Ancestors Part 15

She rang the bell and extended her hand. Gwynne shook it politely; and a moment later was walking down Park Lane in that singular state of elation that in mercurial natures succeeds one of the brutal blows of life, when all the forces of the spirit have leaped to the rescue.

PART II

1905

I

For Isabel Otis the _genius loci_ had a more powerful and enduring magnetism than any man or woman she had ever known. She had felt the consolation of it, although without a.n.a.lysis, in her lonely girlhood by the great Rosewater Marsh; definitely in Tyrol, Perugia, Toledo, in Munich where she had lingered too long, in a hundred tiny high-perched and low-set villages of Austria and Italy of which the tourist had never heard, at Konigsee and Pragserwildsee; and deeply in England. But no place had ever called her, disturbed her, excited her into furious criticism, mockingly maintained its hold upon the very roots of her being, like the city of her birth. Her childhood's memories of it cl.u.s.tered about the old house on Russian Hill where the most cordial neighbors were goats; the beach by the Cliff House on a stormy day; long rides up and down the almost perpendicular hills of the city in the swift cable cars; and certain candy stores on Polk and Kearney streets.

At long intervals there was a children's party at one of the fine houses on the ledge below her home; or out in the Western Addition, where an always migratory people were rivalling the splendors of n.o.b Hill--as that craggy height had long since humbled South Park and Rincon Hill into their abundant dust. She also cherished many charming memories of her mother, with dinner or ball-gown so prudently looped under her rain-coat that it gave her slender figure the proportions of the old-fas.h.i.+oned hoop-skirt; always laughing as she kissed the little girls good-night before braving the two flights of steps to the carriage at the foot of the cliff. Two years before her death Mrs. Otis was glad to bury her mortification and misery in Rosewater. After that Isabel had never so much as a glimpse of San Francisco until she was sixteen, when her father was induced to visit his adopted daughter and take his youngest martyr with him. Isabel had planned for this visit throughout six long months, and arrived in the city of her heart radiant in a frock every breadth of which was new--heretofore her wardrobe had risen like an apologetic ph[oe]nix from the moth-eaten remnants of her mother's old finery--and such uncompromising trust in the benevolence of fate as a girl rarely knows twice in a lifetime. There were three days of enchanted prowling about the old house on Russian Hill, where, as the tenant, in the rocking-chair by the bedroom window, did not invite her to enter, she consoled herself with the views and the memories; and of an even more normal delight in the shopping streets and gay restaurants of a real city. After that the visit existed in her mind with the confused outlines of a nightmare.

Her adopted sister's peevish complaints at being obliged to remain in the foggy windy city all summer, the crying baby, the whirlwinds of dust and s.h.i.+vering nights, she might have dismissed as unworthy the spirit of sixteen, and dreamed herself happy. But Mr. Otis, who had been sober for seven months, selected this occasion for a fall which resounded from Market Street to Telegraph Hill, and rejuvenated the long line of saloons that had graced Montgomery Street since the days when "Jim" Otis had been one of the wildest spirits in the wildest city on earth. That was "back in the Sixties," when his lapses were as far apart as they were unrivalled in consumption, span, and pyrotechny. By the late Eighties he had disappeared into the north, and the careless city knew him no more.

During the Seventies and early Eighties there had been a period of reform, incident upon his marriage with a pretty and high-spirited girl, and one of the city's estimable attempts to clean out its political stables. His brilliant and desperate encounter with Boss Buckley was historic, but its failure, and the indifference of the gay contented majority to the city's underworld, soured him and struck a fatal blow at the never vital roots of personal ambition. When he began to water the roots at his old haunts, the finish of his career and of his splendid inheritance pa.s.sed into the region of problems that Time solves so easily. When she solved his problem he was glad to subside into one of his cottages in Rosewater. Here he reformed and collapsed, reformed and collapsed; but, with fewer temptations, and a remnant of his legal brilliancy, he supported his family after a fas.h.i.+on; and fed his pride to the day of his death with the fact that his wife, unlike the forgotten half of many another comet, had never been obliged to do her own work.

