Part 28

“And may I ask in what way you wish me to assist you in so doing?”

“By promptly and publicly retracting in the 'Clarion' every word of this slander against Harcourt.”

Fletcher looked steadfastly at the speaker. “And if I decline?”

“I think you have been long enough in California, Mr. Fletcher, to know the alternative expected of a gentleman,” said Grant, coldly.

Mr. Fletcher kept his gentle blue eyes--in which surprise still overbalanced their expression of pained concern--on Grant's face.

“But is not this more in the style of Colonel Starbottle than Professor Grant?” he asked, with a faint smile.

Grant rose instantly with a white face. “You will have a better opportunity of judging,” he said, “when Colonel Starbottle has the honor of waiting upon you from me. Meantime, I thank you for reminding me of the indiscretion into which my folly, in still believing that this thing could be settled amicably, has led me.”

He bowed coldly and withdrew. Nevertheless, as he mounted his horse and rode away, he felt his cheeks burning. Yet he had acted upon calm consideration; he knew that to the ordinary Californian experience there was nothing quixotic nor exaggerated in the attitude he had taken. Men had quarreled and fought on less grounds; he had even half convinced himself that he HAD been insulted, and that his own professional reputation demanded the withdrawal of the attack on Harcourt on purely business grounds; but he was not satisfied of the personal responsibility of Fletcher nor of his gratuitous malignity. Nor did the man look like a tool in the hands of some unscrupulous and hidden enemy. However, he had played his card. If he succeeded only in provoking a duel with Fletcher, he at least would divert the public attention from Harcourt to himself. He knew that his superior position would throw the lesser victim in the background. He would make the sacrifice; that was his duty as a gentleman, even if SHE would not care to accept it as an earnest of his unselfish love!

He had reached the point where the mountain track entered the Santa Clara turnpike when his attention was attracted by a handsome but old-fashioned carriage drawn by four white mules, which passed down the road before him and turned suddenly off into a private road. But it was not this picturesque gala equipage of some local Spanish grandee that brought a thrill to his nerves and a flash to his eye; it was the unmistakable, tall, elegant figure and handsome profile of Clementina, reclining in light gauzy wraps against the back seat! It was no fanciful resemblance, the outcome of his reverie,--there never was any one like her!--it WAS she herself! But what was she doing here?

A vaquero cantered from the cross road where the dust of the vehicle still hung. Grant hailed him. Ah! it was a fine carroza de cuatro mulas that he had just passed! Si, Senor, truly; it was of Don Jose Ramirez, who lived just under the hill. It was bringing company to the casa.

Ramirez! That was where Fletcher was going! Had Clementina known that he was one of Fletcher's friends? Might she not be exposed to unpleasantness, marked coolness, or even insult in that unexpected meeting? Ought she not to be warned or prepared for it? She had banished Grant from her presence until this stain was removed from her father's name, but could she blame him for trying to save her from contact with her father's slanderer? No! He turned his horse abruptly into the cross road and spurred forward in the direction of the casa.

It was quite visible now--a low-walled, quadrangular mass of whitewashed adobe lying like a drift on the green hillside. The carriage and four had far preceded him, and was already half up the winding road towards the house. Later he saw them reach the courtyard and disappear within. He would be quite in time to speak with her before she retired to change her dress. He would simply say that while making a professional visit to Los Gatos Land Company office he had become aware of Fletcher's connection with it, and accidentally of his intended visit to Ramirez. His chance meeting with the carriage on the highway had determined his course.

As he rode into the courtyard he observed that it was also approached by another road, evidently nearer Los Gatos, and probably the older and shorter communication between the two ranchos. The fact was significantly demonstrated a moment later. He had given his horse to a servant, sent in his card to Clementina, and had dropped listlessly on one of the benches of the gallery surrounding the patio, when a horseman rode briskly into the opposite gateway, and dismounted with a familiar air. A waiting peon who recognized him informed him that the Dona was engaged with a visitor, but that they were both returning to the gallery for chocolate in a moment. The stranger was the man he had left only an hour before--Don Diego Fletcher!

In an instant the idiotic fatuity of his position struck him fully. His only excuse for following Clementina had been to warn her of the coming of this man who had just entered, and who would now meet her as quickly as himself. For a brief moment the idea of quietly slipping out to the corral, mounting his horse again, and flying from the rancho, crossed his mind; but the thought that he would be running away from the man he had just challenged, and perhaps some new hostility that had sprung up in his heart against him, compelled him to remain. The eyes of both men met; Fletcher's in half-wondering annoyance, Grant's in ill-concealed antagonism. What they would have said is not known, for at that moment the voices of Clementina and Mrs. Ramirez were heard in the passage, and they both entered the gallery. The two men were standing together; it was impossible to see one without the other.

And yet Grant, whose eyes were instantly directed to Clementina, thought that she had noted neither. She remained for an instant standing in the doorway in the same self-possessed, coldly graceful pose he remembered she had taken on the platform at Tasajara. Her eyelids were slightly downcast, as if she had been arrested by some sudden thought or some shy maiden sensitiveness; in her hesitation Mrs. Ramirez passed impatiently before her.

“Mother of God!” said that lively lady, regarding the two speechless men, “is it an indiscretion we are making here--or are you dumb? You, Don Diego, are loud enough when you and Don Jose are together; at least introduce your friend.”

Grant quickly recovered himself. “I am afraid,” he said, coming forward, “unless Miss Harcourt does, that I am a mere trespasser in your house, Senora. I saw her pass in your carriage a few moments ago, and having a message for her I ventured to follow her here.”

“It is Mr. Grant, a friend of my father's,” said Clementina, smiling with equanimity, as if just awakening from a momentary abstraction, yet apparently unconscious of Grant's imploring eyes; “but the other gentleman I have not the pleasure of knowing.”

