Gabriel Conroy

CHAPTER V.
MRS. CONROY HAS AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR

The hot weather had not been confined to San Francisco. San Pablo Bay had glittered, and the yellow currents of the San Joaquin and Sacramento glowed sullenly with a dull sluggish lava-like flow. No breeze stirred the wild oats that drooped on the western slope of the Contra Costa hills; the smoke of burning woods on the eastern hillsides rose silently and steadily; the great wheat fields of the intermediate valleys clothed themselves humbly in dust and ashes. A column of red dust accompanied the Wingdam and One Horse Gulch stage-coach, a pillar of fire by day as well as by night, and made the fainting passengers look longingly toward the snow-patched Sierras beyond. It was hot in California; few had ever seen the like, and those who had were looked upon as enemies of their race. A rashly scientific man of Murphy's Camp who had a theory of his own, and upon that had prophesied a continuance of the probable recurrence of the earthquake shock, concluded he had better leave the settlement until the principles of meteorology were better recognised and established.

It was hot in One Horse Gulch – in the oven-like Gulch, on the burning sands and scorching bars of the river. It was hot even on Conroy's Hill, among the calm shadows of the dark-green pines – on the deep verandahs of the Conroy cottage orné. Perhaps this was the reason why Mrs. Gabriel Conroy, early that morning after the departure of her husband for the mill, had evaded the varnished and white-leaded heats of her own house and sought the more fragrant odours of the sedate pines beyond the hilltop. I fear, however, that something was due to a mysterious note which had reached her clandestinely the evening before, and which, seated on the trunk of a prostrate pine, she was now reperusing.

I should like to sketch her as she sat there. A broad-brimmed straw hat covered her head, that although squared a little too much at the temples for shapeliness, was still made comely by the good taste with which – aided by a crimping-iron – she had treated her fine-spun electrical blonde hair. The heat had brought out a delicate dewy colour in her usually pale face, and had heightened the intense nervous brightness of her vivid grey eyes. From the same cause, probably, her lips were slightly parted, so that the rigidity that usually characterised their finely chiselled outlines was lost. She looked healthier; the long flowing skirts which she affected, after the fashion of most petite women, were gathered at a waist scarcely as sylph-like and unsubstantial as that which Gabriel first clasped after the accident in the fateful cañon. She seemed a trifle more languid – more careful of her personal comfort, and spent some time in adjusting herself to the inequalities of her uncouth seat with a certain pouting peevishness of manner that was quite as new to her character as it was certainly feminine and charming. She held the open note in her thin, narrow, white-tipped fingers, and glanced over it again with a slight smile. It read as follows: —

"At ten o'clock I shall wait for you at the hill near the Big Pine! You shall give me an interview if you know yourself well. I say beware! I am strong, for I am injured! – Victor."

Mrs. Conroy folded the note again, still smiling, and placed it carefully in her pocket. Then she sat patient, her hands clasped lightly between her knees, the parasol open at her feet – the very picture of a fond, confiding tryst. Then she suddenly drew her feet under her, sideways, with a quick, nervous motion, and examined the ground carefully with sincere distrust of all artful lurking vermin who lie in wait for helpless womanhood. Then she looked at her watch.

It was five minutes past the hour. There was no sound in the dim, slumbrous wood, but the far-off sleepy caw of a rook. A squirrel ran impulsively halfway down the bark of the nearest pine, and catching sight of her tilted parasol, suddenly flattened himself against the bark, with outstretched limbs, a picture of abject terror. A bounding hare came upon it suddenly and had a palpitation of the heart that he thought he really never should get over. And then there was a slow crackling in the underbrush as of a masculine tread, and Mrs. Conroy, picking up her terrible parasol, shaded the cold fires of her grey eyes with it and sat calm and expectant.

A figure came slowly and listlessly up the hill. When within a dozen yards of her, she saw it was not Victor. But when it approached nearer she suddenly started to her feet with pallid cheeks and an exclamation upon her lips. It was the Spanish translator of Pacific Street. She would have flown, but on the instant he turned and recognised her with a cry, a start, and a passion equal to her own. For a moment they stood glaring at each other breathless but silent!

"Devarges!" said Mrs. Conroy, in a voice that was scarcely audible. "Good God!"

