Mrs. Wilson Woodrow - The Black Pearl

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She floated about the floor for a moment or two like a thistle-down
blown hither and thither by the caprice of the wind, scarcely seeming to
touch the ground, upborne by the music-tide. Throughout her career she
was always at her best when she took those first few moments about the
stage and waited for her inspiration.

Then she drifted nearer to Hughie and murmured, "The Tango." He changed
his tempo immediately, and almost without a pause of transition she
began that provocative measure--the dance of desire. Thrilling with the
joy of expressing her love, her beautiful new love for Seagreave,
through her art, she danced with a verve, an abandon, a more spontaneous
impulse than she had ever shown before. The Tango! She made it a thing
of alluring advances, of stinging repulses, of sudden, fascinating
withdrawals and exquisite ardors.

When the applause had finally died down, the hall was still noisy with a
babel of voices; those who could, moved about in the crowded space, and
little groups formed and broke up. Bob Flick, speaking to this or that
acquaintance, felt some one touch him lightly on the arm, and turned
suddenly to see Hanson standing beside him.

"Hello, Flick," with a sort of swaggering bravado, "our old friend, the
Black Pearl, is going some to-night, ain't she?"

"I don't know you," drawled Flick, the liquid Southern intonations of
his voice softened until they were almost silky, "and," his hand shot
back to his hip with an almost unbelievable rapidity, "I'll give you
just three minutes to apologize for mentioning Miss Gallito's name, for
speaking to me, and for being here at all."

Hanson's face had turned a sickly white, more with anger than fear.
"Considering the argument you stand ready to offer," he said, "there's
nothing to do but to apologize my humblest on all three counts. I had
hoped that you'd remember me and be willing to introduce me to your
friend." He turned a cynical and evil glance upon Seagreave, who was
talking to some one a few feet away. "But since you won't, I'll go, just
adding that you and your friend, there, are likely to meet me soon
again."

There was a touch of scorn in Flick's faint smile. "The three minutes
are up," he said, and without a word Hanson turned and sought his seat.

The curtains parted now and Hugh again sat down to the piano, but his
music had changed; it was no longer sensuous and provocative, but
strange, and curiously disturbing, with a peculiar, recurring,
monotonous beat.

It was the voice of the desert full of a savage exultation in its own
loneliness and forsaken isolation, and through it rang a cry of deep,
disdainful triumph, as if it said: "All puny races of men, come to me;
embroider my vast surfaces with the green of your fields and gardens,
build your houses upon my quiescent sand and dream that you have
conquered and tamed me. And I abide, I abide. Silent, brooding,
unwitting of your noisy incursions, I lie absorbed in my dream under my
own illimitable skies. But soon or late, when the moment comes, I wake,
I rouse, I see my inviolate desolations invaded. Then I gather my
strength, I drown you with my torrential rivers, I torture you with my
burning sun, I obliterate you with my flying sand. So shall my cactus
bloom once more, my jeweled lizards crawl unmolested and the cry of the
coyote echo again through the vast, soundless spaces of my desolation.
Then to my looms, to my looms and out of emptiness and silence and
space and light to weave all mysteries of color and all illusions of
beauty."

"Lord!" cried Bob Flick to Seagreave, "he's playing the desert. I've
seen her look just like the music sounds. That's a sand storm; there's
no other sound in the world like it." He turned his eyes full of a
puzzled wonder on Seagreave. "How can he play all that so that you and I
can see it, when he can't see it himself?"

"But he does see it," insisted Seagreave; "never think that he doesn't,
and sees it through finer avenues of sight than mere material organs of
vision. He sees the mountains, too. Why, he can play the very shadows on
the snow for me."

During the Spanish dances Seagreave had not shared the excitement of the
audience, and thus had maintained his usual serenity. He had been
intensely interested and appreciative and admiring; but emotionally
unmoved; but now, as this troubling music of Hughie's seemed to express
the dominion of unsuspected but potent earth-forces, primitive, savage
and forever irreclaimable, his calm became strangely disturbed. Dimly he
realized that should every desert on the globe finally be subdued by the
plow, the irrigating ditches and the pruning hook, they would still
remain as realities in the mind of man, forever clouding his aspirations
toward the mountain peaks and the stars. For the desert must ever remain
an unsolved enigma, never to be reduced to a formula, never to be
explained by any human standards; now whispering to man of the
mysteries of the soul and revealing to him more of the infinite than his
finite senses may grasp; and now mocking him with illusions, her
beautiful mirages wrought of airbeams and sunlight, and transforming him
into a beast of greed with her haunting intimations of hidden and
inexhaustible treasure.

