A Ward of the Golden Gate Part 13

"You did me the honor to believe I was one once, when I was simply the most palpable a.s.s and bungler living," said Paul bitterly.

She was still sweetly silent, apparently preoccupied in smoothing out the mane of her walking horse. "Did I?" she said softly. He drew close beside her.

"How different the vegetation is here from what it is with us!" she said with nervous quickness, directing his attention to the gra.s.s road beneath them, without lifting her eyes. "I don't mean what is cultivated,--for I suppose it takes centuries to make the lawns they have in England,--but even here the blades of gra.s.s seem to press closer together, as if they were crowded or overpopulated, like the country; and this forest, which has been always wild and was a hunting park, has a blase look, as if it was already tired of the unchanging traditions and monotony around it. I think over there Nature affects and influences us: here, I fancy, it is itself affected by the people."

"I think a good deal of Nature comes over from America for that purpose," he said dryly.

"And I think you are breaking your promise--besides being a goose!" she retorted smartly. Nevertheless, for some occult reason they both seemed relieved by this exquisite witticism, and trotted on amicably together. When Paul lifted his eyes to hers he could see that they were suffused with a tender mischief, as of a reproving yet secretly admiring sister, and her strangely delicate complexion had taken on itself that faint Alpine glow that was more of an illumination than a color. "There," she said gayly, pointing with her whip as the wood opened upon a glade through which the parted trees showed a long blue curvature of distant hills, "you see that white thing lying like a snowdrift on the hills?"

"Or the family was.h.i.+ng on a hedge."

"As you please. Well, that is the villa."

"And you were very happy there?" said Paul, watching her girlishly animated face.

"Yes; and as you don't ask questions, I'll tell you why. There is one of the sweetest old ladies there that I ever met--the perfection of old-time courtliness with all the motherishness of a German woman. She was very kind to me, and, as she had no daughter of her own, I think she treated me as if I was one. At least, I can imagine how one would feel to her, and what a woman like that could make of any girl. You laugh, Mr. Hathaway, you don't understand--but you don't know what an advantage it would be to a girl to have a mother like that, and know that she could fall back on her and hold her own against anybody.

She's equipped from the start, instead of being handicapped. It's all very well to talk about the value of money. It can give you everything but one thing--the power to do without it."

"I think its purchasing value would include even the gnadige Frau,"

said Paul, who had laughed only to hide the uneasiness that Yerba's approach to the tabooed subject had revived in him. She shook her head; then, recovering her tone of gentle banter, said, "There--I've made a confession. If the colonel talks to you again about my conquests, you will know that at present my affections are centred on the Baron's mother. I admit it's a strong point in his--in ANYBODY'S--favor, who can show an unblemished maternal pedigree. What a pity it is you are an orphan, like myself, Mr. Hathaway! For I fancy your mother must have been a very perfect woman. A great deal of her tact and propriety has descended to you. Only it would have been nicer if she had given it to you, like pocket money, as occasion required--which you might have shared with me--than leaving it to you in one thumping legacy."

It was impossible to tell how far the playfulness of her brown eyes suggested any ulterior meaning, for as Paul again eagerly drew towards her, she sent her horse into a rapid canter before him. When he was at her side again, she said, "There is still the ruin to see on our way home. It is just off here to the right. But if you wish to go over it we will have to dismount at the foot of the slope and walk up. It hasn't any story or legend that I know of; I looked over the guide-book to cram for it before you came, but there was nothing. So you can invent what you like."

They dismounted at the beginning of a gentle acclivity, where an ancient wagon-road, now gra.s.s-grown, rose smooth as a glacis. Tying their horses to two moplike bushes, they climbed the slope hand in hand like children. There were a few winding broken steps, part of a fallen archway, a few feet of vaulted corridor, a sudden breach--the sky beyond--and that was all! Not all; for before them, overlooked at first, lay a chasm covering half an acre, in which the whole of the original edifice--tower turrets, walls, and battlements--had been apparently cast, inextricably mixed and mingled at different depths and angles, with here and there, like mushrooms from a dust-heap, a score of trees upspringing.

"This is not Time--but gunpowder," said Paul, leaning over a parapet of the wall and gazing at the abyss, with a slight grimace.