During that last visit to San Francisco, Isabel, guided by her amused brother-in-law, routed him out of no less than fourteen saloons, and spent night after night walking the streets with him to conquer the restlessness that otherwise would find a prolonged surcease beyond her influence. When she finally steered him back to Rosewater he fell into an exuberant fit of repentance, during which he was so charming and so legal that Isabel forgave him, laid by her bitterness and mortification, and hoped. But although no repentance could maintain a grip upon that slippery flabby substance which he still called his character, at least he never went to San Francisco again. Occasionally he permitted Isabel to spend a week with her sister, while he pledged himself to good behavior during her absence; and kept his word. He always kept his word; and he took care to withhold it except when he was sure of himself. Isabel decided that as everything was relative it was better to have a dipsomaniac as her life portion than a drinking-machine of more steady and industrious habits.

Finally his patient clients left him, he sold the cottage in Rosewater--all that remained of his inheritance--to pay its mortgages, and moved with Isabel out to the ranch-house, preserved with a few hundred acres by the more canny and less thirsty Hiram. When the elder brother died James would have returned forthwith to the sources of supply, but by this time Isabel had the upper hand, and although he disappeared for days at a time, he was always forced to return to the ranch when the small monthly sum allowed him by the terms of his brother's will was exhausted; no one in Rosewater would give him credit.

As he invariably left a note behind him promising to "be quiet about it," Isabel ceased to haunt his footsteps. His appet.i.te was far beyond his control or hers, and as he kept his word and spent his time in the back parlor of a saloon, and had no longer the digestive capacity to achieve his former distinction, she merely sat at home and waited.

Fortunately he did not live long enough after his brother hopelessly to embitter his daughter's youth. Liberty came to her when she had ceased to hate with young intolerance and begun to pity; and before too much longing for freedom, and its insidious suggestions, had poisoned her nature. Indeed, when she had seen her father buried with much pomp in the cemetery behind Rosewater, and returned to the permanent peace of her home, she missed her cares and responsibilities, so long and systematically borne, and mourned, not as a child for its parent, but as an adoptive mother suddenly bereft. Nevertheless, she was bent upon enjoying her freedom to the utmost and rebelled against the obduracy of her uncle's executors, who disapproved of her pilgrimage to Europe unattended by a matron of Rosewater. Hiram Otis, who trusted no man, had appointed four executors; and had not Judge Leslie been one of them the other three might have delayed the settling of the estate beyond the legal term. But at the end of a year Isabel was absolute mistress of her property and herself.

One of the happiest moments of her life was when she sat before her lawyer's table in San Francisco and watched the pen strokes that cancelled the mortgage of the house on Russian Hill. The house and its acre, enc.u.mbered by the inevitable mortgage, had been all that remained of Mrs. Otis's personal inheritance when she left San Francisco for ever. James Otis had promised his dying wife that he would never sell the place, which she bequeathed to Isabel; and when his last client left him and he could no longer pay the interest, Hiram, who was morosely devoted to his niece, met the yearly obligation: he would not redeem the mortgage unless he were permitted to buy the property. But to this James Otis, clinging to his solitary virtue, would not consent; and Hiram, although he intended to leave all he possessed to Isabel, could not bring himself to part with any sum in four figures.

Before leaving for Europe Isabel had leased the house to a young newspaper man whose wife had an income of her own, and not only an artistic appreciation of the view, but a more practical esteem for a site so far removed from the "all-night life" below. Immediately after Isabel's return Mrs. Glait had asked permission to sublet the house, remarking cynically that time had inured her to the desultory phenomena of journalism, but never to the stable prospect of her husband's death struggle with foot-pads, or her children falling down the cliff of this wild bit of nature in the heart of a city.

