It was a crucial period in her life. Old ideals were gone, and new ones not yet formed. There seemed only ruins about her, and amid these she sought for something to cling to, and believe in. With secret passion she nursed the thought of Essex—all she had left that had not been swept away in the deluge of this past week.
Fortunately for her, the business calls of the life of a woman left penniless shook her from her state of brooding idleness. The cottage was hers for a month longer, and despite the impoverished condition of the widow, there was a fair amount of furniture still left in it that was sufficiently valuable to be a bait to the larger dealers. Mariposa found her days varied by contentions with men, who came to stare at the great red lacquer cabinet and investigate the interior condition of the marquetry sideboard. When the month was up she was to move to a small boarding-house, kept by Spaniards called Garcia, that Mrs. Willers, in her varying course, included among her habitats. The Garcias would not object to her piano and practising, and it was amazingly cheap. Mrs. Willers herself had lived there in one of her periods of eclipse, and knew them to be respectable denizens of a somewhat battered Bohemia.
“But you’re going to be a Bohemian yourself, being a musical genius,” she said cheerfully. “So you won’t mind that.”
Mariposa did not think she would mind. In the chaotic dimness of the dismantled front parlor she looked like a listless goddess who would not mind anything.
Mrs. Willers thought her state of dreary apathy curious and spoke of it to Shackleton, whom she now recognized as the girl’s acknowledged guardian. He had listened to her account of Mariposa’s broken condition with expressionless attention.
“Isn’t it natural, all things considered, that a girl should be broken-hearted over the death of a devoted mother? And, as I understand it, Miss Moreau is absolutely alone. She has no relatives anywhere. It’s a pretty bleak outlook.”
“That’s true. I never saw a girl left so without connections. But she worries me. She’s so silent, and dull, and unlike herself. Of course, it’s been a terrible blow. I’d have thought she’d been more prepared.”
He shrugged his shoulders, stroking his short beard with his lean, heavily-veined hand. It amused him to see the way Mrs. Willers was quietly pushing him into the position of the girl’s sponsor. And at the same time it heightened his opinion of her as a woman of capacity and heart. She would be an ideal chaperone and companion for his unprotected daughter.
“When she feels better,” he said, “I wish you’d bring her down here again. Don’t bother her until she feels equal to it. But I want to talk to her about Lepine’s ideas for her. I saw him again and he gave me a lot of information about Paris and teachers and all the rest of it. Before we make any definite arrangements I’ll have to see her and talk it all over.”
Mrs. Willers went back triumphant to Mariposa to report this conversation. It really seemed to clinch matters. The Bonanza King had instituted himself her guardian and backer. It meant fortune for Mariposa Moreau, the penniless orphan.