The Argonauts of North Liberty

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The room had become cold with the dying out of the dining-room fire that
warmed the drum. She would go to bed. She nevertheless arranged the room
again with a singular impression that she was doing it for the last time
in her present existing circumstances, and placing the lamp on the table
in the hall, went up to her own room. By the light of a single candle
she undressed herself hastily, said her prayers punctiliously, and got
into bed, with an unexpected relief at finding herself still occupying
it alone. Then she fell asleep and dreamed of Demorest.




CHAPTER IV


When Edward Blandford found himself alone after his wife had undertaken
to fulfil his abandoned filial duty at her parents' house, he felt a
slight twinge of self-reproach. He could not deny that this was not
the first time he had evaded the sterile Sabbath evenings at his
mother-in-law's, or that even at other times he was not in accord with
the cold and colorless sanctity of the family. Yet he remembered that
when he picked out from the budding womanhood of North Liberty
this pure, scentless blossom, he had endured the privations of its
surroundings with a sense of security in inhaling the atmosphere in
which it grew, and knowing the integrity of its descent. There was a
certain pleasure also in invading this seclusion with human passion; the
first pressure of her hand when they were kneeling together at family
prayers had the zest without the sin of a forbidden pleasure; the first
kiss he had given her with their heads over the family Bible had fairly
intoxicated him in the thin, rarefied air of their surroundings. In
transplanting this blossom to his own home with the fond belief that it
would eventually borrow the hues and color of his own passion, he had
no further interest in the house he had left behind. When he found,
however, that the ancestral influence was stronger than he expected,
that the young wife, instead of assimilating to his conditions, had
imported into their little household the rigors of her youthful home,
he had been chilled and disappointed. But he could not help also
remembering that his own boyhood had been spent in an atmosphere like
her own in everything but its sincerity and deep conviction. His father
had recognized the business value of placating the narrow tyranny of the
respectable well-to-do religious community, and had become a conscious
hypocrite and a popular citizen. He had himself been under that
influence, and it was partly a conviction of this that had drawn him
towards her as something genuine and real. It occurred to him now for
the first time, as he looked around upon that compromise of their two
lives in this chilly artificial home, that it was only natural that she
would prefer the more truthful austerities of her mother's house. Had
she detected the sham, and did she despise him for it?

These were questions which seemed to bring another self-accusing doubt
in his own mind, although, without his being conscious of it, they had
been really the outcome of that doubt. He could not help dwelling on the
singular human interest she had taken in Demorest's love affair, and
the utterly unexpected emotion she had shown. He had never seen her as
charmingly illogical, capricious, and bewitchingly feminine. Had he not
made a radical mistake in not giving her a frequent provocation for this
innocent emotion--in fact, in not taking her out into a world of broader
sympathies and experiences? What a household they might have had--if
necessary in some other town--away from those cramped prejudices and
limitations! What friends she might have been with Dick and his other
worldly acquaintances; what social pleasures--guiltless amusements
for her pure mind--in theatres, parties, and concerts! Would she have
objected to them?--had he ever seriously proposed them to her? No! if
she had objected there would have been time enough to have made this
present compromise; she would have at least respected and understood his
sacrifice--and his friends.

Even the artificial externals of his household had never before so
visibly impressed him. Now that she was no longer in the room it did not
even bear a trace of her habitation, it certainly bore no suggestion of
his own. Why had he bought that hideous horsehair furniture? To remind
her of the old provincial heirlooms of her father's sitting-room. Did
it remind her of it? The stiff and stony emptiness of this room had
been fashioned upon the decorous respectability of his own father's
parlor--in which his father, who usually spent his slippered leisure
in the family sitting-room, never entered except on visits from the
minister. It had chilled his own youthful soul--why had he perpetuated
it here?

He could only answer these questions by moodily wandering about the
house, and regretting he had not gone with her. After a vain attempt to
establish social and domestic relations with the hot-air drum by putting
his feet upon it--after an equally futile attempt to extract interest
from the book of sermons by opening its pages at random--he glanced at
the clock and suddenly resolved to go and fetch her. It would remind him
of the old times when he used to accompany her from church, and, after
her parents had retired, spend a blissful half-hour alone with her. With
what a mingling of fear and childish curiosity she used to accept his
equally timid caresses! Yes, he would go and fetch her; and he would
recall it to her in a whisper while they were there.

