The Argonauts of North Liberty

B >> Bret Harte >> The Argonauts of North Liberty


"This animal has been sniffing at the trail."

"Truly--but Mother of God--where is the discretion of our friend. If he
will continue to haunt the pueblo like a lovesick chicken, he will get
his neck wrung yet."

Following out an ingenious idea of his own, Ezekiel called the next day
on the Demorests, and in some occult fashion obtained an invitation to
stay under their hospitable roof during his sojourn in Buenaventura.
Perfectly aware that he owed this courtesy more to Joan than to her
husband, it is probable that his grim enjoyment was not diminished by
the fact; while Joan, for reasons of her own, preferred the constraint
which the presence of another visitor put upon Demorest's uxoriousness.
Of late, too, there were times when Dona Rosita's naive intelligence,
which was not unlike the embarrassing perceptions of a bright and
half-spoiled child, was in her way, and she would willingly have
shared the young lady's company with her husband had Demorest shown any
sympathy for the girl. It was in the faint hope that Ezekiel might in
some way beguile Rosita's wandering attention that she had invited him.
The only difficulty lay in his uncouthness, and in presenting to the
heiress of the Picos a man who had been formerly her own servant. Had
she attempted to conceal that fact she was satisfied that Ezekiel's
independence and natural predilection for embarrassing situations would
have inevitably revealed it. She had even gone so far as to consider the
propriety of investing him with a poor relationship to her family, when
Dona Rosita herself happily stopped all further trouble. On her very
first introduction to him, that charming young lady at once accepted him
as a lunatic whose brains were turned by occult, scientific, and medical
study! Ah! she, Rosita, had heard of such cases before. Had not a
paternal ancestor of hers, one Don Diego Castro, believed he had
discovered the elixir of youth. Had he not to that end refused even to
wash him the hand, to cut him the nail of the finger and the hair of
the head! Exalted by that discovery, had he not been unsparingly
uncomplimentary to all humanity, especially to the weaker sex? Even as
the Senor Corwin!

Far from being offended at this ingenious interpretation of his
character, Ezekiel exhibited a dry gratification over it, and even
conceived an unwholesome admiration of the fair critic; he haunted her
presence and preoccupied her society far beyond Joan's most sanguine
expectations. He sat in open-mouthed enjoyment of her at the table,
he waylaid her in the garden, he attempted to teach her English. Dona
Rosita received these extraordinary advances in a no less extraordinary
manner. In the scant masculine atmosphere of the house, and the somewhat
rigid New England reserve that still pervaded it, perhaps she languished
a little, and was not averse to a slight flirtation, even with a madman.
Besides, she assumed the attitude of exercising a wholesome restraint
over him. "If we are not found dead in our bed one morning, and
extracted of our blood for a cordial, you shall thank to me for it," she
said to Joan. "Also for the not empoisoning of the coffee!"

So she permitted him to carry a chair or hammock for her into the
garden, to fetch the various articles which she was continually losing,
and which he found with his usual penetration; and to supply her with
information, in which, however, he exercised an unwonted caution. On
the other hand, certain naive recollections and admissions, which in the
quality of a voluble child she occasionally imparted to this "madman" in
return, were in the proportion of three to one.

It had been a hot day, and even the usual sunset breeze had failed that
evening to rock the tops of the outlying pine-trees or cool the heated
tiles of the pueblo roofs. There was a hush and latent expectancy in the
air that reacted upon the people with feverish unrest and uneasiness;
even a lull in the faintly whispering garden around the Demorests' casa
had affected the spirits of its inmates, causing them to wander about
in vague restlessness. Joan had disappeared; Dona Rosita, under an
olive-tree in one of the deserted paths, and attended by the faithful
Ezekiel, had said it was "earthquake weather," and recalled, with a sign
of the cross, a certain dreadful day of her childhood, when el temblor
had shaken down one of the Mission towers. "You shall see it now, as
he have left it so it has remain always," she added with superstitious
gravity.

"That's just the lazy shiftlessness of your folks," responded Ezekiel
with prompt ungallantry. "It ain't no wonder the Lord Almighty hez to
stir you up now and then to keep you goin'."

Dona Rosita gazed at him with simple childish pity. "Poor man; it have
affect you also in the head, this weather. So! It was even so with
the uncle of my father. Hush up yourself, and bring to me the box of
chocolates of my table. I will gif to you one. You shall for one time
have something pleasant on the end of your tongue, even if you must
swallow him after."

