Overland Part 10

Unluckily for Coronado, Clara was half Teutonic, and could comprehend the tone of her father's race. Notwithstanding Thurstane's shyness and silences, she discovered his moral weight and gathered his unspoken meanings. There was more in this girl than appeared on the surface.

Without any power of reasoning concerning character, and without even a disposition to a.n.a.lyze it, she had an instinctive perception of it. While her talk was usually as simple as a child's, and her meditations on men and things were not a bit systematic or logical, her decisions and actions were generally just what they should be.

Some one may wish to know whether she was clever enough to see through the character of Coronado. She was clever enough, but not corrupt enough. Very pure people cannot fully understand people who are very impure. It is probable that angels are considerably in the dark concerning the nature of the devil, and derive their disagreeable impression of him mainly from a consideration of his actions. Clara, limited to a narrow circle of good intentions and conduct, might not divine the wide regions of wickedness through which roved the soul of Coronado, and must wait to see his works before she could fairly bring him to judgment.

Of course she perceived that in various ways he was insincere. When he prattled compliments and expressions of devotion, whether to herself or to others, she made Spanish allowance. It was polite hyperbole; it was about the same as saying good-morning; it was a cheerful way of talking that they had in Mexico; she knew thus much from her social experience. But while she cared little for his adulations, she did not because of them consider him a scoundrel, nor necessarily a hypocrite.

Coronado found and improved opportunities to talk in asides with Clara.

Thurstane, the modest, proud, manly youngster, who had no meannesses or trickeries by nature, and had learned none in his honorable profession, would not allow himself to break into these dialogues if they looked at all like confidences. The more he suspected that Coronado was courting Clara, the more resolutely and grimly he said to himself, "Stand back!"

The girl should be perfectly free to choose between them; she should be influenced by no compulsions and no stratagems of his; was he not "an officer and a gentleman"?

"By Jove! I am miserable for life," he thought when he suspected, as he sometimes did, that they two were in love. "I'll get myself killed in my next fight. I can't bear it. But I won't interfere. I'll do my duty as an honorable man. Of course she understands me."

But just at this point Clara failed to understand him. It is a.s.serted by some philosophers that women have less conscience about "cutting each other out," breaking up engagements, etc., than men have in such matters.

Love-making and its results form such an all-important part of their existence, that they must occasionally allow success therein to overbear such vague, pa.s.sionless ideas as principles, sentiments of honor, etc. It is, we fear, highly probable that if Clara had been in love with Ralph, and had seen her chance of empire threatened by a rival, she would have come out of that calm innocence which now seemed to enfold her whole nature, and would have done such things as girls may do to avert catastrophes of the affections. She now thought to herself, If he cares for me, how can he keep away from me when he sees Coronado making eyes at me? She was a little vexed with him for behaving so, and was consequently all the sweeter to his rival. This when Ralph would have risked his commission for a smile, and would have died to save her from a sorrow!

Presently this slightly coquettish, yet very good and lovely little being--this seraph from one of Fra Angelica's pictures, endowed with a frailty or two of humanity--found herself the heroine of a trying scene.

Coronado hastened it; he judged her ready to fall into his net; he managed the time and place for the capture. The train had been ascending for some hours, and had at last reached a broad plateau, a nearly even floor of sandstone, covered with a carpet of thin earth, the whole n.o.ble level bare to the eye at once, without a tree or a thicket to give it detail. It was a scene of tranquillity and monotony; no rains ever disturbed or remoulded the tabulated surface of soil; there, as distinct as if made yesterday, were the tracks of a train which had pa.s.sed a year before.

"Shall we take a gallop?" said Coronado. "No danger of ambushes here."

Clara's eyes sparkled with youth's love of excitement, and the two horses sprang off at speed toward the centre of the plateau. After a glorious flight of five minutes, enjoyed for the most part in silence, as such swift delights usually are, they dropped into a walk two miles ahead of the wagons.

"That was magnificent," Clara of course said, her face flushed with pleasure and exercise.

"You are wonderfully handsome," observed Coronado, with an air of thinking aloud, which disguised the coa.r.s.e directness of the flattery. In fact, he was so dazzled by her brilliant color, the sunlight in her disordered curls, and the joyous sparkling of her hazel eyes, that he spoke with an ingratiating honesty.

Clara, who was in one of her unconscious and innocent moods, simply replied, "I suppose people are always handsome enough when they are happy."

"Then I ought to be lovely," said Coronado. "I am happier than I ever was before."

"Coronado, you look very well," observed Clara, turning her eyes on him with a grave expression which rather puzzled him. "This out-of-door life has done you good."

"Then I don't look very well indoors?" he smiled.

"You know what I mean, Coronado. Your health has improved, and your face shows it."

Fearing that she was not in an emotional condition to be bewildered and fascinated by a declaration of love, he queried whether he had not better put off his enterprise until a more susceptible moment. Certainly, if he were without a rival; but there was Thurstane, ready any and every day to propose; it would not do to let _him_ have the first word, and cause the first heart-beat. Coronado believed that to make sure of winning the race he must take the lead at the start. Yes, he would offer himself now; he would begin by talking her into a receptive state of mind; that done, he would say with all his eloquence, "I love you."

