The Black Pearl

by Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

CHAPTER XI

Had Gallito but known it, his theory of the unexpected was never more perfectly demonstrated than it was upon the night Pearl danced and in the days which followed. Hanson had left early the next morning with the firm determination of returning almost immediately accompanied by one or more detectives and of securing that much coveted prize, José. Also, he gloated over the prospect of seeing Gallito, Bob Flick and Seagreave arrested for conniving at José's escape and for harboring him during all these months.

But the unexpected did occur. As Seagreave had predicted, the snow began to fall, and began the very night that Pearl danced in the town hall; and fell so steadily and uninterruptedly that the progress of the train which bore Hanson down the mountains was considerably impeded. Thus, the very forces of the air conspired for José, and ably were they seconded by other invisible and unknown agencies. Even before Hanson had reached the coast he found himself powerless "in the fell clutch of circumstance." He had taken cold in the mountains and for several weeks was too seriously ill even to contemplate with much interest his plan of revenge. And by the time that he had recovered sufficiently to give consideration to the matter again, a very little investigation convinced him of the necessity for patience. So thoroughly had the season and the elements conspired, that Colina was effectually cut off from the outer world, a camp beleaguered by snow, and José, for several months at least, would be the prisoner of the mountains and not of man.

But Colina was used to this experience. It was one which she had regularly undergone every winter of her existence. Therefore, her inhabitants prepared for it and bore it with what equanimity they could summon. It was but a small camp so far up in the mountains that the mines were practically only worked during the late spring, the summer and the early autumn months, for the water which ran the concentrating and stamp mills was frozen early in the winter and the mines were practically closed down. One or two, like the Mont d'Or, were kept open, and worked a few hours a day, but no milling was done and the ore dumps increased to vast size.

The railroad, a steep and tortuous way, was not, per se a passenger line, but existed to carry the ore down to the smelters, therefore, when there was no ore to carry, it was a matter of indifference to the mine owners who controlled the line whether trains ran or not; in fact, they preferred not from a strictly business standpoint, and truly they had an excellent excuse in the heavy drifts which completely obliterated the narrow, shining, steel path which led to the world beyond the mountains.

The police officials whom Hanson consulted as soon as his returning health permitted him to do so, realized that in spite of their anxiety to secure the famous and slippery Crop-eared José, he was quite as safely imprisoned by the mountains as if they themselves had secured him. There was no possible escape for him. All trails were blocked long before the railroad was, so there he was, caught as securely as a bird in a cage, and they, his potential captors, might sit down to a comfortable period of pleasant anticipation and await that thaw which was bound to come sooner or later. So much for Gallito's unexpected.

As for those who would have been interested had they but known—the little group held in compulsory inaction by those white, encircling hills—they accepted it as a part of the year's toll, no more to be murmured at than the changing seasons, and as inevitable as were they. But it was an experience which Pearl had never known, and Seagreave looked to see it wear upon her spirit, and daily experienced a new surprise that there was no evidence of its doing so. Instead, she seemed to glow hourly with a richer and fuller life, a softer beauty. But although an intimacy greater than he and she had yet known, would seem to be enforced by this winter of isolation and leisure, she did not, for a time, see as much of him as before. A constraint, almost like a blight upon their friendship, seemed to have fallen between them ever since the night that she had danced. Seagreave did not come down to Gallito's cabin quite so frequently in the evenings, and, according to José, spent much time by his own fireside absorbed in reading and meditation; and when he did come it was usually late and, instead of talking to Pearl, he would listen in silence to Hugh's playing or else engage him in conversation.

But this attitude on his part failed to cloud Pearl's spirits. She had seen men taken with this not inexplicable shyness before, and she made no effort to rouse Harry from his abstraction or to lure him from his meditations; femininely, intuitively wise, she left that to time.

But even in her moods of gayety the Black Pearl was never voluble, and her habit of silence was a factor in maintaining the mystery with which Seagreave's imagination was now beginning to invest her, and during those winter evenings when she would often sit absolutely motionless for an hour at a time, her narrow eyes dreaming on the fire, the sphynx look on her face, more than once he felt impelled to murmur:

"'The Sphinx is drowsy,
Her wings are furled:
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world.
Who'll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept?—
I awaited the seer,
While they slumbered and slept.'"

Thus, more and more, he saw her as the image of beauty and of mystery, and ever more frequently he pondered on the nature of the message of the desert. But had he come down to Gallito's cabin earlier in the evening he would not have found her brooding on the firelight. Usually, she danced, keeping well in practice. She and Hughie would discuss by the hour new movements and effects, and not only discuss, but try them, and she and José, who had a light foot, often gave Gallito the benefit of seeing them in many of the old Spanish dances.