Isabel took back her old home with another spasm of delight, and vowed that not until she was a pauper would she part with it again. Five or six days of every week must be spent on the chicken-ranch, which had grown to such proportions that she was now one of the persons that counted in her flouris.h.i.+ng community. But in time she would live more and more in her lofty home, become a notable figure in San Francisco, drawing with both hands from its varied best; and meanwhile, once a week, she could sit for hours and look down upon the city, which, even in rainy weather, was a wild and beautiful sight from her eyrie.

Mrs. Otis had been a niece of the Mrs. Montgomery who had reigned on Rincon Hill twenty years ago, and a cousin of the Helena Belmont who had been the greatest belle the city had seen since that earlier time when Nina Randolph, Guadalupe Hathaway, Mrs. Hunt McLane, and "The Three Macs" had made history for themselves in spite of the momentous era of which they were so unheeding a part. Mary Belmont would have been no mean heiress herself had not her father been too adventurous a spirit on the stock-market during the Belcher Bonanza excitement of 1872. For a time it looked as if Gordon Belmont would be a far richer man than his famous brother, Colonel Jack, always contented with a modest million; but in ten mad days there was a decline of sixty million dollars in the aggregate value of stocks on the San Francisco market; and six months later, when he died of sheer exhaustion, he had nothing to leave his only child but the house on Russian Hill, and a small income generously supplemented by her uncle and guardian until her marriage. She was thirteen at her father's death, and as her mother had preceded him, she spent the following five years in a New York boarding-school. Then she returned home, and, after a year's gayety, married James Otis. Colonel Belmont surrendered her small property. Skilfully "turned over" it would have multiplied indefinitely. But James Otis and his wife knew far more about spending money than making it, and to-day nothing was left to commemorate the meteoric and eminently typical career of Gordon Belmont but the ancient structure whose nucleus he had taken over just after his marriage as a "bad debt." His wife, too, had insisted upon living in it, for reasons subsequently understood by her daughter and Mrs. Glait, and complacently enlarged it with all the hideous improvements of the day.

That part of Russian Hill conspicuous from the city is little more than a great cliff rising abruptly from the extreme north end of the graded ledge on the summit of n.o.b Hill, which, in its turn, almost overhangs the steep and populous ascent from the valley. In "early days" none but the goat could cling to those rough hills that all but stood on end, and the brush was so thick and the t.i.tles so uncertain that their future distinction was undreamed of. Then came a determined period of grading which embraced the heights in due course, t.i.tles were settled, and many that foresaw the ultimate possession of that great valley now known as "South of Market Street"--but which in its haughty youth embraced South Park and Rincon Hill--by the tenacious sons of Erin and Germania, moved to the uplands while lots could still be bought for a song. The Jack Belmonts, the Yorbas, the Polks, and others of the first aristocracy to follow the Spanish, made n.o.b Hill fas.h.i.+onable before a new cla.s.s of millionaires sprang up in a night, and indulged its fresh young fancy with monstrous wooden structures holding a large portion of converted capital. Mrs. Yorba, who led society in the Eighties, when it was as exclusive as a small German princ.i.p.ality, was disposed to snub all parvenus. But the young people made their way. When Mary Belmont returned from school, and, chaperoned by a widowed relative, gave at least a dance a month until she married, and many a one after, the heirs of all grades thought nothing of leaving their carriages at the foot of the cliff to climb the precarious stair; groping blindly more often than not through the rains of winter or the fogs of summer. To-day Isabel's neighbors wisely made no such demands upon the pampered, but in that incomparably older time the young people would have climbed to the stars for the sake of the lavish hospitality of the gay indulgent young hostess; and if some of the youths rolled down the hill when the lights went out, that was hardly a matter to excite indignant comment in a city where drink was so admittedly the curse that it was philosophically accepted with such other standing evils as fogs, trade-winds, small-pox, mud-holes, dust-storms, and unmentionable politics.

