The San Rosario Ranch
advent of the humble dead to those who had been his fellow-servants.
No one told Millicent that standing near the spot where the ruffian's
horse had been tethered was a second steed. A strong mustang saddled
and bridled was found there. A heavy leading-rein passed through the
bit, and a stout rope lying over the saddle, gave a sinister
significance to the fact. For whom had that horse been brought?
CHAPTER XIII.
"Abroad it rushed,
My frolic soul, for it had sight
Of something half-way, which was known
As mine at once, yet not mine own."
It was early in the morning for Millicent, usually a late sleeper, to be
in the garden among the flowers. There Graham found her, white as the
gown she wore, standing with her arms filled with dark-red
roses,--standing with the sunlight touching her pretty hair, and shining
in her cool gray eyes. He stared at her, as at one risen from the dead;
he touched her hand before he spoke to her, to make sure that it was
really she, alive, with softly heaving breast and warm, clinging
fingers. Alive, and not as he had pictured her a thousand times during
that terrible ride,--cold and dead, with the stain which had dyed her
kerchief, on brow and bosom. For a long time they stood silently
looking into each other's faces; and then the man laid her hand gently
on his arm, and together they passed down the orchard road, across a
space of sunburnt meadow, to a spot they both knew,--Millicent's
boudoir, hanging over the narrow stream, walled by six tall redwoods
grown from the seeds of some giant predecessor, carpeted with thick
green moss, furnished with two rough seats. Here they rested silently
for a time,--Graham drawing long breaths of the morning air to relax his
tired lungs; Millicent resting her wearied heart with looking at him,
all her soul shining through her eyes. Graham first broke the silence
with questions of all that had happened since they had parted. She told
him of her danger, and of the murder of the Chinaman, in a low voice,
full of awe. It had been her first knowledge of death; and the chill
reality, the only certain thing which men look forward to, had first
been known by her now that she was a woman grown, and could fully
understand its dreadful significance. Hitherto, death had been a phrase
only; a thing which must come to all creatures, as a matter of course.
That she should sometime die she knew, but only by tradition; it had
meant nothing to her. Now she understood it all, and the terrible
knowledge had chilled her life-blood. Could she ever again think of
anything but that dead face? One stronger than the King of Terrors was
driving it from her thoughts: love was swiftly painting out the grim
picture from her memory.
Step by step they went over the ground of their mutual experiences since
the time when they had parted: the picnic, and its tragic ending; the
night which Graham had passed in the cabin with Ah Lam's murderer,--for
there could be no doubt it was he who had dropped Millicent's
handkerchief in the hut. Of the little journal Graham spoke sadly,
gently, without anger, as if it were a thing which concerned neither of
them. Then Millicent brokenly told the story which the written words
had simply indicated. She told it with a sense of thankfulness that the
weight of the secret rested no longer on her heart alone; that its pain
was shared, and that at last her lover understood and saw her absolutely
as she was. No reservation did she make, but bared to him the inmost
chambers of her heart, sure of no misunderstanding, and upheld by a
sympathy she had never before known. Then her confidence was returned,
and Graham spoke to her of many things of which he had never spoken
before; of the hopes and aspirations which had sometimes made his life
glorious; of the quicksands and hidden rocks which had often made his
way dangerous.
A wonderful confession,--solemn as those first confessions made by men
and women who at maturity join the Roman Catholic Church, and
unflinchingly reveal to the confessor every temptation to which they
have yielded in the course of their lives. To no mumbling, inattentive
priest, with store of penances and absolutions in his pocket, was the
confession made; in no stifling confessional, with throng of penitents
outside, grudging every moment of delay. Each spoke to a tender human
heart, that filled out the broken sentences, and echoed the deep sighs.
The roof of their temple swayed in the light breeze, and the wild birds
chanted the hymn of praise which consecrated it.
As Millicent at last sat silent, not knowing whether her lover still
spoke to her in words, or if that finer language of the spirit made his
thoughts clear to her, came at once a strange consciousness that she was
no longer a creature of this earth, with material senses and shape. The
last words which she had spoken she remembered as one dimly recalls what
has happened in another life. They were these:--
"Are you sorry for me?"
There had been no answer in words or in looks; for the power of sight
had been left behind with the outer case, now shaken off for the first
time since life upon the earth had begun. She was a thing apart no
longer; her existence had become merged in that of a stronger soul, to
which she was an all-important part. Folded in this spirit-embrace time
was not, nor past nor future; nothing but the perfect ecstasy of a union
which eternity should consecrate. Floating on a celestial ether, the
double soul mounted ever higher and higher. Was it toward eternal bliss
that it was wafted? Was the long waiting at an end?
