The pioneer

by Geraldine Bonner

It was a Sunday or two after Mercedes had driven him there that the young Englishman had appeared on the balcony steps, very red and warm from the heat of the afternoon, and paid a long call, which extended so far into the twilight that he was bidden to dinner and did not go back to town till a late evening train.

It had evidently been an enjoyable afternoon, for he repeated it, and then again repeated it, and finally let it develop into a habit. He wrote to his relations in England that he was deeply interested in California and was studying the mining industry of that remarkable state. And it is true that once in the middle of the summer he went to Virginia for a few days and came back with his mind full of excellent material for a letter to his grandfather which should prove how profound had been his study of the American mining and engineering methods.

The first afternoon that Mercedes found him on the Allens’ balcony she was openly surprised. The second she was sweet and gracious, but her rose-leaf color deepened at the sight of him, and it was noticeable that, for one who was usually so completely mistress of herself, she was distrait and lacking in repose. On leaving, she had asked him if she could drive him back to the station, as her road lay that way, to which the young man had answered, with the stiff politeness of embarrassment, that he was to stay to dinner—“he always did on Sunday.”

This was the inception of a situation that, before the summer was over, had caused more heart-burnings, more wakeful nights and distressed days, than the peaceful valley had known in many years.

For the first time in an existence of triumph and adulation Mercedes knew defeat. She had been certain of her attraction for Harrower, and confident that by her beauty and her wiles she could, before his departure, fan his interest to a warmer flame. Yet July was not spent before she realized that a force more potent than any she could put forth was leading the young man in another direction. His visits to the Allens’ grew more and more frequent as those to Tres Pinos became less so. Curiosity in his interest in the occupants of the De Soto house evolved itself into curiosity in his interest in Rosamund Allen. He forgot the tours he had intended to take into the interior, showed no more interest in Virginia City, and gave up his plan of a horseback expedition to the Yosemite. He spent the summer in town, making trips to San Mateo that grew more and more frequent.

It was difficult for Mercedes to believe it, but when she did it kindled sleeping fires in her. She was doubly wounded; heart and pride were hurt. Her overmastering vanity had received its first blow. Not only had she lost the man for whom her feeling was daily growing warmer, but it would be known of all men that he had withdrawn his affections from her to place them on a girl far her inferior in looks, education and feminine charm. That he should have preferred Rosamund was particularly maddening—Rosamund, whom she had regarded as commonplace and countrified. She looked in her glass, and furious tears gathered in her eyes. It was staggering, incomprehensible, but it was true. She was discarded, and people were laughing at her.

Two instincts—strong in women of her type—rose within her. One demanded revenge and the other protection of her pride. She burned with the desire to strike back at those who had hurt her, and at the same to hide the wounds to her self-love. She knew of but one way to do the latter, and it came upon her—not suddenly, but with a gradually uplifting illumination—that it could be successfully combined with the execution of the former.

Mercedes, who liked gossip, had heard the story of Jerry Barclay’s complication with Mrs. Newbury, and of how it was popularly supposed to have prevented his marriage to June Allen. The busy scandal-hunters of the city had somehow unearthed the story that Jerry and June would have married had the former been free. Mercedes, with her woman’s quickness, guessed that June was the sort of girl who would remain constant in such a situation. But Jerry was a being of another stripe, a man of an unusual attraction for women and of a light and errant fancy. She had not met him half a dozen times when she came to the conclusion that his love for June was on the wane, his roving eye ready to be caught, his ear held, by the first soft glance and flattering tongue he encountered.

Thus the way of protecting herself and of hitting back at one at least of the Allens was put into her hand. She did not care for Jerry, save as he was useful to her, though he had the value of the thing which is highly prized by others. She used every weapon in her armory to attract and subjugate him. Jerry himself, versed in the wiles of women as he was, was deceived by her girlishly open pleasure in his attentions, her fluttered embarrassment when he paid her compliments.

His first feeling toward her was an unbounded admiration for her physical perfections, to which was added a complacent vanity at her obvious predilection for him. But the woman that he regarded as a naïve ingenue was a being of a more complex brain, a more daring initiative, and a cooler head than he had ever possessed. Vain and self-indulgent, the slave of his passions, he was in reality a puppet in the hands of a girl fifteen years his junior, who, under an exterior of flower-like delicacy, had been eaten into by the acids of rage and revenge.