We must not suppose that the declaration would be a pure fib, or anything like it. The man had no conscience, and he was almost incomparably selfish, but he was capable of loving, and he did love. That is to say, he was inflamed by this girl's beauty and longed to possess it. It is a low species of affection, but it is capable of great violence in a man whose physical nature is ardent, and Coronado's blood could take a heat like lava. Already, although he had not yet developed his full power of longing, he wanted Clara as he had never wanted any woman before. We can best describe his kind of sentiment by that hungry, carnal word _wanted_.

After riding in silent thought for a few rods, he said, "I have lost my good looks now, I suppose."

"What do you mean, Coronado?"

"They depend on my happiness, and that is gone."

"Coronado, you are playing riddles."

"This table-land reminds me of my own life. Do you see that it has no verdure? I have been just as barren of all true happiness. There has been no fruit or blossom of true affection for me to gather. You know that I lost my excellent father and my sainted mother when I was a child. I was too young to miss them; but for all that the bereavement was the same; there was the less love for me. It seems as if there had been none."

"Garcia has been good to you--of late," suggested Clara, rather puzzled to find consolation for a man whose misery was so new to her.

Remembering what a scoundrel Garcia was, and what a villainous business Garcia had sent him upon, Coronado felt like smiling. He knew that the old man had no sentiments beyond egotism, and a family pride which mainly, if not entirely, sprang from it. Such a heart as Garcia's, what a place to nestle in! Such a creature as Coronado seeking comfort in such a breast as his uncle's was very much like a rattlesnake warming himself in a hole of a rock.

"Ah, yes!" sighed Coronado. "Admirable old gentleman! I should not have forgotten him. However, he is a solace which comes rather late. It is only two years since he perceived that he had done me injustice, and received me into favor. And his affection is somewhat cold. Garcia is an old man laden with affairs. Moreover, men in general have little sympathy with men. When we are saddened, we do not look to our own s.e.x for cheer. We look to yours."

Almost every woman responds promptly to a claim for pity.

"I am sorry for you, Coronado," said Clara, in her artless way. "I am, truly."

"You do not know, you cannot know, how you console me."

Satisfied with the results of his experiment in boring for sympathy, he tried another, a dangerous one, it would seem, but very potent when it succeeds.

"This lack of affection has had sad results. I have searched everywhere for it, only to meet with disappointment. In my desperation I have searched where I should not. I have demanded true love of people who had no true love to give. And for this error and wrong I have been terribly punished. The mere failure of hope and trust has been hard enough to bear.

But that was not the half. Shame, self-contempt, remorse have been an infinitely heavier burden. If any man was ever cured of trusting for happiness to a wicked world, it is Coronado."

In spite of his words and his elaborately penitent expression, Clara only partially understood him. Some kind of evil life he was obviously confessing, but what kind she only guessed in the vaguest fas.h.i.+on.

However, she comprehended enough to interest her warmly: here was a penitent sinner who had forsaken ways of wickedness; here was a struggling soul which needed encouragement and tenderness. A woman loves to believe that she can be potent over hearts, and especially that she can be potent for good. Clara fixed upon Coronado's face a gaze of compa.s.sion and benevolence which was almost superhuman. It should have shamed him into honesty; but he was capable of trying to deceive the saints and the Virgin; he merely decided that she was in a fit frame to accept him.

"At last I have a faint hope of a sure and pure happiness," he said. "I have found one who I know can strengthen me and comfort me, if she will. I am seeking to be worthy of her. I am worthy of her so far as adoration can make me. I am ready to surrender my whole life--all that I am and that I can be--to her."

Clara had begun to guess his meaning; the quick blood was already flooding her cheek; the light in her eyes was tremulous with agitation.

"Clara, you must know what I mean," continued Coronado, suddenly reaching his hand toward her, as if to take her captive. "You are the only person I ever loved. I love you with all my soul. Can your heart ever respond to mine? Can you ever bring yourself to be my wife?"

CHAPTER VIII.

When Coronado proposed to Clara, she was for a moment stricken dumb with astonishment and with something like terror.

Her first idea was that she must take him; that the mere fact of a man asking for her gave him a species of right over her; that there was no such thing possible as answering, No. She sat looking at Coronado with a helpless, timorous air, very much as a child looks at his father, when the father, switching his rattan, says, "Come with me."

On recovering herself a little, her first words--uttered slowly, in a tone of surprise and of involuntary reproach--were, "Oh, Coronado! I did not expect this."

"Can't you answer me?" he asked in a voice which was honestly tremulous with emotion. "Can't you say yes?"

"Oh, Coronado!" repeated Clara, a good deal touched by his agitation.

"Can't you?" he pleaded. Repet.i.tions, in such cases, are so natural and so potent.

"Let me think, Coronado," she implored. "I can't answer you now. You have taken me so by surprise!"

"Every moment that you take to think is torture to me," he pleaded, as he continued to press her.

Perhaps she was on the point of giving way before his insistence. Consider the advantages that he had over her in this struggle of wills for the mastery. He was older by ten years; he possessed both the adroitness of self-command and the energy of pa.s.sion; he had a long experience in love matters, while she had none. He was the proclaimed heir of a man reputed wealthy, and could therefore, as she believed, support her handsomely.