Filled with this idea, when he changed his clothes again he put on a
certain heavy beaver overcoat, on whose shaggy sleeve her little, hand
had so often rested when he escorted her from meeting; and he even
selected the gray muffler she had knit for him in the old ante-nuptial
days. It was lying in the half-opened drawer from where she had not long
before taken her disguising veil.

It was still blowing in sudden, capricious gusts; and when he opened the
front door the wind charged fiercely upon him, as if to drive him back.
When he had finally forced his way into the street, a return current
closed the door as suddenly and sharply behind him as if it had ejected
him from his home for ever.

He reached the fourth house quickly, and as quickly ran up the steps;
his hand was upon the bell when his eye suddenly caught sight of his
wife's pass-key still in the lock. She had evidently forgotten it. Here
was a chance to mischievously banter that habitually careful little
woman! He slipped it into his pocket and quietly entered the dark but
perfectly familiar hall. He reached the staircase without a stumble
and began to ascend softly. Halfway up he heard the sound of his wife's
hurried voice and another that startled him. He ascended hastily two
steps, which brought him to the level of the half-opened transom of
the kitchen. A candle was burning on the kitchen table; he could see
everything that passed in the room; he could hear distinctly every word
that was uttered.

He did not utter a cry or sound; he did not even tremble. He remained
so rigid and motionless, clutching the banisters with his stiffened
fingers, that when he did attempt to move, all life, as well as all that
had made life possible to him, seemed to have died from him for
ever. There was no nervous illusion, no dimming of his senses; he saw
everything with a hideous clarity of perception. By some diabolical
instantaneous photography of the brain, little actions, peculiarities,
touches of gesture, expression and attitude never before noted by him in
his wife, were clearly fixed and bitten in his consciousness. He saw the
color of his friend's overcoat, the reddish tinge of his wife's brown
hair, till then unnoticed; in that supreme moment he was aware of a
sudden likeness to her mother; but more terrible than all, there seemed
to be a nameless sympathetic resemblance that the guilty pair had to
each other in gesture and movement as of some unhallowed relationship
beyond his ken. He knew not how long he stood there without breath,
without reflection, without one connected thought. He saw her suddenly
put her hand on the handle of the door. He knew that in another moment
they would pass almost before him. He made a convulsive effort to move,
with an inward cry to God for support, and succeeded in staggering with
outstretched palms against the wall, down the staircase, and blindly
forward through the hall to the front door. As yet he had been able to
formulate only one idea--to escape before them, for it seemed to him
that their contact meant the ruin of them both, of that house, of all
that was near to him--a catastrophe that struck blindly at his whole
visible world. He had reached the door and opened it at the moment that
the handle of the kitchen-door was turned. He mechanically fell back
behind the open door that hid him, while it let the cruel light glimmer
for a moment on their clasped figures. The door slipped from his
nerveless fingers and swung to with a dull sound. Crouching still in the
corner, he heard the quick rush of hurrying feet in the darkness, saw
the door open and Demorest glide out--saw her glance hurriedly after
him, close the door, and involve herself and him in the blackness of the
hall. Her dress almost touched him in his corner; he could feel the
near scent of her clothes, and the air stirred by her figure retreating
towards the stairs; could hear the unlocking of a door above and the
voice of her mother from the landing, his wife's reply, the slow fading
of her footsteps on the stairs and overhead, the closing of a door, and
all was quiet again. Still stooping, he groped for the handle of the
door, opened it, and the next moment reeled like a drunken man down the
steps into the street.

It was well for him that a fierce onset of wind and sleet at that
instant caught him savagely--stirred his stagnated blood into action,
and beat thought once more into his brain. He had mechanically turned
towards his own home; his first effort of recovering will hurried
him furiously past it and into a side street. He walked rapidly, but
undeviatingly on to escape observation and secure some solitude for his
returning thoughts. Almost before he knew it he was in the open fields.

The idea of vengeance had never crossed his mind. He was neither a
physical nor a moral coward, but he had never felt the merely animal
fury of disputed animal possession which the world has chosen to
recognize as a proof of outraged sentiment, nor had North Liberty
accepted the ethics that an exchange of shots equalized a transferred
affection. His love had been too pure and too real to be moved like
the beasts of the field, to seek in one brutal passion compensation for
another. Killing--what was there to kill? All that he had to live for
had been already slain. With the love that was in him--in them--already
dead at his feet, what was it to him whether these two hollow lives
moved on and passed him, or mingled their emptiness elsewhere? Only let
them henceforth keep out of his way!