"It don't look very romantic, certainly," said Yerba. "I only saw it from the road before. I'm dreadfully sorry," she added, with mock penitence. "I suppose, however, SOMETHING must have happened here."

"There may have been n.o.body in the house at the time," said Paul gravely. "The family may have been at the baths."

They stood close together, their elbows resting upon the broken wall, and almost touching. Beyond the abyss and darker forest they could see the more vivid green and regular lines of the plane-trees of Strudle Bad, the glitter of a spire, or the flash of a dome. From the abyss itself arose a cool odor of moist green leaves, the scent of some unseen blossoms, and around the baking vines on the hot wall the hum of apparently taskless and disappointed bees. There was n.o.body in sight in the forest road, no one working in the bordering fields, and no suggestion of the present. There might have been three or four centuries between them and Strudle Bad.

"The legend of this place," said Paul, glancing at the long brown lashes and oval outline of the cheek so near his own, "is simple, yet affecting. A cruel, remorseless, but fascinating Hexie was once loved by a simple shepherd. He had never dared to syllable his hopeless affection, or claim from her a syllabled--perhaps I should say a one-syllabled--reply. He had followed her from remote lands, dumbly wors.h.i.+ping her, building in his foolish brain an air-castle of happiness, which by reason of her magic power she could always see plainly in his eyes. And one day, beguiling him in the depths of the forest, she led him to a fair-seeming castle, and, bidding him enter its portals, offered to show him a realization of his dream. But, lo!

even as he entered the stately corridor it seemed to crumble away before him, and disclosed a hideous abyss beyond, in which the whole of that goodly palace lay in heaped and tangled ruins--the fitting symbol of his wrecked and shattered hopes."

She drew back a little way from him, but still holding on to the top of the broken wall with one slim gauntleted hand, and swung herself to one side, while she surveyed him with smiling, parted lips and conscious eyelids. He promptly covered her hand with his own, but she did not seem to notice it.

"That is not the story," she said, in a faint voice that even her struggling sauciness could not make steadier. "The true story is called 'The Legend of the Goose-Girl of Strudle Bad, and the enterprising Gosling.' There was once a goose-girl of the plain who tried honestly to drive her geese to market, but one eccentric and willful gosling-- Mr. Hathaway! Stop--please--I beg you let me go!"

He had caught her in his arms--the one encircling her waist, the other hand still grasping hers. She struggled, half laughing; yielded for a breathless moment as his lips brushed her cheek, and--threw him off.

"There!" she said, "that will do: the story was not ill.u.s.trated."

"But, Yerba," he said, with pa.s.sionate eagerness, "hear me--it is all G.o.d's truth.--I love you!"

She drew back farther, shaking the dust of the wall from the folds of her habit. Then, with a lower voice and a paler cheek, as if his lips had sent her blood and utterance back to her heart, she said, "Come, let us go."

"But not until you've heard me, Yerba."

"Well, then--I believe you--there!" she said, looking at him.

"You believe me?" he repeated eagerly, attempting to take her hand again.

She drew back still farther. "Yes," she said, "or I shouldn't be here now. There! that must suffice you. And if you wish me still to believe you, you will not speak of this again while we are out together. Come, let us go back to the horses."

He looked at her with all his soul. She was pale, but composed, and--he could see--determined. He followed her without a word. She accepted his hand to support her again down the slope without embarra.s.sment or reminiscent emotion. The whole scene through which she had just pa.s.sed might have been buried in the abyss and ruins behind her. As she placed her foot in his hand to remount, and for a moment rested her weight on his shoulder, her brown eyes met his frankly and without a tremor.

Nor was she content with this. As Paul at first rode on silently, his heart filled with unsatisfied yearning, she rallied him mischievously.

Was it kind in him on this, their first day together, to sulk in this fas.h.i.+on? Was it a promise for their future excursions? Did he intend to carry this lugubrious visage through the Allee and up to the courtyard of the hotel to proclaim his sentimental condition to the world? At least, she trusted he would not show it to Milly, who might remember that this was only the SECOND TIME they had met each other.

