The Californians Part 32

Well! this morning I had a scene with papa. He was very angry, talked about honour and all that sort of thing, said that I was an unprincipled flirt, and that I expected too much of a man. But when I said I could not understand how so perfect a man as himself could wish his daughter to marry a rake, he never said another word, but went off and wound up with Mr. Trennahan. I don't know what they said to each other; I don't care. It's all too dreadful to think about, and I never want to hear the subject mentioned again.

We're going to Monterey this afternoon to remain till the end of the season, and then we'll go to the Blue Lakes for a little before settling down for the winter. I'm tired of Menlo. Can't you come to Monterey for a week or two? Do think about it. I haven't a minute to go over to Fair Oaks to say good-bye, but perhaps you'll come to the train. HELENA.

Magdalena got some luncheon from the pantry, then went to bed and slept until six o'clock. At dinner Mr. Polk said to her,--

"I saw Trennahan this afternoon in a hack with a lot of luggage on behind, and I stopped the driver and got in, and went to the ferry with him. His engagement with Helena Belmont is broken, it seems, and he is off for Samoa. Looked like the devil, but was as polite as ever, and asked me to say good-bye to all of you."

Don Roberto looked up. "When he coming back?" he asked.

"You know as much about that as I do; or as he does, I guess. He told me that he was going to explore the South Seas thoroughly, and that ought to take as many years as he's got left, and more too."

It was two or three days before Magdalena realised what a relief it was to have Trennahan out of the country. It moved him back among the memories, and struck from her imagination agitating possibilities. And he belonged to no woman! He could never be hers, but at least she could love him. Already she had begun to do so with a measure of calm. She could hide him in her soul and count him wholly hers; and the prospect seemed far sweeter and more satisfactory than she should have imagined of such immaterial union. And some day, she believed, he would write to her. He had spoken authoritatively of the permanence of their friends.h.i.+p, and of its necessity to him. He had not loved her, as men count love, but for a little she had been to him something more than other women had been. The spiritual sympathy which had been rudely interrupted, but had surely existed, taught her this. In time he would become conscious again of the bond, and his letters alone would be something to live for.

And she had much else. In the evenings when her father was weeding on the lawn, she devoted herself to her uncle; and he seemed grateful for her attentions, slight as was his response. He was visibly shrinking to his skeleton, although he neither coughed nor complained, and went to town every morning with the regularity of his youth. But his gaunt face was less savagely determined, his eyes had lost the hard surface of metal; and one evening when Magdalena slipped her hand into his, he clasped and held it until Don Roberto, gloomy and perspiring, came panting across the drive.

And almost immediately Magdalena began to write. She did not go to her nook in the woods, but after her morning ride she wrote in her room until luncheon. She told her mother of her literary plans and asked her advice about making a similar announcement to her father. Between astonishment and consternation Mrs. Yorba gasped audibly, and her impa.s.sive countenance looked as if the hinges had fallen out of its muscles.

"For G.o.d's sake don't tell your father!" she exclaimed; and she was not given to strong language. "I don't believe you can write, anyhow, and we should only have a terrible scene for nothing."

Magdalena accepted the advice. Her father showed so little sense of his duty as a parent that her own was growing adaptable to circ.u.mstances, although she was still determined not to publish without his knowledge.

She had not returned to her English romance: that had been consigned to the flames, and was now meditating in that limbo which receives the wraiths of the lame, the halt, and the blind of abortive talent. She was at work upon the simplest of the Old-Californian tales.

On the Sat.u.r.day afternoon after Helena's departure for Monterey Rose called and invited Magdalena to drive with her to the train to meet Mr.

Geary. Tiny and Ila, who were with her, added their insistence, and Magdalena, having no reasonable excuse, joined them. As they drove through the woods Ila confided her engagement to young Was.h.i.+ngton, and was kissed and congratulated in due form.

"I'm going to live in Paris," she announced. "No more California for me.

You might as well be on Mars, in the first place, and everybody cackles over your private affairs, in the second. For the matter of that, you haven't any."

"I think it's disloyal of you to desert California," said Tiny. "I have a feeling that we should all keep together, and to the country."

"That's a very fine sentiment, but though I love you none the less, I want to live. I intend to be the best-dressed American in Paris. That's a reputation worth having."

"I'm going East to find a husband," said Rose, shamelessly. "There's no one to marry here. Alan Rush would not have been half bad, but he might as well be in an urn on Helena's mantel-piece. I like Eastern men best, anyhow."

"Why not go to Southern California?" asked Tiny. "It's not so far as New York; and there are always plenty of them there."

"I should feel like a ghoul,--man-hunting in One-lungdom, as Mr. Bierce calls it. Besides, I'd rather die an old maid than have a sick man on my hands for five minutes. I'm not heartless, but--well, we've all had our experiences with fathers and brothers. A sick man's an anomaly, somehow: he doesn't fit into a woman's imagination."

"I'm not going to marry at all," said Tiny. "Fancy what a lot of bother.

It's so comfortable just to drift along like this."