But one evening when Seagreave came down, Pearl was not resting after her exertions, but ran forward to greet him with unwonted vivacity, and drew him toward a window in a dim corner of the room, out of earshot of her father and José.

"Oh!" she cried. "Look, look at what they have sent me from the camp for dancing for them. I had no idea it would be so much." She took a roll of bills from her bosom and showed it to him. Her cheek was flushed, her eyes were like stars. "Why, even here, even up here," she cried, "I can make money."

"You look as if you enjoyed making money," he smiled.

She looked up at him as if surprised, and then laughed. "Of course, of course I do. Who doesn't?" Her touch on the bills was a caress. She seemed to find a joy in the very texture of them. He never dreamed for a moment that she took a delight in those rather crumpled and dirty bills. He merely took it for granted that she exulted in the visible expression of appreciation of her art.

"And what will you do with it?" he asked.

"I will send it to my bank when I can get any letters through, and then when this snowball is big enough I will invest it."

"In mines?" still idly interested and smiling.

She shook her head. "I leave that to my father, he is a good judge and he is lucky at it, and my mother is always buying patches of land and trading them off, usually to good advantage. But my specialty is unset stones. I have some very good ones, really, I have. Oh," with a little glance over her shoulder toward her father and José, "I will show them to you some day when José is not around. If he knew I had them he would steal them just for the pleasure of keeping himself in practice."

"How you love beauty," he said.

"But they are valuable," she said. "Oh, yes, I love them, too. I love to let them fall through my fingers, to pour them from one hand to another. Sometimes, when I am all alone here in the cabin, I sit and I open my little black leather bag and take them out and hold them in the palm of my hand, and I turn them this way and that way just to catch the light, and there is nothing so beautiful; in all the world there is nothing so beautiful as jewels, except," she caught herself quickly, "the desert, of course."

He sighed a little and stirred restlessly, the very mention of the desert made him vaguely uneasy. He had listened to the call of the mountains and obeyed it, and from that moment the desert, like the world, had no place in his thoughts; but since the night that Pearl had danced it had remained in his mind, and had become to him as a far horizon. The desert has ever been a factor in the consciousness of man, not to be excluded, and although Seagreave did not realize it, the moment had come in which he must reckon with it. He felt the fascination and repulsion of its impenetrable mystery, of its stark and desolate wastes, whose spell is yet so potent in the imagination of man, that many have found in its barren horror the very heart of beauty. He wondered if the uncontaminated winds which blew from out the ages across the vast, empty spaces murmured a message of greater import than that whispered to him among the mountain tops, if the wings of light which beat unceasingly above its shifting sands lifted the soul to some undreamed of realm of eternal morning. Something that slept deep within him stirred faintly; the old passion to adventure, to explore rose in his heart, his restless, reckless heart, which had, so he believed, found peace.

The shadow deepened in his eyes, but he suddenly roused from this momentary abstraction to find that Pearl was still speaking.

"Yes, I love them because they are so beautiful, but I love them, too, because they are valuable."

"Well, there is no question about your making all the money you wish," he said, a slight weariness in his tone, "thousands and thousands. The world will fling it at you. It will cover you with jewels."

She smiled, a faint, secretive smile of triumph. Ah, so he recognized that. She had made him feel and admit that she was one of the few great dancers.

Then, she, too, sighed. "If only," she said, forgetful of him and following out her train of thought aloud, "if only when I get what I want, I wouldn't always want something else! Did you ever feel if you could just be free, really free, you wouldn't want anything else in the world?"

"How could any one be more free than you are?" he laughed down at her.

"I know, I know," she agreed, still speaking wistfully, "but I'd like to be free of myself; myself is so strange, and there's so many of me." Then the veil of her instinctive reticence fell over her again and she began to talk of her recent attempts to get about on snow-shoes, José and Hugh having been her instructors, so far. Harry immediately offered his services, and she accepted them, agreeing to go out with him the next morning.

And as they talked José glanced at them from time to time, a touch of malicious laughter in his odd glancing eyes; there were few things that escaped José.

