THE winter rains were over and gone, and the whole long line of Californian coast was dashed with color. There were miles of yellow and red poppies, leagues of lupines that painted the gently rounded hills with soft primary hues, and long continuous slopes, like low mountain systems, of daisies and dandelions. At Sacramento it was already summer; the yellow river was flashing and intolerable; the tule and marsh grasses were lush and long; the bloom of cottonwood and sycamore whitened the outskirts of the city, and as Cyrus Hopkins and his daughter Phœbe looked from the veranda of the Placer Hotel, accustomed as they were to the cool trade winds of the coast valleys, they felt homesick from the memory of eastern heats.
Later, when they were surveying the long dinner tables at the table d’hôte with something of the uncomfortable and shamefaced loneliness of the provincial, Phœbe uttered a slight cry and clutched her father’s arm. Mr. Hopkins stayed the play of his squared elbows and glanced inquiringly at his daughter’s face. There was a pretty animation in it, as she pointed to a figure that had just entered. It was that of a young man attired in the extravagance rather than the taste of the prevailing fashion, which did not, however, in the least conceal a decided rusticity of limb and movement. A long mustache, which looked unkempt, even in its pomatumed stiffness, and lank, dark hair that had bent but never curled under the barber’s iron, made him notable even in that heterogeneous assembly.
“That’s he,” whispered Phœbe.
“Who?” said her father.
Alas for the inconsistencies of love! The blush came with the name and not the vision.
“Mr. Hooker,” she stammered.
It was, indeed, Jim Hooker. But the rôle of his exaggeration was no longer the same; the remorseful gloom in which he had been habitually steeped had changed into a fatigued, yet haughty, fastidiousness more in keeping with his fashionable garments. He was more peaceful, yet not entirely placable, and, as he sat down at a side table and pulled down his striped cuffs with his clasped fingers, he cast a glance of critical disapproval on the general company. Nevertheless, he seemed to be furtively watchful of his effect upon them, and as one or two whispered and looked towards him, his consciousness became darkly manifest.
All of which might have intimidated the gentle Phœbe, but did not discompose her father. He rose, and crossing over to Hooker’s table, clapped him heartily on the back.
“How do, Hooker? I didn’t recognize you in them fine clothes, but Phœbe guessed as how it was you.”
Flushed, disconcerted, irritated, but always in wholesome awe of Mr. Hopkins, Jim returned his greeting awkwardly and half hysterically. How he would have received the more timid Phœbe is another question. But Mr. Hopkins, without apparently noticing these symptoms, went on:—
“We’re only just down, Phœbe and me, and as I guess we’ll want to talk over old times, we’ll come alongside o’ you. Hold on, and I’ll fetch her.”
The interval gave the unhappy Jim a chance to recover himself, to regain his vanished cuffs, display his heavy watch-chain, curl his mustache, and otherwise reassume his air of blase fastidiousness. But the transfer made, Phœbe, after shaking hands, became speechless under these perfections. Not so her father.
“If there’s anything in looks, you seem to be prospering,” he said grimly; “unless you’re in the tailorin’ line, and you’re only showin’ off stock. What mout ye be doing?”
“Ye ain’t bin long in Sacramento, I reckon?” suggested Jim, with patronizing pity.
“No, we only came this morning,” returned Hopkins.
“And you ain’t bin to the theatre?” continued Jim.
“No.”
“Nor moved much in—in—gin’ral fash’nable sassiety?”
“Not yet,” interposed Phœbe, with an air of faint apology.
“Nor seen any of them large posters on the fences, of ‘The Prairie Flower; or, Red-handed Dick,’—three-act play with five tableaux,—just the biggest sensation out,—runnin’ for forty nights,—money turned away every night,—standin’ room only?” continued Jim, with prolonged toleration.
“No.”
“Well, I play Red-handed Dick. I thought you might have seen it and recognized me. All those people over there,” darkly indicating the long table, “know me. A fellow can’t stand it, you know, being stared at by such a vulgar, low-bred lot. It’s gettin’ too fresh here. I’ll have to give the landlord notice and cut the whole hotel. They don’t seem to have ever seen a gentleman and a professional before.”
“Then you’re a play-actor now?” said the farmer, in a tone which did not, however, exhibit the exact degree of admiration which shone in Phœbe’s eyes.
“For the present,” said Jim, with lofty indifference. “You see I was in—in partnership with McClosky, the manager, and I didn’t like the style of the chump that was doin’ Red-handed Dick, so I offered to take his place one night to show him how. And by Jinks! the audience, after that night, wouldn’t let anybody else play it,—wouldn’t stand even the biggest, highest-priced stars in it! I reckon,” he added gloomily, “I’ll have to run the darned thing in all the big towns in Californy,—if I don’t have to go East with it after all, just for the business. But it’s an awful grind on a man,—leaves him no time, along of the invitations he gets, and what with being run after in the streets and stared at in the hotels he don’t get no privacy. There’s men, and women, too, over at that table, that just lie in wait for me here till I come, and don’t lift their eyes off me. I wonder they don’t bring their opery-glasses with them.”
