The sleek and shining creatures of the chase.
We hunt them for the beauty of their skins;
They love us for it, and we ride them down.”
—Tennyson.
The month of Mariposa’s tenantry of the cottage was up. It was the last evening there, and she sat crouched over a handful of fire that burned in the front parlor grate. The room was half empty, all the superfluous furniture having been taken that morning by a Jewish second-hand dealer. In one corner stood huddled such relics as she had chosen to keep, and which would be borne away on the morrow to the Garcias’ boarding-house. The marquetry sideboard was gone. It had been sold to a Sutter Street dealer for twenty-five dollars. The red lacquer cabinet, though no longer hers, still remained. It, too, would be carried away to-morrow morning by its new owners. She looked at it with melancholy glances as the firelight found and lost its golden traceries and sent sudden quivering gleams along its scarlet doors. The fire was less a luxury than an economy, to burn the last pieces of coal in the bin.
Bending over the dancing flames, Mariposa held her hands open to the blaze, absently looking at their backs. They were fine, capable hands, large and white, with strong wrists and a forearm so round that its swell began half-way between elbow and wrist-bone. Pleased by the warmth that soothed the chill always induced by a sojourn in the front parlor, she pulled up her sleeves and watched the gleam of the fire turn the white skin red. She was sitting thus, when a ring at the bell made her start and hurriedly push her sleeves down. Her visitors were so few that she was almost certain of the identity of this one. For all the griefs of the last month she was yet a woman. She sprang to her feet, and as the steps of the servant sounded in the hall, ran to the large mirror in the corner and patted and pulled her hair to the style she thought most becoming.
She had turned from this and was standing by the fire when Essex entered. He had seen her once since her mother’s death, but she had then been so preoccupied with grief that, with a selfish man’s hatred of all unpleasant things, he had left her as soon as possible. To-night he saw that she was recovering, that, physically at least, she was herself again. But he was struck, almost as soon as his eye fell on her, by a change in her. Some influence had been at work to effect a subtile and curious development in her. The simplicity, the something childish and winning that had always seemed so inconsistent with her stately appearance, was gone. Mariposa was coming to herself. His heart quickened its beats as he realized she was handsomer, richer by some inward growth, more a woman than she had been a month ago.
He took a seat at the other side of the fire, and the tentative conversation of commonplaces occupied them for a few moments. The silence that had held her in a spell of dead dejection on his former visit was broken. She seemed more than usually talkative. In fact, Mariposa was beginning to feel the reaction from the life of grief and seclusion of the last month. She was violently ashamed of the sense of elation that had surged up in her at the sound of Essex’s voice. She struggled to hide it, but it lit a light in her eyes, called a color to her cheeks that she could not conceal. The presence of her lover affected her with a sort of embarrassed exultation that she had never experienced before. To hide it she talked rapidly, looking into the fire, to which she still held out her hands.
Essex, from the other side of the hearth, watched her. He saw his arrival had made her nervous, and it only augmented the sentiment that had been growing in him for months.
She began to tell him of her move.