Chapter IV: Inez

Mrs. Prescott had spent the winter in Southern California, and some time in April was registered at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, with her daughter and maid. As her meals were served in her private parlor and she seldom stopped in the public reception room, she saw none of the guests of the house, except a few New Yorkers who were stopping there. Fanny, on the contrary, saw everybody, and flitted through the hotel like a sunbeam, with a pleasant word for those she knew and a smile for those she did not know. Her mother sometimes tried to restrain her from being so free with people, telling her that since she had heard of the circumstances of her birth she had developed a most plebeian taste.

“If I have it _tastes_ good,” Fanny would answer, laughingly, “and I am a great deal happier in liking people and having them like me than I was when I felt that the world was made for me and only a select few had a right to share it with me.”

She was very happy and enjoyed everything thoroughly. Time was passing and only a few months remained before her return to Roy, who wrote her nearly every day. In his last letter he told her he had been to Ridgefield.

“I was in Worcester,” he wrote, “and I took the electric, for I wanted to see Uncle Zach again. He is a case, isn’t he? He had the rheumatism and can scarcely walk. Poor old man! He cried when he spoke of the days when our parents were there making love to each other. He was quite poetic in his lamentations. ‘No more matin’ of birds, here,’ he said. ‘They’ve all flew off to the Tremont House, leavin’ me nothin’ but some _dum_ English sparrers.’ He talked a great deal of your father and a boy Jeff. Said he didn’t believe he was dead, and he should be perfectly happy if he were with him again, turnin’ summersaults! That would be funny, as Jeff, if living, must be over thirty. Of course I visited your property, which, if possible, looks more dilapidated than when we were there last November. It has quite a fascination for me, and I really mean, with your permission, and your mother’s, to build a cottage there, where we can spend a few weeks every summer.

“When do you go to the Yosemite? Do you know I have a queer feeling about that trip and am half inclined to take it with you. I have just seen a chap who two years ago last summer was waylaid by robbers. He says it’s not an uncommon thing for the stage to be stopped. His experience was a bad one. Two ladies fainted from sheer fright and one of them was robbed while unconscious. A strange feature of this robbery was that the watch taken from the fainting woman and which had her name engraved upon it was sent to her by mail to the hotel where she was stopping. Most of the money taken was also returned to the owners who could least afford to lose it. A queer thing for marauders to do, and shows that they are habitues of the neighborhood and have facilities for learning the names and position of those whom they plunder. I hope you will not meet with an adventure of this kind.”

On the morning when Fanny received this letter she was sitting by the window of one of the parlors in the hotel, reading it a second time, and feeling a little nervous with regard to the stage robberies of which she had heard something in San Francisco. A Firemen’s Parade was passing, with all the paraphernalia of bands and hose carts and boys and a crowd generally, but she paid no attention to it until a clear, musical voice, with a slight accent, said to her, “Pretty, isn’t it, Miss Prescott; and isn’t father grand in his new suit? That’s he,—the tall man who bowed to me when I kissed my hand to him. He is foreman of one of the companies.”

Surprised at being so familiarly addressed by a stranger, Fanny looked up and saw standing by the next window a young girl whom she had seen several times in the halls and corridors and wondered who she was. She was tall and well proportioned. Her features were regular, her eyes dark and lustrous and veiled under very long lashes and surmounted by heavy brows which made them seem darker than they were. Her complexion was a rich olive, telling of a southern sun which must have warmed the blood of one or both of her parents. There was nothing impertinent in her manner. It was simply friendly, and Fanny, who was longing for some young person to speak to, answered pleasantly, “How did you know my name?”

“Oh, everybody knows that,” the girl replied, “and if they didn’t they have only to look on the register. I saw you the day you came and have watched you ever since when I had a chance and I wanted to speak to you so badly. I don’t know why, only I did. It seemed to me I should like you, and I know so few young girls. Perhaps I ought not to have spoken to you, but you don’t mind, do you?”

She was so frank and unsophisticated and her face was so pretty and pleasant that Fanny had no thought of being offended. She had been told by her mother never to talk with strangers and especially to the class to which this girl belonged. But Fanny usually talked to whom she pleased and as she attracted this strange girl so the girl attracted and fascinated her.

“Sit down, please, and tell me your name, inasmuch as you know mine,” she said.