The stranger uttered a bitter laugh. "Yes! Devarges! – the man who ran away with you – Devarges the traitor! Devarges the betrayer of your husband. Look at me! You know me – Henry Devarges! Your husband's brother! – your old accomplice – your lover – your dupe!"

"Hush," she said, imploringly glancing around through the dim woods, "for God's sake, hush!"

"And who are you," he went on, without heeding her, "which of the Mesdames Devarges is it now? Or have you taken the name of the young sprig of an officer for whom you deserted me and maybe in turn married? Or did he refuse you even that excuse for your perfidy? Or is it the wife and accomplice of this feeble-minded Conroy? What name shall I call you? Tell me quick! Oh, I have much to say, but I wish to be polite, madame; tell me to whom I am to speak!"

Despite the evident reality of his passion and fury there was something so unreal and grotesque in his appearance – in his antique foppery, in his dyed hair, in his false teeth, in his padded coat, in his thin strapped legs, that this relentless woman cowered before him in very shame, not of her crime but of her accomplice! "Hush," she said, "call me your friend; I am always your friend, Henry. Call me anything, but let me go from here. For God's sake, do you hear? Not so loud! Another time and another place I will listen," and she drew slowly back, until, scarce knowing what he did, she had led him away from the place of rendezvous toward the ruined cabin. Here she felt that she was at least safe from the interruption of Victor. "How came you here? How did you find out what had become of me? Where have you been these long years?" she asked hastily.

Within the last few moments she had regained partially the strange power that she had always exerted over all men except Gabriel Conroy. The stranger hesitated, and then answered in a voice that had more of hopelessness than bitterness in its quality —

"I came here six years ago, a broken, ruined, and disgraced man. I had no ambition but to hide myself from all who had known me, from that brother whose wife I had stolen, and whose home I had broken up – from you – you, Julie! you and your last lover – from the recollection of your double treachery!" He had raised his voice here, but was checked by the unflinching eye and cautionary gesture of the woman before him. "When you abandoned me in St. Louis, I had no choice but death or a second exile. I could not return to Switzerland, I could not live in the sickening shadow of my crime and its bitter punishment. I came here. My education, my knowledge of the language stood me in good stead. I might have been a rich man, I might have been an influential one, but I only used my opportunities for the bare necessaries of life and the means to forget my trouble in dissipation. I became a drudge by day, a gambler by night. I was always a gentleman. Men thought me crazy, an enthusiast, but they learned to respect me. Traitor as I was in a larger trust, no one doubted my honour or dared to question my integrity. But bah! what is this to you? You!"

He would have turned from her again in very bitterness, but in the act he caught her eye, and saw in it if not sympathy, at least a certain critical admiration, that again brought him to her feet. For despicable as this woman was, she was pleased at this pride in the man she had betrayed, was gratified at the sentiment that lifted him above his dyed hair and his pitiable foppery, and felt a certain honourable satisfaction in the fact that, even after the lapse of years, he had proved true to her own intuitions of him.

"I had been growing out of my despair, Julie," he went on, sadly; "I was, or believed I was, forgetting my fault, forgetting even you, when there came to me the news of my brother's death – by starvation. Listen to me, Julie. One day there came to me for translation a document, revealing the dreadful death of him – your husband, my brother – do you hear? – by starvation! Driven from his home by shame, he had desperately sought to hide himself as I had – accepted the hardship of emigration – he, a gentleman and a man of letters – with the boors and rabble of the plains, had shared their low trials and their vulgar pains, and died among them, unknown and unrecorded."

"He died as he had lived," said Mrs. Conroy, passionately, "a traitor and a hypocrite; he died following the fortunes of his paramour, an uneducated, vulgar rustic, to whom, dying, he willed a fortune – this girl – Grace Conroy. Thank God, I have the record! Hush! what's that?"

Whatever it was – a falling bough or the passing of some small animal in the underbrush – it was past now. A dead silence enwrapped the two solitary actors; they might have been the first man and the first woman, so encompassed were they by Nature and solitude.

"No," she went on, hurriedly, in a lower tone, "it was the same old story – the story of that girl at Basle – the story of deceit and treachery which brought us first together, which made you, Henry, my friend, which turned our sympathies into a more dangerous passion. You have suffered. Ah, well, so have I. We are equal now."

