She had withdrawn her hands, but not until Hamilton, ascending the staircase, was nearly abreast of them. He raised his hat to her with well-bred composure, nodded familiarly to Oakhurst, and passed on. When he had gone Mrs. Decker lifted her eyes to Mr. Oakhurst. “Some day I shall ask a great favor of you!”
Mr. Oakhurst begged that it should be now. “No, not until you know me better. Then, some day, I shall want you to—kill that man!”
She laughed, such a pleasant little ringing laugh, such a display of dimples—albeit a little fixed in the corners of her mouth—such an innocent light in her brown eyes, and such a lovely color in her cheeks, that Mr. Oakhurst—who seldom laughed—was fain to laugh too. It was as if a lamb had proposed to a fox a foray into a neighboring sheepfold.
A few evenings after this, Mrs. Decker arose from a charmed circle of her admirers on the hotel piazza, excused herself for a few moments, laughingly declined an escort, and ran over to her little cottage—one of her husband’s creation—across the road. Perhaps from the sudden and unwonted exercise in her still convalescent state, she breathed hurriedly and feverishly as she entered her boudoir, and once or twice placed her hand upon her breast. She was startled on turning up the light to find her husband lying on the sofa.
“You look hot and excited, Elsie, love,” said Mr. Decker; “you ain’t took worse, are you?”
Mrs. Decker’s face had paled, but now flushed again. “No,” she said, “only a little pain here,” as she again placed her hand upon her corsage.
“Can I do anything for you?” said Mr. Decker, rising with affectionate concern.
“Run over to the hotel and get me some brandy, quick!”
Mr. Decker ran. Mrs. Decker closed and bolted the door, and then putting her hand to her bosom, drew out the pain. It was folded foursquare, and was, I grieve to say, in Mr. Oakhurst’s handwriting.
She devoured it with burning eyes and cheeks until there came a step upon the porch. Then she hurriedly replaced it in her bosom and unbolted the door. Her husband entered; she raised the spirits to her lips and declared herself better.
“Are you going over there again tonight?” asked Mr. Decker submissively.
“No,” said Mrs. Decker, with her eyes fixed dreamily on the floor.
“I wouldn’t if I was you,” said Mr. Decker with a sigh of relief. After a pause he took a seat on the sofa, and drawing his wife to his side, said, “Do you know what I was thinking of when you came in, Elsie?” Mrs. Decker ran her fingers through his stiff black hair, and couldn’t imagine.
“I was thinking of old times, Elsie; I was thinking of the days when I built that kerridge for you, Elsie—when I used to take you out to ride, and was both hoss and driver! We was poor then, and you was sick, Elsie, but we was happy. We’ve got money now, and a house, and you’re quite another woman. I may say, dear, that you’re a new woman. And that’s where the trouble comes in. I could build you a kerridge, Elsie; I could build you a house, Elsie—but there I stopped. I couldn’t build up you. You’re strong and pretty, Elsie, and fresh and new. But somehow, Elsie, you ain’t no work of mine!”
He paused. With one hand laid gently on his forehead and the other pressed upon her bosom as if to feel certain of the presence of her pain, she said sweetly and soothingly:
“But it was your work, dear.”
Mr. Decker shook his head sorrowfully. “No, Elsie, not mine. I had the chance to do it once and I let it go. It’s done now; but not by me.” Mrs. Decker raised her surprised, innocent eyes to his. He kissed her tenderly, and then went on in a more cheerful voice.
“That ain’t all I was thinking of, Elsie. I was thinking that maybe you give too much of your company to that Mr. Hamilton. Not that there’s any wrong in it, to you or him. But it might make people talk. You’re the only one here, Elsie,” said the master carpenter, looking fondly at his wife, “who isn’t talked about; whose work ain’t inspected or condemned.” Mrs. Decker was glad he had spoken about it. She had thought so, too, but she could not well be uncivil to Mr. Hamilton, who was a fine gentleman, without making a powerful enemy. “And he’s always treated me as if I was a born lady in his own circle,” added the little woman, with a certain pride that made her husband fondly smile. “But I have thought of a plan. He will not stay here if I should go away. If, for instance, I went to San Francisco to visit ma for a few days, he would be gone before I should return.”