There was something so sweetly reasonable in this, and withal not without a certain hopefulness for the future, to say nothing of the half-mischievous, half-reproachful smile that accompanied it, that Paul exerted himself, and eventually recovered his lost gayety. When they at last drew up in the courtyard, with the flush of youth and exercise in their faces, Paul felt he was the object of envy to the loungers, and of fresh gossip to Strudle Bad. It struck him less pleasantly that two dark faces, which had been previously regarding him in the gloom of the corridor and vanished as he approached, reappeared some moments later in Yerba's salon as Don Caesar and Dona Anna, with a benignly different expression. Dona Anna especially greeted him with so much of the ostentatious archness of a confident and forgiving woman to a momentarily recreant lover, that he felt absurdly embarra.s.sed in Yerba's presence. He was thinking how he could excuse himself, when he noticed a beautiful basket of flowers on the table and a tiny note bearing a baron's crest. Yerba had put it aside with--as it seemed to him at the moment--an almost too p.r.o.nounced indifference--and an indifference that was strongly contrasted to Dona Anna's eagerly expressed enthusiasm over the offering, and her ultimate supplications to Paul and her brother to admire its beauties and the wonderful taste of the donor.

All this seemed so incongruous with Paul's feelings, and above all with the recollection of his scene with Yerba, that he excused himself from dining with the party, alleging an engagement with his old fellow-traveler the German officer, whose acquaintance he had renewed.

Yerba did not press him; he even fancied she looked relieved. Colonel Pendleton was coming; Paul was not loath, in his present frame of mind, to dispense with his company. A conviction that the colonel's counsel was not the best guide for Yerba, and that in some vague way their interests were antagonistic, had begun to force itself upon him. He had no intention of being disloyal to her old guardian, but he felt that Pendleton had not been frank with him since his return from Rosario. Had he ever been so with HER? He sometimes doubted his disclaimer.

He was lucky in finding the General disengaged, and together they dined at a restaurant and spent the evening at the Kursaal. Later, at the Residenz Club, the General leaned over his beer-gla.s.s and smilingly addressed his companion.

"So I hear you, too, are a conquest of the beautiful South American."

For an instant Paul, recognizing only Dona Anna under that epithet, looked puzzled.

"Come, my friend," said the General regarding him with some amus.e.m.e.nt, "I am an older man than you, yet I hardly think I could have ridden out with such a G.o.ddess without becoming her slave."

Paul felt his face flush in spite of himself. "Ah! you mean Miss Arguello," he said hurriedly, his color increasing at his own mention of that name as if he were imposing it upon his honest companion. "She is an old acquaintance of mine--from my own State--California."

"Ah, so," said the General, lifting his eyebrows in profound apology.

"A thousand pardons."

"Surely," said Paul, with a desperate attempt to recover his equanimity, "YOU ought to know our geography better."

"So, I am wrong. But still the name--Arguello--surely that is not American? Still, they say she has no accent, and does not look like a Mexican."

For an instant Paul was superst.i.tiously struck with the fatal infelicity of Yerba's selection of a foreign name, that now seemed only to invite that comment and criticism which she should have avoided.

Nor could he explain it at length to the General without a.s.sisting and accenting the deception, which he was always hoping in some vague way to bring to an end. He was sorry he had corrected the General; he was furious that he had allowed himself to be confused.

Happily his companion had misinterpreted his annoyance, and with impulsive German friends.h.i.+p threw himself into what he believed to be Paul's feelings. "Donnerwetter! Your beautiful countrywoman is made the subject of curiosity just because that stupid baron is persistent in his serious attentions. That is quite enough, my good friend, to make Klatschen here among those animals who do not understand the freedom of an American girl, or that an heiress may have something else to do with her money than to expend it on the Baron's mortgages.

But"--he stopped, and his simple, honest face a.s.sumed an air of profound and sagacious cunning--"I am glad to talk about it with you, who of course are perfectly familiar with the affair. I shall now be able to know what to say. My word, my friend, has some weight here, and I shall use it. And now you shall tell me WHO is our lovely friend, and WHO were her parents and her kindred in her own home. Her a.s.sociates here, you possibly know, are an impossible colonel and his never-before-approached valet, with some South American Indian planters, and, I believe, a pork-butcher's daughter. But of THEM--it makes nothing. Tell me of HER people."

