Mrs. Wilson Woodrow - The Black Pearl

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Again he admired the glints of firelight reflected in his cognac glass.
"But this I do know, Jose, she is an actress before she is anything
else."

Jose leered knowingly. "You think only of your daughter," he said. "What
about Saint Harry? He has mad blood in him, too. It is only a few years
that he has been a saint; before that the Devil held full sway over him.
And," he added pensively, after a moment's cogitation, "there are many
lessons one learns from the Devil."

"You should know," returned Gallito, with his twisting, sardonic smile.

"Ah, the Devil is not all bad," said Jose defensively. "One can learn
from him the lesson of perseverance, and perseverance is a virtue."

Gallito waved his hand with a polite gesture. "You know more of him and
his lessons than I, Jose. I am always ready to grant that." He took
another sip of cognac, blew a succession of smoke wreaths toward the
ceiling, and again resumed his midnight philosophizings. "What puzzles
me, Jose, is what is going to become of us in Heaven. We shall never be
content. Content is a lesson that no one has ever learned. Look at Saint
Harry. He has Heaven right here. His time to himself, enough to live on
without working, no women to bother him, your cooking; and it may be on
that that you will win an entrance to Heaven; it will certainly be on
nothing else. But, if, as you say, he is interested in my daughter, he
is throwing away all chance of keeping Paradise."

"Do we not all do that?" said Jose dismally. "It is because a man cannot
conceive of a Heaven without a woman in it. He thinks in spite of all
experience to the contrary that she is what makes it Heaven."

"Yes, experience counts for nothing," Gallito sighed for himself and his
brothers.

But if Seagreave sat silent and absorbed when he came to Gallito's cabin
in the evening, it did not bother Pearl. She was an expert in such
symptoms. Sometimes he talked to her in a rather constrained fashion,
but for the most part he sat on the other side of the room, listening to
Hugh's music.

One evening when he sat listening he suddenly lifted his eyes and gazed
at the Pearl, who sat almost the length of the room away from him. The
cabin was lighted only by the great log fire, and the leaping, ardent
flames of the pine, mingled with the soft, glowing radiance of burning
birch, invested the room and its occupants with that atmosphere of
mystery and glamour, essential in flame-illumined shadow. And Hugh was
playing the music the masters dreamed in the twilight hours when silence
and shadow permitted them, even wooed them to a more intimate revelation
of the heart than the definite splendors of daylight inspired.

Beyond the zone of the firelight, the room was all in a warm gloom, rich
and dim. Pearl and Hugh had gathered fir branches, even some young
trees, and had placed them about the walls, and in the warmth their
aromatic, delicious odor permeated and pervaded the cabin, and one
discerning those half-defined branches might easily imagine that the
walls stretched away into the dim forest.

Pearl lay back in an easy chair, her narrow, half-closed eyes on the
leaping flames. The wind, low to-night, the wind of eternity which blows
ever in the mountains, sang about the cabin and blended with Hugh's
music like a faint violin obligato. But even in this soft twilight of
blending and mingling and harmonizing, with pine branches above and
beyond her and shadowed gloom about her, Pearl never for a moment seemed
the spirit of the forest.

With its dim depths for a background, she shone on it, as brilliant and
distinct from it as a flashing jewel on the breast of a nun. Her crimson
frock caught a deeper warmth from the firelight, her black hair shone
like a bird's wing, the jewels on her fingers sent out sparkles of light
and flame. As Saint Harry continued to gaze at her the forest with all
its haunting, dreaming witchery vanished, the high invitation of the
mountains, "Come ye apart," ceased to echo in his ears. The world
environed, encompassed her; he seemed to discern the yearning of her
spirit for it, the airy rush of her winged feet toward it; and yet her
eyes, those eyes which sometimes held the look of having gazed for ages
on time's mutations, were turned toward the desert. Then Seagreave's
moment of vision passed and he turned to Hugh with an odd sinking of the
heart.

Hugh had ceased to play and sat silent now on his piano stool with that
motionless, concentrated air of his, as if listening to something afar.

"Hughie," said Seagreave softly, "what _are_ you and your sister,
anyway?"

Hugh laughed and, leaning his elbow on the keys, rested his cheek on
his palm. "I am a little brother of the wind," he said. "I was just
listening to it singing to me out there; and Pearl, well, Pearl is a
daughter of fire."

"What is it that you hear that I don't?" asked Harry. "I listen to the
wind, too, sometimes for hours, up there in my cabin; but it's only a
falling, sighing thing to me, sometimes a rising, shrieking one. What is
this gift of music?"