Mr. Decker was delighted. “By all means,” he said; “go tomorrow. Jack Oakhurst is going down, and I’ll put you in his charge.”
Mrs. Decker did not think it was prudent. “Mr. Oakhurst is our friend, Joseph, but you know his reputation.” In fact, she did not know that she ought to go now, knowing that he was going the same day; but with a kiss Mr. Decker overcame her scruples. She yielded gracefully. Few women, in fact, knew how to give up a point as charmingly as she.
She stayed a week in San Francisco. When she returned she was a trifle thinner and paler than she had been. This she explained as the result of perhaps too active exercise and excitement. “I was out-of-doors nearly all the time, as ma will tell you,” she said to her husband, “and always alone. I am getting quite independent now,” she added gaily. “I don’t want any escort—I believe, Joey dear, I could get along even without you—I’m so brave!”
But her visit, apparently, had not been productive of her impelling design. Mr. Hamilton had not gone, but had remained, and called upon them that very evening. “I’ve thought of a plan, Joey, dear,” said Mrs. Decker when he had departed. “Poor Mr. Oakhurst has a miserable room at the hotel—suppose you ask him when he returns from San Francisco to stop with us. He can have our spare room. I don’t think,” she added archly, “that Mr. Hamilton will call often.” Her husband laughed, intimated that she was a little coquette, pinched her cheek, and complied. “The queer thing about a woman,” he said afterwards confidentially to Mr. Oakhurst, “is that without having any plan of her own, she’ll take anybody’s and build a house on it entirely different to suit herself. And dern my skin, if you’ll be able to say whether or not you didn’t give the scale and measurements yourself. That’s what gets me.”
The next week Mr. Oakhurst was installed in the Deckers’ cottage. The business relations of her husband and himself were known to all, and her own reputation was above suspicion. Indeed, few women were more popular. She was domestic, she was prudent, she was pious. In a country of great feminine freedom and latitude, she never rode or walked with anybody but her husband; in an epoch of slang and ambiguous expression, she was always precise and formal in her speech; in the midst of a fashion of ostentatious decoration she never wore a diamond, nor a single valuable jewel. She never permitted an indecorum in public; she never countenanced the familiarities of California society. She declaimed against the prevailing tone of infidelity and skepticism in religion. Few people who were present will ever forget the dignified yet stately manner with which she rebuked Mr. Hamilton in the public parlor for entering upon the discussion of a work on materialism, lately published; and some among them, also, will not forget the expression of amused surprise on Mr. Hamilton’s face that gradually changed to sardonic gravity as he courteously waived his point. Certainly, not Mr. Oakhurst, who from that moment began to be uneasily impatient of his friend, and even—if such a term could be applied to any moral quality in Mr. Oakhurst—to fear him.
For, during this time, Mr. Oakhurst had begun to show symptoms of a change in his usual habits. He was seldom, if ever, seen in his old haunts, in a barroom, or with his old associates. Pink and white notes, in distracted handwriting, accumulated on the dressing table in his rooms at Sacramento. It was given out in San Francisco that he had some organic disease of the heart, for which his physician had prescribed perfect rest. He read more, he took long walks, he sold his fast horses, he went to church.