The girl sat down and folded her hands just as Fanny had a trick of folding hers. There was this difference, however,—the girl’s hands were large and brown,—helpful hands, used to toil,—while Fanny’s were soft and white and dimpled like a baby’s. The girl was not at all averse to talking of herself and said, “I am Inez Rayborne. My father is an American. My mother was half Mexican, half Spanish,—with a little Gypsy blood in her. She used to call me Gypsy because I love the mountains and rocks and woods so much. Father married her near Santa Barbara, and her name was _Anita_. Isn’t that a pretty name?”

Fanny said it was, and Inez went on: “She was a little bit of a body whom father could take up and set on his shoulder. He is big and tall, and I am big, too. I wish I was small like mother and you. Mother is dead, and I have been so lonely since she died.”

Her eyes filled with tears which hung on her lashes as she continued: “Our home is in the Yosemite, not far from Inspiration Point, and perched on the hillside above the stage road, with a lovely view of the valley and the mountains. We call it Prospect Cottage and in winter we shut it up and come to the city. Before mother died we went sometimes to Santa Barbara, sometimes to Los Angeles. Now we come here and I help the housekeeper in part payment for my board. Father helps round the hotel, and Tom, too, when he is here.”

“Who is Tom?” Fanny asked, and Inez replied, “Oh, he is Tom and has lived with us since I can remember, and is like a son to father. In the summer, when the hotels in the valley are full of visitors, they sometimes go on trails as guides with the people. Again they are off on some business, seeing to exchange of property, which keeps them away for days. Then I am so lonesome and afraid, too, if there is a robbery on the road. I have a splendid dog, Nero, to take care of me. He is young, but very large. He is here with us. Maybe you have noticed him lying in the office or the hall.”

Fanny had seen a big dog around the hotel and had patted his head, for she was fond of dogs, but she was more interested now in what Inez said of a robbery.

“Do you mean stage robberies, and are they of frequent occurrence?” she asked.

“Sometimes, and sometimes not,” was Inez’s answer. “There was a dreadful one just before mother died, and I think the fright killed her. She had heart trouble and was here to-day, gone to-morrow. We were alone, and when the stage passed in the afternoon a neighbor who was on it came and told us how dreadful it was, with two ladies fainting and children crying and the highwaymen taking the watch of the woman who lay like one dead. He sent it back to her at the hotel, and the money to the others. Wasn’t that queer?”

Fanny was thinking of what Roy had written her and exclaimed, “I have heard of that.”

“You have!” Inez rejoined. “Well, the papers were full of it, and people were determined to catch the men, if possible. Mother was very nervous over it, but I never thought of her dying. We always said our prayers together, and that night she prayed that the men might be caught and the wicked work stopped. She seemed the same when she kissed me good night, but when I went into her room in the morning she could not speak. Father had come home late and was caring for her, rubbing her hands and arms, which had in them no power to move. ‘Was it the fright of the robbery?’ I said to father, who nodded, while she tried to speak and her eyes followed him in such a beseeching way. ‘Do you want to tell us something?’ I said. She nodded and made a motion to write. I brought her pencil and paper, but her nerveless hands could not hold the pencil and she died looking up at father so pitifully. He was so tender and kind to her, and cried over her like a baby, and himself put her in the coffin. It was such a little coffin I didn’t realize till I saw it how small she was. We buried her on the hill back of our house where the light from our windows can shine upon her grave when we are there in the summer. In the winter it must be awful with the snow piled so high and all of us gone. Father was almost crazy for a while and walked the floor and sat by her grave and wouldn’t eat. He staid home the rest of the season and Tom staid, too, most of the time. There were no more stages robbed that summer, and not many last summer; three or four at the most, and it so happens that I am always alone with Nero. Of course no harm can come to me but I feel nervous just the same.”

Inez was talking very earnestly and rapidly, and her language was so good that Fanny felt sure she must have had better advantages than were to be had among the mountains and asked her at last where she was educated.

“I am not educated as you are,” Inez replied. “I was at school in Stockton two years and have been to school winters in Santa Barbara and here. The rest I learned from father and mother. She had been in a convent and taught me Spanish;—that was her language. She spoke English brokenly, but so prettily. Tom brings me books to read and I know all about the east where father is to take me some day when we are able to stop at first-class hotels as guests. I am afraid, though, it will be a long time before we go. Father’s business is not always very good.”