With his kindly serious face within a few inches of Paul's, and sympathizing curiosity beaming from his pince-nez, he obliged the wretched and conscience-stricken Hathaway to respond with a detailed account of Yerba's parentage as projected by herself and indorsed by Colonel Pendleton. He dwelt somewhat particularly on the romantic character of the Trust, hoping to draw the General's attention away from the question of relations.h.i.+p, but he was chagrined to find that the honest warrior evidently confounded the Trust with some eleemosynary inst.i.tution and sympathetically glossed it over. "Of course," he said, "the Mexican Minister at Berlin would know all about the Arguello family: so there would be no question there."

Paul was not sorry when the time came to take leave of his friend; but once again in the clear moonlight and fresh, balmy air of the Allee, he forgot the unpleasantness of the interview. He found himself thinking only of his ride with Yerba. Well! he had told her that he loved her.

She knew it now, and although she had forbidden him to speak further, she had not wholly rejected it. It must be her morbid consciousness of the mystery of her birth that withheld a return of her affections,--some half-knowledge, perhaps, that she would not divulge, yet that kept her unduly sensitive of accepting his love. He was satisfied there was no entanglement; her heart was virgin. He even dared to hope that she had ALWAYS cared for him. It was for HIM to remove all obstacles--to prevail upon her to leave this place and return to America with him as her husband, the guardian of her good name, and the custodian of her secret. At times the strains of a dreamy German waltz, played in the distance, brought back to him the brief moment that his arm had encircled her waist by the crumbling wall, and his pulses grew languid, only to leap firmer the next moment with more desperate resolve. He would win her, come what may! He could never have been in earnest before: he loathed and hated himself for his previous pa.s.sive acquiescence to her fate. He had been a weak tool of the colonel's from the first: he was even now handicapped by a preposterous promise he had given him! Yes, she was right to hesitate--to question his ability to make her happy! He had found her here, surrounded by stupidity and cupidity--to give it no other name--so patent that she was the common gossip, and had offered nothing but a boyish declaration! As he strode into the hotel that night it was well that he did not meet the unfortunate colonel on the staircase!

It was very late, although there was still visible a light in Yerba's salon, s.h.i.+ning on her balcony, which extended before and included his own window. From time to time he could hear the murmur of voices. It was too late to avail himself of the invitation to join them, even if his frame of mind had permitted it. He was too nervous and excited to go to bed, and, without lighting his candle, he opened the French window that gave upon the balcony, drew a chair in the recess behind the curtain, and gazed upon the night. It was very quiet; the moon was high, the square was sleeping in a trance of checkered shadows, like a gigantic chessboard, with black foreshortened trees for p.a.w.ns. The click of a cavalry sabre, the sound of a footfall on the pavement of the distant Konigsstra.s.se, were distinctly audible; a far-off railway whistle was startling in its abruptness. In the midst of this calm the opening of the door of the salon, with the sudden uplifting of voices in the hall, told Paul that Yerba's guests were leaving. He heard Dona Anna's arch accents--arch even to Colonel Pendleton's monotonous baritone!--Milly's high, rapid utterances, the suave falsetto of Don Caesar, and HER voice, he thought a trifle wearied,--the sound of retiring footsteps, and all was still again.

So still that the rhythmic beat of the distant waltz returned to him, with a distinctiveness that he could idly follow. He thought of Rosario and the rose-breath of the open windows with a strange longing, and remembered the half-stifled sweetness of her happy voice rising with it from the veranda. Why had he ever let it pa.s.s from him then and waft its fragrance elsewhere? Why-- What was that?

The slight turning of a latch! The creaking of the French window of the salon, and somebody had slipped softly half out on the balcony.

His heart stopped beating. From his position in the recess of his own window, with his back to the part.i.tion of the salon, he could see nothing. Yet he did not dare to move. For with the quickened senses of a lover he felt the diffused and perfumed aura of HER presence, of HER garments, of HER flesh, flow in upon him through the open window, and possess his whole breathless being! It was SHE! Like him, perhaps, longing to enjoy the perfect night--like him, perhaps, thinking of--