I have a very vivid recollection of his first appearance there. He did not accompany the Deckers, nor did he go into their pew, but came in as
the service commenced, and took a seat quietly in one of the back pews. By some mysterious instinct his presence became presently known to the congregation, some of whom so far forgot themselves, in their curiosity, as to face around and apparently address their responses to him. Before the service was over it was pretty well understood that “miserable sinners” meant Mr. Oakhurst. Nor did this mysterious influence fail to affect the officiating clergyman, who introduced an allusion to Mr. Oakhurst’s calling and habits in a sermon on the architecture of Solomon’s Temple, and in a manner so pointed and yet labored as to cause the youngest of us to flame with indignation. Happily, however, it was lost upon Jack; I do not think he even heard it. His handsome, colorless face—albeit a trifle worn and thoughtful—was inscrutable. Only once, during the singing of a hymn, at a certain note in the contralto’s voice, there crept into his dark eyes a look of wistful tenderness, so yearning and yet so hopeless that those who were watching him felt their own glisten. Yet I retain a very vivid remembrance of his standing up to receive the benediction, with the suggestion in his manner and tightly buttoned coat of taking the fire of his adversary at ten paces. After church he disappeared as quietly as he had entered, and fortunately escaped hearing the comments on his rash act. His appearance was generally considered as an impertinence—attributable only to some wanton fancy—or possibly a bet. One or two thought that the sexton was exceedingly remiss in not turning him out after discovering who he was; and a prominent pewholder remarked that if he couldn’t take his wife and daughters to that church without exposing them to such an influence, he would try to find some church where he could. Another traced Mr. Oakhurst’s presence to certain Broad Church radical tendencies, which he regretted to say he had lately noted in their pastor. Deacon Sawyer, whose delicately organized, sickly wife had already borne him eleven children, and died in an ambitious attempt to complete the dozen, avowed that the presence of a person of Mr. Oakhurst’s various and indiscriminate gallantries was an insult to the memory of the deceased that, as a man, he could not brook.
It was about this time that Mr. Oakhurst, contrasting himself with a conventional world in which he had hitherto rarely mingled, became aware that there was something in his face, figure, and carriage quite unlike other men—something that if it did not betray his former career, at least showed an individuality and originality that was suspicious. In this belief he shaved off his long, silken mustache, and religiously brushed out his clustering curls every morning. He even went so far as to affect a negligence of dress, and hid his small, slim, arched feet in the largest and heaviest walking shoes. There is a story told that he went to his tailor in Sacramento, and asked him to make him a suit of clothes like everybody else. The tailor, familiar with Mr. Oakhurst’s fastidiousness, did not know what he meant. “I mean,” said Mr. Oakhurst savagely, “something respectable—something that doesn’t exactly fit me, you know.” But however Mr. Oakhurst might hide his shapely limbs in homespun and homemade garments, there was something in his carriage, something in the pose of his beautiful head, something in the strong and fine manliness of his presence, something in the perfect and utter discipline and control of his muscles, something in the high repose of his nature—a repose not so much a matter of intellectual ruling as of his very nature—that go where he would, and with whom, he was always a notable man in ten thousand. Perhaps this was never so clearly intimated to Mr. Oakhurst as when, emboldened by Mr. Hamilton’s advice and assistance and his predilections, he became a San Francisco broker. Even before objection was made to his presence in the Board—the objection, I remember, was urged very eloquently by Watt Sanders, who was supposed to be the inventor of the “freezing out” system of disposing of poor stockholders, and who also enjoyed the reputation of having been the impelling cause of Briggs of Tuolumne’s ruin and suicide—even before this formal protest of respectability against lawlessness, the aquiline suggestions of Mr. Oakhurst’s mien and countenance not only prematurely fluttered the pigeons, but absolutely occasioned much uneasiness among the fish hawks, who circled below him with their booty. “Dash me! but he’s as likely to go after us as anybody,” said Joe Fielding.
It wanted but a few days before the close of the brief summer season at San Isabel Warm Springs. Already there had been some migration of the more fashionable, and there was an uncomfortable suggestion of dregs and lees in the social life that remained. Mr. Oakhurst was moody; it was hinted that even the secure reputation of Mrs. Decker could no longer protect her from the gossip which his presence excited. It is but fair to her to say that during the last few weeks of this trying ordeal she looked like a sweet, pale martyr, and conducted herself toward her traducers with the gentle, forgiving manner of one who relied not upon the idle homage of the crowd, but upon the security of a principle that was dearer than popular favor. “They talk about myself and Mr. Oakhurst, my dear,” she said to a friend, “but Heaven and my husband can best answer their calumny. It never shall be said that my husband ever turned his back upon a friend in the moment of his adversity because the position was changed, because his friend was poor and he was rich.” This was the first intimation to the public that Jack had lost money, although it was known generally that the Deckers had lately bought some valuable property in San Francisco.