Ezekiel grinned. "Ye ain't afraid o' bein' left alone with the ghost
that haunts the garden, Miss Rosita?"

"After YOU--never-r-r."

"I'll find Mrs. Demorest and send her to ye," said Ezekiel,
hesitatingly.

"Eh, to attract here the ghost? Thank you, no, very mooch."

Ezekiel's face contracted until nothing but his bright peering gray eyes
could be seen. "Attract the ghost!" he echoed. "Then you kalkilate that
it's--" he stopped, insinuatingly.

Rosita brought her fan sharply over his knuckles, and immediately opened
it again over her half-embarrassed face. "I comprehend not anything to
'ekalkilate.' WILL you go, Don Fantastico; or is it for me to bring to
you?"

Ezekiel flew. He quickly found the chocolates and returned, but was
disconcerted on arriving under the olive-tree to find Dona Rosita no
longer in the hammock. He turned into a by-path, where an extraordinary
circumstance attracted his attention. The air was perfectly still, but
the leaves of a manzanita bush near the misshapen cactus were slightly
agitated. Presently Ezekiel saw the stealthy figure of a man emerge from
behind it and approach the cactus. Reaching his hand cautiously towards
the plant, the stranger detached something from one of its thorns, and
instantly disappeared. The quick eyes of Ezekiel had seen that it was a
letter, his unerring perception of faces recognized at the same moment
that the intruder was none other than the handsome, reckless-looking man
he had seen the other day in conference with Mateo.

But Ezekiel was not the only witness of this strange intrusion. A few
paces from him, Dona Rosita, unconscious of his return, was gazing in
a half-frightened, breathless absorption in the direction of the
stranger's flight.

"Wa'al!" drawled Ezekiel lazily.

She started and turned towards him. Her face was pale and alarmed, and
yet to the critical eye of Ezekiel it seemed to wear an expression of
gratified relief. She laughed faintly.

"Ef that's the kind o' ghost you hev about yer, it's a healthy one,"
drawled Ezekiel. He turned and fixed his keen eyes on Rosita's face. "I
wonder what kind o' fruit grows on the cactus that he's so fond of?"

Either she had not seen the abstraction of the letter, or his acting was
perfect, for she returned his look unwaveringly. "The fruit, eh? I have
not comprehend."

"Wa'al, I reckon I will," said Ezekiel. He walked towards the cactus;
there was nothing to be seen but its thorny spikes. He was confronted,
however, by the sudden apparition of Joan from behind the manzanita at
its side. She looked up and glanced from Ezekiel to Dona Rosita with an
agitated air.

"Oh, you saw him too?" she said eagerly.

"I reckon," answered Ezekiel, with his eyes still on Rosita. "I was
wondering what on airth he was so taken with that air cactus for."

Rosita had become slightly pale again in the presence of her friend.
Joan quietly pushed Ezekiel aside and put her arm around her. "Are you
frightened again?" she asked, in a low whisper.

"Not mooch," returned Rosita, without lifting her eyes.

"It was only some peon, trespassing to pick blossoms for his
sweetheart," she said significantly, with a glance towards Ezekiel. "Let
us go in."

She passed her hand through Rosita's passive arm and led her towards
the house, Ezekiel's penetrating eyes still following Rosita with an
expression of gratified doubt.

For once, however, that astute observer was wrong. When Mrs. Demorest
had reached the house she slipped into her own room, and, bolting the
door, drew from her bosom a letter which SHE had picked from the cactus
thorn, and read it with a flushed face and eager eyes.

It may have been the effect of the phenomenal weather, but the next day
a malign influence seemed to pervade the Demorest household. Dona Rosita
was confined to her room by an attack of languid nerves, superinduced,
as she was still voluble enough to declare, by the narcotic effect of
some unknown herb which the lunatic Ezekiel had no doubt mysteriously
administered to her with a view of experimenting on its properties. She
even avowed that she must speedily return to Los Osos, before Ezekiel
should further compromise her reputation by putting her on a colored
label in place of the usual Celestial Distributer of the Panacea.
Ezekiel himself, who had been singularly abstracted and reticent,
and had absolutely foregone one or two opportunities of disagreeable
criticism, had gone to the pueblo early that morning. The house was
comparatively silent and deserted when Demorest walked into his wife's
boudoir.