"Tiny," said Rose, "you're a Menlo Park poppy."

They had arrived at the station, the pretty station under its great oak, and flanked by its beds of bloom. Eight or ten other equipages were there, waiting for the "Daisy train,"--the fast train from town which on Sat.u.r.day afternoons carried many San Franciscans to Monterey.

The women were in their bright summer attire and full of chatter; as the train was not due for some moments, several got out of their carriages and went to other carriages to gossip. It was a very lively and agreeable scene: there being no outsiders, they were like one large family. In the middle of the large open s.p.a.ce beside the platform stood several of the phaetons and waggonettes, whose horses stepped high at sight of the engine. On the far side was a row of Chinese wash-houses, in whose doors stood the Mongolians, no less picturesque than the civilisation across the way. Behind them was the tiny village of Menlo Park. On the opposite side of the track was a row of high closely knit trees which shut the Folsom place from the pa.s.sing eye. Caro, under a big pink sunshade, had walked over to chat with her friends and escort her visitors home.

The train rolled in and discharged its favoured few. The wait was short, and Mr. Geary was still mounting the steps of his char-a-banc when Magdalena sat forward with a faint exclamation. The smoking-car was slowly pa.s.sing. Four hats at four consecutive windows were raised as they drifted past. They were the hats of Alan Rush, Eugene Fort, Carter Howard, and "Dolly" Webster.

XXIV

The Yorba house on n.o.b Hill was the gloomiest house in San Francisco in any circ.u.mstances; upon the return of the family to town this year it suggested a convent of perpetual silence. Mrs. Yorba, bereft of her full corps of servants, herself shook the curtains free of their loops and pinned them together. "Ah Kee can play the hose on the windows from the outside once a month," she remarked to her daughter; "but Heaven only knows when they will be washed inside again, or how often poor Ah Kee will have time to sweep the rooms. I shall make an attempt to keep the reception-room in some sort of order; and as it is comparatively small and I can dust it myself, I may succeed, but I don't suppose anyone will ever enter the parlours again. There seems no hope of your father coming to his senses."

Magdalena flung her own curtains wide, determined to have light if she had to wash the windows herself. But the rest of the house chilled and oppressed her. Even her mother's bedroom was half-lighted, and the halls and rooms downstairs were echoing vaults. One was almost afraid to break the silence; even the soft-footed Chinaman walked on his toes. Magdalena conceived the whimsical idea that her father's house had been closed to receive all the family skeletons of San Francisco, of which many whispers had come to her. Sometimes she fancied that she heard their bones rattling at night, as they crowded together, muttering their terrible secrets. But the idea only amused her; it did not make her morbid, although there was little but her own will to keep her spirits on a plane where there was more light than bog. It was a very grey and rainy winter. She was forced to spend the afternoons after four o'clock in idleness: Don Roberto himself turned off the gas every morning before he went down town, and on again at seven in the evening. The meals in the dining-room, naturally the darkest room in the house, were eaten in absolute silence. In fact, it was seldom that anyone spoke except on Mrs. Yorba's reception day. Herself wore the air of a stoic. Don Roberto's keen eyes searched his wife and daughter now and again for any sign of extravagance in attire, but he rarely addressed them except on the first of the month, when he demanded their accounts. He peremptorily forbade them to go out after dusk, as the night air was bad for the horses. The evenings he spent in his study with his brother-in-law. Mrs.

Yorba and Magdalena sat in their respective rooms until nearly half-past ten; when Don Roberto went the rounds to see that the lights were out.

Were it not for his fear of earthquakes, he would have turned off the gas at that hour, but he permitted a tiny spark to burn in the halls all night. Occasionally Mr. Polk came home early and went to Magdalena's little sitting-room, the old schoolroom, and sat with her for an hour or two. He said little and never talked of himself. She longed to bring her aunt back to this lonely old man, but did not know in the least how to go about it, and the subject never was mentioned between them; he might have been a bachelor or a widower. But as he sat staring into the fire, Magdalena was convinced that he was thinking of his wife. She had never entered his house since the day of her strange discovery; delicacy kept her away, but her feminine curiosity often tempted her to go in and see if the fires were burning, the flowers and magazines on the table.

Sometimes at night she heard footsteps in the connecting gardens behind the houses, and fancied they were those of her uncle, gone on what pilgrimage she dared not imagine.

She and Helena met again early in November. They greeted each other with all their old cordiality, but there was a barrier, and both felt it.

Still, they exchanged frequent visits, and Magdalena was always interested in Helena's new conquests and dazzling regalities. Helena was enjoying herself mightily. She had all her old admirers exhausting and coining adjectives at her feet, and a number of distinguished foreigners, who were spending the winter in San Francisco. She could not drive, nor yacht, nor run to fires on account of the weather, but she unloosed her energies upon indoor society, and started a cotillion club, and an amateur opera company. She gave a fancy dress ball, to which all her guests were obliged to come in the costumes of Old California, and laughed for a week at the ridiculous figure which most of them cut. She also gave many dinners and breakfasts, kettle-drums and theatre parties, and, altogether, managed to amuse herself and others. She never mentioned Trennahan to Magdalena. Nor did he write. The Pacific might have been climbing over him, for any sign he gave.

