A Vendetta of the Hills

CHAPTER X – The Home of the Recluse

AT a gentle pace they wound their way through the forest of magnificent old oaks.

As for Munson, riding by Grace Darlington’s side, the miles were the shortest he had ever before traversed. It seemed only a few minutes before the red tiled roof and towers of a house built in the California Mission style were gleaming through the trees only a short distance ahead.

Great oaken doors closed the arched gateway, but at the clatter of hoofs and the sound of voices, a little peep-hole wicket was withdrawn. The inspection by unseen eyes apparently was satisfactory, for a moment later a postern was opened, and two men, Mexicans obviously by their garb and deferential manner, emerged to take and lead away the horses. Within the patio stood Senor Robles, his usually grave face lighted by a smile of cordial welcome.

“Let me tell you, young men,” he said while shaking hands, “that while Grace and Merle are quite at home here, you are the very first strangers who have passed through my portals.”

“Strangers no longer then,” said Dick, good-naturedly.

“Precisely,” replied Mr. Robles, “or you would not be here. But I foresee that all of us are going to be very close friends. Isn’t that so, Grace, my dear?”

“I’m sure I cannot say,” replied Grace, with a smile of demure innocence toward Mr. Munson. Then she turned to Mr. Robles with a roguish twinkle in her eye. “But I’ve news for you. Mr. Munson has resigned from the army and is looking for a job.”

“Both facts are already known to me,” answered Robles, smiling.

“Oh,” exclaimed Grace, “one can never surprise you, Mr. Robles. Although you live the life of a hermit, you seem to be always the first to learn everything that is going on.”

“A hermit, my dear, need not necessarily be out of touch with the world,” replied Robles, playfully pinching her ear. “And now, Mr. Willoughby, you came specially to see my pictures. Lead the way, Merle. Gentlemen, I say again – welcome to my mountain home.”

They lingered awhile in the patio to admire the marble columns of the cloister that ran all around, the playing fountains at each of the four comers, with groups of symbolical statuary, the wealth of beautiful shrubs and flowers. On the side opposite to the gateway rose a tall tower, fashioned like the campanile of an Old Mission and crowned with bright red tiles.

“We shall ascend there later on,” remarked Mr. Robles, following Dick’s upward glance.

Then they passed through the wide-opened French window into the living rooms.

The first was a great apartment that occupied one entire side of the building. In the centre was a large globe of the world. Here and there were glass cases displaying manuscripts and illuminated missals. Along the walls were finely-carved bookcases filled with several thousands of volumes.

“When you have the leisure you can come and browse here,” said the host, addressing both young men. “Meanwhile you may care to look at the bronzes and statuary” – this with a sweep of the hand that indicated the art treasures distributed about the apartment.

On the side of the house beneath the tower were the dining room and the billiard and smoking room. Passing through these, the visitors came to the picture gallery, a room corresponding in size to the library. Here were hung treasures of the painter’s art, masterpieces signed by names that are immortal. These, as their owner again explained, had been acquired by him during several prolonged visits to Europe.

“Count this just as a preliminary survey, Mr. Willoughby,” he said finally. “Then come again. There are guest chambers on either side of the gateway, and one of these will always be at your disposal when I am at home. I extend the same invitation to you, Mr. Munson.”

“My word, but you may feel honored,” exclaimed Grace, in unconcealed amazement.

“When I open my gates, I open my heart as well,” said Mr. Robles, with a courtly little bow to his new friends.

Next they ascended the tower. Its first floor, above the living rooms, was a delightful den filled with curios of all kinds. From this sprang a winding iron staircase, up which Mr. Robles led the way.

The upper chamber, extending on all sides some distance beyond the supporting tower, proved larger than might have been expected. Its one conspicuous article of furniture was a great terrestrial telescope. The sliding panels of glass which formed a complete window all around the room showed that the instrument could be used without obstruction in any direction.

Here a Mexican boy was on duty. When the visitors entered, his hand was resting on the telescope. A bright red sash around his waist imparted a touch of picturesqueness to his costume. He was perhaps only twelve or thirteen years of age, but wonderfully keen and alert-looking for his years. At a glance from his master, the youngster took his departure, closing the door behind him.

“Gentlemen,” remarked Mr. Robles, when they were again alone, “perhaps before I brought you here I should have exacted the promise I am now going to ask you to make. Grace and Merle know that I am a recluse and wish to live undisturbed by curiosity-mongers or tittle-tattlers. I want nobody but the friends I deliberately choose to know about my habits of living or the contents of my home. Only in this way can I hope to be left alone. Therefore, please give me your word, Mr. Willoughby and Lieutenant Munson, that you will not speak with any outsider about the things I am showing you today.”