Concerned, sympathizing, and indignant, poor Phœbe turned her brown head and honest eyes in that direction. But because they were honest, they could not help observing that the other table did not seem to be paying the slightest attention to the distinguished impersonator of Red-handed Dick. Perhaps he had been overheard.
“Then that was the reason ye didn’t come back to your location. I always guessed it was because you’d got wind of the smash-up down there, afore we did,” said Hopkins grimly.
“What smash-up?” asked Jim, with slightly resentful quickness.
“Why, the smash-up of the Sisters’ title,—didn’t you hear that?”
There was a slight movement of relief and a return of gloomy hauteur in Jim’s manner.
“No, we don’t know much of what goes on in the cow counties, up here.”
“Ye mout, considerin’ it concerns some o’ your friends,” returned Hopkins dryly. “For the Sisters’ title went smash as soon as it was known that Pedro Valdez—the man as started it—had his neck broken outside the walls o’ Robles Rancho; and they do say as this yer Brant, your friend, had suthin’ to do with the breaking of it, though it was laid to the ghost of old Peyton. Anyhow, there was such a big skeer that one of the Greaser gang, who thought he’d seen the ghost, being a Papist, to save his everlasting soul went to the priest and confessed. But the priest wouldn’t give him absolution until he’d blown the hull thing, and made it public. And then it turned out that all the dockyments for the title, and even the custom-house paper, were forged by Pedro Valdez, and put on the market by his confederates. And that’s just where your friend, Clarence Brant, comes in, for he had bought up the whole title from them fellers. Now, either, as some say, he was in the fraud from the beginnin’, and never paid anything, or else he was an all-fired fool, and had parted with his money like one. Some allow that the reason was that he was awfully sweet on Mrs. Peyton’s adopted daughter, and ez the parents didn’t approve of him, he did this so as to get a holt over them by the property. But he’s a ruined man, anyway, now; for they say he’s such a darned fool that he’s goin’ to pay for all the improvements that the folks who bought under him put into the land, and that’ll take his last cent. I thought I’d tell you that, for I suppose you’ve lost a heap in your improvements, and will put in your claim?”
“I reckon I put nearly as much into it as Clar Brant did,” said Jim gloomily, “but I ain’t goin’ to take a cent from him, or go back on him now.”
The rascal could not resist this last mendacious opportunity, although he was perfectly sincere in his renunciation, touched in his sympathy, and there was even a film of moisture in his shifting eyes.
Phœbe was thrilled with the generosity of this noble being, who could be unselfish even in his superior condition. She added softly:—
“And they say that the girl did not care for him at all, but was actually going to run off with Pedro, when he stopped her and sent for Mrs. Peyton.”
To her surprise, Jim’s face flushed violently.
“It’s all a dod-blasted lie,” he said, in a thick stage whisper. “It’s only the hogwash them Greasers and Pike County galoots ladle out to each other around the stove in a county grocery. But,” recalling himself loftily, and with a tolerant wave of his be-diamonded hand, “wot kin you expect from one of them cow counties? They ain’t satisfied till they drive every gentleman out of the darned gopher-holes they call their ‘kentry.’”
In her admiration of what she believed to be a loyal outburst for his friend, Phœbe overlooked the implied sneer at her provincial home. But her father went on with a perfunctory, exasperating, dusty aridity:—
“That mebbee ez mebbee, Mr. Hooker, but the story down in our precinct goes that she gave Mrs. Peyton the slip,—chucked up her situation as adopted darter, and went off with a queer sort of a cirkiss woman,—one of her own kin, and I reckon one of her own kind.”
To this Mr. Hooker offered no further reply than a withering rebuke of the waiter, a genteel abstraction, and a lofty change of subject. He pressed upon them two tickets for the performance, of which he seemed to have a number neatly clasped in an india-rubber band, and advised them to come early. They would see him after the performance and sup together. He must leave them now, as he had to be punctually at the theatre, and if he lingered he should be pestered by interviewers. He withdrew under a dazzling display of cuff and white handkerchief, and with that inward swing of the arm and slight bowiness of the leg generally recognized in his profession as the lounging exit of high comedy.
The mingling of awe and an uneasy sense of changed relations which that meeting with Jim had brought to Phœbe was not lessened when she entered the theatre with her father that evening, and even Mr. Hopkins seemed to share her feelings. The theatre was large, and brilliant in decoration, the seats were well filled with the same heterogeneous mingling she had seen in the dining-room at the Placer Hotel, but in the parquet were some fashionable costumes and cultivated faces. Mr. Hopkins was not altogether so sure that Jim had been “only gassing.” But the gorgeous drop curtain, representing an allegory of Californian prosperity and abundance, presently uprolled upon a scene of Western life almost as striking in its glaring unreality. From a rose-clad English cottage in a subtropical landscape skipped “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower.” The briefest of skirts, the most unsullied of stockings, the tiniest of slippers, and the few diamonds that glittered on her fair neck and fingers, revealed at once the simple and unpretending daughter of the American backwoodsman. A tumult of delighted greeting broke from the audience. The bright color came to the pink, girlish cheeks, gratified vanity danced in her violet eyes, and as she piquantly bowed her acknowledgments, this great breath of praise seemed to transfigure and possess her. A very young actor who represented the giddy world in a straw hat and with an effeminate manner was alternately petted and girded at by her during the opening exposition of the plot, until the statement that a “dark destiny” obliged her to follow her uncle in an emigrant train across the plains closed the act, apparently extinguished him, and left her the central figure. So far, she evidently was the favorite. A singular aversion to her crept into the heart of Phœbe.