XXV

It was midnight, and Magdalena was still awake; a storm raged, prohibitive of sleep. The wind screamed over the hills, tearing the long ribbons of rain to bits and flinging them in great handfuls against the windows; from which they rebounded to the porch to skurry down the pipes and gurgle into the pools of the soaked ground below. The roar of the ocean bore aloft another sound, a long heavy groan,--the fog-horn of the Farallones. Magdalena imagined the wild scene beyond the Golden Gate: the s.h.i.+ps driven out of their course, bewildered by the fog, the loud unceasing rattle of the rigging, the hungry boom of the breakers, the mountains and caverns of the raging Pacific. Her mind, open to impressions once more, stirred as it had not during its period of subservience to the heart, and toward expression. Suffering had not worked those wonders with her literary faculty of which she had read; but she certainly wrote with something more of fluency, something less of attenuated commonplace. She had finished her first story; and although it by no means satisfied her, she had pa.s.sed on to the next, determined to write them all; then, with the education accruing from long practice, to go back to the beginnings and make them literature.

To-night she forgot her stories and lay wondering at the ghostly images rolling through her brain, breaking upon the wall which stood between themselves and speech,--hurled back to rise and form again. What did it mean? Was some dumb dead poet trying to speak through her brain, inextricably caught in the folds of her ravening intelligence before recognising its fatal limitations? Or was that intelligence but the half of another, divided out there in eternity before being sucked earthwards? It was seldom that such fancies came to her nowadays, but to-night the storm shrieked with a thousand voices, no one of which was unfamiliar to these ghosts in her mind. She had heard the expression "h.e.l.l let loose" variously applied. Were those the souls of old and wicked mates tossed into the wild playground of the storm, helpless and furious shuttle-c.o.c.ks, yelling their protests with furious energy? The idea that she too might have been wicked once thrilled Magdalena unexpectedly: she had had a few sudden brief lapses into primal impulse, accompanied by a certain exaltation of mind. As she recalled them the rest of her life seemed flat by comparison, and unburdened with meaning; something buried, unsuspected, left over from another existence, shook itself and made as if to leap to those doomed wretches, heavy with memories, buffeting each other on the tides of the storm.

A crash brought her upright. It had been preceded by a curious b.u.mping along the front of the house. She realised in a moment what it meant: the flag-pole had snapped and been hurled to the ground. She thought of her father's dismay, and shuddered slightly; she was in a mood to greet omens hospitably.

Suddenly her eyes fixed themselves expandingly upon the door. She was cast in a heroic mould; but the storm and the vagaries of her imagination had unnerved her, and she shook violently as the k.n.o.b was softly turned and the door moved forward with significant care. Had her father gone suddenly mad? The possibility had crossed her mind more than once. She would lock her door hereafter.

"What is it?" she faltered.

The door was pushed open abruptly. Her uncle stood there. For a moment she thought it was his ghost. The dim light of the hall shone on a ghastly face, and he wore a long gown of grey flannel. He held one hand pressed against his chest. In another second she heard the rattling of his breath. She sprang out of bed and ran to him.

"I am going to die," Mr. Polk said. "Telegraph and ask her to come."

She led him to his room, roused her father and mother, telephoned for the doctor and a messenger boy, then went to her room, dressed, and wrote the telegram. She had little time to think, but the approach of death made her hands shake a little, and lent an added significance to the horrid sounds without. Death had been a mere name before these last few moments; he suddenly became an actual presence stalking the storm.

The bell rang. She went down to the door herself. It was the messenger boy. She gave him the telegram to despatch, and told him to return and to remain on duty all night. Then she went to her uncle's room. Her mother and a dishevelled maid were compounding mustard plasters and heating water. Her father was huddled in an armchair, staring at the gasping form on the bed. Magdalena shuddered. His face was more terrible to look on than the sick man's.

"It's pneumonia, of course," said Mrs. Yorba, in the hushed whisper of the sick room, although her hard voice was little more sympathetic in its lower register. "He was wet through when he came home this afternoon. I should think it had rained enough for one year."

The doctor came and eased the sufferer with morphine; but he gave the watchers no hope.

"He has no lungs, anyhow," he said. "This abrupt climax is rather a mercy than otherwise."

Magdalena remained by the bedside during all of the next day. Early in the morning a telegram came from Mrs. Polk, saying that she was about to start on a special train. The message was read to her husband, and he whispered to Magdalena, "I should live until she came,--if she took a week." That was the only remark he made until late in the day, when he motioned to Magdalena to bend her ear to his lips. "Don't waste your youth," he whispered; and then he coloured slightly, as if ashamed of having broken the reticence of a lifetime.

Don Roberto barely moved from the chair which commanded a view of the dying man's face. His own shrank visibly. He neither ate nor drank. His sunken terror-struck eyes seemed staring through the pa.s.sing face on the high pillows into an inferno beyond.