The pioneer

During the months of summer, dwellers along the line of the railway became familiar with the figure of Lionel Harrower. He constantly went down to San Mateo on Sunday afternoons and returned to town on Sunday evening. This, at first, was regarded as the outward and visible sign of his devotion to Miss Gracey, but by and by it was remarked that he did not take the Gracey carriage which so often stood under the live-oaks at the depot, but mounted a hired hack and was driven off in the direction of the De Soto house.

It was a Sunday or two after Mercedes had driven him there that the young Englishman had appeared on the balcony steps, very red and warm from the heat of the afternoon, and paid a long call, which extended so far into the twilight that he was bidden to dinner and did not go back to town till a late evening train.

It had evidently been an enjoyable afternoon, for he repeated it, and then again repeated it, and finally let it develop into a habit. He wrote to his relations in England that he was deeply interested in California and was studying the mining industry of that remarkable state. And it is true that once in the middle of the summer he went to Virginia for a few days and came back with his mind full of excellent material for a letter to his grandfather which should prove how profound had been his study of the American mining and engineering methods.

The first afternoon that Mercedes found him on the Allens’ balcony she was openly surprised. The second she was sweet and gracious, but her rose-leaf color deepened at the sight of him, and it was noticeable that, for one who was usually so completely mistress of herself, she was distrait and lacking in repose. On leaving, she had asked him if she could drive him back to the station, as her road lay that way, to which the young man had answered, with the stiff politeness of embarrassment, that he was to stay to dinner—“he always did on Sunday.”

This was the inception of a situation that, before the summer was over, had caused more heart-burnings, more wakeful nights and distressed days, than the peaceful valley had known in many years.

For the first time in an existence of triumph and adulation Mercedes knew defeat. She had been certain of her attraction for Harrower, and confident that by her beauty and her wiles she could, before his departure, fan his interest to a warmer flame. Yet July was not spent before she realized that a force more potent than any she could put forth was leading the young man in another direction. His visits to the Allens’ grew more and more frequent as those to Tres Pinos became less so. Curiosity in his interest in the occupants of the De Soto house evolved itself into curiosity in his interest in Rosamund Allen. He forgot the tours he had intended to take into the interior, showed no more interest in Virginia City, and gave up his plan of a horseback expedition to the Yosemite. He spent the summer in town, making trips to San Mateo that grew more and more frequent.

It was difficult for Mercedes to believe it, but when she did it kindled sleeping fires in her. She was doubly wounded; heart and pride were hurt. Her overmastering vanity had received its first blow. Not only had she lost the man for whom her feeling was daily growing warmer, but it would be known of all men that he had withdrawn his affections from her to place them on a girl far her inferior in looks, education and feminine charm. That he should have preferred Rosamund was particularly maddening—Rosamund, whom she had regarded as commonplace and countrified. She looked in her glass, and furious tears gathered in her eyes. It was staggering, incomprehensible, but it was true. She was discarded, and people were laughing at her.

Two instincts—strong in women of her type—rose within her. One demanded revenge and the other protection of her pride. She burned with the desire to strike back at those who had hurt her, and at the same to hide the wounds to her self-love. She knew of but one way to do the latter, and it came upon her—not suddenly, but with a gradually uplifting illumination—that it could be successfully combined with the execution of the former.

Mercedes, who liked gossip, had heard the story of Jerry Barclay’s complication with Mrs. Newbury, and of how it was popularly supposed to have prevented his marriage to June Allen. The busy scandal-hunters of the city had somehow unearthed the story that Jerry and June would have married had the former been free. Mercedes, with her woman’s quickness, guessed that June was the sort of girl who would remain constant in such a situation. But Jerry was a being of another stripe, a man of an unusual attraction for women and of a light and errant fancy. She had not met him half a dozen times when she came to the conclusion that his love for June was on the wane, his roving eye ready to be caught, his ear held, by the first soft glance and flattering tongue he encountered.

Thus the way of protecting herself and of hitting back at one at least of the Allens was put into her hand. She did not care for Jerry, save as he was useful to her, though he had the value of the thing which is highly prized by others. She used every weapon in her armory to attract and subjugate him. Jerry himself, versed in the wiles of women as he was, was deceived by her girlishly open pleasure in his attentions, her fluttered embarrassment when he paid her compliments.