Henry Devarges looked speechlessly upon his companion. Her voice trembled, there were tears in her eyes, that had replaced the burning light of womanly indignation. He had come there knowing her to have been doubly treacherous to her husband and himself. She had not denied it. He had come there to tax her with an infamous imposture, but had found himself within the last minute glowing with sympathetic condemnation of his own brother, and ready to accept the yet unoffered and perfectly explicable theory of that imposture. More than that, he began to feel that his own wrongs were slight in comparison with the injuries received by this superior woman. The woman who endeavours to justify herself to her jealous lover, always has a powerful ally in his own self-love, and Devarges was quite willing to believe that even if he had lost her love, he had never at least been deceived. And the answer to the morality of this imposture was before him. Here was she married to the surviving brother of the girl she had personated. Had he – had Dr. Devarges ever exhibited as noble trust, as perfect appreciation of her nature and sufferings? Had they not thrown away the priceless pearl of this woman's love through ignorance and selfishness? You and I, my dear sir, who are not in love with this most reprehensible creature, will be quick to see the imperfect logic of Henry Devarges, but when a man constitutes himself accuser, judge, and jury of the woman he loves, he is very apt to believe he is giving a verdict when he is only entering a nolle prosequi. It is probably that Mrs. Conroy had noticed this weakness in her companion, even with her preoccupied fears of the inopportune appearance of Victor, whom she felt she could have accounted for much better in his absence. Victor was an impulsive person, and there are times when this quality, generally adored by a self-restrained sex, is apt to be confounding.

"Why did you come here to see me?" asked Mrs. Conroy, with a dangerous smile. "Only to abuse me?"

"There is another grant in existence for the same land that you claim as Grace Conroy or Mrs. Conroy," returned Devarges, with masculine bluntness, "a grant given prior to that made to my brother Paul. A suspicion that some imposture has been practised is entertained by the party holding the grant, and I have been requested to get at the facts."

Mrs. Conroy's grey eyes lightened. "And how were these suspicions aroused?"

"By an anonymous letter."

"And you have seen it?"

"Yes; both it and the handwriting in portions of the grant are identical."

"And you know the hand?"

"I do; it is that of a man now here, an old Californian – Victor Ramirez!"

He fixed his eyes upon her; unabashed she turned her own clear glance on his, and asked, with a dazzling smile —

"But does not your client know that, whether this grant is a forgery or not, my husband's title is good?"

"Yes; but the sympathies of my client, as you call her, are interested in the orphan girl Grace."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Conroy, with the faintest possible sigh, "your client, for whom you have travelled – how many miles? – is a woman."

Half-pleased, but half-embarrassed, Devarges said "Yes."

"I understand," said Mrs. Conroy slowly. "A young woman, perhaps a good, a pretty one! And you have said, 'I will prove this Mrs. Conroy an impostor,' and you are here. Well, I do not blame you. You are a man. It is well perhaps it is so."

"But, Julie, hear me!" interrupted the alarmed Devarges.

"No more!" said Mrs. Conroy, rising, and waving her thin white hand, "I do not blame you. I could expect – I deserve – no more! Go back to your client, sir, tell her that you have seen Julie Devarges, the impostor. Tell her to go and press her claim, and that you will assist her. Finish the work that the anonymous letter-writer has begun, and earn your absolution for your crime and my folly. Get your reward – you deserve it – but tell her to thank God for having raised up to her better friends than Julie Devarges ever possessed in the heyday of her beauty. Go! Farewell! No; let me go, Henry Devarges, I am going to my husband. He at least has known how to forgive and protect a friendless and erring woman."

Before the astonished man could recover his senses, elusive as a sunbeam she had slipped through his fingers and was gone. For a moment only he followed the flash of her white skirt through the dark aisles of the forest, and then the pillared trees, crowding in upon each other, hid her from view.

Perhaps it was well, for a moment later Victor Ramirez, flushed, wild-eyed, dishevelled, and panting, stumbled blindly upon the trail, and blundered into Devarges' presence. The two men eyed each other in silence.

"A hot day for a walk!" said Devarges, with an ill-concealed sneer.

"Vengeance of God! you are right, it is," returned Victor. "And you?"

"Oh, I have been fighting flies. Good-day!"