For in his first feverish flow of thought--the reaction to his benumbed
will within and the beating sleet without--he believed Demorest as
treacherous as his wife. He recalled his sudden and unexpected intrusion
into the buggy only a few hours before, his mysterious confidences, his
assurance of Joan's favorable reception of his secret, and her consent
to the Californian trip. What had all this meant if not that Demorest
was using him, the husband, to assist his intrigue, and carry the news
of his presence in the town to her? And this boldness, this assurance,
this audacity of conception was like Demorest! While only certain
passages of the guilty meeting he had just seen and overheard were
distinctly impressed on his mind, he remembered now, with hideous
and terrible clearness, all that had gone before. It was part of the
disturbed and unequal exaltation of his faculties that he dwelt more
upon this and his wife's previous deceit and manifest hypocrisy, than
upon the actual evidence he had witnessed of her unfaithfulness. The
corroboration of the fact was stronger to him than the fact itself. He
understood the coldness, the uncongeniality now--the simulated increase
of her aversion to Demorest--her journeys to Boston and Hartford to
see her relatives, her acquiescence to his frequent absences; not an
incident, not a characteristic of her married life was inconsistent with
her guilt and her deceit. He went even back to her maidenhood: how did
he know this was not the legitimate sequence of other secret schoolgirl
escapades. The bitter worldly light that had been forced upon his simple
ingenuous nature had dazzled and blinded him. He passed from fatuous
credulity to equally fatuous distrust.

He stopped suddenly with the roaring of water before him. In the furious
following of his rapid thought through storm and darkness he had come,
he knew not how, upon the bank of the swollen river, whose endangered
bridge Demorest had turned from that evening. A few steps more and he
would have fallen into it. He drew nearer and looked at it with vague
curiosity. Had he come there with any definite intention? The thought
sobered without frightening him. There was always THAT culmination
possible, and to be considered coolly.

He turned and began to retrace his steps. On his way thither he had been
fighting the elements step by step; now they seemed to him to have taken
possession of him and were hurrying him quickly away. But where? and to
what? He was always thinking of the past. He had wandered he knew not
how long, always thinking of that. It was the future he had to consider.
What was to be done?

He had heard of such cases before; he had read of them in newspapers
and talked of them with cold curiosity. But they were of worldly, sinful
people, of dissolute men whose characters he could not conceive--of
silly, vain, frivolous, and abandoned women whom he had never even met.
But Joan--O God! It was the first time since his mute prayer on the
staircase that the Divine name had been wrested from his lips. It came
with his wife's--and his first tears! But the wind swept the one away
and dried the others upon his hot cheeks.

It had ceased to rain, and the wind, which was still high, had shifted
more to the north and was bitterly cold. He could feel the roadway
stiffening under his feet. When he reached the pavement of the outskirts
once more he was obliged to take the middle of the street, to avoid the
treacherous films of ice that were beginning to glaze the sidewalks. Yet
this very inclemency, added to the usual Sabbath seclusion, had left the
streets deserted. He was obliged to proceed more slowly, but he met no
one and could pursue his bewildering thoughts unchecked. As he passed
between the lines of cold, colorless houses, from which all light and
life had vanished, it seemed to him that their occupants were dead
as his love, or had fled their ruined houses as he had. Why should he
remain? Yet what was his duty now as a man--as a Christian? His eye fell
on the hideous facade of the church he was passing--her church! He gave
a bitter laugh and stumbled on again.

With one of the gusts he fancied he heard a familiar sound--the rattling
of buggy wheels over the stiffening road. Or was it merely the fanciful
echo of an idea that only at that moment sprung up in his mind? If it
was real it came from the street parallel with the one he was in. Who
could be driving out at this time? What other buggy than his own could
be found to desecrate this Christian Sabbath? An irresistible thought
impelled him at the risk of recognition to quicken his pace and turn the
corner as Richard Demorest drove up to the Independence Hotel, sprang
from his buggy, throwing the reins over the dashboard, and disappeared
into the hotel!