"I don't know," said Hugh simply, "but if you will wait a moment, I will
play you the song the wind is singing through the pines to-night. It is
just a little, sad one."

Again he sat immobile, listening for a while and then began to play so
plaintive and wistful a melody that Harry felt the old sorrow wake and
stir within his heart and demand a reckoning of the forgetful years. Not
realizing that he did so, he arose and began to pace up and down the
room, nor remembered where he was until he looked up to see Pearl
watching him, surprise and even a slight curiosity upon her face.

"Forgive me," he said, stopping before her, "for walking up and down
that way as if I were in my own cabin, but something in Hugh's music set
me to dreaming."

"You didn't look as if they were happy dreams," she said.

"Didn't I?" he spoke as lightly as he could; then he changed the
subject. "Do you know that the crust on the snow is thicker than it has
been yet? How would you like to go out on your snow-shoes to-morrow
morning?"

She looked her pleasure. "That will be fine," she cried eagerly.

She was up betimes the next day, anxious to see whether more snow had
fallen during the night; but none had. To her joy, it was one of those
brilliant mornings when the sky seems a dome of sapphire sparkles, and
the crust of the snow with the sun on it is like white star-dust
overlaid with gold. The radiance would have been unbearable had not the
bare, black trees veiled the sky with their network of branches and
twigs and the pines softened the snow with their shadows.

Pearl had rapidly acquired proficiency in her new accomplishment, and
she and Seagreave had covered several miles when, on their return, they
paused to rest a bit in the little bower of stunted pines. Here
Seagreave cut some branches from the trees for them to sit on and,
gathering some dry, fallen boughs and cones, built a fire.

They enjoyed this a few moments in silence and then Pearl spoke. "Why,"
she asked with her usual directness, "why did you get up and walk up and
down the room last night when Hughie was playing? What was it in his
music that made you forget all of us and even, as you said, forget that
you were not in your own cabin?"

"That was stupid of me and rude, too," he said compunctiously.
"Something that he was playing called up so vivid a memory that I forgot
everything."

There was a quick gleam in her eyes; she was resentful of memories that
could make him forget her very presence, hers. "What was it you were
thinking of?" she asked. Her voice was low.

He looked out over the snow before he answered. "A girl," he said, and
cast another handful of pine cones upon the fire.

She did not speak nor move, and yet her whole being was instinct with a
sudden tense attention. "Yes, a girl," she said insistently. "What was
she like?" the words leaped from her, voicing themselves almost without
her volition.

He sighed and appeared to speak with some effort. "It was long ago," he
said. "She was like violets or white English roses."

"And did you love her?" she asked, that soft tenseness still in her
voice, "and did she love you?"

"I suppose every man has his ideal of woman, perhaps unconsciously to
himself, and she was mine."

He sighed again and she glanced quickly at him from the corners of her
eyes with a half scornful smile upon her lips. She knew that she did not
suggest violets, shy and fragrant and hidden under their own green
leaves; neither was there anything in the mountains to suggest the
gardens in which roses grew. But he had left the violets and English
roses long ago, because of that spirit of restlessness within him, and
finally he had come to these wild, savage mountains and was content
here, where it was difficult even to picture the calm and repose of the
gardens he had left. He had said that he did not know why he had come,
but Pearl did. She never doubted it. It was the call of her heart across
the world to him, seeking him, reaching him, drawing him to her.

"And does it make you unhappy to think of her now?" she asked still
softly.

"No," he said, "no, not now. But last night something in the music
caused the years to drop away and I was back there again and she rose
before me. Really, I felt her very presence. I saw her as plainly as I
see you now."

Pearl rose and shook the snow from her cloak. "Forget it," she said
scornfully. The little horse-shoe frown showed between her brows, and
her eyes as she looked at him were full of a sparkling disdain. "That
girl wasn't worth that," she snapped her fingers. "And here you've been
loping over the globe for years, because she turned you down. I should
think you'd feel like a fool." She spoke quite fearlessly, although
Seagreave had thrown up his head and stood looking at her with a white
face and compressed lips. "But that ain't the reason," she went on
shrewdly. "I know men. You like to think you quit things because of the
girl," she laughed that low, harsh, unpleasant laugh of hers. "You quit
'em because you got lazy, and anything like a responsibility was a bore.
That's straight."

Without another glance at him, she sped down the hill, like an arrow
shot from a bow.