CHAPTER VI.
GABRIEL DISCARDS HIS HOME AND WEALTH

I am sorry to say that Mrs. Conroy's expression as she fled was not entirely consistent with the grieved and heart-broken manner with which she had just closed the interview with Henry Devarges. Something of a smile lurked about the corners of her thin lips as she tripped up the steps of her house, and stood panting a little with the exertion in the shadow of the porch. But here she suddenly found herself becoming quite faint, and entering the apparently empty house, passed at once to her boudoir, and threw herself exhaustedly on the lounge with a certain peevish discontent at her physical weakness. No one had seen her enter; the Chinese servants were congregated in the distant wash-house. Her housekeeper had taken advantage of her absence to ride to the town. The unusual heat was felt to be an apology for any domestic negligence.

She was very thoughtful. The shock she had felt on first meeting Devarges was past; she was satisfied she still retained an influence over him sufficient to keep him her ally against Ramirez, whom she felt she now had reason to fear. Hitherto his jealousy had only shown itself in vapouring and bravado; she had been willing to believe him capable of offering her physical violence in his insane fury, and had not feared it, but this deliberately planned treachery made her tremble. She would see Devarges again; she would recite the wrongs she had received from the dead brother and husband, and in Henry's weak attempt to still his own conscience with that excuse, she could trust to him to keep Ramirez in check, and withhold the exposure until she and Gabriel could get away. Once out of the country, she could laugh at them both; once away, she could devote herself to win the love of Gabriel, without which she had begun to feel her life and schemes had been in vain. She would hurry their departure at once. Since the report had spread affecting the value of the mine, Gabriel, believing it true, had vaguely felt it his duty to stand by his doubtful claim and accept its fortunes, and had delayed his preparations. She would make him believe that it was Dumphy's wish that he should go at once; she would make Dumphy write him to that effect. She smiled as she thought of the power she had lately achieved over the fears of this financial magnate. She would do all this, but for her physical weakness. She ground her teeth as she thought of it: that at such a time she should be – and yet a moment later a sudden fancy flashed across her mind, and she closed her eyes that she might take in its delusive sweetness more completely. It might be that it wanted only this to touch his heart – some men were so strange – and if it were, O God! – she stopped.

What was that noise? The house had been very quiet, so still that she had heard a woodpecker tapping on its roof. But now she heard distinctly the slow, heavy tread of a man in one of the upper chambers, which had been used as a lumber-room. Mrs. Conroy had none of the nervous apprehension of her sex in regard to probable ghosts or burglars – she had too much of a man's practical pre-occupation for that, yet she listened curiously. It came again. There was no mistaking it now. It was the tread of the man with whom her thoughts had been busy – her husband.

What was he doing here? In the few months of their married life he had never been home before at this hour. The lumber-room contained among other things the disjecta membra of his old mining life and experience. He may have wanted something. There was an old bag which she remembered he said contained some of his mother's dresses. Yet it was so odd that he should go there now. Any other time but this. A terrible superstitious dread – a dread that any other time she would have laughed to scorn, began to creep over her. Hark! he was moving. She stopped breathing.

The tread recommenced. It passed into the upper hall, and came slowly down the stairs, each step recording itself in her heart-beats. It reached the lower hall and seemed to hesitate; then it came slowly along toward her door, and again hesitated.

Another moment of suspense, and she felt she would have screamed. And then the door slowly opened, and Gabriel stood before her.

In one swift, intuitive, hopeless look she read her fate. He knew all! And yet his eyes, except that they bore less of the usual perplexity and embarrassment with which they had habitually met hers, though grave and sad, had neither indignation nor anger. He had changed his clothes to a rough miner's blouse and trousers, and carried in one hand a miner's pack, and in the other a pick and shovel. He laid them down slowly and deliberately, and seeing her eyes fixed upon them with a nervous intensity, began apologetically —

"They contains, ma'am, on'y a blanket and a few duds ez I allus used to carry with me. I'll open it ef you say so. But you know me, ma'am, well enough to allow that I'd take nothin' outer this yer house ez I didn't bring inter it."

"You are going away," she said, in a voice that was not audible to herself, but seemed to vaguely echo in her mental consciousness.