Blandford stood still, but for an instant only. He had been wandering
for an hour aimlessly, hopelessly, without consecutive idea, coherent
thought or plan of action; without the faintest inspiration or
suggestion of escape from his bewildering torment, without--he had begun
to fear--even the power to conceive or the will to execute; when a wild
idea flashed upon him with the rattle of his buggy wheels. And even
as Demorest disappeared into the hotel, he had conceived his plan and
executed it. He crossed the street swiftly, leaped into his buggy,
lifted the reins and brought down the whip simultaneously, and the next
instant was dashing down the street in the direction of the Warensboro
turnpike. So sudden was the action that by the time the astonished hall
porter had rushed into the street, horse and buggy had already vanished
in the darkness.

Presently it began to snow. So lightly at first that it seemed a mere
passing whisper to the ear, the brush of some viewless insect upon the
cheek, or the soft tap of unseen fingers on the shoulders. But by the
time the porter returned from his hopeless and invisible chase of
the "runaway," he came in out of a swarming cloud of whirling flakes,
blinded and whitened. There was a hurried consultation with the
landlord, the exhibition of much imperious energy and some bank-notes
from Demorest, and with a glance at the clock that marked the expiring
limit of the Puritan Sabbath, the landlord at last consented. By the
time the falling snow had muffled the street from the indiscreet clamor
of Sabbath-breaking hoofs, the landlord's noiseless sledge was at the
door and Demorest had departed.

The snow fell all that night; with fierce gusts of wind that moaned in
the chimneys of North Liberty and sorely troubled the Sabbath sleep of
its decorous citizens; with deep, passionless silences, none the
less fateful, that softly precipitated a spotless mantle of merciful
obliteration equally over their precise or their straying footprints,
that would have done them good to heed and to remember; and when morning
broke upon a world of week-day labor, it was covered as far as their
eyes could reach as with a clear and unwritten tablet, on which they
might record their lives anew. Near the wreck of the broken bridge on
the Warensboro turnpike an overturned buggy lay imbedded in the drift
and debris of the river hurrying silently towards the sea, and a horse
with fragments of broken and icy harness still clinging to him was found
standing before the stable-door of Edward Blandford. But to any further
knowledge of the fate of its owner, North Liberty awoke never again.


PART II



CHAPTER I


The last note of the Angelus had just rung out of the crumbling fissures
in the tower of the mission chapel of San Buena-ventura. The sun which
had beamed that day and indeed every day for the whole dry season over
the red-tiled roofs of that old and happily ventured pueblo seemed to
broaden to a smile as it dipped below the horizon, as if in undiminished
enjoyment of its old practical joke of suddenly plunging the Southern
California coast in darkness without any preliminary twilight. The olive
and fig trees at once lost their characteristic outlines in formless
masses of shadow; only the twisted trunks of the old pear trees in the
mission garden retained their grotesque shapes and became gruesome in
the gathering gloom. The encircling pines beyond closed up their serried
files; a cool breeze swept down from the coast range and, passing
through them, sent their day-long heated spices through the town.

If there was any truth in the local belief that the pious incantation of
the Angelus bell had the power of excluding all evil influence abroad
at that perilous hour within its audible radius, and comfortably keeping
all unbelieving wickedness at a distance, it was presumably ineffective
as regarded the innovating stage-coach from Monterey that twice a
week at that hour brought its question-asking, revolver-persuading and
fortune-seeking load of passengers through the sleepy Spanish town. On
the night of the 3d of August, 1856, it had not only brought but set
down at the Posada one of those passengers. It was a Mr. Ezekiel
Corwin, formerly known to these pages as "hired man" to the late Squire
Blandford, of North Liberty, Connecticut, but now a shrewd, practical,
self-sufficient, and self-asserting unit of the more cautious later
Californian immigration. As the stage rattled away again with more or
less humorous and open disparagement of the town and the Posada from its
"outsiders," he lounged with lazy but systematic deliberation towards
Mateo Morez, the proprietor.

"I guess that some of your folks here couldn't direct me to Dick
Demorest's house, could ye?"

The Senor Mateo Morez was at once perplexed and pained. Pained at the
ignorance thus forced upon him by a caballero; perplexed as to its
intention. Between the two he smiled apologetically but gravely, and
said: "No sabe, Senor. I 'ave not understood."

"No more hev I," returned Ezekiel, with patronizing recognition of his
obtuseness. "I guess ez heow you ain't much on American. You folks orter
learn the language if you kalkilate to keep a hotel."

But the momentary vision of a waistless woman with a shawl gathered over
her head and shoulders at the back door attracted his attention. She
said something to Mateo in Spanish, and the yellowish-white of Mateo's
eyes glistened with intelligent comprehension.

