Propped by her pillows, Lucy spoke again; her sentences were short and with pauses between:
“Jake Shackleton married me in St. Louis when I was fifteen. He was soon tired of me. We went to Salt Lake City. He became a Mormon there, and took a second wife. She was a waitress in a hotel. She’s his wife now. He brought us both to California twenty-five years ago. On the way across, on the plains of Utah, you were born. He is your father, Mariposa.”
She made an effort and sat up. Her breathing was becoming difficult, but her purpose gave her strength. This was the information that for weeks she had been nerving herself to impart.
“He is your father,” she repeated. “That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
Mariposa made no answer, and again she repeated:
“He is your father. Do you understand? Answer me.”
“Yes—I don’t know. Oh, mother, it’s so strange and horrible. And you sitting there and looking at me like that, and telling it to me! Oh,—mother!”
She put her hands over her face for an instant, and then dropping them, leaned over on the bed and grasped her mother’s wrists.
“You’re wandering in your mind. It’s just some hideous dream you’ve had in your fever. Dearest, tell me it’s not true. It can’t be true. Why, think of you and me and father always together and with no dreadful secret behind us like that. Oh—it can’t be true!”
Lucy looked at the papers lying brown and torn on the white quilt. Mariposa’s eyes followed the same direction, and with a groan her head sank on her arms extended along the bed. Her mother’s hand, cold and light, was laid on one of hers, but the dying woman’s face was held in its quiet, unstirred apathy, as she spoke again: