had never been deficient in audacity. But, standing in the dark radiance of this maiden's eyes, his self-a.s.surance dwindled, and he could not bring himself to say to her what he would have said to any other pretty woman he had ever met. For he felt that great pride and pa.s.sion were concealed beneath that tranquil surface: it was a nature that might give everything to love, and would never pardon any frivolous parody thereof. Freeman had been acquainted with Miriam scarcely two days, but he had already begun to perceive the main indications of a character which a lifetime might not be long enough wholly to explore.

Marriage had never been among the enterprises he had, in the course of his career, proposed to himself: he did not propose it now: yet he dared not risk the utterance of a word that would lead Miriam to look at him with an offended or contemptuous glance. It was not that she was, from the merely physical point of view, transcendently beautiful. His first impression of her, indeed, had been that she was merely an unusually good example of a type by no means rare in that region. But ere long he became sensible of a spiritual quality in her which lifted her to a level far above that which can be attained by mere harmony of features and proportions. Beneath the outward aspect lay a profound depth of being, glimpses of which were occasionally discernible through her eyes, in the tones of her voice, in her smile, in unconscious movements of her hands and limbs. Demonstrative she could never be; but she could, at will, feel with tropical intensity, and act with the swiftness and energy of a fanatic.

In Miriam's company, Freeman forgot every one save her,--even himself,--though she certainly made no effort to attract him or (beyond the commonplaces of courtesy) to interest him. Consequently he had become entirely oblivious of the existence of such a person as Grace Parsloe, when, much to his irritation, he heard the voice of that young lady, mingled with others, approaching along the veranda. At the same moment he experienced acute regret at the whim of fortune which had made himself and that sprightly young lady fellow-pa.s.sengers from Panama, and at the idle impulse which had prompted him to flirt with her.

But the past was beyond remedy: it was his concern to deal with the present. In a few seconds, Grace entered the curiosity-room, followed by Professor Meschines, and by a dashing young Mexican senor, whom Freeman had met the previous evening, and who was called Don Miguel de Mendoza.

The senor, to judge from his manner, had already fallen violently in love with Grace, and was almost dislocating his organs of speech in the effort to pay her romantic compliments in English. Freeman observed this with unalloyed satisfaction. But the look which Grace bent upon him and Miriam, on entering, and the ominous change which pa.s.sed over her mobile countenance, went far to counteract this agreeable impression.

One story is good until another is told. Freeman had really thought Grace a fascinating girl, until he saw Miriam. There was no harm in that: the trouble was, he had allowed Grace to perceive his admiration.