"Ah, posiblemente; it is Don Ricardo Demorest you wish?"

Mr. Ezekiel's face and manner expressed a mingling of grateful curiosity
and some scorn at the discovery. "Wa'al," he said, looking around as if
to take the entire Posada into his confidence, "way up in North Liberty,
where I kem from, he was allus known as Dick Demorest, and didn't
tack any forrin titles to his name. Et wouldn't hev gone down there, I
reckon, 'mongst free-born Merikin citizens, no mor'n aliases would in
court--and I kinder guess for the same reason. But folks get peart
and sassy when they're way from hum, and put on ez many airs as a buck
nigger. And so he calls hisself Don Ricardo here, does he?"

"The Senor knows Don Ricardo?" said Mateo politely.

"Ef you mean me--wa'al, yes--I should say so. He was a partiklar friend
of a man I've known since he was knee-high to a grasshopper."

Ezekiel had actually never seen Demorest but once in his life. He would
have scorned to lie, but strict accuracy was not essential with an
ignorant foreign audience.

He took up his carpet-bag.

"I reckon I kin find his house, ef it's anyway handy."

But the Senor Mateo was again politely troubled. The house of Don
Ricardo was of a truth not more than a mile distant. It was even
possible that the Senor had observed it above a wall and vineyard as he
came into the pueblo. But it was late--it was also dark, as the Senor
would himself perceive--and there was still to-morrow. To-morrow--ah, it
was always there! Meanwhile there were beds of a miraculous quality
at the Posada, and a supper such as a caballero might order in his own
house. Health, discretion, solicitude for oneself--all pointed clearly
to to-morrow.

What part of this speech Ezekiel understood affected him only as an
innkeeper's bid for custom, and as such to be steadily exposed and
disposed of. With the remark that he guessed Dick Demorest's was "a good
enough hotel for HIM," and that he'd better be "getting along there," he
walked down the steps, carpet-bag in hand, and coolly departed, leaving
Mateo pained, but smiling, on the doorstep.

"An animal with a pig's head--without doubt," said Mateo, sententiously.

"Clearly a brigand with the liver of a chicken," responded his wife.

The subject of this ambiguous criticism, happily oblivious, meantime
walked doggedly back along the road the stage-coach had just brought
him. It was badly paved and hollowed in the middle with the worn ruts of
a century of slow undeviating ox carts, and the passage of water
during the rainy season. The low adobe houses on each side, with bright
cinnamon-colored tiles relieving their dark-brown walls, had the regular
outlines of their doors and windows obliterated by the crumbling of
years, until they looked as if they had been afterthoughts of the
builder, rudely opened by pick and crowbar, and finished by the gentle
auxiliary architecture of birds and squirrels. Yet these openings at
times permitted glimpses of a picturesque past in the occasional view
of a lace-edged pillow or silken counterpane, striped hangings, or dyed
Indian rugs, the flitting of a flounced petticoat or flower-covered
head, or the indolent leaning figure framed in a doorway of a man in
wide velvet trousers and crimson-barred serape, whose brown face
was partly hidden in a yellow nimbus of cigarette smoke. Even in the
semi-darkness, Ezekiel's penetrating and impertinent eyes took eager
note of these facts with superior complacency, quite unmindful, after
the fashion of most critical travellers, of the hideous contrast of his
own long shapeless nankeen duster, his stiff half-clerical brown straw
hat, his wisp of gingham necktie, his dusty boots, his outrageous
carpet-bag, and his straggling goat-like beard. A few looked at him in
grave, discreet wonder. Whether they recognized in him the advent of a
civilization that was destined to supplant their own ignorant, sensuous,
colorful life with austere intelligence and rigid practical improvement,
did not appear. He walked steadily on. As he passed the low arched door
of the mission church and saw a faint light glimmering from the side
windows, he had indeed a weak human desire to go in and oppose in his
own person a debased and idolatrous superstition with some happily
chosen question that would necessarily make the officiating priest and
his congregation exceedingly uncomfortable. But he resisted; partly in
the hope of meeting some idolater on his way to Benediction, and, in
the guise of a stranger seeking information, dropping a few unpalatable
truths; and partly because he could unbosom himself later to Demorest,
who he was not unwilling to believe had embraced Popery with his
adoption of a Spanish surname and title.