CHAPTER XII

As that long, white winter slowly wore away there were many in the camp
who, although they had endured the strain of a wearing monotony through
many previous seasons, nevertheless suffered greatly from it; and, in
consequence, as the clock of the year began to indicate spring an almost
riotous joy was felt and expressed when it was announced through the
camp that the Black Pearl had again consented to dance for them.

It was considered a truly fitting celebration of the fact that there had
already been one great thaw, and, although there was every possibility
of things freezing up again, yet nevertheless spring had at last loosed
her hounds and they were hard on winter's traces. In fact, one belated
train, after hours spent on the road, had succeeded in pushing through,
an evidence that they all would soon be running with their accustomed,
if rather erratic regularity, and there was naturally a tremendous
excitement and jollification in the camp at this arrival of the first
mail bearing news from the outside world.

The messages for Pearl included a letter from her mother and one from
Bob Flick, but none from Hanson. Bob Flick announced that his patience
was worn thin and that he would be up on the first train bearing
passengers. Mrs. Gallito's letter was full of commiserations for her
daughter on her enforced detention, and she evidently regarded the
nature of that durance as particularly vile.

"Pearl, how you been standing it up in that God-forsaken hole where you
can't even keep warm is what beats me. Seems to me I went to church
once, oh, just for a lark, and the preacher talked about some plagues of
Egypt, all different kinds, you know. It was real interesting. I always
remembered it. But in looking back over plagues I've seen, the very
worst of all was snow. I'm afraid, when I see you again, you'll be all
skin and bone and shadow. I do hope you won't be sick like poor Hanson.
I had an awful sad letter from him; seems he took cold and's been at
death's door."

Pearl rustled the paper impatiently. She was not interested in this
news. Hanson occupied her thoughts so little that she did not even pause
to wonder how he was. The very sight of his name in the letter stirred a
vague irritation in her. Absorbed in her love for Seagreave, Hanson had
become to her as a forgotten episode.

However, her mother dropped the subject and took up the more interesting
one of Lolita. "That bird certainly has mourned for you, Pearl. I guess
she'd have just about pined away if it hadn't been for Bob Flick."

But Pearl was not the only recipient of letters from the outside world;
all of the little group, with the exception of Jose, had received their
quota, even Mrs. Nitschkan. But the bulk of the mail, which Gallito
brought up from the village postoffice and gravely distributed, fell to
Mrs. Thomas. Almost without exception, these envelopes were addressed in
straggling, masculine characters which suggested painful effort and
seemed to indicate that the writers were more used to the pick and
shovel than to the pen. But although Mrs. Thomas had to spell out the
contents of each missive with more or less difficulty, her giggles,
blushes and occasional exclamations showed how much pleasure they
afforded her.

Mrs. Nitschkan, however, after glancing carelessly at the large, yellow
envelope which was addressed to her in a clerkly hand, cast it
carelessly aside and went on assiduously cleaning and oiling her gun.
But the sight of it aroused Mrs. Thomas's curiosity, and after glancing
at it once or twice over the top of her own letters, she could not
forbear to ask:

"Ain't you going to read your letter, Sadie?"

"Mebbe. Sometime. By an' by. When I get good an' ready," returned the
gypsy indifferently and abstractedly, squinting with one eye down the
barrel of her gun. "What do I want with letters? I got two bear an' a
mountain lion before the snow flew."

Mrs. Thomas laid aside her letters for the moment, and, lifting a large
pot of coffee from the stove, poured out a cupful for her friend and
then one for herself. "Here, Sadie," she coaxed, "rest yourself with a
cup of coffee. I'll set down the sugar and cream an' whilst you're
drinking it, open your letter. Come now, do. Maybe it's from a
gentleman."

"It sure is," replied Mrs. Nitschkan, laying her gun carefully across
her knee, wiping her hands on the cloth with which she had been
polishing it, and then dropping several lumps of sugar into the cup, she
poured herself a liberal allowance of cream. "It's a bill for that
double-j'inted, patent, electrical fishin' rod that I sent East for,
clean to New York City, for a weddin' present for Celia."

Mrs. Thomas gave a faint, scornful laugh at the thought of this most
incongruous gift for Mrs. Nitschkan's pretty, feminine daughter. "A
fishin' rod for Celia!" she exclaimed, "when all she ever thinks about
is cookin' an' sweepin' an' sewin' all day."

"That's it," Mrs. Nitschkan radiated self-approbation and satisfaction.
"It made a nice show at the weddin', didn't it? And it has sure been
useful to me since."

