He could not sleep, and in the morning walked up to the house before breakfast for news. The servant at the door told him that Mrs. Newbury was dead, having passed away quietly without renewal of consciousness or speech as the day was dawning.
Without a word he turned from the door and walked down the street to where a car line crossed it. Standing on the corner waiting for the car, he was accosted by a boy selling the morning papers, and mechanically, without consciousness of his action, he bought one.
In the same mazed state he opened it and looked at the front page. The first paragraph that met his eye was an announcement that the rumored strike of a great ore-body of astounding richness in the Cresta Plata was confirmed. The excitement in Virginia was intense, the mine being regarded as second only to the Con. Virginia. “This,” concluded the paragraph, “will raise the fortunes of the Gracey boys far above the six naught mark, well up on the list of bonanza millionaires.”
CHAPTER XII
A MAN AND HIS PRICE
The ball given by Mrs. Davenport, to introduce to San Francisco society the fiancée of her son Stanley, was long remembered as one of the most brilliant entertainments ever given in California.
The exhilaration of prosperity was in the air. Stocks were mounting, everybody was making money. More new dresses were ordered for Mrs. Davenport’s ball than ever before for any one function. The jewelers were selling diamonds to men and women who five years before had lived in two-room cabins and worn overalls and calicos. Black Dan Gracey had come down from Virginia to see his daughter and bought her a diamond tiara which it was said eclipsed anything of the kind ever sold in San Francisco or even New York. The bonanza times were beginning, and the fiery wine of life they distilled mounting to the heads of men.
To Rosamund’s surprise June announced her intention of going to the ball. She had gone out little lately, since the death of Mrs. Newbury, now six weeks past, not at all. Every evening she had sat in the parlor in Folsom Street, waiting. But the visitor she expected never came. It was typical of her ineradicable optimism that she should still have expected him. Rosamund had heard and seen enough to feel certain that he would never come, that every leisure hour he had was spent with the daughter of Black Dan Gracey. All Mercedes’ other charms were now enhanced by the luster of great wealth, and the Colonel had told Rosamund that Jerry’s business was practically nil, his private fortune gone. It was necessary to say no more.
June dressed herself for the ball that night as for a crisis. She had ordered a new gown, and sheathed in its glimmering whiteness, with filmy skirts falling from her hips to the floor in vaporous layers, was an ethereally fairy-like figure. Like many women who are not handsome but possess a delicate charm of appearance, she varied singularly in looks. To-night the evanescent beauty, that was now and then hers, revisited her. She was not the blushing, soft-eyed girl that Barclay had kissed in the woods at San Mateo, but a graceful woman in whose fragile elegance there was something spiritual and poetic. She noticed her pallor and accentuated it with powder, rubbing it along her shoulders till they looked like marble. In all this luminous whiteness of skin and raiment her lips were unusually red, her eyes dark and brilliant. She scrutinized herself in the mirror, drew down tendrils of hair from the coil that now crowned her head, studied her profile and coiffure in the hand glass and tried different jeweled pendants round her neck. She was like a general before battle who reviews his resources and tries to display them to the best advantage.
Owing to a delay in the arrival of the carriage they were late. It was half-past ten—an unwonted hour for those days—when they entered the house. At its wide-flung portals currents of revelry and joy seemed to meet them. There was the suggestion of festival in the air; the rhythm of dance music swelled and faded over the hum of voices. Room opened from room with glimpses of polished floors between long trains, reflections of bare shoulders in mirrors, gleams of diamonds, sharp and sudden under the even flood of light from the chandeliers. Over all hung the perfume of flowers, great masses of which stood banked in corners, or hung in thick festoons along the walls.
The Colonel escorted his charges to the end of the drawing-room where Stanley Davenport’s fiancée stood beside the hostess receiving guests and congratulations. Their few sentences of greeting accomplished, they moved aside toward the wide door of entrance. From this vantage point their eyes were instantly attracted by the figure of Mercedes Gracey surrounded by a little group of admirers.