The promise was instantly given and sealed by a hearty hand clasp.

“Now,” resumed the host in lighter tone, “perhaps you would like to view the landscape. I may explain that I had this observatory, as I call it, specially built and equipped so that I could sweep the valley from end to end. For example, I saw you two young men riding along the road this morning,” he went on, with a smile. “I saw one of you alight, about twelve miles from here – it was you, lieutenant – and tighten the girths of your saddle.”

“Great Scott!” murmured Munson, in half-incredulous surprise.

“Test the glass for yourself,” continued Robles, as, placing one eye at the lens, he adjusted the instrument. “Look” – and he stepped back, motioning Munson to approach.

Munson peeped through the long tube and there came from his lips a cry of mingled delight and amazement.

“Dick, Dick, there’s the store as large as life – Buck Ashley standing at the door and lighting a cigar. Geewhizz, and it must be twenty miles away.”

He rose erect and made room for Dick. The latter gazed in silence for a few moments. When he turned to Mr. Robles he said:

“It’s really wonderful – it is the most wonderful glass I ever looked through.”

There was the glimmer of an exultant smile on the face of Ricardo Robles.

“I saw you at the round-up across the valley the other day,” he remarked. “You were much nearer to me than is the store. And while I do not invite any confidence, Mr. Willoughby, you certainly engaged in a very spirited conversation, to say the least, with young Marshall Thurston. Indeed, I half expected to see you come to blows.”

“What was that?” asked Merle in some trepidation.

Willoughby had reddened.

“Nothing of consequence,” he responded, almost curtly. “I had to tell the young cub to mind his own business. That was all.”

“You certainly have the whole valley under observation,” remarked Munson, considerately diverting the conversation.

“Yes,” assented Mr. Robles, with an almost grim smile of satisfaction. “The telescope teaches one not merely to observe, but to reason from the facts observed. Tia Teresa evidently thought that she should have come along today to play duenna, eh, Merle?”

“You don’t say you guessed that?” exclaimed Merle in great astonishment.

“Guessed it! I knew it when she raised her protesting finger.”

“You are a magician, Mr. Robles,” cried Grace.

“No, only a logician,” was the sententious rejoinder.

“Please let me peep at our garden,” asked Merle. “I wonder if mother is among her roses.”

Without a word Robles swung round the instrument on its pivot and changed the focus.

“That’s about right,” he said, stepping back. “There is no one out of doors at present. Move the glass slightly and you can see over the entire garden.”

Each girl in turn made a prolonged scrutiny; they were enchanted with the clearness and marvellous detail of the picture.

“Henceforth we’ll have to be on our best behavior, Dick,” laughed Munson, as they turned toward the winding stairway. “We’ve got to remember Mr. Robles has a constant eye on us.”

“Perhaps I’ve had you under observation quite a while,” laughed the senor, tapping the young fellow on the shoulder.

Then he threw open the door, and, with a slight bow and extended hand, motioned to his visitors to descend. At the foot of the narrow, winding staircase they found the Mexican youth standing on guard. He bowed low as the ladies passed, and when Mr. Robles followed last of all, saluted, and then immediately returned to the chamber above, again without a single word of instruction from his master. Munson and Willoughby exchanged meaning looks; obviously a well-disciplined outlook was kept from the observatory all the time, as if from the conning-tower of a battleship.

Again the party was in the patio. Mr. Robles turned to Willoughby.

“I hope Grace and Merle have explained to you that at present I do not entertain. My own fare is of the simplest.”

“Mother is to have luncheon ready at one,” interposed Grace. “I caught the broiled trout myself this morning.”

“You caught them ready broiled, eh?” laughed Munson.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” rejoined Grace, with a pretty little moue.

“Broiled trout!” exclaimed Dick, appreciatively. “Then I think we’ll be hurrying down the hill, senor.” He had recognized with intuitive courtesy that the interview was at an end.

“Is he not delightful?” asked Merle, as their horses started off at a walk. “And you would never guess how sweet and kind he can be.”

“I don’t doubt it,” assented Willoughby. “A polished gentleman, but a man of mystery, isn’t he?”

“Not when you come to know him. A recluse always has his little idiosyncrasies.” As she spoke, she set her pony at a canter down the gentle incline.

After luncheon, Dick found himself tête-à-tête with Mrs. Darlington in the music room. The mystery attaching to the personality of the recluse was still uppermost in his mind. But for the present the music claimed his attention.

Merle had seated herself at the grand piano and was softly fingering the keys, striking a chord here and there, until finally she drifted into Chopin’s Fifth Nocturne. There was something almost divine in her interpretation. The music fairly rippled from her deft fingers, as they glided on from one beautiful cadence to another until at last, note by note, as if sobbing a reluctant adieu, the melody died away.