"I be. Ef ye don't know why, ma'am, I reckon ez you'll hear it from the same vyce ez I did. It's on'y the squar thing to say afore I go, ez it ain't my fault nor hiz'n. I was on the hill this mornin' in the ole cabin."

It seemed as if he had told her this before, so old and self-evident the fact appeared.

"I was sayin' I woz on the hill, when I heerd vyces, and lookin' out I seed you with a stranger. From wot ye know o' me and my ways, ma'am, it ain't like me to listen to thet wot ain't allowed for me to hear. And ye might hev stood thar ontel now ef I hadn't seed a chap dodgin' round behind the trees, spyin' and list'nin'. When I seed thet man I knowed him to be a pore Mexican, whose legs I'd tended yer in the Gulch mor'n a year ago. I went up to him, and when he seed me he'd hev run. But I laid my hand onto him – and – he stayed!"

There was something so unconsciously large and fine in the slight gesture of this giant's hand as he emphasised his speech, that even through her swiftly rising pride Mrs. Conroy was awed and thrilled by it. But the next moment she found herself saying – whether aloud or not she could not tell – "If he had loved me, he would have killed him then and there."

"Wot thet man sed to me – bein' flustered and savage-like, along o' bein' choked hard to keep him from singin' out and breakin' in upon you and thet entire stranger – ain't fur me to say. Knowin' him longer than I do, I reckon you suspect 'bout wot it was. That it ez the truth I read it in your face now, ma'am, ez I reckon I might hev read it off and on in many ways and vari's styles sens we've been yer together, on'y I waz thet weak and ondecided yer."

He raised his hand to his forehead here, and with his broad palm appeared to wipe away the trouble and perplexity that had overshadowed it. He then drew a paper from his breast.

"I've drawed up a little paper yer ez I'll hand over to Lawyer Maxwell, makin' over back agin all ez I once hed o' you and all ez I ever expect to hev. For I don't agree with that Mexican thet wot was gi'n to Grace belongs to me. I allow ez she kin settle thet herself, ef she ever comes, and ef I know thet chile, ma'am, she ain't goin' tech it with a two-foot pole. We've allus bin simple folks, ma'am – though it ain't the squar thing to take me for a sample – and oneddicated and common, but thar ain't a Conroy ez lived ez was ever pinted for money, or ez ever took more outer the kompany's wages than his grub and his clothes."

It was the first time that he had ever asserted himself in her presence, and even then he did it half apologetically, yet with an unconscious dignity in his manner that became him well. He reached down as he spoke and took up his pick and his bundle, and turned to go.

"There is nothing then that you are leaving behind you?" she asked.

He raised his eyes squarely to hers.

"No," he said, simply, "nothing."

Oh, if she could have only spoken! Oh, had she but dared to tell him that he had left behind that which he could not take away, that which the mere instincts of his manhood would have stirred him to tenderness and mercy, that which would have appealed to him through its very helplessness and youth. But she dared not. That eloquence which an hour before had been ready enough to sway the feelings of the man to whom she had been faithless and did not love, failed her now. In the grasp of her first and only hopeless passion this arch-hypocrite had lost even the tact of the simplest of her sex. She did not even assume an indifference! She said nothing; when she raised her eyes again he was gone.

She was wrong. At the front door he stopped, hesitated a moment, and then returned slowly and diffidently to the room. Her heart beat rapidly, and then was still.

"Ye asked just now," he said, falteringly, "ef thar was anything ez I was leavin' behind. Thar is – ef ye'll overlook my sayin' it. When you and me allowed to leave fur furrin parts, I reckoned to leave thet housekeeper behind, and unbeknowed to ye I gin her some money and a charge. I told her thet if ever thet dear child – Sister Grace – came here, thet she should take her in and do by her ez I would, and let me know. Et may be a heap to ask, but ef it 'tain't too much – I – I shouldn't – like – yer – to turn – thet innocent insuspectin' chile away from the house thet she might take to be mine. Ye needn't let on anythin' thet's gone – ye needn't tell her what a fool I've been, but jest take her in and send for me. Lawyer Maxwell will gin ye my address."

The sting recalled her benumbed life. She rose with a harsh dissonant laugh and said, "Your wishes shall be fulfilled – if" – she hesitated a moment – "I am here."

But he did not hear the last sentence, and was gone.