But Mrs. Thomas had again absorbed herself in her correspondence, and it
is doubtful if she heard these last words. "Say, Sadie," she cried
presently, a ripple of joyous excitement in her voice, "listen here to
what Willie Barker says, 'If you don't come back soon, I'm a-going to
lay right down an' die, or maybe take my own life.'"

"Then you'll stay right on here," said Mrs. Nitschkan shortly but
emphatically. "Such a chanst as that's not to be missed."

Mrs. Thomas pouted, "But, honest, can't we pretty soon leave these old
prospects that you're a-nursin' along to salt an' get ready to palm off
on some poor Easterner?"

The gypsy took a long draught of coffee, wiping her mouth on the back
of her hand. "Your ungratefulness'll strike in and probably kill you,
Marthy Thomas. Here I burdened myself with you to save your life
insurance and the nice little property Seth left you from a pack of
wolves in the camp that's after them, an' not you, an' what thanks do I
get? All these months I been workin' like the devil to convert you an'
Jose, an' as far as either of you's concerned, I might a darned sight
better have put in my time tryin' to save the soul of a flea. You
couldn't even let a poor, God-forsaken robber like Jose alone. Don't you
know that if you get a thousand husbands they'll all treat you as bad or
worse'n Seth did?"

"He's an angel in heaven right now an' don't you dare say a word against
him, Sadie Nitschkan," cried Mrs. Thomas defensively, "but he was a
devil all the same."

"They'll all be devils," returned Mrs. Nitschkan fatalistically. "They's
no man can stand seein' a feather pillow around all the time an' not
biff it, especially when it can turn on a gallon of tears any time of
the day or night."

Mrs. Thomas made no effort to refute this last aspersion. Instead, she
began to weep loudly and unrestrainedly. "Bob Martin says in his letter
that he hopes I'm havin' a pleasant time," she sobbed. "He don't know
the loneliness, not to say the danger, of being snowed up in these
mountains with a woman that ain't got no more feelin' than to skin you
alive whenever she's a mind to. I ain't afraid of gentlemen, even
husbands, but sometimes when you get to jawin' me, Sadie, with a gun in
your hand, it makes my poor heart go like that, an' I crawl all over
with goose-flesh."

Fortunately, the thaws continued, and if no great quantity of snow fell
between now and then, the first passenger train was scheduled to run
through on the day that Pearl would dance, but Bob Flick, by some method
known to himself, had succeeded in making his journey on the engine, and
thus arrived at Gallito's cabin several days before he was expected,
looking a little more worn than usual and faintly anxious, an expression
which speedily disappeared as he saw the radiant health and spirits of
Pearl. As for her, she was unfeignedly glad to see him.

"I sure have worried a lot about you this winter, Pearl," he said to her
that evening as they two sat a little apart from the rest, Gallito,
Jose, Hugh and Seagreave, who all clustered about the fire, while Pearl,
as usual, had drawn her chair within the warm gloom of the pine-scented
shadow.

"Ain't you silly!" She looked up at him with her heart-shattering,
adorable smile.

"I am always about you," he said. "You're all I think of, Pearl, night
and day."

She patted his arm lightly. "I've always got you to depend on anyway,
haven't I, Bob?" Her soft, lazy, sliding voice was itself a caress.

"You sure have. Anytime, anywhere. No matter what happens, I can't ever
change, Pearl. Lord! You ought to know that by this time."

"Maybe I do, Bob, and maybe I like knowing it."

"I hope you do, but it wouldn't make any difference whether you did or
didn't. I got to love you. I guess the cards fell that way for me before
I was born and nothing can ever change that layout."

"You've never failed me yet, Bob."

"And never will. Oh, Pearl, don't you, can't you see your way to
marrying me?"

She stirred restlessly, a faintly troubled look shadowing her face.
"There's so many of me, and I never know what I'm going to do or how I'm
going to feel. I'd just be bound to make you miserable."

"It wouldn't be the first time," he said a little sadly. "But you see I
know you. I ain't got any mistaken notions about you, and I love you
more than any other man in this life'll ever do, Pearl."

Again she moved and looked at him as if his words had roused in her some
regret. "I guess that's so; but--it wouldn't be a square deal."

"I'll tend to that," he urged, "and you'll just have to know that I'm
always loving you, no matter what's to pay."

"I--" she began, but was interrupted by Jose, who bowed low before her.

"Senorita," grandiosely, "the ladies and your father beg that, unworthy
as I am to dance on the same floor as you, that yet, as a compliment to
Mr. Flick, we go through some of the Spanish dances together."

