Part 22

Still following the play of her delicate features into a romance of his own weaving, the imaginative young reporter who had seen so much from the heights of Russian Hill said earnestly, “Then I have your permission to use this material at any future time?”

“Yes,” said the lady smilingly.

“And you will not mind if I should take some liberties with the text?”

“I must of course leave something to your artistic taste. But you will let me see it?”

There were voices outside now, breaking the silence of the veranda. They had been so preoccupied as not to notice the arrival of a horseman. Steps came along the passage; the landlord returned. Mrs. Ashwood turned quickly towards him.

“Mr. Grant, of your party, ma'am, to fetch you.”

She saw an unmistakable change in her young friend's mobile face. “I will be ready in a moment,” she said to the landlord. Then, turning to John Milton, the arch-hypocrite said sweetly: “My brother must have known instinctively that I was in good hands, as he didn't come. But I am sorry, for I should have so liked to introduce him to you--although by the way,” with a bright smile, “I don't think you have yet told me your name. I know I couldn't have FORGOTTEN it.”

“Harcourt,” said John Milton, with a half-embarrassed laugh.

“But you must come and see me, Mr.--Mr. Harcourt,” she said, producing a card from a case already in her fingers, “at my hotel, and let my brother thank you there for your kindness and gallantry to a stranger. I shall be here a few weeks longer before we go south to look for a place where my brother can winter. DO come and see me, although I cannot introduce you to anything as real and beautiful as what YOU have shown me to-day. Good-by, Mr. Harcourt; I won't trouble you to come down and bore yourself with my escort's questions and congratulations.”

She bent her head and allowed her soft eyes to rest upon his with a graciousness that was beyond her speech, pulled her veil over her eyes again, with a pretty suggestion that she had no further use for them, and taking her riding-skirt lightly in her hand seemed to glide from the room.

On her way to San Mateo, where it appeared the disorganized party had prolonged their visit to accept an invitation to dine with a local magnate, she was pleasantly conversational with the slightly abstracted Grant. She was so sorry to have given them all this trouble and anxiety! Of course she ought to have waited at the fork of the road, but she had never doubted but she could rejoin them presently on the main road. She was glad that Miss Euphemia's runaway horse had been stopped without accident; it would have been dreadful if anything had happened to HER; Mr. Harcourt seemed so wrapped up in his girls. It was a pity they never had a son--Ah? Indeed! Then there was a son? So--and father and son had quarreled? That was so sad. And for some trifling cause, no doubt?

“I believe he married the housemaid,” said Grant grimly. “Be careful!--Allow me.”

“It's no use!” said Mrs. Ashwood, flushing with pink impatience, as she recovered her seat, which a sudden bolt of her mustang had imperiled, “I really can't make out the tricks of this beast! Thank you,” she added, with a sweet smile, “but I think I can manage him now. I can't see why he stopped. I'll be more careful. You were saying the son was married--surely not that boy!”

“Boy!” echoed Grant. “Then you know?”--

“I mean of course he must be a boy--they all grew up here--and it was only five or six years ago that their parents emigrated,” she retorted a little impatiently. “And what about this creature?”

“Your horse?”

“You know I mean the woman he married. Of course she was older than he--and caught him?”

“I think there was a year or two difference,” said Grant quietly.

“Yes, but your gallantry keeps you from telling the truth; which is that the women, in cases of this kind, are much older and more experienced.”

“Are they? Well, perhaps she is, NOW. She is dead.”

Mrs. Ashwood walked her horse. “Poor thing,” she said. Then a sudden idea took possession of her and brought a film to her eyes. “How long ago?” she asked in a low voice.

“About six or seven months, I think. I believe there was a baby who died too.”

She continued to walk her horse slowly, stroking its curved neck. “I think it's perfectly shameful!” she said suddenly.

“Not so bad as that, Mrs. Ashwood, surely. The girl may have loved him--and he”--

“You know perfectly what I mean, Mr. Grant. I speak of the conduct of the mother and father and those two sisters!”

Grant slightly elevated his eyebrows. “But you forget, Mrs. Ashwood. It was young Harcourt and his wife's own act. They preferred to take their own path and keep it.”

“I think,” said Mrs. Ashwood authoritatively, “that the idea of leaving those two unfortunate children to suffer and struggle on alone--out there--on the sand hills of San Francisco--was simply disgraceful!”

Later that evening she was unreasonably annoyed to find that her brother, Mr. John Shipley, had taken advantage of the absence of Grant to pay marked attention to Clementina, and had even prevailed upon that imperious goddess to accompany him after dinner on a moonlight stroll upon the veranda and terraces of Los Pajaros. Nevertheless she seemed to recover her spirits enough to talk volubly of the beautiful scenery she had discovered in her late perilous abandonment in the wilds of the Coast Range; to aver her intention to visit it again; to speak of it in a severely practical way as offering a far better site for the cottages of the young married couples just beginning life than the outskirts of towns or the bleak sand hills of San Francisco; and thence by graceful degrees into a dissertation upon popular fallacies in regard to hasty marriages, and the mistaken idea of some parents in not accepting the inevitable and making the best of it. She still found time to enter into an appreciative and exhaustive criticism upon the literature and journalistic enterprise of the Pacific Coast with the proprietor of the “Pioneer,” and to cause that gentleman to declare that whatever people might say about rich and fashionable Eastern women, that Mrs. Ashwood's head was about as level as it was pretty.