“What did you say it was?” Fanny asked, and Inez replied, “Exchange of property. I don’t know what that means, exactly, and when I asked Tom he said I hadn’t brain enough to understand it, if he explained. He likes to tease me.”

There was beginning to dawn upon Fanny a suspicion of the relation in which Tom stood to Inez, but she made no comment, and Inez continued: “I wish you knew father, he is so handsome for a man nearly fifty, and so kind to everybody. They worship him in the Yosemite and depend upon him a great deal. When a stage has been robbed he always gives his services to find the robbers. They have caught one or two who are in prison now, but they can get no clew to the men who have been such a terror to the neighborhood.”

“Oh,” Fanny gasped, “you frighten me so. Mother and I are going to the Yosemite in June and I should die if the stage I was in was stopped.”

“I shouldn’t,” Inez replied. “I have been on the road with father a good many times and nothing happened, but if there did I shouldn’t be afraid. I’d fly at the robber and try to kill him. Father laughs when I talk that way and says there is murder in my Gypsy blood. Perhaps there is. Any way I would not hesitate to kill a man who was robbing a coach. I’d shoot him like a dog.”

Her mood had changed as she talked. The softness had left her eyes which blazed and flashed defiantly, and she took a turn or two across the room as if she were in fancy battling with some desperado.

“Don’t look so fierce. You scare me,” Fanny said, when Inez came back and resumed her chair.

“Do I? I cannot tell you how I feel when I think of the bandits who make our beautiful valley a dread to tourists who visit it. But they may not be there at all this summer. Don’t worry about them. Leave your valuables here, especially your diamonds, if you have any. Then, if you are held up you have not so much to lose. If I knew when you were coming I believe I’d meet you in Milton, where you take the stage, or have father do it. He isn’t afraid. He goes home to-morrow or next day. Tom has already gone. I go in two or three weeks. You must come to our cottage. It is lovely.”

Inez’s face was a very changeable one, now grave and serious and sad, then sunny and sweet, with a smile which changed its whole expression. Like most communicative people she was very inquisitive, and having told all there was to tell about herself she asked Fanny about herself, her home in New York, and how old she was. “I am seventeen,” she said.

“And I am twenty. I thought you older,” Fanny replied, in some surprise.

“So does every one, because I am so tall and big, like my father. Where is _your_ father?” Inez asked.

“He is dead,” Fanny replied, thinking of both Mark Hilton and Judge Prescott.

“Oh, I am so sorry for you; but you have a mother, and mine is lying among the hills,” Inez said, beginning to talk again of her home and her hope that Fanny would visit her when she came to the valley. “You _must_,” she continued. “I want you to see our cottage and mother’s grave, and father and Nero and everything. If you will let me see your mother I will ask her for you. People nearly always do what I wish them to.”

Fanny could not promise for her mother. To her Inez was a frank, simple-hearted girl, a little too forward, perhaps, but this came of her surrounding circumstances and not from any innate ill-breeding. Mrs. Prescott would probably think differently.

“Mother is something of an invalid and does not usually see strangers, but I will tell her of you,” Fanny said, and as a maid just then came to say lunch was ready she bade her good morning and left the parlor.

The acquaintance thus begun ripened into intimacy as the days went by, and the two girls saw each other often. Mistress and maid, a casual observer might have thought them, they were so unlike; the one, slight and fair as a lily and clad in garments of the latest style, with every mark of culture and refinement; the other, tall and strongly built, with a freedom of manner which betokened a child of the mountains rather than of the city, and a face singular in its beauty, and eyes wonderful in their varying expression, from a softness under their veiled lids, amounting almost to sleepiness, to gleams of passion which told of a strong nature which, when aroused, was equal to acts of daring from which Fanny in her timidity would have shrunk appalled. Inez took Fanny on frequent walks through the city which she knew so well and where so many seemed to know her. At first Mrs. Prescott objected to her daughter’s intimacy with one who, in her estimation, was little more than a peasant girl. But Fanny was not to be shaken from her allegiance, and after some inquiries of the housekeeper with regard to Inez Mrs. Prescott ceased to object to Fanny’s being so much with her.

“But don’t bring her in here. Why should I see her?” she said, when Fanny asked that Inez might be presented.

“Because I want you know her, and see if you can tell what makes me feel so when I am with her.”

“Bring her, then,” Mrs. Prescott said, one day, “but don’t let her stay long. My head aches and I am tired.”