Thus Hughie's music; and presently Pearl floated out. She had changed
her Spanish costume for the one of scarlet crepe in which Hanson had
first seen her, a crown of scarlet flowers on her dark hair. Her very
expression, too, had changed, her eyes were elongated, her features
seemed delicately Egyptian; the brooding sphynx look was on her face.

"She's great, ain't she?" asked Bob Flick.

Seagreave nodded. He had never seen her superior in technique. It took
character, he appreciated that, to have endured the years of tiresome,
mechanical practice, and to have undertaken it so intelligently that she
had achieved her marvelous results; and she had, beside, youth and
beauty and magnetism. All this alone would have made her a great dancer,
but as he recognized, she had more, much more to bring to her art; a
complex nature which, in its unsounded depths ever held a vision of
beauty, and a sense of this vision which amounted to unity with it, and
therefore gave her the power of expressing it. Her mind, too, was
plastic to all primitive impulses and to Nature; she blended with it.
She was but little influenced by persons, her will was too dominating,
her intelligence too quick, and--but here his analysis ceased.

The Pearl was dancing to Hugh's strange music, she was dancing the
desert for him--Seagreave. He knew it was for him, although she never
glanced in his direction. And as she danced, he grew to realize that
this feat was not an intellectual one. She was not portraying the spirit
of the desert as gleaned from study and observation and melted in the
crucible of her poetic imagination and molded by her fancy until it was
a thing of form in her thought. The Black Pearl danced the desert
because in her was the power to be one with it and live in its life
through every cell of her being. It was a matter of feeling with her,
one phase of her affinity with the forces of earth; but because she had
the artist's constructive imagination, she could put it into form and
dance it, and by projecting her own feeling into it, convey it to
others.

The world with its round of outworn, hackneyed appeals, its wearisome
repetitions of crude and commonplace joys, its tawdry and limited
temptations, had long ago fallen away from Seagreave--and left him
nothing, but to-night a voice that he had long ignored, the voice of
life, commanded him.

"If the desert seems forever to claim her own, what is that to you! Your
work is to reclaim and in the face of a thousand defeats and desolations
still to reclaim, with the eternal faith that for you the wastes shall
blossom like the rose. Work, no matter how brokenly, how futilely. To
build houses of sand is better than to sit in profitless dreams and live
in an animal content."

When later he drove Pearl up the mountainside, almost in silence, as
they had come, after his few words of admiration and appreciation of her
dancing, there was a shadow for the first time in Harry's clear eyes, a
shadow which did not pass.

CHAPTER XI

Had Gallito but known it, his theory of the unexpected was never more
perfectly demonstrated than it was upon the night Pearl danced and in
the days which followed. Hanson had left early the next morning with the
firm determination of returning almost immediately accompanied by one or
more detectives and of securing that much coveted prize, Jose. Also, he
gloated over the prospect of seeing Gallito, Bob Flick and Seagreave
arrested for conniving at Jose's escape and for harboring him during all
these months.

But the unexpected did occur. As Seagreave had predicted, the snow began
to fall, and began the very night that Pearl danced in the town hall;
and fell so steadily and uninterruptedly that the progress of the train
which bore Hanson down the mountains was considerably impeded. Thus, the
very forces of the air conspired for Jose, and ably were they seconded
by other invisible and unknown agencies. Even before Hanson had reached
the coast he found himself powerless "in the fell clutch of
circumstance." He had taken cold in the mountains and for several weeks
was too seriously ill even to contemplate with much interest his plan of
revenge. And by the time that he had recovered sufficiently to give
consideration to the matter again, a very little investigation
convinced him of the necessity for patience. So thoroughly had the
season and the elements conspired, that Colina was effectually cut off
from the outer world, a camp beleaguered by snow, and Jose, for several
months at least, would be the prisoner of the mountains and not of man.

But Colina was used to this experience. It was one which she had
regularly undergone every winter of her existence. Therefore, her
inhabitants prepared for it and bore it with what equanimity they could
summon. It was but a small camp so far up in the mountains that the
mines were practically only worked during the late spring, the summer
and the early autumn months, for the water which ran the concentrating
and stamp mills was frozen early in the winter and the mines were
practically closed down. One or two, like the Mont d'Or, were kept open,
and worked a few hours a day, but no milling was done and the ore dumps
increased to vast size.

