“It is Mr. Grant, a friend of my father's,” said Clementina, smiling with equanimity, as if just awakening from a momentary abstraction, yet apparently unconscious of Grant's imploring eyes; “but the other gentleman I have not the pleasure of knowing.”
“Ah! Don Diego Fletcher, a countryman of yours; and yet I think he knows you not.”
Clementina's face betrayed no indication of the presence of her father's foe, and yet Grant knew that she must have recognized his name, as she looked towards Fletcher with perfect self-possession. He was too much engaged in watching her to take note of Fletcher's manifest disturbance, or the evident effort with which he at last bowed to her. That this unexpected double meeting with the daughter of the man he had wronged, and the man who had espoused the quarrel, should be confounding to him appeared only natural. But he was unprepared to understand the feverish alacrity with which he accepted Dona Maria's invitation to chocolate, or the equally animated way in which Clementina threw herself into her hostess's Spanish levity. He knew it was an awkward situation, that must be surmounted without a scene; he was quite prepared in the presence of Clementina to be civil to Fletcher; but it was odd that in this feverish exchange of courtesies and compliments HE, Grant, should feel the greater awkwardness and be the most ill at ease. He sat down and took his part in the conversation; he let it transpire for Clementina's benefit that he had been to Los Gatos only on business, yet there was no opportunity for even a significant glance, and he had the added embarrassment of seeing that she exhibited no surprise nor seemed to attach the least importance to his inopportune visit. In a miserable indecision he allowed himself to be carried away by the high-flown hospitality of his Spanish hostess, and consented to stay to an early dinner. It was part of the infelicity of circumstance that the voluble Dona Maria—electing him as the distinguished stranger above the resident Fletcher—monopolized him and attached him to her side. She would do the honors of her house; she must show him the ruins of the old Mission beside the corral; Don Diego and Clementina would join them presently in the garden. He cast a despairing glance at the placidly smiling Clementina, who was apparently equally indifferent to the evident constraint and assumed ease of the man beside her, and turned away with Mrs. Ramirez.
A silence fell upon the gallery so deep that the receding voices and footsteps of Grant and his hostess in the long passage were distinctly heard until they reached the end. Then Fletcher arose with an inarticulate exclamation. Clementina instantly put her finger to her lips, glanced around the gallery, extended her hand to him, and saying “Come,” half-led, half-dragged him into the passage. To the right she turned and pushed open the door of a small room that seemed a combination of boudoir and oratory, lit by a French window opening to the garden, and flanked by a large black and white crucifix with a prie Dieu beneath it. Closing the door behind them she turned and faced her companion. But it was no longer the face of the woman who had been sitting in the gallery; it was the face that had looked back at her from the mirror at Tasajara the night that Grant had left her—eager, flushed, material with commonplace excitement!
“'Lige Curtis,” she said.
“Yes,” he answered passionately, “Lige Curtis, whom you thought dead! 'Lige Curtis, whom you once pitied, condoled with and despised! 'Lige Curtis, whose lands and property have enriched you! 'Lige Curtis, who would have shared it with you freely at the time, but whom your father juggled and defrauded of it! 'Lige Curtis, branded by him as a drunken outcast and suicide! 'Lige Curtis”—
“Hush!” She clapped her little hand over his mouth with a quick but awkward schoolgirl gesture, inconceivable to any who had known her usual languid elegance of motion, and held it there. He struggled angrily, impatiently, reproachfully, and then, with a sudden characteristic weakness that seemed as much of a revelation as her once hoydenish manner, kissed it, when she let it drop. Then placing both her hands still girlishly on her slim waist and curtseying grotesquely before him, she said: “'Lige Curtis! Oh, yes! 'Lige Curtis, who swore to do everything for me! 'Lige Curtis, who promised to give up liquor for me,—who was to leave Tasajara for me! 'Lige Curtis, who was to reform, and keep his land as a nest-egg for us both in the future, and then who sold it—and himself—and me—to dad for a glass of whiskey! 'Lige Curtis, who disappeared, and then let us think he was dead, only that he might attack us out of the ambush of his grave!”
“Yes, but think what I have suffered all these years; not for the cursed land—you know I never cared for that—but for YOU,—you, Clementina,—YOU rich, admired by every one; idolized, held far above me,—ME, the forgotten outcast, the wretched suicide—and yet the man to whom you had once plighted your troth. Which of those greedy fortune-hunters whom my money—my life-blood as you might have thought it was—attracted to you, did you care to tell that you had ever slipped out of the little garden gate at Sidon to meet that outcast! Do you wonder that as the years passed and YOU were happy, I did not choose to be so forgotten? Do you wonder that when YOU shut the door on the past I managed to open it again—if only a little way—that its light might startle you?”
Yet she did not seem startled or disturbed, and remained only looking at him critically.
“You say that you have suffered,” she replied with a smile. “You don't look it! Your hair is white, but it is becoming to you, and you are a handsomer man, 'Lige Curtis, than you were when I first met you; you are finer,” she went on, still regarding him, “stronger and healthier than you were five years ago; you are rich and prosperous, you have everything to make you happy, but”—here she laughed a little, held out both her hands, taking his and holding his arms apart in a rustic, homely fashion—“but you are still the same old 'Lige Curtis! It was like you to go off and hide yourself in that idiotic way; it was like you to let the property slide in that stupid, unselfish fashion; it was like you to get real mad, and say all those mean, silly things to dad, that didn't hurt him—in your regular looney style; for rich or poor, drunk or sober, ragged or elegant, plain or handsome,—you're always the same 'Lige Curtis!”