When Mary Belmont became the wife of James Otis, one of the greatest ranchers in California--in which State, unlike other fervent patriots of that era, he had been born--and a brilliant figure in one of the most notable legal groups of any time, she long held her position as a social favorite. But children came and died too quickly for her health and fragile beauty, and the storms of life beset her. She continued to live in her inconvenient eyrie, not only in the waning hope of ultimately separating her husband from the convivial beings on the lower plain, but because she felt an intense pride in owning a home two generations old in that young community. She was determined that it should remain in the family and be occupied by at least one of her children. So the ugly brown wooden structure with its bay-windows, its central tower, its Mansard-roof--added for the servants--had, contrary to all tradition, actually joined three generations of San Franciscans in one unbroken chain. It owed its proud position, no doubt, to the fact that when the Otis fortunes collapsed there was but one child left to inherit it and to be supported meanwhile.

Isabel intended in time to give the house a new facade, and had gloated over such of the Burnham plans as had been reproduced by the city press.

These lovely plans were designed to make the city as cla.s.sic and imposing as Nature had dreamed of when she piled up that rugged amphitheatre out of chaos; and Isabel had long since resolved that, if she could not be the first to plant a bit of ancient Athens upon a brown and ragged bluff, the high tide of her fortunes should coincide with the awakening of the city to the sense of its architectural guilt. She banished much of the tasteless furniture of the old time, and refitted with a stately comfort that expressed one side of her nature. She too clung to traditions--and to the long mirrors in their tarnished gilt frames, with the little shelf below; the mult.i.tude of family portraits engraved on wood, and surrounded by a wide white margin and tiny gilt frame. That they might strike no discordant note, she made use of a lesson learned in London, where she had spent a month with Lady Victoria, and had the walls and wood of the living-room painted white, covered the windows and furniture with a plain stuff of a dark but neutral blue. In the dining-room were a few paintings of her New England and Spanish ancestors, and she disturbed them only to replace the wall-paper with leather; at the same time sending the black walnut furniture to the auction-room.

Being the one practical member of her family, and the product of an earthquake country, she repaired the uncertain foundations of her house before removing the walls that had cut up the lower floor into the conventional number of rooms and hallways. The house, of no great depth, was so close to the hill-side, still rising above it, that more than one enterprising cook had made use of the natural ledges before the windows.

Besides the kitchen department and pantries, there were now but three rooms on the lower floor: the dining-room, a small reception-room in the tower, and an immense living-room, broken by the white pillars that supported the storys above.

Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Otis, in the time-honored American fas.h.i.+on, had made a day nest of their bedroom, but Isabel was far too modern for that lingering provincialism, and lived luxuriously in the big room down-stairs when she was not in the porch. She had reserved her mother's old alcoved bedroom with its mahogany four-poster for her own use, but the rest of the second-story rooms she had fitted for her English cousins, that they too might have headquarters in town.

Neither appeared to be in any haste to visit the city of their ancestors. Gwynne had left England in October, now nearly a year ago, but, having discovered from his solicitor that he could apply for letters of citizens.h.i.+p as late as the end of the third year after landing, had announced to Isabel his intention to travel slowly about the country "before settling down in its remotest part, which, from all accounts, was sufficiently unlike the rest to provincialize his point of view unless he saw something first of the East, South, and Middle West."

He had written to her several times, but only on business. She had returned in January, after a round of visits in England, and had put his house in order at once. The lease had expired, and Mr. Colton had engaged a temporary superintendent, but Gwynne sent Isabel his power of attorney and she was temporarily in possession. She wrote to him from time to time that all was well, or to send him an account of her expenditures; but felt no promptings towards a friendly correspondence with one who showed as little disposition to encourage it.

From Victoria she had not heard directly since she bade her good-bye in Curzon Street, but Flora Thangue had written that her ladys.h.i.+p's superb health had (to her ill-concealed fury) given way, following an attack of influenza, and she would not be able to leave her doctor for an indefinite time. A few months later she wrote that "dear Vicky" was outwardly herself again, but in reality very nervous, the result, no doubt, of her illness, and of the prolonged stress of business. However, she had finally succeeded in letting the Abbey and Capheaton to advantage, and it was on the cards that she would reach California before the end of the year. Isabel hoped that, unfed by her son's exacting presence the maternal fires burned low; she had a clearly defined intention to be a factor in the new career of Elton Gwynne, and no desire for the capricious interference of his mother.

