VIII.
The Worthingtons' private parlor in the Rideau House was hot and close, although a fog had drifted in at nightfall and cooled the outside air. Two of its occupants, however, were totally unmindful of the heat and the mingled odors of upholstery, gas, and varnish that prevailed within its highly decorated walls. The third, a compact, elderly, prosperous-looking gentleman, whose face wore a slight cloud of ennui, stood by the open window gazing out, not so much from a desire to see what was going on outside as from a good-natured unwillingness to see what was taking place within.
Mr. Frederick Sterling, a shade paler and several shades graver than of old, was looking at the elderly gentleman's daughter in an unmistakable way; and the daughter herself, a fair creature, with the fairness of youth and health and plenty, was returning his gaze with one that was equally unmistakable.
"Do you mean to tell me, Frederick, that the poor thing walked all that distance in that intolerable heat?"
The young man nodded dismally.
"That's what they say, Annette. It makes one feel like a beast."
"I don't see why you need say that, Frederick. I'm sure they ought to have done something, after the awful danger you were in." The young woman swept toward him, with one arm outstretched, and then receded, and let her hand fall on the back of a chair, as her father yawned audibly.
"Of course there was danger, Annette; but that doesn't remove the fact that I was a hot-headed idiot."
"You mustn't talk so. It is not polite to me. I am not going to marry an idiot."
"But you've promised."
The young people laughed into each other's eyes.
"Frederick," said the young girl, after a little silence, during which they drifted into the rigid plush embrace of a sofa, "I'm going up to see that girl and thank her."
The young man leaned forward and caught her wrists.
"You—angel!"
"Yes, I'm going to-morrow. Of course you can't go."
"Oh, good Lord, no," groaned her lover.
"But papa can. There will be plenty of time; we don't leave until evening. And in spite of what her father did, I feel kindly toward the girl. There must be some good in her; she seemed to want to do you justice. How does she look, Frederick?"
The soft-voiced inquisitor drew her wrists from the young fellow's grasp, and flattened his palms between hers by way of an anæsthetic.
"Did you ever see her?"
"Oh, yes, once or twice. A lank, forlorn, little red-headed thing,—rather pretty. Oh, my God, Annette!"
The girl raised the tips of his imprisoned fingers to her lips.
"Couldn't you send her something, Frederick, some little keepsake, something she would like, if she would like anything that wasn't too dreadful?"
The young fellow's face brightened.
"Annette, you are an angel."
"No, I'm not; there are no brunette angels. I am a very practical young woman, and I'm going with you to buy something for that poor girl; men don't know how to buy things." She dropped her lover's hands, and went out of the room, returning with her hat and gloves, and, going to her father's side, she said: "Papa, Frederick and I are going out for awhile. He wants to get a little present for a poor young girl, the daughter of that awful wretch who—that—you know. It seems she saw it all, and came down to say that Frederick was not to blame. Of course it was unnecessary, for the judge and every one saw at once that he did perfectly right; but it was kind of her, and it was a very hot day. Do you mind staying here alone?—or you can go with us, if you like."
"No, thank you; I don't mind, and I don't like," said the elderly gentleman dryly.
"And you'll not be lonely?"
"No, I think not; I've been getting acquainted with myself this trip, and I find I'm a very interesting though somewhat unappreciated old party."
The young girl put down her laughing face, and her father swept a kiss from it with his gray mustache. Then the two young creatures went out into the lighted streets, laughing and clinging to each other in the sweet, selfish happiness that is the preface to so large a part of the world's misery.
They came back presently with their purchase, a somewhat obtrusively ornate piece of jewelry, which Annette pronounced semi-barbarous; being, she said, a compromise between her own severely classical taste and that of Sterling, which latter, she assured her father, was entirely savage.
She fastened the trinket at her throat, where it acquired a sudden and hitherto unsuspected elegance in the eyes of her lover, and then unclasped it, and held it at arm's-length in front of her before she laid it in its pink cotton receptacle.
"I do hope she will be pleased, Frederick," she said, with a soft, contented little sigh.