Pearl assented and half rose, but Flick laid a detaining hand on her
sleeve. "She will in a minute," he said. "Run along now, Jose, me and
Miss Gallito's got something to talk over." He bent close to her again.
"Pearl," there was the faintest shake in his voice, "what are you going
to tell me, now?"

"Oh, Bob," the regret was in her voice now, "I wish, I wish you didn't
feel that way. I love you more than 'most anybody in the world--but not
that way. And--and I don't want to lose your love for me. I like to know
it's there. I sort of lean up against it."

He waited a moment or two before answering her, and then his voice was
as steady as ever. "You can always come back to my love for you. The
stars can fall out of the sky and the mountains slide down, but my love
for you can't change, Pearl. It's fixed and steady and forever."

"Dear old Bob," she touched his cheek as she passed him with a light
caress and went on into the room beyond to get her dancing slippers.

It was later that evening that Jose began his unceasing importunities to
see Pearl dance in the town hall. A stern and surprised veto of this
plan was his immediate answer. But Jose was the most convincing and
plausible of pleaders.

"But, Gallito," he cried almost piteously, "since Mrs. Nitschkan has
watched my manners I have been like an angel. No more does the camp say
that this hill is haunted, you know that."

"I told you what you'd get if you didn't stop hootin' at people who was
passin'," remarked Mrs. Nitschkan, knocking the ashes from her pipe out
on the hearth and then carefully refilling it. "But you're none so good
now that you need brag. I don't know that playin' monkey tricks to
frighten folks ain't just as good a way to put in the time as sittin'
'round holdin' hands with Marthy Thomas."

"Sadie!" Mrs. Thomas drew forth her handkerchief and prepared to shed
the ready tear. "How you can have the heart to talk so to a woman that
ain't buried her husband twelve months! Mr. Jose ain't even thought of
takin' the liberties you sit there accusin' him of. If I had a live
husband to pertect me, you wouldn't dare treat me like what you do.
Whenever you miss a shot, or get fooled on a prospect, or get some money
won away from you, you come back to our little cabin an' sit lookin' at
me like you was a wolf an' talkin' like you was a she-bear. And--and
it's darned hard, that's what it is."

"If you were a man, Nitschkan," Jose drew himself up truculently, "you
would indeed answer for such speeches, and you would not have converted
me so easily, either. I have no fear of men." This was quite true, he
had not, but his eye quailed and drooped before the steady gaze of Mrs.
Nitschkan.

"Come, come," said Gallito peremptorily, "I am glad to see you all each
evening about my fireside, but I will have no arguing nor quarreling,
understand that. A man's house is his castle."

Jose diplomatically dropped the subject, which did not mean that he had
abandoned his plan for one moment. He merely waited a more convenient
season. His strongest arguments were that it was not an infrequent
occurrence for Gallito to entertain guests of his own nationality in his
mountain cabin. "And my hair!" cried Jose pathetically. "It would be a
crown of glory to Nitschkan if she had it; but it is a shame to me, a
man, to have to wear it so long. No one in the camp could possibly know
that I have ears."

Gallito at first absolutely refused to listen to him, but so adroitly
did Jose bring up the subject every evening that he began to make some
impression on his stern jailer. He was careful, though, not to mention
his hopes until near midnight, when Gallito's normally harsh mood was
greatly softened not only by winning the final game, which Jose
invariably permitted now, but also by the mellowing influence of his
bland, old cognac. Then Gallito would embark on an argument, determined
to convince Jose of the wild folly of his desire.

Their debate continued for several evenings and finally ended, as Jose
meant it should, in Gallito giving a reluctant consent, under certain
conditions which he insisted should be rigidly carried out.

He admitted that it was unlikely that any suspicion would be aroused in
the village. Those who saw the party enter the hall would, if they
thought about the matter at all, take it for granted that the stranger
was some friend of Bob Flick's who had come up with him on the train.
But two conditions Gallito insisted upon: the first, that Jose was to
turn the collar of his heavy overcoat high up about his face and draw
his hat low over his brows, and the second was that he was only to be
permitted to observe the dancing from behind the curtain of the little
recess at the end of the hall which served Pearl as a dressing room. He
might gaze his fill through the peep-hole there, but under no
circumstances was he to be seen in the body of the hall. But these
conditions, as Gallito pointed out, were entirely dependent on Pearl. It
was a question whether she would tolerate Jose for a whole evening in
her dressing room.

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