The Californians Part 24

Helena, dazzlingly fair in a frock of forest green, and surrounded by five new admirers, three Eastern and two English tourists, awaited Magdalena on the verandah. The strangers gave Magdalena a faint shock: being the only well-dressed men she had ever seen except Trennahan, they a.s.sumed a family likeness to him, and seemed to steal something of his preeminence among men. She commented distantly on this fact as she went up the stair with Helena.

"Oh, your little tin G.o.d on wheels is not the only one," replied Helena, the astute. "There are five here with possibilities besides dress, and more coming to-morrow. They _are_ such a relief! If I feel real wicked to-morrow night--well, never mind!"

"Helena! You will not make those four young men any more miserable than they are now?"

Helena shook her head. She was looking very naughty. "Four months, my dear! I didn't realise what I had endured until I had this sudden vacation. Two days of blissful rest, and then the variations for which I was born."

They were in Helena's room, and Magdalena sat down by the open window, where she could smell the cypresses, and regarded her beloved friend more critically than was her habit.

"I wonder if you will ever mature,--get any heart?" she said.

"'Lena! What do you mean! Heart? Don't I love you and my father; and the other girls--some?"

"I don't mean that kind. Nor falling in love, either. I never expressed myself very well, but you know what I mean."

"Oh, bother. What were men and women made for but to amuse each other?"

"Life isn't all play."

"It is for a time--when you're young. I am sure that that is what Nature intended, and that the people who don't see it are those who make the mistakes with their lives. Otherwise life would be simply outrageous,--no balance, no compensation. After a certain age even fools become serious: they can't help it, for life begins to take its revenge for permitting them to be young at all, and to hope, and all that sort of thing. Therefore those that don't make the most of youth and all that goes with it are something more than fools."

Magdalena looked at her in dismay. "How do you realise that, at your age? I have lived alone, thought more--had more time to think and to read--but I never should--"

"I have intuitions. And I've seen more of the world than you have. I see everything that goes on--you can bet your life on that. Talk about my powers of concentration! They're nothing to my antennae."

"But have you no principles of right and wrong? No morality? You would not deliberately sacrifice others to your own pleasure, would you?"

"Wouldn't I? I don't take the least pleasure in cruelty, like some women. If I could give people oblivion draughts, I'd do it in a minute--for my vanity has nothing to do with it, either. But the world is at my feet, and there it shall stay, no matter who pays the piper. I love life. I love everything about it. I've never seen anything in the world I thought ugly. I don't think anything is ugly. If it was, I should hate it. I've never been through a slum,--a horrid slum, that is,--and I don't want to. The beauty of the earth intoxicates me. When I even think about it, much less look at it, I feel perfectly wild with delight to think that I am alive. And my senses are so keen. I see so far. I can hear miles. I believe I can hear the gra.s.s grow. I eat and drink little, but that little gives me delight. A gla.s.s of cold spring water intoxicates me. And, above all, I enjoy being loved. I never forget how much you and papa love me. I couldn't exist without either of you. Papa is looking much better since he came down. Don't you think so?

And I like to see love in the eyes of men I don't care a rap about.

Their eyes are like impersonal mirrors for me to read the secrets of the future in. And I don't really hurt them. Most men have a lot of superfluous love in them. I may as well have it as another. It won't interfere with the destination of the reserve in the least."

"Helena!" exclaimed Magdalena, with a sinking heart. "I believe you are a genius."

"I have the genius of personality, but I couldn't do a thing to save my life."

Magdalena breathed freely again.

X

Trennahan, who was to have arrived in time to dine with the Belmonts and Yorbas, missed his train and took his dinner alone. Afterward, he saw Magdalena for a few moments in the Yorbas' private parlour, but she had to dress, and he went off to smoke in the grounds with Don Roberto, Mr.

Polk, Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton, and Colonel Belmont. They subsequently had a game of bowls, and--excepting Colonel Belmont--several c.o.c.ktails. When they suddenly remembered that a ball was in progress to which they were expected, it was eleven o'clock, and Trennahan was not dressed.

It was Helena's ball, but she had made every man promise to look after the wall-flowers, that she might be at liberty to enjoy herself. Her aunt, Mrs. Yorba, and Magdalena received with her; and as all the guests had arrived by the same train, and had dressed at about the same time, the arduous duty of receiving was soon over. Helena left the stragglers to her chaperons and prepared to amuse herself. As usual, she had refused to engage herself for any dances, but she gave the first two to her devoted four, then announced her intention to dance no more for the present. The truth was that one of her minute high-heeled slippers pinched, but this she had no intention of acknowledging; if men wished to think her an angel, so they should. She was a sensible person, far too practical to reduce the sum of her happiness by physical discomfort; but the slippers, which she had never tried on, matched her gown, and she had no others with her that did. But the one rift in her lute induced a sympathetic rift in her temper.