But the second act brought an Indian attack upon the emigrant train, and here “Rosalie” displayed the archest heroism and the pinkest and most distracting self-possession, in marked contrast to the giddy worldling who, having accompanied her apparently for comic purposes best known to himself, cowered abjectly under wagons, and was pulled ignominiously out of straw, until Red Dick swept out of the wings with a chosen band and a burst of revolvers and turned the tide of victory. Attired as a picturesque combination of the Neapolitan smuggler, river-bar miner, and Mexican vacquero, Jim Hooker instantly began to justify the plaudits that greeted him and the most sanguinary hopes of the audience. A gloomy but fascinating cloud of gunpowder and dark intrigue from that moment hung about the stage.
Yet in this sombre obscuration Rosalie had passed a happy six months, coming out with her character and stockings equally unchanged and unblemished, to be rewarded with the hand of Red Dick and the discovery of her father, the governor of New Mexico, as a white-haired, but objectionable vacquero, at the fall of the curtain.
Through this exciting performance Phœbe sat with a vague and increasing sense of loneliness and distrust. She did not know that Hooker had added to his ordinary inventive exaggeration the form of dramatic composition. But she had early detected the singular fact that such shadowy outlines of plot as the piece possessed were evidently based on his previous narrative of his own experiences, and the saving of Susy Peyton—by himself! There was the episode of their being lost on the plains, as he had already related it to her, with the addition of a few years to Susy’s age and some vivid picturesqueness to himself as Red Dick. She was not, of course, aware that the part of the giddy worldling was Jim’s own conception of the character of Clarence. But what, even to her provincial taste, seemed the extravagance of the piece, she felt, in some way, reflected upon the truthfulness of the story she had heard. It seemed to be a parody on himself, and in the laughter which some of the most thrilling points produced in certain of the audience, she heard an echo of her own doubts. But even this she could have borne if Jim’s confidence had not been given to the general public; it was no longer hers alone, she shared it with them. And this strange, bold girl, who acted with him,—the “Blanche Belville” of the bills,—how often he must have told her the story, and yet how badly she had learned it! It was not her own idea of it, nor of him. In the last extravagant scene she turned her weary and half-shamed eyes from the stage and looked around the theatre. Among a group of loungers by the wall a face that seemed familiar was turned towards her own with a look of kindly and sympathetic recognition. It was the face of Clarence Brant. When the curtain fell, and she and her father rose to go, he was at their side. He seemed older and more superior looking than she had ever thought him before, and there was a gentle yet sad wisdom in his eyes and voice that comforted her even while it made her feel like crying.
“You are satisfied that no harm has come to our friend,” he said pleasantly. “Of course you recognized him?”
“Oh, yes; we met him to-day,” said Phœbe. Her provincial pride impelled her to keep up a show of security and indifference. “We are going to supper with him.”
Clarence slightly lifted his brows.
“You are more fortunate than I am,” he said smilingly. “I only arrived here at seven, and I must leave at midnight.”
Phœbe hesitated a moment, then said with affected carelessness:—
“What do you think of the young girl who plays with him? Do you know her? Who is she?”
He looked at her quickly, and then said, with some surprise:—
“Did he not tell you?”
“She was the adopted daughter of Mrs. Peyton,—Miss Susan Silsbee,” he said gravely.
“Then she did run away from home as they said,” said Phœbe impulsively.
“Not exactly as they said,” said Clarence gently. “She elected to make her home with her aunt, Mrs. McClosky, who is the wife of the manager of this theatre, and she adopted the profession a month ago. As it now appears that there was some informality in the old articles of guardianship, Mrs. Peyton would have been powerless to prevent her from doing either, even if she had wished to.”
The infelicity of questioning Clarence regarding Susy suddenly flashed upon the forgetful Phœbe, and she colored. Yet, although sad, he did not look like a rejected lover.
“Of course, if she is here with her own relatives, that makes all the difference,” she said gently. “It is protection.”
“Certainly,” said Clarence.
“And,” continued Phœbe hesitatingly, “she is playing with—with—an old friend—Mr. Hooker!”
“That is quite proper, too, considering their relations,” said Clarence tolerantly.
“I—don’t—understand,” stammered Phœbe.
The slightly cynical smile on Clarence’s face changed as he looked into Phœbe’s eyes.
“I’ve just heard that they are married,” he returned gently.