That evening, after Seagreave had gone home, when José and Gallito and Mrs. Thomas and Mrs. Nitschkan had sat late over their cards, Gallito had risen after a final game, mended the fire, poured himself a glass of cognac, lighted another cigarette and, stretching himself in an easy-chair, entered into one of those confidential talks which he occasionally permitted himself with his chosen cronies. The earlier part of the evening José and Pearl had danced for a time together, and then Pearl had danced for a time alone and in a manner to please even her father's critical taste. Now, in commenting on this, he remarked:

"You see the change in my daughter. She is now cheerful, obedient and industrious. When she came she was none of those things. She is, you see, a good girl at heart, but her mother had almost ruined her. If men but had the time they should always bring up the children of the family. It is only in that way that they can ever be a credit to one."

Mrs. Thomas, who had been bending over the stove brewing a pot of coffee which she and Mrs. Nitschkan drank at all hours of the day and night, raised herself at the utterance of these revolutionary sentiments and looked at Gallito in grieved and bewildered surprise; but Mrs. Nitschkan, who had been pouring cream into the cup of steaming coffee which José had just handed to her, first took a long draught and then remarked with cool impartiality:

"The trouble with you, Gallito, is that you can't bear for nobody, man, woman, child or devil, to get ahead of you. I guess I know somep'n' about the bringin' up of young ones myself."

Here Mrs. Thomas sighed and shook her head with that exasperated incomprehension which all women displayed when the subject of Mrs. Nitschkan's children came up for discussion. Educators discourse much upon the proper environment and training of the young of the human species, but theories aside, practical results seem rather in favor of casting the bantling on the rocks. For, in spite of Mrs. Nitschkan's joyous lack of responsibility, her daughters had grown up the antitheses of herself, thoroughly feminine little creatures, already famous for those womanly accomplishments for which their mother had ever shown a marked distaste, while the sons were steady, hard-working, reputable young fellows, always to be depended upon by their employers.

"It's nothing but your pizen luck, Sadie," murmured Mrs. Thomas.

"We must allow that Providence has been kinder to you than most," remarked Gallito sardonically.

"It's a reward," said Mrs. Nitschkan with calm assurance, refilling her pipe with more care than she had ever bestowed upon her children. "It's 'cause I ain't ever shirked an' left the Lord to do all my work for me."

At this Mrs. Thomas, too overcome to speak, tottered feebly back from the stove and fell weakly into a chair.

"No, sir," continued the gypsy with arrogant virtue, "the trouble with all the parents I know, includin' present company, is that they're too easy. I don't work no claim expectin' to get nothin' out of it, do I? And I don't bring a lot of kids into the world and spend years teachin' 'em manners—"

She was interrupted here by a brief and scornful laugh from Mrs. Thomas, who, on observing that her friend was gazing at her earnestly and ominously, hastily converted it into a fit of coughing.

"Spend years teachin' 'em manners an' sacrifice myself to stay at home and punish 'em when I might be jantin' 'round myself, not to have 'em turn out a credit to me."

There was a finality about the statements which seemed to admit of no further discussion, but after José had escorted the two women to their cabin, he had returned for one of those midnight conferences with Gallito over which they loved to linger, and the Spaniard had again expressed his satisfaction in Pearl's changed demeanor.

José's laughter pealed to the roof. "You have eyes but for mines and cards, Gallito. Though the world changes under your nose, you do not see it. The moles of the earth—they are funny!"

"Bah!" casting at him a scornful glance from under his beetling brows, "your eyes see so far, José, that you see all manner of things which do not exist."

"I have far sight and near sight and the sight which comes to the seventh child," returned José with pride. "Therefore, seeing what I see, I say my prayers each day, now."

A bleak smile wrinkled Gallito's parchment-like cheeks. "And to whom do you pray, José, your patron saint, or rather sinner, the Devil?"

José looked shocked. "You are a blasphemer, Gallito," he reproved, and then added piously, "I say my prayers each day that I may, by example, help Saint Harry."

"And why is Harry in need of your example?" said Gallito, holding up his glass between himself and the fire and watching the deep reflections of ruby light in the amber liquid.

"It goes against me to see an unequal struggle," sighed José. "He is hanging on desperately to his ice-peak, but the Devil has almost succeeded in clawing him off."

Gallito frowned. "This talk of yours is nonsense, José; but if there is anything in it, Harry may understand that any interest he may have in my daughter can lead to nothing. She is a dancer before she is anything else, it is in her blood. Harry does not and never can understand her; only one of her own kind can do that. He is by nature a religious; his cabin is the cell of a monk."

Again José's eerie, malicious laughter echoed through the room.