II

As Isabel stood in her little porch that brilliant September morning, she dismissed her occasional regret that she had not remained in England for a London season. Not only had she put the time to better use on her ranch, but no doubt her agent would have relet this house, and delayed the fulfilment of one of those dreams upon which she unconsciously fed her soul. The shrieking trade-winds and the dense white fogs were hibernating somewhere out in the Pacific. All the city, in the great irregular amphitheatre below, was sharply outlined in the yellow light; Isabel wondered if the sun renewed its stores from the golden veins to north and south. On the wide broken ledge just beneath her pinnacle was the concrete evidence of an architectural orgy to be seen nowhere else on earth: wooden mansions with the pure outlines of the Renaissance; a Gothic palace with bow-windows, also of wood; a big brown-stone house in the style of New York; piles of s.h.i.+ngles and stones; here and there a touch of Romanesque, later French, and Italian; the majority of those plutocratic and perishable ma.s.ses, of no style in particular, unless it were that of Mansard combined with the criminalities of him who invented the bow-window and the irrelevant tower. On the slopes were a few old houses in gardens, some with cottage roofs, others square, brown, dusty, melancholy. But the majority were of the "house in a row" type, radiating in all directions from the "boarding-house blocks" on the lower slopes. Then, down on the plain, came the big compact ma.s.ses of stone and concrete, brick and steel, devoted to business and housing of the itinerant. The lofty domes of the City Hall and a newspaper building, a few church spires and the great white-stone hotel on a crest not far from Isabel's, were the sole pretenders to architectural beauty within her ken.

Far away she could make out the Mission Church, once called after St.

Francis of a.s.sisi, now named Dolores for the vanished lake. It was the last reminder of the work of the Spanish fathers, and looked indescribably ancient in the midst of that busy and densely populated district. At night Isabel watched the lights of the electric cars flas.h.i.+ng about that old monument of an almost forgotten conquest--like the angry haunted eyes of the padres that had labored in the wilderness for naught. But although this old church and the Presidio, which still retained its quadrangle and a few of the original adobe houses, appealed deeply to Isabel on account of the romance of Rezanov and Concha Arguello that distinguished her family, her more personal sympathies were with the streets just below her hill-top, packed as they were with memories, tragic, humorous, gay, pathetic, of a people that had made the city great.

Even the dilapidated houses, with their sixty steps or more toppling above the cut that had widened and levelled the street, had been very hospitable in their time, and Isabel knew that her mother and grandmother had toiled up those perpendicular flights in satin slippers and ballooning skirts on many a rainy night. Mrs. Otis had told her little girls stories of all those old houses, fine and simple, more particularly of the fortunate mansions on n.o.b Hill's brief level. Isabel longed for the time when she should enter them and pick up the threads dropped from her mother's nerveless fingers. The Belmont house was closed, the still restless Helena occupying a palace in Rome at the moment. The Polk house had been sold to the energetic son of one of the plodding old money-makers that had fought shy of stock gambling and railroads. Nicolas Hofer belonged to the latest type the prolific city had bred: the son of a millionaire, but a keen man of business, whom the wildness of the city had never tempted, highly educated, honorable, and an ardent reformer.

Magdalena Yorba--Mrs. Trennahan--like most of her old neighbors, still dwelt in the ancestral mansion, although she had given it a stucco facade and shaved off the bow-windows. In each, Isabel was sure of welcome, and she longed particularly to wander through the old Polk house, where one of her Spanish great-aunts had reigned for a time. Like all San Franciscans of family, she took more pride in her young-old city than a Roman in his Rome. Its forty-two square miles had seen so many changes, its story was so romantic and unique, that its age was not to be measured by the standards of Time. Her grandfather had stood on this hill after his Sunday climb and looked over and down a ragged wilderness to the city bursting out of its sh.e.l.l--a wretched huddle of shacks and tents by the water's edge. The bay no doubt was crowded with s.h.i.+ps from every corner of the world, many of them deserted, unmanned, forced to lie idle until the return of the hungry disappointed gold-seekers. That was less than sixty years ago. In the first ten years of its rapid growth the city had burned seven times, millions blazing out in an hour.