Again she saw the sunlight; again she heard the ripple of the water;
again she felt the earthly tenement closing about the divine spirit.
Before her, framed in the green leaves, was a face dear indeed, the face
of her lover. With solemn eyes they looked at each other; and a broken
voice whispered to her,--
"Dear, what is it?"
She answered softly,--
"I have never been so near to you before."
Then a flood of feeling swept over her, and she would have knelt to him,
her other self; but he was already at her feet, moved by that same
instinct to do homage to the human form which held his counter soul, and
on her white feet he laid a reverent embrace.
Strengthened and uplifted by that mystic union whose memory should never
leave her, whose bonds should ever bind her, was Millicent. In every
existence comes one supreme, all-important moment, which thenceforth is
the landmark by which life is measured; the climacteric point to which
the past merely served to lead, the future availing only to enshrine its
memory. To some men and women the significance of that moment is known
only when it has long passed; to Millicent, the knowledge that her whole
after life should be controlled by that hour was not wanting. And her
lover,--would he be faithful to that unspoken vow? The thought never
crossed her mind; she was irrevocably bound to him; priest and rite
could but make a poor, earthy contract between what was mortal in them
both; the spiritual union was not for this world, and might not be
broken by either.
CHAPTER XIV.
"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice
earned.
The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be
discerned."
It was a pitiful story which the little journal had made known to John
Graham,--the story of a woman grievously wronged, cruelly deceived.
Millicent Almsford's life had not been a happy one. Her childhood had
been lonely, and she had none of those early recollections which are so
comforting in after years to people more fortunately bred. Her father
was an invalid and a bookworm, and looked upon his only daughter as a
creature to be fed, clothed, educated, and kept quiet. Her feeding he
intrusted to her faithful nurse, who had promised her dying mother never
to leave the child till she should be grown to womanhood. Her wardrobe
was ordered by a relative who lived in Paris, and who twice a year
overlooked the making and packing of her clothes, from her first baby
wrappings to the ball dress in which she was presented at the court of
St. James. Her education he left very much to chance and her own taste,
simply locking up the _livres defendus_ of his library, and telling her
English governess to order any necessary volumes from Mudie's. The
young woman in whose charge Millicent was placed, was more eager to
learn Italian than to teach English; to explore the literature of Dante
than to familiarize her pupil with the British authors. When Millicent
was sixteen years old, the feeble protection of this governess was taken
from her; the woman returning to England to keep a long protracted
marriage engagement with her own cousin. The same year old Nina died;
and then it was that the lonely girl fell under the influence which was
to darken her destiny and turn aside the natural current of her life.
Millicent Almsford, at that age, was a very peculiar and interesting
study. Her mind had eagerly grasped much more material than it could
master. Her vivid imagination and great talent for music were, with a
love of beauty, the most strongly developed traits in her nature, whose
intellectual growth was destined to be slow and late; whose spiritual
existence had not yet begun. An exquisite native refinement and a
perfect taste were among her most interesting qualities. Singularly
attractive and strangely incomplete, she had formed few relations; and
her friendship with Edward Holworthy, the man whose influence so marred
her life, was the first strong feeling which she had known. He was her
opposite in character, and knew life only through people, while she had
lived purely in ideas. Her complex nature, unfathomable to herself, was
to him a novel and engrossing study, and it was through him that she
learned to understand one side of it. The man found a great heart which
had never loved; a strong power for working good or evil; a bold mind,
that feared not to grapple with the deepest problems of life; and a
possibility of absolute devotion to a resolution once formed, which is
rarely found among young women. He became her mental guide, and
directed her readings; with a certain clever intuition bringing her
under the influence of minds as sophistical and frivolous as his own.
Sympathetic to an extreme degree, her nature quickly took from his the
color of an exaggerated cynicism, which was sometimes strongly shaken by
the inner spirit which still slept under the untouched heart.
Platonics, where the man is of the world wise, and the woman foolish
with the innocence of childhood, are dangerous things, as he knew full
well, and she did not. In pointing out the forces which mould the lives
of men and women, what theme is so often upon the lips of two life
students of opposite sexes as that of love? To the girl it seemed a
strange, rather interesting force, whose power it would not be
unpleasant to test; and when one day her mentor confessed to her that
she had bound him irrevocably by those bonds which he had taught her
were but ropes of sand, she smiled half sadly, but in her heart laughed
with childish merriment. She now should see the actual workings of that
strange hallucination; she should learn something of what love was. She
was as unfeeling as a young lioness, and learned the lesson of making
him turn pale and red by turns, as quickly as she had learned the knack
of touching the chords of her mandolin. She looked upon her quondam
friend in the light of an invalid, suffering from a dangerous but
non-contagious malady. And so things went on; the man gaining every day