It was a pretty room, looking upon the garden, furnished with a singular
mingling of her own inherited formal tastes and the more sensuous
coloring and abandon of her new life. There were a great many rugs
and hangings scattered in disorder around the room, and apparently
purposeless, except for color; there was a bamboo lounge as large as a
divan, with two or three cushions disposed on it, and a low chair that
seemed the incarnation of indolence. Opposed to this, on the wall, was
the rigid picture of her grandfather, who had apparently retired with
his volume further into the canvas before the spectacle of this ungodly
opulence; a large Bible on a funereal trestle-like stand, and the
primmest and barest of writing-tables, before which she was standing as
at a sacrificial altar. With an almost mechanical movement she closed
her portfolio as her husband entered, and also shut the lid of a
small box with a slight snap. This suggested exclusion of him from her
previous occupation, whatever it might have been, caused a faint shadow
of pain to pass across his loving eyes. He cast a glance at his wife
as if mutely asking her to sit beside him, but she drew a chair to the
table, and with her elbow resting on the box, resignedly awaited his
speech.

"I don't mean to disturb you, darling," he said, gently, "but as we were
alone, I thought we might have one of our old-fashioned talks, and--"

"Don't let it be so old-fashioned as to include North Liberty again,"
she interrupted, wearily. "We've had quite enough of that since I
returned."

"I thought you found fault with me then for forgetting the past. But
let that pass, dear; it is not OUR affairs I wanted to talk to you about
now," he said, stifling a sigh, "it's about your friend. Please don't
misunderstand what I am going to say; nor that I interpose except from
necessity."

She turned her dark brown eyes in his direction, but her glance passed
abstractedly over his head into the garden.

"It's a matter perfectly well known to me--and, I fear, to all our
servants also--that somebody is making clandestine visits to our garden.
I would not trouble you before, until I ascertained the object of these
visits. It is quite plain to me now that Dona Rosita is that object, and
that communications are secretly carried on between her and some unknown
stranger. He has been here once or twice before; he was here again
yesterday. Ezekiel saw him and saw her."

"Together?" asked Mrs. Demorest, sharply.

"No; but it was evident that there was some understanding, and that some
communication passed between them."

"Well?" said Mrs. Demorest, with repressed impatience.

"It is equally evident, Joan, that this stranger is a man who does not
dare to approach your friend in her own house, nor more openly in this;
but who, with her connivance, uses us to carry on an intrigue which may
be perfectly innocent, but is certainly compromising to all concerned.
I am quite willing to believe that Dona Rosita is only romantic and
reckless, but that will not prevent her from becoming a dupe of some
rascal who dare not face us openly, and who certainly does not act as
her equal."

"Well, Rosita is no chicken, and you are not her guardian."

There was a vague heartlessness, more in her voice than in her words,
that touched him as her cold indifference to himself had never done,
and for an instant stung his crushed spirit to revolt. "No" he said,
sternly, "but I am her father's FRIEND, and I shall not allow his
daughter to be compromised under my roof."

Her eyes sprang up to meet his in hatred as promptly as they once had
met in love. "And since when, Richard Demorest, have you become so
particular?" she began, with dry asperity. "Since you lured ME from the
side of my wedded husband? Since you met ME clandestinely in trains and
made love to ME under an assumed name? Since you followed ME to my house
under the pretext of being my husband's friend, and forced me--yes,
forced me--to see you secretly under my mother's roof? Did you think of
compromising ME then? Did you think of ruining my reputation, of driving
my husband from his home in despair? Did you call yourself a rascal
then? Did you--"

"Stop!" he said, in a voice that shook the rafters; "I command you,
stop!"

She had gradually worked herself from a deliberately insulting precision
into an hysterical, and it is to be feared a virtuous, conviction of
her wrongs. Beginning only with the instinct to taunt and wound the man
before her, she had been led by a secret consciousness of something else
he did not know to anticipate his reproach and justify herself in a wild
feminine abandonment of emotion. But she stopped at his words. For a
moment she was even thrilled again by the strength and imperiousness she
had loved.

They were facing each other after five years of mistaken passion, even
as they had faced each other that night in her mother's kitchen. But the
grave of that dead passion yawned between them. It was Joan who broke
the silence, that after her single outburst seemed to fill and oppress
the room.

"As far as Rosita is concerned," she said, with affected calmness, "she
is going to-night. And you probably will not be troubled any longer by
your mysterious visitor."

Whether he heeded the sarcastic significance of her last sentence, or
even heard her at all, he did not reply. For a moment he turned his
blazing eyes full upon her, and then without a word strode from the
room.

She walked to the door and stood uneasily listening in the passage until
she heard the clatter of hoofs in the paved patio, and knew that he had
ordered his horse. Then she turned back relieved to her room.