His first feeling toward her was an unbounded admiration for her physical perfections, to which was added a complacent vanity at her obvious predilection for him. But the woman that he regarded as a naïve ingenue was a being of a more complex brain, a more daring initiative, and a cooler head than he had ever possessed. Vain and self-indulgent, the slave of his passions, he was in reality a puppet in the hands of a girl fifteen years his junior, who, under an exterior of flower-like delicacy, had been eaten into by the acids of rage and revenge.

While he still thought himself a trifler in the outer court of sentiment he was already under her dominion. He thought of himself as taking an impersonally admiring interest in her when he was continually haunted by the thought of her, and hastened to spend his spare hours beside her, his eyes drinking in her beauty, his vanity fostered and stimulated by the flattery she so cunningly administered. Like Paris, he felt himself beloved by goddesses. June’s image faded. Two years had passed since his confession in the wood. He had seen her only at intervals and then under a perpetual ban of restraint. He was not the man to remain constant to a memory. June hovered on the edges of his consciousness like a sad-eyed shadow, looking at him with a pleading protest that made him feel angry with her. She was a dim, unappealing figure beside the radiant youthfulness, the sophisticated coquetries of Black Dan’s daughter.

During the early part of the summer June was in ignorance of the momentous shuffling of the cards of her destiny. She lived quietly, rarely going to the city, and spending most of her time in the gardens or on the balcony. Rosamund, who went about more, marketed in the village and shopped in town, began to hear rumors of Jerry’s interest in Miss Gracey. She met them riding together in the hot solitude of the country roads, saw them meet on the trains to the city. Finally the rumors passed to San Francisco and the Colonel heard them. He came down to San Mateo that Saturday to talk things over with Rosamund. They were worried and uneasy, a sense of calamity weighing on them both.

Though June was one of those women who obstinately adhere to the bright side, who cling to hope till it crumbles in their hands, she felt, during the summer, premonitions of ill fortune. Those inexplicable shadows of approaching evil that Nature throws forward over the path of sensitive temperaments had darkened her outlook. She questioned herself as to her heaviness of heart, assuring herself that there was no new cloud on her horizon. In the constancy of her own nature she did not realize, as a more experienced woman would, that her hold on Jerry was a silken thread which would wear very thin in the passage of years, and be ready to snap at the first strain.

But the moods of apprehension and gloom began to be augmented by ripples from the pool of gossip without. She heard that Jerry was oftener in San Mateo than ever before, and she saw him less frequently. One afternoon she met him driving with Mercedes, and the girl’s radiant smile of recognition had something of malicious triumph under its beaming sweetness. June drove home silent and pale. In her room she tried to argue herself out of her depression. But it stayed with her, made her preoccupied and quiet all the evening, lay down with her at night, and was heavy and cold at her heart in the morning.

At the end of September they returned to town. They had been back a few weeks when one afternoon she met Jerry on the street and they stopped for a few moments’ conversation. It was nothing more than the ordinary interchange of commonplaces between old friends, but when he had passed on, the girl walked forward looking wan and feeling a deadly sense of blankness. He was the same man, gay, handsome, suave, and yet he seemed suddenly far removed from her, to be smiling with the perfunctory politeness of a stranger. The chill exhaled by a dying love penetrated her, pierced her to the core. She did not understand it, him, or herself. All that she knew was that the sense of despondency became suddenly overpowering, and closed like an iron clutch on her heart.

It was an overcast autumn that year, with much gray weather and early fogs. The city had never looked to June so cheerless. She was a great deal alone, Rosamund’s time being more and more claimed by Lionel Harrower. He was her first lover, and it was a part of Rosamund’s fate that he should have come to her unexpected and unasked for. She was of the order of women who stand where they are placed, doing what comes under their hand, demanding little of life, and to whom life’s gifts come as a surprise.