The party was very gay and pretty. The rooms had been fantastically decorated with red berries and s...o...b..a.l.l.s, pine, and cedar. The leader of the band was in that stage of intoxication which promised music to make the soles of the dado tingle. All the girls had brought their prettiest frocks, and all the matrons their diamonds. There were no tiaras in the Eighties, but there were a few necklaces, stars, and ear-rings--of the vulgar variety known as "solitaires." It is true that certain of the Fungi looked like crystal chandeliers upon occasion; but Helena would have none of them.

Herself had rarely been more lovely,--in floating clouds of pale pink tulle, which looked like a shower of almond blossoms. Her hair was roped up with pearls, hinting the head-dress of Juliet, but stopping short of eccentric effect. She wore nothing to break the lines of her throat and neck, but on her arms were quant.i.ties of odd and beautiful "bangles,"

many made from her own suggestions, others picked up in different parts of the world.

She was standing opposite the door in the middle of the room as Trennahan entered, leaning lightly upon a little table to rest her mischievous foot. Only one man was beside her at the moment, and Trennahan's view of her was uninterrupted. He knew at once who she was.

His second impression was that he had seen few girls so beautiful. His third, that she possessed something more potent than beauty, and that he was responding to it with a certain wild flurry of the senses, and a certain glad exultation in youth and danger which had not been his portion for many a long year. The instinct of the hunter leaped from its tomb, shocked into the eager quivering life of its youth. Trennahan was appalled to hear the fine web he had spun between his senses and his spirit rent in a second, then gratified at the youthful singing in his blood. The old joy in recklessness, in surrender to the delirium of the senses, came back to him. He pushed them roughly aside, and looked about for Magdalena. She was listening to the rapid delivery of Mr. Rollins.

He thought she looked ill, and was about to go to her when Colonel Belmont took him by the arm.

"You must meet my daughter," he said. "Oh, bother! There go half a dozen."

When Trennahan reached Helena, he was presented in the same breath with two other new arrivals, and her slipper was fairly biting. She did not even hear his name. She was in a mood to make her swains unhappy; and she liked Trennahan's face, and what she saw there. There was eager admiration in his eyes and nostrils, and on his face the record of a man who might possibly be her match. Of man's deeper and more personal life she never thought. She had heard that men sometimes loved married women, and others whose like she had never seen; but she hated the mere fact of vice as she did all forms of ugliness, and dismissed it from her mind.

She read in Trennahan's face that he had had many flirtations, nothing more.

"I am not going to dance any more to-night," she announced. She placed her hand in Trennahan's arm. "Take me to the conservatory," she said.

There was really nothing for him to do but take her. But it was three hours before either was seen again.

XI

"You are not looking well this morning," said Trennahan, solicitously, about twelve hours after he had appeared in the ball-room. He had just entered the Yorbas' private parlour.

"Neither do you," replied Magdalena.

"I sat up late with some of the men, and slept ill after."

Magdalena raised her eyes and looked at him steadily. "You have fallen in love with Helena," she said.

"What nonsense! My dear child, what are you talking about? Miss Belmont asked me to take her to the conservatory; and as I do not dance, and as you do, and as she announced her intention of not dancing again, and is a very entertaining young woman, I decided to remain there. If our engagement had been made known, of course I should have done nothing of the sort. But as it was--"

"You turned white when you first saw her. Alan Rush looked just like that. Now he is mad about her."

"I am not Alan Rush, nor any other boy of twenty-five. The man you have elected to marry, and who is not half good enough for you, as I have told you many times, is a seasoned person past middle age, my dearest. I could not go off my head over a pretty face if I tried. My day for that is long past."

He spoke vehemently.

"You never looked at me like that."

"Doubtless my pallor was due to some such unromantic cause as an extremely bad dinner."

"I have seen that look several times. Alan Rush is not the only one. And Helena is no doll. She has every fascination."

"Possibly. Shall we go for our walk? I am most anxious to see those old houses and graves."

He did not offer to kiss her. She was too proud to take up woman's usual refrain. She put on her hat, and they left the hotel, and walked toward the town.

"I believe the cemetery comes first," she said. "I have made inquiries.