Overland: A Novel

by John William De Forest

He has made some progress in his conspiracy to entrap love and a fortune. It must be understood that the two muleteers persisted in their story concerning Apaches, and that consequently Clara has come to think of Thurstane as dead. Meantime Coronado, after the first two days of wild excitement, has conducted himself with rare intelligence, never alarming her with talk of love, always courteous, kind, and useful. Little by little he has worn away her suspicions that he planned murder, and her only remaining anger against him is because he did not attempt to search for Thurstane; but even for that she is obliged to see some excuse in the terrible word "Apaches."

"I have had no thought but for her safety," Coronado often said to Mrs. Stanley, who as often repeated the words to Clara. "I have made mistakes," he would go on. "The San Juan journey was one. I will not even plead Garcia's instructions to excuse it. But our circumstances have been terrible. Who could always take the right step amid such trials? All I ask is charity. If humility deserves mercy, I deserve it."

Coronado even schooled himself into expressing sympathy with Clara for the loss of Thurstane. He spoke of him as her affianced, eulogized his character, admitted that he had not formerly done him justice, hinting that this blindness had sprung from jealousy, and so alluded to his own affection. These things he said at first to Aunt Maria, and she, his steady partisan, repeated them to Clara, until at last the girl could bear to hear them from Coronado. Sympathy! the bleeding heart must have it; it will accept this balm from almost any hand, and it will pay for it in gratitude and trust.

Thus in two months from the disappearance of Thurstane his rival had begun to hope that he was supplanting him. Of course he had given up all thought of carrying out the horrible plan with which he had started from Santa Fé. Indeed, he began to have a horror of Garcia, as a man who had set him on a wrong track and nearly brought him into folly and ruin. One might say that Satan was in a state of mind to rebuke sin.

Let us now glance at Clara. She is seated beside Aunt Maria on the quarter-deck of the schooner. Her troubles have changed her; only eighteen years old, she has the air of twenty-four; her once rounded face is thin, and her childlike sweetness has become tender gravity. When she entered on this journey she resembled the girl faces of Greuze; now she is sometimes a mater amabilis, and sometimes a mater dolorosa; for her grief has been to her as a maternity. The great change, so far from diminishing her beauty, has made her seem more fascinating and nobler. Her countenance has had a new birth, and exhibits a more perfect soul.

We have hitherto had little more than a superficial view of the characters of our people. Events, incidents, adventures, and even landscapes have been the leading personages of the story, and have been to its human individualities what the Olympian gods are to Greek and Trojan heroes in the Iliad. Just as Jove or Neptune rules or thwarts Agamemnon and Achilles, so the monstrous circumstances of the desert have overborne, dwarfed, and blurred these travellers. It is only now, when they have escaped from the dii majores, and have become for a brief period tranquil free agents, that we can see them as they are. Even yet they are not altogether untrammelled. Man is never quite himself; he is always under some external influence, past or present; he is always being governed, if not being created.

Clara, born anew of trouble, is admirable. There is a sweet, sedate, and almost solemn womanliness about her, which even overawes Mrs. Stanley, conscious of aunthood and strongmindedness, and insisting upon it that her niece is "a mere child." It is a great victory to gain over a lady who has that sort of self-confidence that if she had been a sunflower and obliged to turn toward the sun for life, she would yet have believed that it was she who made him shine. When Clara decides a matter Mrs. Stanley, while still mentally saying "Young thing," feels nevertheless that her own decision has been uttered. And in every successive resistance she is overcome the easier, for habit is a conqueror.

They have just had a discussion. Aunt Maria wants Clara to stand on her dignity in a hotel until old Muñoz goes down on his marrow-bones, makes her a handsome allowance, and agrees to leave her at least half his fortune. Clara's reply is substantially, "He is my grandfather and the proper head of my family. I think I ought to go straight to him and say, Grandfather, here I am."

Beaten by this gentle conscientiousness, Aunt Maria endeavored to appeal the matter to Coronado.

"I am so glad to see you enjoying your cigarito once more," she called to him with as sweet a smile as if she didn't hate tobacco.