That such a man as the young Briton should prefer her to her sister, whose superior charm she had always acknowledged and been proud of, was to her astonishing. She was sobered and softened in these days of awakening love. One could see the woman, the mother, ripe, soft, full of a quiet devotion, slowly dawning. Sometimes she was irritable, a thing previously unknown. She could not believe that Harrower loved her, and yet as the days passed, and she found the hours spent with him growing ever more disturbingly sweet, she wondered how she could ever support a life in which he did not figure, and the thought filled her with torturing fears.

One gray afternoon, Rosamund having left for a walk in the park with Harrower, June, after wandering about the empty house for a dreary hour, resolved that she too would go out for a stroll. She had felt more cheerful lately. Jerry had come to call two days before, when she was out, and this fact had seemed to her a proof of his unwaned interest. She had written him a brief note, stating her regrets at missing him and her hopes that he would repeat the visit soon. This was only polite and proper, she assured herself.

Her walk took her to Van Ness Avenue and then up the side street toward the little Turk Street plaza. For the past two years it had been a favorite promenade of hers. The present was not sufficiently fraught with pain to render memories of a happier past unbearable. She strolled through the small park and then returned and walked back toward the avenue. As she turned the corner into the great thoroughfare, she stopped, the color dying from her face, the softness of its outlines stiffening.

Walking slowly toward her were Jerry and Mercedes Gracey. They were close together, Mercedes lightly touching with the tips of her fingers the top of the ornamental fence beside her. Her eyes were down-drooped, her whole air one of maidenly modesty, which yet had in it something coyly encouraging. Jerry, close at her shoulder, was looking down at her, with the eyes of a lover.

For the first moment June was too stricken to move. She stood spellbound, poised in mid-flight, hungrily staring. Then the desire for concealment seized her, and she was about to turn and steal back to the corner whence she had come, when Mercedes raised her eyes and saw her. She threw a short, quick phrase at Jerry, and he started and drew himself up. June moved forward, and as she approached them forced her lips into a smile and bowed. She was conscious that Jerry had flushed and looked angry as he raised his hat. But Mercedes enveloped her in a glance of fascinating cordiality, inclining her head in a graceful salutation.

A half-hour later June gained her room and sank into an arm-chair. For some time she sat motionless, gazing at the gray oblongs of the two windows with their shadowy upper draperies. As the look in Jerry’s face kept rising upon her mental vision, she experienced a slight sensation of nausea and feebleness. But even in this hour of revelation she kept whispering to herself,

“He couldn’t! He couldn’t! He couldn’t have the heart! He couldn’t hurt me so!”

The few poor memories she had of moments of tenderness between them, the meager words of love that she had regarded as binding vows, rose in her mind. It had seemed to her he could no more disregard them than she could. She thought of herself responding to the love of another man—of its impossibility—and sat bowed together in her chair, for the first time catching a revealing gleam of the difference in their attitudes. Then the memory of Mrs. Newbury came to her, and with it a strengthening sense of his unbreakable obligation. Nearly three years ago, when June had first heard of this, it had seemed so degraded and repulsive that she had shrunk from the thought of it. Now, sitting lonely in the twilight, her eyes staring at the gray panes, she recalled it with relief, found it a thing to be glad of, to congratulate herself upon. The city had put its stain upon her. Her maidenly fastidiousness was smirched with its mud.

Plunged in these dark thoughts she did not hear the door open, nor see Rosamund’s head gently inserted. It was not till the rustling of her advancing skirts was distinct on the silence that June started and turned. The last light of day fell through the long window on the younger girl’s face, rosy with exercise, and shining with a new happiness. She paused by June’s chair and stood there, looking down. For the first time in her life the preoccupation of her own affairs prevented her from noticing her sister’s sickly appearance.

“It’s all arranged, June,” she said in a low voice.

“Arranged!” repeated June, looking up quickly, her ear struck by something unusual in her sister’s tone. “What’s arranged?”

“Everything between Mr. Harrower and me. We’re—we’re—”

“You’re engaged?” said June, almost solemnly.

Rosamund, looking into the upturned face, nodded. There was a sudden pricking of tears under her eyelids, an unexpected quivering of her lips. She bent down and laid her cheek against her sister’s, and in the dim room they clung together for a silent moment, one in the first flush of her woman’s happiness, the other in the dawning realization of her desertion.