It was already sunset when Demorest drew rein again at the entrance
of the corral, and the last stroke of the Angelus was ringing from
the Mission tower. He looked haggard and exhausted, and his horse was
flecked with foam and dirt. Wherever he had been, or for what object, or
whether, objectless and dazed, he had simply sought to lose himself in
aimlessly wandering over the dry yellow hills or in careering furiously
among his own wild cattle on the arid, brittle plain; whether he had
beaten all thought from his brain with the jarring leap of his horse, or
whether he had pursued some vague and elusive determination to his own
door, is not essential to this brief chronicle. Enough that when he
dismounted he drew a pistol from his holster and replaced it in his
pocket.

He had just pushed open the gate of the corral as he led in his horse
by the bridle, when he noticed another horse tethered among some cotton
woods that shaded the outer wall of his garden. As he gazed, the figure
of a man swung lightly from one of the upper boughs of a cotton-wood
on the wall and disappeared on the other side. It was evidently the
clandestine visitor. Demorest was in no mood for trifling. Hurriedly
driving his horse into the enclosure with a sharp cut of his riata, he
closed the gate upon him, slipped past the intervening space into the
patio, and then unnoticed into the upper part of the garden. Taking a
narrow by-path in the direction of the cotton woods that could be seen
above the wall, he presently came in sight of the object of his search
moving stealthily towards the house. It was the work of a moment only to
dash forward and seize him, to find himself engaged in a sharp wrestle,
to half draw his pistol as he struggled with his captive in the open.
But once in the clearer light, he started, his grasp of the stranger
relaxed, and he fell back in bewildered terror.

"Edward Blandford! Good God!"

The pistol had dropped from his hand as he leaned breathless against a
tree. The stranger kicked the weapon contemptuously aside. Then quietly
adjusting his disordered dress, and picking the brambles from his
sleeve, he said with the same air of disdain, "Yes! Edward Blandford,
whom you thought dead! There! I'm not a ghost--though you tried to make
me one this time," he said, pointing to the pistol.

Demorest passed his hand across his white face. "Then it's you--and you
have come here for--for--Joan?"

"For Joan?" echoed Blandford, with a quick scornful laugh, that made the
blood flow back into Demorest's face as from a blow, and recalled his
scattered senses. "For Joan," he repeated. "Not much!"

The two men were facing each other in irreconcilable yet confused
antagonism. Both were still excited and combative from their late
physical struggle, but with feelings so widely different that it would
have been impossible for either to have comprehended the other. In the
figure that had apparently risen from the dead to confront him, Demorest
only saw the man he had unconsciously wronged--the man who had it in his
power to claim Joan and exact a terrible retribution! But it was part of
this monstrous and irreconcilable situation that Blandford had ceased
to contemplate it, and in his preoccupation only saw the actual
interference of a man whom he no longer hated, but had begun to pity and
despise.

He glanced coolly around him. "Whatever we've got to say to each other,"
he said deliberately, "had better not be overheard. At least what I have
got to say to you."




CHAPTER V


Demorest, now as self-possessed as his adversary, haughtily waved his
hand towards the path. They walked on in silence, without even looking
at each other, until they reached a small summer-house that stood in the
angle of the wall. Demorest entered. "We cannot be heard here," he said
curtly.

"And we can see what is going on. Good," said Blandford, coolly
following him. The summer-house contained a bench and a table. Blandford
seated himself on the bench. Demorest remained standing beside the
table. There was a moment's silence.

"I came here with no desire to see you or avoid you," said Blandford,
with cold indifference. "A few weeks ago I might perhaps have avoided
you, for your own sake. But since then I have learned that among the
many things I owe to--to your wife is the fact that five years ago she
secretly DIVORCED ME, and that consequently my living presence could
neither be a danger nor a menace to you. I see," he added, dryly, with
a quick glance at Demorest's horror-stricken face, "that I was also told
the truth when they said you were as ignorant of the divorce as I was."

He stopped, half in pity of his adversary's shame, half in surprise of
his own calmness. Five years before, in the tumultuous consciousness of
his wrongs, he would have scarcely trusted himself face to face with
the cooler and more self-controlled Demorest. He wondered at and partly
admired his own coolness now, in the presence of his enemy's confusion.

"As your mind is at rest on that point," he continued, sarcastically,
"I don't suppose you care to know what became of ME when I left North
Liberty. But as it happens to have something to do with my being here
to-night, and is a part of my business with you, you'll have to listen
to it. Sit down! Very well, then--stand up! It's your own house."