The railroad, a steep and tortuous way, was not, _per se_ a passenger
line, but existed to carry the ore down to the smelters, therefore, when
there was no ore to carry, it was a matter of indifference to the mine
owners who controlled the line whether trains ran or not; in fact, they
preferred not from a strictly business standpoint, and truly they had an
excellent excuse in the heavy drifts which completely obliterated the
narrow, shining, steel path which led to the world beyond the mountains.

The police officials whom Hanson consulted as soon as his returning
health permitted him to do so, realized that in spite of their anxiety
to secure the famous and slippery Crop-eared Jose, he was quite as
safely imprisoned by the mountains as if they themselves had secured
him. There was no possible escape for him. All trails were blocked long
before the railroad was, so there he was, caught as securely as a bird
in a cage, and they, his potential captors, might sit down to a
comfortable period of pleasant anticipation and await that thaw which
was bound to come sooner or later. So much for Gallito's unexpected.

As for those who would have been interested had they but known--the
little group held in compulsory inaction by those white, encircling
hills--they accepted it as a part of the year's toll, no more to be
murmured at than the changing seasons, and as inevitable as were they.
But it was an experience which Pearl had never known, and Seagreave
looked to see it wear upon her spirit, and daily experienced a new
surprise that there was no evidence of its doing so. Instead, she seemed
to glow hourly with a richer and fuller life, a softer beauty. But
although an intimacy greater than he and she had yet known, would seem
to be enforced by this winter of isolation and leisure, she did not, for
a time, see as much of him as before. A constraint, almost like a blight
upon their friendship, seemed to have fallen between them ever since the
night that she had danced. Seagreave did not come down to Gallito's
cabin quite so frequently in the evenings, and, according to Jose, spent
much time by his own fireside absorbed in reading and meditation; and
when he did come it was usually late and, instead of talking to Pearl,
he would listen in silence to Hugh's playing or else engage him in
conversation.

But this attitude on his part failed to cloud Pearl's spirits. She had
seen men taken with this not inexplicable shyness before, and she made
no effort to rouse Harry from his abstraction or to lure him from his
meditations; femininely, intuitively wise, she left that to time.

But even in her moods of gayety the Black Pearl was never voluble, and
her habit of silence was a factor in maintaining the mystery with which
Seagreave's imagination was now beginning to invest her, and during
those winter evenings when she would often sit absolutely motionless for
an hour at a time, her narrow eyes dreaming on the fire, the sphynx look
on her face, more than once he felt impelled to murmur:

"'The Sphinx is drowsy,
Her wings are furled:
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world.
Who'll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept?--
I awaited the seer,
While they slumbered and slept.'"

Thus, more and more, he saw her as the image of beauty and of mystery,
and ever more frequently he pondered on the nature of the message of the
desert. But had he come down to Gallito's cabin earlier in the evening
he would not have found her brooding on the firelight. Usually, she
danced, keeping well in practice. She and Hughie would discuss by the
hour new movements and effects, and not only discuss, but try them, and
she and Jose, who had a light foot, often gave Gallito the benefit of
seeing them in many of the old Spanish dances.

But one evening when Seagreave came down, Pearl was not resting after
her exertions, but ran forward to greet him with unwonted vivacity, and
drew him toward a window in a dim corner of the room, out of earshot of
her father and Jose.

"Oh!" she cried. "Look, look at what they have sent me from the camp for
dancing for them. I had no idea it would be so much." She took a roll of
bills from her bosom and showed it to him. Her cheek was flushed, her
eyes were like stars. "Why, even here, even up here," she cried, "I can
make money."

"You look as if you enjoyed making money," he smiled.

She looked up at him as if surprised, and then laughed. "Of course, of
course I do. Who doesn't?" Her touch on the bills was a caress. She
seemed to find a joy in the very texture of them. He never dreamed for a
moment that she took a delight in those rather crumpled and dirty bills.
He merely took it for granted that she exulted in the visible expression
of appreciation of her art.

"And what will you do with it?" he asked.

"I will send it to my bank when I can get any letters through, and then
when this snowball is big enough I will invest it."

"In mines?" still idly interested and smiling.

