The pioneer

by Geraldine Bonner

While he still thought himself a trifler in the outer court of sentiment he was already under her dominion. He thought of himself as taking an impersonally admiring interest in her when he was continually haunted by the thought of her, and hastened to spend his spare hours beside her, his eyes drinking in her beauty, his vanity fostered and stimulated by the flattery she so cunningly administered. Like Paris, he felt himself beloved by goddesses. June’s image faded. Two years had passed since his confession in the wood. He had seen her only at intervals and then under a perpetual ban of restraint. He was not the man to remain constant to a memory. June hovered on the edges of his consciousness like a sad-eyed shadow, looking at him with a pleading protest that made him feel angry with her. She was a dim, unappealing figure beside the radiant youthfulness, the sophisticated coquetries of Black Dan’s daughter.

During the early part of the summer June was in ignorance of the momentous shuffling of the cards of her destiny. She lived quietly, rarely going to the city, and spending most of her time in the gardens or on the balcony. Rosamund, who went about more, marketed in the village and shopped in town, began to hear rumors of Jerry’s interest in Miss Gracey. She met them riding together in the hot solitude of the country roads, saw them meet on the trains to the city. Finally the rumors passed to San Francisco and the Colonel heard them. He came down to San Mateo that Saturday to talk things over with Rosamund. They were worried and uneasy, a sense of calamity weighing on them both.

Though June was one of those women who obstinately adhere to the bright side, who cling to hope till it crumbles in their hands, she felt, during the summer, premonitions of ill fortune. Those inexplicable shadows of approaching evil that Nature throws forward over the path of sensitive temperaments had darkened her outlook. She questioned herself as to her heaviness of heart, assuring herself that there was no new cloud on her horizon. In the constancy of her own nature she did not realize, as a more experienced woman would, that her hold on Jerry was a silken thread which would wear very thin in the passage of years, and be ready to snap at the first strain.

But the moods of apprehension and gloom began to be augmented by ripples from the pool of gossip without. She heard that Jerry was oftener in San Mateo than ever before, and she saw him less frequently. One afternoon she met him driving with Mercedes, and the girl’s radiant smile of recognition had something of malicious triumph under its beaming sweetness. June drove home silent and pale. In her room she tried to argue herself out of her depression. But it stayed with her, made her preoccupied and quiet all the evening, lay down with her at night, and was heavy and cold at her heart in the morning.

At the end of September they returned to town. They had been back a few weeks when one afternoon she met Jerry on the street and they stopped for a few moments’ conversation. It was nothing more than the ordinary interchange of commonplaces between old friends, but when he had passed on, the girl walked forward looking wan and feeling a deadly sense of blankness. He was the same man, gay, handsome, suave, and yet he seemed suddenly far removed from her, to be smiling with the perfunctory politeness of a stranger. The chill exhaled by a dying love penetrated her, pierced her to the core. She did not understand it, him, or herself. All that she knew was that the sense of despondency became suddenly overpowering, and closed like an iron clutch on her heart.

It was an overcast autumn that year, with much gray weather and early fogs. The city had never looked to June so cheerless. She was a great deal alone, Rosamund’s time being more and more claimed by Lionel Harrower. He was her first lover, and it was a part of Rosamund’s fate that he should have come to her unexpected and unasked for. She was of the order of women who stand where they are placed, doing what comes under their hand, demanding little of life, and to whom life’s gifts come as a surprise.

That such a man as the young Briton should prefer her to her sister, whose superior charm she had always acknowledged and been proud of, was to her astonishing. She was sobered and softened in these days of awakening love. One could see the woman, the mother, ripe, soft, full of a quiet devotion, slowly dawning. Sometimes she was irritable, a thing previously unknown. She could not believe that Harrower loved her, and yet as the days passed, and she found the hours spent with him growing ever more disturbingly sweet, she wondered how she could ever support a life in which he did not figure, and the thought filled her with torturing fears.

One gray afternoon, Rosamund having left for a walk in the park with Harrower, June, after wandering about the empty house for a dreary hour, resolved that she too would go out for a stroll. She had felt more cheerful lately. Jerry had come to call two days before, when she was out, and this fact had seemed to her a proof of his unwaned interest. She had written him a brief note, stating her regrets at missing him and her hopes that he would repeat the visit soon. This was only polite and proper, she assured herself.

Her walk took her to Van Ness Avenue and then up the side street toward the little Turk Street plaza. For the past two years it had been a favorite promenade of hers. The present was not sufficiently fraught with pain to render memories of a happier past unbearable. She strolled through the small park and then returned and walked back toward the avenue. As she turned the corner into the great thoroughfare, she stopped, the color dying from her face, the softness of its outlines stiffening.

Walking slowly toward her were Jerry and Mercedes Gracey. They were close together, Mercedes lightly touching with the tips of her fingers the top of the ornamental fence beside her. Her eyes were down-drooped, her whole air one of maidenly modesty, which yet had in it something coyly encouraging. Jerry, close at her shoulder, was looking down at her, with the eyes of a lover.