With stealthy persistence he followed the steps of the peaceful couple who had it in their power to ruin him. Serenity began to come to him as he heard that the union was singularly happy; that Moreau, confident no one would molest them, had gone through a ceremony of marriage with Lucy, and that the child was being brought up as their own.
As wealth came to Shackleton he thought of them with a sort of jealous triumph. With his remarkable insight into men he knew that Dan Moreau would never make money; that he was one of the world’s predestined poor men. Then as riches grew and grew, and the emigrant of the fifties became the bonanza king of the seventies, he wondered if the time might not come when they would turn to him.
He would have liked it, for under the cold indifference of his manner the transaction at the cabin in the Sierra forever haunted him with its savage shamelessness. It was the one debasing blot on a career which, hard, selfish, often unprincipled, had yet never, before or after, sunk to the level of that base action.
When Moreau died at Santa Barbara Shackleton heard it with a sense of relief. He was secretly becoming very anxious to see his child. Bessie had borne him two children, a boy and a girl, and it was partly the disappointment in these that made him desirous of seeing Mariposa. He knew and Bessie knew that she was his only legitimate child. Though he had virtually entered California with but one wife, and the blot of Mormonism had been wiped from his record before he had been two days in the state, the rumor that he had once been a Mormon still carelessly passed from mouth to mouth. Should it ever become known that there had been a former wife, Bessie and her children would have no lawful claim on him, though the children, as acknowledged and brought up by him, would inherit part of his estate.
With his great wealth the pride that was one of the dominant characteristics of his hard and driving nature grew apace. He had money by millions, but no one to do it credit. It would have been the crowning delight of his tumultuous career to have a beautiful daughter or talented son to grace the luxury that surrounded him. But Bessie’s children were neither of these things. They were dull and commonplace. Maud was fat and heavy both in mind and body, while Winslow was, to his father, a slow-witted, characterless youth, without the will, energy or initiative of either of his parents. Affection not grounded on admiration was impossible to Shackleton, who sometimes in his exasperation,—for the successful man bore disappointment ill,—would say to himself:
“But they are not my real children; I have only one child—Dan Moreau’s daughter.”
After the death of Moreau he learned that Lucy and Mariposa were in San Francisco. There he lost trace of them and was forced to consult a private detective who had done work for him before. It was an easy matter to find them, and only a few letters passed between him and the detective. In these the man gave the address and financial condition of the ladies and added that the daughter was said to be “a beautiful, estimable and accomplished young woman.” This fired still further the father’s desire to see her. He learned, too, of their crippled means and it pleased him to think that now they might be dependent on him. But he shrank with an unspeakable repugnance from the thought of seeing Lucy again, and he was for weeks trying to find some way of meeting Mariposa and not meeting her mother. It was at this stage that, purely by accident, he learned that Mrs. Willers’ daughter was one of Mariposa’s pupils. A day or two after he summoned Mrs. Willers to the interview that finally brought about the meeting.
Satisfied pride was still seething in him when he alighted from the train and entered the waiting carriage. This magnificent girl was worthy of him, worthy of the millions that were really hers. She had everything the others lacked—beauty, charm, talents. Her whole air, that regalness of aspect which sometimes curiously distinguishes the simple women of the West, appealed passionately to his ambition and love of success. She was born to conquer, to be a queen of men. The image of Maud rose beside her, and seemed clumsier and commoner than ever. The father felt a slight movement of distaste and irritation against his second daughter, who had supplanted in his home and in the world’s regard his elder and fairer child.
The carriage turned in through a lofty gate and rolled at a slackened pace up a long winding drive. Jacob Shackleton’s Menlo Park estate was one of the showy ones of that gathering place of rich men’s mansions.
The road wound for some half mile through a stretch of uncultivated land, dotted with the forms of huge live-oaks. The grass beneath them was burnt gray and was brittle and slippery. The massive trees, some round and compact and so densely leaved that they were as impervious to rain as an umbrella, others throwing out long, gnarled arms as if spellbound in some giant throe of pain, cast vast slanting shadows upon the parched ground. Some seemed, like trees in Doré’s drawings, to be endowed with a grotesque, weird humanness of aspect, as though an imprisoned dryad or gnome were struggling to escape, causing the mighty trunk to bow and writhe, and sending tremors of life along each convulsed limb. A mellow hoariness marked them all, due to their own richly subdued coloring and the long garlands of silvery moss that hung from their boughs like an eldrich growth of hair.