"Aye, laugh," growled Gallito; "but you see my daughter for the first time. You think because she smiles at Harry that she loves him; you think because she is the only woman he talks to that he loves her; you do not know her. She is young, she is beautiful and a dancer. She has had many lovers ever since she put her hair up, and learned how she could make a fool of a man with her eyes and her smile, and she has made them pay toll. She always did that from the first." There was a note of fierce pride in his harsh, brief laughter. "Yes, she would smile and promise anything with her eyes, but she gave nothing. It is strange"—the old Spaniard, his austere spirit mellowed by his excellent cognac, fell into a mood of confidential musing, an indulgence which he rarely permitted himself—"that Hugh, the child of a woman I never saw, reaches my heart more than my own daughter does. But Pearl is a study to me. I say to myself, 'She cares for nothing but money, applause, admiration,' and yet, even while I say it, I am not sure; I do not know, I do not know."

Again he admired the glints of firelight reflected in his cognac glass. "But this I do know, José, she is an actress before she is anything else."

José leered knowingly. "You think only of your daughter," he said. "What about Saint Harry? He has mad blood in him, too. It is only a few years that he has been a saint; before that the Devil held full sway over him. And," he added pensively, after a moment's cogitation, "there are many lessons one learns from the Devil."

"You should know," returned Gallito, with his twisting, sardonic smile.

"Ah, the Devil is not all bad," said José defensively. "One can learn from him the lesson of perseverance, and perseverance is a virtue."

Gallito waved his hand with a polite gesture. "You know more of him and his lessons than I, José. I am always ready to grant that." He took another sip of cognac, blew a succession of smoke wreaths toward the ceiling, and again resumed his midnight philosophizings. "What puzzles me, José, is what is going to become of us in Heaven. We shall never be content. Content is a lesson that no one has ever learned. Look at Saint Harry. He has Heaven right here. His time to himself, enough to live on without working, no women to bother him, your cooking; and it may be on that that you will win an entrance to Heaven; it will certainly be on nothing else. But, if, as you say, he is interested in my daughter, he is throwing away all chance of keeping Paradise."

"Do we not all do that?" said José dismally. "It is because a man cannot conceive of a Heaven without a woman in it. He thinks in spite of all experience to the contrary that she is what makes it Heaven."

"Yes, experience counts for nothing," Gallito sighed for himself and his brothers.

But if Seagreave sat silent and absorbed when he came to Gallito's cabin in the evening, it did not bother Pearl. She was an expert in such symptoms. Sometimes he talked to her in a rather constrained fashion, but for the most part he sat on the other side of the room, listening to Hugh's music.

One evening when he sat listening he suddenly lifted his eyes and gazed at the Pearl, who sat almost the length of the room away from him. The cabin was lighted only by the great log fire, and the leaping, ardent flames of the pine, mingled with the soft, glowing radiance of burning birch, invested the room and its occupants with that atmosphere of mystery and glamour, essential in flame-illumined shadow. And Hugh was playing the music the masters dreamed in the twilight hours when silence and shadow permitted them, even wooed them to a more intimate revelation of the heart than the definite splendors of daylight inspired.

Beyond the zone of the firelight, the room was all in a warm gloom, rich and dim. Pearl and Hugh had gathered fir branches, even some young trees, and had placed them about the walls, and in the warmth their aromatic, delicious odor permeated and pervaded the cabin, and one discerning those half-defined branches might easily imagine that the walls stretched away into the dim forest.

Pearl lay back in an easy chair, her narrow, half-closed eyes on the leaping flames. The wind, low to-night, the wind of eternity which blows ever in the mountains, sang about the cabin and blended with Hugh's music like a faint violin obligato. But even in this soft twilight of blending and mingling and harmonizing, with pine branches above and beyond her and shadowed gloom about her, Pearl never for a moment seemed the spirit of the forest.

With its dim depths for a background, she shone on it, as brilliant and distinct from it as a flashing jewel on the breast of a nun. Her crimson frock caught a deeper warmth from the firelight, her black hair shone like a bird's wing, the jewels on her fingers sent out sparkles of light and flame. As Saint Harry continued to gaze at her the forest with all its haunting, dreaming witchery vanished, the high invitation of the mountains, "Come ye apart," ceased to echo in his ears. The world environed, encompassed her; he seemed to discern the yearning of her spirit for it, the airy rush of her winged feet toward it; and yet her eyes, those eyes which sometimes held the look of having gazed for ages on time's mutations, were turned toward the desert. Then Seagreave's moment of vision passed and he turned to Hugh with an odd sinking of the heart.

Hugh had ceased to play and sat silent now on his piano stool with that motionless, concentrated air of his, as if listening to something afar.

"Hughie," said Seagreave softly, "what are you and your sister, anyway?"