She shook her head. "I leave that to my father, he is a good judge and
he is lucky at it, and my mother is always buying patches of land and
trading them off, usually to good advantage. But my specialty is unset
stones. I have some very good ones, really, I have. Oh," with a little
glance over her shoulder toward her father and Jose, "I will show them
to you some day when Jose is not around. If he knew I had them he would
steal them just for the pleasure of keeping himself in practice."

"How you love beauty," he said.

"But they are valuable," she said. "Oh, yes, I love them, too. I love to
let them fall through my fingers, to pour them from one hand to another.
Sometimes, when I am all alone here in the cabin, I sit and I open my
little black leather bag and take them out and hold them in the palm of
my hand, and I turn them this way and that way just to catch the light,
and there is nothing so beautiful; in all the world there is nothing so
beautiful as jewels, except," she caught herself quickly, "the desert,
of course."

He sighed a little and stirred restlessly, the very mention of the
desert made him vaguely uneasy. He had listened to the call of the
mountains and obeyed it, and from that moment the desert, like the
world, had no place in his thoughts; but since the night that Pearl had
danced it had remained in his mind, and had become to him as a far
horizon. The desert has ever been a factor in the consciousness of man,
not to be excluded, and although Seagreave did not realize it, the
moment had come in which he must reckon with it. He felt the fascination
and repulsion of its impenetrable mystery, of its stark and desolate
wastes, whose spell is yet so potent in the imagination of man, that
many have found in its barren horror the very heart of beauty. He
wondered if the uncontaminated winds which blew from out the ages across
the vast, empty spaces murmured a message of greater import than that
whispered to him among the mountain tops, if the wings of light which
beat unceasingly above its shifting sands lifted the soul to some
undreamed of realm of eternal morning. Something that slept deep within
him stirred faintly; the old passion to adventure, to explore rose in
his heart, his restless, reckless heart, which had, so he believed,
found peace.

The shadow deepened in his eyes, but he suddenly roused from this
momentary abstraction to find that Pearl was still speaking.

"Yes, I love them because they are so beautiful, but I love them, too,
because they are valuable."

"Well, there is no question about your making all the money you wish,"
he said, a slight weariness in his tone, "thousands and thousands. The
world will fling it at you. It will cover you with jewels."

She smiled, a faint, secretive smile of triumph. Ah, so he recognized
that. She had made him feel and admit that she was one of the few great
dancers.

Then, she, too, sighed. "If only," she said, forgetful of him and
following out her train of thought aloud, "if only when I get what I
want, I wouldn't always want something else! Did you ever feel if you
could just be free, really free, you wouldn't want anything else in the
world?"

"How could any one be more free than you are?" he laughed down at her.

"I know, I know," she agreed, still speaking wistfully, "but I'd like to
be free of myself; myself is so strange, and there's so many of me."
Then the veil of her instinctive reticence fell over her again and she
began to talk of her recent attempts to get about on snow-shoes, Jose
and Hugh having been her instructors, so far. Harry immediately offered
his services, and she accepted them, agreeing to go out with him the
next morning.

And as they talked Jose glanced at them from time to time, a touch of
malicious laughter in his odd glancing eyes; there were few things that
escaped Jose.

That evening, after Seagreave had gone home, when Jose and Gallito and
Mrs. Thomas and Mrs. Nitschkan had sat late over their cards, Gallito
had risen after a final game, mended the fire, poured himself a glass of
cognac, lighted another cigarette and, stretching himself in an
easy-chair, entered into one of those confidential talks which he
occasionally permitted himself with his chosen cronies. The earlier part
of the evening Jose and Pearl had danced for a time together, and then
Pearl had danced for a time alone and in a manner to please even her
father's critical taste. Now, in commenting on this, he remarked:

"You see the change in my daughter. She is now cheerful, obedient and
industrious. When she came she was none of those things. She is, you
see, a good girl at heart, but her mother had almost ruined her. If men
but had the time they should always bring up the children of the family.
It is only in that way that they can ever be a credit to one."

Mrs. Thomas, who had been bending over the stove brewing a pot of coffee
which she and Mrs. Nitschkan drank at all hours of the day and night,
raised herself at the utterance of these revolutionary sentiments and
looked at Gallito in grieved and bewildered surprise; but Mrs.
Nitschkan, who had been pouring cream into the cup of steaming coffee
which Jose had just handed to her, first took a long draught and then
remarked with cool impartiality:

"The trouble with you, Gallito, is that you can't bear for nobody, man,
woman, child or devil, to get ahead of you. I guess I know somep'n'
about the bringin' up of young ones myself."