That afternoon Fanny went out with her maid on an errand, saying to Inez as she left the hotel, “When I come back I am going to take you to mother.”

For a while Inez waited patiently, watching for Fanny’s return. To call upon Mrs. Prescott was a great event in her life and something of which to tell her father and Tom when she got home. In the housekeeper’s room and from the servants and some of the guests whom she knew, she had heard a great deal of Mrs. Prescott, who was said to be fabulously wealthy, and had such costly diamonds and wore such pretty negligées in the morning and such beautiful dresses to dinner, although there was no one but her daughter at table with her. Occasionally she had caught a glimpse of the lady on the rare occasions when she went to drive, but she was always so closely veiled that it was impossible to tell how she looked. Now, however, Inez was to see her, and she grew very impatient at Fanny’s protracted absence.

“Maybe she has come and I didn’t know it. I mean to go up and see,” she thought, as the clock struck four and there was no sign of Fanny.

Going up to Mrs. Prescott’s rooms she stole softly to the door, which was partly open. Fanny was not there, but she heard a sound as of some one in pain. Mrs. Prescott had complained of a headache all day and after Fanny and her maid went out it grew so much worse that she dropped the shades and lay down upon the couch, hoping to sleep. But the pain which was of a neuralgic nature increased so fast that she at last uttered the moan which Inez heard. Her first impulse was to go in at once; then, knowing this was not the thing to do, she knocked twice and receiving no answer ventured in. Mrs. Prescott, who was lying with her eyes closed, did not know she was there until she said, “Are you sick, and can I do anything for you?”

The voice was singularly sweet, with a tone in it which brought to Mrs. Prescott’s mind vague memories of woods and hills and sunshine on a river and pond where the white lilies grew and where in her giddiness and pain she seemed for a moment to be sailing away into the shadow of the willows which drooped over the water. Just where the woods and hills and river were was not clear to her, and the picture passed as soon as it came. Looking up she saw a young girl standing by her couch, plainly attired in a gingham dress and white apron, with a fancy silk handkerchief knotted around her neck.

“One of the chambermaids,” she thought and answered “There’s nothing you can do unless you rub my head. It aches very hard. Are you on this floor?”

Inez looked a little puzzled and replied, “On this floor? No; I room with the housekeeper. I am Inez,—Miss Prescott’s friend.”

“Oh!” and Mrs. Prescott’s eyes opened wide and a slight frown contracted her brow at what she thought an undue familiarity.

But something in Inez’s face disarmed her and brought back the picture of the woods and hills and river, with herself younger and happier than she was now. Before she could reply, Inez continued: “I used to rub mother’s head when it ached and she said it helped her. Father says I have a great deal of magnetism in my hands. I take it from him. Let me try.”

She knelt on the floor as she talked and began to manipulate Mrs. Prescott’s temples, which thrilled at once to the touch of her fingers.

“You are doing me good,” Mrs. Prescott said, lying very still while Inez smoothed her hair and rubbed her forehead and talked in her low, musical voice of her dead mother and what she used to do for her.

Mrs. Prescott listened until she had a pretty accurate knowledge of _Anita_ and her grave among the hills and the cottage among the rocks and Inez’s handsome father. Then, as the pain in her head grew less, there came over her a feeling of restfulness and quiet. Inez’s voice was like the murmur of a brook she had heard somewhere. The leafy woods and hills and river were all blended together. Inez’s face, like something she had seen before, looked at her through the mist which was stealing over her senses and when Fanny came in she found her mother sleeping quietly, with Inez sitting by her and fanning her. After that Mrs. Prescott made no objection to her daughter’s intimacy with Inez.

“Yes, she is very nice, with something charming in her voice and manner. It is her Spanish blood, I think,” she said to Fanny, “but, of course, she is wholly untrained and knows nothing of the world. You could not have her for an associate in New York, but here it does not matter. Mrs. Ward, the housekeeper, tells me she is perfectly correct in her morals, and her father is highly respectable,—rather superior to his class which accounts for some things in Inez. I do not know that I shall object to your spending a day or so with her when we are in the Yosemite. I shall try and secure the services of her father as guide, if I go on any of the trails. They say he is exceptionally good.”

This was said a few days after Inez had left for her mountain home and Fanny was expressing a wish to visit her. The trip was planned for the middle of June, and Fanny, who had become greatly attached to Inez, was looking forward to meeting her again with nearly as much pleasure as to the Yosemite itself.