His half cynical, wholly contemptuous ignoring of the real issue between
them was more crushing to Demorest than the keenest reproach or most
tragic outburst. He did not lift his eyes as Blandford resumed in a dry,
business-like way:

"When I came across the plains to California, I fell in with a man about
my own age--an emigrant also. I suppose I looked and acted like a crazy
fool through all the journey, for he satisfied himself that I had some
secret reason for leaving the States, and suspected that I was, like
himself--a criminal. I afterwards learned that he was an escaped thief
and assassin. Well, he played upon me all the way here, for I didn't
care to reveal my real trouble to him, lest it should get back to North
liberty--" He interrupted himself with a sarcastic laugh. "Of course,
you understand that all this while Joan was getting her divorce unknown
to me, and you were marrying her--yet as I didn't know anything about it
I let him compromise me to save her. But"--he stopped, his eye kindled,
and, losing his self-control in what to Demorest seemed some incoherent
passion, went on excitedly: "that man continued his persecution
HERE--yes, HERE, in this very house, where I was a trusted and honored
guest, and threatened to expose me to a pure, innocent, simple girl
who had taken pity on me--unless I helped him in a conspiracy of
cattle-stealers and road agents, of which he was chief. I was such a
cursed sentimental fool then, that believing him capable of doing this,
believing myself still the husband of that woman, your wife, and to
spare that innocent girl the shame of thinking me a villain, I purchased
his silence by consenting. May God curse me for it!"

He had started to his feet with flashing eyes, and the indication of an
overmastering passion that to Demorest, absorbed only in the stupefying
revelation of his wife's divorce and the horrible doubt it implied,
seemed utterly vacant and unmeaning.

He had often dreamed of Blandford as standing before him, reproachful,
indignant, and even desperate over his wife's unfaithfulness; but
this insane folly and fury over some trivial wrong done to that plump,
baby-faced, flirting Dona Rosita, crushed him by its unconscious but
degrading obliteration of Joan and himself more than the most violent
denunciation. Dazed and bewildered, yet with the instinct of a helpless
man, he clung only to that part of Blandford's story which indicated
that he had come there for Rosita, and not to separate him from Joan,
and even turned to his former friend with a half-embarrassed gesture of
apology as he stammered--

"Then it was YOU who were Rosita's lover, and you who have been here
to see her. Forgive me, Ned--if I had only known it." He stopped and
timidly extended his hand. But Blandford put it aside with a cold
gesture and folded his arms.

"You have forgotten all you ever knew of me, Demorest! I am not in
the habit of making clandestine appointments with helpless women whose
natural protectors I dare not face. I have never pursued an innocent
girl to the house I dared not enter. When I found that I could not
honorably retain Dona Rosita's affection, I fled her roof. When I
believed that even if I broke with this scoundrel--as I did--I was still
legally if not morally tied to your wife, and could not marry Rosita, I
left her never to return. And I tore my heart out to do it."

The tears were standing in his eyes. Demorest regarded him again with
vacant wonder. Tears!--not for Joan's unfaithfulness to him--but for
this silly girl's transitory sentimentalism. It was horrible!

And yet what was Joan to Blandford now? Why should he weep for the woman
who had never loved him--whom he loved no longer? The woman who had
deceived him--who had deceived them BOTH. Yes! for Joan must have
suspected that Blandford was living to have sought her secret
divorce--and yet she had never told him--him--the man for whom she got
it. Ah! he must not forget THAT! It was to marry him that she had taken
that step. It was perhaps a foolish caution--a mistaken reservation; but
it was the folly--the mistake of a loving woman. He hugged this belief
the closer, albeit he was conscious at the same time of following
Blandford's story of his alienated affection with a feeling of wonder
and envy.

"And what was the result of this touching sacrifice?" continued
Blandford, trying to resume his former cynical indifference. "I'll tell
you. This scoundrel set himself about to supplant me. Taking advantage
of my absence, his knowledge that her affection for me was heightened by
the mystery of my life, and trusting to profit by a personal resemblance
he is said to bear to me, he began to haunt her. Lately he has grown
bolder, and he dared even to communicate with her here. For it is he,"
he continued, again giving way to his passion, "this dog, this sneaking
coward, who visits the place unknown to you, and thinks to entrap the
poor girl through her memory of me. And it is he that I came here to
prevent, to expose--if necessary to kill! Don't misunderstand me. I have
made myself a deputy of the law for that purpose. I've a warrant in my
pocket, and I shall take him, this mongrel, half-breed Cherokee Bob, by
fair means or foul!"