Here Mrs. Thomas sighed and shook her head with that exasperated
incomprehension which all women displayed when the subject of Mrs.
Nitschkan's children came up for discussion. Educators discourse much
upon the proper environment and training of the young of the human
species, but theories aside, practical results seem rather in favor of
casting the bantling on the rocks. For, in spite of Mrs. Nitschkan's
joyous lack of responsibility, her daughters had grown up the antitheses
of herself, thoroughly feminine little creatures, already famous for
those womanly accomplishments for which their mother had ever shown a
marked distaste, while the sons were steady, hard-working, reputable
young fellows, always to be depended upon by their employers.

"It's nothing but your pizen luck, Sadie," murmured Mrs. Thomas.

"We must allow that Providence has been kinder to you than most,"
remarked Gallito sardonically.

"It's a reward," said Mrs. Nitschkan with calm assurance, refilling her
pipe with more care than she had ever bestowed upon her children. "It's
'cause I ain't ever shirked an' left the Lord to do all my work for me."

At this Mrs. Thomas, too overcome to speak, tottered feebly back from
the stove and fell weakly into a chair.

"No, sir," continued the gypsy with arrogant virtue, "the trouble with
all the parents I know, includin' present company, is that they're too
easy. I don't work no claim expectin' to get nothin' out of it, do I?
And I don't bring a lot of kids into the world and spend years teachin'
'em manners--"

She was interrupted here by a brief and scornful laugh from Mrs. Thomas,
who, on observing that her friend was gazing at her earnestly and
ominously, hastily converted it into a fit of coughing.

"Spend years teachin' 'em manners an' sacrifice myself to stay at home
and punish 'em when I might be jantin' 'round myself, not to have 'em
turn out a credit to me."

There was a finality about the statements which seemed to admit of no
further discussion, but after Jose had escorted the two women to their
cabin, he had returned for one of those midnight conferences with
Gallito over which they loved to linger, and the Spaniard had again
expressed his satisfaction in Pearl's changed demeanor.

Jose's laughter pealed to the roof. "You have eyes but for mines and
cards, Gallito. Though the world changes under your nose, you do not see
it. The moles of the earth--they are funny!"

"Bah!" casting at him a scornful glance from under his beetling brows,
"your eyes see so far, Jose, that you see all manner of things which do
not exist."

"I have far sight and near sight and the sight which comes to the
seventh child," returned Jose with pride. "Therefore, seeing what I see,
I say my prayers each day, now."

A bleak smile wrinkled Gallito's parchment-like cheeks. "And to whom do
you pray, Jose, your patron saint, or rather sinner, the Devil?"

Jose looked shocked. "You are a blasphemer, Gallito," he reproved, and
then added piously, "I say my prayers each day that I may, by example,
help Saint Harry."

"And why is Harry in need of your example?" said Gallito, holding up his
glass between himself and the fire and watching the deep reflections of
ruby light in the amber liquid.

"It goes against me to see an unequal struggle," sighed Jose. "He is
hanging on desperately to his ice-peak, but the Devil has almost
succeeded in clawing him off."

Gallito frowned. "This talk of yours is nonsense, Jose; but if there is
anything in it, Harry may understand that any interest he may have in my
daughter can lead to nothing. She is a dancer before she is anything
else, it is in her blood. Harry does not and never can understand her;
only one of her own kind can do that. He is by nature a religious; his
cabin is the cell of a monk."

Again Jose's eerie, malicious laughter echoed through the room.

"Aye, laugh," growled Gallito; "but you see my daughter for the first
time. You think because she smiles at Harry that she loves him; you
think because she is the only woman he talks to that he loves her; you
do not know her. She is young, she is beautiful and a dancer. She has
had many lovers ever since she put her hair up, and learned how she
could make a fool of a man with her eyes and her smile, and she has made
them pay toll. She always did that from the first." There was a note of
fierce pride in his harsh, brief laughter. "Yes, she would smile and
promise anything with her eyes, but she gave nothing. It is
strange"--the old Spaniard, his austere spirit mellowed by his excellent
cognac, fell into a mood of confidential musing, an indulgence which he
rarely permitted himself--"that Hugh, the child of a woman I never saw,
reaches my heart more than my own daughter does. But Pearl is a study to
me. I say to myself, 'She cares for nothing but money, applause,
admiration,' and yet, even while I say it, I am not sure; I do not know,
I do not know."

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