Both the visitors were generous in their tributes of congratulation.

“Thank you,” said Merle, as she arose from the piano and proceeded to unfasten the clasps of a violin case.

“What now?” exclaimed Munson.

“Oh, I am not the performer; I am merely the accompanist,” and she held out a beautiful old violin to Grace. As Merle sounded a key on the piano, Grace touched the strings of the Stradivarius. When all was ready she tenderly caressed the violin with her chin, and, her bow sweeping across the instrument, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata trembled from the strings, in soft and plaintive melody, filling the room with echoing and re-echoing notes of sweetness, while Merle’s accompanying notes lent support, in blending harmony, to the rich cadences.

“Splendid! magnificent!” exclaimed the young men in unison.

Munson was now called upon to sing, and Dick felt himself at full liberty to converse with Mrs. Darlington. He broached the subject that had been occupying his thoughts.

“What is known of Senor Ricardo Robles?” he enquired. “Have you been long acquainted?”

“Oh, I have known him for many, many years,” replied Mrs. Darlington. “We used to be next door neighbors in Los Angeles. That was twenty years ago. Then we returned to England – Mr. Darlington had fallen heir to the family estates. Mr. Robles used to visit us off and on. He is, as you have seen, very fond of Grace” – she paused a moment, then went on – “and of my adopted daughter Merle as well. Merle, you know, was the child of my dearest girl friend who died a year after her baby was born.”

“Yes, Merle has told me this.”

“Well, six years ago my dear husband died, and it was Mr. Robles who persuaded me to return to California. He selected this beautiful ranch for us, near to his own home. And we have all been so happy here at La Siesta.”

“Mr. Robles is certainly a wonderful man, with all those art treasures around him.”

“He has princely tastes and princely wealth as well – this you will have seen for yourself today. He travels a great deal abroad, sometimes for a whole year at a time, and then returns quietly to his hermitage. He has taken a great fancy to you, Mr. Willoughby. You are lucky in gaining the friendship of such a man.”

“I think I’ll like him, too – when I know him better,” replied Willoughby, with cautious reserve.

CHAPTER XI – A Rejected Suitor

IN Dick Willoughby’s presence Marshall Thurston contented himself with sullen looks. But beyond his sight and hearing he spoke truculently of what he was going to do some day to get level with “the hired hand who had had the infernal insolence to call him down in public.” So all the little world on the rancho knew, or at least believed, that a bitter feud was in progress.

Two or three of the cowboys fostered young Marshall’s feelings of animosity, partly out of sheer devilment, partly because they deemed it good policy to keep in the good graces of the heir to the rancho. Moreover, so long as old Ben Thurston knew nothing about it, they were always willing to break a bottle with the dissipated spendthrift, not only because good liquor was not to be despised at any time, but also for the sake of the amusement afforded by Marshall, in his cups, with his stories of fast life in New York and his apparently inexhaustible fund of highly spiced anecdotes. Even his braggart threats against Willoughby had an element of fun.

“Why don’t you cut him out with the girl?” one of his boon companions had suggested on an occasion of this kind.

“By gad, I will,” Marshall had responded with vehemence. “You just watch me.”

Thenceforward this thought was uppermost in his alcohol-sodden brain.

Marshall Thurston had met Mrs. Darlington and her daughter on several occasions, but, although he had been formally introduced, he had never been invited to call at La Siesta. Nor up to the present had he felt any inducement to take the initiative. Like clings to like, and these people were not of his kind – in the presence of pure and refined womanhood the human toad becomes uncomfortably conscious of his own loathsomeness.

But now there was a valid reason to egg him on. He would show Dick Willoughby who was who on the San Antonio Rancho. If the heir to all those broad acres chose to pay court to Merle Farnsworth, the girl would only be too glad to jump at him and his millions. He would tell her, too, that Willoughby was going to be fired and that the fellow was not worth a moment’s consideration.

Such was his mood one afternoon when, his motor car being in the repair shop, he had not made his usual trip to Bakersfield. “Yes, he would ride over that very day to La Siesta;” and he proceeded to fortify the resolve by opening a bottle of champagne in the solitary seclusion of his den. After gulping down the wine he felt brave enough to face the devil himself. Yet, when mounted on his horse, he still evinced sufficient discretion to make a wide detour lest Willoughby should catch sight of him and divine his intentions.

As he rode along young Thurston nursed his wrath to keep it warm. At the same time the desire to possess the girl for her own sake began to inflame his imagination. Unscrupulous passion had been bred in the very bone of this worthless degenerate. Just as his father, Ben Thurston, had thirty years before trampled on the virtue of the young Spanish beauty, Senorita Rosetta, the sister of Don Manuel, so now was the son hatching in his brain a foul plot of spoliation.