Hugh laughed and, leaning his elbow on the keys, rested his cheek on his palm. "I am a little brother of the wind," he said. "I was just listening to it singing to me out there; and Pearl, well, Pearl is a daughter of fire."

"What is it that you hear that I don't?" asked Harry. "I listen to the wind, too, sometimes for hours, up there in my cabin; but it's only a falling, sighing thing to me, sometimes a rising, shrieking one. What is this gift of music?"

"I don't know," said Hugh simply, "but if you will wait a moment, I will play you the song the wind is singing through the pines to-night. It is just a little, sad one."

Again he sat immobile, listening for a while and then began to play so plaintive and wistful a melody that Harry felt the old sorrow wake and stir within his heart and demand a reckoning of the forgetful years. Not realizing that he did so, he arose and began to pace up and down the room, nor remembered where he was until he looked up to see Pearl watching him, surprise and even a slight curiosity upon her face.

"Forgive me," he said, stopping before her, "for walking up and down that way as if I were in my own cabin, but something in Hugh's music set me to dreaming."

"You didn't look as if they were happy dreams," she said.

"Didn't I?" he spoke as lightly as he could; then he changed the subject. "Do you know that the crust on the snow is thicker than it has been yet? How would you like to go out on your snow-shoes to-morrow morning?"

She looked her pleasure. "That will be fine," she cried eagerly.

She was up betimes the next day, anxious to see whether more snow had fallen during the night; but none had. To her joy, it was one of those brilliant mornings when the sky seems a dome of sapphire sparkles, and the crust of the snow with the sun on it is like white star-dust overlaid with gold. The radiance would have been unbearable had not the bare, black trees veiled the sky with their network of branches and twigs and the pines softened the snow with their shadows.

Pearl had rapidly acquired proficiency in her new accomplishment, and she and Seagreave had covered several miles when, on their return, they paused to rest a bit in the little bower of stunted pines. Here Seagreave cut some branches from the trees for them to sit on and, gathering some dry, fallen boughs and cones, built a fire.

They enjoyed this a few moments in silence and then Pearl spoke. "Why," she asked with her usual directness, "why did you get up and walk up and down the room last night when Hughie was playing? What was it in his music that made you forget all of us and even, as you said, forget that you were not in your own cabin?"

"That was stupid of me and rude, too," he said compunctiously. "Something that he was playing called up so vivid a memory that I forgot everything."

There was a quick gleam in her eyes; she was resentful of memories that could make him forget her very presence, hers. "What was it you were thinking of?" she asked. Her voice was low.

He looked out over the snow before he answered. "A girl," he said, and cast another handful of pine cones upon the fire.

She did not speak nor move, and yet her whole being was instinct with a sudden tense attention. "Yes, a girl," she said insistently. "What was she like?" the words leaped from her, voicing themselves almost without her volition.

He sighed and appeared to speak with some effort. "It was long ago," he said. "She was like violets or white English roses."

"And did you love her?" she asked, that soft tenseness still in her voice, "and did she love you?"

"I suppose every man has his ideal of woman, perhaps unconsciously to himself, and she was mine."

He sighed again and she glanced quickly at him from the corners of her eyes with a half scornful smile upon her lips. She knew that she did not suggest violets, shy and fragrant and hidden under their own green leaves; neither was there anything in the mountains to suggest the gardens in which roses grew. But he had left the violets and English roses long ago, because of that spirit of restlessness within him, and finally he had come to these wild, savage mountains and was content here, where it was difficult even to picture the calm and repose of the gardens he had left. He had said that he did not know why he had come, but Pearl did. She never doubted it. It was the call of her heart across the world to him, seeking him, reaching him, drawing him to her.

"And does it make you unhappy to think of her now?" she asked still softly.

"No," he said, "no, not now. But last night something in the music caused the years to drop away and I was back there again and she rose before me. Really, I felt her very presence. I saw her as plainly as I see you now."

Pearl rose and shook the snow from her cloak. "Forget it," she said scornfully. The little horse-shoe frown showed between her brows, and her eyes as she looked at him were full of a sparkling disdain. "That girl wasn't worth that," she snapped her fingers. "And here you've been loping over the globe for years, because she turned you down. I should think you'd feel like a fool." She spoke quite fearlessly, although Seagreave had thrown up his head and stood looking at her with a white face and compressed lips. "But that ain't the reason," she went on shrewdly. "I know men. You like to think you quit things because of the girl," she laughed that low, harsh, unpleasant laugh of hers. "You quit 'em because you got lazy, and anything like a responsibility was a bore. That's straight."

Without another glance at him, she sped down the hill, like an arrow shot from a bow.