And the young man set his teeth, and smiled at her from the depths of a self-abasement that made her content a marvel to him.
Annette went up to the mountains with her father the next day, stopping the carriage under the pepper-trees in front of the Withrow cabin, and stepping out a little bewildered by the meanness and poverty and squalor of it all.
The children came out and stood in a jagged, uneven row before her, and the hounds sniffed at her skirts and walked around her curiously. Mrs. Sproul appeared in the doorway with the baby, shielding its bald head from the sun with her husband's hat, and Lysander emerged from between two dark green rows of orange-trees across the way, his hoe on his shoulder.
"I want to see your daughter, the young girl,—the one that walked to Los Angeles the other day," she said, looking at the woman.
"M'lissy?" queried Mrs. Sproul anxiously. "Lysander, do you know if M'lissy's about?"
Her husband nodded backward.
"She's over in the orchard, lookin' after the water. I'll"—
The stranger took two or three steps toward him and put out her hand.
"May I go to her? Will you show me, please? I want to see her alone."
Lysander bent his tall figure and moved along the rows of orange-trees, until he caught a glimpse of Melissa's blue drapery.
"She's right down there," he said, pointing between the smooth trunks with his hoe. "It's rough walkin',—I've just been a-throwin' up a furrow fer the irrigatin'; but I guess you c'n make it."
She went down the shaded aisle between the orange-trees, Mrs. Sproul looking after her dubiously, as a person guilty of a serious breach of decorum in asking to see any one alone.
Melissa leaned on her hoe, and watched her approach with listless amazement. She took in every detail of her daintily clad loveliness,—the graceful sway of her drapery as she walked, the cluster of roses in her belt, and the wide hat with its little forest of curling plumes.
"You are Melissa?" The stranger put out her softly gloved hand, and Melissa took it in limp, rustic acquiescence. "Mr. Sterling wished me to come,—and I wanted to come myself,—to thank you for what you did; it was very kind, and you were very brave to undertake it, and for one you scarcely knew—it was very, very good of you."
Melissa colored to the little ripples of vivid hair about her temples.
"Is he gone away?" she asked, rubbing her hands up and down on the worn handle of the hoe.
"No, but he is going this evening. Of course he could not stay. It would be very painful for him, for all of you. Is there anything he can do for you? He will be so glad if he can be of use to you in any way"— She hesitated, watching the pained look grow in her listener's face.
"Ain't he never comin' back?" asked Melissa wistfully.
Annette opened her brown eyes wide, and fixed them on the girl's face.
"I don't know," she faltered.
"I'd like to keep his hankecher," Melissa broke out tremulously. "I hurt my arm oncet up where they was blastin', and he tied it up fer me with his hankecher. I was takin' it to 'im that Sunday. I had it all washed and done up. I'd like to keep it, though,—if you think he wouldn't care." Her eyes filled, and her voice broke treacherously. "That's all. Tell 'im good-by."
Annette was gazing at her breathlessly. It came over her like a cloud, the poverty, the hopelessness, the dreariness of it all. She made a little impetuous rush forward.
"Oh, yes, yes," she said eagerly, through her tears; "and he is so sorry, and he sent you these,"—she took the roses from her belt, her lover's roses, and thrust them into Melissa's nerveless grasp,—"and I—oh, I shall love you always!"
Then she turned, and hurried through the sun and shadow of the orchard back to the carriage.
"I am ready to go now," she said, somewhat stiffly, to her father.
All the way down the dusty mountain road, over which Melissa had traveled so patiently, she kept murmuring to herself, "Oh, the poor thing,—the poor, poor thing!"
Some years afterwards, when Mr. Frederick Sterling's girth and dignity had noticeably increased, he saw among his wife's ornaments a gaudy trinket that brought a curious twinge of half-forgotten pain into his consciousness. He was not able to understand, nor is it likely that he will ever know, how it came there, or why there came over him at sight of it a memory of sycamores and running water, and the smell of sage and blooming buckthorn and chaparral.