A few evenings after this an incident occurred which seemed to unpleasantly discord with the general social harmony that had always existed at San Isabel. It was at dinner, and Mr. Oakhurst and Mr. Hamilton, who sat together at a separate table, were observed to rise in some agitation. When they reached the hall, by a common instinct they stepped into a little breakfast-room which was vacant, and closed the door. Then Mr. Hamilton turned, with a half-amused, half-serious smile, toward his friend, and said—
“If we are to quarrel, Jack Oakhurst—you and I—in the name of all that is ridiculous, don’t let it be about a—”
I do not know what was the epithet intended. It was either unspoken or lost. For at that very instant Mr. Oakhurst raised a wine glass and dashed its contents into Hamilton’s face.
As they faced each other the men seemed to have changed natures. Mr. Oakhurst was trembling with excitement, and the wine glass that he returned to the table shivered between his fingers. Mr. Hamilton stood there, grayish white, erect, and dripping. After a pause he said coldly—“So be it. But remember! our quarrel commences here. If I fall by your hand, you shall not use it to clear her character; if you fall by mine, you shall not be called a martyr. I am sorry it has come to this, but amen!—the sooner now the better.”
He turned proudly, dropped his lids over his cold steel-blue eyes, as if sheathing a rapier, bowed, and passed coldly out.
They met twelve hours later in a little hollow two miles from the hotel, on the Stockton road. As Mr. Oakhurst received his pistol from Colonel Starbottle’s hands he said to him in a low voice, “Whatever turns up or down I shall not return to the hotel. You will find some directions in my room. Go there—” but his voice suddenly faltered, and he turned his glistening eyes away, to his second’s intense astonishment. “I’ve been out a dozen times with Jack Oakhurst,” said Colonel Starbottle afterwards, “and I never saw him anyways cut before. Blank me if I didn’t think he was losing his sand, till he walked to position.”
The two reports were almost simultaneous. Mr. Oakhurst’s right arm dropped suddenly to his side, and his pistol would have fallen from his paralyzed fingers, but the discipline of trained nerve and muscle prevailed, and he kept his grasp until he had shifted it to the other hand, without changing his position. Then there was a silence that seemed interminable, a gathering of two or three dark figures where a smoke curl still lazily floated, and then the hurried, husky, panting voice of Colonel Starbottle in his ear, “He’s hit hard—through the lungs—you must run for it!”
Jack turned his dark, questioning eyes upon his second, but did not seem to listen; rather seemed to hear some other voice, remoter in the distance. He hesitated, and then made a step forward in the dir
ection of the distant group. Then he paused again as the figures separated, and the surgeon came hastily toward him.
“He would like to speak with you a moment,” said the man. “You have little time to lose, I know; but,” he added in a lower voice, “it is my duty to tell you he has still less.”
A look of despair so hopeless in its intensity swept over Mr. Oakhurst’s usually impassive face that the surgeon started. “You are hit,” he said, glancing at Jack’s helpless arm.
“Nothing—a mere scratch,” said Jack hastily. Then he added, with a bitter laugh, “I’m not in luck today. But come! We’ll see what he wants.”
His long feverish stride outstripped the surgeon’s, and in another moment he stood where the dying man lay—like most dying men—the one calm, composed, central figure of an anxious group. Mr. Oakhurst’s face was less calm as he dropped on one knee beside him and took his hand. “I want to speak with this gentleman alone,” said Hamilton, with something of his old imperious manner, as he turned to those about him. When they drew back, he looked up in Oakhurst’s face.
“I’ve something to tell you, Jack.”
His own face was white, but not so white as that which Mr. Oakhurst bent over him—a face so ghastly, with haunting doubts and a hopeless presentiment of coming evil, a face so piteous in its infinite weariness and envy of death, that the dying man was touched, even in the languor of dissolution, with a pang of compassion, and the cynical smile faded from his lips.
“Forgive me, Jack,” he whispered more feebly, “for what I have to say. I don’t say it in anger, but only because it must be said. I could not do my duty to you—I could not die contented until you knew it all. It’s a miserable business at best, all around. But it can’t be helped now. Only I ought to have fallen by Decker’s pistol and not yours.”
A flush like fire came into Jack’s cheek, and he would have risen, but Hamilton held him fast.
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