“I’ll get even with Willoughby, by God, in the very way that will hurt his pride the most. Women! – pshaw, they’re all alike. And she’s a peacherino all right – those flashing dark eyes – she sure looks good to me.” This was now the tenor of his musing as his pony cantered up the slope to La Siesta.

He advanced on foot to the portico with a swagger and a smile, and there, as luck would have it, he found Merle seated in a rocker, reading, and alone. She rose with quiet courtesy and returned his greeting.

“I am sorry,” she said, “mother is not at home. She and my sister Grace have driven over to the dairy. We have a model dairy, you know, on La Siesta,” she went on, anxious to make conversation that would not prove embarrassing. For already she divined some particular object in the young man’s visit, knowing as she did that he and Willoughby had recently exchanged angry words.

“Won’t you show me your famous rose gardens?” asked Thurston, boldly.

“With pleasure,” she replied, assenting with a sweet smile of politeness, although there was sore reluctance in her heart, as she stepped from under the portico.

But, unknown to herself, she did not go unattended, for as Merle and her visitor passed round the house and through the shrubberies there glided after them the figure of a woman, clothed in black, wearing over her head and shoulders a Spanish mantilla. It was Tia Teresa, the ever watchful duenna.

The roses of La Siesta, as Marshall Thurston had said, were indeed famous. Here were all the finest varieties, growing in the perfection to which only care and scientific skill applied under ideal climatic conditions can attain. Merle was glad to point out the different blooms and give them their names – the topic was certainly an innocuous one, and she smiled at the thought as they strolled along. She was vaguely wondering, too, whether Dick Willoughby would approve even this slight measure of courtesy toward the visitor to her home. Although she had as yet not the remotest conception that the quarrel at the round-up had been in any way connected with her name, she knew that the two young men were at daggers drawn, and toward Dick there was the instinctive loyalty in her heart that prompted her to count his enemies as her enemies, his friends as her friends.

The young girl was too unversed in the ways of the world to notice that Marshall Thurston was under the influence of wine. He was too experienced a toper to show any signs of unsteadiness on his feet, but all the same there was undoubted tipsiness in his leering side-glances and occasional slurring of his words. Of this Merle in her maidenly innocence was supremely unconscious, nor did she dream that the very sparkle of her eyes was completing the intoxication of wine fumes.

Once she cast a look up the hill and asked herself whether the wizard of the red-tiled tower had his spy-glass on La Siesta and was even then quietly surveying the scene in the gardens. The thought made her uncomfortable; she felt sure that her kind friend, Mr. Robles, would not look with favor on her condescending to show even the slightest attention to one whose evil ways of living were notorious.

Suddenly she came to a halt, close beside a little clump of oleander trees laden with rich blossoms.

“I am sorry I must leave you now,” she said, quite abruptly.

“Leave me?” stammered Thurston. “What for?”

“I have other things to attend to,” she replied.

“Oh, I say, Miss Farnsworth” – the inebriate as he spoke made a gesture of appeal – “I hope you are not angry with me. If that scalawag of a fellow Willoughby told you I said anything disrespectful of you the other day, he is a demed liar – that’s what he is, a derned liar, and a poor penniless beggar as well, whom my father’s going to fire off the ranch.”

Merle stood speechless. She stepped back when Thurston advanced with outstretched hands.

“The truth of the whole matter is,” he rambled on, with growing incoherence, “I am madly in love with you myself. That’s what I am, and I’m going to have you, too.” And he grabbed her fiercely and attempted to draw her to him.

Merle screamed both in fear and in repulsion as she tried to push him away.

Just then, from among the oleanders, rushed Tia Teresa. The old duenna came like a cyclone. Her eyes blazed with anger. Grasping the young libertine by the collar of his coat, she pulled him madly from the now half-fainting girl. Then, whirling him around, she rushed him, with the strength and ferocity of a tigress defending her whelps, down the gravelled path and flung him bodily over the low retaining wall along the embankment that separated the rose gardens from the public road. She spat upon his prostrate figure below and rained down on him a torrent of imprecations in the Spanish tongue.

It was all over in one brief minute. When young Thurston picked himself up, it was to see the aged fury half-leading, half-carrying Merle away in the direction of the house.

“The hell cat,” he murmured.

Then he brushed the dirt from his coat and straightened out his tumbled appearance as best he could. His horse was tied to the gate post a hundred yards along the road. He slunk toward it, climbed into the saddle, and rode slowly away in the falling twilight. He had been thoroughly sobered by the incident, yet continued somewhat dazed, for his horse was headed toward the woods and hills and not in the direction of home.