To-day San Francisco was replete not only with life but with wealth, talents, and every variety of enterprise; it was as full of fads and cults and artistic groups as London itself; it had sent forth authors, artists, mummers, singers--and millionaires by the score. Many of the art treasures of the world had been brought here and hidden from the vulgar in those awful impermanent "palatial mansions." Some of the finest libraries of the world were here. It had its bibliomaniacs, its collectors, its precieux. And yet what a lonely city it was, stranded on the edge of the still half-vacant western section of the United States, with all the Pacific before it. Save for the rim of towns across the bay, which were little more than a part of itself, it watched the Orient alone, and was far too gay and careless, too self-absorbed and insolent, to keep its jaws on the alert. Tact it was much too high-handed to cultivate. It welcomed the hungry Oriental for so long as he was useful, and when he outstayed his welcome, incontinently kicked him out. San Francisco's intensity of independence as well as of civic pride was due in part no doubt to the isolation which compelled it to be self-centred, and to its unconscious dislike of the elder breeds beyond the Rocky Mountains; but largely to the old adventurous reckless gambling spirit and the habit of sleeping on its pistol. These first causes had developed individuality to such proportions that the hair of a Californian bristled when he was alluded to as a "Westerner," or even as a mere American.

And with time the patriotism of the San Franciscan waxed rather than waned. It was no longer the fas.h.i.+on to take one's money to New York, merely because of the higher cost of living that made a millionaire "feel his oats," and of the allure of the older and more difficult society to his women. San Franciscans still fled from the winds and fogs of summer to their beloved Europe, and country-house life gained ground very slowly, but deserters were few; and of late the rich men had shown their faith not only by investing the greater part of their capital in the city--until "improved real estate" was become a current phrase--but the best of them, including Hofer and the mayor who had preceded the present figurehead and his omnivorous Boss, were engaged in a desperate battle with the highly organized gang of political ruffians that owned and pillaged and dishonored the city in a manner with which nothing in the history of munic.i.p.al corruption could compare save the old Tweed Ring of New York. For at least ten years previous to 1901, San Francisco had enjoyed a period of not only decent but honorable government. There was no "graft" in high places, the city was out of debt, it held up its head with the cleanest munic.i.p.al governments in the land. But, as ever, the disinterested grew somnolent with content, and gave no heed to the burrowing of the hungry recuperated and wiser rats in that prolific underworld whence never a high-minded citizen emerges. The few that saw and warned were disregarded; and circ.u.mstances, proper in themselves, swelled the ranks of the petty politicians with thousands of greedy and insurgent laborers. San Francisco awoke one morning to find herself in the drag-net of a machine to which old Boss Buckley and the ill.u.s.trious Tammany doffed their hats. But the majority still gave little heed, too content in their various blessings, and the gay light spirit the climate gave them, to foresee the time when their pleasant city would be utterly debauched, and life among arrogant thieves, prost.i.tutes, and socialists have become as impracticable as it already was in Chinatown or on Barbary Coast.

A group of the more thoughtful and patriotic citizens, a.s.sisted by the one militant editor the city boasted, were doing all that was humanly possible to prevent the re-election of the mayor, who had already represented the worst element twice, and to break the power of the Boss.

Isabel in her lonely ranch house, when her chickens were asleep, followed the fight with a pa.s.sionate interest, and was tempted to come forth from her seclusion and meet at least the representative men of her city. But she was not yet ready to take up her own share of the burden, and was far too modest to imagine that she could be useful until she had become a person of importance in San Francisco. Nevertheless, as she looked down to-day on the sharp outlines of the city under the hard blue sky, almost glittering in their golden bath, she was impatient to become a part of its life, or at least to discuss its interests with some one.