“Ah! Don Diego Fletcher, a countryman of yours; and yet I think he knows you not.”

Clementina's face betrayed no indication of the presence of her father's foe, and yet Grant knew that she must have recognized his name, as she looked towards Fletcher with perfect self-possession. He was too much engaged in watching her to take note of Fletcher's manifest disturbance, or the evident effort with which he at last bowed to her. That this unexpected double meeting with the daughter of the man he had wronged, and the man who had espoused the quarrel, should be confounding to him appeared only natural. But he was unprepared to understand the feverish alacrity with which he accepted Dona Maria's invitation to chocolate, or the equally animated way in which Clementina threw herself into her hostess's Spanish levity. He knew it was an awkward situation, that must be surmounted without a scene; he was quite prepared in the presence of Clementina to be civil to Fletcher; but it was odd that in this feverish exchange of courtesies and compliments HE, Grant, should feel the greater awkwardness and be the most ill at ease. He sat down and took his part in the conversation; he let it transpire for Clementina's benefit that he had been to Los Gatos only on business, yet there was no opportunity for even a significant glance, and he had the added embarrassment of seeing that she exhibited no surprise nor seemed to attach the least importance to his inopportune visit. In a miserable indecision he allowed himself to be carried away by the high-flown hospitality of his Spanish hostess, and consented to stay to an early dinner. It was part of the infelicity of circumstance that the voluble Dona Maria--electing him as the distinguished stranger above the resident Fletcher--monopolized him and attached him to her side. She would do the honors of her house; she must show him the ruins of the old Mission beside the corral; Don Diego and Clementina would join them presently in the garden. He cast a despairing glance at the placidly smiling Clementina, who was apparently equally indifferent to the evident constraint and assumed ease of the man beside her, and turned away with Mrs. Ramirez.

A silence fell upon the gallery so deep that the receding voices and footsteps of Grant and his hostess in the long passage were distinctly heard until they reached the end. Then Fletcher arose with an inarticulate exclamation. Clementina instantly put her finger to her lips, glanced around the gallery, extended her hand to him, and saying “Come,” half-led, half-dragged him into the passage. To the right she turned and pushed open the door of a small room that seemed a combination of boudoir and oratory, lit by a French window opening to the garden, and flanked by a large black and white crucifix with a prie Dieu beneath it. Closing the door behind them she turned and faced her companion. But it was no longer the face of the woman who had been sitting in the gallery; it was the face that had looked back at her from the mirror at Tasajara the night that Grant had left her--eager, flushed, material with commonplace excitement!

“'Lige Curtis,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered passionately, “Lige Curtis, whom you thought dead! 'Lige Curtis, whom you once pitied, condoled with and despised! 'Lige Curtis, whose lands and property have enriched you! 'Lige Curtis, who would have shared it with you freely at the time, but whom your father juggled and defrauded of it! 'Lige Curtis, branded by him as a drunken outcast and suicide! 'Lige Curtis”--

“Hush!” She clapped her little hand over his mouth with a quick but awkward schoolgirl gesture, inconceivable to any who had known her usual languid elegance of motion, and held it there. He struggled angrily, impatiently, reproachfully, and then, with a sudden characteristic weakness that seemed as much of a revelation as her once hoydenish manner, kissed it, when she let it drop. Then placing both her hands still girlishly on her slim waist and curtseying grotesquely before him, she said: “'Lige Curtis! Oh, yes! 'Lige Curtis, who swore to do everything for me! 'Lige Curtis, who promised to give up liquor for me,--who was to leave Tasajara for me! 'Lige Curtis, who was to reform, and keep his land as a nest-egg for us both in the future, and then who sold it--and himself--and me--to dad for a glass of whiskey! 'Lige Curtis, who disappeared, and then let us think he was dead, only that he might attack us out of the ambush of his grave!”

“Yes, but think what I have suffered all these years; not for the cursed land--you know I never cared for that--but for YOU,--you, Clementina,--YOU rich, admired by every one; idolized, held far above me,--ME, the forgotten outcast, the wretched suicide--and yet the man to whom you had once plighted your troth. Which of those greedy fortune-hunters whom my money--my life-blood as you might have thought it was--attracted to you, did you care to tell that you had ever slipped out of the little garden gate at Sidon to meet that outcast! Do you wonder that as the years passed and YOU were happy, I did not choose to be so forgotten? Do you wonder that when YOU shut the door on the past I managed to open it again--if only a little way--that its light might startle you?”

Yet she did not seem startled or disturbed, and remained only looking at him critically.

“You say that you have suffered,” she replied with a smile. “You don't look it! Your hair is white, but it is becoming to you, and you are a handsomer man, 'Lige Curtis, than you were when I first met you; you are finer,” she went on, still regarding him, “stronger and healthier than you were five years ago; you are rich and prosperous, you have everything to make you happy, but”--here she laughed a little, held out both her hands, taking his and holding his arms apart in a rustic, homely fashion--“but you are still the same old 'Lige Curtis! It was like you to go off and hide yourself in that idiotic way; it was like you to let the property slide in that stupid, unselfish fashion; it was like you to get real mad, and say all those mean, silly things to dad, that didn't hurt him--in your regular looney style; for rich or poor, drunk or sober, ragged or elegant, plain or handsome,--you're always the same 'Lige Curtis!”

In proportion as that material, practical, rustic self--which nobody but 'Lige Curtis had ever seen--came back to her, so in proportion the irresolute, wavering, weak and emotional vagabond of Sidon came out to meet it. He looked at her with a vague smile; his five years of childish resentment, albeit carried on the shoulders of a man mentally and morally her superior, melted away. He drew her towards him, yet at the same moment a quick suspicion returned.