“I had no time to hate because
The grave would hinder me,
And life was not so simple I
Could finish enmity.”
—Dickinson.
For two days after her hysterical outburst Mariposa kept her room, sick in body and mind. The quick succession of nerve-shattering events, ending with the death of Shackleton, seemed to stun her. She lay on the sofa, white and motionless, irresponsive even to the summons of the boys, who drummed cheerfully on her door as soon as they came home from school.
Fortunately for her, solitude was as difficult to find in that slipshod ménage as method or order. When the boys were at school, young Mrs. Garcia, in the disarray that attended the accomplishment of her household tasks, mounted to her first-floor boarder and regaled her with mingled accounts of past splendors and present miseries. Mrs. Garcia spoke freely of her husband and the affluence with which he had surrounded her. The listener, looking at the faded, blond prettiness of her foolish face, wondered how the Juan Garcia that Gamaliel Barron had described could have loved her. Mariposa had yet to learn that Nature mates the strong men of the world to the feeble women, in an effort to maintain an equilibrium.
Once or twice the old señora came upstairs, carrying some dainty in a covered dish. She had been born at Monterey and had come to San Francisco as a bride in the late fifties, but had never learned English, speaking the sonorous Spanish of her girlhood to every one she met, whether it was understood or not. Even in the complete wreck of fortune and position, in which Mariposa saw her, she was a fine example of the highest class of Spanish Californian, that once brilliant and picturesque race, careless, simple, lazy, happy, lords of a kingdom whose value they never guessed, possessors of limitless acres on which their cattle grazed.
The day after Shackleton’s death Mrs. Willers appeared, still aghast at the suddenness of the catastrophe. Mariposa did not know that a few days previously, Shackleton had acquainted the newspaper woman with his intention of sending her to Paris with Miss Moreau, the post of correspondent to The Trumpet being assigned to her. It had been the culminating point of Mrs. Willers’ life of struggle. Now all that lay shattered. Be it said to her credit her disappointment was more for the girl than for herself. She knew that Shackleton had made no definite arrangements for the starting of Mariposa on her way. All had been in statu quo, attending on the daughter’s recovery from her mother’s loss. Now death had stepped in and forever closed the door upon these hopes.
Mrs. Willers found Mariposa strangely apathetic. She had tried to cheer her and then had seen, to her amazement, that the girl showed little disappointment. That the sudden blow had upset her was obvious. She undoubtedly looked ill. But the wrenching from her hand of liberty, independence, possibilities of fame, seemed to affect her little. She listened in silence to Mrs. Willers’ account of the Bonanza King’s death. As an “inside writer” on The Trumpet the newspaper woman had heard every detail of the tragic event discussed threadbare in the perturbed office. Shackleton had been found, as the paper stated, sitting at his desk in the library at Menlo Park. He had been writing letters when death called him. His wife had come in late at night and found him thus, leaning on the desk as if tired. It was an aneurism, the doctors said. The heart had been diseased for years. No one, however, had had any idea of it. Poor Mrs. Shackleton was completely prostrated. It was not newspaper talk that she was in a state of collapse.