Rosewater, which of late years had become virtuous to excess, and almost blind and deaf with local pride, took no interest in San Francisco whatever, except as a market for eggs. When driven to the wall it confessed the superiority of the metropolis in the matter of shops and theatres; but its politics it invariably dismissed with adjectives more forcible than elegant.

It was at this point in Isabel's meditations that her eye happened to rove along the plank walk to the rickety old flight of steps that led from Taylor Street up Russian Hill. There was something vaguely familiar about a tall, thin, well-groomed, but by no means graceful, figure rapidly ascending the steps. In a moment her mind lost its tensity of projection and she was almost flying down her own long stair.

Gwynne broke into a run as he saw her. She wondered if he intended to kiss her, but he merely shook her hand for a full minute.

"I never in my life was so glad to see anybody!" he exclaimed, with the joyousness of a school-boy come home for his first holiday. "It was such luck to hear that you were in San Francisco."

"But why didn't you telegraph? In a way I am disappointed--glad as I am to see you. I intended to meet you at Oakland and take you directly up to Lumalitas, where everything was to have been in gala array. And how did you know I was in town?"

"While I was taking my lonely breakfast this morning--I arrived late yesterday afternoon--and glancing over one of your newspapers, my eye caught your name. I learned that 'the charming and beautiful young mistress of the old Belmont House on Russian Hill, who had excited so much interest of late, had come down as usual for Sunday."

"No?" Isabel flushed for the first time within Gwynne's knowledge of her. "That is the very only time I have been the subject of a newspaper paragraph--outside of Rosewater, which doesn't count--and I am as delighted--as I have no doubt you were the first time you saw your name in print!" she added, defiantly.

There was nothing cynical in Gwynne's smile. "I understand," he said; and then, as he ceased to smile, the light died out of his face, and Isabel noticed that it was older and thinner. It had lost more than a little of its aloof serenity, and his crest was visibly lowered. But on the whole he was improved, for he had cut his hair, his lilting locks having been too conspicuous a feature in the cartoons of _Punch_ and _Vanity Fair_. But there was something subtly forlorn about him, and Isabel's maternal promptings, once too active, but long moribund, suddenly awakened.

They mounted the steep flight of steps to the house slowly, exchanging ejaculatory remarks. When they reached the porch she motioned to a long wicker chair.

"It is only ten," she said. "Luncheon will not be ready until one, and my California hospitality demands that your entertainment shall begin at once. Make yourself comfortable while I brew you a cup of Spanish chocolate. I have actually one of the molinillos of our ancestors."

When she returned with the frothy and fragrant beverage he was standing with his hands in his pockets staring down at the city. He turned swiftly at the sound of her step on the wood, but something was rus.h.i.+ng to the back of his eyes, and once more Isabel had the singular impression of hearing his spirit cry: "Oh G.o.d! Oh G.o.d!" But his lips were hard pressed and his eyes became suddenly contemptuous, then smiling.

"This is jolly of you," he said. "I have a weakness for chocolate--cultivated during the winter I was in Munich with my tutor. I never cared for beer--don't like anything bitter. Do you remember the Cafe Luitpoldt, and all those little tables in the garden of the Residenz--"

He paused and narrowed his eyes. Isabel had turned white. "I must hear that story," he said, quietly. "You are my only friend out here. In a way you have altered the whole course of my life. I shall always have a sense of relations.h.i.+p with you quite different from anything I have ever known. So there must be perfect confidence and openness between us. I told you frankly the unpleasant finish of my episode with Mrs. Kaye. I hate mystery. I saw you go white once before, when I tried to make you talk about Munich; and the romantic Flora was full of surmises.

Confession is good for the soul, anyhow. I want the atmosphere cleared--not out of curiosity--I don't care tuppence about other people's affairs--but I don't know you! I must know you! I am always conscious of a wall about you--and in this d.a.m.ned G.o.d-forsaken country I must have one friend!" he burst out.