He had made up his mind that he would tell Bessie he had seen and intended to assist his eldest child. He had always been frank with her and he was not going to dissemble now. He knew that with all her faults she was a generous woman.
CHAPTER IV
A GALA NIGHT
“He looked at her as a lover can;
She looked at him as one who awakes.”
—Browning.
From his first meeting with her, Barry Essex had conceived a deep interest in Mariposa. He had known women of many and divers sorts, and loved a few after the manner of his kind, which was to foster indolently a selfish caprice. Marriage was out of the question for him unless with money, and some instinct, perhaps inherited from his romantic and deeply-loving mother, made this singularly repugnant to his nature, which was neither sensitive nor scrupulous. The mystery and hazard of life appealed passionately to him, and to exchange this for the dull monotony of a rich marriage was an unbearably irksome thought to his unrestrained and adventurous spirit.
Mariposa’s charm had struck him deep. He had never before met that combination of extreme simplicity of character with the unconscious majesty of appearance which marked the child of the far West. He saw her in that Europe, which was his home, as a conquering queen; and he thought proudly of himself as the owner of such a woman. Moreover he was certain that her voice, properly trained and directed, would be a source of wealth. She seemed to him the real vocal artist, stupid in all but one great gift; in that, preëminent.
Mariposa was trembling on the verge of a first love. She had never seen any one like Essex and regarded him as the most distinguished and brilliant of beings. His attentions flattered her as she had never been flattered before, and she found herself constantly wondering what he saw in a girl who must appear to him so raw.
Her experience of men was small. Once in Sacramento, when she was eighteen, she had received an offer from a young lawyer, and two years ago, in Santa Barbara, she had been the recipient of a second, from a prosperous rancher. Both had been refused without hesitation, and had left no mark on imagination or heart. Then, at a critical period of her life—lonely, poor, a stranger in a strange city—she had fallen in with Essex, and for the first time felt the thrill at the sound of a footstep, the quickening pulse and flushing cheek at the touch of a hand, that she had read of in novels. She thought that nobody had seen this; but the eyes of the dangerous man under whose spell she had fallen were watching her with wary yet ardent interest.
He had known her now for three months and had seen her frequently. His visits at the Pine Street cottage were augmented by occasional meetings at Mrs. Willers’, when that lady was at home and receiving company, and by walks together. Of late, too, he had asked her to go to the theater with him. Lucy was always included in these invitations, but was unable to go. The theater was an untarnished delight to Mariposa, and to refuse her the joy of an evening spent there was not in the mother’s heart. Moreover, Lucy, in her agony at the thought of leaving the girl alone in the world, watched Essex with a desperate anxiety trying to fathom his feelings. It seemed to the unworldly woman, that this attractive gentleman might have been sent by fate to be the husband who was to love and guard the child when the mother was gone.