Maruja | Page 6

A servant?"
"Pardon me--the mayordomo. The old confidential servitor who stands
in loco parentis. No one knows what he says. If the victim appeals to
the mistress, she is indisposed; you know she has such bad health. If in
his madness he makes a confidante of Maruja, that finishes him."
"How?"
"Why, he ends by transferring his young affections to her--with the
usual result."
"Then you don't think our friend the Captain has had this confidential
butler ask his intentions yet?"
"I don't think it will be necessary," said the other, dryly.
"Umph! Meantime, the Captain has just vanished through yon
shrubbery. I suppose that's the end of the mysterious espionage you
have discovered. No! De'il take it! but there's that Frenchman popping
out of the myrtlebush. How did the fellow get there? And, bless me!
here's our lassie, too!"
"Yes!" said Raymond, in a changed voice, "It's Maruja!"
She had approached so noiselessly along the bank that bordered the
veranda, gliding from pillar to pillar as she paused before each to
search for some particular flower, that both men felt an uneasy
consciousness. But she betrayed no indication of their presence by look
or gesture. So absorbed and abstracted she seemed that, by a common
instinct, they both drew nearer the window, and silently waited for her
to pass or recognize them.
She halted a few paces off to fasten a flower in her girdle. A small
youthful figure, in a pale yellow dress, lacking even the maturity of
womanly outline. The full oval of her face, the straight line of her back,

a slight boyishness in the contour of her hips, the infantine smallness of
her sandaled feet and narrow hands, were all suggestive of fresh,
innocent, amiable youth--and nothing more.
Forgetting himself, the elder man mischievously crushed his
companion against the wall in mock virtuous indignation. "Eh, sir," he
whispered, with an accent that broadened with his feelings. "Eh, but
look at the puir wee lassie! Will ye no be ashamed o' yerself for putting
the tricks of a Circe on sic a honest gentle bairn? Why, man, you'll be
seein' the sign of a limb of Satan in a bit thing with the mother's milk
not yet out of her! She a flirt, speerin' at men, with that modest
downcast air? I'm ashamed of ye, Mister Raymond. She's only thinking
of her breakfast, puir thing, and not of yon callant. Another sacrilegious
word and I'll expose you to her. Have ye no pity on youth and
innocence?"
"Let me up," groaned Raymond, feebly, "and I'll tell you how old she is.
Hush--she's looking."
The two men straightened themselves. She had, indeed, lifted her eyes
towards the window. They were beautiful eyes, and charged with
something more than their own beauty. With a deep brunette setting
even to the darkened cornea, the pupils were blue as the sky above
them. But they were lit with another intelligence. The soul of the Salem
whaler looked out of the passion-darkened orbits of the mother, and
was resistless.
She smiled recognition of the two men with sedate girlishness and a
foreign inclination of the head over the flowers she was holding. Her
straight, curveless mouth became suddenly charming with the parting
of her lips over her white teeth, and left the impress of the smile in a
lighting of the whole face even after it had passed. Then she moved
away. At the same moment Garnier approached her.
"Come away, man, and have our walk," said the Scotchman, seizing
Raymond's arm. "We'll not spoil that fellow's sport."
"No; but she will, I fear. Look, Mr. Buchanan, if she hasn't given him

her flowers to carry to the house while she waits here for the Captain!"
"Come away, scoffer!" said Buchanan, good-humoredly, locking his
arm in the young man's and dragging him from the veranda towards the
avenue, "and keep your observations for breakfast."

CHAPTER II
In the mean time, the young officer, who had disappeared in the
shrubbery, whether he had or had not been a spectator of the scene,
exhibited some signs of agitation. He walked rapidly on, occasionally
switching the air with a wand of willow, from which he had impatiently
plucked the leaves, through an alley of ceanothus, until he reached a
little thicket of evergreens, which seemed to oppose his further progress.
Turning to one side, however, he quickly found an entrance to a
labyrinthine walk, which led him at last to an open space and a rustic
summer-house that stood beneath a gnarled and venerable pear-tree.
The summerhouse was a quaint stockade of dark madrono boughs
thatched with red-wood bark, strongly suggestive of deeper woodland
shadow. But in strange contrast, the floor, table, and benches were
thickly strewn with faded rose-leaves, scattered as if in some